You see, Eliphaz, the crew of Pinzón’s boat, the Pinta, the mutinous crew that I had faced down to save the lives of Colón, Pinzón, and my watchdog, Abbas, still wondered whether I was flesh or other. My four skinny friends had never climbed the ladder, had never materialized beyond the vague homunculi that the mutineers had imagined when they smashed open our hogshead havens in search of weapons. Pinzón, in his wisdom, thought it best to keep it that way. Five phantoms held far more power at sea than five unexplained Jews.
So back to our barrels we went, the five of us. And the next morning, when the crew had regained their sobriety, we weighed anchor.
Colón wanted to sail to the southwest, the vaginal southwest, a maddening choice of destination for a breast-mad young man. Certain as I was, even in my barrel, that we were no more than two days’ sail from my dream peninsula, I would nonetheless have supported the plan with enthusiasm. But an unforeseen fever drove the crew mad and, for a time, interrupted my search for a homeland and Colón’s for the Indies.
Gold. Gold. There were three captains and ninety-six sailors aboard the three ships, all infected. Against ten barrel-bound Jews. The odds were not good. So we bounced from island to island, small to large to small, sending out landing parties, finding just enough of the shiny stuff to keep us going, enough to keep us from the real work of the expedition.
One afternoon the ships changed course and turned eastward, back in the direction of the Old World. When Abbas brought my dinner that night I insisted on speaking with Pinzón.
“Don Martín,” I said, when we were safely inside his cabin, “you must seize control of the expedition and head north immediately. There is a peninsula of a large continent there. It is the source of all goodness, all life on this hemisphere. You must drop our Minyan there. Two days’ journey, that is all.” Pinzón looked at me in amazement. The six weeks had worn worse on him.
“With all due respect, Esau,” he finally whispered, “you are out of your mind. I can no more control Colón among the savages and the waves than I could in the port of Palos, where I had friends, family, and ammunition. You saw how he was, the night of the mutiny. He’d sooner be crucified than give up command.”
“Don Martín,” I continued. “You have seen where the desire for gold has led the king and queen of Spain. The Jews were their final mine. They booted them from the country and seized their possessions. If this expedition turns into a single-minded search for gold …”
“I can do nothing,” Pinzón whispered and dropped to the bench. I looked to Abbas. He was looking at me. I put my hand on Pinzón’s shoulder, as Abravanel had his on mine. I felt great love for this man who had kidnapped me, whose life I had saved, whose daughter filled my dreams. But it was time for the son to act.
“In that case, Don Martín, with all due respect, please remain in your cabin. I must take control of the ship. Abbas, open the barrels.”
The night watch put up no resistance when I appeared on deck with my four wraiths. North was the course I gave. North was the course called down to the helmsman below deck. As we came about, I heard a whisper in the wind from off the port side of the Santa María—a loose rope, a coded message, a new world bird, my mother’s viol? My heart was my lodestone, locked to its magnetic pole, feeling its way across the strait. There was no turning back. I was sure of my direction. I left to others the how.
After an hour’s pursuit, the Santa María and the smaller Niña gave up the chase. I hadn’t expected Colón to alter course and follow mine. At best, I hoped for a meeting away from the sight of his latest El Dorado, a chance to whisper the name Santángel in his ear, a chance to steer him, move him to the right course.
Eliphaz, my son. As we approached the coast two dawns later, the sun at our shoulders lighting the waves as they broke along the reefs, flocks of long-legged birds shimmering in circular clouds overhead, and Don Martín, up from his cabin for the first time, rested, with the gleam of moral righteousness in his eye and his hand, steady and heavy, on my shoulder once more, my lodestone of a heart near to bursting, pulling us forward, forward, that extra foot over the waves, I saw Home—for the Jews, perhaps; for the five of us, certainly; for myself, without a doubt.
I left Abbas with a map for Santángel and a copy for my teacher, Zacuto. The rest of the crew stood at the rail as we lowered a boat.
“I will try to send Colón,” Pinzón said, “with his five Jews.”
