A Guide for the Perplexed
Page 21
My palm brushed her knee. Close, my elbow still bent. But a knee, after all, even her divinely mysterious, lightly muscled Amazonian knee, is only a tertiary landing place, a momentary stop in the search for a homeland, and far too far south of the latitude we were sailing. And so I pulled my arm up, rotating clockwise from my shoulder, the needle of a compass. I wiggled my fingers, stretched, strained, knowing what I would find if only closer, tempted, maddened by the equatorial humidity that teased my fingertips, tickled them with the suggestion of fertile, pungent, adolescent hair, finally relaxing my fingers, bending my elbow to relieve the strain, and discovering, of course, with a heat that ran through my arm and to the prehistoric heart of the Congo, that my palm fit perfectly, wonderfully, beneath one warm, tropical breast.
I noted the position of my arm, then relinquished control, and fell into a deep, perfect sleep.
“He wants to know.” Abbas brought me an extra cup of water with my salt beef the next day.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
“Then let me sleep.”
“Again?”
This dream, I wasted no time in vain explorations but reached directly for the large, dangling fruit, made my quick observations on the change in the angle of my elbow, and then passed the few remaining moments of control in thumb-aided evaluation of the lovely moles and ridges of the ocean-side of her breast.
The next day Abbas brought no water.
“Let me have some water.”
“Not until you tell him.”
“How far did the ship travel yesterday, Abbas?”
“That is known only to the admiral.”
“Colón.”
“Yes.” My first piece of solid information.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
“Then let me sleep.”
“He says enough with sleeping.”
“One more night, Abbas, tell him one more night. And if you bring me the information, how far we traveled yesterday, and how far we travel today, I will tell Pinzón down to the mile how much farther.”
“How do you know it is Pinzón?” Abbas was lost.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Sleep tight.” Abbas dropped the lid back on my cask.
I came to my dream later than usual. We were close, my elbow was well bent, though try as I might, I could not raise my head to a position of greater appreciation. But this time, whether from thirst or curiosity, I let my hand slide down to tease the hard, salty nipple, and was surprised to find a drop, two drops, a whole rainfall of drops along the sand in that mysterious gulf between her breasts and her unreachable vagina. I drew my hand, cupped and damp, back to my mouth and sucked furiously on my palms and my fingers until I woke myself in a frenzy. My lips were wet, my mouth tasted strongly—no imagination—strongly and sweetly of milk.
Abbas brought me the information. I made a quick calculation, with a double portion of salt beef and water.
“If we continue to sail at this speed, Abbas, three more days.”
“Three more days!” Abbas smiled broadly. “The captain will be pleased.”
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
It must have been shortly after midnight on the twelfth night of October when a thunderstorm of angry voices shook me awake. The sound of hatchet meeting wood mixed with a curse of frustration. The top flew off my cask. I rubbed my eyes and looked up. A torch lit the ceiling of the hold and below the torch three faces, unshaven, angry, and then terrified, as if the sight of me was the last thing they had expected. Screams, bootsteps, other screams, echoes, then silence and darkness as before.
I stood up warily, hesitant, wanting to look, afraid. Gripping the rim, I bent my elbows, pulled myself up, with none of the ease of dreams, none of the warmth, only pain in unused shoulders and aching back. I peered over the top. A grayish light oozed through the planks of the deck, between the slats above the waterline, the sound of water lightly urging the boat forward. As the minutes passed, the shadows moved, lightened into four other pale faces, peering out in terror and in wonder.
With great effort, I drew myself up to sit on the lip of the barrel. There must have been a hundred casks in the hold, hogsheads as big as tree stumps, double hogsheads as big as a blacksmith’s, all lashed together with hemp. Mine stood in the middle of the field. The only exit was a stoop-shouldered duck walk from the top of one cask to another.
