Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  2. Provision

  The commander of the ship was the infamous Ferdinand Magellan—Portuguese and pragmatic—who, after failing to obtain backing from his own king, had turned to Spain. Magellan had spent years in India, up and down the west coast of that land, securing and protecting the area from other invaders—in this case, Arabs—seeking to do the same. Magellan was successful, although his time as a soldier had left him with a shattered knee and the attendant limp, and when Pigafetta first saw him sawing his way down the quay, he looked as though he were tacking into the wind, a wind that was blowing furiously and auspiciously, ruffling the explorer’s beard, threatening to displace his hat, which—possibly because God ordained it, for how else was it achieved?—remained stubbornly upon his head, a large loaf of a hat bearing down on Magellan’s round eyes, soft nose, and inflated, cherubic lips; Pigafetta recalled hearing that Magellan’s mother had been a Jewess and that others attributed his piety—a frightening and passionate embracing of Jesus Christ—to his maternal origins. Pigafetta saw the power in this man and it awed him. He felt charged with a strange, invisible light and knew, as Magellan approached, that his journey to reach the earth’s end would be made to follow this man, rather than the inverse. When the explorer was close enough to hail, Pigafetta called out:

  “God keep you, Sir Captain General and Master and good ship’s company.”

  “God keep you!” responded Magellan. “Whoever you are.”

  “My name,” said Pigafetta, and he bowed politely, “is Antonio Pigafetta.”

  “How nice for you. Are you going on the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a Venetian?”

  “Yes, from Vicenza.”

  “Ah. You’re that rich guy who bought his way onto the boat!”

  Pigafetta, who had lived as “that rich guy” for most of his life, found nothing shocking or even offensive in this. He smiled. “I’m a scholar and a translator,” he said.

  “I have a translator!” said Magellan. “My slave, Enrique, over there.”

  Magellan gestured down the pier and Pigafetta saw a young and oily-looking Indian with glossy hair and—Pigafetta was surprised to note—a look of cunning. He was wearing a loose cotton shirt and wide, cropped pants, and the wind was whipping all his wrappings with such vigor that they snapped like sails.

  “Is he truly a translator?” said Pigafetta. “Can he call himself such when he already has the knowledge of these languages? What value is there in that? Let him bring his cannibal king in all his feathered glory to the court of our Charles, and then he can translate because, and I’m presuming here, he knows English.”

  Magellan looked over at Pigafetta: fine features, droll look. “I can’t imagine that face,” he said, “at the end of the earth.”

  And Pigafetta raised his eyebrows in mild surprise.

  “Do you know cosmography?” asked Magellan.

  “Oh yes,” said Pigafetta. “And here I’ll be honest with you—I’m a terrible draftsman and the best of my charts look penned by a drunken Franciscan. But for constellations and calculations, I’m quite accomplished, although I’m assuming you have a pilot.”

  “I do,” said Magellan. “I just wanted to make sure we’d have something to talk about.”

  Magellan began to gimp his way to the gangplank, but thought to stop. “Pigafetta, yes?”

  “Antonio Pigafetta, Captain General.”

  “You will eat with me tonight.”

  And then he wobbled past a bale of hay, and past the pigs that were also to make the journey. Past the casks of wine, barrels of biscuit and salted meat and millet, bolts of linen, silk robes fashioned by Turks, copious amounts of sparkling beads, jars of quince, and a bewildering stack of red caps. Who wanted to sally forth without some red caps? Cannons and cannonballs were loaded, arrows, bows, and cutlasses. Pigafetta was all right with a cutlass, providing his adversary wasn’t fighting back. He looked around at the others, who, on some far-flung and ferocious island, might be called upon to protect him. They were a scrappy lot—Sicilians, Naxians, Genoese, Galicians, Danes, and Bavarians, to name but a few—and Pigafetta was amused, and strangely comforted, to note that every nation had its class of brutes. And then he realized, with less comfort, that he was to commit two years of his life to their company.

