The Rags of Time (5 page)

Come off it.
Your tone not amused, not indulgent.

I wound back to the comfort zone, the course of my flight through the lobby of the El Dorado with its homey grandeur—sofa, club chairs, flowers stiffly arranged—past the kindest of men at the imperial front desk and the doorman who would never comment on my coat with its last buttons dangling, bleach spots of a misbegotten wash day splattering my jeans, then my crossing to the park with the comfort of its stories. Waiting for linguine to test al dente, I confessed I had not cried for today’s boys blown up by the side of a dusty road.

I could barely distinguish between my mother’s correction and your tolerant smile at pennies in a jar. I moved on to the owl, claiming the bird as my discovery of the day, how he tricked me into submission. You said,
Watching the pot?

In the morning I phone my brother; he of total recall.

As we talk, I pick at the medallion still stuck on my book. When I have it off, Alberich comes into view, the gnarled dwarf who grabbed the gold ring. The Rhinemaidens, all three laughing at his plug-ugly body; at his rejection of love which set Wagner’s whole Ring Cycle rolling on and on, fable begetting fable. By family telepathy my brother gets the message. I’m in the dumps. I protect myself with a pawn, tremor of uncertainty in my voice:
My Summer of
War and Peace
? That creaking wicker chair? How come I hung out in their bedroom?

But yes, that Summer I set one more place at the kitchen table.
And the war news? Before supper we gathered by the Philco.

Trust he’s right about the Magnavox, but I know for certain that on D-Day FDR’s message of sorrow and hope was cut off by the clatter of forks, knives and spoons.

Mystery solved:
I dropped the good silver ’cause Grandma came to stay!

My brother’s voice is strong today, sharp, lighthearted:
What are you on about?
He gets it.
D-Day? Your prize story—rubbing salt in the wound of success? All that old stuff.

Calendar stuff. Like Grandpa in a dinner jacket at the Grand Knights of Columbus. They served oysters Rockefeller, don’t you know.
Santa María,
remember?

That was my brother’s ship in a bottle. I recall his concentration with glue, pincers, scraps of a linen napkin dipped in tea for the sails, button-thread rigging. He remembered pebbles brought home from the schoolyard, painted gold. The treasure chest stuck to the balsa wood deck of the Admiral’s flagship,
Santa María.

I heard the
Times
flop down on the table that lives by his side with amber bottles of pills for the daily doses aiding and abetting stealth moves on his body. We compare systolic over diastolic achievements, scoring low for the gold star.

He knew, this brother who was there from the beginning, that I was out of sorts, weighted with more than my displacement to a wicker chair, what big eyes you have Gramma, sleeping in my bed—all that old stuff. He groaned slightly as he rose. I heard the slow squeak of his walker as he made his way across to the bookshelf in his tidy study. Now he would pick
The Anatomy of Melancholy
off the shelf, the book so heavy as he flipped through its pages to find clever bits to amuse me. We had been into Burton’s big book of a lifeline before:

Till he induces laughter.
So, you think while they listened to war news after the dishes were dried, I read Tolstoy by lamplight? Flies batting the screen.

Stay on message,
he says.
Honor the holiday, one of your brief lives, Columbus.

I’d launched a piece on Columbus but it sniffed of embalming fluid, seemed a replica of his statue commanding the Piazza Acquaverde, the bus station in Genoa. We did tour the house where Christoforo was probably not born, and in a nautical museum viewed waxy simulacra of the Admiral with a first mate, and selection of sailors costumed for the journey. His instruments of navigation, the quadrant and the astrolabe, while never useful, were beautiful, and in yet another funky museum, a plaster cast of his hand. Why his hand?
It’s so undiscovered, Genoa
.
The well-worn joke . . . À tre scopertede . . .

Prego,
not to tell it again.
Do Columbus.

Like the old days, I obey his command.

For some days Columbus noted in his log:
weeds in abundance with crabs among them;
a whale,
they always keep near the coast;
pelicans and a turtle-dove. On October 11 he sighted a flickering light in the distance as though from a candle. That proved a mirage. The true sighting is attributed to Martín Alonzo, who sounded the alarm at 2:00 AM, according to orders. Columbus knelt on the shore of Guanahani to claim San Salvador for the King and Queen of Spain in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He had reached the Indies. In the heat of his discovery, his account flips from third to first person. The natives are recorded as
an inoffensive people.
He gave them glass beads, red caps and various trifles in exchange for parrots and skeins of cotton thread. No need to say who got the better of the bargain. These Indians had no fireboxes, no candles, no weapons. The naked bodies of the men were decorated with red and white powders in mysterious designs, but it seemed to the Admiral they would make good servants and
would readily become Christians as they have no religion.