At the foot of the ladder leading up to the deck, I joined my four ghostly comrades. Silently, we squinted, as pale and tentative as moles sniffing the gray air, reaching out paws to touch, confirm. Yes, this was a nose, these eyes, ears, hair, the familiar necessities. And yes, something different, something more, something felt, something less. Jews, all of us.
Up the ladder, through the hatch leading onto the deck, there was only the creaking of wood, the soft rush of fresh air. I signaled to my friends that I would ascend first, and they gladly gave way, ready to crawl back to their barrels at the first sound of danger.
On deck, Eliphaz. If ever there was a moment as fine and soul-strengthening as my first sight of the sea it was this, when my feet first touched the deck of a seagoing ship in the midst of a warm, calm ocean. I breathed, once, twice, three times. I felt—to the bottom of my feet and the ends of my hair—air, water, the smell of rotting wood and nighttime fill my lungs, my bowels, channel the life I had missed, my many weeks in the hold. The gray light disappeared. The boat rocked gently up and down. In the privacy of utter darkness, I rode a single plank over the surf, with the supreme weightlessness of the crest of a wave. I reached my arms out to the side. Zacuto’s astrolabe and book of charts fell out of my sleeves and clattered to the deck. No matter. The wind at my back filled the Franciscan cowl I still wore into a pair of angelic wings. An invisible hand pulled aside the curtain of a thick cloud, and at once all was bathed in the brilliant wash of a full moon.
Ranged before me stood twenty-five men. With a single breath, they stepped back to the rail, all eyes fixed on me as if on a ghost. One knelt. Suddenly they all knelt, crossed themselves, prayed, gasped, bowed their heads. A sound came from above, piercing the mumbling of the heads below. Tied to the foremast was a man. Another sound cried out above me. On the mainmast, silhouetted against the sails, the heavy square sheets shining against the clouds, another man. Halfway up each of the three masts was a man, standing in the same position as I was, feet down, arms stretched out to the side. But while I was free, these men were bound.
The men on the hempen crosses were conversos of a type all too familiar to a boy who had spent two years in a priory. And the men before me, cowering in the clarity of moonlight, were twenty-five mutineers, terrified that, thirty days past their last sight of land, they were just forty waves away from the edge of the earth. Quickly, I grabbed a knife from a kneeling sailor, climbed the rigging to the foremast and freed Abbas—for it was he, gasping for breath, the weight of his body pressing down on his chest. I eased him down to the deck, where he lay unmolested, the sailors still frozen in horror. Climbing up the mast at the stern, I reached a pair of broad shoulders.
“Captain Pinzón?” I whispered, unable to speak fully after ten weeks in the barrel. The man raised his beard from his chest, and I looked into the gray eyes of the father of my drifted love.
“My son!” He smiled. No words of gratitude could have matched that perfect expression of my hopes. I wanted to sit with him, high above the waves, pester him with questions. What was she like as a young girl? Does she sing? Does she walk on the beach at dusk with her eyes toward the west? How soon can she join me in the new world?
But there was another man hanging from the mainmast.
“Good morning, Admiral Colón,” I rasped.
“Esau, where the hell did you come from?”
“Now do you believe me, Admiral?”
“Believe you what?”
“Land. Between Spain and China.”
“Surely you don’t want to stay up here?”
“What makes you think you know what I want?” A real martyr, our admiral. No doubt about it, a Jew.
“You want to go down in history.”
“Leave me alone.”
“As the Great Discoverer.”
“Spices. Gold. The Indies. I told you before. Everything else is sentiment and illusion.”
“As the Savior of the Jews.”
“You and Santángel,” he said, struggling against the ropes. “There is a saying in Spain, do you know it? ‘In three cases has water flowed in vain—the water of the river into the sea, the water in wine, and the water at a Jew’s baptism.’ ”
“So you are one of us,” I said, smiling. But this man, this Colón, was reaching down inside himself for a Catholic answer. For if truth be told, I was right and Santángel was wrong. Colón was a nation unto himself, a nation so angry, so confused, so thoroughly pleased with itself, that, crucified as he was, his sole rebuttal was a gob of spittle to baptize the cheek my grandfather had missed.
