Read Online Waiting For Columbus by Thomas Trofimuk - Free Book Online

bed and stands beside him. Beatriz is terrified of spiders and this is what’s going through her mind. The size of this spider must be substantial.
    “The chart! I placed a chart there. Under the blankets. I put it there to make it flat.”
    “Under the blankets?”

    It’s almost ruined. The blood in the bed and on the chart is menstrual. They use a cloth with water to try and lift some of the red stain off. Both of them get down on the floor and dab at it but it’s useless. They smudge the lines. The chart, according to Columbus, was created by an old mariner named Zuane Pizzigano in the 1420s. It shows a small cluster of four islands far off in the Western Sea. Regardless of the fact that no one had ever confirmed these islands existed, Columbus was thrilled to find them situated so far out into the darkness. These islands are now tinged a reddish brown. While the chart is stained, it still has value. They hang it on a rod near the window and scamper for the bed. It’s cool and humid in the room. Under the covers, they hug each other warm. There is only the sound of thunder, leagues away, and a dripping sound, and a dog barking, and the sound of the moon behind the clouds reflected in a puddle.

    They had televisions, she thinks, in the fifteenth century? Consuela leans forward, quizzical. She does not want to appear confrontational, so keeps her voice uplifted. “So, Columbus was … you were flipping channels?”
    “And there were many, many channels. But not much of it was interesting.”
    “You’re saying there was television in the fifteenth century. Does that make sense to you, Columbus?”
    “Everybody knows this, Consuela. Have you not read Zimmerman? Zimmerman references this repeatedly in his dissertation on fifteenth-century domestic commonalities. What’s your point?”
    He’s left her nowhere to go. She has no idea who Zimmerman is. And really, what does it matter that he imports televisions into a story that is set five hundred years in the past? But if she were trusting the
tale
and not the
teller
, like the saying suggests, she’d have some serious problems, because this tale is a crazy, mish-mashed, time-crossed slip down a rabbit hole. And the teller is, of course, institutionalized.
    “Was it color or black-and-white?” she says hesitantly.
    “Was what color or black-and-white?”
    “Nothing.”

    He has finished his morning swim and is taking coffee outside, in the shade of a massive holm oak. Consuela slept in. She was not there for his early-morning swim. She arrived at work in a panic of apology and moved quickly into high gear. This quick coffee and check on Columbus was her first pause. Columbus clears his throat, something he does whenever he’s going to tell another story. Consuela isn’t sure how to take these rambling tales. For her, the details of his stories are remarkable. The clarity with which he paints these word pictures is sometimes quite marvelous. She sometimes finds herself caught beyond redemption, so enthralled that she
wants
to believe him. Something denied inside her yearns to believe him.
    She came onto the patio deck and saw him hopping up and down on one foot, tilting his head back and forth. Sunlight slices through the high branches of the holm in the center of the courtyard, and the upper branches move in the breeze. The sunlight speckles the ground where Columbus continues to hop. What now? What gimmick or scheme is this? What’s he up to? He stops hopping when he sees her and smiles. He is genuinely pleased to see her. Is she reading something that isn’t there? “Got water in my ear. Won’t come out,” he says.

    He clears his throat again. “He, Cristóbal Colón, realizes he has always been a bit insecure with women, and at the same time he loves the fleshy union. He adores this woman, Beatriz. He loves her. But he doesnot marry her. Columbus will not make the promises of marriage. Not when there is a chance that he may in fact sail across the