I felt unsure—with only a bar mitzvah education and the little I picked up from the Minyan—what it meant to leave Jews six through ten in Colón-bound barrels, how shaky a community I would be building with only five male Jews. I could only feel my way to action, no more blind now, at the helm of an unfamiliar vessel, than I was in my cave, my cell, or my barrel.
“I will try, Esau,” he said. “I will try, at least, to send your brother.”
My brother. My brother. All at once, Eliphaz, the sound of the viol overwhelmed me. That was the music I heard as we left shore in Palos. My mother’s viol, passed on to my brother, Yehuda, to make new music in the New World. Pinzón spoke as if I knew the plan all along. I blessed Santángel silently and showed no emotion.
“Better yet”—I spoke quickly to relieve him of the need to fulfill my dreams of reunion—“tell Santángel that you succeeded.”
“I will bring New Christians next trip. Women.” My mind moved from Yehuda to long hair, broad shoulders, gray eyes.
“I owe you much, Don Martín. I should like to name this new land after you.”
“No, no, Esau, much better a saint …” He caught himself. “Or at least a woman.”
The first man, whom the Jews call Adam, was given absolute authority to name the beasts and the plants of Paradise. I carried with me, in my barrel, in my Franciscan cowl, twenty-one years of a language, and an unusual way of seeing things that was at once part of me and outside of me. What that power was, that drew me from Córdoba to Mariposa, from Mariposa to the beach of La Rábida, from Palos across the ever-changing maze of the Ocean Sea, was a force that not even the Mayaimi have named. I love your mother, Eliphaz, as I love my own life. But a man always carries with him his first love. And if that love moves him, guides him, becomes the land that nourishes him, baptizes him, redefines him, well—any attempt at forgetting would be immoral.
“You have a daughter, Don Martín?”
He looked at me, another gray-eyed question. I looked out at the shore. The four Jews were perched in the boat, a week’s supplies lashed to the bottom.
“A daughter? You mean Florida?”
GRANDPA—1 OCTOBER 1919
New York, New York
1 October 1919
My dear Son,
In the latest fair copy I was able to examine, belonging to Zebulon Whiteman of Edom County, Missouri, dated 1882, the story of the discovery of the mainland of the North American Continent and the naming of the peninsula of Florida constitute the final words of the Last Will and Testament of Esau Benavides, born Eliyahu ben Moshe Halevy, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
In adapting the copy of 1882, which was itself taken directly from the 1763 translation of the original and certified authentic by the Franciscan missionary Bartolomeo de las Camas, I have merely attempted to impose a fluidity onto the literal translation from the Spanish, with the goal of persuading an American publisher to broadcast to a wider public the true history of our proud family, which is the true history of our country.
In the course of my studies of this remarkable document, I had occasion to visit most of the reputable booksellers of Judaica up and down the East Coast of the United States. Many of them provided valuable material on the history of the Jews in Spain and elsewhere prior to the Expulsion. None of them, however, was able to lay his hands on documents relating to the further history of Esau, his son Eliphaz, or any of his offspring and succeeding generations. Similarly unsuccessful were my communications with the few id
entifiable descendants. The history of the Mayaimi merged with that of the Seminoles. The subsequent removal of the Seminoles in the 1830s by the Gentiles into larger reservations in the Oklahoma Territory destroyed the requisite curiosity of origins. Only my direct ancestors have taken Esau’s advice to heart—in motion there is survival.
But as I was nearing the end of my work, one of my many inquiries finally bore fruit. I was visited one day by a decrepit bookdealer who claimed to have run a business in Sephardic Judaica out of his tenement on Essex Street in New York City for over thirty-five years, although God knows I have walked the length of Essex Street dozens of times without hearing its name. He boasted that he possessed several documents, in Spanish and in English, that might pertain to the history of Esau Benavides. Upon further inquiry, and a personal visit on my part to his attic, I discovered merely that he had recently received a letter from a Mrs. Albin Barker in Olive Hill, Kentucky, offering for sale several ancient pieces of paper she had discovered stored in a clay jug at the narrow end of a bat cave behind her truck farm. She could read nothing on the paper—she believed in her confusion that the symbols were Egyptian hieroglyphs—except for a large scrawl at the top of the first page: YSWA.