The men looked up from twenty feet below, confusion, wonder, terror, such a mixture of mysteries and symbols peculiar to the Catholic religion, my dear son, that it would take me ten letters to try to unravel what these poor men saw in my two minutes on deck. But for me, after ten weeks in a barrel, what a feeling of control, power beyond the manipulation of my own dreams, the admiral beside me, the crew below, the sparkling nighttime sea.
I wiped my face with my sleeve, then turned and pointed. The crew peered as one through the gray-eyed dawn. There on the horizon, lit clearly, superbly, unmistakably, a success beyond my map of Africa. Not a breast, but an island nonetheless—a drop, life-giving soul food. I licked my thirsty lips and discovered salt spray. I swallowed, and my cracked, deserted voice box moistened with the dreamy taste of her sweet, sweet milk.
“Land,” I shouted. “Land Ho!”
ESAU—FLORIDA
When I woke from my dream, the taste of milk was still fresh on my lips, a woman’s breast only a bent elbow from my nose. I was lying on my back at full length, on the most comfortable straw mattress this side of my Córdoban childhood. There was no face attached to the breasts, no body below the hips, the artist had merely fashioned the obvious around the nipples of two knots in a plank of the ceiling. I turned my head. Hundreds of other knots winked back at me, similarly adorned. Abbas, standing guard, smiled.
I sat up on the bunk, careful of my head, and swung down to my friend. I pointed to my mouth, asking to speak and drink all in the same pantomime. He handed me a gourd. I tasted. Fresh water. I drank. Not the brackish liquid of ten weeks at sea, but fresh, clear water. I emptied the gourd as Pinzón entered the cabin.
He stood for a moment, huge in the frame of the door, a man clearly designed for a voyage of discovery, for great things. His chest dwarfed the slender Abbas. His head almost brushed the ceiling. His graying hair, still in the thick of youth, spoke of energy and wisdom. His hooded gray eyes were filled with a thirst, demanding knowledge from a world too small to answer all his questions. His voice rang, not in the insinuating, argumentative tenor of Colón, but with the rich basso profundo of a man.
“My son!” he said again, and let the echo fill the cabin with its unambiguous message of delight and gratitude.
“Captain Pinzón,” I began. He put his finger to his lips.
“There will be plenty of time for you to speak, Esau,” he said, closing the door gently behind him. “But first, taste this,” and he held out a dull orange root to me, freshly picked and still shining. I needed no further invitation. I bit and swallowed, barely chewing. The root tasted of dirt and water and home.
“The first fruits of the new world”—Pinzón smiled—“rightfully belong to you.
“Now,” he continued, as I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my cowl, “I suppose you deserve an explanation.” I nodded, still chewing. He sat on a bench opposite, motioned Abbas to guard the door. “I am afraid I can explain very little about the expedition. Until you were brought to me, the night of our departure from Palos, I knew only that I owed my ships, my family, my life, to the generosity of Don Luis de Santángel. I would follow any design of his without a murmur, even if it led to the depths of the Ocean Sea.
“I had heard of Colón, had met him at the occasional Mass in Palos and the infrequent visits I made with my daughter to La Rábida. He was a fanatic, without a doubt, too converted, too full of miracles and prophecy to lead an armed expedition to the slave coast or a merchant ship to Genoa. He was strong enough only for the impossible. I have known dozens of men like him. The dockyards of Cádiz, Lisbon, Mariposa, Valencia, are full of shipless captains ready to sail west to the Indies, south around Africa, or east through some imagined channel into the Arabian Sea. Don Luis came to me and said, ‘Don Martín, I need you to be the brain of an expedition whose heart beats in the breast of a crazy man.’ I was skeptical. But Don Luis asked. I requisitioned the ships, hired the crews, even in the face of the rumor that we were sailing beyond the edge of the world.
