The Discoveries of Mrs. Christopher Columbus by Paula DiPerna

Author:Paula DiPerna
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023917
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

Chapter Thirteen

The End of Portugal

At times, giving voice to one’s fears diffuses them, like finding out that the shadow on a window is not an intruder, but just a branch shifting in the wind. Yet at other times, speaking of fears gives them life and authority. Then retreat is very difficult. I therefore remained silent about the Enterprise idea, and who had had it first.

I had no thought of going to Spain, certainly not then. And since most of what happened there to my husband is by now well known, I shall recount only those events that pertain to me.

Armed with his correspondence from Toscanelli, the Admiral left for Seville, stopping en route to visit with several of my cousins who had left Portugal when insinuations against my family’s loyalty were at their peak. I wrote the Admiral letters of introduction, and he slipped them into his black velvet portfolio without reading them. He would live in Spain on the money we had put aside to defray the costs of the Enterprise. And he promised he would let me know as soon as he received sovereign backing, and that we would sail.

“I’m sorry you won’t be coming with me,” he whispered the night before he left, as we lay in bed.

“If mother were feeling more well,” I began, but then the Admiral kissed me full on the lips. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, he filled with wanting. He rolled his body on mine, and exhausted all his power inside me in a gasp of final pleasure.

I had long since given up discussing children with my husband. He had seemed so adamantly opposed, and all the preparations for meeting the King had deterred me as well, drowning my womanly yearning in the splendor of the Enterprise and the notion that fulfillment could be found in something else.

But now if the idea was no longer mine, if now the Enterprise was a moribund matter in Portugal?

“Perhaps I’ll join you in Spain,” I had said to the Admiral, the morning he was to leave.

“Perhaps you’ll have reasons not to travel,” he answered giving me a long tender kiss on the lips. I remembered the night before.

Did he now want a child?

When the Admiral left Lisbon, we both understood that he might be gone for a very long time. But, there was little choice for me, for love is the most complex of human emotions and I loved the Admiral with all of my heart. He embraced me one last time and stepped into the round rocky carriage that would carry him across the brown-gold fields of my country to Spain.

I had not been alone in Lisbon since my days in the convent, when the city sat beyond the stone and ivy walls, within sight but beyond reach, and it was an odd experience to be without my husband, whose ambitions had been my compass for so long.

When Nicola returned to Lisbon, not long after he left,

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