Authors: Paul Metcalf
Genoa (14 page)
Stanny: “I walked from there on the beach with two other young fellows to Greytown in Nicaragua, one of the boys died on the beach, & we dug a grave in the sand by the sea, & buried him, & travelled on again, each of us not knowing who would have to bury the other before we got there, as we were both sick with the fever & ague.”
Columbus drifted down the coast, searching for a passage, a channel to the Red Sea . . .
(Plato, describing Atlantis: “. . . and drove a canal through the zones of land three hundred feet in width, about a hundred feet deep, and about sixty miles in length. At the landward end of this waterway, which was capable of navigation by the largest vessels, they constructed a harbour. The two zones of land were cut by large canals, by which means a trireme, or three-decked galley, was able to pass from one sea-zone to another.”
Stanny: “I went up the San Juan river to Lake Nicaragua about a hundred miles with a Naval surveying expedition going up to survey for a ship Canal . . .
. . . searching for a canal, a short-cut, to avoid the rigors of the long voyage . . .
(Melville, commenting on Emerson: “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff all this is.”
Stanny: “. . . from Greytown I shipped on a schooner for Aspinwall; after arriving in Aspinwall, I got wrecked there in that heavy gale of wind . . . and I lost all my clothes, & every thing I had, & was taken sick again with the fever, I went into the hospital there, & then came home on the Steamer Henry Chauncey, where I find the cold weather agrees with me much better, than the sun of the tropics.
Now I say New York forever.”
Later: “I am happy to announce to you that this morning I went to work for a dentist, a Dr. Read; I went to his office on Saturday, & told him I wanted a place to work & perfect myself in the profession . . .”
M
OBY
-D
ICK
:
“With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes—some few days after the other work—Queequeg, Dagoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood-lands.”
And in M
ARDI
, the cannibals wore teeth as ornaments, and hoarded them as money—teeth, like money, being the means of eating . . .
(Stanny: “. . . in a few years I will be independent of any man.”
But: “I have encountered a serious obstacle which will prevent me from becoming a number one dentist, & that is I am too near sighted; I found it out as quick as I commenced operating in the mouth . . . I am going to sail Wednesday for San Francisco . . .”
Lizzie: “We have better news from Stanny—He is on a sheep-ranch in California . . .”
And: “I wanted to tell you that we are expecting Stanny home in a short time—A very favorable opening for his going back to his old business,
mechanical
dentistry offered itself . . .”
“Stanny begs me to thank you very much for all your kind wishes—he is very well now (with the exception of a little bowel trouble) . . .”
1875, departs for San Francisco, and
“There is a party of five or six of us that are going to start for the Black Hills country about the middle or last of January . . . I have made up my mind, this is a chance, & I may be lucky there, at any rate I can get miners wages which is more than I can make here . . . and I am going this winter if I die of starvation or get frozen to death on the road.”
Lizzie: “I have been writing to Stanny . . . he has been sick poor fellow, and had to go in the hospital at Sacramento . . .”
“We hear constantly from Stanny—I wish I could say he is materially better . . .”
“. . . a good deal worried about Stanny’s health—his pulmonary troubles have been worse . . .”
and Melville, now age 66—whose own paternity had been blasted, who had been thrust loose in an earlier world—signs a letter to Stanny:
Good bye, & God bless you
Your affectionate Father
H. Melville.
A death notice:
MELVILLE
—At San Francisco, Cal., 23
d
inst., Stanwix, son of Herman and Elizabeth S. Melville, in the 35th year of his age.
And there was Bessie, third-born, and oldest daughter:
thin, small, weak-voiced, but with a sharp tongue (she liked raw humor),
crippled with arthritis (they never saw such feet on one who could still walk), afraid of strong winds, afraid that she would be blown over . . .
lived with her mother, and then alone, an old maid (she didn’t like little children, couldn’t stand their little smelly drawers),
and when she died, quarts of black liquid—undigested food—were found in her system . . .
And finally, Fanny, last-born, furthest removed from the disaster,
who salvaged life and fertility (she married a man from Philadelphia, and gave birth to four daughters . . .
who nevertheless had her troubles (and blamed them all on her own father . . .
developed arthritis (she could be seen on the porch of her summer home, Edgartown—white-headed, her sweet, gentle face, white, she in a white dress—her leg out stiff, arthritic . . .
and died, finally, incontinent and placid, a baby—1935.
Thus the four children of Herman Melville:
The men:
one, dead by his own hand, and the other, wasted . . .
(Melville, as Pierre: “Lo! I leave corpses wherever I go!”
And the women:
arthritic, motionless, holding against the down-rushing waters . . .
And hovering over all, moving, surviving, through the long term of Melville’s life, and beyond—was Lizzie . . .
