by Mary Morris
Rachel squeezes his too. “So am I and look, we did it. We got out of the house.”
Nathan laughs. “Yes, that is an accomplishment.”
Rachel has been wanting to see Chaco Canyon since they moved to New Mexico. It is one of the oldest sites of the ancient Pueblo people, and its buildings and structures are believed to be more than a thousand years old. She did some research and learned that they can camp on the grounds. Rachel thought about making a camping reservation but Nathan said, “What for? Let’s wing it. Besides that’s just if you’ve got a Winnebago or something like that.”
So they are going to wing it. The way they used to when they first met. Backpacking around Europe. Busing it through Latin America, never sure of where they were going from one stop to the next. It was an adventure. And neither of them could recall the last time they’d been on one—though, of course, as Rachel likes to remind Nathan, moving to the Southwest is an adventure, isn’t it? Not what anyone expected them to do.
They drive through miles of desert. Brilliant sunshine filters down. The pure light. That’s what they call it around here. Because of the altitude and the dryness the light is as clear and pure as anywhere in the world. Rachel closes her eyes. Listening to the wolf spirit music soothes her. For the first time since she can remember, certainly since they moved to the Southwest, she can relax. Perhaps she dozes off. She isn’t sure, but suddenly she is jerked awake. She looks around. Ahead dark storm clouds loom. Rachel points to the sky. “Look at those clouds.”
Nathan nods. “Don’t worry. They’re moving the other way.”
Rachel stares at the black clouds. “How do you know?”
“From the way the wind is blowing,” Nathan says.
They pass a motel. “Maybe we should just grab a motel room for the night.”
Nathan shakes his head. “Rach, it’s going to be fine. I didn’t spend all this time getting camping gear together for us to check into a motel.”
She squeezes his arm. “You’re right. And the clouds probably are moving the other way.” Though it seems to Rachel that the sky is darkening even more. She gazes at her husband. His sharp nose and pale blue eyes, his round face. They should get out more. Go hiking. When the boys get a little older, they’ll do that. But for now it is just them. And she is glad.
As they reach the turnoff to Chaco Canyon, a sign reads, CAMPGROUND FULL.
Rachel plucks Nathan on the arm. “Nathan, it says that the campground is full.”
Nathan laughs, shaking his head. “They always say that. They don’t want too many people camping here at night.”
“But why would they make that up?”
“Honey, would you please stop worrying? We’ll be fine.”
They drive for thirteen miles at a snail’s pace down the pitted road, bumping along, and when they reach the campground, it is full. Every space is taken. Rachel stares straight ahead, not wanting to say anything, but she’s thinking about that cozy motel room with clean sheets. They drive around in circles. Finally two men—a father and son—motion for them. “There’s some space here if you want it.”
The space is at the edge of a sandy mound. It’s not really a space, but it’s enough for them to park the car and set up their tent. And there’s a picnic table nearby. “Thank you,” Nathan says. “Much obliged. Hey, why is it so crowded tonight?”
“Oh, it’s the night of the summer solstice. A lot of people have come out to, you know, worship the sun. Enjoy the stars.” That’s when Rachel realizes that the men have a telescope set up.
“Are you here to stargaze?”
The son, who is probably in his early twenties, nods. “Chaco Canyon is one of the darkest places on Earth. And one of the best places to see the stars.” Rachel thinks about that for a moment. She’ll have to tell Miguel. Maybe he’d like to come here sometime. Maybe they could all come together to go camping as a family. He could bring his telescope and show them what he knows of the stars. Rachel can’t help but notice that overhead the skies are darkening. “Maybe we should set up camp.”
Nathan agrees. “I’ll put up the tent. Why don’t you get dinner on the table?”
Rachel has Tupperware, neatly stacked, filled with chicken that she fried herself, deviled eggs, pasta salad, and fruit. She puts them on the table along with a bottle of red wine and a bottle opener. She’s just taken the lid off the food when the wind picks up, blowing sand everywhere. “Oh, my god.” Quickly she’s covering the food, racing it to the car. Just then the skies open. She sees Nathan struggling with the tent stakes. It’s only about six inches off the ground. “Nathan, let’s put the tent up. We can eat inside.”
