A Guide for the Perplexed

by Jonathan Levi

  For three years they argued.

  My opinion was never asked. I was grateful. I could concentrate on the facts.

  I studied the portolano maps of the Mediterranean and learned about ocean currents and prevailing winds. I read the histories of St. Brendan and examined the voyages of the red-bearded Norsemen. Most important, I studied the sky with the astronomer Abraham ben Samuel Zacuto. And that meant release from the cave.

  No longer did Abbas slide the firebox aside after our Arabic lesson and send me back down to my cave. Instead, I lay on the pier behind the hut while the sun set over Mariposa, until Zacuto knocked on the door. He walked me through the stars, around the planets. He made me see the pearness of the earth, the attraction of the lodestone, the shape of the universe. I learned how to shoot the sun at noon. I listened as he spoke of the wisdom of the Pleiades, the deception of Orion. We slept on the pier after the lesson, rising at dawn to study the sun, squinting through his copper astrolabe, refining his charts, his tables.

  I studied the problem of Colón.

  Santángel had met Colón for the first time in 1485, at the Franciscan priory of La Rábida at the mouth of the river Tinto, where the water runs the color of copper. Colón, a Genoese sailor and a politician, had recently arrived, dispirited and hungry, from the Portuguese court of João II, where his proposal to find a western passage to the Indies had evaporated.

  Santángel had no personal enthusiasm for a trip to the Orient. Although he adopted an officially neutral position before the Minyan, I sensed that Santángel was partial to the Congo contingent, anxious to see the Iberian Jews carve a homeland out of the crazy, endless equatorial fecundity of the African jungle.

  But powerful as Santángel was, he needed a disguise—deer’s clothing for his grand hunt. Always on the trail of an energetic ally, he arranged for Colón to meet the monarchs in Córdoba. Santángel needed a captain with a cause, with a belief as strong as his own, but whose outward appearance and manner would disguise Santángel’s ulterior motives. Santángel was a converso. He prayed beside Isabel as often as possible. She was constantly worried that he might slide back into the religion of his forefathers.

  But Colón was a fanatic. Everything he did was as a messenger for God, the Christian God. He had a ready phrase from the Bible, the Christian Bible, to justify, prove, defend every one of his actions and goals. He was purer than Fernando and running at the shoulder of Isabel in the race for Best Catholic in Spain.

  Best of all, Colón was a Jew, and didn’t even know it.

  Santángel did. He had access to the bloodlines of every animal that ate and shat within the confines of Castile and Aragón. Beneath the patina of Catholic fanaticism, Colón possessed, Santángel believed, a Jewish soul. Here was the man to seduce the royal seal from the royal hands, to transport the Spanish Jews—and, most important, all their worldly goods—to a newfound land. Here was a Moses, born a Jew, raised a Catholic, ready to return to his people and lead the Israelites out of Egypt to their new homeland.

  When Colón met Isabel in Córdoba, Santángel and the Minyan had not yet determined the destination of the Israelites. Santángel persuaded Isabel to hesitate, to set up a commission, to keep Colón on a long leash.

  The leash was long enough for Colón to return to Lisbon and glean the news of the Dias discovery. The discovery of the seaward passage beneath the tip of Africa to the Indies snuffed out Colón’s Portuguese dream.

  “Why would the Portuguese need a westward passage,” Santángel asked me one starry evening when he, Zacuto, and I lay on the platform behind the hut with cups of dark, sweet coffee, “when an eastward passage lay open below the tip of Africa?”

  “And with all that land across the ocean to the west, hiding Europe from China,” I agreed.

  I don’t know what I would have said if Santángel had let me continue. But the slackened jaw, the wide eyes, were enough to stop me in mid-sentence.

  “All that land?” he finally asked. “What land?” I looked to Zacuto for support, but his eyes were focused westward. What support could he have given me? The words had sprung immaculate from my lips, unfathered by thought. I knew I was right, knew that there was a vast continent west of Europe and east of the Orient. But how could I explain what I didn’t understand?

