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Never Before Seen
by Chris Sharp
I well remember Christopher Columbus
that morning. Jumping from his long boat into the surf of the one
leg that couldn’t hold him, he fell right on a wave, with the water
pulling his cassock-like hat onto the beach. As he stood from all
that embarrassment we saw his amber hair in its fullness for the first
time.
“I told you,” he said, spitting his words. “We have arrived in
India.”
For some of us the landing was the difference of daylight emerging from
virtual nothingness. For most of the voyage, I was stuck in the bottom
rung of the quarter gallery, with the stench of all the vermin and the
human waste of the Santa Maria festering there. Now it was at
last time to be out, and it felt wonderful.
Finally we had all made it into the open, and the land we sought was at
last coming together. Still, there were those itching to have an
argument with Columbus ever at this moment.
“Sir, I’m afraid that these people are not Indians,” said a perpetually
skeptical officer. “We have a book on board that illustrates what
people from India look like.”
“These are Indians,” Columbus said back. “How does a drawing in a
book compare to a person who is really an Indian? Can there be
any doubt that these are Indians?”
The truth was that nothing was in doubt because credibility itself was
overcome by a new magic. There was truly no doubt of the green
magic of the tropics working on us as we neared the land, the same
abracadabra that can create life out of nothing on a rock in an
isolated pond. For any person who has been looking too long at
the color the sky or the sea or any kind of desert, the power of the
any green grove of trees as seen by us over this new land was enough to
give our whole world an entire new power of distortion.
Not the least of this distortion was the feeling of the extreme
smallness of these natives as they were viewed from the Santa
Maria. But then, as we drew near them in our boats, they became
much larger – even huge -- as we began to feel ourselves becoming the
small ones.
It was their native hospitality that set things right with us.
Even while they were witnessing the first of its kind beachhead in
human history, they feasted and entertained and loved us in every way
possible.
I did my part by finding a native woman that I named in my mind
“Celeste” – and I think I chose that because I have had a good history
with women of that kind of name. I took this woman and held onto
and would not let go of her. This was the manner of the people on
both sides of this great voyage – we simply loved each other for five
days in a way that is practically unheard of among any other people we
knew.
But of course it could not go on. On the sixth day Celeste became
ill.
The carousing ended.
It turned out that Celeste was one of many daughters of the local
chief. It was the chief’s job -- like a queen ant among ants --
to produce royal and outstanding children like Celeste. I do not
wish to say exactly I felt sorry for myself, but of course it was just
my luck that my own woman would be one of the chief’s most
successful children.
Celeste was brought out into a public square on a thatched stretcher
and pulled by the four most muscular men in sight, as she was unable to
move anywhere herself. The shaman looked at her with great
concern, and then turned to the chief with nothing on his face.
The tension thickened as the chief strode away and in a very short time
he brought Christopher Columbus back to look at her.
Columbus stiffened as he looked at her rash and contorted
features. “The Pox,” he said. He turned on his heel and
stepped away. “The Pox has taken this poor innocent woman.
She will not live.”
I am sure that while the natives did not understand what Columbus said,
it was the clearly stricken sound of his broken voices that kept them
from assaulting him and his sailors at that same moment.
It was certainly the broken-up voice coming out of that tired face of
Christopher Columbus that enabled him to continue creating his own
legend in this New World. But whether this was actual sincerity on the
part of Columbus only he would know.
“Somehow we have brought the Pox with us, and now we have carried it to
this innocent world from our poor tired ship,” Columbus went on,
clearly more histrionic than during even the most difficult days of the
journey. “It blemishes my own being here, and I understand that.”
“So what are you planning to do now for these people, Columbus?” I
said, but of course no one could hear me.
No, I am never happy when people talk about me as “the Pox” as if I
were a “The” word, instead of a “Living” word.
But even as “the Pox” I go on living in my different hosts longer than
Columbus. Truly, The Pox has lived longer than anyone who felt he
was doing something so new and original in those first days of America.
The End.
© 2014 Chris Sharp
Bio: Chris Sharp
has several fiction stories in the archives of Every Day Fiction,
Yesteryear Fiction, Linguistic Erosion and Weirdyear as well as
Aphelion. He lives in Menifee, California with his wife Debbie
Bongiovanni-Sharp. His latest Amazon book is “How to Like a Human
Being.”
E-mail: Chris Sharp
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