Nathan who is getting drenched steps back. “It is up,” he shouts.
Rachel can’t see how this is possible. It’s barely above the ground. “What do you mean it is up?”
“I guess I borrowed a pup tent.” Nathan shrugs as the rain pelts his shoulders. “It’s not what I expected.”
“Me either.” Rachel tries to laugh it off, but as she looks at the army-issue pup tent, she sees any hopes for a romantic night sliding away. It occurs to her as she watches Nathan pounding the tent stakes deeper into the ground that he doesn’t put much effort into things when it comes to her and the boys. He doesn’t try very hard for them at all. If he really cared about her, and about being with her, wouldn’t he have found a tent they could cuddle up in? “Let’s get in the car,” Rachel shouts and they rush into the car as the rain pours down. They rip off their wet clothes and throw on dry T-shirts and sweatpants. They eat in silence, watching the rivulets of rain rush down, pooling around their tent.
The chicken has the gritty taste of sand. In her mind Rachel calculates. How long would it take them to drive back along the pitted road to that motel. And what if it’s full now? Rachel looks around. She sees all the well-appointed camp sites. The tents with the rain covers. The tents in which she can see entire families eating dinner at folding tables. Hurricane lights turned on. One family is playing cards. Another has a generator and a portable TV.
It is only eight o’clock. “What should we do?” Rachel asks. She’d imagined a moonlit walk among the ruins. Romantic caresses. Shooting stars. Instead they are sitting in the bucket seats of their SUV, eating their picnic out of Tupperware tubs. And they can’t even joke about it. She remembers when a friend had an outdoor wedding and during the ceremony the neighbor’s dog ate their wedding cake. And the bride and groom just laughed about it. Why can’t they be like that couple? Rachel touches his sleeve. “Can we talk about this?”
“What’s there to talk about?” She wonders why he’s so stubborn. Why can’t he just admit that they should have stayed in the motel? They should have checked to see that they had actual camping equipment. They should have turned back when the sign said that the campground was full. Why can’t he ever say, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”
They eat in silence, staring at the torrents cascading down their windshield. Rachel wipes her hands and picks up a guidebook to the Southwest that she proceeds to leaf through. She learns that Chaco Canyon is believed to be a place of special powers. The Pueblo people lived here for hundreds of years and then, about a thousand years ago, they abandoned it. No one knows why.
Nathan, who is reading a medical journal about advances in the artificial heart, yawns. The rain has let up. “Shall we try going to bed?”
Rachel gazes at the sodden ground. “Maybe we should sleep in the car?” But he shakes his head. He takes the air mattress and puts it inside the tent. There’s no point blowing it up because it wouldn’t fit inside, so he lays it flat on the ground to keep the water from seeping into their sleeping bags, which he then unrolls. They crawl into the tent and into their respective sleeping bags. Then they just lie there.
After a while, Rachel says, “I’m going to read.”
“Me too,” Nathan says. They try to prop the flashlights on their chests, but the lights keep falling over. They agree that it’s futile. Shutting of
f their lights, they decide to sleep. Rachel thinks about zipping the sleeping bags together, but Nathan hasn’t suggested it, and really what is the point? She lies there, not touching her husband. In the dark Rachel turns to Nathan, “You know they just abandoned this place.”
“Who did?” Nathan asks.
“The Pueblo people. They lived here for thousands of years until about 1250 and then they just left. They completely abandoned it. No one knows why. Isn’t that interesting?” But he doesn’t answer her. His breathing grows heavy. Outside the rain continues to fall. The rhythmic pattern it makes on the tent roof is soothing. Soon she is starting to drift off as well. In the morning this will be over and they can begin their adventure again. They will walk among the ruins. They will learn the ancient ways. Then she hears the drums.
