I am availing myself of that absolute silence. I turn it inside out like a glove and use it for my own advantage. Absolute silence. Eternal secrecy. What became of the talkative, fantastical Genoese? Where did he really come from? Why, if he was Italian, did he write only in Spanish? But why doubt he was Italian when he himself (that is, I myself) wrote: I am a foreigner. But what did it mean in those days to be a foreigner? A Genoese was a foreigner to a Neapolitan, as was an Andalusian to a Catalan.
As if I had foreseen my destiny, I sowed minuscule confusions. In Pontevedra, I left a false archive to drive the Galicians insane. No matter, their heads are a muddle of realism and fantasy. On the other hand, in Estremadura, where they never dream, I convinced people that I grew up in Plasencia, when in fact it was Piacenza. As for Majorca and Catalunia, well, I gave them the flesh of my flesh: my last name, that of the Holy Spirit, which abounds on those coasts. Corsica, which as yet has produced no man of note, could claim me because of a lie I told to two drunken abbots when I passed through Bastia.
I fooled no one. The only thing about myself I put down in writing clearly is this:
At a very tender age, I became a seafarer and have continued to be one until this very day … For more than forty years I have been doing this work. Everything that until today has been sailed I have sailed; everywhere I have traveled. I have had business and conversation with wise folk, churchmen and laymen, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and with many others of other sects.
My country is the sea.
* * *
I threw the bottle with its pages of legend into the sea — all the lies about sirens and amazons, gold and pearls, leviathans and sharks. But I also told the truth about rivers and coasts, mountains and forests, arable land, fruit and fish, the noble beauty of the people, the existence of Paradise.
I disguised it in a name I heard here and created a special identity for it. The name was Antilia. The identity was intermittence; that is, the isle of Antilia would appear and disappear. One day, the sun would reveal it; the next, the mists would blot it out. It floated one day and sank the next. A tangible mirage, a fleeting reality between sleep and wakefulness, this land of Antilia was only visible, ultimately, for those who, like me as a child, could imagine it first.
I tossed the bottle with the legend into the sea, certain that no one would ever find it. If someone did, he would read in it the ravings of a madman. Led by my sweet friends to the place that would be my permanent residence, I told myself a truth that only now I can put on record.
This was the place: a freshwater gulf into which seven rivers emptied, overwhelming the salt sea with their fresh force. A river is an eternal birth, renovation, perpetually renewed cleanliness and spirit, and the rivers of Antilia flowed into the gulf with a delightful, constant noise that dispelled the clamor of the Mediterranean alleys with the din of their peddlers, children, doorkeepers, rogues, street surgeons, butchers, trinket sellers, knife sellers, oil sellers, tinkers, bakers, skinners, and barbers. It also banished the silence of the night and its fear. The silence of imminent death.
Here they assigned me a hut and a hammock (the name of their woven beds). A tender woman, eager to please. A canoe for my little trips, and two young oarsmen to accompany me. Plenty of food, dorados from the sea and trout from the river, deer and turkey, papaya and custard apples. Out of my sack I took orange seeds, and together we planted them along the valleys and hillsides of the Gulf of Paradise. The trees grew better in Antilia than in Andalusia, with shiny leaves and fragrant flowers. I never saw better oranges, oranges that so resembled the sun they made the sun envious. I finally had a garden of perfect breasts, suckable, edible, renewable. I had conquered my own life. I was the eternal owner of my recovered youth. I was a boy without the shame or nostalgia of being one. I could suck oranges until I died.
That’s right, paradise. So I stayed there, liberated above all from the horrible need to explain a different reality to Europeans, a history for them inexplicable. How could Europe understand that there is a history different from the one it made or learned? A second history? How will Europeans accept that the present is not only the heir of the past but the origin of the future? What a hideous responsibility. No one could stand it. Especially me.
I would have enough trouble eliminating all the lies about me and admitting that I’m not Catalan, Galician, Majorcan, or Genoese. I am a Sephardic Jew whose family fled Spain because of the usual persecutions: one more, one of so many, not the first and not the last …
* * *
The reader of these notes dedicated to chance will no doubt understand the reasons behind my silence, my abstention, my staying in Antilia. I wanted to attribute the care with which I was treated to my personal charm or to my empathy with those who received me. I paid no attention to the rumors that transformed me into the protagonist of a divine legend. Me, a bearded white god? Me, punctually returning to see if mankind had taken care of the earth I’d given them? I remembered the breasts of my wet nurses and took a big bite out of the orange that’s always at my side, perennially renewed, almost my scepter.
From the top of my high, whitewashed belvedere, I see the length and breadth of the lands and the confluence of the rivers, the gulf, and the sea. Seven rivers flow down, some calm and others torrential (including one waterfall), to fill the gulf, which, in turn, gently opens on to a sea protected from its own rage by coral reefs. My white house, cooled by the trade winds, dominates the orange groves and is defended by dozens of laurels. Behind me, the mountains whisper their names: pine and cypress, oak and strawberry. Royal eagles perch on the white summits; butterflies descend like another waterfall, half gold, half rain; all the birds in the world meet in this immaculate air, from cranes, macaws, and owls wearing black glasses to those I identify more by their looks than by their names: birds like witches with black ears, birds that unfold what look like huge parasols, others dressed in the red of princes of the Church, others with plantlike throats, woodpeckers and squirrel birds, birds with red beaks and doves with short beaks, birds that sound like trumpets and others that sound like clocks, jacamars and ant-eating birds who live off the abundance of those they consume. The permanent cry of the caracara bird presides over alclass="underline" my earthbound falcon that has never flown but which, dragging itself over the earth, devours waste and in so doing redeems life.
Beyond the visible life of my earthly paradise is what sustains it, the minutiae of invisible life. The richness of animal life is obvious, and the crow, the ocelot, the tapir, and the ounce mark their paths through the jungle or the forest clearly. They would get lost without the guidance of the living odors that are the routes of the silence and the night. The araguato monkey, the armadillo, the jaguar, and the iguana are all guided by millions of invisible organisms that purge the water and the air of their daily poisons, just as the caracara falcon does it right before our eyes. The aroma of the jungle is dispelled by millions of hidden little bodies that are like the invisible light of the forest.
They await the night to move around and learn things. We wait for the dawn. I look at the enormous, downy ears of the gray-brown wolf that comes up to my door every night. Blood rushes into those ears and allows heat to escape. It’s the symbol of life in the tropics, where everything is arranged for living well, provided we want to prolong life and respect its natural flow. But everything turns against us the instant we show hostility and try to dominate nature by harming it. The men and women of my new world know how to care for the earth. I tell them that from time to time, which is why they venerate and protect me, even if I’m not God.