Chapter VII
Making Ends Meet
The Dire Unction of Prophecy

. . . me temo que yo no sea bien entendido.
Christopher Columbus, 1501.

Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor General of Islands and Mainlands of Asia and the Indies, had his last ride on a mule. Simple as that may sound, it was neither effortless nor an unquestionable given. It was the least problematic of the available means to make his way to court, in Segovia at the time. Travel on horseback for the Admiral was out of the question. Forty years at sea made that exertion physically impossible. Columbus returned to Seville in November of 1504 from his fourth and final voyage, which included being marooned for one year and five days on the island of Jamaica. The fiftythree-year-old mariner's body was wracked with gout and arthritis that made even Andalusia's temperate clime unbearable. The jostling of a horse's gait would be excruciating. In a letter to his son Diego, dated 28 November 1504 and still preserved in the Admiral's hand in Seville's Archivo General de Indias (Patronato, 295:51), Columbus alludes to an alternate form of transport. He writes, "Si me escrives, vayan las cartas a Luis de Soria porque me las enbíe al camino donde yo fuere, porque si voy en andas será creo por la Plata [If you write to me, direct the letters to Luis de Soria so that he can send them to me wherever I might be on the road, because if I go by bier, it will be, I believe, by way of La Plata]."^[1] This was the easiest road to Valladolid where Spain's itinerant court was quartered at the moment. The "bier" Columbus refers to was a magnificent funeral catafalque on wheels that

had recently transported to Seville the corpse of Spain's Grand Cardinal, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, from the monastery of Tentudia. Columbus had solicited the use of that regal contraption from the Cathedral chapter of Seville and, two days before he writes to Diego, permission had been granted. That was on 26 November, the same day that, unbeknownst to Columbus, Queen Isabel died. For reasons of inclement weather and aggravated ill health (vid. Letter of 1 December 1504), Columbus discarded the surreal idea of having his ailing body rolled on a funeral litter across the plains of Castille. In the same batch of letters in the Archivo General de Indias, there is one dated 21 December 1504, also in the Admiral's hand, in which Columbus requests of his son Diego at court that "if, without much trouble, a permit for travelling on muleback could be obtained, I would endeavor to depart for where you are after January, and I will do so even without it. One cannot hasten enough to see that the Indies are not lost, as they are. [Si sin importunar se obiese licencia de andar en mula, yo trabajaría de partir para allá pasado Henero, y ansí lo haré sin ella. Puriende non se dese de dar priesa porque las Indias non se pierdan, como hazen]."^[2] January's "cold" immobilized his body, as he repeatedly complains. On 23 February 1505, King Ferdinand grants the necessary license to travel by mule, "the only favor he ever showed Columbus," according to Samuel Eliot Morison's reading of that ambivalent relationship.^[3] Travel by mule had been forbidden to all but women and the clergy by a royal edict of 1494. The prohibition came about at the instance of the Andalusian horse breeders who, citing the scarcity of mounts for the knights-errant of the crusade against Granada two years earlier, sought to increase demand and production. Columbus thus made the three-hundred-mile trek from Seville to Segovia, where the court sat at the time, in May of 1405. A year later, still moving with the itinerant court, Columbus will be in Valladolid where, on Ascension Day, 20 May 1506, a Wednesday, his ailing body succumbs. Death overtakes his pilgrimage even as he tenaciously pursues what he believes are just ends and labors "to see that the Indies are not lost."

I rehearse the circumstances of Columbus's "last ride" in order

to highlight the turn of fortune in the Admiral's itinerary, a turn that still retains something of the cosmological sublime from one of the most remarkable careers, but also one that partakes of certain elements of pathos and the ridiculous, thus giving Columbus a greater dimension of humanity than ever. At the end of the day, the Admiral's circumstances speak of an unbreachable gap between the rhetorical formulations, born of a prophetic vision, that gave the enabling ideology of the enterprise of the Indies its conquering impetus and the rather pathetic quandary of the ideology's paradigmatic proponent and earliest practitioner. Having overtaken the ends of the Earth, more earthly ends overtake Columbus. In the process, the ideological enablements and their rhetorical screens with which he is identified fall decidedly out of synchrony with the newly emerged realities. Modified ideological forms and new rhetorical formulations become necessary to suit a new phase of imperial ends and to legitimate a new set of conquering means. By the end of his third voyage, Columbus has more than a premonition that his vision, at once prophetic and pragmatic, no longer coincides with imperial sights set on incorporation of "the other world," not as apocalyptic interlude for eschatological ends, but as hegemonic prelude to colonialist means. This does not mean that prophetic vision and its rhetorical formations outlive their usefulness as instruments of a conquering ideology. On the contrary, as we have seen, the same repertoire of discursive strategies is deployed more than a century later in Virginia and in New England for ends materially not different or differently articulated in the language of their pursuit. And, too, subsequent to the consolidation of the worldly ends pursued in that more northerly arena, those who would persist in the pressing of claims in keeping with their original rhetorical formulations fall out of step and are ruled out of order, either as nonconformists and dissidents (Roger Williams), or as antinomians, literally as "outlaws" (Anne Hutchinson). Although Columbus was neither banished nor outlawed, as were these later avatars of vision's earnestness, he was effectively marginalized. His delivery from the New World in irons at the end of the third voyage, his prolonged displacement as marooned shipwreck during his

fourth voyage, and the protracted waiting before being summoned to court to brief Their Highnesses on his final journey may all have their fortuitous turns—whether in bureaucratic over-zealousness, inclement weather, or royal illnesses—that mitigate the idea of deliberate shunning. Nonetheless, the unrecorded infrahistory or the opportunistic capitalization on those reversals of fate make the Admiral's vicissitudes more than symbolic of his precarious predicament in official and institutional circles.

