Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

Somewhere in this hotel, there is a whirlpool and steam room. He’d love to soak for a while but there is always the risk of running into a stranger who wants to talk. Emile does not feel like talking. Nor does he feel like being friendly. He tries to open the window but it sticks. He has to lean into it to get it to open. The air is surprisingly cool. He looks up into gray and remembers when he was a child, stepping out in front of the house and looking up into the sky at stars. He remembers the blackness of the sky and what seemed like layers of stars behind swirling layers-and some parts of that night sky seemed alive with movement, a blurred gossamer net of starlight.

The clouds over Valdepeñas are socked in, thick and gray. The stars are up there somewhere, Emile thinks, and perhaps the moon as well, but tonight these heavenly bodies are not for me. A dog barks in the distance. A car drives by on the street below. A light comes on in a fifth-floor window in the building across the road. He leans on the iron balustrade and fights the impulse to fall back into the loop of the accident. It was an accident. Not his fault. It was not him who started shooting in Paris.

Emile is driving south, away from Valdepeñas. The swordsman in the bar was given directions to Córdoba, so that’s where Emile will attempt to pick up the trail. He can’t seem to get the radio to work, and he has no disks in his bag. There’s music inside his laptop but no way to get that music to play on the car’s music system. He’d kill for anything by Keith Jarrett right now. The first few notes of the Köln Concert or any of the solo piano recordings. Funny how his musical cravings go. Last month he absolutely had to hear Heinrich Schiff’s Bach cello suites. He found a CD of the recording but it was the vinyl he wanted. So he drove an hour out of Paris and found himself, at three in the morning, in his father’s garage going through boxes of vinyl records.

He’s driving inside a muffled silence. The hum of the tires on the road and the sound of the air-conditioning become white noise. Emile considers turning on the GPS system to see if there’s a friendly voice to keep him company. A female voice would be lovely.

They are sitting in the common room. There’s a haze across the city today, making everything appear softer. Consuela likes this diffusion. They’re alone in the room, which is rare-there are 480 patients at this institution, give or take about a dozen due to the constant stream of discharges and admittances. It’s a sunny, warm day, and many of the patients are in the courtyard or wandering through the lemon orchard. A wall of windows allows light to splash across conglomerations of chairs and couches, clustered around tables. There is a sturdy wire mesh covering the windows, but most who spend their days here do not notice this. After the first week they become just windows, not barred windows.

“How long did you stay with Father Paulo?”

“We had a couple of months of discussions. He proved to be a most fascinating man. He was no normal monk.”

Consuela sits up-presses her back into the chair. “Well, the question I have is about understanding beauty. Did you find an answer? Can you define beauty, Mr. Columbus?”

“Not without poetry or art.”

“So you’re defining beauty with beauty?”

“Beauty is nothing without the language of beauty.”

This stops her. When he says things like this she leans heavily to the port side-the side of her that believes he’s more sane than not. For most of the time he’s been at the institute she has been starboard, but he was also heavily drugged for much of that time. She carries the weight of this. It was convenient for him to be sedated for this time. It made her life, everybody’s life at the institute, easier. “So we need words-”

“Not just words… language.”

He leans forward, reaches slowly across the table, and takes her hand. Her first impulse is to pull away. This is her patient. But she leaves her hand in his-she’s curious. Where’s he going with this?

“I want to breathe the piquant fragrances of a mature woman-to rest my head atop her thighs and breathe her in, make her scent such an essential part of my being that I will never be able to forget. So living without her would be like living without lungs, heart, legs, arms. And I want to write words for her, capture my frailest feelings and the smallest details of loving, find the words that resonate with life, love, sex, desire. And I want to write the words: I cannot hear your voice, not now, because your voice is my desire, a knife that cuts both ways…”

Consuela looks into his eyes. Are they gray? Or is that blue? There’s certainly a hint of green, but as for the rest, she’s not sure. Columbus seems to be on the verge of tears. His eyes do not waver from hers. She is suddenly, irrevocably connected to his sadness. It takes her breath away.

She pulls her hand out of his. Breaks eye contact. She tries to shake him off. This is far too close. She thinks for a moment that Columbus is talking about her. But that can’t be. She takes a deep breath. Beauty. We were talking about the idea of beauty. “Um, what about a combination of qualities that make something pleasing to the eye,” she says, “or ear, or touch? Does that not define beauty?”

He smiles, seemingly unaffected by her pulling away. “What about metaphor? Or, here, let me define beauty for you… It was 1485, March, and she was most decidedly beautiful. But it was a sad beauty.”

“Who?”

“Cassandra. Aren’t you listening?”

“It’s like this,” she says, and then Cassandra drops the towel-she’s picked a white towel. Her first impulse was to choose one of the burgundy towels-red is lust and desire-but for her, white is the perfect color for seduction. It does not speak directly of innocence, but it’s there. Uncharted territory. Virginal ground. “I have feelings for you, Mr. Columbus. Very strong feelings. Feelings so strong that if I let them out you would perhaps be frightened.”

“Nothing much scares me,” he says. Columbus is staying in a borrowed villa-he’s traveling, trying to muster up some interest and, of course, money.

I love you with all my heart, Columbus, she thinks. “I have never felt like this,” she says.

“What?”

“This connection.”

“Connection?”

She sighs and looks into his eyes. Could this man be so incredibly dense that he cannot see my love, my need?

Cassandra loved him the second she saw him in the bar. He’d come in to ask for directions and wound up sitting down for a drink. He was trying to find an apartment that was, as it turned out, just around the corner. He’d been invited to a dinner party. The bartender free-poured the Scottish beverage, the Uisge Beatha, into a small, squat glass. She knew instantly she wanted him. She’d heard him introduce himself to the bartender: Christopher Columbus-the man who wanted to sail beyond what is known. Sitting in a darkened booth, she dabbed perfume under her armpits and then approached the bar. It’s crowded at the bar and she trips on a foot, or the leg of a stool, or her own feet, and falls to the floor. “Goddamnit,” she says, pulling herself up. “It’s these fucking shoes. I can’t get used to them.”

“Are you all right?” Columbus says. “I think you might need a cloth. Your chin is bleeding. I think you’ve cut yourself.” There is a gash along her jawline, close to her chin. The bartender passes Columbus a cloth, which he holds to her face.

“This is not what I’d envisioned. I just wanted to meet you, introduce myself. I’m so embarrassed.”

“Oh, don’t be. I see falling women all the time.”