by Gary Barwin
Moishe took the package and began to unwrap it.
“Do not,” Torquemada hissed. “Beneath the cloth is a book which teaches of life everlasting—if one learns to read its secrets. But there is another book which speaks of this, as you well know, for it is the story of your people.” Torquemada’s lungs were a bellows in seizure. It was a moment before I realized that this defined laughter in the sallow dictionary of his body.
“But that old scribble is but fable and ancient geography. This one reveals a new Eden on this earth where springs a fountain that refreshes both body and soul. He who bathes there will live until the world ends, which, since you have returned again, is a thousand years. A life longer than Methuselah. In this cascade, the soul is cleansed and one begins again without memory or sin. ’Sblood, I say. Without sin, everything we have worked for would be ruined.”
Moishe nodded with solemnity. Let the blateration of the alter kaker continue. In a chamooleh’s dreck, there may be gold.
If the chamooleh eats at the bank.
If he was to be believed, the meshugener Grand Expectorator had given us a book of directions, a Michelin guide to Paradise. Finally: the visiting hours for the Tree of Knowledge and the rules about flash photography and snakes.
“But,” he said, “it’s a Jewish book. And so, requires commentary. I’m told the book has four sisters,” Torquemada continued, “each like a Talmud. The teachings of learned men. Interpretations. Explanations. Maps. Where these others are, I do not know. Now hide this and do not speak of it again.”
Torquemada began making the sign of the cross over Moishe, but stopped midway. Instead he pointed west.
“This Columbus travels the road to France. He hopes to receive both blessing and money from the French king for his westward journey. You shall ride quickly along this road. I expect, this admiral, riding on his mule, will not have travelled further than Pinos. You shall find him and give my command that he return to the Queen. Soon, I shall have you, the book, and the viceroy of the leftmost world far from where you can interfere with our work. I cannot change heaven, but earth shall be my dominion.”
He gave Moishe a great black horse and bade him ride.
A story is a great city, and words are its citizens, jostling and kibitzing in its busy streets. It’s these words that tell the tale, not the parrot.
But it’s also marbeh dvorim, marbeh shtus, the more words, the more foolishness.
So I must have a sharp tongue, be a circumcising moyel, and make short what is long: We found Columbus. He returned to the Queen. He asked for the world and was granted half of it.
After three months of tideless and aimless sloshing, most spent working the monastery gardens of La Rábida, Moishe and I found ourselves with Columbus on the banks of the Rio Tinto at Palos, ready to leave one difficult world for another. Ready to transmute land to sea and then back again. To cross the trough in the centre of the atlas. To sail to the Jewless margins.
Thanks God, a godless place where God withdrew to make space and where roam those free-range souls, unfarmed by tax farmers or religion.
The unquisition.
But what would we find?
It’s like they say about gatkes underwear: zol zayn ergereh, abi andereh. Let it be worse, as long as it’s a change.
Chapter Eight
August 3, 1492. The Port of Palos and its boat-busy river. Moishe and I watching over the larboard gunwale, suffocating in the hot canine breath of summer. Dog days when the sea convulsed, wine turned sour, hounds grew mad, and man became afflicted with burning fevers and frenzies, the brain boiling like an egg in a bone pot.
And now the end of the procession of gangplanking child- and sack-carrying Jews. A sea-crowding exodus for which we waited.
For days, Columbus’s sailors had been loading sufficient nosh for an entire year. Filling small boats with supplies and then rowing to the deeper middle of the river where the ships were anchored.
Salt pork, flour, olive oil, water and manzanilla wine.
And such marvels of our ingenuity as would fill the childlike mind of a great khan or pagan chieftain with wonder, an awareness of our implied military and technological dominance, and knowledge that our God was a bigger macher and more almighty than theirs. Thus would this great leader clap his royal hands in delight and then surrender.
Such marvels? Glass beads and hawks’ bells, which were carried in great quantity onto our ships.