  “I don’t know.” I finally apologized to Santángel. “I don’t know why I spoke. But I know it’s true. There is land there. A lot of land.”

  “Zacuto!” Santángel drew the astronomer around. “You tell us. Is there land west of Europe and east of the Indies?”

  A warm breeze stirred the waves around the piles of the pier. Inside the hut, Abbas hummed a tune about sand mountains and sailing ships. Zacuto raised himself up on his elbows and let a slight smile draw a slit in his dark beard. “Either there is land, Don Luis, or there is one hell of a lot of water.”

  The conversation moved on to provisions and sail size. But for the rest of the evening, I felt the gaze from the mild eyes of Zacuto, a curiosity mixed with a new respect. I felt dizzy, discomfort somewhere between throat and stomach, my equilibrium lost between intuition and knowledge.

  I dreamed that night, for the second time, of my copper-colored girl.

  Two years passed, two years of constant study with Zacuto and Abbas, of frequent congregations of the Minyan, of occasional visits from Santángel. But not a word of the mysterious Colón. Until one cool morning in the autumn of 1490, a retinue of the chancellor’s guards appeared at the door of the hut with a string of horses and an extra set of clothes in my size. Colón was back in Spain, at the priory of La Rábida. I was going to meet him, and possibly the queen. I washed. I changed. I mounted the horse. I had been in the cave for seven years.

  It was a different Andalusia I crossed. An Andalusia without Jews, it was true. But the brilliance of the sky after so many days in candlelight, the vastness of the real earth after the fine lines of my chalk drawings. It was impossible to share Santángel’s concerns, his obsessions. For five days, over the mountains of the Serranía de Ronda, through the marshes of the Coto Doñana, I reveled in my freedom from darkness and secrecy and Judaism. I rejoiced in my conversion.

  The priory of La Rábida was set at the edge of a rise, through a broad park of fir trees and sand. On one side, scrub trees and berry bushes stuttered down to the banks of the river Tinto. On the other, the land dropped off to a wide sand beach and the ocean.

  We approached the priory at the hour for evening prayers. Santángel met me at the gates and thought it better to delay my arrival past vespers, rather than display my absolute ignorance of the form and ceremony of the Catholics. While he chatted with the captain of the guards, I wandered down the dunes to the shore of the ocean.

  We had ridden all day, and though the sun was sinking, I was eager for an encounter with this new sea. Stripping off my clothes, I dove without rope or barrel or hesitation into the waves.

  The ocean was warm with the current of the river Tinto, warmer than I had expected. As free as I had felt under the Andalusian sun, I felt freer over the vast ocean deep. I dove till I touched bottom. I swam out farther and dove even deeper. I held my breath for what seemed like hours, picked up rocks and shells and bits of overwashed wood. I lifted myself up as high as I could above the surface, and then floated for minutes with my nostrils barely out of the water. I turned eastward to the shore, northward toward England, southward toward Africa, westward toward a land I knew was somewhere, if only I were a strong enough swimmer.

  As I turned back from the west, I saw a figure on the beach, a young girl, already stripped naked, wading out into the water as if to greet me. I was far enough away, and my boy’s head bobbed close enough to the waves, that I remained invisible to the girl. But young as she was, she was enough of a large-breasted, dark-nippled girl that even water and dusk couldn’t hide her sex from my eyes. She waded, she swam. What she felt when the final wave was crested and she floated into my trough, gray-eyed and unstartled, I could not tell you. I w
as twenty years old, son, and had known only the copper-colored girl of my dreams.

  Who was responsible? I for being the boy? She for being the girl? The waves for hiding me? The waves for enticing her? The waves for their backward, forward, ever-bobbing motion, revealing me to the chest when she was close enough to see, revealing her to me when she was still too far to hold? The fading light for making all judgment of distance irrelevant until she swam into my touch with the gray of her eyes, the perfect corks of her nipples? The tow for drawing us in and in? The sand for netting our single starfish? The ocean for its undrawn loneliness, stoppering all conversation unbegun? The earth for its revolution? The moon for its tides? The stars for their luminescence? The universe for its motion?

