The Orange Tree

The Two Americas

Fragments from the Diary of a Genoese Sailor

TODAY I landed on the enchanted beach. It was hot and the sun rose at an early hour. The radiance of the water was brighter than the light in the sky. No sea is more translucent, as green as the lemon juice my sailors craved, ravaged as they were by scurvy during the long voyage from the port of Palos. You can see all the way to the bottom, as if the surface of the water were a sheet of glass. The bottom is white sand, crisscrossed by fish of every color.

The storms shredded my sails. On August 3, we crossed the Saltes bar, and on September 6, we saw land for the last time when we left the port of Gomera in the Canaries. There were three caravels, but all that remains is the ship’s boat I managed to save after the mutiny and massacre. I am the only survivor.

Only my eyes see this shore, only my feet walk it. I do what habit orders me to do. I get down on my knee and give thanks to a God who is certainly too busy with more important matters to think about me. I cross two old branches and invoke the sacrifice and benediction. I claim this land in the name of the Catholic Kings who will never set foot on it, and understand why they showed such magnanimity when they granted me possession of everything I might discover. They knew very well that without resources I couldn’t dominate anything. I’ve reached these shores naked and poor. But what will they or I possess? What land is this? Where the hell am I?

* * *

Back in Genoa, my mother would say to me while I helped her stretch the huge sheets out to dry — while I imagined myself, even then, carried along by great sails to the far edges of the universe—“Son, stop dreaming. Why can’t you be happy with what you can see and touch? Why do you always talk about things that don’t exist?”

She was right. The pleasure of what I’m looking at should satisfy me. The white shore. The abrupt silence, so different from the deafening clamor of Genoa or Lisbon. The mild breezes and weather like Andalusia’s in April. The purity of the air, with not one of the foul odors that plague the thronged ports of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Here only flocks of parrots darken the sky. And on the beaches I don’t find the shit, the garbage, the bloody rags, the flies, and the rats of all the European cities. Here I find the snowy white horizons of purity, pearls as plentiful as the sand itself, turtles laying eggs, and beyond the beach, in successive ranks, a thick forest: palm trees near the beach and then, rising toward the mountains, thick groves of pine, oak, and strawberry trees. It’s bliss just to look at them. And, on the highest peak in the world, an extremely high mountain crowned with snow, dominating the universe and exempted — I dare say it — from the furies of the universal flood. I have reached — can there be any doubt? — Paradise.

* * *

Is this what I wanted to find? I know my plan was to reach China and Japan. I always said that in the end we discover what we first imagine. So getting to Asia was only a metaphor for my will, or, if you prefer, of my sensuality. From the cradle, I had a carnal impression of the roundness of the earth. My mother had two glorious breasts that I was so good at sucking that they quickly ran dry. She said she preferred washing and hanging out sheets to feeding such a voracious baby. One after another: that’s how my Italian wet nurses came, each one milkier, rounder, than her predecessor, enjoyable, with their breasts capped off with delicious tips which for me came to represent, clearly, my vision of the world. Breast after breast, milk after milk, my eyes and my lips overflowed with the vision and savor of the globe.

First consequence: I always viewed the world as a pear, very round except where it comes to a point, where it is highest. Or like a very round ball, but, instead of a ball, like a woman’s breast, with the nipple being the highest part and closest to heaven.

Second consequence: If someone told me I was insane and that an egg can’t stand on its end, I would win the argument by smashing one end of the egg and standing it up. But my mind, in reality, was thinking about biting a nipple until the breast was empty of milk, until the wet nurse shrieked. In pleasure or in pain?

I’ll never know.

* * *

That childhood of mine had a third consequence I’d better confess right now. We Genoese are not taken very seriously. In Italy, there are different levels of seriousness. The Florentines give us Genoese no credence. Of course, they see themselves as a nation of sober, calculating people with a good head for business. But the citizens of Ferrara view the Florentines as sordid, sinister, avaricious, full of deceit and tricks they use to get what they want and justify themselves in some fashion. The people of Ferrara prefer to be fixed and aristocratic, like classical medals and just as immutable and refined. Because they are (or feel) so superior, they do nothing to betray the image of their nobility and quickly fall into despair and suicide.

So, if the Ferrarese scorn the Florentines, and the Florentines scorn the Genoese, there’s nothing left for us to do but despise the loudmouthed, scummy, frivolous Neapolitans, who, in turn, have no way out but to heap filth on the sinister, murderous, dishonest Sicilians.