Columbus stood beside us. “This day is Tisha B’Av in the Hebrew calendar,” he said. “The ninth day of Av when we remember the destruction of the ancient temples. And when history will remember the day we made the world new.”
“Me,” said Moishe, “I’m hoping history will remember how I found beautiful women.” In the past five years, Moishe had learned not only the maps, knots and hornpipes of sailing, but also its swagger.
Then from below deck, “Retreat, fetid piss-dribbler, or ye shall wear your red guts for ribbons in your malodorous hair.” The unmistakeable poetry of Jacome el Rico, tavern-dwelling husbander of books with the zayin-scarred face. He was already claiming territory.
Columbus left the ship to confer with Martín Pinzón, local crew-procurer, captain of the Pinta, and second-in-command of the fleet. Pinzón stood tall on a sack of grain surveying the grand duchy of the Palos docks, a place where he was the tallest tree and could unfurl the top gallant of his pride.
Columbus hove up on the boards beside him, gesticulating in the Italian manner, flying his words like a kite. Pinzón nodded solemnly and watched the preparations of his men all around them.
There were three boats ready to sail.
The Niña. The Pinta. The Santa María.
The first two were extracted like teeth from the town of Palos, required by King and Queen in quittance of a fine. The Niña, little girl, named after Juan Niño, its owner who would sail with us. The Pinta, the painted or spotted one: pinta, a disease that pocks the skin. Think syphilis, bejel or yaws. But more, later, of the fleshy story of these spiralling putz-devils that travel always with sailors.
Santa María, the flagship, the largest, a carrack; the other two, caravels.
But who would sail these three nautical hand-me-downs?
Most of the crew were from Palos or other ports along the Rio Tinto. Several—including Jacome—were, like Columbus, from Genoa. There were conversos, a hidden Jew or two, some Basques, a couple Portuguese, and Fernandez, the painter. Certainly, he would haul sheets and repair rigging, but he would also fill the painted foreground with what had previously only been seen over an imaginary horizon: the peoples, creatures and lands beyond.
Columbus had also engaged the services of a translator: Luis de Torres. Torres was able to speak Hebrew and Aramaic in the event that the lost and found tribes of Israel were teeming on the beaches, awaiting contact from the mother ship, the Santa María, that had travelled half the world on a watery crusade to find them.
When all you have is history, everything looks like diaspora.
Columbus expected to discover these tribes in the Far East and Torres would parley with them in their common and ancient tongue.
A landing party would row up to an island in a skiff and Torres would call out, “So, nu, vos macht ir? How you been these last two thousand years? And breakfast before you left, was it eggs?”
Except, of course, he’d say it in Aramaic.
Sailing with us, in order to ensure that the royal interests were protected, were representatives of the King and Queen.
Or as Moishe termed them, ballast.
And though the Queen had offered pardons to criminals who would commute their sentence from land to sea, would choose the uncertain hornpipe of the waves over the inevitability of the hangman’s reel, there were only four who chose to dance this freedom freylekhs.
Bartolomé de Torres had taken the local magistrate’s life from his body with a knife then left the corpulent remains on the floor while he drank the deceased’s flagons of win
e and collapsed, like a brother beside him, thereby entering himself into evidence. A day later, rats gnawed his bleeding ear and returned him to consciousness. He found himself jailed and knew his own shlemiel life would soon be over.
But later that night of little moon, Goday, Patiño, and Foronda, three of his compadres, removed the prison bars with a rope and a mule, and the four escaped—halevay, it should happen to you—into the ever-loving arms of the jailors, returning from an evening of drink and carnal satisfaction.
These four perfectly illustrated two species of Yiddish fool. Shlemiels pass out and find themselves in hot water. Schlimazels pull their friend from the roiling pot only to get their mortal goose cooked into soup.
These hapless shmucks were now sailors making the world new. Escaping the jail of one world for another, their new digs barred only by palm trees, lagoons, and sweet fruit.
There were ninety crew. Sailors, representatives of Their Jew-horking Highnesses, but no priest.
Why would Columbus, who sang so sweetly, at least to the Queen, of discovering a new world of souls not include a single Holy Father on board?
