I compare this life with the one I left behind in Europe and shudder. Cities buried in garbage, redeemed from time to time by fire, but immediately drowned in soot. Cities with visible intestines, crowned with feces, along whose gutters flow pus and urine, menstrual blood and vomit, useless semen and dead cats. Cities without light, narrow, cramped, where everything wanders, ghostlike, or nods off like a succubus. Beggars, thieves, the insane, multitudes talking to themselves, skulking rats, runaway dogs that return in packs, migraines, fevers, vertigoes, tremors, hard volcanoes of blood between the legs and in the armpits, a black pattern on the skin: forty days of abstinence did not prevent forty million deaths in Europe. The cities were depopulated. Bands of looters came in to steal our possessions, and animals took over our beds. Our eyeballs burst. Our people were accused of poisoning wells. We were expelled from Spain.
Now I live in Paradise.
For how long? Sometimes I think about my family, about my scattered people. Do I also have a family, a wife, children here in this new world? Possibly. To live in Paradise is to live without consequences. My loves pass over my skin and my memory like water through a filter. What’s left is more a sensation than a memory. It’s as if time hadn’t passed since I reached these lands and took up residence in the white mansion with the orange trees.
I cultivate my own garden. My most immediate sensual pleasures occur in the orange grove — I look, touch, peel, bite, and swallow. So do the oldest of sensations: my mother, wet nurses, breasts, the sphere, the world, the egg …
If I want my personal story to have a collective resonance, I’ll have to go beyond the breast-orange to the two memory objects I’ve always borne with me. One is the key to the ancestral house of my forefathers in the Toledo ghetto. Expelled from Spain by persecution, we never lost the language of Castile or the key to our home. It’s passed from hand to hand. It’s never been a cold key despite being made of metal. Too many Jewish palms, fingers, and fingertips have fondled it.
The other thing is a prayer. We Sephardic Jews all travel with it and nail it to the door of our closets. I do the same thing in Antilia. I’ve improvised a clothing chest that holds, like mementos, my old doublet, my jerkin, and my breeches — my New World friends have taught me to wear linen, smooth and soft, white and airy: a shirt and trousers, sandals. To the chest I’ve nailed the prayer of the Jewish émigrés, which goes like this:
Mother Spain, you have been cruel to your Israelite children. You have persecuted and expelled us. We have left behind our houses, our lands, but not our memories. Despite your cruelty, we love you, Spain, and we long to return to you. One day you will receive your wandering children, you will open your arms to them, ask their forgiveness, and recognize our fidelity to your land. We shall return to our houses. This is the key. This is the prayer.
I recite it, and, almost like a satisfied desire, a memory returns to me of my disastrous arrival, shrieking like a caracara bird. I am sitting on my balcony at the first hour, doing what I do best: contemplating. The earliest breezes are blowing. The only thing missing is the sound of nightingales. I have recited the prayer of the Sephardic return to Spain. I don’t know why, but I’m thinking about something that never worries me because I’m so used to it. Antilia is a land that appears and disappears periodically. I haven’t discovered the laws that govern this mutability, and I prefer not knowing them. I’m afraid that knowing the calendar of appearances and disappearances would be something like knowing the date of our death beforehand.
I prefer doing what nature and the real time of life ordain. Contemplation and enjoyment. But this morning, surprisingly, a white bird flies by carrying the stalk of a bulrush, the kind of bird sailors see with pleasure because it doesn’t sleep at sea; it’s a sign land is near. The trade winds blow and the sea is as flat as a river. Crows, ducks, and a gannet pass over, fleeing to the southeast. Their haste alarms me. In a rare gesture, I stand up with a start as I see a kite floating high in the sky — a bird that makes gannets and other birds of prey vomit up their food and then eats it. It’s a seabird, but doesn’t land on the water, and never goes farther than twenty leagues out to sea.
I realize I’m looking at an event from the past. This is what I saw when I first arrived here. I try to dismiss this mirage and see what’s happening today, but I can’t distinguish between the two events. Another bird becomes visible in the sky. It comes closer, first barely a dot, then a brilliant star, so brilliant that it blinds me when I compare it to the sun. The bird descends toward the gulf. From its belly emerge two feet as huge as canoes, and, with a horrifying grunt that silences the terrified shrieking of the caracara, it settles on the water, raising a cloud of foam.
Everything becomes calm. The bird has doors and windows. It’s an air house. A combination of Noah’s ark and the Pegasus of mythology. The door opens and there appears, smiling, with teeth whose shine darkens that of the sun and of metal, a yellow man, just as my predecessor Marco Polo describes them. He’s wearing glasses that add to the glare and is dressed in a strange fashion: he carries a small black case in one hand and wears crocodile-skin shoes.
He bows, boards a roaring boat lowered from the flying ship, and comes toward me.
* * *
Nothing surprises me. From the beginning, I disabused those who wanted to see in me a kind of garrulous, ignorant sailor. God gave me intelligence, and it flourished in the sailing world; of astrology it gave me a sufficiency, as it did of geometry and arithmetic; and ingenuity enough in my soul to draw spheres, and within them the cities, rivers, mountains, islands, and ports — all in their proper place.
Even if I possess these talents, I’ve grieved deeply (while never admitting it) because I suspect I never reached Japan, as I’d wanted, but a new land. As a man of science, I had to confess its existence; as a political man, I had to deny it. Which is what I did, but that fatal morning in my story, when the small man in the light-gray suit as brilliant as the bird that brought him to me, with his black leather case in his hand and his crocodile shoes, smiled and introduced himself, I discovered the terrible truth: I hadn’t reached Japan. Japan had reached me.
Surrounded by six people, four men and two women, who worked all sorts of contraptions, compasses perhaps, hourglasses, calipers, or chastity belts for all I knew, and who pointed disrespectfully at my face and voice, my visitor introduced himself simply as Mister Nomura.
His argument was direct, clear, and simple:
“We’ve been attentively and admiringly observing your custodianship of these Lands. Thanks to you, the world possesses an immaculate reserve of rivers, forests, flora and fauna, pristine beaches and uncontaminated fish. Congratulations, Cristóbal-san. We have respected your isolation for a long time. Today the moment for you to share Paradise with the rest of humanity has come.”
“How did you find out…?” I stammered.
“You did not reach Japan, but your bottle stuffed with manuscripts did. We are patient. We’ve been waiting for the right moment. Your Paradise — do you see? — would appear and disappear very frequently. Expeditions sent out in the past never returned. We had to wait for a long time, until we perfected the technology that would fix the presence of what we agreed to call the New World, locate it permanently, despite its random, ultimately deceptive movements, despite the appearances and disappearances. I’m talking about radar, laser, ultrasound … I’m talking about high-definition screens.”