Translation
. . . for no other had had so much natural talent nor the boldness to learn how to circumnavigate the world, as he had almost done.
1. Wind
At first were the endless stretches of water, weeks of static horizon, circumvolving heavens. And after that the tempests that tossed the ships like cats toss mice, and waves that towered then collapsed, shattering both timber and spirit. One might laugh when the storm was over, a short laugh, one of relief, because few things were funny. When one had tired of the sea and sky and their shared inconstancy, land was welcome: a beach of pale sand or maybe arching cliffs. And if you made it past the reefs, one still had to contend with natives—first a sparking on the cliff top, a quivering mass of darkness, then a rain of spears.
“Still, you say you’re not afraid?”
“Since you phrase it that way, I would be a fool not to be afraid. So yes, I am afraid. And possibly a yet bigger fool because I still want to go.”
“Do you know why I speak to you of natives?”
“I can guess,” said Pigafetta. “Everyone else speaks of a giant squid, which is impossible to fear. A cliff with no bottom. All these unknowns of the natural world invented to disturb the sleep of children, but natives—man—impossible to deny.”
The financier chucked his head quickly to one side. “Man is, by definition, the only one capable of perverting nature—his presence instantly corrupts the natural world.” He didn’t mind playing a little at philosophy if it did not take much time. “So this native is not natural because it is man. But primitive people—are they people? Are they sufficiently removed from nature to be called as such, when they have not yet learned—” And here the financier gestured at the roof beam, load bearer of civilization, and, unintentionally, a rat scuttling across. But his tolerance for philosophical discussion was spent. “I like the fact that you have money!” He laughed and Pigafetta trusted this: frank exploitation. “I need money,” he continued. “But I am not a wet nurse and what will you be doing on the ship?”
“I’m a scholar,” said Pigafetta.
“Is everything here learned?” and the financier waved into the street, where a steaming pile of horse dung was, in two strokes, delivered by two separate wagons’ wheels—one traveling north and one east—beatified.
“Yes,” said Pigafetta. “No.” Pigafetta thought to himself. “Are you waiting for me to beg you? Because I will. I have no pride. It makes my father angry, and my mother is sweet and fat and has never had reason to prostrate herself, but given one, her big behind would rise in the air very quickly. And I am more like her than him, only thin.”
The financier had a twinkle in his eye, so Pigafetta knew he had already earned passage, but he wanted to prove himself as useful. Being decadent and slothful required wealth, but wealth did not require decadence and sloth, and although money, in general, bought respect, after months and months on a ship it probably bought some derision too. “You’re going to need a translator,” said Pigafetta. “I can translate for you.”
“Translate what?” said the financier. “No one’s ever been there. That has defined the trip. To go where one cannot. If Pliny’s one-footed man who rolls about for ambulation exists, you will meet him. And do you speak his language?”
“If he has a mouth,” said Pigafetta, “I will learn.”
Twinkle, twinkle. “You will turn his language into my language. Sounds more like—” and there was a contemplative belch.
“Alchemy,” said Pigafetta.
He was back on the street, several thick and signed papers rolled into his hand. Had he purchased his own annihilation? He looked over his shoulder, at the man who had managed—through a certain kind of genius—to put a price on this process.
“God save us from the dreamers!” he heard the financier bellow, and this was followed by the pleasant clink of coin hitting coin: the wind behind dreamers’ sails.
2. Provision
The commander of the ship was the infamous Ferdinand Magellan—Portuguese and pragmatic—who, after failing to obtain backing from his own king, had turned to Spain. Magellan had spent years in India, up and down the west coast of that land, securing and protecting the area from other invaders—in this case, Arabs—seeking to do the same. Magellan was successful, although his time as a soldier had left him with a shattered knee and the attendant limp, and when Pigafetta first saw him sawing his way down the quay, he looked as though he were tacking into the wind, a wind that was blowing furiously and auspiciously, ruffling the explorer’s beard, threatening to displace his hat, which—possibly because God ordained it, for how else was it achieved?—remained stubbornly upon his head, a large loaf of a hat bearing down on Magellan’s round eyes, soft nose, and inflated, cherubic lips; Pigafetta recalled hearing that Magellan’s mother had been a Jewess and that others attributed his piety—a frightening and passionate embracing of Jesus Christ—to his maternal origins. Pigafetta saw the power in this man and it awed him. He felt charged with a strange, invisible light and knew, as Magellan approached, that his journey to reach the earth’s end would be made to follow this man, rather than the inverse. When the explorer was close enough to hail, Pigafetta called out:
“God keep you, Sir Captain General and Master and good ship’s company.”
“God keep you!” responded Magellan. “Whoever you are.”
“My name,” said Pigafetta, and he bowed politely, “is Antonio Pigafetta.”
“How nice for you. Are you going on the ship?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a Venetian?”
“Yes, from Vicenza.”
“Ah. You’re that rich guy who bought his way onto the boat!”
Pigafetta, who had lived as “that rich guy” for most of his life, found nothing shocking or even offensive in this. He smiled. “I’m a scholar and a translator,” he said.
“I have a translator!” said Magellan. “My slave, Enrique, over there.”
Magellan gestured down the pier and Pigafetta saw a young and oily-looking Indian with glossy hair and—Pigafetta was surprised to note—a look of cunning. He was wearing a loose cotton shirt and wide, cropped pants, and the wind was whipping all his wrappings with such vigor that they snapped like sails.
“Is he truly a translator?” said Pigafetta. “Can he call himself such when he already has the knowledge of these languages? What value is there in that? Let him bring his cannibal king in all his feathered glory to the court of our Charles, and then he can translate because, and I’m presuming here, he knows English.”
Magellan looked over at Pigafetta: fine features, droll look. “I can’t imagine that face,” he said, “at the end of the earth.”
And Pigafetta raised his eyebrows in mild surprise.
“Do you know cosmography?” asked Magellan.
“Oh yes,” said Pigafetta. “And here I’ll be honest with you—I’m a terrible draftsman and the best of my charts look penned by a drunken Franciscan. But for constellations and calculations, I’m quite accomplished, although I’m assuming you have a pilot.”
“I do,” said Magellan. “I just wanted to make sure we’d have something to talk about.”
