Yiddish for Pirates(65)

Early next morning Pinzón comandeered the Pinta. He would put his own gilded island on the charts, his own hand into the open jar of the Caribbean. He would sail back to trumpets, parades, fame, and hereditary wealth and power. He would write his own chapter in the history books,

And with the persuasive eloquence of an arquebus, he press-ganged Moishe.

“Board the Pinta,” Pinzón commanded. “You must tend to our pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento. He suffers.” The Pinta’s surgeon was only help for the removals of either blood or limb and the Santa María’s physician himself lay below deck in a hypnogogic fever, yammering mishegoss about the hairy backs of sailors being sucked by teams of spine-hungry leeches and the heated mouths of glass cups.

And so Moishe, who had assisted physicians aboard Mediterranean ships and as we sailed from Spain, had helped administer salves, bloodletting, and, to be plain, medicines slippery as snakeoil became great khan of the medicine chest.

Moishe, a doctor? His mother would have been so proud.

The pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento, was splayed on a pallet below deck on the Pinta, the air fetid and constellated with flies.

“Drink,” Moishe said and unstoppered a bottle of Madeira, pouring it between Xalmiento’s dry and trembling lips.

“Jacome,” Moishe called. “We must carry him on deck. He needs new air.”

“Better to whore with a holeless mermaid as to think him salvageable,” Jacome spat.

“Take his legs,” Moishe instructed.

“Better to toss the neargone overboard and feed me the wine,” Jacome said, but still, he hove on Xalmiento’s legs and helped.

Optimism and the open air, and not a frank diagnosis, appeared the best medicine for the man and he soon began to moan. Which was improvement. To feel close to death after feeling nothing was convalescence.

And to kvetch about it meant recovery was likely. Soon he would sing opera and wrest anchors from the seafloor with his teeth.

Pinzón strode about the deck, surveying his mutinous duchy. He was admiral of this floating nutshell yet considered himself king of infinite space: what was undiscovered was boundless and filled with possibility.

All about the ship, the crew was ministering to sheets and yardarms while Moishe in the bow herded Xalmiento away from fever. Pinzón went aft to his cabin. Through the small window, I saw him heave a book from chest to table.

I knew it by the pattern of its cover. We had carried this text from Lisbon—from one Columbus to another. Pinzón had thieved not only boat but book. Onboard were two of the five which spoke of the Fountain. Moishe must find means to poke his nose between the broad flanks of this tome. Such knowledge was power.

The Pinta sailed in search of a new island. Pinzón certainly sought gold. The yellow teeth of his acquisitive grin seemed to desire a grille-work of the stuff. But perhaps he, too, sought, immortality or to become its gatekeeper.

Soon he was back at the binnacle directing the helmsman toward a distant shadow.

An island.

The native people had seen the white flukes of our sails rising from the horizon. They had gathered on the beach as if awaiting the arrival of a Leviathan or emperor. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder with little more than plaited reed loinclothes mantling their scrolls. Several wore headdresses of feathers and shells, some held gourd bowls filled with fruit, coloured stones and feathers.

Mariners and philosophers regularly state that such newly encountered natives are handsome, as if one could say that noses, beauty and nobility existed in equal quantity among all members of a people. Surely there’s always an Auntie Faygel or a Zaiydee Shmuel with a nose like a tableau from Exodus played out on an anthill. But nu, these people were impressive pieces of bronze. Bright coins on the sand: their skin more lustrous than our sailors’ pockdotted and leathered parchment; their strong bodies, the muscled arms and chests of the men, the smooth torsos and naked breasts of the women.

Ach. Perhaps these are but overheated words from the ajar mouths of Pinzón’s gawking sailors for each member of this mutinous crew was now a sail billowing full with the Zephyrous thrill of recklessness in a kvelling gale of ambition and freedom. Each thought himself his own admiral, cut lose from the halyards of society, travelling into the unwritten margins.

Each man, now individual, thought himself impressive. The great canoe of our caravel growing into the barque of a giant as it rose from beyond the horizon, our vast mainsail like the banner of an advancing army entering a city, emblazoned with a green cross: F for Ferdinand, Y for Ysabella, large as trees surmounted with crowns broad as horses.

Pinzón: “We arrive from the East like the rising sun bringing light to the dark unknowing, these uncivilized lands on the fringes of Cipangu, Cathay, and the territories of the Great Khan. Here, each of us shall be as an emperor or king.”

Of course, to the islanders we may have appeared as monkeys dressed up in silks. A hundred monkeys typing Shakespeare would seem to them to be chattering gibberish. Though they would have been impressed by the typewriters.

We dropped anchor and the men rowed to shore, sacks filled with tchatchkes, the swag of visiting gods. Moishe was in the second boat, and I travelled on his leeward shoulder. We stood like rock stars awaiting special effects: Pinzón in his furs and silk breeches, some of the men in metal breastplates, ready to stride into the Promised Land or to re-enter Eden.