Mr. Eternity (8 page)

“Okay,” said Azar, adjusting the camera and peering into the viewfinder. “But maybe now you could repeat what you said about Columbus, so we have it on film?”

My phone began to buzz and I squeezed it until it stopped. Our walk had spoiled my mood. It was all obesity and disposable packaging out there, and not a solar panel to be seen, and this was Florida, where there was enough sunlight to power the whole corrupt enterprise three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

“What do you think of our culture of consumption?” I asked.

The ancient mariner beamed, but he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s nothing,” said Azar. “Forget about it. Tell us about Columbus.”

“He had a lazy eye.”

“No,” I said. “Azar, listen. If he’s six hundred years old or something, he can help us put all of this in perspective.” I turned to the ancient mariner again. “I’m asking about plastic, for example.”

“Plastic is a marvel.”

“I mean disposable packaging. You use it and you throw it out, like the plastic bags they give you at the grocery store. A plastic container of blueberries in a plastic bag.”

“Okay.”

“But where do the blueberries come from? The whole point of fruit is that it’s seasonal! Are we kings that we have to have blueberries every day of the year?”

“Kings?” said the ancient mariner.

“It’s economies of scale or something.”

“What is?”

“It’s cheaper to destroy the world than it is to save it!”

“Listen,” said Azar, “slow down and take a breath. No one wants to destroy the world. It’s just that who doesn’t enjoy a handful of blueberries?”

“When you were young,” I said to the ancient mariner, “there was no plastic, no landfills, no blueberries in the winter.”

“There was sewage in the streets,” he said. “It got all over you.”

“But the cost now is that the seas are rising! The earth is heating up!”

“Oh yes, I believe you, but it’s wonderful to be able to throw things out. Modern sanitation is a miracle. You put it out by the curb and it’s gone. Isn’t this a sign of progress? You should have smelled the old cities.”

We could hear the parakeets again. The sun was shining. It was still a beautiful world. The spirit went out of me.

“I’m trying so hard to be less gloomy,” I said, “and suddenly I’m talking about trash and plastic again, like always.”

Azar sat down next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Very gently, he said, “You’re kind of fucked up, huh?”

I started to say, “I feel,” but how did I feel? I felt painfully out of step with the world I lived in. I longed for a place and time in which there were fewer people, fewer cars, less garbage. At the same time I took hot showers and flew on airplanes and drank coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I was complicit. And I knew perfectly well that if I’d been born into another time, I’d have found another thing to grieve over. There was something wrong with me.

“I actually think you’re doing better than you were,” Azar said. “This is just a small relapse. A few months ago it was all garbage all the time. Remember?”

I hung my head like a sad cartoon man in an antidepressant commercial. I had never taken antidepressants but I was addicted to anxiety medication. I would have been addicted to painkillers too if it were easier for me to get them. I was addicted to bad news. Maybe I was also addicted to cynicism and gloom! Sometimes I worried that my tongue would swell up and choke me in the night.

“But it’s such a nice day, though,” I said.

“That’s the spirit.”

I sit with the alcalde on the little bench at the back of the house. The pincha palms wave in the hot dusty air. The sound of an oxcart fills the street. He is telling me how miserable and sinful he is. He says that he only wants to live well and honor God, and yet he cannot. He hears the whispering of the devil. He sins and sins. He confesses but then he sins fresh sins. He tells me that he awoke this morning in the slime and muck of the pigpen, which I already know. He remembers nothing and he fears he has committed a terrible sin. He tells me that he awoke whispering the “Miserere Mei, Deus,” but what was the use? His eyes are watering, his hair is slick on his round head, his cheeks are like the inflamed rump of a kogai monkey. He asks me if I think he is beyond salvation. He asks me if it is possible, as some heretics have claimed, that every soul is predestined for heaven or hell, and what we do on earth is only the enactment of that destiny, which we can do nothing to change. Then he says that he would like to kill himself, but that too is against God, so his only hope is to apply for a papal dispensation authorizing this course of action.

