by Mary Morris
He’s a little bruised by the ride he took down the arroyo. Beyond his pride he’s not really hurt, but he’s angry with his father for not giving him a truck with four-wheel drive. Now Miguel is waiting for someone to rescue him. But because of the storm no one has come down this road in a while. He probably shouldn’t have either.
Miguel considers walking back to Mrs. Rothstein’s house but fears that he will arrive in the pitch-dark, covered in mud like the creature from your worst nightmare, and then he will be out of a job. There don’t seem to be any other houses nearby. At least none that he can see. He doesn’t want to go climbing out of this canyon in the fading light.
But it’s not very safe inside his car in case there’s another flash flood, which there easily could be. For now he rests on the hood, doing what he likes doing best. He’s staring at the stars. With his finger he traces the constellations. He can name almost every one that he can see with the naked eye. He’s already counted three shooting stars and made as many wishes. Lying on his back he wishes that he could see Voyager. He wonders where it’s journeyed to now. More than eight billion miles from Earth, traveling one hundred thousand miles a day. Speed, time, and distance beyond anything mortals can imagine.
On the wall of his bedroom Miguel has a poster of Voyager as it passes Jupiter. On the poster is written “Keep on Going.” Every night before he goes to sleep, Miguel gazes up at it. He thinks of the ship, hurtling through space, and its message. “Keep on Going.” Never mind that he’s stuck in the mud right now, somehow that message seems intended for him. On September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 set off on its interstellar mission. Miguel knows the date very well. It’s the day he was born. He couldn’t believe it when he learned this in Mr. Garcia’s science class. Voyager has been on its trajectory as long as Miguel has been alive.
The spaceship is on an endless mission. Destination unknown. It was a shot in the dark with only one real purpose: to find others like ourselves. Miguel chuckles at this notion. He assumes that the chances are one in a zillion that we’d find people like ourselves. Bacteria with brains is more like it. Many people thought this was a fool’s errand, but after all isn’t that how Polynesia was discovered? By men sailing from the coast of the Southern Hemisphere into the unknown. Didn’t Columbus do the same, setting off on his quest for China? So what if he only got to Cuba.
Miguel knows all about Voyager. And that time capsule known as the Golden Record that’s meant to last a billion years and has greetings in fifty-five languages, the music of Bach and Mozart, as well as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” There are the sounds of volcanoes and earthquakes, thunder and rain, frogs croaking and an elephant’s cry, wild dogs, footsteps, heartbeats, laughter, fire, Morse code, horses, crickets, and a human kiss. The songs of humpback whales. NASA wouldn’t allow a naked human and so there are the only silhouettes of a man and a woman, including a fetus in the womb. What were they afraid of? That some alien would get off on Earth porn?
Sometimes Miguel thinks he’s just like Voyager. Alone, wandering through space, destination unknown. He lies back with his hands under his head, counting the shooting stars. It’s a crystal-clear night now. Somewhere out there Voyager continues on through the solar system. Eventually it will leave the Milky Way. It is expected to pass by the star Gliese 445 in the galaxy Camelopardalis in 17.6 light-years or 40,000 Earth years. No one knows for certain where Voyager will go. If the universe is infinite, it is possible that it will continue hurtling through space. Or if Einstein was correct, its journey could be circular and it will end up light-years from now back in the solar system where it began. Anyway, it is out there, moving at a greater speed than any object ever has before.
It’s getting chilly in the high desert. If someone doesn’t come and get him soon, Miguel will be spending the night. In his trunk he digs out an old dog blanket, for a dog long dead, and wraps it around his shoulders. If he has to sleep out here, this will have to do. Then he goes back inside his car and leans on the horn.
At the horizon he sees the red shine of Mars. His mother told him that when he was born, Mars was very close to Earth and they took him outside, all bundled up, so that he could see it for himself. Recently he’d heard that certain boulders and hills on the red planet are being named after the men from Columbus’s first voyage. There is one that will be named for Pedro de Terreros, Columbus’s lowly cabin boy. Miguel chuckles to himself. He bets that boy wasn’t much older than he is right now. And yet he has a rock named after him in the sky.
