Genoa (15 page)

As the anger diminishes, there is left the warmth, and again, the disturbance, the imbalance, and something erotic . . .

          
Columbus: “In Cariay and the neighboring country there are great enchanters of a very fearful character. They would have given the world to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age, and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder . . .”

          
Elsewhere: “They afterwards came to the ship’s boats where we were, swimming and bringing us parrots, cotton threads in skeins, darts, and many other things . . .”

          
“Here the fish are so unlike ours that it is wonderful. Some are the shape of dories, and of the finest colors in the world, blue, yellow, red, and other tints, all painted in various ways, and the colors are so bright that there is not a man who would not be astonished, and would take great delight in seeing them.”

          
“. . . the women have very pretty bodies, and they were the first to bring what they had, especially things to eat, bread made of yams, and shrivelled quinces . . .”

Rising, pushing back the chair, I step to my left, leading with the club . . . but the stride is strange. There is something other than the old sensation of heel and ball, in the false boot, striking the floor: an over- or under-balance in a different direction . . . as though the right foot were clubbed, globular, and more monstrous than the left. I pause, and retreat, my hands reaching back for the arms of the chair . . . and am scarcely seated again before the third leg, the middle leg—clubbed in its own way—hardens and rises . . .

but this is not all: I am refreshed, my body renewed: remaining still, leaning back in the chair, I become aware of different locations, different sources from which motion might originate, from which my body might begin to move: shoulder, thigh, elbow, knee—random centers never before used, or neglected and atrophied . . . and as I consider each, fresh energy comes into me, and the old centered leg subsides . . .

Columbus:

          
“This said island of Juana is exceedingly fertile, as, indeed, are all the others; it is surrounded with many bays, spacious, very secure and surpassing any that I have ever seen; numerous large and healthful rivers intersect it, and it also contains many very lofty mountains. All these islands are very beautiful, and distinguished by a diversity of scenery; they are filled with a great variety of trees of immense height, and which I believe to retain their foliage in all seasons; for when I saw them they were as
verdant and luxuriant as they usually are in Spain in the month of May—some of them were blossoming, some bearing fruit, and all flourishing in the greatest perfection, according to their respective stages of growth, and the nature and quality of each: yet the islands are not so thickly wooded as to be impassable. The nightingale and various birds were singing in countless numbers, and that in November, the month in which I arrived there. There are, besides, in the same island of Juana, seven or eight kinds of palm trees, which, like all the other trees, herbs and fruits, considerably surpass ours in height and beauty. The pines, also, are very handsome, and there are very extensive fields and meadows, a variety of birds, different kinds of honey . . .”

          
“. . . there are mountains of very great size and beauty, vast plains, groves, and very fruitful fields, admirably adapted for tillage, pasture and habitation. The convenience and excellence of the harbors in this island, so indispensable to the health of man, surpass anything that would be believed by one who had not seen it.”

          
“The island of Española is preeminent in beauty and excellence, offering to the sight the most enchanting view of mountains, plains, rich fields for cultivation, and pastures for flocks of all sorts, with situations for towns and settlements. Its harbours are of such excellence that their description would not gain belief, and the like may be said of its abundance of large and fine rivers . . .”

          
“In all this district there are very high mountains which seem to reach the sky . . . and they are all green with trees. Between them there are very delicious valleys.”

          
“He said that all he saw was so beautiful that his eyes could never tire of gazing on such loveliness, nor his ears of listening to the songs of birds.”

          
and there was the review of Melville’s
M
ARDI
:
“Wild similes,
cloudy philosophy, all things turned topsy-turvy, until we seem to feel all earth melting away from beneath our feet, and nothing but Mardi remaining . . .”

          
Dr. Chanca, reporting on the second voyage: “Thus, surely, their Highnesses the King and Queen may henceforth regard themselves as the most prosperous and wealthy sovereigns in the world; never yet, since the creation, has such a thing been seen or read of . . .”

TWO

Glancing at the books, reaching for my handkerchief to rearrange the dust among them, I become, for a moment, the pale Usher, at the very beginning of M
OBY
-D
ICK
: “. . . Threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”

Musing for a moment, the dusty handkerchief in hand, my body relaxed, refreshed, waiting for something, I read that on a certain cruise away from Isabella, Columbus was constantly on duty, day and night, at one time going thirty-two days without sleep. He suddenly became ill, suffering a pestilential fever and a drowsiness or supreme stupor which totally deprived him of all his forces and senses, so that he was believed to be dying.

          
Melville, in a letter: “For my part, I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long snooze together, under the sod . . .”

Musing, still, I think of islands, of the meaning of islands . . .

. . . of the Aegean, the Indes, and Polynesia . . .

and the endings in islands: Antillia disintegrating, perhaps, into the Indes, and Atlantis, into the Canaries, Azores and Cape Verdes . . .

There was Melville, an old man, 104 East Twenty-Sixth Street: withdrawn into family, books, and private publications: lonely as Hunilla on the Encantadas, the enchanted islands: insular on Manhattan . . .

and Columbus, back in Spain, in Valladolid, shunted from the Court, alone, crippled with gout . . .

