Free East, West by Salman Rushdie Page B

the Queen is good.’
    Columbus ponders:
    Does she torment him merely for sport?
    Or: because he is foreign, and she is unused to his ways and meanings.
    Or: because her ring finger, still hot with the memory of his lips his breath, has been – how-you-say? – touched. Yes: tentacles of warmth spread backward from her fingers towards her heart. A turbulence has been aroused.
    Or: because she is torn between the possibility of embracing his scheme with a lover’s abandon, and the more conventional, and differently (maliciously) pleasurable option of destroying him by laughing, finally, after much foreplay, in his foolish, supplicant face.
    Columbus consoles himself with possibilities. Not all possibilities are consoling, however.
    She is an absolute monarch. (Her husband is an absolute zero: a blank, couldn’t be colder. We will not speak further of him.) She is a woman whose ring isoften kissed. It means nothing to her. She is no stranger to flatteries. She resists them effortlessly.
    She is a tyrant, who numbers among her possessions a private menagerie of four hundred and nineteen fools, some grotesquely malformed, others as beauteous as the dawn. He, Columbus, is merely her four hundred and twentieth idiot. This, too, is a plausible scenario.
    Either: she understands his dream of a world beyond the world’s end, and is moved by it, so profoundly that it spooks her, and she turns first towards it, then away;
    Or: she doesn’t understand him at all, nor cares to understand.
    ‘Take your pick.’
    What’s certain is that he doesn’t understand her. Only the facts are plain. She is Isabella, all-conquering Queen. He is her invisible (though raucous, multicoloured, wine-bibbing) man.
    ‘Consummation.’
    The sexual appetites of the male decline; those of the female continue, with the advancing years, to grow. Isabella is Columbus’s last hope. He is running out of possible patrons, sales talk, flirtatiousness, hair, steam.
    Time drags by.
    Isabella gallops around, winning battles, expellingMoors from their strongholds, her appetites expanding by the week. The more of the land she swallows, the more warriors she engulfs, the hungrier she gets. Columbus, aware of a slow shrivelling inside him, scolds himself. He should see things as they are. He should come to his senses. What chance does he have here? Some days she makes him clean latrines. On other days he is on body-washing duty, and after a battle the bodies are not clean. Soldiers going to war wear man-sized diapers under their armour because the fear of death will open the bowels, will do it every time. Columbus was not cut out for this sort of work. He tells himself to leave Isabella, once and for all.
    But there are problems: his advancing years, the patron shortage. Once he decamps, he will have to forget the western voyage.
    The body of philosophical opinion which holds that life is absurd has never appealed to him. He is a man of action, revealing himself in deeds. But without the western voyage he will be obliged to accept the meaninglessness of life. This, too, would be a defeat. Invisible in hot tropical colours, unrequited, he remains, dogging her footsteps, hoping for the ecstasy of her glance.
    ‘The search for money and patronage’, Columbus says, ‘is not so different from the quest for love.’

    — She is omnipotent. Castles fall at her feet. The Jews have been expelled. The Moors prepare their last surrender. The Queen is at Granada, riding at her armies’ head.
    = She overwhelms. Nothing she has wanted has ever been refused.
    — All her dreams are prophecies.
    = Acting upon information received while sleeping, she draws up her invincible battle plans, foils the conspiracies of assassins, learns of the infidelities and corruptions for which she blackmails both her loyalists (to ensure their support) and her opponents (to ensure theirs). The dreams help her forecast the weather, negotiate treaties, and invest shrewdly in trade.
    — She eats