Cindy inherited everything and no longer wanted to find out anything.
Dead, I would like to add something, much more, to that brief biography. I dream of other destinies that could have been mine. I imagine myself in Mexico conquering Great Tenochtitlán, loving an Indian princess. I imagine myself in jail, dreaming about my dead, abandoned mother. I imagine myself in another century, amused, organizing toasts and serenades in a baroque city I don’t recognize. Opposite another unknown but ancient city, I imagine myself dressed in black standing before an army in mourning, determined to win in a battle against pure, invisible space. In a long night of fog and mud, I see myself walking along a river holding a child by the hand. I’ve saved her from prostitution, sickness, death …
I dream about the orange tree and try to imagine who planted it, a Mediterranean, Oriental, Arabian, Chinese tree, in this distant coast of the Americas.
Since my face disappeared because of the seawater, the sun, and death, María de la Gracia took a papier-mâché mask she bought in the village market and put it over my face before burying me.
“This is your face. Your face for death.”
That’s what the girl said, as if she were intoning an ancient rite.
I’ve never been able to see that mask. I don’t know what or whom it represents. You see: I’ve closed my eyes forever.
Acapulco — London, May 1991–September 1992
The Two Americas
TO BÁRBARA AND JUAN TOMÁS DE SALAS
… to give an account to the King and Queen of the things they saw, a thousand tongues would be insufficient; nor would the author’s hands suffice to write about them, because they seemed enchanted …
Fragments from the Diary of a Genoese Sailor
TODAY I landed on the enchanted beach. It was hot and the sun rose at an early hour. The radiance of the water was brighter than the light in the sky. No sea is more translucent, as green as the lemon juice my sailors craved, ravaged as they were by scurvy during the long voyage from the port of Palos. You can see all the way to the bottom, as if the surface of the water were a sheet of glass. The bottom is white sand, crisscrossed by fish of every color.
The storms shredded my sails. On August 3, we crossed the Saltes bar, and on September 6, we saw land for the last time when we left the port of Gomera in the Canaries. There were three caravels, but all that remains is the ship’s boat I managed to save after the mutiny and massacre. I am the only survivor.
Only my eyes see this shore, only my feet walk it. I do what habit orders me to do. I get down on my knee and give thanks to a God who is certainly too busy with more important matters to think about me. I cross two old branches and invoke the sacrifice and benediction. I claim this land in the name of the Catholic Kings who will never set foot on it, and understand why they showed such magnanimity when they granted me possession of everything I might discover. They knew very well that without resources I couldn’t dominate anything. I’ve reached these shores naked and poor. But what will they or I possess? What land is this? Where the hell am I?
* * *
Back in Genoa, my mother would say to me while I helped her stretch the huge sheets out to dry — while I imagined myself, even then, carried along by great sails to the far edges of the universe—“Son, stop dreaming. Why can’t you be happy with what you can see and touch? Why do you always talk about things that don’t exist?”
She was right. The pleasure of what I’m looking at should satisfy me. The white shore. The abrupt silence, so different from the deafening clamor of Genoa or Lisbon. The mild breezes and weather like Andalusia’s in April. The purity of the air, with not one of the foul odors that plague the thronged ports of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Here only flocks of parrots darken the sky. And on the beaches I don’t find the shit, the garbage, the bloody rags, the flies, and the rats of all the European cities. Here I find the snowy white horizons of purity, pearls as plentiful as the sand itself, turtles laying eggs, and beyond the beach, in successive ranks, a thick forest: palm trees near the beach and then, rising toward the mountains, thick groves of pine, oak, and strawberry trees. It’s bliss just to look at them. And, on the highest peak in the world, an extremely high mountain crowned with snow, dominating the universe and exempted — I dare say it — from the furies of the universal flood. I have reached — can there be any doubt? — Paradise.
* * *
Is this what I wanted to find? I know my plan was to reach China and Japan. I always said that in the end we discover what we first imagine. So getting to Asia was only a metaphor for my will, or, if you prefer, of my sensuality. From the cradle, I had a carnal impression of the roundness of the earth. My mother had two glorious breasts that I was so good at sucking that they quickly ran dry. She said she preferred washing and hanging out sheets to feeding such a voracious baby. One after another: that’s how my Italian wet nurses came, each one milkier, rounder, than her predecessor, enjoyable, with their breasts capped off with delicious tips which for me came to represent, clearly, my vision of the world. Breast after breast, milk after milk, my eyes and my lips overflowed with the vision and savor of the globe.
First consequence: I always viewed the world as a pear, very round except where it comes to a point, where it is highest. Or like a very round ball, but, instead of a ball, like a woman’s breast, with the nipple being the highest part and closest to heaven.
Second consequence: If someone told me I was insane and that an egg can’t stand on its end, I would win the argument by smashing one end of the egg and standing it up. But my mind, in reality, was thinking about biting a nipple until the breast was empty of milk, until the wet nurse shrieked. In pleasure or in pain?
I’ll never know.
* * *
That childhood of mine had a third consequence I’d better confess right now. We Genoese are not taken very seriously. In Italy, there are different levels of seriousness. The Florentines give us Genoese no credence. Of course, they see themselves as a nation of sober, calculating people with a good head for business. But the citizens of Ferrara view the Florentines as sordid, sinister, avaricious, full of deceit and tricks they use to get what they want and justify themselves in some fashion. The people of Ferrara prefer to be fixed and aristocratic, like classical medals and just as immutable and refined. Because they are (or feel) so superior, they do nothing to betray the image of their nobility and quickly fall into despair and suicide.
So, if the Ferrarese scorn the Florentines, and the Florentines scorn the Genoese, there’s nothing left for us to do but despise the loudmouthed, scummy, frivolous Neapolitans, who, in turn, have no way out but to heap filth on the sinister, murderous, dishonest Sicilians.
I want the readers of this diary, which I will soon toss into the sea, to understand what I’ve just said so that they will also understand my dramatic decision. A man of my country and my era had to suffer as many humiliations as he inflicted on others. As a Genoese, I was considered a visionary and a fraud in every court in Europe to which I brought my knowledge of navigation and my theories about the planet’s mammary circumference. Fast-talking and proud, more full of fantasy than facts. That’s how I was treated, whether in Paris, Rome, London, or the ports of the Hanseatic League. That’s how Ferdinand and Isabella — I was told by the ubiquitous gossips — talked about me after my first visit. Which is why I moved to Lisbon: all the adventurers, dreamers, merchants, moneylenders, alchemists, and inventors of new worlds congregated in the Portuguese capital. There I could be one among many, be anything I wanted while I learned what I had to learn in order to embrace the round world, grab the universe by the teats, and suck its nipples until there wasn’t a drop of milk left. I had a costly apprenticeship.