Excerpt
Its skin hung over the bones of its croup and withers like a bed sheet,
but I managed to load itwithmy few belongings without being bitten.
The rules of our Order forbade us to ride on horseback unless
absolutely necessary. I had argued I would manage with a donkey,
but the man organizing the expedition was adamant. So I swallowed
my pride and cracked a smile, accepting the quadruped for the sake
of peace. But I refused to ride the beast, and that was that.
Bartolomé had come ashore and was directing the taking on of
water and supplies in preparation for his own departure. His dark
hair glittered in the early morning sun of the tropics. I thought his
posture rather regal, had it not been for his muscles that a king
would never need. And the scars under his linen shirt. A king
wouldn’t have those either.
I stood a few feet away, waiting for him to finish taking his leave
of Pánfilo and Benjamin, who were both abandoning life at sea to
take their chances on dry land. And then it hit me. It might be the last
time I would ever see him.
The last time we were together, Bartolomé had come to the
monastery for his usual quarterly visit and found me in an agony of
fever. Fray Bernardo had ministered the viaticum; prayers had been
said for my soul. For five days and nights he stayed. Sometimes he
dozed off on a makeshift bed beside mine, and occasionally he woke
me with his snoring, until eventually I was healed.
Between voyages and his studies of cosmography in the Casa de
Contratación, time had flown. And now, here we were, after so much
and so little, parting without the certainty of a rendezvous.
I felt keenly aware of my surroundings, of how strange they were,
as we sat in the sand. By mid-morning the sun was strong, although
a few dark clouds threatened a downpour like the day before. We
felt the wind in our faces, the sun on our backs, the surf drowning
the voices of the men working behind us. I tried to appreciate the
beauty of the place, watching our shadows stretch on the sand
before us, but I felt a hollow in the pit of my stomach, pressure in my
chest. My mouth was dry. The incident with Benjamin still bothered
me, partly because it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.
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