I want the readers of this diary, which I will soon toss into the sea, to understand what I’ve just said so that they will also understand my dramatic decision. A man of my country and my era had to suffer as many humiliations as he inflicted on others. As a Genoese, I was considered a visionary and a fraud in every court in Europe to which I brought my knowledge of navigation and my theories about the planet’s mammary circumference. Fast-talking and proud, more full of fantasy than facts. That’s how I was treated, whether in Paris, Rome, London, or the ports of the Hanseatic League. That’s how Ferdinand and Isabella — I was told by the ubiquitous gossips — talked about me after my first visit. Which is why I moved to Lisbon: all the adventurers, dreamers, merchants, moneylenders, alchemists, and inventors of new worlds congregated in the Portuguese capital. There I could be one among many, be anything I wanted while I learned what I had to learn in order to embrace the round world, grab the universe by the teats, and suck its nipples until there wasn’t a drop of milk left. I had a costly apprenticeship.

* * *

Yesterday I was approached by the first men I’d ever seen from these new lands. I was sleeping on the sand, exhausted by the last days of my voyage in the ship’s boat, alone, guided only by my excellent knowledge of the stars. In my dream, actually a nightmare, appeared the terrible scenes of storms on the high seas, the despair of the sailors, scurvy, death, the mutiny, and finally the vile decision of the Pinzón brothers to return to Spain and abandon me in a boat with three casks of water, two bottles of spirits, a sack of seeds, and my trunk filled with curiosities: trumpery, red caps, and a secret compartment with paper, quill pens, and ink. They left me in dire straits: yesterday I dreamed their toothless corpses passed by on a raft made of snakes.

I awaken, my lips covered with sand, like a second skin granted by the deepness of my sleep. First I see the sky and the fugitive procession of ravens and ducks, instantly blocked out by the circle of faces the color of the natives of the Canary Islands. They speak like birds, in a singsong, high-pitched language, and when they rise to take me by the armpits and stand me up, they reveal themselves totally naked before me.

They gave me water and led me to tentlike buildings where they gave me food I didn’t recognize and let me rest.

Over the course of the following days, cared for and protected by these people, I regained my strength. I was amazed by these men and women unsullied by the evil of war, naked, very gentle, and without weapons. Their lands were extremely fertile and very well watered. They led peaceful, happy lives. They slept in beds that swayed back and forth like cotton nets. They strolled through their villages carrying smoking coals they sucked with as great satisfaction as I had sucked breasts. They made very beautiful dugouts ninety-five palms long out of a single trunk that carried as many as one hundred and fifty people, and thus they communicated with other islands and the mainland, which they soon brought me to see.

Yes, I had reached Paradise, and I had only one problem: Should I communicate this discovery to my illustrious European patrons or not? Should I remain silent or announce my feat?

* * *

I wrote the appropriate letters so the astonished world would honor me and the monarchs of Europe would bow at my great deed. What lies didn’t I tell? I knew the mercantile ambition and the boundless greed of my continent and the rest of the world, so I described lands full of gold and spices and mastic and rhubarb. After all, these discovery companies, whether English, Dutch, Spanish, or Portuguese, were paid to put salt and pepper on the tables of Europe. So I wrote that gold nuggets may be gathered like grains of wheat. King Solomon’s mountains of gold are to be found here, safe from the waters of the flood, tall and resplendent, as if they were the breasts of creation.

Also, I was not ignorant of my contemporaries’ need for fable, the metallic wrapping that would disguise and make palatable their lust for gold. Gold, yes, but hidden in deep mines by cannibals and fierce beasts. Pearls as well, but revealed by the song of sirens, sirens with three breasts — three. Transparent seas, but plied by sharks with two phalluses — folding phalluses. Prodigious islands, defended by amazons who receive men only once a year, who allow themselves to be made pregnant and each nine months send their male children back to their fathers, keeping only the girl children. Implacable with themselves, they cut off one breast, the better to shoot their arrows.

* * *

Now, I must admit that both my mythical outlandishness and my very solid appreciation of the nobility of these savages masked the most painful experience of my life. Twenty years ago, I joined a Portuguese expedition to Africa, which turned out to be an infamous business of capturing blacks and then selling them. No one had ever seen greater cynicism. The black kings of the ivory coasts would hunt down and capture their own subjects, accusing them of rebellion and desertion. They would hand them over to Christian clergymen who would convert them and save their souls. The clergymen, in turn, would entrust them to the kind care of the Portuguese slavers, who were to teach them trades and transport them to Europe.

