by Gary Barwin
But at other times, he would confide his late-at-night thoughts to Moishe in a quieter voice.
“The truth has many façades,” he said. “A man may hide his true face, or faith, with beard or mask. Some sailors taking passage on our three ships—I could mention Luis de Torres—have the skin and words of a good Christian yet Jewish blood pumps from their hearts and their heads are filled with Hebrew prayers.” He had a sip from a cup of wine and continued. “A storyteller may change his tale for that which tells more true, for the truth has two sides, an inside and an outside.” Columbus stood up and walked across the cabin.
“There is something I must show you.”
From a shelf, he hefted a large book and laid it on the table. He ran his hand tenderly over the cover.
Ech, I thought. For a bird whose only library had been the waves, my world was becoming ongeshtupted with books. Moishe seemed to attract them the way analogies attract fools.
It was the ship’s logbook, written in the hand of Rodrigo de Escobedo, the scrivener.
“Look,” Columbus said, pointing to an entry.
Sailed northwest and northwest by north and at times west nearly twenty-two leagues. Sighted a turtledove, a pelican, a river bird and other white fowl; —weeds in abundance with crabs among them. The sea being smooth and tranquil, the sailors muttered that in such a region of smooth water, there would never be sufficient wind to return them to Spain; but afterwards the sea rose without wind, which astonished them. The Admiral spoke on this occasion, thus: “the rising of the sea was very favourable to me, as the waters so lifted before Moses when he led the Jews from Egypt.”
We remembered that day of waves without wind and what Columbus had said. Moishe had whispered to me, “Ech, but each day his land becomes more ‘promised.’ ”
“Soon,” I said, “he’ll think himself more Moses than you.”
Not long after this logbook day, we had entered a region of deep blue, thick with seaweed. The waters were of such exceptional clarity that, looking over the gunwales, it seemed as if we could stand on the fishes and eels that swam in myriad constellations far below us. This was the “sea without shores” spoken of by Portuguese marinheiros. The Sargasso Sea. A viscous Atlantis. Some of the crew had heard of this place. Most appeared bazorgt worried and agitated, not knowing what this plenitude of seaweed, this sea change, might mean.
Columbus now left the logbook, then unlocked a chest in the corner of the cabin and lifted out another book. He carried it to the table, and spread, too, its wings beside the other book and pointed to the entry of September 23, the same day’s date.
“Twenty-seven leagues,” Moishe said. The direction is the same but the distance is different.”
“On this voyage,” Columbus said, “as elsewhere, there are two truths. One longer than the other.”
The truth and the shvants-truth, I thought.
“The first book is for the pilot and others of the crew. For now. The second is for history and the future. When we have crossed this great ocean and the men’s feet walk on the shores of Cipangu or the palace paths of the Great Khan, then can the true tale be told. I tell you so that this second truth can be known by one other. Many things may befall an admiral. Sickness. Capture. Mutiny. Death.”
If there were a mutiny and—Gotenyu—the admiral’s journey came to a sudden and definitive end, we would be quiet. Very quiet. What second log book?
It would be no time to reveal that we were intimates of he who’d gone overboard.
Already, the sailors questioned his books, his charts and his maps.
Several weeks in, the pilots had noticed that the compass needles no longer pointed to the North Star. They muttered that even the heavens were unsure of the journey.
Columbus reassured them. The needles must have been pointing to some invisible point on earth. North was different in the west. The west that would soon become east.
For now, they accepted his explanation, deferring to his self-assurance which was, emes, astronomical.
The compass readings were critical: like all navigators of the time, he used dead reckoning. Appropriate, for as his crew reckoned it, they’d be dead soon enough.
So, when he rode the pitching deck, attempting to determine latitude by pointing his new-fangled astrolabe at the stars, such meshugas inspired even less confidence. These instruments required a steady horizontal, and relations between ship and sea most often resembled a shore-leave sailor writhing between the roiling legs of his shvitzing maideleh.
I’d heard Domingo de Lequeitio muttering with others of the crew.
