by Mary Morris
He hardly feels the bump as the hull drifts onto a sandbar. Perhaps only an experienced sailor would, and they are all in a drunken stupor, even the Admiral. At first Pedro thinks that one of the other ships has fired a canon. He only notices that the wind has left the sails. Their forward motion has slowed and now the wheel won’t budge. It isn’t at all what Pedro thought it would feel like. He expected the crunch of the slats, the piercing of the hull, not this easy settling into place. It is hard to imagine that this was how the Santa María would run aground.
In his cabin the Admiral of the Ocean Sea stirs and then sits up in his cot. He gazes out his porthole and rushes onto the deck as the cabin boy struggles to turn the wheel. “Nino,” he shouts for his drunken helmsman. “Nino, where are you?”
Even as the helmsman staggers topside with the rest of the crew behind him, shoving the now sobbing boy out of the way, Columbus knows it is too late. Still he orders all cargo tossed overboard, all provisions, furniture, belongings, tables, chairs, anything to lighten the load. The horses, goats, sheep, cows, and chicken that remain are thrown into the water and swim frantically to shore. They will populate the New World, providing milk and cheese and fresh meat and turn these consumers of berries and roots and nuts into plump and lazy carnivores.
And when this still doesn’t ease the ship off the sandbar, they hurl everything else, including the satchel with all the letters that Luis de Torres has written for the sailors. The epistles that contain their secrets and hopes and dreams fall with a single splash into the warm sea where the ink runs and all the words to the ones they love smear and vanish from the pages of parchment. All to no avail. On Christmas morning the ship sinks. In his cabin the great explorer weeps.
* * *
They name the place La Navidad, because it is the birthday of Jesus. It is here that Columbus orders his men to dismantle the Santa María. He suddenly sees this as an act of God’s will. It is Christmas after all. God has sent them to this spot. Columbus will not punish the cabin boy. This is all part of the destiny. He manages to see the bright side. They will build a fort, a foothold in the New World. Out of the remains of his own ship the first building in the Americas will be constructed. There at La Navidad out of the bones of the Santa María the first Spanish settlement is born.
They break down the boat and salvage its wood. Luis de Torres, Rodrigo de Triano, and thirty-eight other men agree to stay and establish a settlement at La Navidad. Columbus will pick them up on his next voyage. Rodrigo has his plan. He will turn this settlement into a homeland for the Jews. They will get word back to their wives and children and to the other Jews who have fled, who will find a way to come to La Navidad, the birthplace, in the New World.
The cabin boy pleads with Columbus to let him to stay as well, but the Admiral refuses. “I cannot allow it,” he says. “You are just a boy.” And, Columbus does not add, a careless one at that. But Pedro knows that his dream of being a great explorer will never be realized. His fame will come in five hundred years when a boulder on Mars is named after him.
“But I will be a boy in the streets of Cádiz when we return.”
Still Columbus won’t let him stay. It breaks Luis’s heart to see the boy go. It is as if he is leaving his own sons all over again, but he cannot show this to the boy. Instead, with the ink, stylus, and paper he managed to rescue before the ship went down, Luis drafts a final letter to his wife. “Tell them I am well,” Luis says to Pedro before he leaves. “Ask my wife if she can house you. Tell her I will return as soon as I can. Or that I will send for her.”
He hands the boy his address and the letter he has written to Catalina. It is the last letter he will write and the only one that will ever reach her. It contains all the things he’s never been able to say. “Please,” he whispers, “do this for me and when I return, I will do anything for you.” Even as he says these words, Luis knows that he will never see the boy again. Perhaps Pedro knows this as well, for he does not look back when they sail away.
The forty men bring their few belongings, some provisions and trinkets to trade with the natives. They set up a small settlement near the beachhead where they eat guava and sweet mangoes and sleep under the stars. Luis dreams of Catalina. He wants to touch her soft flesh. He wants to smell the cinnamon in her hair, the ginger and turmeric of her nails. At night he is as tormented as the other men are—each longing for a woman to sleep at their side. They are tired of their own sweat and the piss of men who stand up against the trees. He is tired of their rough skin and beards. He wants softness. He wants a woman. And so do the others.