I saw them sail from the ports of the Gulf of Guinea, where the Portuguese traders would arrive with shiploads of merchandise for the African kings, to exchange for their enslaved population — redeemed, of course, by religion. The ships would empty of silks, percales, thrones, dishes, mirrors, views of the Ile de France, missals, and chamber pots; they would fill up with husbands separated from their wives — the women sent one place, the men elsewhere, their children similarly divided, and all thrown into crowded cargo holds with no place to move around, forced to shit and piss on top of one another, to touch only what was near them and to speak to others, mortally embracing them, who understood nothing. Has there ever been a race more humiliated, despised, subjected to the pure whim of cruelty than they?

* * *

I saw the ships sail out of the Gulf of Guinea, and now, here in my New World, I swore it would never happen again.

This was like the Golden Age the ancients evoke, which is how I recited it to my new friends from Antilia, who listened to me without understanding. After all, I was describing them and their time: first came the Golden Age, when man governed himself with uncorrupted reason and constantly sought the good. Not forced by punishment, not spurred on by fear, man used simple words and possessed a sincere soul. There was no need for law where there was no oppressor, no need for judges or courts. Or battlements, or trumpets, or swords to be forged, because everyone was ignorant of these two words: yours and mine.

Was it inevitable that the Iron Age come? Could I put it off? For how long?

I had reached the Golden Age. I embraced the noble savage. Was I going to reveal his existence to Europeans? Was I going to deliver these sweet, naked people, devoid of malice, to slavery and death?

I decided to be silent and to stay among them for several reasons, using several strategies. I don’t want the reader to think he’s dealing with a fool: we Genoese may be liars but we aren’t idiots.

I opened my trunk and found the hats and beads. It gave me pleasure to give them to my hosts, who enjoyed themselves immensely with the trinkets. But I asked myself: If my intention was to reach the court of the grand khan in Peking and the fabulous empire of Japan, whom did I think I was going to impress with this junk I picked up in the Puerto de Santa María market? The Chinese and the Japanese would have laughed at me. So, within my mammary, unconscious zone, I knew the truth: I would never reach Cathay because I didn’t really want to reach Cathay; I wanted to get to Paradise, and in Eden the only wealth is nakedness and unawareness. Perhaps that was my real dream. I carried it through. Now I would have to protect it.

I was helped by the most ironclad law of Portuguese navigation, the law of secrecy. The sailors who left Lisbon and Sagres had imposed a policy of secrecy at all costs, ordered by their Sebastianist, utopian monarchs. Any Portuguese captain (to say nothing of common sailors) who revealed the routes or the places they’d discovered would be hunted to the ends of the earth and, when found (which they would be, don’t doubt it for a second), would be drawn and quartered. The heads, feet, and hands of traitors had been seen all along Portuguese routes, from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope, from Mozambique to Macao. The Portuguese were implacable: if they encountered ships intruding in their sea-lanes, they had standing orders to sink them immediately.

I am availing myself of that absolute silence. I turn it inside out like a glove and use it for my own advantage. Absolute silence. Eternal secrecy. What became of the talkative, fantastical Genoese? Where did he really come from? Why, if he was Italian, did he write only in Spanish? But why doubt he was Italian when he himself (that is, I myself) wrote: I am a foreigner. But what did it mean in those days to be a foreigner? A Genoese was a foreigner to a Neapolitan, as was an Andalusian to a Catalan.

As if I had foreseen my destiny, I sowed minuscule confusions. In Pontevedra, I left a false archive to drive the Galicians insane. No matter, their heads are a muddle of realism and fantasy. On the other hand, in Estremadura, where they never dream, I convinced people that I grew up in Plasencia, when in fact it was Piacenza. As for Majorca and Catalunia, well, I gave them the flesh of my flesh: my last name, that of the Holy Spirit, which abounds on those coasts. Corsica, which as yet has produced no man of note, could claim me because of a lie I told to two drunken abbots when I passed through Bastia.

I fooled no one. The only thing about myself I put down in writing clearly is this:

At a very tender age, I became a seafarer and have continued to be one until this very day … For more than forty years I have been doing this work. Everything that until today has been sailed I have sailed; everywhere I have traveled. I have had business and conversation with wise folk, churchmen and laymen, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and with many others of other sects.

My country is the sea.

* * *

I threw the bottle with its pages of legend into the sea — all the lies about sirens and amazons, gold and pearls, leviathans and sharks. But I also told the truth about rivers and coasts, mountains and forests, arable land, fruit and fish, the noble beauty of the people, the existence of Paradise.