Magellan began to gimp his way to the gangplank, but thought to stop. “Pigafetta, yes?”
“Antonio Pigafetta, Captain General.”
“You will eat with me tonight.”
And then he wobbled past a bale of hay, and past the pigs that were also to make the journey. Past the casks of wine, barrels of biscuit and salted meat and millet, bolts of linen, silk robes fashioned by Turks, copious amounts of sparkling beads, jars of quince, and a bewildering stack of red caps. Who wanted to sally forth without some red caps? Cannons and cannonballs were loaded, arrows, bows, and cutlasses. Pigafetta was all right with a cutlass, providing his adversary wasn’t fighting back. He looked around at the others, who, on some far-flung and ferocious island, might be called upon to protect him. They were a scrappy lot—Sicilians, Naxians, Genoese, Galicians, Danes, and Bavarians, to name but a few—and Pigafetta was amused, and strangely comforted, to note that every nation had its class of brutes. And then he realized, with less comfort, that he was to commit two years of his life to their company.
3. Abomination
It was the middle of December, 1519, when the five ships of the Armada de Molucca finally sighted the Land of Verzin. Magellan had already faced the predictable challenge to his authority—mutinies were as common on long voyages as head lice—and there had been an intense and confused juggling of power that had landed a relative of his—yet another Portuguese—in command of the San Antonio. On this, a Spanish voyage! The Castilians were outraged, and lucky them, for there was little else to keep one occupied. Pigafetta, of course, had tried to apply himself as a scholar; however, all the skies were charted here and—unless he wanted to learn Danish or Greek, which involved mixing with sailors—there was nothing linguistic to do. He considered being a naturalist, but very few birds presented themselves, and those that did were of the most mundane variety.
But finally the horizon had appeared broken and, quickly, with the wind pressing at his back, Pigafetta saw the land approach—the distance dissolve as if it were the land advancing—and he stood still upon the surface of the water. Once in sight of the beach, an enthusiastic cheer rose up from the men, not so much for the surgeless prospect of land, but for the dull-eyed, thick-lipped, bare-breasted women strolling across it. In little time they had dropped anchor in the waters off Rio de Janeiro.
Predictably, as soon as they were ashore, the sailors disappeared into the bristling huts, and although Pigafetta had no desire to join this orgy at the end of the earth, he found it on the whole entertaining: the men were fucking, the sun was shining, he had his journal. Shaded by a palm, with the swish and swish of waves, an occasional buzzing insect, fresh—although strange—food, it was hard to feel despairing. And Pigafetta was not despairing by nature. Every disappointed hope—and in his twenty-eight years of life, there’d been many—had made him accustomed to suffering; he did not avoid good food and company when feeling melancholic, but rather hoped to offset his gloom with liberal doses of both.
He leafed through the first few pages of his book and began rereading his account of the storm that had nearly wiped him and his problems from the earth, of the appearance of Saint Elmo dancing on the railing like a drunken fairy, and the stillness that followed. Pigafetta realized that it was his guilt that kept conjuring the image of the Sicilian Antonio Salamón: Magellan had ordered him strangled after he’d been discovered with the cabin boy, and that poor lad, barely more than twelve, had pitched himself over the side of the ship and beyond the reach of shame. They had strangled Salamón on deck for all to see, to act as a warning, but if Magellan insisted on the murder of sodomites—it was Spanish law—surely his crew would be reduced by half: pragmatism dictated that Magellan look the other way, much as it dictated, on long journeys, that you widen your options for companionship.
Pigafetta looked up and saw one of the native women wading in the shallows. She seemed barely more than a child and wore very little to disguise this. Feeling his gaze upon her, she turned and met his eyes, then looked away, recognizing in an instant, and with an animal instinct, that he would not harm her.
Perhaps an hour later, Pigafetta was lunching on some roasted meat when, with a whirling conflux of emotions, he noted Magellan—his distinctive stride—coming up the beach.
“Antonio!” Magellan said when he was close.
“Hail the mighty explorer,” responded Pigafetta laconically, and forced a smile.
“You sound sleepy,” said Magellan. He looked at the meat and Pigafetta raised the banana-leaf plate so that he might help himself. “It’s good. What is it? Or,” and here he squinted pointedly, “should I ask, who is it?” Ha, ha, ha.
Pigafetta took back the meat and set it on the rock. Together, they looked at the waves, although it might have been more novel to face inward to land. Magellan took Pigafetta’s journal from him and looked it over.
“Well?” said Pigafetta.
There was a moment of concerned silence. “Antonio, I know this is your book, but listen.” Magellan brought the book close to his eyes, then a half-arm’s distance away, and read, “The men gave us one or two of their daughters as slaves for one hatchet or one large knife, but they would not give us their wives for anything at all.”
Pigafetta considered. “It’s accurate.”
Magellan nodded first to one side, then the other. “Yes, but it sounds—”
“Immoral?”
“Yes. It says these things . . .” And here he trailed off because “saying things,” after all, was the purpose of writing. “It’s suggestive.”
“It suggests that you are buying women for your sailors and that they’re sleeping with naked cannibals.”
“And they are,” said Magellan, pondering and fair, “but can’t you make it sound better? For me?”
Pigafetta snatched back the book, hastily scribbled something, and passed it back.
Magellan read, “Mass was said twice on the shore, during which those people remained on their knees with so great contrition and with clasped hands raised aloft, that it was an exceeding great pleasure to behold them.” Magellan’s face broke into a dazzling smile. The sun was shining through his beard, fuzzing the light around him in a reverse chiaroscuro. “Thank you, Antonio! You are a genius, my only friend on this voyage. You are writing our journey of discovery into history.” Magellan rested his hand heavily upon Pigafetta’s shoulder and Pigafetta enjoyed the weight of it, the manly salty smell hovering so close to his ears.
“‘Our journey of discovery’ meaning you, Ferdinand.” Pigafetta was now familiar with his captain. “I am writing you into history.”
“You are morose!” accused Magellan.
“Not morose, my friend, fearful.”
“But why?” Magellan looked at him, at the sudden inward turning of his eyes. “It is because of the Sicilian.”
“Am I that obvious?” said Pigafetta.