“Who needs a priest,” Moishe said, “when God chirps by the cave of your ear, huffs your sails, inks your charts, and pulls back the cover of the world as if readying it for your Vice Regal shlof. Besides, God might get to thinking He knows more than His captain. It’s not good to risk mutiny by one who controls the sea.”
“And everything else,” I said.
“Tell that to Martín Pinzón,” Moishe said.
Pinzón and his younger brother, Vicente, who captained the Niña, were khans of the Palos shore and most the crew whom they’d procured, considered them so.
“It’s hard to pick your nose with another man’s finger,” I said.
“Unless it’s very dark,” Moishe said. “But what do you mean?”
“It’s hard to command another man’s army.”
“Emes. Unless it were decreed by the King and Queen.”
We set sail.
I expected ceremony. There was no ceremony save the bustling pragmatics of embarkation. The scurry of men gripping halyards, clambering ratlines, hauling hawsers and knotting sheets into Celtic alphabets of rope. The diapason of the bo’sun’s whistle. The gleeful kibitzing.
“Pedro, I heard the early worm got your wife’s bird and you away at sea.”
“Leech-prick, may a lobster take your bowels for a lover and may you pass only starfish.”
Over the entire ship, a kind of exhalation as the lamden old salts felt, once again, the wind blowing against their abraded yardang faces. As the mariners returned to marinating.
First, the Santa María; then, like ducklings in our wake, the Niña and the Pinta. We had leapt out the window of Europe. We had no choice but to fly or return with a sorry tale between our legs.
I flew.
Moishe was standing at the binnacle overturning an hourglass. It had to be tipped every quarter hour, like a shikker’s hooch-filled flask.
At sea, time isn’t money. It’s position. Longitude and the reconciliation of the sun, stars, and the hour depend on these buxom jars of slipping sand.
It’s important to know where you are, when you’re nowhere.
Moishe looked east.
“I was thinking about Sarah and the others,” he said. “We’re sailing away from Spain. But we’re sailing for Spain, also. For their execrable yemach-shmom Majesties and the stinking black Holy Orifice and Torquemada.”
“Ptuh, ptuh, ptuh,” I said at the mention of the name. And you should know, psittacine spitting, even when its muse is contempt, requires some practice.
“I don’t want to be a nochshlepper,” Moishe said. “A hanger-on. Whatever we find on the other side of this Ocean Sea, whether it’s a cursed farsholtn or promised land, I want it to help—not the King and Queen and their Church—but those ground beneath their feet. We Yids have often seen the tread of those boots coming down.”
The sand had run out of the top of the hourglass and so Moishe inverted it. Like many things, its name didn’t reflect what it was. Hourglass. Feh. It only measured a blaychik sickly quarter of an hour.
I could say something about how each individual sandgrain makes a difference.
Just think how it feels when one gets in your shorts.
But the bo’sun rang the bell and it was time for a nosh in the mess. I hoped for a bisl seed and a snootful of wine, but emes, there are many who wait for the Messiah also.
Chapter Nine
It had been more than a month since we’d left Spain. We’d had a brief sojourn on Gomera in the Canary Islands to take on more supplies—beans, goat cheese, salted beef and pork, salt cod, water, wine, garlic, olive oil, almonds, chick peas and hardtack—and to refit the lateen-rigged Niña with square sails. Then we were becalmed offshore for a few days. And now we were in the middle of nowhere.
Where was that?
Exactly.
To know if you’re in the middle, you need to be able to tell where nowhere ends, assuming you still remember where it began. This much we knew: we were, as Dante, il Poeta, wrote, Nel mezzo del cammin, except the dark wood we were in the middle of was water.
We had bobbed for weeks along the deserted surface of the Ocean Sea, the closest terra firma a few miles straight down, though I wouldn’t want to visit. It would be no party, poison jellyfish the only balloons, black brine the only wine. A watery firmament. Cold. Dark. Only the faint preternatural neshomeh glow of bioluminescent tentacles and urine-coloured deep-sea gerkins, jaundiced-faced death-creatures-without-faces floating around in eternal midnight. The cellar-sand of the Ocean Sea miles below whales and the secret Leviathans of the deep, the wet underside of the waves where life wears its soul on the outside.