I disguised it in a name I heard here and created a special identity for it. The name was Antilia. The identity was intermittence; that is, the isle of Antilia would appear and disappear. One day, the sun would reveal it; the next, the mists would blot it out. It floated one day and sank the next. A tangible mirage, a fleeting reality between sleep and wakefulness, this land of Antilia was only visible, ultimately, for those who, like me as a child, could imagine it first.

I tossed the bottle with the legend into the sea, certain that no one would ever find it. If someone did, he would read in it the ravings of a madman. Led by my sweet friends to the place that would be my permanent residence, I told myself a truth that only now I can put on record.

This was the place: a freshwater gulf into which seven rivers emptied, overwhelming the salt sea with their fresh force. A river is an eternal birth, renovation, perpetually renewed cleanliness and spirit, and the rivers of Antilia flowed into the gulf with a delightful, constant noise that dispelled the clamor of the Mediterranean alleys with the din of their peddlers, children, doorkeepers, rogues, street surgeons, butchers, trinket sellers, knife sellers, oil sellers, tinkers, bakers, skinners, and barbers. It also banished the silence of the night and its fear. The silence of imminent death.

Here they assigned me a hut and a hammock (the name of their woven beds). A tender woman, eager to please. A canoe for my little trips, and two young oarsmen to accompany me. Plenty of food, dorados from the sea and trout from the river, deer and turkey, papaya and custard apples. Out of my sack I took orange seeds, and together we planted them along the valleys and hillsides of the Gulf of Paradise. The trees grew better in Antilia than in Andalusia, with shiny leaves and fragrant flowers. I never saw better oranges, oranges that so resembled the sun they made the sun envious. I finally had a garden of perfect breasts, suckable, edible, renewable. I had conquered my own life. I was the eternal owner of my recovered youth. I was a boy without the shame or nostalgia of being one. I could suck oranges until I died.

That’s right, paradise. So I stayed there, liberated above all from the horrible need to explain a different reality to Europeans, a history for them inexplicable. How could Europe understand that there is a history different from the one it made or learned? A second history? How will Europeans accept that the present is not only the heir of the past but the origin of the future? What a hideous responsibility. No one could stand it. Especially me.

I would have enough trouble eliminating all the lies about me and admitting that I’m not Catalan, Galician, Majorcan, or Genoese. I am a Sephardic Jew whose family fled Spain because of the usual persecutions: one more, one of so many, not the first and not the last …

* * *

The reader of these notes dedicated to chance will no doubt understand the reasons behind my silence, my abstention, my staying in Antilia. I wanted to attribute the care with which I was treated to my personal charm or to my empathy with those who received me. I paid no attention to the rumors that transformed me into the protagonist of a divine legend. Me, a bearded white god? Me, punctually returning to see if mankind had taken care of the earth I’d given them? I remembered the breasts of my wet nurses and took a big bite out of the orange that’s always at my side, perennially renewed, almost my scepter.

From the top of my high, whitewashed belvedere, I see the length and breadth of the lands and the confluence of the rivers, the gulf, and the sea. Seven rivers flow down, some calm and others torrential (including one waterfall), to fill the gulf, which, in turn, gently opens on to a sea protected from its own rage by coral reefs. My white house, cooled by the trade winds, dominates the orange groves and is defended by dozens of laurels. Behind me, the mountains whisper their names: pine and cypress, oak and strawberry. Royal eagles perch on the white summits; butterflies descend like another waterfall, half gold, half rain; all the birds in the world meet in this immaculate air, from cranes, macaws, and owls wearing black glasses to those I identify more by their looks than by their names: birds like witches with black ears, birds that unfold what look like huge parasols, others dressed in the red of princes of the Church, others with plantlike throats, woodpeckers and squirrel birds, birds with red beaks and doves with short beaks, birds that sound like trumpets and others that sound like clocks, jacamars and ant-eating birds who live off the abundance of those they consume. The permanent cry of the caracara bird presides over all: my earthbound falcon that has never flown but which, dragging itself over the earth, devours waste and in so doing redeems life.

Beyond the visible life of my earthly paradise is what sustains it, the minutiae of invisible life. The richness of animal life is obvious, and the crow, the ocelot, the tapir, and the ounce mark their paths through the jungle or the forest clearly. They would get lost without the guidance of the living odors that are the routes of the silence and the night. The araguato monkey, the armadillo, the jaguar, and the iguana are all guided by millions of invisible organisms that purge the water and the air of their daily poisons, just as the caracara falcon does it right before our eyes. The aroma of the jungle is dispelled by millions of hidden little bodies that are like the invisible light of the forest.

