He named the place Kuba, which is what the natives — who appeared to greet him from beyond the green jungle drapery — said it was called. And what the Germans, fond of the letter K, still call it. The Admiral napped in a hammock strung between a palm and a paw-paw, tired after such a long journey, lulled by the syncopated crash of waves and the sultry and healthful air, happy in his own genius and exactly where he wanted to be. True beauty and the unknown are alike, in having no precedents. You recognize them when you see them, if you have such a gift of seeing. Numeric calculations are no match for life’s unrest. Far superior is knowing the world is a pear, a violin, a breast. By such poetic and razor precision, the Admiral mapped an unmappable world.
2
They cooked his toes separate from the rest of the stew. With the toes severed from the feet, the Admiral could not tromp inland and subjugate the island. He couldn’t tromp inland anyhow, because they’d punctured his body with arrows dipped in deadly manchineel sap. When the natives attacked, the Admiral had instinctively pulled out his shaving mirror and reflected sunlight at them. But the natives were not as crude as the Admiral had suspected. They’d known how to make mirrors since the Neolithic age, with self-polishing obsidian. The Admiral was wading through a sulfuric bog, trying to run away, when they ambushed him. Soon after, his body simmered over a fire of mangrove charcoal, in a soup that bubbled and steamed. They weren’t driven to eat him out of hunger — this was the Tropics, bountiful with sea animals and wild fruits, and the living was easy. When the meat was tender, the Tribe Taster had a bite. He said, in a language now lost, that the Admiral tasted like rubber bands. Two men and a boy dumped the enormous pot on its side and bones and meat and broth sluiced onto the red clay earth. They carefully extinguished the fire and vacated their cooksite. What was dumped from the pot, leftovers spoiling and reheating in the sunlight, was eaten by wild pigs. The French Poet, who came later in this history, believed that noxious animals were the embodiment of man’s evil thoughts. This man’s evil thoughts lapped him up, flesh, femur, and marinade.
The Queen was anxious for the Admiral’s return. Not only for the feedback, which meant bounty from the exploration, in a time when this imperialist meaning was the only meaning the term “feedback” had, but to satisfy her desire. The pomp and expense of the Admiral’s voyage to the Orient had seemed a kind of elaborate foreplay between the two of them. In circling the earth the Admiral was circling her breast with his slim, Portuguese fingers. And the circling of the breast was only a prologue to other, more irreversible acts. Meanwhile, the Cardinal had forgotten all about the Admiral, preoccupied with other jewelry, sharper and more elaborate, for other dandies, braver and more attentive than the Admiral had been, who never even thanked the Cardinal for his yellow diamond ring.
The Queen was washed-over with desire, remembering the Admiral’s shining black eyes, his broom-heavy lashes sweeping down and then up again as he’d requested the gold. The Admiral had put his head in her lap after he told her, passionately, of the earth’s true shape. She’d resisted the urge to push his face into the bunting and toile of her skirt. She thought of him and squeezed her legs together. The King asked her what she was doing and she said nothing. For days on end she crossed her legs and squeezed them tight, thinking of that moment, the Admiral’s face resting in her lap, wishing she’d pushed him toward her, into the layers of toile and gauze and bunting. He would have capitulated, she knew. Anything for the voyage.
But all that was left of the Admiral was the yellow diamond ring. Like most gifts in the history of gift giving, objects whose meanings are lost on recipients, the ring had gone straight to the Symbolic Junkyard of Forsaken Gifts. The Cardinal had looked at the Admiral and the Admiral had looked at his map. Now, the ring’s yellow diamonds coruscated in the thick, tropical light, tied to a string dangling from the end of a pole.