Feh.
With no land in sight, our minds fill with cabin-fever dreams and create restless sandcastles-in-the-air mirages of thought and word.
And the crew fights, and shtups, and gambles.
And kvetches about Columbus and his futile westward tilting.
Moishe lay against a barrel amidships. I’d thought of what was below us, and having plumbed that subject dry, I dreamed of beautiful birds amourously cooing at us, the sound like wingbeats and the beach-fall of waves.
“So,” Moishe began, his eyes closed. He was almost speaking to himself, “Imagine the ship gets tsekrochn—worn out—and the crew must replace the shmutzik planks one by one—though where we’d get the wood out here, ver veyst—who knows? After awhile, they’ve replaced every klots and nail with another. Is it the same ship or a different one? We’d still be on board, half-asleep against this barrel, kibitzing. But it’d be a different barrel and a different deck. And what if someone took the gantseh pile of wood and made another ship out of it? Is that our ship or a different one?”
“Depends. Which ship is closer to land?” I said.
“And what if we—or sailors not yet born,” Moishe said, “continued to replace the planks? They could replace them an infinite number of times and the ship would last forever.”
“But we’d still be gone. What’s the use of an eternal hat if the head is dead?”
“My father said we’re made of tiny specks and each of these specks changes over a lifetime. Our hair when it’s shorn keeps growing, our skin when it’s cut, so why shouldn’t the rest of our bodies? But we’re still ourselves. A shtetl is always a shtetl even if the people change.”
“So there’s a bisl of me scattered here and there?”
“And tiny bits of shmutz from other people all over you.”
“Now I could use a bath.”
“It’s the same with conversos.”
“They need no bath. Baptism was enough.”
“No, shlemiel, how many planks can you replace and still be yourself?”
“Or how many Jews?” I said, but what I thought was, “What if you change every word that you say?”
“A broch,” he said. “May each Inquisitor become a secre
t Jew so he can betray himself and haul himself before the Tribunal.”
“May each Inquisitor burn first himself and then the others at the stake.”
“May each Inquisitor host a bowelful of Jewish rats who convert in the churchy dark of his insides and then gnaw like fressers on his unkosher guts.”
“May each Jew change each plank of the world until it is new.”
“Omeyn,” he said. “But let this new world be different than the old.”
Later.
Dark night and the ship cantered on the waves. We were in the admiral’s cabin. A lantern encircled the table in honey light. Wine, cheese, dried plums and nautical charts were spread invitingly before us. Worlds hidden from the crew.
If they had once been buoyed by Columbus’s chutzpah, enthusiasm and professed expertise, by now the crew believed he was meshugeh. Out of his depth and with no clue about where we were or how far we were from any kind of terra—either firma or incognito.
It was an epic and mutinous “Are we there yet?” befitting impatient children, bristle-faced tousle-heads with few teeth but many swords.
If his navigations were to be correct Columbus required the world to be 20 percent smaller than the estimation of the ancients. Perhaps since then the world had shrivelled like Eratosthenes and his friends’ once ripe beytsim. Time can make between-the-leg prunes out of even the most succulent of plums.
Columbus’s calculations were based on his reading a letter from a certain Toscanelli that he worried like a rosary, which agreed with his results. If your mind is a matzoh ball, then everything looks like soup.
But almost from the beginning, the canny mariner understood the measure of his men—that their patience was short—and so he acted with duplicitous and data-massaging cunning.
Mostly, Columbus kept his thoughts and schemes to himself, except when he shared them in loud sermons to the crew of the Santa María. Perhaps the men of the Niña and the Pinta also heard his speeches for he stood on the poop deck like the Pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s, and declaimed them in balebos stentorian tones for all—God, the wind, the waves and the reluctant land included—to hear.