They await the night to move around and learn things. We wait for the dawn. I look at the enormous, downy ears of the gray-brown wolf that comes up to my door every night. Blood rushes into those ears and allows heat to escape. It’s the symbol of life in the tropics, where everything is arranged for living well, provided we want to prolong life and respect its natural flow. But everything turns against us the instant we show hostility and try to dominate nature by harming it. The men and women of my new world know how to care for the earth. I tell them that from time to time, which is why they venerate and protect me, even if I’m not God.

I compare this life with the one I left behind in Europe and shudder. Cities buried in garbage, redeemed from time to time by fire, but immediately drowned in soot. Cities with visible intestines, crowned with feces, along whose gutters flow pus and urine, menstrual blood and vomit, useless semen and dead cats. Cities without light, narrow, cramped, where everything wanders, ghostlike, or nods off like a succubus. Beggars, thieves, the insane, multitudes talking to themselves, skulking rats, runaway dogs that return in packs, migraines, fevers, vertigoes, tremors, hard volcanoes of blood between the legs and in the armpits, a black pattern on the skin: forty days of abstinence did not prevent forty million deaths in Europe. The cities were depopulated. Bands of looters came in to steal our possessions, and animals took over our beds. Our eyeballs burst. Our people were accused of poisoning wells. We were expelled from Spain.

Now I live in Paradise.

For how long? Sometimes I think about my family, about my scattered people. Do I also have a family, a wife, children here in this new world? Possibly. To live in Paradise is to live without consequences. My loves pass over my skin and my memory like water through a filter. What’s left is more a sensation than a memory. It’s as if time hadn’t passed since I reached these lands and took up residence in the white mansion with the orange trees.

I cultivate my own garden. My most immediate sensual pleasures occur in the orange grove — I look, touch, peel, bite, and swallow. So do the oldest of sensations: my mother, wet nurses, breasts, the sphere, the world, the egg …

If I want my personal story to have a collective resonance, I’ll have to go beyond the breast-orange to the two memory objects I’ve always borne with me. One is the key to the ancestral house of my forefathers in the Toledo ghetto. Expelled from Spain by persecution, we never lost the language of Castile or the key to our home. It’s passed from hand to hand. It’s never been a cold key despite being made of metal. Too many Jewish palms, fingers, and fingertips have fondled it.

The other thing is a prayer. We Sephardic Jews all travel with it and nail it to the door of our closets. I do the same thing in Antilia. I’ve improvised a clothing chest that holds, like mementos, my old doublet, my jerkin, and my breeches — my New World friends have taught me to wear linen, smooth and soft, white and airy: a shirt and trousers, sandals. To the chest I’ve nailed the prayer of the Jewish émigrés, which goes like this:

Mother Spain, you have been cruel to your Israelite children. You have persecuted and expelled us. We have left behind our houses, our lands, but not our memories. Despite your cruelty, we love you, Spain, and we long to return to you. One day you will receive your wandering children, you will open your arms to them, ask their forgiveness, and recognize our fidelity to your land. We shall return to our houses. This is the key. This is the prayer.

I recite it, and, almost like a satisfied desire, a memory returns to me of my disastrous arrival, shrieking like a caracara bird. I am sitting on my balcony at the first hour, doing what I do best: contemplating. The earliest breezes are blowing. The only thing missing is the sound of nightingales. I have recited the prayer of the Sephardic return to Spain. I don’t know why, but I’m thinking about something that never worries me because I’m so used to it. Antilia is a land that appears and disappears periodically. I haven’t discovered the laws that govern this mutability, and I prefer not knowing them. I’m afraid that knowing the calendar of appearances and disappearances would be something like knowing the date of our death beforehand.

I prefer doing what nature and the real time of life ordain. Contemplation and enjoyment. But this morning, surprisingly, a white bird flies by carrying the stalk of a bulrush, the kind of bird sailors see with pleasure because it doesn’t sleep at sea; it’s a sign land is near. The trade winds blow and the sea is as flat as a river. Crows, ducks, and a gannet pass over, fleeing to the southeast. Their haste alarms me. In a rare gesture, I stand up with a start as I see a kite floating high in the sky — a bird that makes gannets and other birds of prey vomit up their food and then eats it. It’s a seabird, but doesn’t land on the water, and never goes farther than twenty leagues out to sea.

