The Brink (9 page)

The five acres at Five Mile will not be theirs. The market will shit itself again, but they will sell their house and buy another house. Em will go away to college, but she will call regularly, and when she calls, she will ask to speak to her father because, and this he couldn't have predicted, she will want him to know her. The event of a secret will become a kind of
gift. She will tell him about strange boys she meets, about her anxiety, about the place she volunteers. Eventually she will talk about traveling, as her father and mother did once, to ruins in Asia, to the coast of Spain, gathering distance from them and from the dark molecule. And when Em does, Graham will hear his voice, across the years, saying,
Go, go, go
.

Mother, I have seen such marvels. Like the ocean aglow at night with a cold green fire and a fish with a child's face and two fleshy whiskers. (No man would eat it. We blessed the creature and tossed it back.) I've seen a corpse with golden hair in a boat set adrift; his eyes were the slits on a newly born kitten. When the boatswain came to after three days on the
garrucha
for the crime of sodomy—his wrists tied behind him and hoisted above the deck so that his arms tore and jellied—he asked, “Am I dead?” and soon he was. I looked to Diego, who dropped his dark eyes in shame, and I saw that too. Three hundred leagues into the sea, we came upon a floating meadow, crabs and petrels tinkering along its dank branches and fronds. A palm tree had taken root there and I imagined, briefly, the coastline of Seville, of home.

But none of these compare to you, Mother, suddenly here, at the gunwale of this ship, soaking wet. Your hands are folded across your chest and you stare away, at the ledge. You look precisely as I left you, your long black hair damp and loose against your back and your bare feet white as salt. Around me, the crew and the others race to trim the
Elena
's sails in a westerly. The captain is missing and I am full of questions. Are you a dream?
Is this a fever or worse? I'm afraid to speak. And so I sit alone with my ledger, in the shade of the quarterdeck, and write.

The great Venetian saw the court of the Kublai Khan and wrote his
Book of Marvels
. I remember how I loved it as a young man, how I stole into the college to read the manuscript and teach myself the words. It took me a year to finish it, and when I was done, I started over again. At night, I dreamed of trader Polo's adventures: the falcons of Karmania, the gold and silver tower of Mien, and the festival of wives. Marco Polo told his story from a Genoese jail. The
Elena
is now my prison. His stories saved his life. Perhaps so will mine.

This record began three days ago, on the
Elena
's twenty-second day at sea. We sailed in search of the sea path to India, driving a slant from the Canaries to the Azores into the blue-black unknown. For days, we had been mired in a meadow of sargassum. Captain Veragua, convinced it was the grass of a submarine ridge, ordered the crew to sound the waters on every watch. But the bulb of lead, at the end of the fathom-long cordage, could not sink through the dense thicket. In boredom, the English conscript used a crossbow to hunt a petrel, resting on the carpet of weed, and his arrow succeeded only in punching it down into oblivion. But on Sunday, the meadow miraculously began to break into patches and then lacy fingers. As it trailed into our wake, the crew sang psalms and “Salve Regina” with renewed (if not exactly pleasing) vigor.

Summoned by our good feeling, a group of dolphins assembled beneath the
Elena
and moved together like a shadow,
fracturing and collecting with astounding speed. They teased us, the way children at the Magdalena city gate greet strangers. They leapt into the air and made an exuberant birdlike speech. I opened the navigation ledger and stared at our rhumb line, fixed at one end and one thousand leagues long. I wrote, “Sea like a river, new company, new hope.”

And then a cry came from the rigging. Diego, swung up in the web of mainsail rope, yelled a shapeless sound and pointed frantically off the side of the ship. At port, two iridescent coils, the height of three men, arched across our length. They moved as fast as a lash and seemed pure muscle, strong enough to splinter the
Elena
to matchwood. Their scales shimmered like slick cathedral glass. I froze with the ledger open on my lap. Before long, other sea serpents, large as the first, foamed the water in a frenzy. The ocean was a tipped basket of eels. The serpents coiled and, at once, lunged beneath the boat.

The men backed away from the gunwale. The waters went still and the air flashed with heat. No man moved. In short time, our wake ran red. Bits of pink meat floated and were snatched down.

Pinzón, our interpreter, clutched my arm.