This is why, I believe, Columbus's last writings, primarily his correspondence and drafts of memoranda to court, are so significant. They are poignantly articulate of what happens to the visionary and rhetorical vanguard of a particular ideology when it no longer occupies that forward position in relation to the ends for which it was deployed either as means or as screen. Something of the farcical that Karl Marx discerned in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte sets in with the human pathos that accompanies the apprehension of one's caducity. Historiography has not missed the pathetic farce of a waning Columbus unrelentingly clamoring for "my third, my eighth, my tenth" as desperate clutching in an attempt to hold on and as indignant righteousness aiming to recoup what it feels is its due. Historians and biographers of Columbus have uniformly read these final writings very much in this vein.

To my knowledge, however, no one has read these letters and drafts of the Admiral's final five years with an eye to what they may reveal, symptomatically, about the moment when the ideological embodiment of a particular rhetorical formulation falls off, becomes alienated from the ends to which it may have once been put. Columbus, extreme exemplum of anything he ever exemplified, displays the symptoms of this alienation in starkly human terms of bewilderment. He displays greatest urgency in selfrecovery, in the recuperation of a personal history and historical deeds, in the recapitulation of the official capitulations that authorized his enterprise, in the enumeration of privileges granted him by patents, in the litany of wrongs he has endured, and in vaunting his endurance in the face of those he proved wrong. But, significantly, Columbus in this process becomes somebody else, an other

to himself in the trials and drafts and versions of these memoranda, all aimed at constituting the one final memorandum and the one definitive self that would vindicate him, his cause, and his legacy. The drafts I am referring to are still extant in Columbus's hand, preserved among the holdings of the Archivo de la Casa de Alba in Madrid.^[4] Columbus entered the venerable House of Alba posthumously. He did so with the marriage of his son Diego to Doña Maria de Toledo, niece of the Duke of Alba. It was a marriage arranged by King Ferdinand himself.

As drafts for a memorandum, or a memorial, as it is known in Spanish, these fragmentary attempts are, literally, trials of memory, rehearsals at self-memorialization. Within these "tryouts" for a constituted whole and in remembrance, the "I," the "you," and the "he" of the self as subject and protagonist are arrayed, made to file before the self-drafting Columbus as in a parade whose point of origin has to be made to coincide with its point of arrival. Columbus's, we might say, is a desperate attempt to make ends meet, an attempt that may have well succeeded totally on Ascension Day of 1506. I say Columbus becomes an other to himself in these scriptive rehearsals, then, because of this essaying of a number of voices in an equally varying number of subject pronouns that run the gamut of grammar's possibilities. There are four drafts in his handwriting, one in the second person, one in the first, one in the third, and one in an admixture. This form of grammatical quandary of the subject is reminiscent of the social and corporate alienation the French sociologist Emile Durkheim designated as anomie, literally an existence without law. Columbus's vacillation in grammar is symptomatic of a larger shift of the grounds on which his tenacious vision had previously discerned and legitimated a world-altering endeavor, the enterprise he launched across the Ocean Sea. Now, once more, the master mariner of dead reckoning finds himself in uncharted seas, but with a certain loss of mastery over his reckoner's abacus. Providential history and provident cosmography no longer fit the bill. Prophetic vision and apocalyptic calculus may still set and rhetorically justify the course. But millennialism's expectancy has become inextricably entangled with the economy of "millionism"

of a more earthly ledger. Columbus's grammatical anomie, then, evinces the symptoms of a crisis whose pressing exigencies precipitated by certain reality shifts make imperative the re-visioning of vision.