I realize I’m looking at an event from the past. This is what I saw when I first arrived here. I try to dismiss this mirage and see what’s happening today, but I can’t distinguish between the two events. Another bird becomes visible in the sky. It comes closer, first barely a dot, then a brilliant star, so brilliant that it blinds me when I compare it to the sun. The bird descends toward the gulf. From its belly emerge two feet as huge as canoes, and, with a horrifying grunt that silences the terrified shrieking of the caracara, it settles on the water, raising a cloud of foam.

Everything becomes calm. The bird has doors and windows. It’s an air house. A combination of Noah’s ark and the Pegasus of mythology. The door opens and there appears, smiling, with teeth whose shine darkens that of the sun and of metal, a yellow man, just as my predecessor Marco Polo describes them. He’s wearing glasses that add to the glare and is dressed in a strange fashion: he carries a small black case in one hand and wears crocodile-skin shoes.

He bows, boards a roaring boat lowered from the flying ship, and comes toward me.

* * *

Nothing surprises me. From the beginning, I disabused those who wanted to see in me a kind of garrulous, ignorant sailor. God gave me intelligence, and it flourished in the sailing world; of astrology it gave me a sufficiency, as it did of geometry and arithmetic; and ingenuity enough in my soul to draw spheres, and within them the cities, rivers, mountains, islands, and ports — all in their proper place.

Even if I possess these talents, I’ve grieved deeply (while never admitting it) because I suspect I never reached Japan, as I’d wanted, but a new land. As a man of science, I had to confess its existence; as a political man, I had to deny it. Which is what I did, but that fatal morning in my story, when the small man in the light-gray suit as brilliant as the bird that brought him to me, with his black leather case in his hand and his crocodile shoes, smiled and introduced himself, I discovered the terrible truth: I hadn’t reached Japan. Japan had reached me.

Surrounded by six people, four men and two women, who worked all sorts of contraptions, compasses perhaps, hourglasses, calipers, or chastity belts for all I knew, and who pointed disrespectfully at my face and voice, my visitor introduced himself simply as Mister Nomura.

His argument was direct, clear, and simple:

“We’ve been attentively and admiringly observing your custodianship of these Lands. Thanks to you, the world possesses an immaculate reserve of rivers, forests, flora and fauna, pristine beaches and uncontaminated fish. Congratulations, Cristóbal-san. We have respected your isolation for a long time. Today the moment for you to share Paradise with the rest of humanity has come.”

“How did you find out…?” I stammered.

“You did not reach Japan, but your bottle stuffed with manuscripts did. We are patient. We’ve been waiting for the right moment. Your Paradise — do you see? — would appear and disappear very frequently. Expeditions sent out in the past never returned. We had to wait for a long time, until we perfected the technology that would fix the presence of what we agreed to call the New World, locate it permanently, despite its random, ultimately deceptive movements, despite the appearances and disappearances. I’m talking about radar, laser, ultrasound … I’m talking about high-definition screens.”

“What is it you want?” I managed to say, in spite of my growing confusion.

“Your collaboration, Colombo-san. Be a team player. We only work in teams. Cooperate and everything will turn out fine. Wa! Wa! Wa! Conformity, Don Cristóbal,” he said, prancing a bit and then standing on tiptoe.

He smiled and sighed. “We meet at last. Well, better late than never.”

* * *

I signed more papers than I had during the Santa Fe capitulations with Ferdinand and Isabella. Nomura and his army of Japanese lawyers (the gulf filled up with yachts, ketches, and hydroplanes) forced me to cede the beaches of Antilia to the Meiji Company which in turn subcontracted their development to the Amaterasu Company which in turn ceded construction of hotels to the Minamoto Corporation which contracted to buy tablecloths from Murasaki Designs, all towel-related items from the Mishima Group, and soaps and perfumes from the Tanizaki Agency, while foodstuffs would be supplied by Akutagawa Associates in combination with the Endo Group insofar as imported products were concerned and with the Obe Group insofar as domestic products were concerned, all of which would be processed on the island by the Mizoguchi Corporation and transported to the hotels by Kurosawa Transport Corporation. All of it would be procured by local employees (what term do you think we should use for them: “aborigines,” “natives,” “indigenous peoples,” “Antilleans”? We wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings) who will prosper with the influx of tourists, Columbus-san, and see their standard of living go through the roof. We need tourist guides, drivers, bus lines, car rental agencies, pink jeeps, and pleasure boats for the hotel guests. Which in turn will require highways and everything tourists need strung out along them: motels, pizzerias, gas stations, and recognizable trademarks to make them feel at home, because tourists — it’s the first thing you should know as Admiral of the Ocean Sea and president of the Paradise Administrative Council Inc. — travel to feel they haven’t left home.