These are the problems of Christians, who are persecuted by God as they themselves persecute their animals. I am grateful that I am not expected to respond. I am grateful that I am not yet Christian enough to feel haunted by these spirits myself. For now it is easier to live in Pirahao, although the Pirahao will be haunted too, as soon as God learns of their existence.

Late in the morning, when the sun is high enough that it draws the color from the world, Daniel de Fo arrives with an escort of two soldiers. He wears his Toledo cap. There is a notary present as well. There is always a notary present.

Daniel de Fo begs the alcalde’s pardon. There has been a terrible misunderstanding, he says, caused by his own confusion and negligence. He should have come at once and given his account of the Lopez y Barra expedition, but he went mad in the forest and forgot his duty.

The alcalde is delighted by this courtesy and apologizes in his turn for the rough treatment Daniel de Fo has received. He suspects that it is a blessing to be the auditor of any truth or clarification, because in that case he is privileged to become the medium by which Daniel de Fo begins to make an atonement for his crimes. Could it be that the role of medium, or of auditor, will redound to his credit in the ledger books of heaven, assuming of course that our terrible fates are not predestined after all? Both men apologize once again. There is no way to say “I’m sorry” in Pirahao.

“Now tell me, friend,” says the alcalde. “The Lopez y Barra expedition.”

So Daniel de Fo begins to tell his story. They departed from Quito, he says, but before they could descend into the lowland forest they had a mutiny. Neither he nor Diego Paez de Sotelo had any part in it, of course. They had a mutiny and Pedro Avila killed the captain general Diego Lopez y Barra.

“This happened just after you left Quito,” says the alcalde.

“Within a fortnight. But we forgot about that very soon because the Indian porters died in the mountains, every one of them, so many that the men were simply striking the heads off the bodies so that they didn’t have to waste time opening the fetters.”

Without porters, they had to jettison some things. They chose to jettison their food. They thought they would be able to hunt jungle creatures, but the jungle creatures were too clever for them and soon they began to starve. For Christmas they ate a thin gruel of boiled saddle leather and girth straps. At the Feast of Saint Renard they cooked their belts and the soles of their shoes.

“But now Esteban Zancas had the clever idea to draw off some of the horses’ blood and boil it in his helmet. For a moment we thought this
trick would preserve us. It was food for nothing! But there were some disagreements about the proper way to prepare the horse blood. One man argued that horse blood was best with this kind of herb, but another said that it was better with a certain root, and there could be no consensus. No one had starved to death yet, and the three or four Christians who’d died since we left Quito had died only in the usual way, boiled into a broth by the ravenous air of the jungle, except of course poor murdered Diego Lopez y Barra. But now men did begin to die as a result of these culinary ambitions. Some died in combat with one another as they argued about their recipes. Others died as you might expect, from eating the poison herbs and roots they used to season their blood.”

He talks and talks. I have trouble listening. At midday the sun makes so much noise that it isn’t easy to hear anything. In the river I can see a vulture ripping open the belly of a dead caiman. They float together, the caiman on its back, the vulture balanced on its rib cage.

“Do you mind if I smoke the tobacco weed?” I say. A concubine should never ask such a thing, but I am impatient. I was never impatient before I became a Christian.

“I beg you not to,” says the alcalde. “You may do what you wish but I beg you not to.”

“Well,” Daniel de Fo continues, “now things in the jungle started to get bad. Now arrows rained down from every quarter, and some of the men were killed on the spot, and others died later, in screaming misery, because the arrows were poisoned.”

But if this was bad, he says, then what came next was worse. Now they attempted to travel down the Rio Equus in stolen dugout canoes, and in rafts they bound together with sturdy lianas. The canoes overturned, and the rafts were dashed to pieces in the rapids, and they lost twenty more men this way. But if that was terrible enough, and it was, then the days that followed were even more terrible. Now Death walked beside them and jeered and shouted and pointed his bony fingers. Two men, whose names were Rodrigo de Salamanca and Juan Carvajal, were taken by a dragon, and then Aloysius Federmen, a German, stepped into the
river and was devoured by ravenous fish, and then one morning they turned out to find Giacomo Fontesecca, a Venetian, reduced to a clean white skeleton inside his armor. This calamity had befallen him without him even crying out.

