Waiting For Columbus (2 page)

“I’ll let Dr. Fuentes know you’re awake.”

“Yes, let your doctor know that I’m hungry, and I have to piss, and I’m not crazy.”

She shuts the door—the click echoes in the stone hallway. Consuela walks past the admitting desk and around the corner to Dr. Fuentes’s office. She knocks on his door. Waits. Knocks again.

The door squeaks open, slowly. “Yes. What is it?” He says this with the proclivity of someone who has been doing something frustrating and this intrusion is the icing on the annoyance cake. Dr. Fuentes is a tall, clean-shaven man who is a fastidious bureaucrat. He’s just been appointed chief of staff at the institute. Consuela is honestly uncertain about his skills as a doctor.

He holds the door open with one hand and fumbles with his lab-coat buttons with the other. The sound of a chair scraping on a tiled floor comes from inside the office.

“Patient 9214 is awake.” Consuela decides she does not want to know who else is in there. Damnit! She hates stuff like this—office politics. Knowing the human contents of Doctor Fuentes’s office would put her in the middle of something. There was no scraping sound, she tells herself. It was nothing. There was no scraping.

“Thank you.” The doctor releases the door but catches it immediately. “Wait. Is he still sedated?” She nods. Fair enough. There was no way to know for sure if this new patient was going to explode again or if he was done.

Consuela wakes up at her usual time, thinking about this patient who wanted her to call a king and queen who’ve been dead for nearly five hundred years, on a telephone. She’s intrigued. Regardless of his
ranting, she liked the color of his voice. It sounded like burnt sienna, and at the bottom, the color and texture of fine sand.

She does not work today, and so she grinds the coffee beans, boils water, and makes a leisurely French press. She pushes the kitchen window open and is immediately aware of the difference in the quality of air. It never really cooled off overnight. The air-conditioning in her flat is now at cross-purposes with this open window. The warm, dry air pushes up against the cool, forced air of her apartment.

She’s been moving around her apartment, waiting for sunrise on the Guadalquivir. This riverside flat has been her home for six years and sunrise is one of the benefits. She loves her mornings with the fine, dusty-orange color inching its way up her walls. This apartment came with a wall of bookshelves in the living room, which Consuela had no problem filling. She added two more stand-alone shelves in her bedroom. She pauses this morning in front of a row of her to-read books—books she’s bought because of a review, a mention in another book, or a recommendation, or because the cover spoke to her. She pauses at Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
. She runs her finger down the spine
of Riddley Walker
. She tilts a book called
Tropisms and the Age of Suspicion
by Nathalie Sarraute as if to slide it off the shelf—this was a recent addition, found in a bookstore in Madrid, bottom of a pile, hideously ugly cover but there was something about the title. She eventually picks Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
. But decides mornings are not for starting novels. She takes the Bulgakov into her bedroom—places it on the bedside table.

In the kitchen, she opens the newspaper and immediately wants a cigarette. The coffee, the newspaper, and the time spark a memory of smoking. Four years of not smoking and still the cravings come. Less frequently now, but still. Consuela performs a mental checklist of the places where she’s stashed cigarettes in the past. Ridiculous because her stashes have long since been pillaged or abandoned. She knows, positively, there are no secret stashes of cigarettes in her flat. But she remembers where they used to be.

The sparrows are playing in the orange trees and palms along the river. Flirting with the dark river, thrilled at the prospect of light, as if they have the most ridiculously brief memories and sunrise is always an excited surprise. Do birds remember days? There are no clouds in this pink-tinged, predawn sky. It will likely be another blistering hot day.

It seems the front section of her newspaper is always about bombings and killings and scandals. The ramifications of bombings and killings. Accusation of scandals, and the fear of more actual bombings. Consuela flips to the entertainment section where there are movies, some stupidly violent and even one about bombings—this makes her smile a bit—but for the most part, the news here is pleasant. In fact, it’s not really news at all.

Consuela pushes the French-press plunger and pours herself a mug of coffee. She looks across the river, across the city, and wonders what it was like five hundred years ago, before the New World was discovered by Europeans, before Columbus sailed out of Palos. Why would this new patient go there? Why Columbus? Why not Genghis Khan or one of the Roman emperors, or keeping with Spain, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, or Ferdinand of Aragon? Christopher Columbus doesn’t seem like much fun. Obsessed with the prospect of discovery. Desperate for people to believe him. Pigheaded to the point of ignoring all those absolutely correct scholars who repeatedly told him that China was too far—that he’d never make it. Not fun.

She takes a big gulp of coffee. Ah, we don’t pick our delusions, she thinks.

Consuela can’t tell if she actually knows about Columbus, or if she’s simply half recalling the Hollywood renditions of Columbus from the movies about him.

“God, I could use a cigarette,” she says to the sun as it pushes its way onto the river, into the sky, and splashes yellow into her eyes.