Adam with an agenda: he named each island in this earthly paradise—Trinidad, Fernando, Isabella, Santa María de la Concepción and so forth—bringing it all back home. Best that he did not invoke the Lord in naming Puerto Grande, a sculpted harbor of Cuba we know as our naval base, Guantánamo Bay with its history of detention and “outrages upon personal dignity” (Geneva Convention). On first sight, the vegetation of the islands recalled the beauty of Andalusia, but deeper into the rain forest’s dense thickets of vines and lush trees the humidity was overwhelming. The natives, friendly and instructive, alas had no vein of gold. They offered stone glittering with something like mica, and the story of a great king who lived by an inland lake. Or perhaps the golden man was lord of a distant island? Could he be farther up the dangerous waters of the Orinoco, this godlike figure in some versions named El Dorado, with coffers of the precious stuff in his city of Manoa, enough to fill the royal treasury impoverished by holy wars to convert infidels to the one true faith. Now Colón’s calling was to be as much missionary as miner, persisting in his duties until on the island of Hispaniola he might find the river of gold in the waters of the Ciabo, might find enough glitter to show in Madrid along with curiosities and his captives. He settled the crew he left behind to set up shop. The book of Colombo’s discoveries was a best seller; his tales wonderful and so wonderfully told they might be the adventures of Marco Polo, which he read and reread in Italian, his mother tongue, preparing for his discoveries and for the writing of his own extravagant tale. After the success of the first voyage, Columbus drew up a contract,
The Book of Privileges,
in which Don Colombo demanded and received a title, a coat of arms, and a share
in perpetuity
of the profits of all the lands of his discovery. On the second voyage, he brought chickens to this handsome race quick to learn words of a strange language and the value of a farmyard egg. Prospects did not turn out for the best.

The High Admiral of the Ocean Seas proved to be a slack administrator of the greatest real-estate deal of all time. He was unfortunate in choosing his lieutenants. Christoforo’s gift was for mapping the sea, not transatlantic politics, not sorting out quarrels between gold diggers and the indigenous people. Among the curiosities brought back from his first travels—lemon seeds, a necklace of fish bones, tobacco, cinnamon bark, corn—were strange birds and slaves. He had assumed his captives would submit to this arrangement, though the Queen found their possession a bad show when they were put on public display—perhaps the beginning of his fall from grace. And where in advertised abundance was the gold? At the outset of his third voyage, he was becalmed in the Doldrums under the sign of Leo, which, given his belief in astrology, foretold the severity of his fate. When at last the Admiral landed at Santo Domingo, the ungrateful settlers he had left behind revolted. His powers dissolved, Columbus was shipped home in chains.

In a homey museum just above Genoa, we discovered him in two roles. A white marble statue portrays a pretty boy with abundant curls, dreaming the glorious future, longing for adventures at sea. This charming Christoforo sits on a shelf with the crusty oil painting of a broken man, scant white hair, swollen feet, tattered robes.
Shackled below deck,
you said,
head bowed to darkness.
Upon his return to Hispaniola, the settlers had not thanked him for their hunger, war with the natives, death and disease. And yet again he returned. Now here’s the pity: the Don came back that fourth voyage, sailing with his young son and brother, to find the route to China described by Marco Polo, confusing fiction with geography, presuming that the estuaries of Panama might be the rivers of Cathay.

Cristóbal Colón, Colom. Or Colombo—an Italian-Jewish name. A wool carder, weaver, boy sailor. Instructed by his brother Bartholomew in cartography, he mapped the known world. In Portugal and Spain, cartography was a Jewish profession. According to Christoforo’s calculations, the world might be shaped like a pear, and so he sailed round this fruity globe to bring back spices and trinkets of the Caribbean. His true quest had been for the wonders of China or Japan. He figured the world too small, America lay in the way. It is said the Admiral, bitter and nearly blind, passed his last years consumed with the defense of his
Privileges
and his title. It is said the Genoese bankers drew on his
pesos d’oro
in Hispaniola, which supported him grandly. If true, he died rich. A devout Christian, he was deeply religious yet a confessed mystic who communed with the stars, though he never mastered celestial navigation. Five hundred years after weeds and a pelican foretold the most promising landfall known to man, a colossal statue of Christopher Columbus was refused by five cities in the States and Puerto Rico. A Taino woman, descendant of the people who first greeted Columbus, debunked the memorial enterprise:
To allow the ultimate symbol of mass murder, genocide, oppression, colonialism . . .
Enough! There is never enough outrage to fully tarnish a symbol. We are left with the navigator, son of the wool merchant, possibly illegitimate, the bright ambitious boy who went to sea.

The public television documentary turns folio pages from his log book, voice-over reading the translated text on-screen; model of the
Santa María
; an animated map of each voyage, with his fleets bobbing over the sea: the professors disagree about the date and place of his birth, perhaps a hill town above Nervi. A facsimile of the chart used on the triumphant voyage of discovery is pegged as it was every four hours, pin-pricking the distance achieved each day. The flow of sand in an egg timer tracked navigational hours. A quadrant and an astrolabe are displayed: the nifty new tools he carried on board. But the Admiral could not fix his latitude; in bad weather could not site the North Star. In a letter to the King of Spain, Columbus claimed he had determined his latitude off Cuba by use of a quadrant. In truth, his readings were off. He did not have the math, laid the instrument aside, sailed the parallel by dead reckoning, pinprick by pinprick, a ship’s boy, perhaps his son, turning the egg timer until the last willful voyage was done. The astrolabe behind glass case is not of his period, so the tag says in all honesty. When we left that museum set in a park just down from the villa in Bogliasco, we took a wrong turn into a boccie-ball game, old men, old as we are, passing the time. They were welcoming to
i stranieri
with museum pamphlets in hand. One with a grizzled beard could not resist the old Genovese query,
À tre scopertede Genoa sono?
I answered: pesto, banking, and America. We laughed in bilingual accord.