He offered me some bitter tea: “Accordingly, we’ve given concessions to very familiar trademarks. You should sign — right here, if you don’t mind — private contracts with each one to avoid difficulties that might arise out of the antimonopoly law of the European Economic Community, which, I add to relieve your conscience, would never have accepted something as greedy as the 1503 Casa de Contratación in Seville.”

Dazed, I signed the various contracts, including clauses relating to fried chicken and soda water, gas stations, motels, pizzerias, ice cream parlors, picture magazines, cigarettes, tires, supermarkets, cameras, cars, yachts, musical instruments, and a list of etceteras longer than the list of titles belonging to the monarchs of Spain for whom I had embarked on my voyage of discovery.

I felt my new world had been covered over by a spiderweb and that I was the poor fly captured at the center, impotent, because, as I’ve already said, living in Paradise was living without consequences.

“Don’t worry. Work with the team. Work with the corporation. Don’t ask who is going to be the owner of all this. No one. Everyone. Trust us: your natives are going to live better than they ever did. And the world will thank you for the Last, the Supreme, the Most Exclusive Resort on the Planet, the New World, the Enchanted Beach Where You and Your Children Can Leave Behind Pollution, Crime, Urban Decay, and Enjoy a Pure Earth, PARADISE INC.”

* * *

I want to shorten this. The landscape is changing. Night and day, an acid smoke flows down my throat. My eyes tear, even when I smile at the hyperactive Mister Nomura, my protector, who has placed at my service a team of samurai who guard me against the people who have threatened me or organized unions and protests. Not long ago they were my friends.

“Remember, Don Cristóbal. We are a corporation for the twenty-first century. Speed and agility are our norms. We avoid offices and bureaucracies; we have no buildings or staff; we rent everything, and that’s it. And when reporters ask you questions about the real owner of Paradise Inc., just say: No one. Everyone. Team spirit, Cristóbalsan, company loyalty, yoga every morning, Valium every night…”

Nomura pointed out that, far from being a restricted place, Paradise Inc. was open to all nations. It’s true: I felt nostalgia looking at the old flags I’d left behind as they arrived on the airships with a horde of tourists eager to enjoy our immaculate waters and our pure air, the whiteness of our beaches and the virginity of our forests. TAP, Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa, Alitalia, BA … The colors of their insignia reminded me, with sweet bitterness, of the courts I’d wandered through, begging support for my enterprise. Now they were like the coats of arms decorating a herd of Pegasus in the field of the Pleiades.

Thousands and thousands of tourists came, and on October 12, dressed in my fifteenth-century clothes, I was paraded around on a float brought from the Carnival of Nice, surrounded by naked Indians (male and female). Now, it’s hardly worth saying, all my clothing comes from Banana Republic. No one bothers me. I’m an institution.

But my nose vainly tries to sniff the invisible highways of the night, when thousands of hidden organisms used to perfume the air to guide the tapir, the deer, the ocelot, and the ounce. But I don’t hear them anymore, don’t smell them either. Only my gray-brown fox with pointy ears stays close to me. The heat of the tropics escapes through those palpitating white ears. The two of us look toward the orange groves that surround us. I wish the fox would understand: the grove, the animal, and I are survivors …

They don’t let anyone near me. They’ve forced me to become fearful. From time to time, I exchange glances with a lanky, dark-skinned Indian girl who fixes my pink-sheeted bed and waters the orchids before leaving. Her eyes are not only wary but hostile and something worse: resentful.

One night, the young Indian maid doesn’t show up. Annoyed, I’m just about to protest. I realize a change has taken place. I become intolerant, comfortable, old … I open the netting that protects my hammock (I’ve retained that delightful custom from my original astonishment) and find stretched out in it a slim young woman the color of honey: stiff as a pencil, only the swaying of the hammock softens her. She introduces herself with verbal and gestural intensity as Ute Pinkernail, native of Darmstadt, Germany. She tells me she’s managed to sneak in by taking the maid’s place, that I’m very protected and don’t know the truth. She stretches out her arms, wraps them around me, and whispers breathlessly, nervously into my ear: “There are six billion people on the planet, the big cities in the East and the West are about to disappear. Asphyxiation, garbage, and plague are burying them. They’ve fooled you. Your paradise is the last sewer for our narrow, packed, beggarly cities without light, without roofs, through which wander thieves, madmen, crowds that talk to themselves, skulking rats, dogs in savage packs, migraines, fevers, vertigoes: a city in ruins, submerged in its own sewage, for the majority; for the smallest minority, there is another, inaccessible city on the heights. Your island is the last sewer, you’ve carried out your destiny, you’ve enslaved and exterminated your people…”