Consuela wasn’t at that first meeting, but she could see the change in her patient. Columbus went from lucid and slightly outlandish to frenzied and implausible—from conversational to incoherent. Must have been a hell of a session. Afterward, it seems he truly went mad inside a steady, overprescribed lineup of sedatives and antipsychotics, some of which were so obscure that Consuela had to look them up. They threw everything and anything at Columbus to keep him quiet, harmless, and sedate. Columbus refused to wear clothing. At most, when in the hallways and gardens and courtyards, he wore a robe. He just didn’t care. In his room, he was naked, always. He spent days and weeks as a drooling idiot in a corner of his room, slumped over and muttering to himself. He would stare at the stone wall, rock back and forth, and mutter, “Ships to sea. Ships to sea. This is me. This is me. Ships to
sea! Me! Me!ME!”
This became his mantra—this, and his constant inquiries as to what day it was. The passage of time was important to Columbus. He was diligent about it—obsessive. Even when he was hazy on some new adjustment to his meds, he found a way to know what day it was and how long he’d been at the institute.

The orderlies dreaded going into this cell.
Room
. They dreaded going into this room. Dr. Fuentes insists his staff call the cells rooms. They’re far more like cells than rooms, but the doctor is the boss. Patient 9214 was crafty and fast. Further, he hadn’t weakened. At least, not physically. When they had to get in to clean or check on Columbus, Consuela would dope him up on as much diazepam as she could safely administer. Even then, while slower, he was still dangerous. He was always good for one crazy lunge or kick. There were times, in the weeks following his arrival, when Consuela had to swallow fear as she looked at him; she had to will herself to be calm, to breathe with long, even inhalations. She remembers being scared silly.

Up until a few weeks ago, Consuela did not go into his room unless she was with an orderly. Those first few days, when he was restrained, she was fine being alone in the room. But after the restraints came off, he
was unpredictably violent. He’d been incoherent, with occasional bouts of lucidity and a lot of gibberish. Even now he still strikes out with a righteous violence, and his resolve to escape is emphatic. Columbus wants to go to sea. This is clear from his babble. Apparently something horrible will happen out there. Something only he can stop. There are days when Consuela wonders if she should just tell him how the real Christopher Columbus has already made the journey to the New World—that it’s all been discovered. And it wasn’t exactly India or Japan. It was more, a dangerous wasteland filled with risk—not exactly profitable. Not much gold. Some interesting birds. A lot of land for the taking. The real Christopher Columbus has been to the New World and returned. But she thinks that telling this story would be mean. This man does no harm by believing himself to be Christopher Columbus.

For the remainder of April and all of May, Columbus is a testing ground for antipsychotic drug regimens. Near the end of May, Dr. Fuentes announces his engagement to the nurse who was very likely in his office that April day. Sergio, one of the better orderlies, dies in a climbing accident in the mountains at the beginning of June. And Consuela carries on as usual. She continues to date but finds most men uninteresting after a few hours of telling lies over dinner. Once the thin veneer of genuinely interesting wears off, Consuela escapes into drinking too much wine, which eventually leads to her saying something true—usually brutal and true. And, confronted by blunt truth, most men run screaming from the room. Second dates for Consuela were rare.

June 25 is Consuela’s birthday. When she arrives at work, she looks through the barred hatch at the man who has only a number in her world, though he does have a name for himself. Officially she refers to this man as patient 9214. Unofficially he is, of course, Christopher Columbus.

Consuela stops in front of the door to patient 855’s room in D
wing. Inside is the pope—at least, a patient who thinks she’s the pope. Rather optimistic to think there could actually be a female pope in the first place, and of course, she is not the pope.

Regardless of the odds against there ever being a female pope, Consuela likes this one. Pope Cecelia the First. There is a regal gentleness about her. Consuela likes chatting with her, is always blessed by her, and certainly does not mind kissing her ring every time she enters or leaves the room. She’s not sure if this is what happens with the real pope. Do people kiss his ring? Is kissing somebody’s ring the highest form of respect?

Consuela opens the door. “Good morning, Your Holiness.”

“Oh, good morning, dear. Bless you. Bless you.”

The pope is wearing two housecoats and an ornate purple smoking jacket. She smiles her gap-toothed smile at Consuela. Ashen skin, sandy-gray hair. She stretches out her hand and Consuela recognizes her cue.

She takes her leave of the pope and checks again on Columbus.

He’s sleeping soundly. The light in the room is faint but she can see a few strands of gray hair across his pillow. Consuela pushes the viewing portal door shut and turns around. She shakes her head, partly with pity and partly with admiration at his dogged, undaunted determination. In his almost lucid moments, he has never wavered from his story. He is Christopher Columbus, and his mission in life is to venture out onto the Western Sea, straight across the dark ocean, until he finds a route to the East Indies and China. He is going to find a new way to acquire the much-needed spices from the East. Even inside his drug-induced state, his babbling confirms this obsession.