When I woke from my dream, the taste of milk was still fresh on my lips, a woman’s breast only a bent elbow from my nose. I was lying on my back at full length, on the most comfortable straw mattress this side of my Córdoban childhood. There was no face attached to the breasts, no body below the hips, the artist had merely fashioned the obvious around the nipples of two knots in a plank of the ceiling. I turned my head. Hundreds of other knots winked back at me, similarly adorned. Abbas, standing guard, smiled.
I sat up on the bunk, careful of my head, and swung down to my friend. I pointed to my mouth, asking to speak and drink all in the same pantomime. He handed me a gourd. I tasted. Fresh water. I drank. Not the brackish liquid of ten weeks at sea, but fresh, clear water. I emptied the gourd as Pinzón entered the cabin.
He stood for a moment, huge in the frame of the door, a man clearly designed for a voyage of discovery, for great things. His chest dwarfed the slender Abbas. His head almost brushed the ceiling. His graying hair, still in the thick of youth, spoke of energy and wisdom. His hooded gray eyes were filled with a thirst, demanding knowledge from a world too small to answer all his questions. His voice rang, not in the insinuating, argumentative tenor of Colón, but with the rich basso profundo of a man.
“My son!” he said again, and let the echo fill the cabin with its unambiguous message of delight and gratitude.
“Captain Pinzón,” I began. He put his finger to his lips.
“There will be plenty of time for you to speak, Esau,” he said, closing the door gently behind him. “But first, taste this,” and he held out a dull orange root to me, freshly picked and still shining. I needed no further invitation. I bit and swallowed, barely chewing. The root tasted of dirt and water and home.
“The first fruits of the new world”—Pinzón smiled—“rightfully belong to you.
“Now,” he continued, as I wiped my mouth with the sleeve of my cowl, “I suppose you deserve an explanation.” I nodded, still chewing. He sat on a bench opposite, motioned Abbas to guard the door. “I am afraid I can explain very little about the expedition. Until you were brought to me, the night of our departure from Palos, I knew only that I owed my ships, my family, my life, to the generosity of Don Luis de Santángel. I would follow any design of his without a murmur, even if it led to the depths of the Ocean Sea.
“I had heard of Colón, had met him at the occasional Mass in Palos and the infrequent visits I made with my daughter to La Rábida. He was a fanatic, without a doubt, too converted, too full of miracles and prophecy to lead an armed expedition to the slave coast or a merchant ship to Genoa. He was strong enough only for the impossible. I have known dozens of men like him. The dockyards of Cádiz, Lisbon, Mariposa, Valencia, are full of shipless captains ready to sail west to the Indies, south around Africa, or east through some imagined channel into the Arabian Sea. Don Luis came to me and said, ‘Don Martín, I need you to be the brain of an expedition whose heart beats in the breast of a crazy man.’ I was skeptical. But Don Luis asked. I requisitioned the ships, hired the crews, even in the face of the rumor that we were sailing beyond the edge of the world.
“In those last moments before the Expulsion, my days were already full with renting carracks to transport the thousands of Jews pouring into Palos. It was only seventy-two hours before our own sailing that Don Luis instructed me to package you and the nine others in barrels, and make certain you were on board before midnight on the day of the Expulsion.”
“Pardon me, Don Martín,” I croaked, “but what expulsion are you talking about?”
Pinzón laughed, started to go on, paused, laughed again, stopped laughing. He looked at me, troubled, gray eyes.
“Were you so cloistered in that monastery, poor Esau, that you heard nothing of the Expulsion of the Jews?” Silence. “Esau, my poor Esau.” He shook his head. “Your patience has been abused. Fourteen ninety-two was a busy year. Shortly after the turn of the calendar, Their Most Catholic Majesties finally conquered Granada.”
“That much I know,” I said, “and that they agreed to Colón’s expedition.”
“They did, in theory.” Pinzón nodded. “But the contract was not signed until April, two weeks after their signatures appeared on the Order of Expulsion. The Jews of Aragón and Castile had until the end of July to sell their belongings and take only what they could carry out of the country. All of them.” All of them, I thought. The Jews of Córdoba, my parents, my brother. I looked at Abbas. He had tried to tell me at La Rábida. How could he?