One night under the stealth of a half-moon they make their preparations. All except for Luis, who refuses to go. He remains inside his lean-to and when his eyes catch those of his friend, he looks upon him in scorn. Rodrigo looks away, but his eyes seem to say that the ocean is too big and perhaps they will never return. That night they sneak through the forest. They know where to find them. At night they see the light of their fires and hear their drums.
The Spaniards have learned to walk like Indians. They make no noise. They don’t let the branches snap as they slip by. They crouch behind fallen trees. It is at the moment of the deepest slumber that they strike. Children who scream have their throats cut. Men who reach for their machetes have their heads lopped off or an arm severed. Hands are cupped swiftly over the mouths of struggling women as the Spaniards carry them back to their settlement. One woman fights Rodrigo even as he grasps her by her hair. He has never injured a woman before. Until now he has always been the most gentle of men, but now he drags her behind him. He slaps her. He believes that in time she will come to want him. He strikes her with his fist until he silences her.
Back in the settlement each man takes his woman into a tent. The ones who have not gotten a woman must wait their turn. They are ravenous. They have been trapped in the hold of the ships with only men and have longed for warm bodies to satisfy them. In his tent Rodrigo holds the screaming woman down. He tries to silence her but then he gives up. He is upon her. Even when he is finished, he does not share her with the other men but keeps her for himself.
Eventually she stops whimpering. She lies curled into a ball and as he reaches for her again he sees that she is hardly a woman. She is a child. The hair between her legs has only begun to sprout. The breasts to bud. And the blood that pours from between her legs is his doing. He gives her a rag and motions for her to clean herself, but she does not move. Her eyes are dark and fixed. They stare at him as if she is already dead. She uses the rag to cover her breasts. The blood dries and cakes, but that doesn’t stop him from taking her again.
Luis sits in his lean-to, staring out at the sky. He tries to trace the constellations. Orion, Andromeda, Pleiades, but without his friend, he loses the way. He wonders if Catalina sees the same stars he does and if he will ever find his path home. He mutters the Hebrew prayers under his breath. He tries not to listen to the women’s cries, the men’s deep groans. He tries not to blame them. In silence he recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. At some point he shuts his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE PALE BLUE DOT—1992
Miguel stands under the oak tree with his telescope aimed at the outer edge of the solar system. Above him the tree looms. It is hard for him to believe that it has stood here for four hundred years—as long as his ancestors have been in Entrada. And yet at times it feels as if he knows more about this tree than he does about himself. And more about the universe than he knows about any of it. There are as many stars in the sky as neurons in the brain, and we know even less about the brain. How is it that humans have managed to be here at all?
Miguel has come to observe the supermoon. He doesn’t really need his telescope, but he likes to gaze into the craters. It was Galileo who first used the word crater to describe these depressions. When he turned his telescope to the moon, he gave them the Greek word for vessels that contain wine. Perhaps he imagined that some day he would sip from these. It w
as only later that these craters came to be named after deceased scientists. Copernicus, Tycho, Janssen, Humboldt, Fra Mauro, Picard.
But as Miguel moves his telescope along the uneven ground, it’s not the moon he’s thinking about. It’s Voyager that comes to mind. He knows that Voyager is now almost six billion miles away from Earth. He wishes he could see it. Or at least chart the radio waves it is transmitting back to Earth. Though he realizes it is a spaceship, it is hard for Miguel not to think of it as being lonely.
Most boys Miguel’s age only care about girls, booze, cars, tattoos, smokes, their muscles, drugs, sports, and occasionally school. Unlike them, Miguel struggles to understand his place in the universe. Voyager is his touchstone. Ever since he learned that the spaceship was launched on his birthday, he’s been charting its course. When he went into juvenile detention, Voyager was sailing past Neptune. Just before it left the solar system, Carl Sagan asked the NASA engineers to turn Voyager’s cameras around. He wanted one last glimpse, and the spacecraft obliged. It took the Solar System Family Portrait: a snapshot of the planets as they rotated around the sun. In the family portrait, Earth is a pale blue dot.