They were getting restless with too much rest and not enough discovery. If Columbus would not soon agree to turn the ship around, Domingo suggested they could drop him into the Ocean where he would be admiral of an ever-diminishing quantity of air and, eventually, Viceroy of the ocean floor.
“And,” he said, “the tale we sailors will well recollect is that his eyes peeped through his astry-lad only, an’ he stepped into the pitchy brine without knowing. Time enough before he fell, we’d see’d him staggering about the tossing deck with no thought but the stars.”
Moishe and I weren’t troubled by the length of the voyage.
“Know where we’re going?” Moishe asked.
“Of course,” I said, shrugging my grey-wing shoulders.
“Where?”
“West toward—”
“—the west,” Moishe finished. Not content with fishing for the moon, we were chasing the setting sun. Putting distance between us and Spain required time. You couldn’t hurry time. We had no expectations about the unexpected. The world was large, the sea was wide, and there was still salt pork, hardtack, wine and water.
But surely even the sun must need to take a load off and rest a biseleh on a daybed of land before shlepping over the next horizon and rising.
Moishe and I left Columbus’s cabin. Some of the Basque sailors were sitting abaft the forecastle kvetching and making oakum from old rope. Their blaberation concerned the captain.
“The scupper-skulled futtock is willing to die to make hisself gran señor of lands we’ll not return from.”
The group of them nodded in assent.
“The walty Genoese is sailing us into the barathrum of nowhere ’tils we starve an’ our flesh dries to bouillon.”
They nodded again. They sang the bitter shanty of kvetchers.
Moishe turned to me.
“We all have our across to bear, azoy?”
Before long, Martín Pinzón was rowed across the scalloping water between the Pinta and the Santa María.
“The men can endure no more,” he said to Columbus as he climbed on board. Columbus did not reply but ordered a lombard signal to be fired. Soon after, Martín Pinzón’s brother Vicente Yañez Pinzón, captain of the Niña, appeared over the starboard bow. He clambered up a ladder and the three captains went into Columbus’s cabin and haken a tsheinik, argued and flosculated late into the night.
The following day, Columbus gathered the crew. “Three more days,” he said. “On the Third Day, He created Dry Land. I need only as much time as God.”
“What’s the difference between the great God Adonai and Columbus?” Moishe asked me.
“What?” I said, knowing the answer.
“God doesn’t think he’s on a mission from Columbus.”
And so we passed the time.
On the second day, the sky was dark. The feathered millions of a great forest were above us, their voices like storm. A twisting hurricane of birds, as if every leaf of a great continent—or the shadow of every leaf—had taken flight and was flying west-southwest. Where there are birds, there must be land. Columbus ordered an alteration of our course to follow this migration, to sail in its shadow.
Two nights later, we could hear more birds calling overhead in the darkness. I did not know these birds or their voices. A vast crowd muttering “watermelon” in a language I had never heard.
Then the crew of the
Niña found a small branch bearing delicate blossoms and soon after, the men of the Pinta collected from the sea: a cane, a stick, a piece of board, a plant that clearly was born on land, and another little stick fashioned, it appeared, with iron, so intricate was its working. We, on the Santa María, found nothing but a vast collection of waves.
Early morning, October 10. Morning watch. Two bells. Columbus high on the forecastle as if he were about to present us—Aspirin-like—with the two tablets of the law. Instead, he announced that he would award a coat of silk to the first sailor to sight land.
Just what any wind-and-salt bitten sailor wants on the other side of the world: a shmancy silk shmatte to wear when swabbing and breaming and when hauling a shroud in a skin-luffing gale.
Later that afternoon at three bells of the watch, a sailor high up in the rigging shouting excitedly, “Tierra! Tierra!” Domingo de Lequeitio pointed in frenzy to the larboard-side horizon. A scurrying of the watch to the gunwale. The admiral striding out of his cabin in the forecastle. Men on deck coming to consciousness on their straw pallets, blinking in the light, fonfering the primeval waking thought, “Huh?” Moishe, too, awakening. In a moment, I was in the air then high on the foretop yardarm. Could it be that we were somewhere, or just before?