  3. Abomination

  It was the middle of December, 1519, when the five ships of the Armada de Molucca finally sighted the Land of Verzin. Magellan had already faced the predictable challenge to his authority—mutinies were as common on long voyages as head lice—and there had been an intense and confused juggling of power that had landed a relative of his—yet another Portuguese—in command of the San Antonio. On this, a Spanish voyage! The Castilians were outraged, and lucky them, for there was little else to keep one occupied. Pigafetta, of course, had tried to apply himself as a scholar; however, all the skies were charted here and—unless he wanted to learn Danish or Greek, which involved mixing with sailors—there was nothing linguistic to do. He considered being a naturalist, but very few birds presented themselves, and those that did were of the most mundane variety.

  But finally the horizon had appeared broken and, quickly, with the wind pressing at his back, Pigafetta saw the land approach—the distance dissolve as if it were the land advancing—and he stood still upon the surface of the water. Once in sight of the beach, an enthusiastic cheer rose up from the men, not so much for the surgeless prospect of land, but for the dull-eyed, thick-lipped, bare-breasted women strolling across it. In little time they had dropped anchor in the waters off Rio de Janeiro.

  Predictably, as soon as they were ashore, the sailors disappeared into the bristling huts, and although Pigafetta had no desire to join this orgy at the end of the earth, he found it on the whole entertaining: the men were fucking, the sun was shining, he had his journal. Shaded by a palm, with the swish and swish of waves, an occasional buzzing insect, fresh—although strange—food, it was hard to feel despairing. And Pigafetta was not despairing by nature. Every disappointed hope—and in his twenty-eight years of life, there’d been many—had made him accustomed to suffering; he did not avoid good food and company when feeling melancholic, but rather hoped to offset his gloom with liberal doses of both.

  He leafed through the first few pages of his book and began rereading his account of the storm that had nearly wiped him and his problems from the earth, of the appearance of Saint Elmo dancing on the railing like a drunken fairy, and the stillness that followed. Pigafetta realized that it was his guilt that kept conjuring the image of the Sicilian Antonio Salamón: Magellan had ordered him strangled after he’d been discovered with the cabin boy, and that poor lad, barely more than twelve, had pitched himself over the side of the ship and beyond the reach of shame. They had strangled Salamón on deck for all to see, to act as a warning, but if Magellan insisted on the murder of sodomites—it was Spanish law—surely his crew would be reduced by half: pragmatism dictated that Magellan look the other way, much as it dictated, on long journeys, that you widen your options for companionship.

  Pigafetta looked up and saw one of the native women wading in the shallows. She seemed barely more than a child and wore very little to disguise this. Feeling his gaze upon her, she turned and met his eyes, then looked away, recognizing in an instant, and with an animal instinct, that he would not harm her.

  Perhaps an hour later, Pigafetta was lunching on some roasted meat when, with a whirling conflux of emotions, he noted Magellan—his distinctive stride—coming up the beach.

  “Antonio!” Magellan said when he was close.

  “Hail the mighty explorer,” responded Pigafetta laconically, and forced a smile.

  “You sound sleepy,” said Magellan. He looked at the meat and Pigafetta raised the banana-leaf plate so that he might help himself. “It’s good. What is it? Or,” and here he squinted pointedly, “should I ask, who is it?” Ha, ha, ha.

  Pigafetta took back the meat and set it on the rock.
Together, they looked at the waves, although it might have been more novel to face inward to land. Magellan took Pigafetta’s journal from him and looked it over.

  “Well?” said Pigafetta.

  There was a moment of concerned silence. “Antonio, I know this is your book, but listen.” Magellan brought the book close to his eyes, then a half-arm’s distance away, and read, “The men gave us one or two of their daughters as slaves for one hatchet or one large knife, but they would not give us their wives for anything at all.”

  Pigafetta considered. “It’s accurate.”

  Magellan nodded first to one side, then the other. “Yes, but it sounds—”

  “Immoral?”

  “Yes. It says these things . . .” And here he trailed off because “saying things,” after all, was the purpose of writing. “It’s suggestive.”

  “It suggests that you are buying women for your sailors and that they’re sleeping with naked cannibals.”