Strong visionaries, particularly those such as Columbus who derive their prescience from the surety of conviction and the prophetic grace of infallible providence, fare rather poorly in times of revisionary imperatives. Their fate, if fading, like Columbus in this final act, is the fluster of puzzlement and righteous clamoring for unswerving steadiness. We can call this quandary a form of anomie precipitated by vision's slippage out of what at that moment might be reality's focus. However, if these visionaries be strong still and vitally commanding, their predicament of anomie becomes transmuted by corporate declaration. The institutional powers that be at the moment render such anomie by indictment into antinomy . This, in essence, is what differentiates the precarious predicament of Christopher Columbus at the end of his life from, say, the equally precarious situation of someone like Anne Hutchinson who is still dynamic and in full command of her persuasive and prophetic powers. There is a continuity from the "lack of law," or anomie, in Columbus's befuddled state to the lawlessness or antinomy ("against the law") of Hutchinson's enthusiastic subscription to an ideology of a literal and plenary covenant of grace, already compromised by worldly contingency by the time of her arrival in 1634, a scant four years after the Commonwealth's godly founding. The continuity I speak of is not necessarily in the nature of content or essential doctrine. Rather, it is in the character of form and the form of institutional reaction to ideological formulations that may have been outdistanced by newly institutionalized interests. In both cases, that of Columbus at the end of his life and Anne Hutchinson at the beginning of her life in the New World, we see the emergence of a dialogical confrontation. This is a confrontation between, on the one hand, certain formulations within the ideological enablements that made the current institutional state of things possible and, on the other hand, the structures of interest and accommodation that have shifted away from those formulations. The

expedient necessity of investing in such shifts rest in the need to consolidate the institutional structures that the original formulations had put into motion. In other words, once the interests in whose service those ideological formulations had been deployed have taken hold, the rhetorical injunctions of prophetic discourse and its ideological forms are deemed out of place and out of synchrony. As such, these are literally conditions of utopia (noplace) and anachronism (out of time). Of course, these are conditions Columbus has always inhabited in good measure since his historical emergence in the Iberian peninsula. His greatest feats were pursued and accomplished even as he lived perennially "out of place," and with another time beyond a this-worldly time always in view. Having thus lived and found vindication for his wildest dreams, he now has some difficulty in reconciling himself to the worldly caprices of a historical situation that would deauthorize his claims and cast his centrality as protagonist to the periphery. Hence his grave preoccupation with the possibility that he might be misunderstood, as the citation I have taken as epigram for this chapter conveys.

Always a stranger, and not oblivious to that fact, Columbus now feels more estranged than ever. And it is wholly appropriate to extend the analogue with Anne Hutchinson also to this point. She, a woman, is no less a phenomenal stranger to the powers that be in the Patriarchal Commonwealth at Massachusetts Bay, a "strangeness" the Anglo-American tradition has flouted through the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne's errant "Mrs. Hutchinson" in the Salem Gazette of 1830 being a supreme example. Only recently is a critical revaluation of women like Anne Hutchinson being undertaken by historians and cultural critics sensitive to Mrs. Hutchinson as woman in prophecy's patriarchal tradition.^[5] After Columbus and before Anne Hutchinson, an analogous disjunction between commonwealth (the state) and ideological vision of foundations befalls the evangelical idealism and apostolic simplicity in New Spain's "millennial kingdom," as John Leddy Phelan has pointed out.^[6] The incursion of the earthly commonwealth into the "city of God" through state decrees and official controls, as well as the steady supplanting of

the Mendicant friars and Minorite Orders by the episcopate and Church bureaucracy, lead Father Gerónimo de Mendieta at the end of the sixteenth century to see the history of New Spain after 1564 as the "Age of Silver," in contrast to the previous forty years which he took as the "Age of Gold." Clearly, there is more than mere reference to the metallurgical capitalization that was an intricate part of Spain's economic history in New Spain where Father Gerónimo's pagan nominations for a historical schema are concerned. The prophetic vision of the Franciscan friar that had considered the Spanish nation and its imperial monarch, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as the messianic agents of cosmic eschatology, is forced to lower its sights in the bureaucratic reign of Philip II. Philip's official state policy sought to contain the Ecclesia Indiana that was the idealized restoration of the primitive apostolic Church in the New World, supplanting it, instead, with the expanding clericy and the state-bound institutions of the Roman Church and the regular clergy.

Columbus's predicament, not unlike that of the Spiritual Franciscans and the Puritan enthusiasts, is amply articulate in what it teaches us about the relationship between prophecy and empire. Whereas prophecy is literally a fore-word, a speaking form that capitulates history and its events, as ideological figuration it is a form of (and for) forethought, a fore-structure, if you will, on whose fundamental provisions (and previsions) the empire is founded. Once the structural edifice of that founding has taken form, consolidated its position, and vested its interests with some degree of firmness, the prophetic precedents either fall off altogether, or, more often, they become transmuted, expediently metamorphosed as rhetorical formulations that continue to abet and further imperial investments in the structures and contexts that have been consolidated. Thus, prophetic rhetoric in the service of an ideology of conquest, colony, and empire passes from an initial founding stage, in which it serves as pre -formative instrument, to the conservative and preservative force of a per -formative discourse. As in the unsettled predicament of Columbus at the end of his life, then, the rhetorical injunctions of prophecy's visions and prophetic ideology that once capitulated (that

once headed) the project of conquest and colonization now serve as mediate instrument of recapitulation, of recovery and incorporation. This may explain why official Spain, now inadvertently, now subtly, sought to displace Columbus, as it would seek to replace the Spiritual visionaries in New Spain who sought the realization of prophecy's visions in Indian eutopias . This might explain, too, Columbus's haste and the alertness he would urge on his son Diego "to lose no time in seeing that the Indies are not lost." But, then, as we have seen, he adds, "como hazen,"—"as they are," meaning, as is happening to them. Columbus's self, his own identity, is so inextricably enmeshed with the Indies that his fluctuation and indecisiveness in putting forth a determinate subject pronoun by which to denote himself in this task of memorial recapitulation is clear indication that the Indies are, indeed, deemed lost by their rightful "finder." Clearly, in the founding of empires finders are not necessarily keepers. And Columbus's desperate grammatical flailing speaks of a frantic attempt to recover what he feels he has discovered by the grace of God.

