And if God knows, then God must want Columbus to do this thing. It is God’s will. What is faith if it is not this journey into the unknown? The journey is a shining example of faith. They are truly in God’s hands.
“Why?” Father Antonio whispers the word. The word becomes more a long escaping stream of gas, a sorrowful sigh. “Why, after all you’ve suffered. After all your difficulties. After all your years of chasing this dream. Why? Why do you wish to give up?”
“I feel something horrible is about to happen. I know some tragedy is following me across the Western Sea.”
“What could you possibly know? Only God knows the future.”
“Juan once suggested that time is nothing but a fluid. The past, the present, the future, all mix together. Water is water is water.”
“Only God sees all, Cristobal. You are not God. You do not think you are God, do you?”
“No, Father, but my dreams. My nightmares. It’s there! Some awful thing above me. It waits, Father. This journey is doomed to some catastrophe.”
“Cristobal-”
“So much death. So much death and destruction. And the thing is, I come through all right. Death is all around but it does not come for me.”
“I do not know what to say to you. What do you want to do?”
“I want to defy my fate. I wish to disobey my destiny. I want forgiveness for what I’m about to do.”
“God will forgive you. You have always been a good servant of God.”
Columbus laughs. It’s a sharp-edged, hollow sound that reverberates off the stone walls.
“Am I evil?”
“How can you say this, Cristobal?”
“Where is evil if not inside of me? Does it exist there?” He points to the cross on the far wall. “Is it inside the men of the Inquisition who torture and kill in the name of God?”
“Not evil, good!”
“Both, Father. Both good and evil are here.” Columbus pounds his chest. “Here… inside of me.”
“What will you do?” Father Antonio has tears in his eyes. He has been a friend to Columbus for many years. He has seen his suffering. “Will you tell the men who believed you that they were wrong?”
“No. I will follow through with my deal. I have a deal with the king and queen and with the merchants who supplied the
“Cristobal.” Father Antonio doesn’t know where to look-does not know what to say.
“If you truly wished to serve God, Father, you would take a sword and kill me. For everything I fear I am about to do.”
“You do not know this, my friend. Nothing is written. The future is not written.”
“And yet, I know.” Columbus stands and he does not feel lighter. No weight has been lifted. Religion, faith, God-all these things fail again, he thinks. They offer nothing. No salvation. No relief. Nothing. “Come, Father, let’s have wine together. We will make our own last supper, yes?”
“I cannot join you tonight, Cristobal. I don’t have the heart.”
Columbus shrugs and sighs. He doesn’t have the energy to try and convince Father Antonio to come and have a drink with him. He just wants a drink. So Columbus leaves the disconsolate father sitting on the wooden pew in the church that was once a mosque and walks through the cool, triple-arched doorway into the dusty heat.
Consuela looks him up. She Googles Emile Germain, the Interpol investigator who thinks he knows the identity of her Columbus. She searches his name, along with the words
“My God,” she whispers. She reads about an Interpol investigator, an Agent Germain, who was involved in a gunfight with members of an alleged Al Qaeda cell in Paris. Bullets from the gunfight went through a wall and killed a young girl, who was in bed, asleep. The girl was a promising pianist, a prodigy. The investigator had been looking for a German woman, who’d been missing for almost a year. He’d tracked her to the address in the same building as the young prodigy. The men living on the main level had opened the door, seen the offered Interpol identification, and opened fire on the agent, hitting him twice. They left him in the hallway and fled into the street. The agent dragged himself to the doorway and fired at their car. They fired back. They shot badly, wildly. The sleeping girl was in her bedroom one floor up, in her bed, which was against the outside wall.
When the wine is gone, she opens another bottle and dials her sister’s number. She’d like to call Dr. Balderas but she knows he’s off for a week, skiing in Switzerland with his family.
“Hello, Sis. You’re not going to believe what I just found out. There’s this guy from Interpol…”
Consuela and Columbus are in the long hallway that leads to the pool. The stone walls made the hallway feel cold. The ubiquitous Moorish-style arches persist even in this small space. Columbus stops.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
Consuela, three steps ahead, turns toward him. She’s so tired. The man from Interpol weighs on her. She can’t imagine living with the ramifications of inadvertently causing the death of an innocent.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.
“Why?”
“God, Columbus, why do you have to be so goddamned intense all the time! Let’s just go swimming, all right?”
“Something has shifted in you. Your eyes have changed.”
“Yes, I’m tired.”
“It’s more than fatigue.”
“Trust me. It’s lack of sleep. Why don’t we switch today? I’ll swim and you can watch. Or if you like, you can tell stories.”
“Ah, you want a story. You want to know what happens, don’t you? Well, let me warn you, it’s not the ending you might expect.”
They arrive at the pool. Consuela slips out of her uniform. In her bra and panties, she slides into the water.
“Begin,” she says, a little more demanding than she’d intended.
Columbus watches as she starts to quietly glide through the water. “Okay,” he says. “Imagine two women squatting to relieve themselves in a forest, only a few feet apart. The air is as smooth as silk. The sky a pristine blue. These two women both love the same man.”
“So, you are Beatriz,” Isabella says.
“What?” Beatriz looks around and then finds a splash of color through the leaves not ten feet away.
It’s midday. It’s stifling hot-more than a little uncomfortable, even to people who are used to such heat. They are peeing at the edge of a small orange grove near the town of Palos. It is the day before Columbus is to set off.
Isabella has minimal security. Nothing close. Her men watch from the perimeter. She’s thinking she’d like to see Columbus one last time, but she knows a quick meeting, an official good-bye, is all she can probably safely arrange. Something, anything, would be better than smiling like an idiot and waving from some balcony with Ferdinand by her side.
“I said, you’re Beatriz.”
“Yes. Who wants to know?” Beatriz wipes herself with a handful of long grass and then drops it.
“Queen Isabella.”
“Right. The queen.”
“That’s right.”
