She takes a big gulp of coffee. Ah, we don’t pick our delusions, she thinks.
Consuela can’t tell if she actually knows about Columbus, or if she’s simply half recalling the Hollywood renditions of Columbus from the movies about him.
“God, I could use a cigarette,” she says to the sun as it pushes its way onto the river, into the sky, and splashes yellow into her eyes.
Consuela wasn’t at that first meeting, but she could see the change in her patient. Columbus went from lucid and slightly outlandish to frenzied and implausible-from conversational to incoherent. Must have been a hell of a session. Afterward, it seems he truly went mad inside a steady, overprescribed lineup of sedatives and antipsychotics, some of which were so obscure that Consuela had to look them up. They threw everything and anything at Columbus to keep him quiet, harmless, and sedate. Columbus refused to wear clothing. At most, when in the hallways and gardens and courtyards, he wore a robe. He just didn’t care. In his room, he was naked, always. He spent days and weeks as a drooling idiot in a corner of his room, slumped over and muttering to himself. He would stare at the stone wall, rock back and forth, and mutter, “Ships to sea. Ships to sea. This is me. This is me. Ships to
The orderlies dreaded going into this cell. Room. They dreaded going into this room. Dr. Fuentes insists his staff call the cells rooms. They’re far more like cells than rooms, but the doctor is the boss. Patient 9214 was crafty and fast. Further, he hadn’t weakened. At least, not physically. When they had to get in to clean or check on Columbus, Consuela would dope him up on as much diazepam as she could safely administer. Even then, while slower, he was still dangerous. He was always good for one crazy lunge or kick. There were times, in the weeks following his arrival, when Consuela had to swallow fear as she looked at him; she had to will herself to be calm, to breathe with long, even inhalations. She remembers being scared silly.
Up until a few weeks ago, Consuela did not go into his room unless she was with an orderly. Those first few days, when he was restrained, she was fine being alone in the room. But after the restraints came off, he was unpredictably violent. He’d been incoherent, with occasional bouts of lucidity and a lot of gibberish. Even now he still strikes out with a righteous violence, and his resolve to escape is emphatic. Columbus wants to go to sea. This is clear from his babble. Apparently something horrible will happen out there. Something only he can stop. There are days when Consuela wonders if she should just tell him how the real Christopher Columbus has already made the journey to the New World -that it’s all been discovered. And it wasn’t exactly India or Japan. It was more, a dangerous wasteland filled with risk-not exactly profitable. Not much gold. Some interesting birds. A lot of land for the taking. The real Christopher Columbus has been to the New World and returned. But she thinks that telling this story would be mean. This man does no harm by believing himself to be Christopher Columbus.
For the remainder of April and all of May, Columbus is a testing ground for antipsychotic drug regimens. Near the end of May, Dr. Fuentes announces his engagement to the nurse who was very likely in his office that April day. Sergio, one of the better orderlies, dies in a climbing accident in the mountains at the beginning of June. And Consuela carries on as usual. She continues to date but finds most men uninteresting after a few hours of telling lies over dinner. Once the thin veneer of genuinely interesting wears off, Consuela escapes into drinking too much wine, which eventually leads to her saying something true-usually brutal and true. And, confronted by blunt truth, most men run screaming from the room. Second dates for Consuela were rare.
June 25 is Consuela’s birthday. When she arrives at work, she looks through the barred hatch at the man who has only a number in her world, though he does have a name for himself. Officially she refers to this man as patient 9214. Unofficially he is, of course, Christopher Columbus.
Consuela stops in front of the door to patient 855’s room in D wing. Inside is the pope-at least, a patient who thinks she’s the pope. Rather optimistic to think there could actually be a female pope in the first place, and of course, she is not the pope.
Regardless of the odds against there ever being a female pope, Consuela likes this one. Pope Cecelia the First. There is a regal gentleness about her. Consuela likes chatting with her, is always blessed by her, and certainly does not mind kissing her ring every time she enters or leaves the room. She’s not sure if this is what happens with the real pope. Do people kiss his ring? Is kissing somebody’s ring the highest form of respect?
Consuela opens the door. “Good morning, Your Holiness.”
“Oh, good morning, dear. Bless you. Bless you.”
The pope is wearing two housecoats and an ornate purple smoking jacket. She smiles her gap-toothed smile at Consuela. Ashen skin, sandy-gray hair. She stretches out her hand and Consuela recognizes her cue.
She takes her leave of the pope and checks again on Columbus.
He’s sleeping soundly. The light in the room is faint but she can see a few strands of gray hair across his pillow. Consuela pushes the viewing portal door shut and turns around. She shakes her head, partly with pity and partly with admiration at his dogged, undaunted determination. In his almost lucid moments, he has never wavered from his story. He is Christopher Columbus, and his mission in life is to venture out onto the Western Sea, straight across the dark ocean, until he finds a route to the East Indies and China. He is going to find a new way to acquire the much-needed spices from the East. Even inside his drug-induced state, his babbling confirms this obsession.
CHAPTER TWO
For Consuela, mornings at the Sevilla Institute for the Mentally Ill are divided by routine, peaceful and usually uneventful. She arrives early, makes coffee, and moves gently into her day. She checks on seventeen patients, makes notes on anything unusual, and then has time to herself.
Two days after her birthday, Consuela is a couple of hours into her shift when Columbus stands up and looks directly into the two-way mirror, behind which Consuela is slumped with her morning coffee, her legs over the arm of the chair. She’d been thinking about a man she slept with a few weeks back-the first in more than a year. She’d been imagining him and actually feeling quite aroused. His name was Antonio and he was certainly not a keeper. But as a physical distraction, he was exquisite. He was a generous lover, thought about her pleasure, liked to kiss. Consuela had an hour to herself every morning, in between her various duties at the hospital. This morning, she wants to meander with Antonio. Just a little reverie. Just a little drift into recent memory. The door is locked. All is well and quiet. She just needed to focus. But Columbus looks directly at her-looks straight into the mirror. “I know you’re there, Consuela,” he says, smiling, his eyes flashing with clarity.
She drops her coffee mug on the floor. It shatters-hot coffee splashes up her legs.
“Jesus!” Relax, she tells herself, he can’t actually see you. But it’s unnerving.
He clears his throat. Swallows. “It’s time, Nurse Consuela, that I told you about how I got my ships. It wasn’t easy, you know. I want to tell you the one true and only, emphatically accurate, and undeniably authentic story of how Christopher Columbus”-he smiles a little boy’s smile, innocent and playful-“that’s me, got his ships and set to sea.”
She has no idea about the true identity of this man. But what if we are what we believe ourselves to be? Consuela has no doubt about his belief that he is, in fact, Christopher Columbus. That’s the easy part.
Everybody knows Columbus had three ships. A couple of days after Columbus announces his intention to tell her his story, Consuela gets the twelve-ship dream, a story that is more of a delusion built into a forgery of a dream. Dr. Fuentes, who seems distracted, verging on disinterested, has directed her to listen carefully to