“Don Luis rode to Palos to assist me. You were the easiest; we knew where to find you. The other nine came from all over Spain, handpicked by Santángel.”
“Handpicked for what?” I asked.
“Esau, sit down,” Pinzón said. I was standing above him. I sat back on the bunk. I unclenched my fists and laid my palms flat on my knees. “Esau,” he began again, history lesson over, time to move on, “I have just returned from the most beautiful beach I have seen in all my fifty years of sailing, more beautiful than the Azores, than the Canaries, than the Cyclades of Greece. The natives, the fruit, the streams, are warmer, purer, sweeter than any I’ve known in Europe. Your people will thrive here, multiply, be a great people once more.”
“My people?” I asked.
“The Jews.” I had almost forgotten. “Did you never hear of the Minyan?” Of course I had heard of the Minyan—the Minyan that held its disputations and religious observances in my bedroom, in my study, in my living room, in my wonderful cave in Mariposa.
“Ten Jews made up the Minyan in Spain, Esau,” Pinzón said. “It will take ten Jews to make up the Minyan in a new homeland.” I had been handpicked. It will take ten Jews. In a new homeland. For weeks my ears had heard only wood against wood, seawater against wood. I had to pass Pinzón’s words from my lips to my ears several times until the sense became clear.
I was not just a navigator, as Santángel had told me. I had been picked by my benefactor, handpicked, along with nine other Jews of Spain, to sail with Colón and Pinzón, to lay the foundations for a new Temple of Solomon, a new Garden of Eden. The four ghosts who climbed from their barrels in the moonlight were my fellow Jews. Five others remained hidden in barrels in the hold of Colón’s boat, the Santa María, their presence known only to Pinzón, Abbas, and an ordinary sailor, who kept them fed as Abbas did us.
“Tonight, Esau”—Pinzón lowered his voice—“Abbas will row you and your friends to the Santa María, and finally all ten ashore. I guarantee that the rest of the crew will be dead drunk.”
I hated to disappoint a man I so revered. But Santángel had named me navigator.
“Captain Pinzón,” I said, “I believe we have found only an island.”
“Yes?”
“A small one.”
“Colón believes it to be one of the islands of Cipangu.”
“With all due respect, Don Martín”—I blushed—“Colón has been spending too much time with Marco Polo and not enough with his charts.”
“So?”
“Could you imagine a homeland for the Jews the size of Zahara de los Membrillos?”
Pinzón sighed. “What do you recommend, Esau?”
I opted for more wandering, urging Pinzón all the time to sail north-by-northwest to the womanly peninsula we both knew so well. In so doing, I doomed all ten of us Jews to a few more barrel-bound weeks at sea.
You see, Eliphaz, the crew of Pinzón’s boat, the Pinta, the mutinous crew that I had faced down to save the lives of Colón, Pinzón, and my watchdog, Abbas, still wondered whether I was flesh or other. My four skinny friends had never climbed the ladder, had never materialized beyond the vague homunculi that the mutineers had imagined when they smashed open our hogshead havens in search of weapons. Pinzón, in his wisdom, thought it best to keep it that way. Five phantoms held far more power at sea than five unexplained Jews.
So back to our barrels we went, the five of us. And the next morning, when the crew had regained their sobriety, we weighed anchor.
Colón wanted to sail to the southwest, the vaginal southwest, a maddening choice of destination for a breast-mad young man. Certain as I was, even in my barrel, that we were no more than two days’ sail from my dream peninsula, I would nonetheless have supported the plan with enthusiasm. But an unforeseen fever drove the crew mad and, for a time, interrupted my search for a homeland and Colón’s for the Indies.
Gold. Gold. There were three captains and ninety-six sailors aboard the three ships, all infected. Against ten barrel-bound Jews. The odds were not good. So we bounced from island to island, small to large to small, sending out landing parties, finding just enough of the shiny stuff to keep us going, enough to keep us from the real work of the expedition.
One afternoon the ships changed course and turned eastward, back in the direction of the Old World. When Abbas brought my dinner that night I insisted on speaking with Pinzón.
“Don Martín,” I said, when we were safely inside his cabin, “you must seize control of the expedition and head north immediately. There is a peninsula of a large continent there. It is the source of all goodness, all life on this hemisphere. You must drop our Minyan there. Two days’ journey, that is all.” Pinzón looked at me in amazement. The six weeks had worn worse on him.