In an undated draft of a letter most likely destined for the Council of the Indies, Columbus reminds the Councilors who now oversee the State's imperial enterprise, "[i]n seven years I carried out this conquest by divine will. When I thought I would enjoy favors and rest, I was unexpectedly seized and brought back loaded with irons. [En siete años hize yo esta conquista por voluntad divina. Al tiempo que yo pensé de haber mercedes y descanso, de improvisto fui preso y traido cargado de fierros]."^[7] The draft is in the Admiral's hand and forms part of his documents in the Archivo General de Indias. It is obviously written after his third voyage. It is, understandably, a dark period in his life, perhaps the low point of his career when he might feel that even God-willed achievements and divine intentions may not be altogether immune to worldly travesty. And the measure of loss that creates the chasm between the ends of his prophetic vision and the ends that have befallen his lot is most overtly expressed in Columbus's letter to Pope Alexander VI. Dated February 1502, there is no certainty that it ever reached its destination. But a copy of the letter survives in the hand of Hernando Colón, Colum-

bus's other son. In the letter, Columbus recapitulates the history of his accomplishments, emphasizing the diversity and riches of the island that is the seat of his Viceroyalty and General Governorship, "[e]sta isla es Tharsis, es Cethia, es Ophir y Ophaz e çipanga," and, he says, "we have called it Española." He recounts, as well, that he has reached a region where "I believed and believe what so many saintly and sacred theologians believed and believe, that there in that region is the Earthly Paradise. [Creí y creo aquello que creyeron y creen tantos sanctos y sacros theólogos, que allí en la comarca es el Paraíso Terrenal]."^[8] As he laments to His Holiness the Pope, however, more than the Earthly Paradise may have been lost by fortune's fickleness and human interests. At risk now is the Heavenly Kingdom's millennial reign on Earth, because the ultimate ends of the New World enterprise have been compromised by human temptation and waylaid by the caprices of Satan:

Esta empresa se tomó con fin de gastar lo que d'ella se oviesse en presidio de la Casa Sancta a la Sancta Iglesia. Después que fui en ella y visto la tierra, escreví al Rey y a la Reina, mis Señores, que dende a siete años yo le pagaría çincuenta mill de pie y cinco mill de cavallo en la conquista d'ella, y dende a cinco años otros cincuenta mill de pie y otros çinco mill de cavallo, que serían dies mill de cavallo e çient mill de pie para esto; Nuestro Señor muy bien amostró que yo compliría, por experiencia amostrar que podía dar este año a Sus Altezas ciento y veinte quintales de oro y çerteça que sería ansí de orto tanto al término de los çinco años. Sathanás ha destorbado todo esto y con sus fuerças ha puesto esto en término que non haya effecto ni el uno ni el otro, si Nuestro Señor no lo ataja. La governación de todo esto me habían dado perpetua, agora con furor fui sacado d'ella. Por muy cierto se ve que fue malicia del enemigo y porque non venga a luç tan sancto propósito.^[9]

[This enterprise was undertaken with the purpose of spending whatever accrued from it in restoring the Holy Sepulcher to the Holy Church. Having gone there and seen the land, I wrote to the King and Queen, my Lords, that within seven years I would finance fifty thousand foot soldiers and five thousand horsemen in its conquest; and within five more years, another fifty thousand foot soldiers and another five thousand cavalry, that would be ten thousand horsemen and one hundred thousand foot soldiers to this end. Our Lord

showed that I would well accomplish this, showing in practice that I could give Their Highnesses this year one hundred and twenty hundred-weight of gold and certainly that it would be likewise at the end of the next five years. Satan has undone all this, and with his powers will have put an end to this and to the other, if Our Lord does not stop him. I was granted the government of all this for perpetuity; now I have been deprived of it violently. Most certainly one can see that it was the malice of the enemy so that such holy purpose should not come to light.]

