Yiddish for Pirates(50)

I’m a feygeleh parrot who has sailed many seas and travelled in many languages. How would Columbus’s greeting sound to the Great Khan?

I translate:

“Great Khan, or Lesser Khan, or Hardly-Khan-at-All, I am Brother Christopher and I was in the neighbourhood. Are you happy with your civilization? I bring Good News. Also, I am here to trade some magic beans for precious things, or else, ransack your house.”

Torquemada and Isabella heard only Jesus, gold, glory, Jerusalem. And, “Portugal, you conquer the world in your way; we conquer it in His.”

And: “first.”

And: “more.”

Columbus did not wait for a response but launched into a disquisition on distances, ancient Greeks and ocean currents.

“You could run a sword through their bodies,” Torquemada said, suddenly emerging from his chiliastic stupor. “Though it might puncture or slice, it would not injure their hinkypink souls,” he said, grinning like a chimp. “They have no souls.”

“Who?” Isabella asked.

“Heathens.”

“But, Padre, should we not wish to baptize them?”

“I hope thereby to win new lands for the Holy Church,” Columbus said.

“And I believe all people to be human,” Isabella said.

These words were fighting words then. A colourless green idea sleeping all over Europe, full of sound and fury, but, ultimately, signifying nothing.

Or, signifying plenty if you were a slave.

Isabella continued. “And some of these humans, our Lord God has chosen to allow to serve us.”

Exactly.

Who wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would sell some of its members? A barbecue joint that calls its ingredients “patrons”?

“And,” she said, “these humans, we must teach as children.”

“Then, Su Majestad,” Columbus interjected, “allow me to discover these kindling gardens for Spain. I will achieve glory, gold, new land, souls, and good servants.”

“These people cannot be human if being human is to mean anything at all. To be human is to have a soul. To be rational. To understand that there must be a Pater, Filius and a Spiritus Sanctus,” Torquemada said. “Most—such as the Africans—are, at best, human in part only.”

Columbus turned to Isabella. “Su Majestad,” he said. “These many years, I have been petitioning your illustrious Majesties. The Reconquista has been accomplished, the Jews sent into exile. If there is to be a time for Columbus, before there is no more time in this world, surely this is that time.”

He went down on one knee. “I am your humble servant, he who will bring you gold, the passage to India, the new edge of the world, great wealth, and much land, yet he who will seek, if he must, the patronage of another crown if the splendid double crown of Spain wishes to wait for the future to wash ashore like seaweed and wet sticks. Su Majestad, I believe it is God’s will that a caravel and its courageous captain should sail the new sea. We wait now only for the King and Queen.”

“Se?or Columbus, we thank you for your words, for your ardent faith, your pressing enthusiasm, your sometime loyalty,” Isabella said. “As you well know, some months ago, the King and I convened a council to discuss your plea. These learned and Godly men have decided that, though your many words stir our imagination, what is unknown is too much not known. We have watched the world unfold as you talk your way around the globe, but the calculations of our council—astronomers, astrologers, cartographers, mathematicians, cosmologists, priests, bishops, navigators, scholars, those with knowledge of the ancients and the lands and distances in their books—make the Ocean Sea a moon away and not some few Canary-distances as you promise. You could wish to travel to the sky with a jump, but, unless your legs were mountains or you had a map charting where the high blue reached close, no words could take you there, and no king or queen could, even if willing, finance such a leap.

“Se?or Columbus, we ask you to leave Santa Fe. Do not tarry, but go now. Your story here has reached its conclusion. It ends on this soil, not on a field lit by the sun’s far side and furrowed by Amazons.”

Columbus stood. “Su Majestad,” he said with simple dignity. He did not back away from the Queen, mincing into retreat, but turned and strode calmly from the room. For once, he had calculated perfectly. His full and brimming hopes in a slop bucket carried with poise and calibration as he walked steadily out of the door.

All were silent as the topography of the stairs was told by the waning tale of Columbus’s footfalls.

A broch tsu Columbusn. A curse on Columbus. A brocheh. A blessing.

Then a wheezy hyena sawblade of a laugh from Torquemada’s pious hole, his snail tongue pressed against his palate as he rocked back and forth in the chair and hissed. Not all people were human.

Throughout the scene, the painter had continued painting, the second smaller Isabella gazing steadfastly out from the canvas. The real Isabella posing in imitation of her portrait. Staid. Stolid. Regal.

Then a flash of colour from the back wall. Limbs suddenly moving. A luffing cape. A baggywrinkle coming alive from the distant horizon of pages. A single tree from Birnam forest sprinting toward Dunsinane.

A flashing flying fish of a blade.

Some vants nobody boychik, only the down of a duck’s tuches on his chin, attempting to pay his respects to the inside of the Queen with a knife.