She was unable to go on. The samurai came in shouting, jumping, brandishing submachine guns, violently pulling me away. My veranda was shrouded in dust and noise; everything was bathed in white light, and in one vast, simultaneous instant, the flamethrowers burned up my orange grove, a bayonet pierced the heart of my trained wolf, and Ute Pinkernail’s breasts appeared before my astonished, desiring eyes. The girl’s blood dripped through the weaving in the hammock …

* * *

To live in paradise is to live without consequences. Now I know I’m going to die, and ask permission to return to Spain. First, Mr. Nomura berated me: “You didn’t act like a member of the team, Cristóbal-san. Well, what did you think, that you were going to be able to keep your paradise away from the laws of progress forever? You’ve got to realize that by preserving a paradise you were only magnifying a universal desire to invade it and enjoy it. Try to understand once and for all: there is no paradise without a Jacuzzi, champagne, a Porsche, and a discotheque. No paradise without french fries, hamburgers, sodas, and Neapolitan pizza. Something for everyone. You can’t go around believing in the symbolism of your name, ’Christ-bearer, dove of the Holy Spirit.’ Come back, fly away little dove, and carry your message: Sayonara, Christ; Paradise, Banzai! Wa! Wa! Wa! Conformity! The nail that sticks out will soon be hammered down.”

On the Iberia flight, I’m treated like what I am, a venerable relic: Cristóbal Colón returning to Spain after a five-hundred-year absence. I’d lost all notion of time and space. Now, up in the sky, I recover them. Oh, how I enjoy seeing from up here the trace of my first voyage — in reverse: the oak-covered hills, the strawberry trees, the incredibly fertile soil all under cultivation, the canoes plying the gulf into which seven rivers empty, one of them in a smooth, milk-colored cascade. I look at the sea and the sirens, the leviathans and the amazons shooting their arrows at the sun. And flying over my burned-out orchard, I begin to sense the beaches with shit tides, bloody rags, flies and rats, the acrid sky, and the poisoned water. Will they put the blame for all this on the Jews and the Arabs before expelling them or exterminating them again?

I observe the flight of ducks and ravens, and I feel that our own ship is pushed along by soft trade winds on a variable sea — here it’s as smooth as glass; there, when we’re anchored in the sargasso, it’s sometimes as stormy as it was in the worst moments of the first voyage. I fly near the stars and yet I see only one constellation as night falls. It’s made up of Ute Pinkernail’s magnificent breasts, the teats I was never to touch …

They serve me Freixenet champagne and they give me the magazine Hola to read. I don’t get the drift of the articles. They don’t mean anything to me. I’m on my way back to Spain. I’m going home. In each hand I carry the proof of my origin. In one hand, I clutch the orange seeds. I want this fruit to survive the implacable exploitation of the island. In the other, I carry the frozen key to my ancestral house in Toledo. I’ll go back there to die: a stone house with a sagging roof, a door made of creaking boards that hasn’t been opened since the time of my ancestors, the Jews expelled by pogroms and plagues, fear and death, lies and hatred …

I silently recite the prayer nailed to my chest like a scapulary. I recite it in the language the Jews of Spain kept alive during all eternity, so we would not renounce our home and house:

You, beloved Spain, we call Mother, and during all our lives we will not abandon your sweet language. Even though you exiled us like a stepmother from your breast, we will not cease to love you as a most holy land, the land where our fathers left their families buried and the ashes of thousands of their loved ones. For you we save our filial love, glorious nation; therefore we send you our glorious greeting.

I repeat the prayer, I squeeze the key, I caress the seeds, and I give myself up to a vast sleep over the sea where time circulates like the currents, uniting and relating everything, yesterday’s conquistadors and today’s, reconquests and counterconquests, besieged paradises, pinnacles and decadences, arrivals and departures, appearances and disappearances, utopias of memory and desire … The constant element in this going back and forth is the painful movement of peoples, immigration, escape, hope, yesterday and today.

What shall I find when I return to Spain?

I shall open the door of my home again.

I shall plant the orange seed again.

London, November 11, 1992