Consuela’s fifth time in, and the guard barely looks at her.
“?Que dia es este? Por favor.” The new patient stares at Consuela. His voice is demanding, almost commanding. It’s a voice that is perhaps used to giving orders. His head is lifted and he’s trying to see what it is that’s keeping him down in the bed.
“?Que?”
“?Que dia es este? What day is it?”
“It is Sunday,” Consuela says.
“Sunday? What date?” He pulls at his wrist restraints, still checking.
“Sunday, the fourth day of April.”
“April? You mean August. Where am I?” He flexes against the ankle restraints.
“Sevilla.”
“How did I get here? What happened to me?”
“You were brought here-” She stops. What exactly can she tell him? She’s not sure.
“I was in Palos. It all went sideways. There were two girls. Are they all right? Everything went horribly wrong…” But his voice trails off as if he is slowly finding the answers to his own questions.
“I was in Palos. I remember broken glass. People shouting. The ships were in the harbor.” He stops. He looks at her with such expectant eyes. “And?” he says. “And?”
What did this man want?
“Why am I tied to this bed? I’m perfectly fine. My ships, though. Have they… have they sailed?” He’s irritated. Yanks at the wrist ties.
“Ships?” She’s thinking she should probably not say any more. There ought to be doctors here. The psychologists at this asylum are some of the best in the world. In the institution’s lengthy history, they’d had people from all over Europe as patients-even a couple of kings and a few wayward princesses called this place home for brief periods of time. This is one of the first asylums in the world to actually attempt to help the mentally ill-to get at the root cause of an illness. When it first opened, so-called treatments in other parts of Europe were still muddled in the casting out of devils or burning people or drowning them as witches-remarkably final and fatal cures-when the Sevilla Institute was actually caring for the mentally ill. This place, this hospital of innocents, had been a relatively safe haven for many, many years.
“I’ll get a doctor,” Consuela says, turning.
“Wait.”
She stops.
“Get me a phone,” he snaps. “I want to make a call.”
“Pardon?”
“A phone, damnit. Look, I am Columbus. Christopher Columbus. I know the queen, the queen and the king. They can vouch for me. I am to lead three ships across the Western Sea. We’ve got a deal, damnit! Just get them on the phone.”
Whoa, she thinks. Consuela can hear the earnest certainty of his voice. He believes what he’s saying. “You want to fall off the edge of the Earth?” Consuela is performing her own little experiment. “You want to die?”
“You don’t believe that. Nobody but a simpleton would believe that old wives’ tale. Try not to underestimate my intelligence and I’ll do the same for you.”
“I’ll let Dr. Fuentes know you’re awake.”
“Yes, let your doctor know that I’m hungry, and I have to piss, and I’m not crazy.”
She shuts the door-the click echoes in the stone hallway. Consuela walks past the admitting desk and around the corner to Dr. Fuentes’s office. She knocks on his door. Waits. Knocks again.
The door squeaks open, slowly. “Yes. What is it?” He says this with the proclivity of someone who has been doing something frustrating and this intrusion is the icing on the annoyance cake. Dr. Fuentes is a tall, clean-shaven man who is a fastidious bureaucrat. He’s just been appointed chief of staff at the institute. Consuela is honestly uncertain about his skills as a doctor.
He holds the door open with one hand and fumbles with his lab-coat buttons with the other. The sound of a chair scraping on a tiled floor comes from inside the office.
“Patient 9214 is awake.” Consuela decides she does not want to know who else is in there. Damnit! She hates stuff like this-office politics. Knowing the human contents of Doctor Fuentes’s office would put her in the middle of something. There was no scraping sound, she tells herself. It was nothing. There was no scraping.
“Thank you.” The doctor releases the door but catches it immediately. “Wait. Is he still sedated?” She nods. Fair enough. There was no way to know for sure if this new patient was going to explode again or if he was done.
Consuela wakes up at her usual time, thinking about this patient who wanted her to call a king and queen who’ve been dead for nearly five hundred years, on a telephone. She’s intrigued. Regardless of his ranting, she liked the color of his voice. It sounded like burnt sienna, and at the bottom, the color and texture of fine sand.
She does not work today, and so she grinds the coffee beans, boils water, and makes a leisurely French press. She pushes the kitchen window open and is immediately aware of the difference in the quality of air. It never really cooled off overnight. The air-conditioning in her flat is now at cross-purposes with this open window. The warm, dry air pushes up against the cool, forced air of her apartment.
She’s been moving around her apartment, waiting for sunrise on the Guadalquivir. This riverside flat has been her home for six years and sunrise is one of the benefits. She loves her mornings with the fine, dusty-orange color inching its way up her walls. This apartment came with a wall of bookshelves in the living room, which Consuela had no problem filling. She added two more stand-alone shelves in her bedroom. She pauses this morning in front of a row of her to-read books-books she’s bought because of a review, a mention in another book, or a recommendation, or because the cover spoke to her. She pauses at Calvino’s
In the kitchen, she opens the newspaper and immediately wants a cigarette. The coffee, the newspaper, and the time spark a memory of smoking. Four years of not smoking and still the cravings come. Less frequently now, but still. Consuela performs a mental checklist of the places where she’s stashed cigarettes in the past. Ridiculous because her stashes have long since been pillaged or abandoned. She knows, positively, there are no secret stashes of cigarettes in her flat. But she remembers where they used to be.
The sparrows are playing in the orange trees and palms along the river. Flirting with the dark river, thrilled at the prospect of light, as if they have the most ridiculously brief memories and sunrise is always an excited surprise. Do birds remember days? There are no clouds in this pink-tinged, predawn sky. It will likely be another blistering hot day.
It seems the front section of her newspaper is always about bombings and killings and scandals. The ramifications of bombings and killings. Accusation of scandals, and the fear of more actual bombings. Consuela flips to the entertainment section where there are movies, some stupidly violent and even one about bombings-this makes her smile a bit-but for the most part, the news here is pleasant. In fact, it’s not really news at all.
Consuela pushes the French-press plunger and pours herself a mug of coffee. She looks across the river, across the city, and wonders what it was like five hundred years ago, before the New World was discovered by Europeans, before Columbus sailed out of Palos. Why would this new patient go there? Why Columbus? Why not Genghis Khan or one of the Roman emperors, or keeping with Spain, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, or Ferdinand of Aragon? Christopher Columbus doesn’t seem like much fun. Obsessed with the prospect of discovery. Desperate for people to believe him. Pigheaded to the point of ignoring all those absolutely correct scholars who repeatedly told him that China was too far-that he’d never make it. Not fun.