Her Highness received his first letter from the island weeks after the Admiral died, his toes cooked separate from the rest of the meal the natives discarded. The Admiral, having understood that all elements of discovery had a price tag and would save his reputation and ensure the financing of future expeditions, had marketed the place like a twenty-dollar whore. Everything was usable, sellable, smeltable, shippable, eatable, drinkable, smokable, wearable. He even claimed that the flocks of cantankerous parrots blotting out the blue of the sky were the tastiest flesh he’d ever sunk his teeth into. He yanked out their iridescent feathers and sawed off their emerald green wings, and cooked them unseasoned over a smoky fire just to prove his point. There wasn’t much meat on a parrot, and the flesh was slightly bitter. “Armpit acidic” is how the Tribe Taster would have described its flavor, before he and his tribe were annihilated. Nonetheless, parrot eating was later considered the utmost in sophistication among the Spanish who built their colonial courts on the hills above the white lagoons. The aristocrats trained the parrots to hurl insults at them, and thereby a grand pantomime of insult and injury was played out, a kind of dinner theater. Parricide is murdering someone to whom you owe reverence. This was not parricide. The birds, to whom the Spanish owed nothing, spoke profanely and deserved to be punished, and their death elevated the vulgar ceremony of eating to the noble proceedings of justice.
The purest of maps is the treasure map — the essence of cartography, its ethanol. With the riches of this unexpected island mapped out, the Queen sent expedition after expedition, consoling herself by neutralizing the Admiral’s memory as one name lost in a long list of explorers who curried her favor and went East. Or West, as it turned out. But the riches that scended over the waves of the Dark Ocean arrived on the Dark Continent with an unintended gift from beyond the green jungle drapery: syphilis. The Queen was its first mainland victim, but she spread it amply before expiring. In Second Empire Paris, where it was rampant, they called this disease “flâneur’s curiosity.” But it wasn’t simply a disease, a tropical so-called malady. It was phantom testimony of the Europeans’ taste for suffering, infection and luxury. The Second Empire Poet, in his rose gloves and bloody cravat, said the man unthirsty for the consolations of pockmarked, disease-ridden women was a harp with no bass string. This was a later era, when the taste for luxury, suffering and infection was better understood. The Poet himself loved pockmarked women. “I feel sorry,” he said, “for the man who does not.”
3
Goodbye tropical traveler! they called, waving. It was a small crowd that had accompanied her to the Lake City train platform. She lifted up her petticoats and stepped onto the scuff grate. She was light. It was the gown that was heavy. Flounces with three hundred dollars worth of gold coins sewn into the hems, like the jeweled bridal corset of a Romanov heiress. Her name was light as welclass="underline" Aloha Oe. Like a shrimp chip, a tuft of cloud-pink cotton candy. A word that meant hello, and also goodbye. The people on the platform waved goodbye as the train rolled slowly east.
The idea was born in the tractor beam of a Kinetoscope, a cylinder of dusty light that splashed onto a linen screen at Lake City’s newly built Palace of Moving Actualities, one of only three in the entire state of Colorado. Aloha saw bleached flickering images of the streets of Havana: black shadows on a white wall and men in rumpled duck suits and Panama hats. Then Theodore Roosevelt posing for the camera before he turned to charge up a hill. The film cut to natives working for the United Fruit Company, chomping on fibrous sugar cane and putting chilled custard apples in what seemed to be their underwear. To cool themselves while they worked, was Aloha’s educated guess. She’d seen the painted transparencies of stereorama, panorama, zoopraxiscope — hardly wonders compared with the dusty, marvelous light splashing on the linen screen. It was like watching her own dreams. As if she’d dreamed about the Spanish losing the war and this dank paradise opening, the new version of the Western frontier. The distance between her and the palm shadows on a white wall, the giant stalks of bananas violently hacked from the trees and thudding to the earth, the men putting chilled custard apples in their underwear, was the distance between a place on a map and a slab of actual land, surrounded by a foamed crepe of waves. Or wood and wood grain alcohol. Things that were vastly different and yet linked. The light splashing on the screen, almost a déjà vu, tricked her into getting on a train, then another train, then a boat that floated the bluish purple gulf stream to the Caribbean.