Spacious enough that I could stand at the center, wide enough that I could lie on the bottom in a not-too-uncomfortable curl. None of my prisons had prepared me for ten weeks in a barrel. Abbas, my warden of Mariposa, brought me a meal once a day, waited patiently while I disposed of my previous one. I lacked nothing. I lacked everything.
I had seen and heard enough my final night on shore to scribble a rough sketch. I was on a boat, one of three; three boats were planned for Colón’s expedition; I was on Colón’s expedition. That much was easy. My imagination could draw more precise hypotheses. I was on Pinzón’s boat; that was Pinzón kissing the woman and girl good-bye; the girl I made love to on the beach of La Rábida was Pinzón’s daughter.
But my guesswork came up short against the hundreds of questions that remained. Why was I taken at night in such secrecy? Why the barrel? Was I the only member of the crew barrel-bound? What were the voices I heard in lamentation the night of our sailing? Why the sound of my mother’s viol? With so many questions, bound and blinded, could I possibly be the navigator?
We sailed for ten days, dropped anchor for two weeks, sailed again for a few days, dropped anchor, began again in earnest. From time to time I heard voices close by, other barrels, other men. Abbas said nothing and held a knife to my throat when I threatened to speak.
At night, I wrapped my body at the base of the barrel, my head oriented in the direction of the ship’s motion, secure in the knowledge that Colón’s expedition was headed west. I curled into Africa and dreamed clear, precise, wonderful dreams of Pinzón’s daughter on the beach.
Two weeks out, Abbas spoke to me for the first time.
“A question from the captain.”
“Who’s the captain?” I asked.
“He wants to know how long.”
“How long what?”
“Till we reach land.”
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
“Then let me sleep.”
I dreamed my dream. As always, I came to her unsuspecting in the surf, our hips drawn together by the motion of the waves, entwining her, arms, legs, fingers in hair, entering her, floating, if possible, the lightest millimeter above the spray, pulled by the tide onto the gentle sand. Then the drifting into a first dream-sleep, me curled, Africa head in her lap, her surrounding breasts on my back, above—mystery. Then the second dream-sleep, somehow dividing, drifted apart, eyes opening. But this time, instead of meeting her gray storm-eyes, instead of letting my dream move the girl to her wonted bittersweet disappearance, I grabbed the half-consciousness, took control of that half-sleep of my dream. Gently, I reached forward from the coast of Africa, stretching my fingers fanlike across the sand, trying to touch any part of my dream-love, how far, how far?
My palm brushed her knee. Close, my elbow still bent. But a knee, after all, even her divinely mysterious, lightly muscled Amazonian knee, is only a tertiary landing place, a momentary stop in the search for a homeland, and far too far south of the latitude we were sailing. And so I pulled my arm up, rotating clockwise from my shoulder, the needle of a compass. I wiggled my fingers, stretched, strained, knowing what I would find if only closer, tempted, maddened by the equatorial humidity that teased my fingertips, tickled them with the suggestion of fertile, pungent, adolescent hair, finally relaxing my fingers, bending my elbow to relieve the strain, and discovering, of course, with a heat that ran through my arm and to the prehistoric heart of the Congo, that my palm fit perfectly, wonderfully, beneath one warm, tropical breast.
I noted the position of my arm, then relinquished control, and fell into a deep, perfect sleep.
“He wants to know.” Abbas brought me an extra cup of water with my salt beef the next day.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
“Then let me sleep.”
“Again?”
This dream, I wasted no time in vain explorations but reached directly for the large, dangling fruit, made my quick observations on the change in the angle of my elbow, and then passed the few remaining moments of control in thumb-aided evaluation of the lovely moles and ridges of the ocean-side of her breast.
The next day Abbas brought no water.
“Let me have some water.”
“Not until you tell him.”
“How far did the ship travel yesterday, Abbas?”
“That is known only to the admiral.”
“Colón.”
“Yes.” My first piece of solid information.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
“Then let me sleep.”
“He says enough with sleeping.”
“One more night, Abbas, tell him one more night. And if you bring me the information, how far we traveled yesterday, and how far we travel today, I will tell Pinzón down to the mile how much farther.”
“How do you know it is Pinzón?” Abbas was lost.
“Let me up on deck.”
“Sleep tight.” Abbas dropped the lid back on my cask.
I came to my dream later than usual. We were close, my elbow was well bent, though try as I might, I could not raise my head to a position of greater appreciation. But this time, whether from thirst or curiosity, I let my hand slide down to tease the hard, salty nipple, and was surprised to find a drop, two drops, a whole rainfall of drops along the sand in that mysterious gulf between her breasts and her unreachable vagina. I drew my hand, cupped and damp, back to my mouth and sucked furiously on my palms and my fingers until I woke myself in a frenzy. My lips were wet, my mouth tasted strongly—no imagination—strongly and sweetly of milk.
Abbas brought me the information. I made a quick calculation, with a double portion of salt beef and water.
“If we continue to sail at this speed, Abbas, three more days.”
“Three more days!” Abbas smiled broadly. “The captain will be pleased.”
“Let me up on deck.”
“Impossible.”
It must have been shortly after midnight on the twelfth night of October when a thunderstorm of angry voices shook me awake. The sound of hatchet meeting wood mixed with a curse of frustration. The top flew off my cask. I rubbed my eyes and looked up. A torch lit the ceiling of the hold and below the torch three faces, unshaven, angry, and then terrified, as if the sight of me was the last thing they had expected. Screams, bootsteps, other screams, echoes, then silence and darkness as before.