Up ahead Miguel sees high beams and hears a souped-up engine making its way to where he sits entrenched in the mud. The horn sounds the opening bars of “Guantanamera” and he knows that his father is coming to save him.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SCRIBE—1492
"My dearest Catalina,” Luis de Torres writes, “the days do not matter.” He dips his quill into the inkwell, searching for his next sentence. “They blend into one.” He pauses again. This is not his first attempt at writing to his wife, but he hopes that this will be more successful than the last. He has not been able to settle upon the words to tell her of his life at sea.
What can he say of his travels? How he avoids the dank quarters of the men and sleeps on the deck? He doesn’t want to speak of the rancid meat that the cook boils to kill the maggots or the stagnant drops of water they sip each day. The alcohol they drink to assuage their thirst until they are all stumbling across the deck. It is a wonder no man has gone overboard. He doesn’t want to share with her their tight quarters or the men who are going mad from gazing into the sea. Or their fears of the giant waves or sea monsters that might await them.
He wants to share his fears that he will never touch her skin again. That he will die far away and alone. That he will not live to see his sons grow up. Instead he tells her of the pewter sea and the sound the wind makes in the sails. Almost like a beating. How the ship rocks like a cradle. He tells her how stars shoot across the sky so brightly that he thinks they will crash into the water beyond the prow. Instead they burn out within seconds. “The seas are calm,” he writes. “My skin smooth and healed.” Though this is a lie. Then he runs out of things to say.
He tries to speak of his feelings. How his body longs for hers. And the heat that runs through his veins. He wants to tell her that he remembers the first time he saw her in the market of Murcia. She wore a blue mantilla and a long blue skirt. She was a girl, only fifteen years old, and he was almost twenty. She walked beside her mother with a basket in her hand and lowered her eyes when he gazed at her. Something was sealed between them on that day. He was patient, and he waited for her. When the time was right, he presented himself to her parents. They courted for a year but it was as if they were already husband and wife. He remembers the cool touch of her fingers on his brow and her flesh against his. He remembers every moment even as he fears that there will be no more to remember. But this does not come easily. How can you tell a woman you love her when you’ve never said those words before?
Though he intended to, it was always implied. Just never spoken. For an interpreter he’d never been very good with words. In the morning light he can see her, hand on her hip, head cocked, reading his letter. He can almost reach out and touch the softness of her cheek, smell the almond soap she washes in. Putting his pen down, he smiles. And she fades as all apparitions do and Luis is left with the pitch of the waves.
It is just daybreak, but for hours Luis has been hard at work. Whenever Columbus is on the deck, Luis uses the desk in his small cabin. The Admiral’s desk is made of sturdy cherrywood. It is an old desk and Columbus used it to draw his maps and write his innumerable appeals to the kings and queens of Europe. At the back of the desk sits the rolled-up portolan map Columbus drew to make this voyage. From time to time he has seen the Admiral unroll it as he studies their course. At this desk Luis goes about his tasks of translating or copying documents. In his spare time he writes in his journal as well. One that he imagines he might publis
h someday. In his journal he is more honest than he is in his letters. He speaks of the unknowable sadness, of his fears of looking into the sea, afraid that the depth and darkness will swallow him.
Luis is also kept busy by the sailors who learned that he could write letters. And he had paper and ink. He knows the deepest secrets of every sailor’s heart. If they love a woman they can never have. If they have betrayed their wives or long for their bodies. They tell their sons to grow up and be strong. They beg their fathers to be proud of them. He swears to each sailor that his secrets are safe. He copies their words onto paper and puts them in the pouch that will never reach home.