“Yes,” said Magellan. “Even Father Valderrama is off screwing someone. He had to get it out of the way because he has to hear everyone’s confession tomorrow and he thinks it will take at least ten hours.” Magellan smiled. “I killed Salamón because I needed to kill someone.”
“He was hardly a threat.”
“But a law existed. And it was there for me. And I used it.”
“Used it for what? To kill a Sicilian?”
“No, to put down the rebellion.”
“There is no rebellion.”
“Exactly.” Magellan smiled broadly. “Feel safe, Antonio. What use would it be for me to kill a Venetian nobleman with an interest in languages, nature, the stars? How would your death affect the sailors? Would they say, ‘That could have been me?’ No. The closest thing they have in common with you is that they like the occasional arse.” And here Magellan laughed. “But I haven’t even noticed you with anyone: woman, man, dog.” Ha, ha, ha. “You must have some object of your desire.”
“Always desire with you, Ferdinand,” said Pigafetta. “What of affection, if not love?”
There was a moment of silence, and then the two men began laughing, a laughter made all the sweeter for Pigafetta because it was shared and—with relief—earned, and the monkeys chattered on the branches above and in the ocean a fish leaped, a spit of silver, and with a splash was gone.
4. Language
Three months they had been moored off the coast of Patagonia, and why? Because on Magellan’s map there had been straits through to the Pacific, and Magellan, like an unskilled lover, was prodding and poking his way down the coast, looking for his opening and finding none. Now they were waiting for winter—in April—to pass. The men were mad or mad, or mad and mad, and one ship—the San Antonio—had disappeared: reeled back quickly like a toy boat with wheels, pushed and drawn at will. Another had dissolved itself upon the rocks with such efficiency that you marveled at its skill in vanishing. And three captains had mutinied: two killed, one left on a shore spitting and swearing until darkness and distance (and possibly a large cat) swallowed him.
And through all this grumbling and discontent, Magellan had remained in charge. There he was, standing at the porthole in his quarters, his pocket knife in his hand, while Pigafetta, slumped with something that would have been despair in a commoner, but in a nobleman was more like ennui, was looking at him with undisguised passion: disguise having gone the way of the Valencia oranges two months previous.
“Ferdinand, what are you doing with that knife?”
“Thinking that I would like to be peeling an orange.”
Magellan thumbed the knife a half-orange hemisphere.
“And I am thinking of you.”
“I have changed my mind,” said Magellan. “With this knife, I am contemplating suicide.” He pointed the dull blade at his heart. “I can’t take it!” Then a pantomimed death: shock, slack. Recovery. “Only I think this might be funny—over wine—later. The translator in love with me, and me with nowhere to go.”
“Your friends will drink and laugh and you, Ferdinand, who claim to be my friend, will laugh loudest of all.”
Magellan smiled crookedly and Pigafetta braced himself for more humor. “You could try harder. You could play a guitar.” And Magellan brushed delicately the strings of his imagined instrument. “You could change your stockings—”
Pigafetta was smiling despite himself. “Change my stockings? Give me a reason to remove them.”
Magellan laughed. “I already have. They are the only things left to eat!” Ha, ha, ha.
Pigafetta pulled himself to his feet. “There is plenty of food,” he said. “You put us on half rations out of longing for something dire.”
“Antonio, please, where are you going?”
“Oh, the Spice Islands, and you?”
“You know you are my favorite,” said Magellan. He wiped his hands on his leather waistcoat, which, coming from him, was almost an apology.
“Your favorite? Such an honor.” Pigafetta nodded. “I saw João yesterday. He was eating his own shit.”
“He’s gone mad.” It was a casual remark.
“And the rest of the men eating rats.”
“Only the fast men.”
A silence hung, and Pigafetta’s aching heart acknowledged that this callousness and endless insult was what fed his love.
Of course, Magellan knew this. “I applaud their resourcefulness. They don’t have the luxury of escaping their hunger with a broken heart.”
Pigafetta resolved to make his escape and turned to the door.
“’Tonio, no. Don’t stand there with your heart breaking, your stomach growling, your stockings stinking. You should write something. Come over here. Look with me out the window.”
Disguise, Valencia oranges, and pride. Pigafetta went to stand by Magellan, lured by simple nearness. He saw the coast, that same coast, cold, dead. Deadening. “There’s nothing there.”
“Nothing there? Make it up.”
“I’m not a poet,” said Pigafetta. “I’m a chronicler. A cartographer. A translator.”
“Then translate!”
“Translate what?”
Magellan gestured outward, embracing everything that was not yet anything. “That is your page.”
“It’s a big page.”
“Then fill it with giants.”
Pigafetta tried to resist Magellan’s suggestion; he could not bear to reward him, but he was hungry in every possible way and needed distraction. He brought his writing table and chair to the place on deck that promised the least interruption and the freshest air. A short distance away, the Naxian, his name never known so as not forgotten, was moaning relentlessly. Pigafetta began to hum a popular tune to drown out the man, and although he could still be heard Pigafetta found that he had incorporated the moaning into his humming; it worked as a sort of accompaniment. He began to write—
| For head | her |
| For eye | other |
| For nose | or |
—and was hard at it when a familiar shadow fell across the page.
“’Tonio, what are you doing?”
“Taking your advice. The giants. Here they are.”
“Giants?” Magellan splayed his fingers over the open page.
“It’s their language.”
“Is this how you make a giant? You give him something to say? And this language of the giants—it sounds like English.”
Pigafetta cocked his head at the page. Magellan was right.
| For eyebrows | occhechel |
“That sounds like Italian. And it’s even like occhi, the eyes, for the eyebrows.”
| For eyelids | sechechiel |
“How do you pronounce that one?”
“At least you admit it doesn’t sound like anything,” said Pigafetta. “And I’m not trying to speak it.”
“How about the mouth?”
| For mouth | xiam |
“And the lips?”
| For lips | schiahame |
“And tongue?”
Pigafetta turned to face him. He said, “For tongue, schial.”
“And throat?”
“Ohumez.”
“And finger?”
“Cori.” Which sounded like heart, since Pigafetta’s was pounding mercilessly in his ribs.
“And face?”
“Cogechel.”
“And breasts?” Magellan held two large breasts of air before him, as if desire had conjured a pair of his own for him to play with.