“In those last moments before the Expulsion, my days were already full with renting carracks to transport the thousands of Jews pouring into Palos. It was only seventy-two hours before our own sailing that Don Luis instructed me to package you and the nine others in barrels, and make certain you were on board before midnight on the day of the Expulsion.”
“Pardon me, Don Martín,” I croaked, “but what expulsion are you talking about?”
Pinzón laughed, started to go on, paused, laughed again, stopped laughing. He looked at me, troubled, gray eyes.
“Were you so cloistered in that monastery, poor Esau, that you heard nothing of the Expulsion of the Jews?” Silence. “Esau, my poor Esau.” He shook his head. “Your patience has been abused. Fourteen ninety-two was a busy year. Shortly after the turn of the calendar, Their Most Catholic Majesties finally conquered Granada.”
“That much I know,” I said, “and that they agreed to Colón’s expedition.”
“They did, in theory.” Pinzón nodded. “But the contract was not signed until April, two weeks after their signatures appeared on the Order of Expulsion. The Jews of Aragón and Castile had until the end of July to sell their belongings and take only what they could carry out of the country. All of them.” All of them, I thought. The Jews of Córdoba, my parents, my brother. I looked at Abbas. He had tried to tell me at La Rábida. How could he?
“Don Luis rode to Palos to assist me. You were the easiest; we knew where to find you. The other nine came from all over Spain, handpicked by Santángel.”
“Handpicked for what?” I asked.
“Esau, sit down,” Pinzón said. I was standing above him. I sat back on the bunk. I unclenched my fists and laid my palms flat on my knees. “Esau,” he began again, history lesson over, time to move on, “I have just returned from the most beautiful beach I have seen in all my fifty years of sailing, more beautiful than the Azores, than the Canaries, than the Cyclades of Greece. The natives, the fruit, the streams, are warmer, purer, sweeter than any I’ve known in Europe. Your people will thrive here, multiply, be a great people once more.”
“My people?” I asked.
“The Jews.” I had almost forgotten. “Did you never hear of the Minyan?” Of course I had heard of the Minyan—the Minyan that held its disputations and religious observances in my bedroom, in my study, in my living room, in my wonderful cave in Mariposa.
“Ten Jews made up the Minyan in Spain, Esau,” Pinzón said. “It will take ten Jews to make up the Minyan in a new homeland.” I had been handpicked. It will take ten Jews. In a new homeland. For weeks my ears had heard only wood against wood, seawater against wood. I had to pass Pinzón’s words from my lips to my ears several times until the sense became clear.
I was not just a navigator, as S
antángel had told me. I had been picked by my benefactor, handpicked, along with nine other Jews of Spain, to sail with Colón and Pinzón, to lay the foundations for a new Temple of Solomon, a new Garden of Eden. The four ghosts who climbed from their barrels in the moonlight were my fellow Jews. Five others remained hidden in barrels in the hold of Colón’s boat, the Santa María, their presence known only to Pinzón, Abbas, and an ordinary sailor, who kept them fed as Abbas did us.
“Tonight, Esau”—Pinzón lowered his voice—“Abbas will row you and your friends to the Santa María, and finally all ten ashore. I guarantee that the rest of the crew will be dead drunk.”
I hated to disappoint a man I so revered. But Santángel had named me navigator.
“Captain Pinzón,” I said, “I believe we have found only an island.”
“Yes?”
“A small one.”
“Colón believes it to be one of the islands of Cipangu.”
“With all due respect, Don Martín”—I blushed—“Colón has been spending too much time with Marco Polo and not enough with his charts.”
“So?”
“Could you imagine a homeland for the Jews the size of Zahara de los Membrillos?”
Pinzón sighed. “What do you recommend, Esau?”
I opted for more wandering, urging Pinzón all the time to sail north-by-northwest to the womanly peninsula we both knew so well. In so doing, I doomed all ten of us Jews to a few more barrel-bound weeks at sea.