Miguel wonders what his family portrait would look like? Just MG and his dad. When his dad left, his mom cut him out of half the pictures they had together. In some she just cut out his head so that there’s a blank circle where his father should be. Miguel has some cousins on his mother’s side whom he rarely sees. He had an aunt and uncle who were killed in a car crash when they were drunk. There is his aunt Elena who shows up once every few years for a funeral. He doesn’t think he could pick her out of a lineup. Miguel laughs to himself. That’s a phrase he remembers from juvie.
On the wall of his room, across from his poster of Voyager, Miguel has a poster of the pale blue dot. Voyager took the snapshot on February 14, 1990. Valentine’s Day. The poster is of a sunbeam and in its midst, barely a pixel, the tiniest of blue dots. It is on this dot that all people have lived, all animals have been born and perished. Battles have been fought and won, and lost, generations upon generations of humans have lived and struggled and died. Everyone who has ever loved or cried or lost or hoped or dreamed, every creature that has ever fought for its survival or watched it come to an end. All the life we have ever known has been lived on the pale blue dot that sits in the middle of a sunbeam.
He’s read that Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, his lover and, later, his wife, had asteroids named after them. They are in an orbit around each other for eternity. He thinks of Carl Sagan believing that somewhere in the universe other forms of life exist. Perhaps not just like us, but intelligent life all the same. This is how Miguel thinks about his family. Surely they are out there somewhere. But he has no idea where. Or what form they might take.
After Voyager took this final picture, its cameras were turned off and the ship continued on its dark, solitary journey toward the edge of the Milky Way. Miguel estimates that he will be almost forty—a number that is incomprehensible to him—when Voyager leaves the Milky Way and crosses into interstellar space. And by then he will be an old man.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SUPERMOON—1992
Rachel Rothstein can’t sleep. She sits in her living room, staring out the large picture window. She should have known there was a full moon when her restlessness settled in. The boy told her that it would happen this week, but she forgot. Normally she’s so tired or has had so much to drink that she just drops into bed. Passes out, Nathan will say. Nathan never has trouble sleeping. His circadian rhythms are inordinately intact. He sleeps the guiltless sleep of children. Even her own children, especially Davie, toss and turn more than Nathan does.
But for Rachel it’s different. It isn’t that she’s tossing and turning. It’s that she will wake for no reason in the middle of the night as if she’s slept for eight hours. Her sleep is more like a long nap. But tonight she’s just awake. When she finally came out of their bedroom, leaving Nathan snoring in his deep REM sleep, she found the living room bathed in a shimmering blue light. It was as if a spaceship had landed in their driveway. Something that would not really surprise her in this desolate landscape in which she has, for reasons that at the moment escape her, decided to live.
She goes to the window to see if ET is standing in the shrubs, but instead she sees the enormous moon. It is a supermoon. She recalls that Miguel told her that. He seems to be into such things. The full moon is in perigee, he told her, the closest it ever comes to Earth. Perigee, she likes that word. Like pedigree. It implies something important. And now it is fourteen percent bigger than a regular full moon. This is just one of the reasons why Rachel cannot sleep. For years she’s tried to practice good sleep hygiene. No late-night television. No caffeine and as little alcohol as she can manage. She’s tried to use the bed only for purposes of sleep or intimacy—neither of which seems available to her at the moment. Still she is awake.
She glances at the digital clock in the kitchen. It is 3:47. She’s been sitting up since 2:17. She contemplated taking half an Ambien, but the boys will be up at 6:30, and she’d be out cold. She could take a bath, maybe that would relax her. It took a few days but Julio Lorca did get the well drillers back. They had clogged up the cold-water pipe and they unclogged it. She left Lorca a box of oatmeal cookies and a thank-you note, but he never responded. Nathan worries that he’s going to take their well rights away. She decides against a bath. It might wake the boys.