Pigafetta managed an exhausted laugh, and took up the pen once more. He wrote:
| For Bosom | othen |
“Another one, impossible to pronounce.” Ha, ha, ha. “What about penis? What about testicles? You care about that!”
5. Cartography.
A map can be many things: a sheet of paper, a peppering of stars, a gesturing spear poked with jovial menace toward the hairy wall of virgin jungle, and in this case, an idea of what must lie ahead. Because Magellan knew where they had to go, the possibility that where they had to go might not exist made things impracticable.
They were now in the straits, the Straits. THE STRAITS! These shifting, amorphous tributaries and the sparking: fire in suppurating bursts on the bristling grass.
Tierra: land if land this was.
Fuego: fire, an arse-waggling assertion from the natives.
And good enough, this naming: dramatic, enticing, and bold. Here at the end of the earth, fire mixed with ice, ice with sky, land with, well, fire. There was an elemental purity to it.
“Prosaic. Obvious. And corny,” said Pigafetta. “You did better with Patagonia.”
“You think so?” said Magellan, and laughed. Patagonia, a neologism, came from patacones: dogs with large paws, a reference to Pigafetta’s giants, who—along with their enormous legs—had sprung enormous feet, consequently enormous shoes to put them in; his image of padding dogs, this whole mess of invention and whimsy (an incontinent word) christening the lower wedge of the continent.
“You need to name the straits.”
Magellan shrugged and Pigafetta felt a pang of affection, because of course he wished the straits to be named for him. “Everyone calls it what they want. San Martin says it’s the Strait of All Saints, because he believes we need every last one to get through. And there’s the Victoria Strait, since the Victoria entered first. And your favorite: the Patagonian Strait.”
“Why hesitate to name it?” asked Pigafetta.
“Who cares? Do I care? Ask the priest.”
Father Valderrama did care. After Big-Footed Dog Place and a land that called to mind visions of the inferno (weren’t we looking for heaven on earth?), it was time for something religious. He had a few suggestions, and Magellan chose “Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins,” because it sounded—and was—funny.
“How do we know there were eleven thousand?” asked Pigafetta.
Then Magellan: Ha, ha, ha. “How do we know they were virgins?”
Great plates of ice rose up from the arctic waters, and chasms of incalculable depth sheltered every undiscovered beast and fear. Pigafetta marveled at the enormous glacial mirrors, the refracted images of the ship moving past. The air had been thick with moisture, one low-slung cloud after the other, confounding and chilling. The pilot was near fits as he attempted to orient himself. He ran this way and that, peering over, and up, and away from, and in this hysteria of compensation made everyone nervous. Where were the stars?
But sometimes the sky would reveal itself, and in its blinding nudity mock them all, because what use were the stars if they were the wrong stars? Or in the wrong place? What was that blazing stripe supposed to implicate when blazing there? And the scales, now tilted, quite provocative, gave forth the following information: you’re lost. And what comfort was it that one was supposed to be lost, beyond the point of bearings? The constellation hanging, awkward from this angle, underscored disorientation: it was a nose protruding from a cheek, or teeth massing in an ear. Pigafetta remembered the second of these possibilities from his childhood: an infant covered with hair and spitting tiny bones from its skin, like stones from the earth at first frost; the baby, to the relief of all, had perished within a year.
Magellan, after a well-disguised moment of doubt, was once again all bluster and purpose and trajectory: the cross had appeared in the sky, proving that Magellan was not only blessed, but heading in the right direction.
“Your reasoning is off,” said Pigafetta. “If we were headed in the opposite direction, those stars would still be shining.”
“I say that it’s a blessing, that God approves of what we are endeavoring to do.”
“And somewhere over there,” said Pigafetta, gesturing into the jungle and, to his understanding, the Stone Age, “a pair of Indians are fornicating under the trees, ready to birth more pagans, their activities presided over by that same constellation. And who’s not to say that Orion blesses us, because there’s his belt, and over there’s some other thing—the twins, or the centaur, or whatever—and that we sail because they wish it and guide us.”
“’Tonio, I know you’re a sodomite. Must you be a heretic?”
“I’m not a heretic. You interpret blindly and justify this through faith. Faith does not exist to prove your actions, but quite the reverse. Of course I believe in God!”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” But for the first time Pigafetta felt a small and difficult-to-ignore refluent stirring amid the usual pounding surf of his faith, asserting itself, somehow strengthened by the effort to bury it. He steered his reason elsewhere. “Ferdinand,” said Pigafetta, “I don’t think that God wields his celestial power like that: like an innkeeper waving a lantern to light the way for drunks.”
Like a termination for all this water and unknowing: the Moluccas.
Like a purpose for all this mad zeal and bravery: Magellan’s faith.
What conjured what into being?
Later that night, Pigafetta was disturbed from his sleep. There was always activity, twenty-four hours a day: changing watches, pricking positions, mending ropes, raising sails, rotating hourglasses. Pigafetta had grown accustomed to all of these vital functions; they were the lungs and spleen and stomach of the ship—but Magellan was up, and he should have been sleeping. Pigafetta recognized the thump and drag, thump and drag of the explorer’s progress across the deck. Concerned, he roused himself and went to see.
“Although it may hurt you to admit it, the ship moves even while you sleep,” said Pigafetta.
“If sleep would come, I would take it and hold it as long as it would have me,” Magellan replied.
Pigafetta would have asked Magellan what was bothering him, but it would have been a stupid question. There were many things that Magellan would have to answer for upon reaching Spain. First among these was his stranding of Cartagena, the Spaniard and nobleman, back in Patagonia; he’d replaced him with another relative, Mesquita, whose fittedness—beyond blood—was that he hadn’t the skill to sail, thus no will to rebel. Magellan was hated for being Portuguese, but once he drew near to the Moluccas, it would be the Portuguese—protecting their stake in the Spice Islands—who would give him the most to fear. And there was the San Antonio, presumed back in Spain and slandering. Once again he would be forced to defend himself, and why? Because he was the greatest explorer! He, Ferdinand Magellan, had the whole world: his seas and lands rolled out before him; his march into creation; this track always slouching off to the west and west; the eternal conquering of diminishing distance and unreachable point. The king had only his red carpet and slippered foot upon it. Yes, greatness was something to be feared—his greatness! But to be feared by a king was also something to be feared.