“
Where
,” he whispered, “
are we?
”

Every sailor knows the stories of sea cats and mermaids with cadaver-cold breasts. St. Brendan told of riding on the back of a whale. But in my young years at sail, as a scribe, men never died from stories. They reefed on fogged-out coasts. They wrecked on breakers off Cape Bojador, circled forever
in the Mare Tenebrosum. Except now, new horrors brushed against our keel and knifed the water. We were eighteen men buoyed by forty feet of caulked and tarred oak, a thin wooden wall between our fate and us.

Thirteen-year-old Marco, the ship's boy, squirreled up the mast, as high as he could go. The brothers Alfredo the Tall and Armando the Taller fell to their knees and raced through the Lord's Prayer. Others went to the sail locker for armaments, but the
Elena
is an ocean exploration ship, fast and weak. We carry no arms stronger than crossbows and a meager falconet mounted on the deck that spits spoons and scrap metal. Against raiders—or worse—we have little defense.

Only Diego bravely craned over the side and searched through the water. I wanted to go to his side, the safest place I know, but panic fixed me.

“What do you see?” the English conscript said to him, teeth clacking. Piss had spilled down his right legging and his swagger had gone with it.

Diego did not reply. He had his tongue and his wit but was as mute as a fish. Much as I felt for him, Diego has never spoken my name. Can you love something that you never name?

We found him grinning on the steps of the cathedral, a drunk Franciscan friar, tonsure gone prickly. A spray of freckles fell across the bridge of his nose and vanished under whiskers, his face an admixture of boy and man. The friars said that he'd been silent since he entered their order and had never taken to cloistered life; instead, he kept the garden full of flowers that brought the birds, then the cats, until a plague
of aphids finally brought it to ruin. He was round as a cask and the captain, searching for crew, asked him to join us as a cook, pointing down to the banks of the Guadalquivir, to our expedition ship, with her royal flags sharp in the wind. Diego's gaze went out, past the sails of the barques and the harbor riot, toward an unseeable shore.

How is it that some men inspire no feeling in me while others stir the deep waters? On those cathedral steps, I took his right hand, smooth as calfskin, and he pressed his left against the outside of mine, so that my hand was held in a gentle, warm prayer. I felt my blood rise up, the way a bulb of quicksilver feels in a pot of boiling water. He pointed to my ginger hair and made a flickering motion of fire with his fingers. I smiled like an idiot. And if Diego did not speak, his hands were more fluent than any words. He practiced a religion at the cook box, the communion of salt pork and sea fish, all that mattered. And at night, in shadows, those hands made other blessings. Now, at the bulwark, Diego looked eager and expectant. As if this encounter was his whole reason for coming.

The deck bell rang. Captain Veragua came to the entrance to his quarters. In the daylight, he was plainly dying. He wore a hood, white eyes shining from the shadow like marble. On our second week at sail, the captain had stupored on wine and a candle in his cabin tipped in a swell, setting his bedclothes and doublet alight. He jumped overboard and when he was fished from the water, his left side looked like a hank of meat rescued from embers. It took two days for Diego to pare the
seared cloth from the captain's skin with a carving knife. Every command he gave to us now was curt and purposeful, trimmed to the minimum amount of gesture.

“Peralonso,” the captain asked me, “what is that sound?”

My attention went to the sails. The wind had worn out; the main and the fore drooped without breeze. The ship's planks creaked in complaint. The sea slapped lightly against the
Elena
. We had entered a white calm, the horizon crouched behind a mist. But as I listened, below all of this came a faint, wide roaring, like the rumor of a waterfall. It stretched the width of my perception.

“Land?” I answered.

The captain ordered the deep-sea lead hove overboard again. The lead, at one hundred fathoms, failed to find bottom. The brothers recalled the line, spliced a second to the first, and sent that into the sea. Again, the rope drifted behind in the current. The sea was too deep to sound.

Then the captain called for the crows to be released. They cawed up in their cage, high on the mast. Marco scampered up the rope ladder and released them. The birds circled higher and higher, hunting shoreline. As land birds, they hate travel over seawater. But they continued to circle until we could not make them out.

“
Listen,” the captain said.

Soon enough the drone was all I could hear. The
Elena
drifted in a weak current. Slowly, as the world reaches focus through a looking glass, the mist thinned and revealed itself as a great spume of ocean water. One league away, the curve of
horizon straightened to a line, to a drop, like the edge of an enormous table. Clouds bent over this line and disappeared.