“He made no sound?” says the alcalde. “Amazing. Such courage.”

Then it pleased God to let fall a stone from Heaven, which killed Francisco Morales. Then one day another man was boiling a piece of aromatic wood and speaking of the three sheep he was going to buy with his share of the treasure, and suddenly he gave an expression of disgust, as if he had tasted something unpleasant, and burst open, like a seedpod, in an explosion of dark spores.

“This can happen,” I say, making encouraging gestures. I pretend to know about the forest, although I know nothing about the forest. “These are common problems. The forest is an evil place. But don’t you want to tell the alcalde what you told me? The cities, the king, the pearls.”

Daniel de Fo nods. “I am coming to that,” he says. And yet he is at ease. He takes his time. No one would know that his life depends on what he says. He asks the alcalde if it is not remarkable that you always remember the good things more clearly than the bad.

“So much bloodshed,” he says, “and yet I woke this morning and remembered the smell of the forest, and the taste of the coffee fruit.”

The alcalde is not troubled by this digression. He agrees. He says that he now finds himself remembering his wretched time in Salamanca with fondness.

“Once,” says Daniel de Fo, “long ago, I was sold for a slave on the coast of Africa. I spent four years in the house of a rich merchant in Rabat. But when I think of that time I think of tea and chickpeas and the clear warm sunlight in January.”

“But please continue,” says the alcalde. “What happened to Pedro Avila, the traitor?”

“Pedro Avila went mad. He walked through the jungle with his organ of generation standing erect like a divining rod, which was very troubling for all the men, and then he was cut down by Indians.”

“Remarkable,” I say, “but what about El Dorado?”

The alcalde tells me that it isn’t kind to interrupt. In reply I begin to open my dress, so he can see what God has given me. I smile as an iguana smiles. He looks away.

But he seems to have come to a decision. To Daniel de Fo he says, “I will be honest with you, because I believe you have been honest with me. Accusations have been made against you. I must decide whether to condemn you myself, or free you, or send you away so that you can stand trial. You must have realized this.”

“I had my suspicions.”

“First of all, you have been accused of eating unleavened bread.”

“I certainly would have, but I had no bread.”

“And you have been accused of amending a hymn of David.”

“It was when José Casanova lay dying of snakebite. He began to sing. I repeated the words in a different order, but that was only because it was the order in which I remembered them. Diego Paez de Sotelo was outraged.”

“What were the words?”

“In my own recollection, they were, ‘Oh Lord, do not take me away in the midst of my days.’”

The three of us are silent. The birds are silent. God gives no sign of his existence.

Then the alcalde sighs and continues in a quieter voice. “You are accused of reverting to the Mosaic heresy.”

“I have lived as a Christian longer than anyone in Santa Inés has been in the world. I have never returned to Spain. But they knew I was a converso, and it was for that reason that I joined the expedition in the first place. They thought I would be useful as a translator. They thought we might encounter Indians who spoke the languages of the Holy Land.”

“Do you speak the languages of the Holy Land?”

“I do not.”

The alcalde laughs. I keep quiet and stare at the wading birds in the swamp. There is no god but God, who is only one god among many and
who is himself three gods. Nothing will happen but what will happen. The world exists for a reason, and we must always wonder what it is. If I want to prevent the destruction of Anaquitos, I must do something now, and I do nothing, and it is not my decision at all, it is God’s will, which is as large as the world, and comprehends everything that will happen, and everything that won’t.

Daniel de Fo is speaking companionably about the fate of expeditions. They are always the same, he says. Treasure, bloodshed, mutiny. He speaks of Fernando de Magallanes and his voyage around the world. He tells the alcalde about the pearls of Cipango, the rubies of Pegu, the gold of Sumatra, the silks of Kata.

“Enough,” I say. “Tell the alcalde about El Dorado.”

He speaks a Pirahao phrase that has no translation. I answer him in Pirahao. He laughs, haha, and the alcalde laughs, haha, and we all laugh together, haha, but no one understands anything.