“With all due respect, Esau,” he finally whispered, “you are out of your mind. I can no more control Colón among the savages and the waves than I could in the port of Palos, where I had friends, family, and ammunition. You saw how he was, the night of the mutiny. He’d sooner be crucified than give up command.”
“Don Martín,” I continued. “You have seen where the desire for gold has led the king and queen of Spain. The Jews were their final mine. They booted them from the country and seized their possessions. If this expedition turns into a single-minded search for gold …”
“I can do nothing,” Pinzón whispered and dropped to the bench. I looked to Abbas. He was looking at me. I put my hand on Pinzón’s shoulder, as Abravanel had his on mine. I felt great love for this man who had kidnapped me, whose life I had saved, whose daughter filled my dreams. But it was time for the son to act.
“In that case, Don Martín, with all due respect, please remain in your cabin. I must take control of the ship. Abbas, open the barrels.”
The night watch put up no resistance when I appeared on deck with my four wraiths. North was the course I gave. North was the course called down to the helmsman below deck. As we came about, I heard a whisper in the wind from off the port side of the Santa María—a loose rope, a coded message, a new world bird, my mother’s viol? My heart was my lodestone, locked to its magnetic pole, feeling its way across the strait. There was no turning back. I was sure of my direction. I left to others the how.
After an hour’s pursuit, the Santa María and the smaller Niña gave up the chase. I hadn’t expected Colón to alter course and follow mine. At best, I hoped for a meeting away from the sight of his latest El Dorado, a chance to whisper the name Santángel in his ear, a chance to steer him, move him to the right course.
Eliphaz, my son. As we approached the coast two dawns later, the sun at our shoulders lighting the waves as they broke along the reefs, flocks of long-legged birds shimmering in circular clouds overhead, and Don Martín, up from his cabin for the first time, rested, with the gleam of moral righteousness in his eye and his hand, steady and heavy, on my shoulder once more, my lodestone of a heart near to bursting, pulling us forward, forward, that extra foot over the waves, I saw Home—for the Jews, perhaps; for the five of us, certainly; for myself, without a doubt.
I left Abbas with a map for Santángel and a copy for my teacher, Zacuto. The rest of the crew stood at the rail as we lowered a boat.
“I will try to send Colón,” Pinzón said, “with his five Jews.”
I felt unsure—with only a bar mitzvah education and the little I picked up from the Minyan—what it meant to leave Jews six through ten in Colón-bound barrels, how shaky a community I would be building with only five male Jews. I could only feel my way to action, no more blind now, at the helm of an unfamiliar vessel, than I was in my cave, my cell, or my barrel.
“I will try, Esau,” he said. “I will try, at least, to send your brother.”
My brother. My brother. All at once, Eliphaz, the sound of the viol overwhelmed me. That was the music I heard as we left shore in Palos. My mother’s viol, passed on to my brother, Yehuda, to make new music in the New World. Pinzón spoke as if I knew the plan all along. I blessed Santángel silently and showed no emotion.
“Better yet”—I spoke quickly to relieve him of the need to fulfill my dreams of reunion—“tell Santángel that you succeeded.”
“I will bring New Christians next trip. Women.” My mind moved from Yehuda to long hair, broad shoulders, gray eyes.
“I owe you much, Don Martín. I should like to name this new land after you.”
“No, no, Esau, much better a saint …” He caught himself. “Or at least a woman.”
The first man, whom the Jews call Adam, was given absolute authority to name the beasts and the plants of Paradise. I carried with me, in my barrel, in my Franciscan cowl, twenty-one years of a language, and an unusual way of seeing things that was at once part of me and outside of me. What that power was, that drew me from Córdoba to Mariposa, from Mariposa to the beach of La Rábida, from Palos across the ever-changing maze of the Ocean Sea, was a force that not even the Mayaimi have named. I love your mother, Eliphaz, as I love my own life. But a man always carries with him his first love. And if that love moves him, guides him, becomes the land that nourishes him, baptizes him, redefines him, well—any attempt at forgetting would be immoral.
“You have a daughter, Don Martín?”
He looked at me, another gray-eyed question. I looked out at the shore. The four Jews were perched in the boat, a week’s supplies lashed to the bottom.
“A daughter? You mean Florida?”