Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

“Why are you here? You show up here looking like you’ve had a bath in blood and claiming you’re Christopher Columbus. Now I’m not saying you’re not. But do me a favor. Look at your hands.”

Columbus looks down into his palms.

“No, the other way. Good. What do you see?”

He wants to say hands but he has the good sense to know she’s after something else. “A ring,” he says. “A silver or white-gold band with a rope design.”

“And what finger is it on?”

“On my ring finger. It’s a symbol of commitment.” As if he’s almost surprised.

“And you are committed to…?”

“Beatriz. Columbus is-I am, committed to Beatriz.”

“You’re telling me that’s not a wedding ring? Goddamnit! Who are you married to? You! Who’s your wife?”

Clearly he does not know what to say. He looks at her, lost. Genuinely bewildered. She recognizes this and feels forced to retreat-to honor his reality.

“I don’t believe you’re crazy,” she says. “Why are you here?”

“Because you suggested a stroll in the garden and I asked if it might be too hot today, and you said, no, it’s comfortable, and I said…”

Consuela sighs. Enough, she thinks. I can’t take this today. “I’m going to have an orderly take you back,” she says.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to feed the ducks. Read a book. Maybe take my shoes off and walk on the grass. Anything but put up with this bullshit. I’m just not in the mood.”

He sits up and turns around in the chair-looks over his shoulder at her. Silence presses in on them.

A squirrel chatters in a tree behind Consuela. The wind brushes through the high branches. Something splashes in the pond.

“I’m lucky to be here.”

“Lucky how?” she says. She’ll be damned if she’s going to let him off the hook.

“Lucky to be alive.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“But it’s the truest thing I know, since we’re navigating around bullshit today.”

“You’re lucky to be alive?” She raises an eyebrow, gives him a look that says: Oh for Christ’s sake, get on with it then.

Usually they’re dead. They wash onto the shore in the darkness, bloated and stinking and ugly. Half naked and chewed up. Unidentifiable. Usually they’re long-gone dead. But this man rolls up on the beach near Palos, in the south of Spain, after a vicious storm pounds the coast for five days, and he’s only half dead. His ship is either destroyed by the storm or pushed out to sea. This sailor somehow managed to tie himself to a plank. He drifted onto the beach still attached to his makeshift life preserver.

Once the man is discovered, the people of the town rush to the beach and carry him to the monastery. They had to cut the ropes in order to extract the man from the board. Believing the man would not live, Father Paulo’s church seems the logical choice. They pass him through the arched doorway into the hands of the monks who live there. Father Paulo knows several languages. The sailor, they find out later, has limited Portuguese, good Italian and English, passable French, and excellent Spanish. Father Paulo chooses Spanish as the language in which they will conduct their discussions of navigation and the ocean. He chooses English to talk about the everyday nonsense of eating and cooking and going to the bathroom. He chooses French to speak of women and love. He chooses Portuguese to speak of poetry. For the first three or four days, the sailor says very little-he moans and sometimes talks in his sleep. It is Father Paulo who sets the parameters of language and subject matter. He is quick, loves to hear his own voice, and is seriously opinionated. He asks many questions but barely breathes before answering these questions himself, and he is definitely verbose. If he has a captive audience-and with the sailor this was certainly the case-Father Paulo carries both sides of the conversation. The sailor is too weak to do much more than eat the thin broths, sleep, and listen to the ranting of this Franciscan father.

“It is perhaps an odd notion but it is my experience, from the days before I was a monk of course, that women like to pursue as much as they like to be pursued. To have them chase you, you must show yourself to be charming and then retreat. This takes understanding and creativity. Make a study of women. Learn what makes a man attractive. It is not just the eye. There is more to attractiveness than being pleasant to the eye. There is great pleasure in the chase, my friend-no matter who is doing the chasing. Take it from me, the journey is everything. Once you arrive, one must devise new goals, new challenges.” He leans back in his chair, the wood creaks under his shifting weight. He closes his eyes. “I remember the curves of a woman in Paris, her skin, her green eyes. And she had the most peculiar but pleasant scent. Oranges and cinnamon. The smell of rain and dirt. Moist earth. Don’t get me wrong, my friend. Just a hint of this scent and you would need more. Desire would blossom in you as it did in me. Ah, she would have been the one who kept me from God had she not already been married. Her name was Maria, and she was not only beautiful but she was intelligent.” Father Paulo opens his eyes. “I wonder if you are intelligent.”

He thinks I can’t hear or understand him, the sailor is thinking.

Father Paulo nurses this man back to health. It’s a slow process as he passes through fever after fever. It takes two weeks for him to speak his first words. The monk has been sitting quietly waiting for him to wake up. When the sailor opens his eyes he sees the balding pillar of a man sitting against a white stone wall, his eyes closed in a meditation. The father has a warm, open face.

He’s asleep, the sailor thinks. It is the first peace I’ve had since I got here. This man never shuts up. He is the most opinionated, pigheaded, domineering, and often-very-wrong man I’ve ever encountered. He never stops talking. Thank God and all the heavens he’s asleep.

“I am not asleep, my friend,” says the monk. “I was meditating-something I learned from a friend, a Chinese monk who came through here a few years back. It’s a completely conscious, focused prayer.”

He reads my mind, the man thinks. He smiles cautiously. “Thank you,” he says, finally.

“I was worried about you, my friend,” Father Paulo says. “You are very welcome. You’re going to be all right.”

“No, thank you for stopping your talking.”

The monk tightens the rope that secures his robe-clears his throat. “What are you called by?”

“Cristóbal. I am Cristóbal, a navigator. I was a navigator.”

“Where were you sailing to?”

“To Portugal, and then Spain with the Barto out of Venice. From Britain and the North Sea.” He pauses. “You said I was the only survivor? Nobody else came ashore? Nothing else? No other wreckage?”

“A few planks, and you attached to one of them. That’s it, I’m afraid.”

“I am grateful.”

“Listen, do you know the sextant, my friend?”

“Yes, I understand the sextant. I understand how it works.”

“And you understand the stars?”

He’s testing me, Columbus thinks. He wants to test the limits of my knowledge. The sextant is new. Dead reckoning and a compass is the standard for navigation. “I have guided ships by the stars. But I do not understand the stars.”

This stops Father Paulo.

“You guide your ship by the stars yet you do not understand the stars? Is this a riddle? Are you any good as a navigator?”

Columbus laughs. “I do not understand the beauty of the stars. It is simply that. I do not understand their beauty.”

The monk smiles. This is something he can sink his teeth into. There is a built-in dichotomy in this man who plays with language and apparently loves the stars. He arrives on the beach tied neatly to a plank and barely survives this ordeal. Nothing else comes ashore. He knows the sextant and knows about navigating by the stars. In his delirium he called out at least three different names-all women. So perhaps he is also a lover.