From the helm Pedro looked at me, pondered, and said no, he couldn’t understand such meaningless words, they were too different from what he would have said to explain his own life: “All the things you never had, I had and lost. Lands and harvests: the lands burned, the harvest stolen; descendants: well, my sons were murdered; honor: my women were besmirched by the Liege. And liberty as well, or its illusion, for I came to know how the multitude can be deceived and led into slavery and death in the name of liberty. Do you know anything at all of this, Pilgrim? I think not, and that’s why I can’t understand your words.”
I tried to explain how little I understood myself, for the fleetingness of my recollections was of a different nature, and very few voices came to my aid in explanation. Visions of pale deserts and distant oases, bronzed mountains and indistinct islands, walled cities, temples of death, men’s faces, cruel or humiliated, perverse or desiring women, the muted cries of children, galloping horses, fire and flight, dogs howling beneath the moon, old men sleeping beside their camels. Could I reconstruct the memory of a life from such visions? I don’t know. I didn’t know the precise names of those places and those people any more than I knew my own name or place. Was what I then said to Pedro enough to encompass all those featureless memories?
“I’ve always lived beside Mare Nostrum. I am a Mediterranean man.”
No. It was not enough: at the moment I uttered the words, my cruel memory, unlimited but also without guideposts, dragged me backward in its impetus, backward to a distant and close memory, never making clear what came before and what came after: memory like air, lost sigh of the past and agitated breath of the present, all one. How could I explain this to the old man? Helpless before absolutes I was myself unable to penetrate, I preferred to concede this invalid but immediate argument once I had satisfied, if only temporarily, it’s true, my immediate instinct of self-preservation. I felt two principles struggling within my breast. One impelled me to survive at all cost. The other demanded mad adventure in pursuit of the unknown. Between the two, resignation reigned. For that reason, my rebelliousness quelled, the spirit of adventure latent, I said: “Since I, like you, am fleeing, although I have no motive and you say you have more than enough, I accept, old man, this voyage to death. Perhaps in death my poor enigmas will be resolved, perhaps it is my destiny to resolve them at the moment I am dying, and to know only when I am dead. It doesn’t matter, it will all have been in vain.”
Resignedly, I arose from the deck where I had been thrown by the force of Pedro’s blow and the motion of the ship, as Pedro said: “You will see, my boy, that we’re not going to our deaths but to a new land.”
“Don’t be deceived. You have many illusions for a man of your years, and I admire you. At the least, I swear to weep with you when you lose them.”
“You’d wager your life against my illusions?” Pedro laughed with a trace of bitterness. “And what will you give me if at the end of the voyage both my illusions and your life survive?”
“Nothing more than I can give you now. My company and my friendship. But I am calm. May you be, too. Believe me, old man, I accept the destiny we will share.”
Pedro sighed. “I could believe you better if you believed what I do.”
He told me then how one must believe in that other land beyond the ocean. How when the sun sinks in the west every night, it is not devoured by the earth or miraculously reborn in the east at dawn, but has circled around the earth, which must be round like the sun and the moon, for his old eyes had never seen flat bodies in the heavens, only spheres, and our earth would not be the monstrous exception.
He recounted how thousands of times at dusk, his feet planted firmly upon the dry earth of summer or sunken in the winter mud, he had gazed upon the expanse of an enormous open field, free of the accident of mountain or forest, and how whirling where he stood he had seen that the earth and the horizon traced two perfect circles and that the sun, as it nightly bade farewell to the earth, recognized itself in its sister form.
“Poor old man,” I said with increasing melancholy, “if what you say is true, then at the end of this voyage we’ll have returned to our point of departure and everything will have been in vain. I will be right. And you’ll be returning to what you remember with horror.”
“And you?”
It was difficult for me to say: “To what I have forgotten.”
“Then believe as I do,” Pedro said energetically, “that God did not create this world to be inhabited only by the men that you and I have known. There must be another, better land, a free and happy land made in God’s true image, for I believe the one we have left behind is but an abominable reflection.”
And he repeated, his voice trembling: “I don’t believe that God created this world to be inhabited only by men that you and I have known, men we have remembered or forgotten … it’s all the same. And if that is not the case, I will no longer believe in God.”
I told him I could respect his faith, but that he needed proof to sustain these questionable convictions. He asked me to bring him a lime from the sack. This I did. We knelt on the deck and he asked me to stand the lime on end. I was convinced of the old man’s madness, but again resigned myself to my bad fortune. I tried to do what he asked, but the elliptical faded green fruit again and again rolled over onto its side. I looked at Pedro in silence, not yet daring to point out his error. And as I say, I was resigned. The old man took the lime, held it high between two thick fingers, then smashed it down against the planking of the deck. The base of the lime split open, its juice ran out, but it stood on end.
Pedro handed me the lime: “Your lips are white, Pilgrim. You need to suck one of these little limes every day.”
That night neither of us slept. Some wretched suspicion kept us awake until the appearance of our early-morning star. I had nothing to fear but certain death, the fatal moment when we’d be tossed into a foaming cemetery to perish, crushed beneath the monumental opaque waters, black as the deepest rivers of Hell. Nevertheless, as the star appeared, announcing another day of heat and calm, I fancied I’d struggled against sleep to prevent Pedro’s worrying that as he slept I would take advantage of his rest to strangle him with a cord, throw him overboard, and undertake the return to the coast from which we’d set sail.
But in truth I’d also feared that as I slept, the old man, for fear of me, would do the same, would kill me with the broken knife he kept beside him at the helm, throw me to the sharks that had for days been following in the wake of the ship, and then continue alone, assured, without misgivings, his willful voyage to disaster.
The disquieting star — sister to dusk and to the dawn — glimmered, seeming to confirm in her round the old man’s circular reasoning. And it was he who resolved our fears, he the valiant one who first lay down in a corner of the deck, shaded by the canvas that protected our casks of sweet water.
“Aren’t you afraid of me, Pedro?” I shouted from the helm in my white and briny voice.
“The death you foresee for us is a worse risk,” the old man said. “If you believe so strongly we’re going to perish, why would you kill me now?” And after a brief pause he added: “I want the first person to set foot on the new land to be a young man.” And closed his eyes.
I imagined myself master of the ship, free of the old man and his fatal race toward disaster: I imagined returning to the coast we’d left behind twelve days before. And as I pictured myself there, I tried to imagine what I would do once we’d returned to the starting point. Well, Sire: I could imagine only two courses. One would carry me back to an earlier point of departure, and from there to the one before that, and so on, until I’d reached the place and time of my origins. But if I began again from that forgotten origin, what road offered itself to me but the one I’d already traveled? And that road, what could it do but lead me to the shore where I’d found Pedro, and from there, with him on this ship, to the same point we find ourselves, in this very instant, on the sea? I reflected in this way about the sad fate of a man in time, for the great abundance of the past obliged me to forget it and live only this fleeting present: but caught in the memory-less succession of the seconds, I was given no choice: my future would be as obscure as my past.