I paid the dealer five dollars for the woman’s address. For an extra five, the documents were mine. Written on vellum and dated 1653, these must be fragments from one of the earliest copies made of the original letter. They could even be part of the Spanish copy from which the translation of 1763 was taken.
I am a ham-handed translator of Spanish, and, with the scant information that exists on the Native Americans of Florida, the whole is therefore sketchy, full of gaps, mysterious at times, and at others unbelievable.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt in my mind that these are the last pages of the Will and Testament of Esau Benavides. With the fondness of a father, I have rushed to finish my translation in time for your bar mitzvah.
Happy birthday,
Papa
“This is absurd,” I said.
“You should see what other boys get as bar mitzvah presents.” Hanni was leaning back against the headboard, snugly surrounded by half a dozen pillows, eyes half-closed. “My Papa was a very lucky young man.”
Isabella still lay chin on hands, giving no sign of either boredom or understanding. The pile of paper I had read was spread around the armchair like a pinochle fan. There was one more sheaf to go, bound in its own purple ribbon.
“Did your grandfather honestly expect any publisher to believe that a Jew named Esau discovered America?”
“Why shouldn’t a publisher believe? There is the proof, in front of your nose.”
“This?” I whispered. “This copy of a copy of a translation of a copy of who knows how many other copies? Maybe if you could find the original …”
“The original?” Hanni finally opened her eyes. “Would you expect a double-breasted publisher, smoking a Montecristo at a mahogany desk high above Union Square to read a cardboard box full of tree bark in the original Castilian?”
“You mean you’ve seen the original?”
“Have you seen five-hundred-year-old tree bark?” Hanni smiled back. “My grandfather would have been laughed out of every waiting room in Manhattan if he had claimed to be carrying the original.”
“But you have no other way to prove the authenticity of the letter!” I felt I was explaining the alphabet to a summer intern. Hanni’s face dropped. Not as if I had finally twigged her to the crucial weakness of her obsession. More as if she had come to the realization that it was I who had failed to qualify for the summer job.
“Look at your own work, your documentaries. Are any of your viewers demanding to see the original?”
“No,” I said, “but they believe in the process of making copies of a film.”
“I mean the original scene, before you put it on film, with your subject walking in his garden, or sitting in her chair, full body, not a tightly framed soft-focus close-up. Does your audience have to be there in order to believe you? Do they have to walk with the astronauts before they believe that man really stood on the moon and not on some highly sophisticated TV set? Would anything less than being Neil Armstrong satisfy them? Would anything less than being Esau satisfy you?”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, what I always say when I can’t think of a good retort. She did have a point. I never could trust a camera crew.
“Holland,” she said, with remarkable equanimity, “I think it is worth realizing that, put between two leather-bound covers, televised on any public broadcast system, preached from any pulpit, religious or otherwise, just about anything will be believed by most people.”
“Then you admit this is all a fiction?” I smiled triumphantly.
“Of course not,” she said. “We were merely discussing the need for what you called ‘authenticity.’ Now stand up!” Isabella was on her feet in an instant, Hanni a moment later. My legs had fallen asleep. “Let your head drop, chin on chest, roll it slowly to one side, then the other. Head up, raise your hands slowly above your head …”
“Hanni, what are you doing?” I asked. My watch said 5.45.
“In America we call it the seventh-inning stretch.”
ESAU—NEW WORLD SERIES
The storm swept away the last of my companions. The Minyan was down to one. One Jew, one God, one Florida. I hate to say I was happy, but I am a monogamist at heart.
“All Jews dead?” I asked Hanni.
“Yes.”
“Except Esau?”
“Of course.”
“Very convenient. Kill off all your witnesses with Hurricane Jehovah. Very Moby Dick.
“Moby Dick was a whale.”
“It’s still deus ex machina. Automatic and unsatisfying.”