And that was if he managed to bring the ships back: who knew what lay hidden by the wall of horizon, crouching in the shade of the unknown?
The explorer raked through his beard with his fingers, his head tilted, about to say something—even opening his mouth!—but then, thinking better, resorted to a vague nodding and frowning.
“I have something that will cheer you,” said Pigafetta.
“You talk with such confidence, Antonio, as if I am looking for cheer, or peace, or happiness—all these things that men want. I am not a man like other men are men. But not like you either.”
“Not peace then. Not cheer.” Pigafetta went to stand by the explorer and steered him into the night sky. There were two shreds of cloud—star cloud—as if they had torn off the Milky Way and caught upon some distant, galactic bramble. “Do you see the clouds?”
“Yes,” said Magellan. “Is that something new?”
“New or old, it does not matter. We are the first to see it,” said Pigafetta. “I would have shown you last night, but the mist was all about, and thick.” Pigafetta placed his hand on the explorer’s shoulder. “They are the Magellanic Clouds.”
“The Magellanic Clouds.” Magellan looked at his clouds. “Will they stay?”
“Oh yes,” said Pigafetta. “We will go everywhere, but they will stay to laugh at us.”
“But there are two. Why not take one for yourself?” Magellan smiled now. “The smaller one,” he added.
“No, no,” said Pigafetta. “They’re both yours, but maybe if we’re here again together, you might let me have use of one—of course, the smaller.”
6. Peace
The land had vanished, slipped into the horizon like a gold coin into a cardinal’s coffer, and now there was naught but a reflective and uncommunicative surface. Magellan had joked that if there were a monster, they’d find it here, and although a great fanged and bristled serpent had not risen out of the water, hovered upon its spiked tail, roared and shrieked before staving in the ship’s hull and consigning them all to a quick, efficient burial, they had found their monster: scurvy.
Magellan and Pigafetta had remained scurvy-free—even in this unhealthy air—but Pigafetta wondered if it were not so much their noble lungs and the ability to purify the bad humors, but rather the jars of quince, a staple of officers’ dinners. Of course, Pigafetta kept this to himself. There was not enough for everyone, and Magellan had an altruistic nature: he would share whatever remained of the quince if he deemed it curative rather than an indulgence, and although Pigafetta was, on occasion, generous, he could not be quite so cavalier with his beloved captain’s life.
If scurvy were the only threat, Magellan would have been a successful steward, but they were starving. Even the leather casings on the mast had been soaked and boiled, served and devoured. There was now a price on the rats, one half ducado, and that was money well spent; rat meat fended off both hunger and scurvy. Twenty men had died. Pigafetta struggled with a debilitating compulsion to stare at the horizon with a hopeful resolve that left him cross-eyed and ill, cringing. He closed his eyes, a spike-like pressure asserting itself on the left side of his head. The real issue was time: they could last another couple of weeks at most.
Although maps made clear that only a few days’ travel separated Chile from the Moluccas, the ships had been at sea for over three months—propelled by a brisk and unrelenting wind, without a single storm—and still nothing.
Pigafetta was sitting collapsed against the side of the ship in a sliver of shade, his eyes shut, a wash of purple dancing outside, when a shadow crossed this shadow.
“Is this sleep?”
He opened his eyes and sure enough Magellan stood there.
“No,” said Pigafetta.
“Why close your eyes?”
“There is nothing to see.”
Magellan looked out at the horizon, where Pigafetta’s point was amply proven. “If it is not too much trouble, leave the eyes open.”
Pigafetta arched an eyebrow. “You were concerned?”
“About what?”
“About me. You thought I was dead.”
“How can this matter to you? My concern!”
Pigafetta stood up and went to stand by his friend at the railing. “I saw a bird yesterday. It lays its eggs upon the back of its mate. They have no need for land.” Magellan said nothing, his eyes continuing to roam the offing. “Are you listening?”
But Magellan was not. “Mar Pacifico.”
“Mar Pacifico?” Pigafetta scoffed. “Peace? A not-too-distant peace. Call this salted, sparkling hell for what it is: a grave to us all.”
“What do you know of death and its gifts? Let peace be one of them, but I am not so sure.”
“Who’s the heretic now?”
“I am a true believer. I don’t only believe the good things. With salvation, there’s the possibility of damnation, which makes the salvation all the sweeter.”
“And the salvation is there—that possibility—which makes the damnation all the worse, and worse still since we choose it. Tempt me back to God, Ferdinand.” Pigafetta smiled handsomely. “Bring me into your fold. Remind me of salvation, the saved, how it’s savored—its taste. And what does salvation look like anyway?”
“Sails.”
“It looks like sails?”
“No,” said Magellan, a fierce delight clear on his face. “Sails!”
There was the cry from the lookout, who no doubt had questioned his first sighting, but now committed the figures flying across the water to recognition: sails, manned by people who needed to eat, or could be eaten. He was that hungry.
7. Conversion
A deeper sloth could not be imagined for people still alive. And the indulgence—meat and fish and fruit and liquor—after all that time spent floating in the Mar Pacifico (nothing could be worse than such quiet torture), even the air, fragrant and sweet, made one feel a drunkard: a passionate drunkard. Passion. Maybe they weren’t so slothful after all. The men had gone from near death to such fervent fucking that Pigafetta had actually thought to pen it in his book, a naturalist’s observation, of how prolonged proximity to death left one with the urge to procreate. Then he thought better of it: his urge to take the basic things in man and endow them with explanation—the need to translate licentiousness into the more noble desire to survive.
The Cebuan women were beauties—Pigafetta noticed, although with the same aesthetic astuteness with which he admired horses and weapons—and more akin to Europeans than Patagonians. A subversive and forking thought entered Pigafetta’s mind: was it possible that one’s European identity was as tainted by the warmer climes as the Cebuans’ was refined by contact with the porcelain, silk, and writing, brought to these islands with Arabs and Chinese? And were Arabs and Chinese a civilizing force? Were they capable of such a thing?