Coralito, the
Elena
's frail navigator, crossed himself and went to the captain, our sail chart spindled in his hand. He was an old and difficult man, a widower, too vain to admit his fading eyesight. Long white eyebrows billowed from his face, like puffs of sweet weather. But aged as he was, Coralito was the
Elena
's will, our human compass. At the Talavera Commission in Salamanca, he watched Queen Isabella decree, on a carpet of maps, that the world was a plate ringed by water and that to traverse this lip from Spain to the Indies would take three years. Under his breath Coralito had muttered,
What do priests and Queens know of science? The world is not flat, but as round as a ball of wax and as knowable. You can leave a place, travel a line, and arrive where you began.

“What did you say?” the captain asked.

“I have failed you, Captain,” Coralito said. “I was wrong.”

The crows returned and settled noisily on two belaying pins.

“We have reached the edge of the ocean,” Coralito continued. “We can go no further. This is the fourth corner of the world.”

Every man is born to his first corner. Mine was a pile of flour sacks in a house in the port of Seville, in the year 1469, under the reign of King Ferdinand of Aragon. That year, my father, a blacksmith, was conscripted into the
armada marvallosa
in the English war and lost at sea. He returned to my mother
as one thousand
maravedis
of wheat grain, the compensation for her sacrifice. Desperate and poor, my mother bricked in his furnace, hand-ground her grief into powder, and opened a bakery.

Every morning, I rose to find her kneading the dough, and I will always remember her ghosted with this fine white dust, cool and papery to the touch, haunting a passage to and from the oven. She was a striking, sad beauty, her hair gathered in a silver band. Countless men needled me in an effort to get her attention and force a smile on her. But none could tempt her out of the downward stare of her solitude.

“You must never leave me,” she would say, flattening my hand against her cheek. “One day you will want to. It will be a girl with gray eyes, or a distant shore. That day, you will count all the things that are keeping you here and they will not be enough. That day will be my last.”

My mother gave me the gift of letters. When I was thirteen years old, she led me to a field of goldenrod and covered my head in a shawl. She told me I must study a new book and make new prayers. I asked, “Who are we praying to?” and she said, “To the God of Israel, your true people.” That afternoon, I became two: a Catholic, the faith of my father, and a
Marrano
, Jew by candlelight.

Soon after, the butcher came on afternoons to sit me on his lap and write letters on a slate. He read the words aloud while I repeated them. Sometimes he would whisper made-up words in my ear, or put my hand on his belly to show me how breath worked until he sighed. I delighted in this, but my
mother sent him away. “You're too old for such things,” she said. I wept inconsolably for a loss I felt but couldn't bring into words.

Over time, my mother's bakery grew to serve the harbor, preparing tack and meal for sea journeys to and from the Levant, the terminus of the spice road. It was my task to deliver the breads to the
barcas
and
navículas
anchored in the river. I grew to love the crowded port, so dense with ships that I could hardly see the water. There were many familiar faces, salted in every crease, and crabs savoring the treacle on dry-docked hulls. The port felt like a floating city of fathers: exuberant, bronzed men, barefoot and dressed only in trousers. They taught me knots, the mysteries of splicing and parceling the cordage, even as they pilfered my breads. Many asked if I wanted to join their crews, but only if I could assure that their hardtack would never worm.

I was tempted. The sailors spoke of the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, and their incomprehensible bounty. They had seen the moon dyed orange by windblown curries, palms scorched betel-red. Along the coastline, the air was so heavy with pepper you had to breathe through cloth. It seemed to me that these spice villages harvested delirium, and the lives there were surely made of pure color.

Once, the boldest I ever was, I stole into the hold of a docked caravel. Twenty barrels sat lashed to the floor. One barrel had been knocked open, revealing a rubylike powder. Mace, the fine netting on the nutmeg shell. I'd seen it in the market, a spice so treasured that a tablespoon is worth a week's
labor. I tasted it with a finger. I felt that I was savoring a quality of dusk.

Just then, a mariner stepped from the shadows. He was broad-shouldered and grimy, as if he'd been swimming in the bilge. I stumbled back, afraid. He motioned for silence and slid closed the lid of the barrel. From the deck, I heard the mainsail catch in a gust and felt the ship pull.