At first she is not sure what she’s hearing. It might be rain or thunder but it doesn’t stop. It just goes on and on. Finally Rachel gets up. “Nathan, do you hear that?” But he is fast asleep. The rain has let up as Rachel crawls out of the tent onto their muddy campsite. When she stands, she trips over the tent rope, almost falling. “Damn it,” she says under her breath. Around her are people in their campers, drinking beer and grilling on their hibachis. Others recline in lounge chairs in their nicely lit tents, complete with mosquito netting, listening to the Late Show. Or reading. It’s like a little village. Now she can hear the drumming louder and she follows the sound until she comes to a group of about twenty people sitting in a circle, banging on bongos, tambourines, plastic garbage cans, toy drums. A man standing outside the circle sways to the rhythm. “What is this?” Rachel asks.
“It’s the summer solstice,” the man informs her. “We’re with the California Summer Solstice Society.”
“And the drumming?”
He smiles at her through luminous white teeth. “We’re honoring the sun.”
Rachel looks up at the pitch-black sky. “But it’s hours until dawn.”
“We greet that dawn. It’s our tradition. We do it twice a year.” There is something strange about this man. It almost seems to Rachel that he is glowing in the dark. It starts to rain again as she makes her way back to their tent. She crawls in. Her sweatpants, her socks are wet. Nathan is breathing heavily, burrowed into his bag. Damp and exhausted, she slips into her sleeping bag and lies awake all night, listening to the drums.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE SILENT WHORE—1494
Columbus is returning to find his men. The ones he left behind to build the fort he named La Navidad. In fact he left them so that he would have an excuse to return. It had taken months to convince the king and queen that he needed to return. Now he is back with seventeen ships. But as they anchor in quiet harbors, he sees things that haunt him. Skulls used to hold trinkets, long bones boiling in cauldrons. One young man shows Columbus his back where the flesh has been bitten away. Young boys whom the cannibals have castrated are presented to him. Castration makes them more tender. Columbus cringes before these ghastly stories. Then goes on to perpetrate some of his own.
They come upon the encampment. The wood from the Santa María has been burned to ash. Bones are scattered among the lean-tos his men built. Heads sit on wooden spikes. It is clear that he is too late. He hears that the Carib killed everyone at La Navidad. Or that his own men stole women from a nearby village and the villagers killed them. Another rumor hints that they fought among themselves until they were all dead.
Except for one. There is one, the Indians say, who survived. They did not kill him because of his red hair and piercing blue eyes. They believed he was not a real man but a ghost man, a shadow, a god. They tell Columbus that this one preached against the Spanish God. He cursed the place called La Navidad. Some say he escaped into the jungle, taking a wife, and is living in a hut on the shore. Others say he has gone to Cuba and is founding a colony of his own kind. Luis de Torres has been spared. He has been killed. He has been captured and eaten by the Carib. He is living in Cuba with wives and tobacco and gems.
This bothers Columbus more than his men can know. Everyone supposes that Ferdinand and Isabella have financed this second voyage, but in fact the Duke of Seville financed it with the money he confiscated from the Jews of Seville before they were all exiled or killed. What if the first citizen of the New World is a Jew? What a curse this would be. Columbus thinks fondly of his scribe with the delicate white hands and mottled skin. It saddens him that he was left behind and he missed him on his return voyage. But that does not mean that he wants him to be the first settler to survive in the New World.
In his despair he sails on. Columbus loses track of the coves they drift into, the harbors where they seek to anchor but can’t because the reefs are too sharp or the sea worms will bore holes into the hulls and sink his ships in a matter of days. He cannot recall all the places where they don’t stop. He loses track of the natives who greet him, of the hawk bells and glass beads he hands out, the flowers he has sniffed, the fruits whose sweetness he has never imagined, and the buoyant breasts of the women who climb aboard or wave at them from the shore.
