When I returned there were only a few pitiful molecules of burnt parrot left wafting over the beach. The air had been cauterized by death and barbecue. Moishe was standing with Columbus, Luis de Torres and a young native man.
“Diego,” Columbus said. “Diego Columbus.” Columbus was pointing at the young man, naming him, claiming him by sticking his finger into his thin chest. He had named the man after his own son, Diego, as he had named the islands after his king, his queen, and his God.
Luis de Torres spoke then. Diego Columbus the native had become Diego Columbus the translator. He was being taught Spanish and he was teaching Luis his native tongue. Two tongues intertwining, this French kissing of linguists.
I landed on Moishe’s shoulder. Diego looked at me and said something.
Maybe it was the native word for bird.
Or lunch.
“Aaron,” Moishe explained, introducing me.
“Ahh-rown,” Diego said.
Shortly thereafter, the sailors gathered their tchatchkes, swords, and a selection of tropical fruits, meats, islanders, a newly made translator, and boarded the skiffs to return to the ships.
I don’t know what word Diego Columbus used to describe his situation, but he might consider: stolen, shipped, transported.
Gaffled and blagged.
Crimped.
The sun sank red like a boil on the seatmeat zitsfleysh of the sky and by the next day, October 28, we had arrived at what Columbus decided was the firm land, the mainland.
Cuba, which he called Juana.
It was the same recipe.
Land. Conquer. Repeat.
Luis de Torres recorded the events for Columbus.
October 28, 1492. Here are palm-roofed houses, barkless dogs, a technology of fishing tackle, clay figurines and silver ornaments. Los Indios are timid and artless regarding weapons. They quake at our arquebus. Here grow sea plums, shore lavender, beach morning glory, cedar, and a riotous concatenation of roots known as mangroves. Here are placid rivers, their edge and surface teeming with small frogs and great parti-coloured birds. The natives make chairs of hardwood in a Noah’s Ark of animal shapes.
And so too do they gather certain herbs that they wrap in dry leaf and then enflame. The smoke of this they inhale, by which they become benumbed and almost drunk, and so it is said they do not feel fatigue. This burning leaf we have begun to call “muskets,” but they term “tabacos.”
“Avast, a cloudy lungful of this fuming would be fine satisfaction after festive conjugation with a slattern,” Jacome snorted after a huff of the leaf.
“Aye,” said Fernández the painter, dragging the twilight air from the burning herb and exhaling slowly as if his sighs were ghosts. “Its smouldering tendrils, curling round me as I gaze into the gloaming margins of my own mind, would be a fog of sure drama for those acolytes who would watch me await the faint tintinnabulations of the muse.”
When they smoked, there was always time for talk. Sometimes words can, in certain moments of grace, attain the quality of important deeds.
And emes, the men were quick to enslave themselves to this tobacco, taking to it as to drink. They sucked and posed, they gathered and kibitzed. This tobacco soon became an existential theatre of smoke and camaraderie.
Though nu, a surfeit of enthusiasm caused some to surrender their insides to the outside world in a foaming cascade of near-Iberian expulsion, some alchemy turning smoke to puke even as a zeal for wine can turn the body into the quaking spawn of hammers and swill.
Geyt gezunterhayt. Go in good health, humans.
I, too, puffed this russet leaf, but beside the polychrome tragicomedies of the Orient’s hashish, it was but the poor exhaust of ferns.
And Moishe? Luftmensch no more, he engaged with the breath of the physical world and smoked himself green.
We spent the days on land, learning from Los Indios, for Martín Pinzón had convinced Columbus that the ships needed to be careened and caulked, barnacles riven from their soggy ballix.
Which is a good medicine for any sailor.
“I, too, would delight in doing nothing but lying on my side like a ship in cool water,” Moishe said. “My gildeneh oder golden veins swabbed by a gentle team.” His gildeneh oder. His hemorrhoids. “Though I’d hope for mermaids and the lithe bodies of pretty island girls instead of this stumbling and bristly crew.”
Columbus was certain we were on a mainland. That Cuba was not an island. But nu, if it isn’t water, all land is—eventually—an island. And all men, ultimately, islanders.
After three days in Cuba, Columbus sent explorers down the shore both east and west. And what did they find? More shore. More sons of beaches, more littoral daughters but no large villages, great khans, Cathay emperors, or gold.