Luis wonders if he isn’t involved in some fool’s errand. Perhaps they are sailing to the end of the world. That is what Sepharad means, isn’t it? The end of the world. For the Jews of Spain, Iberia had always been the end of their world. But that is no longer the case. Nor will it ever be again. It is possible that if Catalina ever reads a word he writes it will be after he is long gone. Still he admires Columbus. He navigates by the wind and the sun. He rarely sleeps. Few ever see him retire to his cabin for long. If he sleeps, it is more like a cat. Little naps, and then he is back on the prowl.
Already Luis’s hand aches and the sun barely peeks through the porthole. He rises to stretch. It will be a clear day with a gentle wind and the sails are flying at full-staff. The ship moves with a lilt like a cradle. Luis has come to learn that there are good days at sea and bad days, just as there are on land, but somehow on the ship with nowhere to go it is more pronounced, and they seem much longer. Returning to the desk, his fingers touch the portolan map. Gently he unrolls it. He has not looked at it since they sailed, but now he sees once again Frixlandia to the north, Cathay, and the tiny island of Paradise. Perhaps the Admiral knows what he is doing. Perhaps they will arrive somewhere after all.
Now with the calm seas it is easier for him to write. Shaking out his hand, he sits back down. The Admiral has left him several documents to translate from the Latin. The work is tedious and Luis is surprised to find that his eyesight is not as strong as it once was. He had not come on this journey intending to be a scribe. But early in the voyage Columbus shared with him his most prized possession. Luis had no idea why one evening Columbus called him into his quarters. Perhaps because he is the only one besides the Admiral who can read or write.
“I have something to show you,” Columbus said. He opened the strongbox in which he kept a letter of introduction, signed by the king and queen of Spain. It is addressed to His Supreme Preciousness. The name of the Great Khan has been left blank, to be filled in when they learn it at their journey’s end. Luis stared at the document and then gazed into the pale, piercing eyes of the explorer. He hesitated to ask but wondered if Columbus had considered it. “With all respect, sir, but will the Great Khan be able to read Latin?”
Columbus seemed startled by the question. This had not occurred to him. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t he?” But what if the Great Khan can’t read Latin? It is so obvious. Perhaps he can read other languages. It was then that Columbus made his request. “Can you translate the document into the languages you know?”
Luis nodded. “I can do that, sir.” Luis began his labors with the documents in Latin. He translated them into Hebrew and Arabic, but then there were other letters and documents that Columbus needed. Luis became his scribe. While the Admiral keeps his own log, Luis translates the many letters and documents he carries with him. He copies them into Hebrew and Arabic so that the traders and the Great Khan will know who Columbus is and why he has come.
The sun is beginning to rise. When Luis looks up, shading his eyes from the glaring sun, he sees Rodrigo, no bigger than a bird, on the mast. Luis trembles. He could never climb a mast. It makes him dizzy just to think about it. He is sure he will faint from the heights, let alone a mast that juts out over the sea. He is a small, slight man used to the work of books and paper and pens. He worries that his friend might fall, toppling to the deck or into the sea. And then Luis will be alone in the founding of their settlement for the secret Jews. With each crash of a ladder or leap of a dolphin, Luis cringes, thinking that at last Rodrigo has been catapulted into the waters, but Rodrigo is as sure-footed as the goats that once grazed in the hills of Andalusia.
Once more Luis gazes at the map. Running his finger due west from Palos, Luis tries to imagine where they are right now. How much closer are they to China than when they set sail weeks ago. Are they ever going to really arrive?
Luis is staring out the porthole when there is a knock at the door. “Your breakfast, sir,” the cabin boy calls. Without waiting for Luis to answer, Pedro de Terreros kicks open the cabin door, carrying in a tray of sea biscuits and salted beef. “Shall I put it on the desk?”
“Yes, Pedro. Thank you, that will be fine.”
His hands trembling, the boy manages to put the tray down. Every morning Luis is certain that the boy will drop it. He seems too clumsy and ill-suited for this life at sea. Much the same as Luis feels ill-suited, but he is not asked to do chores such as carry trays across the deck in the unsteady seas. And when the boy does drop a tray, the cook gives him a sound beating. He is no more than fourteen, yet his parents sent him to sea.