Prophecy's own visionary formulation had taught Columbus all too well that one only seeks to recover what one has already lost. And perhaps the most poignant insight of this predicament for the Admiral might well be the recognition that in the clamoring for self-recuperation through drafts and memorial trials, the very object of that attempt, perforce, may have slipped away. When that object would also be, as in this case, the very subject drafting or essaying the pursuit of such redemption, implacable utopia sets in with vehemence and anachronistic derision. A stark sentence from Columbus's Lettera Rarissima (7 July 1503), written from Jamaica in the course of the foundered fourth and last voyage, reads: "Yo soy tan perdido como dixe. [I am as lost as I said]." The sentence Columbus passed on himself then, now resonates more suggestively than ever. In a worldly context where prophecy's redemptive rhetoric and enlivening promise have already run their course, u-topia becomes the strangest of the stranger's dwellings, a habitat in Nowhereland, and not just as rhetorical figura or as philological trope, such as Martin Waldseemüller's Amerige, discussed in our third chapter. In this regard, the fates do indeed prove implacable when they would have Columbus, in this final act of his drama, meet with his friend Amerigo Vespucci in Seville, probably for the last time, and write to Diego, in a letter for which Amerigo himself served as courier, a letter that reveals as much, or more, about Columbus's own fortunes as those of Vespucci which the Admiral laments here:

fablé con Amerigo Vespuchi, portador d'esta . . . es mucho hombre de bien; la fortuna le ha sido contraria como a otros muchos. Sus

trabajos non le han aprovechado tanto como la razón requiere; él va por mío y en mucho deseu de hazer cosa que redonde a mi bien, si a sus manos está. Yo non sey de aquá en qué yo le enponga que a mí aproveche, porque non sey qué sea lo que alla le queren. El va determinado de hazer por mí todo lo que a él fuere posible. Ved allá en qué puede aprobechar y trabajad por ello, que él lo hará todo y fablerá y lo porná en obra, y sea todo secretamente, porque non se aya d'él sospecha.^[10]

[I spoke with Amerigo Vespucci, bearer of the present . . . he is a good man; fortune has not favored him, as with many others. His labors have not served him as well as reason would dictate they might have. He goes on my behalf and is most desirous to do whatever might redound to my good, if it be within his reach. From here, I do not know what to ask of him that would benefit me, because I do not know why he is wanted there. He goes determined to do for me whatever he can. See what he could best do there and aid him in it, for he will do everything, and he will speak and see to it that it is done. And let it all be in secret, so that no one should suspect him.]

There is immense irony in this letter, given the treatment Vespucci has received at the hands of history's pundits, from Father Bartolomé de Las Casas to Ralph Waldo Emerson, as we have seen in our third chapter. The most ironic of all is Columbus's language and commendation of his fortunes to the ministry of Vespucci. Clearly it is a much more prophetic letter than Columbus could have imagined, and in ways he probably could have imagined less. The letter is dated 5 February 1505 and is one of Columbus's autographs in the Archivo General de Indias referred to earlier. But I would like to turn to those earlier drafts, now in the Archives of the House of Alba, written sometime between the Admiral's inauspicious, though amply prophetic, third and the ill-starred fourth voyages.

Self-fashioning has been one of Columbus's most constant occupations. It begins on record with his official arrival into the annals of archival history with the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe of 17 April 1492. The titles, entitlements, and charter privileges in that primal document reveal the conviction of a man with a mission. But they reveal, too, the unmistakable anxieties of an outsider, one who feels the immeasurable necessity of having

further to reach. Overreaching, in such circumstances, becomes compensatory gesture for being a stranger. The repeated requests and ensuing reconfirmations of his titles and charter privileges, as we have seen in our fourth chapter, become as much forms of self-confirmation as they serve to reaffirm accomplished deeds and the due emoluments that accrue to them. It is unusual for any of Columbus's letters to the Spanish monarchs not to include an autobiographical sketch or a reminder of his unyielding piety and triumphs over adversity. In his own script, Columbus is definitely the leading character, now heroic, now humble, often obeisant and pious, but never diffident. Even at his most abject, or especially then, as in the letter to the Governess of Prince Don Juan and in the Lettera Rarissima, as we have seen in our last chapter, Columbus portrays either a baptized Stoic or an outright Job. And when in utmost dejection and in the most dire straits, as we have also seen, Columbus turns from earthly king and queen directly to God in covenantal dialogue as between contracting parties. Prophetic vision(s), then, have a history as unction for dire straits in Columbus's itinerary. This, of course, should not surprise us. It is part and parcel of the prophetic tradition and of prophecy's cultures, from the Patriarchs of Genesis and Exodus to the patriarchs of New Canaan in New England's wilderness. What is unique in the case of Columbus is the measure and circumstance, the reach and the grandeur of the rhetorical gesture that has always been characteristic and only intensifies in his final years. And, again, the reach is cosmic, the circumstances dire, the conditions incongruous and, though the focus falters, the determination remains unrelenting.