(from the medical book:

called in the old days the “Disease of Diana,” because it afflicted hunters, gout is arthritic in type, resulting from imperfect excretion of uric acid. It occurs more often in spring and autumn—the seasons of change.

          
“The disturbance of uric acid metabolism causes an over-saturation of urates in the blood . . . Crystalline deposits formed will . . . act as centers for further precipitation of the over-saturated fluids.

          
In the bone-marrow below the endochondral junction, small deposits of urate crystals may be found . . .”

. . . the Indes, lost to Columbus now that they had become actual, were repossessed, precipitated once more from his imagination into the extremities of his body—the joints of his toes—as he had precipitated them before into the extremities of the known world: the islands, once more his, as crystals . . .

THREE

Beyond the attic is the wind, and beyond that, the sounds of the city, a general hum, a background, through which breaks the midnight whistle at General Motors, announcing the graveyard . . .

          
“Twelve o’clock! It is the natural centre, key-stone, and very heart of the day. At that hour, the sun has arrived at the top of his hill; and as he seems to hang poised there a while, before coming down on the other side, it is but reasonable to suppose that he is then stopping to dine . . .”

Melville, describing the other twelve, the sunny one . . .

Linda will soon be home—she gets a ride in an old Plymouth, the back door hanging loose from the hinges, with some people who live beyond us, in what may still be described as country . . .

The wind turns the north corner, and whistles under the eaves . . . leaning back in the chair, stretching my limbs, I experience well-being, as though I had just dined . . . I reach for an inner pocket, and take out a fine cigar, given me yesterday by the superintendent at the plant. I prolong the ritual: removing the cellophane, sniffing the weed, and lighting up . . .

          
Las Casas: “. . . and having lighted one part of it, by the other they suck, absorb or receive that smoke inside with the breath, by which they become benumbed and almost drunk, and so it is said that they do not feel fatigue. These muskats, as we call them, they call tobacco.”

Withdrawing the cigar, holding it before me, I inspect it, the craftsmanship of it, and think of the Indian canoes, made of “very tall, large, long and odoriferous red cedars . . .”

Leaning forward again, the cigar now fixed in the corner of my mouth, I read

of dexter and sinister: the old words for right and left . . .

to the Greeks, whose gods resided in the north, the word for right also meant east, the word for left west . . .

and in Mayan mummification, white was associated with the north and the lungs, yellow with the south and the belly, red with the east and larger intestines, black with the west and the lesser intestines . . .

There was Columbus, making the “Pilot’s blessing”: arm raised, with flattened palm between the eyes, pointing at Polaris, the North Star . . . the arm then brought straight down to the compass card, to see if the needle varied . . .

. . . or telling time, by checking the rotation of the Guards, two brightest stars of the Dipper, around Polaris . . . the time being determined by where the principal Guard appeared on the chart: West Shoulder, East Arm, Line below West Arm, or East Shoulder . . .

As I sit here, facing east, crouching over the desk, north and south at my elbows, my back to the west, I read

(Columbus)

          
“. . . that the world of which I speak is different from that in which the Romans, and Alexander, and the Greeks made mighty efforts with great armies to gain possession of.”

Columbus, extending himself, stretching against the contractile tensions of the known world, became a world to himself,

exasperating his fellow-pilots, in any navigational dispute, because he invariably turned out
right,
even his errors, gross as they were,
being more accurate than those of the others; and his unreasonable and least accurate presumptions had a way of meeting compensations, that made the results of these presumptions correct . . .

. . . proud and arrogant, demanding (second voyage) more honors than those by which he was already overwhelmed . . . suspicious and distrustful, breaking, one by one, with all his associates: Pinzon, Fonseca, Buil, Margarite, Aguado . . .

                    
(as Melville broke with Hawthorne,

                    
Duyckink . . .

. . . unable to understand the Spaniards, who clamored to join him on the second voyage out, and who must therefore (he thought) desire to establish a permanent colony in the Indes . . .

                                        
(but who only wanted to get their rape, gold, slaves and the hell home to Spain, so that on the second voyage, return, the
Niña
and the
India,
each designed for a complement of 25 men, carried a total of 255 . . .

Stranded,

like Melville (whose family all made attempts to “bring him out of himself”:

          
“I am as deeply impressed as you possibly can be of the necessity of Herman’s getting away from Pitts. He is there solitary, without society, without exercise or occupation except that which is very likely to be injurious to him in over-straining his mind.”

          
Lizzie: “The fact is, that Herman, poor fellow, is in such a frightfully nervous state . . . that I am actually
afraid
to have any one here for fear that he will be upset entirely . . .”

There is a commotion on the stairs, voices: one of them seems to be Linda, and I get the sense that she is going in two directions—her footsteps ascending (the old stairs creaking under her weight), while her voice goes down the stairwell, to one of the children.

I am confused, the midnight whistle has only just blown, Linda couldn’t possibly be home . . . off-balance, I stumble as I get up, nearly tipping the chair,