As Pigafetta strode down the beach to find his friend, he searched for the right words. He had resolved for the fifth time in as many days to speak frankly to Magellan, to clarify what had caused the grumbling among the men, and why it wasn’t the will of God they were opposing, but rather Magellan’s. Pigafetta paused among the bananas, a personal favorite, and pulled one, slightly green, but irresistible in its exotic presentation and convenience, to eat. He had only risen from his sleeping mat a half hour ago and the sun was already reaching its zenith. Magellan must have been up for hours. Where would he be? And then Pigafetta saw it: the cross.
There was a rope and pulley struggle unfolding in a clearing a short distance over the lagoon, and a massing of dark and obedient muscle—native and, to Pigafetta, not to be trusted—and then, like the hand of a clock moving to the twelve, the cross was raised. Pigafetta chewed on his banana and heard Magellan’s barking as the cross was secured—a large cross that cast a large shadow, larger still in Pigafetta’s mind. He took a few moments to compose himself, but his thoughts were scattered; he’d begun to wonder about his future back in Vicenza, a future of print and privilege, and frankly, as he stood in the steamy heat, a future too known. Magellan would go home to his wife, spawn, and return to the sea, like all those flightless birds he’d seen in Patagonia.
But hadn’t the known itself been rendered obsolete? Hadn’t Magellan done that?
By the time Pigafetta reached what would have been the town square, had there been a town, Magellan had accomplished his erection. The cross was standing quite well, looking—despite its shiny newness and inferior material—quite permanent.
“Are you done with baptizing people?” asked Pigafetta. “Are you on to crucifying?”
Magellan waved his finger in Pigafetta’s face. “Only you talk to me like this.”
“Only I care enough to speak my mind.”
Magellan looked frankly at Pigafetta and shook his head. “This is my duty.” He began to walk away.
“Ferdinand, I will not be misunderstood. I think it’s wonderful that you’ve baptized everyone, and the men are, no doubt, grateful to be sleeping again with good Christian girls rather than heathens.”
“You make fun of me,” said Magellan.
“It is not mocking. It is honesty tempered with affection. You are not here to baptize everyone—”
“There is no greater purpose!”
“Perhaps. But it’s not your purpose. I must remind you that you have sailed this far to take hold of the Moluccas for our King Charles, to deprive the Portuguese of this prize, to sail back with the miracle of having sailed west and only west, and to return with our holds filled with cloves. This trip has nothing to do with Christian Indians. Christian Indians. The very term is a mockery of itself.”
“And what about that man I healed? He was dying—almost dead, and I said to the Cebuans to burn all their idols and that I would make him walk. And I walked into his hut, and—”
“And he walked. And there was no one more surprised than you, excepting him. I commend you for having all their idols burned, ours being much more handsome, but Ferdinand, I would less fear disaster than all of this success.”
“Antonio,” said Magellan, and he seemed concerned, “have you lost your faith in me?”
“In you, no, and that is what I fear because I—throwing to the wind reason and intellect and every God-given gift—would follow you anywhere. That is faith, that I would still do that. But please don’t ask me if I think you lead me well.”
Later, with the sun dropping ferociously behind the mountains and the insects swarming like a chorus of the damned, Pigafetta, a mug of distilled coconut juice dwindling in his grasp, felt a foreboding chill. He recalled their arrival on the island of Cebu, the boom of cannons and King Humabon falling to his knees in fear, while Magellan laughed. Magellan had later informed King Humabon that the Spaniards always greeted powerful sovereigns with cannon fire, and perhaps, unintentionally, had told the truth. After the cannons, he’d dressed one of the larger sailors in a suit of armor and had another attack him all about, much to the astonishment of the Cebuans, who did not even wear shirts, so how could they comprehend this? Then Magellan had boasted that one of his men was equal to one hundred Indians, and at that, King Humabon, although feigning an ignorant deference, had fallen into hushed discussion with Magellan’s slave, Enrique. Enrique, to the surprise of all, including himself, was fluent in this dialect, even though Magellan had acquired him in Africa. This was Enrique’s forgotten home.
When Humabon and Enrique fell to whispering, Pigafetta was filled with dread. And the next day, when masses of the Cebuans embraced Christianity, Pigafetta sensed that Magellan was being manipulated by a skilled adversary.
Pigafetta wanted to be wrong, but the morning brought cold comfort and understanding. Lapu-Lapu, a rival chieftain of the neighboring island of Mactan—to Humabon’s horror—had refused to accept Christianity, and now Magellan had declared war upon him. Magellan’s sailors were now soldiers, involuntary crusaders, in his planned offensive. They would attack Mactan and all the heathens there, or at least subdue them, and Humabon and his allies would assert their power to keep Mactan good and Christian.
When Pigafetta paddled out to the Trinidad early in the morning, he saw a disheartening bustle: cannons and flint being readied, armor being assembled—for how long had it lain neglected, a home for rats and rust? Pigafetta had insisted on seeing Magellan, even though Magellan had wanted solitude: a time for prayer. Piety supplied the words for Magellan, but what informed God’s response? And whatever the will of God, if it was not in the financial interests of Spain, it was not to be listened to.
“Surely you see the folly in this,” said Pigafetta, but Magellan was kissing his cross and readying himself for armor. “How many are the Mactanese in number, and what do you know of their leader, Lapu-Lapu? The very fact that Humabon wants him dispensed with and has not done so himself—and the Cebuans number many—fills me with a grave and justified concern.”
“This is duty.”
“This is hubris.”
“I knew you would say that. Why are you here to torture me? I need to pray.”
“Then pray that God will give you humility.”
“What is the great danger? We have guns and cannons and steel blades. It would take one hundred of their number to kill one of our soldiers.”
“If we had soldiers. We are sailors and cabin boys and pilots. The only soldier is you, an old man with a heavy limp armed with faith, and sorry, but faith makes a dull blade.”
Magellan looked serious but had to laugh. “Go back to the island, and tonight I will see you, and you will apologize for calling me an old man.”
But Pigafetta had resolved to go with him. There were many who wanted Magellan dead, and stranding him in battle would be a very good way to accomplish this. The armor didn’t fit well and Pigafetta looked silly in it, but if Magellan was marching into battle so would he.