In a letter to Queen Isabel written sometime in August or September 1501, Columbus reiterates what he has always claimed about the source of his strength and daring determination. As much a disclosure of conviction, this letter is a revelation of character, as we shall see. It is unlikely that at the time he was writing to the queen Columbus would have been unaware of the appointment of Nicholás de Ovando as Governor of the West Indies. That official act took effect on 3 September 1501, thereby, as Columbus writes to Pope Alexander VI five or six months later, "depriving

me with fury" of the government that "had been granted me for perpetuity." Columbus's letter to the queen, then, could be read as his most immediate response to his now official displacement as "Viceroy and Governor General of Islands and Mainlands" in the Indies. It is clear from his letter (the original has survived—Archivo General de Indias, Autógrafos, 43) that his protest is plaintive, but his determination is relentless. And it is clear, too, that though he may have lost the worldly governance of the Indies, he has yielded no ground either in that geography's other-worldly significance or in the self-apperception as mediate agent for placing the New World in the service of prophecy's greater ends. Thus, rather than worldly honor that has proved so fleeting, Columbus reaches after other-worldly glory. He demurs to monarchical privilege, but he enjoins, in the process, imperial responsibility to transworldly purpose. Worldly government, Columbus implies, remains a mediate instrument of transcendent objectives, and now more so than ever before. Thus, as has been his wont, Columbus not only rises to the occasion, he seeks to rise above it. And, as I noted, he reiterates that the origin of what assures such triumph, or what at least makes him feel triumphant, on such occasions, lies in: "Una confiança grandíssima que yo tengo en Aquel piadoso Redemptor Nuestro [quien] me da esta oxadía, y non abilidad ni esfoerço que de mí cognosca. Yo me di en Barçelona a Vuestra Alteza sin desar de mi cosa, y ansí como fue el ánima, ansí fue la honra y hazienda. [My audacity [that] is given me by the great confidence I have in Our Merciful Redeemer and not by any ability or power of my own. I surrendered myself to Your Highness in Barcelona, holding back nothing, as it was with my soul, so it was with my honor and estate]."^[11] It would take Spain's literary tradition nearly a century to dramatize in the honor tragedies, the Comedias of the Siglo de Oro, the subtle distinctions Columbus insinuates here. Rhetorical as Columbus's grandiloquent gesture might be, however, unlike those Renaissance plays, it is a lived rhetoric and a vital gesture, not yet a spectacle rehearsed as discursive or as didactic reflection in the staged mirror of the world. Obviously, Columbus's gesture does not lack rhetorical conveyance or theatricality. But his is an existential, a pragmatically lived

spectacle, a spectacle of self-essaying. However much self-deluded, Columbus's "geste" has something of the epic's primacy, as opposed to the prosaic's performance, if I may paraphrase Hegel. "Indeed," Marx would say, as he did on Hegel, "but this essayed epic gesture is a rehearsal nonetheless, coming as it does after a season of loss and in the final act of the drama that is Columbus's life, a moment of desperate seeking after recuperation. As such," the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire 's opening lines might quip, "the quotient of repetition entailed in such an act interjects an element of farce into the geste's would-be grandeur." One would be hard-pressed to contest the claim. But, as already noted, that admixture of farce and tragic pathos is, nevertheless, what humanizes Columbus. And, though a character in his own drama, he remains, at least in his writings, his own human character rather than another human's literary invention. The surrendering of himself to his Monarch "soul, honor, and estate," and his claim to have done so at this greatest moment of triumph—his exultant return from his initial voyage to be received by Their Highnesses in Barcelona—lays bare Columbus entirely. In that extreme divestiture, Her Royal Highness, in turn, is to countenance a higher obligation, one that would make her accede to serve Her servant in the name and by the call of a transcendent duty. Surrendering all to Her mercy, Columbus renders his queen all but duty bound. And the ultimate criterion to adjudicate between his remittent capitulation and Her unremitting sovereignty is the very standard Columbus himself advances as the source of his strength and of his audacity, "la confiança grandíssima que yo tengo en Aquel Piadoso Redemptor Nuestro." Accordingly then, Columbus begins his letter thus: "Christianíssima Reina: Yo soy el siervo de Vuestra Alteza. Las llaves de mi voluntad yo se las di en Barcelona. [Most Christian Queen: I am your Highness's servant. The keys to my will I surrendered to you in Barcelona]." In this utmost self-divestment, Columbus invests proportionately utmost expectations that, in his estimation, should at least have parity with any other royal obligations. In breaching the distance between the two extremes of divestiture and expected return, Columbus brooks no difficulty, nor does he risk the queen's suspicion of his rhetorical

gesture and grand geste as gambit of an artful ploy. Thus, he moves artfully to interdict that possibility: "Lo que yo tengo pensado de mi vida yo lo di a Vuestra Alteza en un memorial por mi mano. Si yo creyese que Vuestra Alteza crehe que alí non va maliçia ni arte, sería yo muy alegre. [What I have thought of my life I have conveyed to Your Highness in a memorandum in my own hand. If I could believe that Your Highness believes that there is neither malice nor artifice there, I would be most content]."^[12]

Columbus clearly is most anxious to suspend disbelief, both on his part and on Her Majesty's. His other writings, however, would seem to indicate that he had little success, at least as concerns his own qualms toward the sovereigns. And, one suspects, the king's and queen's reservations were not altogether assuaged either. At any rate, having thus sought in the rhetoric of his obeisance to breach the distance between servant and sovereign, Columbus moves to posit what he conceives as his and the queen's common ground. That is, providential history's ends as promised in prophecy's requirements that have made him and the queen equally elect agents of a godly task in pursuit of a God-willed goal:

Yo veu este negoçio de las Indias muy grande. Los otros muchos que Vuestra Alteza tiene, con su indisposición, non da lugar que el regimiento d'este vaya perfeto. Esto me contrista por dos cabos: el uno es por lo de Yerusalem, de que suplico a Vuestra Alteza que non le tenga en poco, ni que yo fablé en ello por arte; el otro es que yo he miedo que este negoçio se pierda . . . Yo suplico a Vuestra Alteza que non me tenga en esto ni en otra cosa alguna por parte salvo por servidor suyo . . . Vea agora si le aplaz de me experimentar como a tal en esto de las Indias y del otro de la Casa Santa . . . Puédese dar orden con que este negoçio se punga en filo luego sin mucha fatiga.