The boy is a relative of the Pinzón brothers who own the other two ships that accompany them on this journey—the Pinta and the Niña. Perhaps they invited him on board. Or agreed to take him. Pedro is small, almost frail, but there is something naughty about him that Luis likes. He enjoys it when the boy is near. He likes the smell of him. His youth. It makes him think of his own small sons. Will they look this way one day—laughing with a toothy grin, a pimply face? Just the hint of a mustache on their lips?
Luis does not know that the boy has spent the first weeks weeping in his hammock for his mother or vomiting over the side in sickness. But he is the youngest of six children and his father forced him to leave. His father told him that when he returned, he would not be able to come home except to visit. He had to make his way in the world on his own. So he learned as quickly as he could. In a matter of weeks he got his sea legs. He learned the sails and the ropes. He knows the rigging and the lines. He scampers up the mast into the yards whenever the sails have to be trimmed. And during daylight he must turn the sandglass over every half hour.
Pedro de Terreros is responsible for time. In his brief fourteen years he’d never given much thought to time, but now he cannot do otherwise. It is right before his eyes. At each half hour, before the sand runs out, the glass must be turned, the bell rung, and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea takes his reading of the winds, the currents, and how far they have gone. This is how he sets their course. At first it was difficult for Pedro to remember, but soon the half hour became a part of him. He knows how many trays he can carry, dishes he can wash, ropes he can set before the sand runs through the glass. For the remainder of his long life Pedro de Terreros will do everything in snippets. He will eat a meal, make love to his wife, set a horseshoe—for he will become a blacksmith when he returns to Spain—all in brief increments of time.
Sometimes, when the weather is fair and the winds calm, the helmsman lets him try the wheel. Never alone. It is one of Columbus’s main rules of the sea. The cabin boy can never take the wheel alone, but on fine days when the seas are calm, he can try his hand at the wheel, keeping the Santa María steady and on her course.
As Luis takes a bite of the cheese biscuit, the boy gazes at the paper he’s writing. Luis pushes the page closer and the boy moves forward. “I can teach you if you like,” Luis says. It occurs to him how much he would welcome this.
Pedro nods. He wants to learn. Perhaps one day he will be a ship’s captain and keep a log the way the Admiral does. “Yes,” Pedro replies, “I would like that very much.” Then the boy scurries off because it is time for him to turn the glass.
* * *
The night is clear and calm as Luis and Rodrigo lay out their bedding on the deck. A few nights ago one of the sailors caught a
glimpse of Luis covering Rodrigo with his blanket. Since then they make fun of them, calling them “lover boys.” Luis and Rodrigo don’t care. They have their wives and children at home. Their bond is not of their bodies. Not like some of the men whose coupling can be heard in the night. They share something deeper that the others cannot understand. They don’t know if it is Tuesday or Thursday, but they sense when it is Friday night.
Rodrigo has brought some bread and a bladder of red wine he siphoned off one of the kegs below. They whisper the same blessings that their families are whispering thousands of miles away. So far away that they have no idea of how they might cross this ocean and return. Perhaps they will make a circle around the globe. “Unless we fall off of it,” Rodrigo jokes.
While some think they are lovers, others believe they practice the dark arts of their race. Julio, the quartermaster, fears that they will come in the night and leach his blood. Julio asks Luis if what they say is true. Did the Jews kidnap that child, Dominguito del Val? Did they crucify him and drink his blood? Did they bring the plague to Seville?
There are rumors that Columbus himself is a Jew. That would explain his strange handwriting that appears to be almost backward, and his need to get away. But the sailors do not really care. They crave gold, and they have other concerns. They have gone through all the salted fish and dried fruit. They are living on rotting yams and hard cassava root. Some of them suffer from bruises that come from nowhere. They wake up in the morning with blood in their mouths. They have no more grain. The bread has worms. They try to lure fish out of the sea, but their nets do not go deep enough.