8. Engagement
These are the great generals: Julius Caesar with his flanking phalanxes; Alexander with his speed and daring; Miltiades with his plea for boldness; Hannibal, although he lost; that barbarian Chinese flying on the wind to the very gates of Christendom. Later, when careless history lifted her skirts and fled this bloody battle, she would find other commanders: Napoleon, Sherman, Rommel. And they would all have one thing in common: a plan.
Magellan did not have a plan. He did not even have a battle, really: this was not Gaugamela, nor Marathon. He was bringing faith and civilization to Mactan, a tiny island that even savages—Cebuans with their bronze-bolted penises, their hog-toothed idols, their bare-arsed social mores—considered beyond the pale. Magellan, his ships bobbing harmlessly distant, prevented from approach by the low tide, was wading through the water in his armor. The men were following, slowly, while the cannonballs fell around them, the targets leaping and hooting onshore.
Pigafetta was wading too. The armor was heavy and he couldn’t keep track of Magellan, whom he’d planned to protect. His terror was transformed into a kind of ferocity paired with cold reason, which, as he raised his musket and fired at a native, presented this: you had less to fear from the fearless than the truly terrified. The native was hopping around—Pigafetta having missed his mark—but after some awkward fumbling (he didn’t want to get the wadding wet) he managed another shot, and to the surprise of both, this projectile hit the native’s leg. Each took a second to process this. The native shrieked and fell to his knees in the shallows; Pigafetta, now with a moderate understanding of what battle was about, turned to find another target.
There was now a hut ablaze onshore and the smoke poured out, its thatched roof seizing with flames; the smoke from the weaponry, the dry skunk smell of the gunpowder, the pearl-blue water now turned pink with blood, all of this presented itself and all at once, but where was Magellan? Pigafetta reminded himself that he had injured and probably, although death might wait for morning, killed a native—that he was capable of this, that he should find the battle rather than lingering at its fringes. He felt as if he were a marionette, and that God’s large hand—that hand pointing the way out of Eden frescoed on the family chapel wall—was now dangling him here and there, as he splashed about pantomiming assault. His eyes scanned the thick of fighting and found their mark—not the enemy, but his beloved captain, who was battling on with a blow-and-blow efficiency, as if he were cutting a trail in the jungle, a small path for a little light to filter in.
And then Magellan fell. What had felled him?
And then the Mactanese were on him like rain or ants or some other force of nature.
And then Pigafetta felt a sharp pain in his leg, and looked, and saw the bamboo spike pushed through his flesh.
He looked up and Magellan was no longer there, only the glossy brown backs and smooth black hair and a hundred limbs pounding and the water turning a dark red, a fragment of armor floating on its surface like a paper boat.
9. Domus
Pigafetta awoke to the sound of sails. He could hear them flapping in the wind—a steady breeze bringing him back to Europe—awakening him to the familiar. But when he opened his eyes he saw the corners of his bedroom, the draping of the bedclothes, the cold stone of the walls, and a small sparrow whose desperate flutter had entered, translated, into his dream.
Pigafetta woke up in the same state of disorientation every day, the stillness of the room unnatural, the size, solidity, and quiet a departure from the normal. He sat up in bed and placed his feet upon the floorboards. The sparrow swooped and flapped, looping in small and ineffective paths of escape. Pigafetta ducked out of its way and reached for his robe; he would trap the bird and set it free.
He had managed to confine the sparrow to the space between the wardrobe and the wall when a servant knocked on the door.
“Come in,” said Pigafetta.
The servant stepped inside.
“And for God’s sake, close the door behind you. Can’t you see what I’m doing?”
But the servant could only see Pigafetta’s back, the unenlightening nightshirt, his bandy legs and bare feet, and the raised robe that made him look as if he were bullfighting with the wardrobe. Was this the madness that all the servants had been waiting for since his return from the east? The servant shut the door with a grudging obedience.
“Keep away from the window,” Pigafetta said, and the servant stepped to one side.
Pigafetta, having netted the sparrow in his robe, quickly ran to the window to set it free, but the bird was frightened, aquiver in all directions; it seemed highly likely that upon release, the sparrow would once more be inside. Seeing no other option, Pigafetta threw the robe, unfurling it, out the window. The servant remained by the door, respectfully still.
“Why are you here?” asked Pigafetta.
“Sir,” said the servant, bowing his head, “Lady Carlotta is here to see you.”
“Carlotta?” Carlotta was Pigafetta’s favorite cousin. “She was not expected, was she?”
“No, sir. And I feel obliged to add that she is in quite a state.”
“And what state is that?”
“She is very upset and weeping.”
“Weeping?”
Pigafetta had made plans to dine with Carlotta at the end of the week. There was much to talk about, and in the year since his return from the east she had been the only person he confided in. She had nursed him back to health when he returned from Spain, and when his nightmares awoke him in his convalescence, it was she whose cooling cloth and soothing voice calmed him and stilled the demons.
He had returned from Spain, having delivered his deposition to the king, in a condition of extreme fatigue. Shortly after having reestablished a household, in Venice itself—he could not bear the landlocked towers of his native Vicenza—he had collapsed into a state of delirium, and Carlotta—boozy, sweet, honest Carlotta, with her current fashion and fading looks, her progressively younger lovers and fatally aging husbands—had shown tender fortitude and helped him through it. He remembered her gravelly, hypnotic voice as the one thing that had guided him through the shadows of that time: her hoarse promise of the present his only compass.
“There is no more Mactan,” she had said. “I have erased it. There is no dissembling king of the Moluccas, no more ships sinking beneath the weight of cloves. There are no more Portuguese to imprison you, to pursue you to the Cape of Good Hope, because that is no more: no fierce winds, no jagged rocks, no endless waiting while you starve for the winds to favor you, and the Victoria. The Portuguese are not waiting in Santiago to hang you, but are in Portugal, where they can do you no harm. We have all the food you can eat and sweet water and wine. The Land of Verzin lies only in your imagination. We know no cannibals, nor giants. There are no fish with razor teeth that prey on men, no poison darts to poison dreams. You are home, Antonio, home.”
Pigafetta turned to the servant. “Go outside and get my robe,” he said. “I need it.”