[I see this business of the Indies as very great. The many other concerns Your Highness has, begging your pardon, do not allow for the due resolution of this matter. This saddens me on two counts: the one concerning Jerusalem, about which I beg Your Highness not to take it lightly, nor did I speak of it out of cunning. The other is that I fear that this business [of the Indies] be lost . . . I beg Your Highness that you not consider me in this matter or in any other except as your servant . . . I hope it please you to treat me as such in this matter of the

Indies and the other concerning the Holy Sepulcher . . . It could be ordered that this business be put right soon without much trouble.]

Artfully artless, cunningly ingenuous, Columbus sets his "business of the Indies" and the matter of Jerusalem on level terms. In this gambit, Columbus re-invokes the ideological form of prophecy and providential history. He recurs to that ideology's rhetorical formulation, its prophetic rhetoric and eschatological imperatives. This is the formula that conquered the Indies. The question for Columbus now is, Can the unction of prophecy salvage their loss? Can prophetic injunction and its ideological pinions serve, as they did before, in what is now a recuperative enterprise for what was Columbus's "enterprise of the Indies"? History would prove that they could not. But Columbus, indomitable "divine" and incorrigible visionary that he is, though his ways betray an understanding of his recuperative project's impossibility, his acts speak of his refusal to admit to what he may have understood. And any such admission, he gives us to understand, would be tantamount to a different sort of capitulation. He gives himself, instead, to the task of recapitulating, an act of reinvestment of the prophetic self in providential history's waylaid path and travestied futures. It is at this juncture that the self-scattering drafts grasping for integrity and self-reintegration become most shrill and also most revealing. Drafted during this same period, these trials would eventuate in the necessity to undertake a clinching fourth voyage, one which, it was hoped, would put everything right, at last. But, as we have seen, rather than worldly vindication, this was a voyage that would turn as much into a via dolorosa as into prophetic pilgrimage through the Ocean's wilderness.

It is not my wish to psychologize the Columbus drafts I have been referring to. I do believe that they offer productive readings of Columbus's own self-fashioning. I deliberately opt for "self-fashioning" rather than "self-portrayal," because I read these drafts as desperate attempts in adverse conditions to forge a self and not just to portray an already securely existing subject. Columbus's is a task undertaken at a disruptive juncture, a critical crossing point when and where the habitual self falls into the

necessity of essaying adversative constructs as venues to an identity. By adversative constructs I mean those procedures most frequently identified with language devices such as "but," "rather," "or," and phrases such as "then again," "on the other hand," "on second thought," and so forth. All of these elements represent highly self-conscious instances where Columbus checks his inadvertent self-characterizations and, in doing so, compounds inadvertence because the instruments and enablements of self-awareness and calibration are the very gestures of a habitual self. If Columbus seeks in these drafts for a self that would coincide with a self-perception suited to his predicament, his ultimate failure is painful evidence that he does not succeed. However, in his overwrought attempts at self-adequation, at coming forth with a self adequate to the dire circumstances of the occasion, Columbus becomes poignantly consubstantial with those attempts themselves. His task of self-fashioning, then, betrays a self-portrait that is of a piece with the process of this very task, a portrait that betrays as much inadvertence and self-consciousness, as it betrays habit and character. In the final analysis, these drafts, like all drafts or self-rehearsals, are more articulate than the ultimate portraiture or consequence for which they were destined. Columbus, then, tells us more about himself, in spite of his difficulties and vacillations, than he might have wished us to know. His failure, in this sense, is a greater success than the success he may have intended. But what emerges from these tryouts and trials of self-portrayal corroborates what we glimpse of Columbus throughout his career. It is an emphatic form of corroboration by virtue of the fact that Columbus's task at this stage has not only the force of assertion but also the vigor of a counterassertion and the urgency of a recuperative undertaking. In the reactive and reiterative verve of Columbus's task, then, whatever is corroborated for us has a heightened intensity. Having always glimpsed a Columbus with a providential mission and a divinely elect role in the drama of prophetic history, we now see Columbus even more magnified in his self-apperception as key player on the cosmic stage. And though the oscillation between grandeur and humility still tracks

a pendular swing, the extremes now move farther out, describing an arc of greater proportions. This is the amplified motion we see in the term of self-aggrandizement and self-abjection in the drafts under discussion.