Eyes puckered under awnings of hand in the dazzle of bright light.
It didn’t look like land to me.
“That,” said Columbus looking toward where Domingo was pointing, “is a cloud.”
I heard Jacome abaft, muttering beyond the captain’s hearing, “A cloud be good land for us, for soon we be memberless as angels, our pizzles snapped like dead twigs from off a dried-out tree, else we find fresh water or solid land for our watering.”
The crew, as mocking angels, flapped their crooked arms like celestial chickens then made their groins shvantsless with shielding hands. “Tierra, tierra,” they jeered at Domingo de Lequeitio high up the foremast. The frivolity lasted only moments until, as a man, they had the realization that they yet remained landless.
Columbus had not appeared to notice this outbreak of heavenly poultry. He had installed himself on the bowsprit, straining his eyes into the Ouija-board distance, attempting, it seemed, to summon forth shore like a spirit from the Olam ha-Ba beyond. He remained like a figurehead, through three watches, willing land to appear, Columbus both dowser and dowsing stick, remembering Exodus. “ ‘We are in the wilderness, Lord, What shall we drink?’ Like Israelites, we seek ‘the twelve wells of water, the threescore-and-ten palm trees. We would encamp there by the waters. Lord, bring us land.’ ”
Later that night, seven bells into a dog watch, Domingo de Lequeitio, Columbus and Rodrigo Sanchez observed a dim flickering. I woke Moishe who was sleeping through some kind of illness, and he saw it, too. Though the moon was but a shtikl less than full, the light was not mere moonshine. There was the orange tinge of fireblaze, small and turbulent, a bonfire on a distant shore. The men on watch took note, whispering quietly to each other, but avoiding the ostentatious mekhaye hoo-hah of hope and celebration and the eventual disappointment of the previous afternoon.
Even Columbus, usually given to chisel-worthy pronouncements spoken in doughty capital letters, only nodded to the pilot, indicating, “Sail toward the light.”
The following night, two hours after midnight, after the fourth bell of the dog watch had sounded.
An arquebus fired into the night sky from the poop deck.
What happens on a ship at 2 a.m. when, without warning, there is a shot?
The rational grog-soused mariner, drowsy and hypnogogic on his pallet, can only assume a murderous infestation of ocean-borne invaders sharp with the flesh-kebabing talons of raptors and blistering with the halitosis of harpies.
Or else the sighting of land.
Under a full moon, Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor from Seville, had seen una cabeza blanca de tierra, a white stretch of land.
“Tierra!” he called. “Tierra!” And for good measure, he again shot the arquebus at the stars.
Perhaps I should consider it auspicious that on this day, when the prodigal halves of the earth were joined once again, no bird or other flying creature was shot from the sky, keneynehoreh.
On deck, the men exulted.
The next day, October 12, 1492, we would make landfall.
If one wants to beat a dog, one finds a shtekn, a stick.
We had found a stick. Now what kind of dog would we beat?
“A golden retriever,” Moishe said and lay back on his pallet, feverish and green.
It was early morning when Rodrigo de Triana had seen land. And now we’d sailed out of night and into the next day until we were but a cannon’s blast away from what we took to be an island. The crew gathered on deck.
After months sailing the featureless ocean, heading toward nowhere but the horizon and the edges of maps, how did we feel about touching tierra firma?
Nisht geferlach. Could have been worse.
We felt only the way a man lost in the desert would feel about a bucket of water. About a fountain of water. About a thimbleful of water. About a droplet of sweat on a camel’s tuches.
Love at first sighting.
For a season I had perched on barren masts and now there was the prospect of a living tree, heavy with leaves. Of rivers, waterfalls, and clear pools.
And perhaps there would be parrots. The pretty feathers of zaftik island parrots warmed by both sun and desire.
The firm land.
I couldn’t remember the last time.