  “And they are,” said Magellan, pondering and fair, “but can’t you make it sound better? For me?”

  Pigafetta snatched back the book, hastily scribbled something, and passed it back.

  Magellan read, “Mass was said twice on the shore, during which those people remained on their knees with so great contrition and with clasped hands raised aloft, that it was an exceeding great pleasure to behold them.” Magellan’s face broke into a dazzling smile. The sun was shining through his beard, fuzzing the light around him in a reverse chiaroscuro. “Thank you, Antonio! You are a genius, my only friend on this voyage. You are writing our journey of discovery into history.” Magellan rested his hand heavily upon Pigafetta’s shoulder and Pigafetta enjoyed the weight of it, the manly salty smell hovering so close to his ears.

  “‘Our journey of discovery’ meaning you, Ferdinand.” Pigafetta was now familiar with his captain. “I am writing you into history.”

  “You are morose!” accused Magellan.

  “Not morose, my friend, fearful.”

  “But why?” Magellan looked at him, at the sudden inward turning of his eyes. “It is because of the Sicilian.”

  “Am I that obvious?” said Pigafetta.

  “Yes,” said Magellan. “Even Father Valderrama is off screwing someone. He had to get it out of the way because he has to hear everyone’s confession tomorrow and he thinks it will take at least ten hours.” Magellan smiled. “I killed Salamón because I needed to kill someone.”

  “He was hardly a threat.”

  “But a law existed. And it was there for me. And I used it.”

  “Used it for what? To kill a Sicilian?”

  “No, to put down the rebellion.”

  “There is no rebellion.”

  “Exactly.” Magellan smiled broadly. “Feel safe, Antonio. What use would it be for me to kill a Venetian nobleman with an interest in languages, nature, the stars? How would your death affect the sailors? Would they say, ‘That could have been me?’ No. The closest thing they have in common with you is that they like the occasional arse.” And here Magellan laughed. “But I haven’t even noticed you with anyone: woman, man, dog.” Ha, ha, ha. “You must have some object of your desire.”

  “Always desire with you, Ferdinand,” said Pigafetta. “What of affection, if not love?”

  There was a moment of silence, and then the two men began laughing, a laughter made all the sweeter for Pigafetta because it was shared and—with relief—earned, and the monkeys chattered on the branches above and in the ocean a fish leaped, a spit of silver, and with a splash was gone.

  4. Language

  Three months they had been moored off the coast of Patagonia, and why? Because on Magellan’s map there had been straits through to the Pacific, and Magellan, like an unskilled lover, was prodding and poking his way down the coast, looking for his opening and finding none. Now they were waiting for winter—in April—to pass. The men were mad or mad, or mad and mad, and one ship—the San Antonio—had disappeared: reeled back quickly like a toy boat with wheels, pushed and drawn at will. Another had dissolved itself upon the rocks with such efficiency that you marveled at its skill in vanishing. And three captains had mutinied: two killed, one left on a shore spitting and swearing until darkness and distance (and possibly a large cat) swallowed him.

  And through all this grumbling and discontent, Magellan had remained in charge. There he was, standing at the porthole in his quarters, his pocket knife in his hand, while Pigafetta, slumped with something that would have been despair in a commoner, but in a nobleman was more like ennui, was looking at him with undisguised passion: disguise having gone the way of the Valencia oranges two months previous.

  “Ferdinand, what are you doing with that knife?”

  “Thinking that I would like to be peeling an orange.”

  Magellan thumbed the knife a half-orange hemisphere.

  “And I am thinking of you.”

  “I have changed my mind,” said Magellan. “With this knife, I am contemplating suicide.” He pointed the dull blade at his heart. “I can’t take it!” Then a pantomimed death: shock, slack. Recovery. “Only I think this might be funny—over wine—later. The translator in love with me, and me with nowhere to go.”

  “Your friends will drink and laugh and you, Ferdinand, who claim to be my friend, will laugh loudest of all.”