Shifting again, I glance, not upward, as at the crossbeam, but downward, between my legs, at the floor . . . and I recall (my arms and legs are tense, a little tired, as though strained) waiting in the basement, alone with Mother, during the tornado . . . the loneliness, the wanting to be with Carl, wanting to be, as he was, up in the rigging, in the storm, with Father—and having to wait, instead, in the darkness, in the grip that I was too young to break . . . lifting my eyes level again, I read
that the bride of Columbus in all probability did not survive five years of the marriage; and
“Not the slightest hint has come down to us of the appearance or disposition of Columbus’s only wife; Dona Felipa is as shadowy a figure as the Discoverer’s mother.”
(About Melville’s wife, and mother, a great deal is known . . .
Whether dead or still living, Dona Felipa was abandoned when Columbus left Portugal.
And on the first voyage, early in the return, Columbus set out to discover the island of
Matinino,
inhabited, as the Indians told him, only by women; for this might be Marco Polo’s
Feminea
. . .
. . . but the ships were leaking, and the wind blew strong from the west: he changed his course for Spain.
Third voyage: “. . . at the lengthe an Eastsoutheaste wynde arose, and gave a prosperous blaste to his sayles.” . . . the fleet coasted before the trades, through “El Golfo de las Damas,” the Ladies’ Sea . . .
And Mellville, late in life, in a letter: “But you do not know, perhaps, that I have already entered my eighth decade. After twenty years nearly, as an outdoor Customs House officer, I have latterly come into possession of unobstructed leisure, but only just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines.”
Columbus, on the third voyage, executed one of the most extraordinary feats of dead-reckoning navigation: Margarita (The Terrestrial Paradise) to Hispaniola . . .
and arriving, troubled with gout, found the colony disorganized, Roldan in rebellion . . . and instead of clean action, fighting and subduing Roldan, he negotiated, submitted to a set of humiliating agreements . . .
(Fanny, describing Melville, his later peacefulness: “He just didn’t have the energy any more . . .”
. . . and later he was put in fetters (darbies, Melville called them) and sent back to Spain, on what proved to be the only eastward voyage, return voyage, accompanied by any sort of good weather . . .
(on shipboard, they offered to take off the fetters, but he refused, declared that he would wear them until he had the opportunity to kneel with them still on, before the Sovereigns. Ever after this, he guarded them jealously, kept them in his room, directed that they be interred with his body . . .
Melville, reading Homer, checks and underscores: “The work that I was born to do is done!”
After the Civil War, when Franco had won, Carl teamed with a Spanish family, four brothers and a sister: Rico, Rafael, Salomón, Diego, and Concha—old Spanish aristocrats (though they had been fighting, so Carl claimed, for the Loyalists). All wanted to get out of Spain (the Spaniards complained that no one spoke Spanish, it was all Russian and German), so they acquired a yacht and set sail for Cuba . . .
. . . where Carl lived for several years, becoming embroiled in one after another of the rebellions. One by one, three of the four brothers (Rico alone escaped) were destroyed, aligning themselves on different sides in the fighting . . . Carl carried with him a photo of Rafael, his shirt torn, his body spattered with blood, lying drenched in sunlight on the pavement, where he had fallen . . . it came out (when Carl was drunk) that they had been fighting on opposite sides, and that perhaps it had been Carl’s own gun that had killed him . . .
We heard little of Concha, she was studying medicine, and was quiet, but she fought side by side with the men . . . and Carl seemed to be always where she was . . .
C
OLUMBUS
, in the original capitulations—a set of outrageous demands imposed upon the Sovereigns, before undertaking the first voyage—refers to “the things requested and which Your Highnesses give and grant Don Cristóbal Colón, as some satisfaction for what he has discovered in the ocean seas, and of the voyage which now, with the help of God, he is to undertake through those seas in the service of Your Highnesses.”
. . . the man from Genoa, at a time when the Indes existed only as spots in his own wild imaginings, referring to them as “what he
has
discovered” . . .
(as the Azores were first pulled out of the ocean by Portuguese, in search of St. Brandon’s . . .
There is a law of excess, of abundance, whereby a people must explore the ocean, in order to be competent on land . . .
(Melville: “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in . . .”
Men must put out space, and nations ships . . .
Columbus, reported by a contemporary: “. . . the said Admiral always went beyond the bounds of truth in reporting his own affairs.”
and
T
YPEE
,
Melville’s first book, was first rejected because “it was impossible that it could be true and therefore was without real value” . . .
Columbus: “I hold it for certain that the waters of the sea move from east to west with the sky, and that in passing this track they hold a more rapid course, and have thus carried away large tracts of land, and that from hence has resulted this great number of islands; indeed these islands themselves afford an additional proof of it, for all of them, without exception, run lengthwise, from west to east . . .”
Sitting forward in my chair, I am aware of energy flows in my body—nerve sensations, something that feels like accelerated blood circulation—as though internal balances, relationships, centers of control have been disturbed. Pushing the chair back, I stand up, leaning forward slightly, my arms limp, and give the sensation full play . . . in the matter of balance, I am aware almost at once of the clubfoot: there is the old anger, the hatred, the desire to amputate the monstrous member . . .
Slumping in the chair, I let the anger rankle in me . . . my blood is warm, and begins to move more thickly . . .