Carlotta was in the living room fanning herself with an anxious vigor. Her hair was up, but had been arranged carelessly, and the overall effect was dishevelment and haste. She was no longer weeping, having moved on to anger. Pigafetta noted all.
“Carlotta,” he said, “you cannot always believe what you hear.”
“That confirms it,” she responded. She flared her nostrils and stomped across the room, flinging herself into a chair.
“Why?”
“For my religion.”
“Religion? You have no religion other than wine and boys, like me.”
“It is never too late to reunite with God, to reaffirm one’s faith.”
“You think the Turks need to be killed?”
“For my faith—”
“And even if you believe that, which you don’t, you think you’re the one to do it?”
“To create the kingdom of God on earth.”
“Listen to yourself, Antonio: one aphorism after another. How can I trust this? Observe clearly your embracing of the cross, this march east and east—backward into the past, because the time for knights and infidels was four hundred years ago. Call it what it is—suicide.”
Pigafetta took a chair a safe distance from Carlotta and slumped into it. The servant appeared at the door with goblets and a carafe of wine, and Carlotta watched him pour out the wine, biting her lip. Then the servant was gone, and she drained half her glass, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“I know you are brokenhearted for your captain, who, as I understand it, never loved you. Only as his friend. You will get past this—”
“You only say that because he was a man.”
“No,” said Carlotta. “I say this because you are a man. Grief is a young man’s privilege. At your age, it is only loss and acceptance. This crusade—who are you killing? Turks? Arabs? You care enough about these people to kill them? And you are not a soldier. You told me you shot one Indian and then were pierced in the leg by a poison arrow. Turks and Arabs are not so strangely armed, and worse, they know you, their enemy, whereas those naked heathens know nothing at all.”
Pigafetta looked out the window at the hazy blue sky. How could he argue for the importance of his decision when nothing had value, nothing was worth fighting for, so why not fight? How could this convince anyone? How had he convinced himself?
“You cannot stay in the wake of this Magellan, who, even in death, moves you by simply having passed.”
“Many die having never been so moved.”
“So you wish to die because of it? They will kill you. Infidels are superior to barbarians. It is an irrefutable fact.”
“How simple the world is for you, Carlotta.”
“You mean to insult me and scare me off.” Carlotta laughed. “Simple? You, like young men, desire complication a virtue.” She folded her hands in her lap; she was now serious. “Venice is your home. The doge is your friend and admirer, and they are publishing your book everywhere,” she said. “Even the pope takes it to bed with him each night, to read about the giants and the native girls girdled about with nothing but their hair. You are not a man who needs a profession, but there it is: writer.” She smiled. “There is only one problem with the account, and that is everything is somehow Magellan. Even after he dies, you’re singing his praises, as if he is the wind pushing the sails and his cunning helps you outrun the Portuguese boats. Write another work, and this time—” Carlotta leaned forward and raised her eyebrows significantly. “You are the star! Antonio Pigafetta, native of Vicenza, nobleman, adventurer. Honestly, your Magellan never even made it around the world . . .”
And so she continued for some time, and as the moon waxed and waned, rose and sank, and the tides marched up and up, then back and back, Carlotta could still have been prattling on, sitting in her chair, demanding the servant bring more wine. It made little difference to Pigafetta. It made none at all.
10. Paradise
I will leave Pigafetta, nobleman of Vicenza, first writer of the modern world, standing on the battlefield. It might be Turkey; it might be the moon. He has just been thrown from his horse and is inordinately pleased to have survived this with no broken bones. The horse, smart thing, is returning to camp and is nothing but a distant drumming of hooves curtained by a poof of dust. Pigafetta’s armor is heavy, and he dislikes how it chafes at the knees and shoulders. His sword is also heavy and he can barely lift it. It seems unlikely that he could use the sword to inflict harm on anyone other than himself; in swinging it about, he might dislocate his shoulder.
Pigafetta starts walking to the heart of the conflict, aware that where he now stands is somewhat peripheral. There is dust all around, and heat. He can hear the shrieking of the injured horses rise above the grumble of men at war and the tromp of their boots. Pigafetta feels irrelevant to this battle—to himself—and would gladly fritter away what could very well be his final moments in this state of carelessness, but he does not have that option, because Pigafetta needs to relieve himself. He knows the knightly thing to do would be to just let loose, let the urine trickle down his leg, pool into his shoe, and march on. That would save him from having to set down his sword and unburden himself, plate by plate, of this ridiculous carapace, and what if he is ambushed? He pictures himself turning—all gleaming metal above, all hairy pinkness below—and the surprise on the Mussulman’s face. It would certainly be funny. Pigafetta finds himself laughing, laughing, and laughing louder. He walks in circles, deeply amused, dragging his sword behind him as if it is a toy, as if he is a drunk: the sword records his passage in the dust in erratic zigzags. How sad to be laughing alone!
And then, playing in his ear like a song lodged there against his will, he hears his friend laugh with him. Magellan is laughing too, ha, ha, ha, in his bawdy, flat way:
“’Tonio, what have you done to yourself, and all for me?”
He’s laughing with Pigafetta, and although, so close that you can smell them, men are fighting—not just fighting, but dying too, and for God! For their faith! For the cross!—it is somehow still funny. These men have left their families behind, and little boys, their mouths turned down in sad little bows, will never know their fathers. Silken, perfume-choked hankies will be blooming with leaked blood and limbs will be left here and there, tossed around as the young discard their clothes.
People are dying and in pain—blood is spilled upon the plain.
But in this world, what could be so terribly serious?
Pigafetta, fumbling with his pants, looks up and surprises the infidel, who—his nose covered with some sort of veil—has crept up behind him. Oh, the hilarity of it all. Now the tears pour out the sides of Pigafetta’s eyes, and Magellan laughs ha, ha, ha, and the infidel—who knows to fear madness in dogs but is not sure if the same holds in men—stands with his scimitar, gripped loosely as skilled soldiers hold their weaponry. Pigafetta sees him, and fans inward with his hands, in a gesture of welcome, an invitation: Avvicinarsi! And laughing all the while. The infidel does not laugh, but sees the easy kill. And Magellan and Pigafetta see no harm in a little more blood spilled. They see no reason to become morbid in this morbid situation. Soon it will all be over and there will still be love. Why shouldn’t they laugh?