“Piss buckets,” Moishe said. “A fen of bilge water, black rats which dine on the wounds of the dead. We have plundered all people and goods of any worth.”
“True,” said Fray Juan. “But perhaps a map may be of use. Such charts have more value than gold, if they are a guide to what you seek.”
“We seek only two things: revenge and gold. And, even without a map, we know how to find them aboard each Iberian sloop we encounter,” Moishe said.
“The Bible commands us to forgive our enemies,” Fray Juan said.
“But nowhere to forgive our friends,” I said with a cynical tweet, climbing aboard Moishe’s shoulder.
“Beyond what is written in the Bible, I understand little,” Fray Juan said. “And even that is often mysterious. But I know you seek certain books. Books such as you would not want found by those who follow Cristóbal Colón. The Colonizers. Conquistadors of space and—if they were to find these books—time.”
The mad monk knew how to get our attention.
“How do you know of them?” I asked.
“I am a priest in a place of few priests. In confession, many secrets are spoken.”
“You are an honest man, if not an honest priest,” Moishe said. “Lead us to these books, then.”
“These books are my ransom and are hidden beyond the distant horizon,” the priest said. “And aboard no ship. The first belonged to the admiral’s brother and you bore it yourself from one to another. The second was given you like a curse by Torquemada, for it had made him lunatic as the vexed sea. He had it bound in the skin of a child, removed before birth from a heretic’s womb. Both mother and child then sacrificed by fire. Miguel Levante, you may dowse this new world searching for this grimoire, this sanguinary, but it would be futile as seeking a camel in a stack of angels.”
“So, Father, where are they?”
“There is a map.” Fray Juan said. “But, ay,” he said, “once you held these books in your arms. Once you caressed their words with your fingertips. Once you gazed at them longingly. But they were taken away.”
Moishe looked to the sea, again gazing with longing.
He held us ransom with his words.
“The first stolen from Columbus when Pinzón first stole away. The second from your sea chest by Pinzón when you fled into Los Indios’ forest. He did not find eternal youth, but eternity. By year’s end, he died of a fever and was buried in the churchyard in Palos. The books became his brother’s and were then passed like unlucky talismen from man to man until word of them became known by the crazed and clever, the short and ravenous governor of Coquibacoa, Francesco de Ojeda, who seeks them still like magic rings, Jewish Grails. And so they were buried by Captain Israel Manos on an island somewhere in this Caribbean sea.”
“So this chart is a treasure map, then,” Moishe said. “Not to the full set, but to a library of two.”
“So, nu,” I said. “Let’s hope when we arrive, these two are not already checked out.”
Chapter Six
The sun scudded above our black sails, glowering over a gloomy day of dark cumulus and wind. Most of the crew took to their hammocks while Fernández stood piloting at the wheel and splotching gaudy daubs of paint on a canvas propped against the binnacle. His many portraits were of the open sea. The frothy epaulets of its waves, the indecipherable blues of its depths. No faces, bodies, fish, or islands.
Moishe had a small cabin beneath the quarterdeck. Yahíma now joined him in a hammock where they intertwined limbs and faces and sighed. There’s a language more universal than music or than memories of first love: the shvitzy harmony of shuffling bodies, the sweet tart tingling of entangled tongues. A beast with two backs but a Shiva-blur of legs and arms and bellies. The ship swayed on the waves and Moishe and Yahíma played tsung in tsingl, the uvulation of tongues like the shmeckel-in-knish gyrations down below. The cantillation of the mind in the language of the body. Or the other way round. With all this topsy-tuches-over-turvy-tsitskehs shtupping who, except for the participants, knew which way was up or where the pole star was?
And then they slept.
Dreaming of dreaming what they were dreaming, as the mystics say.
Did I watch?
Who can watch another’s dreams or such conjugal hurly burly?
Ach, I knew where my end was, even if not where it belonged.
Except beneath me.
Which sweet parrot would be my dove? Man or maidel, African Grey or Red-spectacled Amazon? I’d loved many but didn’t have the words.
I lived on the border. Neither man nor bird.
Feh. I’m all talk. Words only.
And nu. So maybe I looked at Moishe and Yahíma. A bisl.
The sap-sweet shout, the free-falling yawp.
Hard to ignore. Like the inexorable arrival of a bad joke.
So.