Instead she pours herself three fingers of Scotch to which she adds an equal amount of half-and-half and a spoonful of honey. She sticks the concoction into the microwave for forty-five seconds. Moose milk. It was once a surefire remedy to get her back to sleep, though as she sips it the impact it’s having is to make her feel drunk but not tired. All her life the moon has interfered with her sleep. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that some people have circadian rhythms and others are governed by circalunar rhythms? Coral reefs, she read somewhere, reproduce once a year after the full moon.
As a young girl, she’d wander sleepless through her parents’ house or tug on her mother’s nightgown sleeve until she woke, looked out the window, and said, “Oh, it must be the moon.” But then her mother, who was usually drunk, would tumble back into whatever stupor she lay. But at least in this her mother was consistent. Studies have shown that sleep isn’t as deep when the moon is full, nor is it as long. Minutes are shaved off the night; dreams are troubled and seem never to end. Some people, even those who dwell in dark places like basement rooms or windowless cells, still can’t sleep. It is not because of its light but because of its pull.
And of course the moon meant other things. When she was a teenager and became impossible, hysterical, when she binged and vomited and drank until she took herself to AA, her father called her “the lunatic.” She’d overhear him as he and her mother stood outside of her bedroom, arguing. Now, in this household full of men with their love of blood sports and propensity for sound sleep, Rachel has no doubt that she is governed by the moon. She touches her aching breasts and feels the stiffness in her back. Her period will come soon. And when it does, it is always a relief, a letting go. It happens every twenty-eight days like clockwork. Her whole body is governed by the moon.
As she sits up, staring at the blue curtain of light that filters down into the room, a brightness that seems otherworldly, she wonders what her next move should be. What will it take for something to occupy her enough that it will make her actually get tired? The three miles she runs every day doesn’t do it. The running after the boys, the picking up and dropping off, the crossword puzzles, the attempts at modeling in clay, the long phone calls with her mother and friends back in New York who imply every so often that it might be time to reconsider her move to, as her mother calls it, the middle of nowhere. None of this can make her lie down and close her eyes.
Sex used to do the trick. For a time it was Rachel’s cure for everything. It had long been her drug of choice. She’d meet men in libraries, on the bus, in bar
s. Sex plus vodka worked very well for a time. And then she met Nathan and sex was how she put herself to sleep with him as well. Until something changed. Maybe it was her hormones after two babies. Or maybe it was the sex itself. But instead of putting her to sleep, it keeps her awake. If they make love at night, she’ll be as awake as if she’s had a double espresso—something she doesn’t dare drink after ten in the morning. Though sex in the early morning does still put her to sleep.
She could go into the bedroom and wake Nathan. Probably if she tried hard enough, he would comply. And perhaps at this point it would make her sleep. But she doesn’t want to risk it. And besides the moose milk is settling in. She feels warmth growing inside of her. Not sleep, exactly, but cozy, which is almost as good.
They came here for a reason, didn’t they? They wanted a better life. You need to learn how to hold on to the good, her therapist would say. But where is her therapist now? Perhaps Rachel is just lost in one of those moments in life where everyone finds herself from time to time. Isn’t that how Dante begins his Divine Comedy? About being in the middle of the woods where the right way is lost? Or something like that.
Rachel can’t explain this to anyone—not to her husband or her closest friends or her family—but she believes deep down that things happen for a reason. That people’s lives have paths—destinies, if you will—that will take them eventually where they need to go. Rachel believes, for instance, that she was destined to meet Nathan on that kibbutz in Israel. That their lives together were intended for a reason the way she believes most things are intended. Of course this theory falls apart if you are in Germany in 1938 or a mudslide in Peru. Her belief in the inevitable cannot alter the hand of history, but in some sense there is such a thing as destiny. It is as if there is an invisible map that you have to find and then you will know your way.