Chapter One
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María shlepped around the great arc of the Ocean Sea and landed in what he took to be the other side of the world. A great moment.
But Moishe and I weren’t there when those of the old world first met those of the new.
Our luck. A mensch tracht un Got lacht. A person plans and God laughs.
Moishe was green, puking with fever and shaking with palsy. Bent heaving over the gunwales, he saw the New World, saw the sailors rowing, saw them land. He saw Columbus kneel down and kiss the reassuring shore. He saw Columbus take his sword and draw in the sand. What was it: a cross, a prayer? Was he writing, “Ferdinand and Isabella,” as if labelling luggage? Was he signing his name? “Ah, yes, my pretty picture. Think I’ll call it ‘America.’ ”
Columbus, the mapmaker, the navigator. He inscribed a compass rose on the shore, the New World a map of itself.
San Salvador, he called the island. Holy Saviour.
For it had saved him: if he had sailed to the island and it was not there, he would soon enough have discovered mutiny and the empty sea floor where the island was supposed to be.
But Moishe did not land on San Salvador. Like Moses, his namesake, he had to watch as others entered the Promised Land. And I, like Aaron, also did not enter, though it was Columbus and his kind who worshipped golden things, who practically birthed a golden sea cow in their excitement, joined hands and danced in a ring at the thought of their true God and its value in power, prestige and purchase.
We heard the cheering of the men, heard the singing of the native people as they gathered on the beach. We heard, though we could not make out the words, the speeches given, the long prayers made by Columbus as he trod on what he thought was an older world than the one he came from. Cathay. Cipangu. India. The Indies.
There was an exchange. Food for glass beads. Shells for tchotchkes and chazerai such as little metal toys.
As night fell, there were fires. More singing. Speeches. Cheering.
Moishe slept. I stayed with him on the empty ship, my green shoulder, my blue-eyed boy. I didn’t venture onto the island. Besides, who knew if these natives, or, for that matter, the farklemteh sailors, would make of me a fricassee, spiced with who knew what delicate and unfamiliar spices?
Our men rowed back from shore. Columbus opened the casks to the crew. Laughing, singing, puking, the happy b
uffeting of each other’s ears like drunken puppies, late into the night until they all collapsed in a historic heap.
The following morning, the incessant blacksmithing of fiends inside each man’s skull. Inside their bellies, thirty boiling cats, cooking in roiling bilge water. Outside, the sun like a Klieg light, branding the eyes of all who attempted vision. Moishe woke as fresh-faced and pokey as the rest, which is to say, consciousness came upon him like a mallet.
Luis de Torres stumbled down the middeck, his clothing a polyglot-stippling of vomit, wine, New World sand and tropical fruit.
“Don’t tell the admiral, but the savages speak Hebrew,” he said and collapsed onto a pipa-sized barrel.
Moishe opened the slit of an eye.
“How can that be?” he asked.
“I spoke the ancient tongue and they understood. They are Children of Israel—like us,” Torres whispered. “We have found the Lost Tribes. Wherever we are.”
“The savages are Jews?” Moishe said.
Noble cabbages, then, I thought. Haleshkehs stuffed with exotic meat.
“I can’t believe it,” Moishe said, gripping the gunwales and hauling himself onto a knee. “This, I need my own eyes to see.”
But by then Torres was slumped over, brought back to sleep by the continuing effects of the previous night’s revelry.
“It was probably the drink talking Hebrew, not the natives,” Moishe said. “Or Torres heard himself speaking and thought it was someone else.”
“Hebrew,” I said. “It’s always backwards.”
Then it was sometime later that morning. There were no watches, no bells, only the rousing voice of Columbus ringing over the deck, and then the more strident voice of a matchlock shot, waking men from sleep, returning the ship to the regular shape of days. The men of the Niña and the Pinta, also submerged in wine-addled shlof, were woken by the shot as it reverberated off the jungle trees fringing the shore. A landing party was established to return to the island. Moishe was to carry baskets and jars to lubricate the parley. Columbus had others bring flags.