  We lay on our sides in the sand, too close, too weak to look into faces. My body was curled like Africa, her breasts above my shoulders, my face in her belly. Her knees were drawn up, thighs warm against my chest. We lay there, nudged gently into slumber, gently, by the waves. When I awoke, the moon had risen, and she was six feet away. The groove on the beach where the water had slowly separated us, grew shallower, fainter with each wave. I was still curled like Africa, she lay still on her side. But I saw her gray eyes, north of her belly, wide, inviting, familiar, dreamlike, lost. In the moonlight, her skin was copper.

  Then she disappeared.

  I returned to the priory, naked, shivering, unwilling to say a word either to Santángel or Father Juan, whom I had met in the cave of Mariposa. I asked the cook for a cup of soup and a bottle of sherry. Up in my room, I wrapped myself in a horse blanket and stood by the window, the moon shining full through the glass. There was a knock on the door. I told the cook to enter and put the soup on the table. I squinted through the moonlight for traces of my girl, even at the height of the priory over the beach. I turned to my soup. There was a man. Not a cook by the cut of his garments and the light in his eye.

  He set the tray, with its soup, sherry, candle, and tankards, on the table by my bed. I said nothing, so deep in my confusion that I could only hope he would leave quickly and not think me entirely insane.

  “Don’t mind if I take a drop of your sherry, do you?” he asked, pouring himself a generous dose. “You are Esau.” I thought he smiled. I smiled back. He raised his glass. “They call me Colón.”

  Hardly the intimidating monster I had imagined, chased from the courts of Spain and Portugal. Shorter than I, heavier, more pockmarked, more chinned. He was more Abravanel than Santángel, more kind companion than daunting teacher.

  “I think,” I said, then stopped to control my mouth, still caked with salt and sand and saliva. “I think that I have discovered something.”

  “Sit.” Colón took a glass to the window. I pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders and sat to my soup. It was hot. Colón refilled his glass, poured me a drink from the bottle, and returned to the window. “Now,” he said, “your discovery?”

  I told him about the ocean at sunset, about the girl, the spiral Mediterranean of her hair on the surface, the broad shoulders, the peninsular weight of her breasts below the water, the stiff, salt corks of her nipples, the gray sea eyes. The very telling painted a memory more vivid than the encounter.

  All the while, Colón’s voice, his Abravanel voice, encouraged without urging, led me closer to a discovery that I was certain was just over the next wave. Suddenly, the complete map flashed in front of me, as if I had drawn it on the wall of my room.

  “Africa,” I said. “I was Africa.”

  I dropped my blanket and took my chalks from my bag. Naked as on the beach, I scrawled for half an hour on the whitewashed walls of my cell, while Colón held the candle.

  “Here am I, Africa,” I said, tracing the drawing with my finger, “all curled up, my back the north coast, my head and shoulders the bulge to the west, my buttocks Arabia, my toes pointing south to the seaward passage to the Indies.”

  “I know.” Colón spat on the floor. “I was in Lisbon when Dias returned.”

  “And here’s the girl.” I swallowed. “First, as we were when …” and I drew her in the waning moments of our first passion, as we lay curled up in one another on the beach. There were her feet, just below mine; her knees by my chest; my head, the bulge of west Africa, in her belly. Her large, tropical breasts rested warm on my back.

  And then I moved her, as the water parted us, so that the gap between us, between Africa and her body, revealed her neck, her face, her hopeful, inviting, lost gray eyes.

  Finally, I drew Europe above my Africa, and filled in the bits that matched above the girl’s body. No longer were we girl and boy, momentary passion, the heat of creation, but two mature continents, pulled, pushed, cooled, drifted apart by time.

  This was my answer, the ultimate map of my seven-year apprenticeship under Santángel. The girl was the new continent that no one, not the Portuguese, not the Africans, not the Arabians, not the Chinese, had imagined. This was the land that blocked the westward passage to the Indies, the land I had guessed at that warm evening on the pier above the cave. But what a land! A land that once, long ago, Europe and Africa had clung to in deep, prehistoric heat. The mate that once upon a time fit the Old World, the Known World. The wife, the mother, the daughter that had gone away, run away, floated away. The Unknown, the Terra Incognita, the Promised Land, the only Canaan left for a new Moses to find, to found a new people.