He cannot recall the name of the large nuts filled with sweet milk that he sips after the natives slash them with sharp knives. He cannot remember all of the women who kiss his hands and the gold studs he sees in their noses and ears, the promises made, the treasures that elude him. He is weary of the wonders he has seen. The parrots that speak the same language as the natives who let them perch on their shoulders. The mermaids whom he found ugly and pearls that he believes come from dew raining on the shells of oysters. He passes up bitter leaves that the natives light and draw the smoke into their lungs. All he wants, all that matters to him, and that has ever mattered, is gold. And the men he left behind. His heart aches for them. But there is nothing he can do except journey on.
As Columbus sails through the Caribbean on his endless search for China and silk and gold, the itinerant Jew taunts him. Will the Jew be the one who finds his way to the coffers of the Great Khan? How can Luis de Torres have survived when the others perished? Though in his heart he believes that the Jew is dead, his doubts gnaw at him, keeping him awake at night, pacing the decks so that the crew wonders if he hasn’t finally gone mad. They catch glimpses of him staring at the sky as if charting new courses. Columbus knows everything through his instincts. He knows where to sail because he feels it in the wind and the movements of the water. He reads it in the flight of a bird. And just as he knows this, he is sure that the Jew is dead along with all the others left behind. He is as sure of this as he is that he has discovered China.
And yet there are doubts.
He cannot find the palaces of the Great Khan, the men and women with long braids, dressed in silk. It is just this endless sailing. When it is safe, they drop anchor but mostly they keep moving. The reefs are too dangerous, the shore too shallow. Or he spies sea worms, wiggling in the turquoise ocean. When they do stop and go onto the pristine sandy beaches, or when the natives sail to greet them, he asks where the gold can be found. He has no interest in the pearls or the tobacco they bring in their trembling hands.
In his rages he has ears severed, hands chopped off. He has a man’s nose cut off to prove that he can. Soon he will be roasting them alive. He will teach them not to lie. Or deny him his precious gold. He will hang anyone who defies him, including his own men. He will force the natives to take him to the Great Khan. But on this second voyage he has another goal besides the gold and the discovery of China and bringing new Christians into the fold.
This voyage is different from his first. This time he has many ships. And there are women on board. Columbus only refers to them in his logs as “the ladies of Castile.” Their names do not appear on the passenger or crew manifest. It is not as if they are wives or lovers. Women are bad luck to the sailors, but these he found on the docks at Palos. They are here to keep the men at bay. Their skin is still smooth and they smell of lavender and clove. He knows nothing of them except that they have each agreed to p
leasure his men. There are never two women on the same ship at the same time. They only see one another in passing. They are rotated between the ships so that no man grows attached.
But there is one woman who is different from the rest. She does not have the cold, calculating ways of the others. She does not drink or make jokes. One of the women laughed at a sailor’s penis and the other sailors had to stop him from slitting her throat and tossing her overboard. Even then she laughed. But this one is possessed with a strange, dark beauty. And silence.
She does not speak. She nods her head and agrees to what is offered. She is not deaf. The sound of plates clattering to the floor makes her jump. But she is silent. Some of the men thought her tongue had been cut out and they pried open her lips, but her tongue was there and ready to welcome them. When they have sex with her, she groans, not with pleasure but in some anguish they cannot understand. So the men know that she has vocal cords. It becomes a game at times. They try to frighten her by jumping out at her in the dark. They try to make her laugh. One puts a knife to her throat and draws a thimbleful of blood, but still she doesn’t say a word. And then the sailor, thinking she is a saint, tosses his knife aside and, on his knees, pleads for her forgiveness.
The fact is Inez Cordero does not speak because if she did the truth would come out. And the truth is unspeakable. So her life has become a vicious circle of silence. It is not only that she has caused her father’s death but also that she has betrayed him and herself. She banished herself before her family had the chance to banish her. No one knows that she comes from a wealthy family who dealt in books and rare maps, who traded in spices throughout the Mediterranean world. Her father was a man who could take a whiff of stew and know if it was seasoned with cinnamon or cardamom, turmeric or saffron.