I stood up warily, hesitant, wanting to look, afraid. Gripping the rim, I bent my elbows, pulled myself up, with none of the ease of dreams, none of the warmth, only pain in unused shoulders and aching back. I peered over the top. A grayish light oozed through the planks of the deck, between the slats above the waterline, the sound of water lightly urging the boat forward. As the minutes passed, the shadows moved, lightened into four other pale faces, peering out in terror and in wonder.
With great effort, I drew myself up to sit on the lip of the barrel. There must have been a hundred casks in the hold, hogsheads as big as tree stumps, double hogsheads as big as a blacksmith’s, all lashed together with hemp. Mine stood in the middle of the field. The only exit was a stoop-shouldered duck walk from the top of one cask to another.
At the foot of the ladder leading up to the deck, I joined my four ghostly comrades. Silently, we squinted, as pale and tentative as moles sniffing the gray air, reaching out paws to touch, confirm. Yes, this was a nose, these eyes, ears, hair, the familiar necessities. And yes, something different, something more, something felt, something less. Jews, all of us.
Up the ladder, through the hatch leading onto the deck, there was only the creaking of wood, the soft rush of fresh air. I signaled to my friends that I would ascend first, and they gladly gave way, ready to crawl back to their barrels at the first sound of danger.
On deck, Eliphaz. If ever there was a moment as fine and soul-strengthening as my first sight of the sea it was this, when my feet first touched the deck of a seagoing ship in the midst of a warm, calm ocean. I breathed, once, twice, three times. I felt—to the bottom of my feet and the ends of my hair—air, water, the smell of rotting wood and nighttime fill my lungs, my bowels, channel the life I had missed, my many weeks in the hold. The gray light disappeared. The boat rocked gently up and down. In the privacy of utter darkness, I rode a single plank over the surf, with the supreme weightlessness of the crest of a wave. I reached my arms out to the side. Zacuto’s astrolabe and book of charts fell out of my sleeves and clattered to the deck. No matter. The wind at my back filled the Franciscan cowl I still wore into a pair of angelic wings. An invisible hand pulled aside the curtain of a thick cloud, and at once all was bathed in the brilliant wash of a full moon.
Ranged before me stood twenty-five men. With a single breath, they stepped back to the rail, all eyes fixed on me as if on a ghost. One knelt. Suddenly they all knelt, crossed themselves, prayed, gasped, bowed their heads. A sound came from above, piercing the mumbling of the heads below. Tied to the foremast was a man. Another sound cried out above me. On the mainmast, silhouetted against the sails, the heavy square sheets shining against the clouds, another man. Halfway up each of the three masts was a man, standing in the same position as I was, feet down, arms stretched out to the side. But while I was free, these men were bound.
The men on the hempen crosses were conversos of a type all too familiar to a boy who had spent two years in a priory. And the men before me, cowering in the clarity of moonlight, were twenty-five mutineers, terrified that, thirty days past their last sight of land, they were just forty waves away from the edge of the earth. Quickly, I grabbed a knife from a kneeling sailor, climbed the rigging to the foremast and freed Abbas—for it was he, gasping for breath, the weight of his body pressing down on his chest. I eased him down to the deck, where he lay unmolested, the sailors still frozen in horror. Climbing up the mast at the stern, I reached a pair of broad shoulders.
“Captain Pinzón?” I whispered, unable to speak fully after ten weeks in the barrel. The man raised his beard from his chest, and I looked into the gray eyes of the father of my drifted love.
“My son!” He smiled. No words of gratitude could have matched that perfect expression of my hopes. I wanted to sit with him, high above the waves, pester him with questions. What was she like as a young girl? Does she sing? Does she walk on the beach at dusk with her eyes toward the west? How soon can she join me in the new world?
But there was another man hanging from the mainmast.
“Good morning, Admiral Colón,” I rasped.
“Esau, where the hell did you come from?”
“Now do you believe me, Admiral?”
“Believe you what?”
“Land. Between Spain and China.”
“Get out of here and leave me alone.” My back was turned to the bow, but I knew what Colón would see in a matter of moments.
“Surely you don’t want to stay up here?”
“What makes you think you know what I want?” A real martyr, our admiral. No doubt about it, a Jew.
“You want to go down in history.”
“Leave me alone.”
“As the Great Discoverer.”
“Spices. Gold. The Indies. I told you before. Everything else is sentiment and illusion.”
“As the Savior of the Jews.”
“You and Santángel,” he said, struggling against the ropes. “There is a saying in Spain, do you know it? ‘In three cases has water flowed in vain—the water of the river into the sea, the water in wine, and the water at a Jew’s baptism.’ ”
“So you are one of us,” I said, smiling. But this man, this Colón, was reaching down inside himself for a Catholic answer. For if truth be told, I was right and Santángel was wrong. Colón was a nation unto himself, a nation so angry, so confused, so thoroughly pleased with itself, that, crucified as he was, his sole rebuttal was a gob of spittle to baptize the cheek my grandfather had missed.
The men looked up from twenty feet below, confusion, wonder, terror, such a mixture of mysteries and symbols peculiar to the Catholic religion, my dear son, that it would take me ten letters to try to unravel what these poor men saw in my two minutes on deck. But for me, after ten weeks in a barrel, what a feeling of control, power beyond the manipulation of my own dreams, the admiral beside me, the crew below, the sparkling nighttime sea.
I wiped my face with my sleeve, then turned and pointed. The crew peered as one through the gray-eyed dawn. There on the horizon, lit clearly, superbly, unmistakably, a success beyond my map of Africa. Not a breast, but an island nonetheless—a drop, life-giving soul food. I licked my thirsty lips and discovered salt spray. I swallowed, and my cracked, deserted voice box moistened with the dreamy taste of her sweet, sweet milk.
“Land,” I shouted. “Land Ho!”