  “This is where we must go!” I shouted at Colón. “Here is the continent we must find!”

  Slowly, Colón turned to me, the candle casting shadows past his chin, his nose, up to the crown of his head. A smile drove across one cheek.

  “I remember,” he said, “I remember what it was like the first time. The earth moved.”

  I felt a chill. He didn’t understand.

  “Then I grew up.” Colón opened the door, and the draft hit me full force. “Spices. Gold. The Indies. Everything else is sentiment and illusion.”

  HOLLAND—KIPFERLN

  “Columbus was a Jew?”

  “Oh, Holland, don’t disappoint me!” Half the pages of the Esau Letter remained in my lap, half were scattered on the floor beside my armchair. Hanni and Isabella lay on their stomachs on Sandor’s bed, elbows on the duvet, chins on palms, a pair of teenagers.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “It has nothing to do with being serious.” Hanni stood up and shuffled through the unread pages of the Esau Letter. “The most you’ll hear Spanish officials admit is that Columbus’s father was a converted Jew, which, technically speaking, makes Columbus no Jew at all. But, ah, here it is!” She handed me a page marked “Bibliography.” “This is just a partial list of the critical articles that the family has written over the centuries.”

  “Your family?”

  “Who else would bother? Columbus, Esau, the whole Discovery of America—look at how many countries have reinterpreted the story to suit their own purposes.”

  “Spain, Italy, the U.S.,” I guessed partially.

  “Portugal,” Hanni continued, “Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Colombia, of course, and the rest of South and Central America while we’re at it. Even the Japanese have a theory.”

  “Columbus was on his way to Japan,” I added.

  “To what Marco Polo called Cipangu.”

  “And your family?”

  “The Jewish question, at least, was solved at the end of the last century by a cousin on my Mama’s side—a chemist at the University of Oklahoma—through analysis of ink and handwriting. He found a number of short notes written in Hebrew, from Columbus to his son Diego, and published a monograph with an interpretation of Columbus’s signature that proved him to be a practising Jew at the time of his voyage to the New World.”

  “But Columbus has always been painted as a rabid Catholic,” I said, “always quoting the Apocrypha, calculating the distance to the Indies with measurements from the New Testament.”

  “And as the greatest sailor the world has ever known.”

 
; “Exactly.”

  “Two facts about Columbus, trumpeted by all the modern historians?” Hanni smiled and crawled back onto the bed.

  “Yes?”

  “All the modern methods at their disposal, navigational, historical, forensic?”

  “I suppose.”

  “If the second—Columbus the Greatest Sailor, et cetera, et cetera—was shown to be not only false but ridiculous, wouldn’t you be inclined to doubt the first?”

  “Columbus the Catholic?”

  “And replace it with Columbus the Jew?”

  “Are there any other options?” I looked over at Isabella, wondering how much of this she was catching.

  “Certainly.” Hanni sat up and crossed her legs. “To forget about Columbus, for one.”

  “And concentrate on Esau?” I smiled.

  “Are you sure you aren’t Jewish?” Hanni stretched her arms above her head, in pleasure, I thought.

  “It’s a little difficult,” I said. “Whenever I see the name Esau, I think of Alan Bennett as the Anglican vicar in Beyond the Fringe. ‘But my brother Esau is an Hairy Man …’ ”

  “ ‘But I am a Smooth Man.’ Leo and I saw him in Edinburgh in ’61. Wonderful!”

  “So you understand why I have difficulty taking the story seriously.”

  “The story, or Esau, or Alan Bennett?”

  “All three I suppose.” The bed looked awfully inviting. I had just hit the wall of fatigue and ached for a pillow to cushion my fall.

  “Holland, sit up!” My eyes, always a giveaway. Hanni ran down the steps to the courtyard and returned with the jar of kipferln. “Open,” she said, and popped two in my mouth. I chewed through my irritation.