“It’s what happened,” Hanni said. “I thought you were the stickler for authenticity. Do you want Esau to give Queequeg CPR just to satisfy your literary tastes?”
I turned back to the letter.
I was hungry. Hungrier than I’d been in the cave, hungrier than during the hundreds of pointless fasts I’d endured as a Jew and a friar. Hungrier than I’d been since my bar mitzvah. Along with my friends went my food. And among the many books that Santángel left me, among the many lessons that Abbas and Zacuto taught me, those on “How to Catch a Fish” or “How to Make a Fire from a Stone” or “How to Tell the Edible Mushroom from the One That Will Turn Your Tongue Black and Choke You to Death” were conspicuously absent.
I had cowered on the same small square of sand since our arrival. It had brought only misfortune. I turned my back to the beach and walked inland. Half an hour later I was at the shore, another shore. Another island? Could my dream have been so misaligned that what I had thought was solid breast was merely another lactic mirage? In the distance, beneath the afternoon sun, more land rose from the haze, a mile, perhaps half a mile, away. More broad-leaved trees, more sand. I was on a reef, maybe only an accident of the storm. I turned to the north and began walking. I hadn’t gone far when I heard the first pahk. I stopped in my
“There’s a gap here,” I said.
“There always is. Keep reading.”
beyond the huts came another pahk and then a loud grunt, as if a small crowd of people had been slapped on the
“Hanni!” I complained.
“I was beginning to like you, Holland,” she said, shifting on the pillows. “Don’t be such a whiny little girl.”
I couldn’t tell whether it was ceremony or entertainment, war or game. There was a ball. There was a stick. Can you remember, Eliphaz, the first time I took you out to the Ball Game, the wonder, the mystery, the feeling that the intricate rules and rituals were only steps in a path toward losing yourself in the rhythm of the game. That was how I felt, son, lying on my stomach in the sand, peering between the stilts of the hut, the backs of two braves only a few feet
a crack, as the stick hit the ball, the sound of sap bursting in fire, of a spear shattering against the shoulde
r of a twelve-pointed buck, of breaking bones, of my grandmother quartering a chicken against the sharp edge of the Fountain of the Lions. I jumped up and ran, knowing that the ball might clear the roof of the hut, watching it white against the blue of the sky, then coming down, down, so wrapped up in the game that I gave no thought to whether to hide or to catch, but held my palms up, wanting desperately to be part of the game.
When I opened my eyes, my hands were full. And two braves stood before me, mouths open, terror and gratitude both mixed
on their shoulders into the midst
the Calusa beaten, gathered up their
then, that I opened my hands and found, staring up at me—I know you will find it hard to believe that your people were once so cruel—the rounded, ball-shaped, sun-bleached skull of a baby
I looked up from the page. Hanni was beaming, munching away at a kipferln.
“Do you want a translation?”
“A paper bag would help.”
“Anthropologists have dug up hundreds of these skulls in burial grounds all over the South, scarred and dented from repeated blows. They’ve condemned the aboriginal American for murdering defective infants, unwanted babies, et cetera.”
“Esau’s description is rather horrifying,” I said.
“But think for a moment—what if these babies had died of natural causes, miscarriages, stillbirths, prehistoric Sudden Infant Death Syndrome? What if the holiest use you could make of your child’s remains was in your holiest ritual?”
“A ball game was a holy ritual?”
“Have you ever been to a baseball game?”
“No,” I had to admit.
“Keep reading,” she said. “It gets easier.”
I was brought onto the platform of one hut, larger than the rest. The braves, Eliphaz, set me down in front of their father, another Santángel, another Pinzón. I understood by their gestures that they were giving the chief a step-by-step reenactment of how I had risen out of the reeds, the savior of the game against the Calusa. The whole tribe had gathered around, only about thirty people then. You notice that, fifteen years later, people who have never seen me still stare. The excitement of the Mayaimi the first time they saw me was almost enough to drown out the voices of your uncles.
A Guide for the Perplexed Page 22