  Magellan smiled crookedly and Pigafetta braced himself for more humor. “You could try harder. You could play a guitar.” And Magellan brushed delicately the strings of his imagined instrument. “You could change your stockings—”

  Pigafetta was smiling despite himself. “Change my stockings? Give me a reason to remove them.”

  Magellan laughed. “I already have. They are the only things left to eat!” Ha, ha, ha.

  Pigafetta pulled himself to his feet. “There is plenty of food,” he said. “You put us on half rations out of longing for something dire.”

  “Antonio, please, where are you going?”

  “Oh, the Spice Islands, and you?”

  “You know you are my favorite,” said Magellan. He wiped his hands on his leather waistcoat, which, coming from him, was almost an apology.

  “Your favorite? Such an honor.” Pigafetta nodded. “I saw João yesterday. He was eating his own shit.”

  “He’s gone mad.” It was a casual remark.

  “And the rest of the men eating rats.”

  “Only the fast men.”

  A silence hung, and Pigafetta’s aching heart acknowledged that this callousness and endless insult was what fed his love.

  Of course, Magellan knew this. “I applaud their resourcefulness. They don’t have the luxury of escaping their hunger with a broken heart.”

  Pigafetta resolved to make his escape and turned to the door.

  “’Tonio, no. Don’t stand there with your heart breaking, your stomach growling, your stockings stinking. You should write something. Come over here. Look with me out the window.”

  Disguise, Valencia oranges, and pride. Pigafetta went to stand by Magellan, lured by simple nearness. He saw the coast, that same coast, cold, dead. Deadening. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Nothing there? Make it up.”

  “I’m not a poet,” said Pigafetta. “I’m a chronicler. A cartographer. A translator.”

  “Then translate!”

  “Translate what?”

  Magellan gestured outward, embracing everything that was not yet anything. “That is your page.”

  “It’s a big page.”

  “Then fill it with giants.”

  Pigafetta tried to resist Magellan’s suggestion; he could not bear to reward him, but he was hungry in every possible way and needed distraction. He brought his writing table and chair to the place on deck that promised the least interruption and the freshest air. A short distance away, the Naxian, his name never known so as not forgotten, was moaning relentlessly. Pigafetta began to hum a popular tune to drown out the man, and although he could still be heard Pigafetta found that he
had incorporated the moaning into his humming; it worked as a sort of accompaniment. He began to write—

  For head her

  For eye other

  For nose or

  —and was hard at it when a familiar shadow fell across the page.

  “’Tonio, what are you doing?”

  “Taking your advice. The giants. Here they are.”

  “Giants?” Magellan splayed his fingers over the open page.

  “It’s their language.”

  “Is this how you make a giant? You give him something to say? And this language of the giants—it sounds like English.”

  Pigafetta cocked his head at the page. Magellan was right.

  For eyebrows occhechel

  “That sounds like Italian. And it’s even like occhi, the eyes, for the eyebrows.”

  For eyelids sechechiel

  “How do you pronounce that one?”

  “At least you admit it doesn’t sound like anything,” said Pigafetta. “And I’m not trying to speak it.”

  “How about the mouth?”

  For mouth xiam

  “And the lips?”

  For lips schiahame

  “And tongue?”

  Pigafetta turned to face him. He said, “For tongue, schial.”

  “And throat?”

  “Ohumez.”

  “And finger?”

  “Cori.” Which sounded like heart, since Pigafetta’s was pounding mercilessly in his ribs.

  “And face?”

  “Cogechel.”

  “And breasts?” Magellan held two large breasts of air before him, as if desire had conjured a pair of his own for him to play with.

  Pigafetta managed an exhausted laugh, and took up the pen once more. He wrote:

  For Bosom othen

  “Another one, impossible to pronounce.” Ha, ha, ha. “What about penis? What about testicles? You care about that!”

  5. Cartography.

  A map can be many things: a sheet of paper, a peppering of stars, a gesturing spear poked with jovial menace toward the hairy wall of virgin jungle, and in this case, an idea of what must lie ahead. Because Magellan knew where they had to go, the possibility that where they had to go might not exist made things impracticable.