I take first the draft written in the second-person singular. Here, as in most dialogical soliloquies, Columbus takes as interlocutor, really as addressee, his own mirror image, or at least a spectral semblance of his own apperception. A curt sentence at the end of this draft, a sentence that slips into the first person singular, sums the gist of the fragment: "Información de mis privilegios. [Report of my privileges]." Aside from the terse bottom line and the penultimate clause before, to be discussed shortly, the rest of the draft is in the second person. It is a declamatory apostrophe and grandiloquent enumeration. The fragment begins with an invocation to the Virgin, a common practice in Columbus's writings, and proceeds to address the rhetorically evoked second self by the writing self:

Magnífico Señor: Por vuestro privilegio y capitulación parece que Sus Altezas os fizieron su Almirante del mar Oçéano, el cual fizieron marcar por una raya que pasa de las islas del Cabo Verde [a] aquelas de los Açores de polo a polo, con todas las merçedes y honras que ha y tiene el Señor Almirante de Castilla en su distrito.

[Magnificent Lord: By your privilege and capitulation it is manifest that Their Highnesses made you their Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which they divided with a line from pole to pole that passes from the isles of Cape Verde to those of the Azores, with all benefices and honors of the Admiral of Castille in his district.]

In the letter of 1500 to the Governess Doña Juana de la Torre, Columbus had essayed a self-portrayal as knight-errant and as chivalric hero of the romance epic. The self-characterization in the passage cited here clearly supersedes that of the passages from the letter to the Governess cited in our last chapter. To look into the mirror of the second-person singular subject and address a "Magnificent Lord" is not exactly an understated magnification.

As already noted, Columbus's aim at this juncture is a recapitulation of his historic deeds in an effort to register, once more, his accomplishments, and to legitimate deeded claims he feels have

slipped away. In the process, he becomes entangled in a quagmire of circular reasoning and endless calculation. In the draft under discussion, for example, he asserts the legitimacy of his claims by virtue of the fact that he discovered the Indies. At the same time, he feels that he certainly must have done so because the contracted privileges deeded to him for that purpose have been reconfirmed. Columbus pursues this spectral line of reasoning with such elaborate certainty that he gives the impression of no longer being certain of anything, hence the necessity for its reaffirmations. Here is the fifth clause of this draft where Columbus addresses his second-person self in this circuitous vein:

Parece por las confirmaciones de vuestros privilegios que habéis descobierto las islas y tierra firme de las Indias, y que si algo se descobre, que es por vuestra industria, ni se puede para con Vuestra Señoría llamar descobrir, porque vos descobristes las Indias sobre que era la profía [sic. for porfía], sobre la cual ansí sabios de letras en tierra como la gente de la mar todos fueron contrarios a vuestra opinión, y todos dezían que era burla y que Dios nunca había dado alí tierra; ansí que non descobren para con Vuestra Señoría, salvo que van o pueden ir adonde no haya andado; mas todo esto non lo hazen ni pueden hazer sin entrar en el dicho almirantado y ir a tierras o mar que habéis descobierto; de manera que en todo lo andado y que se andoviere de aquí en adelante tenéis en la mar vuestra preheminençia de Almirante.

[It is manifest by the confirmations of your privileges that you have discovered the islands and mainland of the Indies. And that if something is discovered that is by your effort, it cannot be said to have been just discovered in the case of Your Lordship. Because you discovered the Indies over the obstinacy of the learned in letters of the earth as of the sea, all of whom were opposed to your opinion. And they all said it was a joke, and that God had not put any land there. Thus, they do not discover through Your Lordship. Rather, they go or can go where no one has gone. But all this they do not, nor could they, do without entering into the said admiralty and go to lands or sea that you have discovered. So that, in all that has been traversed and is to be traversed from now on, you have your preeminence of Admiral at sea.]

I hope my translation has not overly domesticated the convoluted discourse of this passage. Although the reasoning may be

circuitous, it is so, I believe, by virtue of the fact that Columbus's project here is recursive, his aim restorative of what he feels has been lost. His ratiocinations, then, I would say constituted more a de-volution than a convolution. His worldly and other-worldly deeds devolve upon the language that engendered them. If the proverbial wisdom of the Book of Prayer be "ashes to ashes," in the case of Columbus's enterprise it would have to be "words to words." Having begun as language in the productive text of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, the New World and its "discovery" (a problematic term, even for Columbus, as we have just seen in the passage above) now return, in the ghastly lucubrations of their protagonist, to a language that wrestles with its mirror image. In these spectral refractions of Columbus's "I" as "You" and historical reality as indomitable words, the ends of the world and the ends of reason, the protagonist's ulterior ends and the circumstances he ends up in resist justification. They just will not add up. That is why Columbus's obsessive harping on claims for "my third, my eighth, my tenth" refuse to construe with reality and fail to convince those who define current reality's configuration. And the invocation of criteria and terms sanctioned by Papal blessing, a blessing whose sanction only a decade earlier had the power to bisect the globe by circumscribing it with an imaginary line, seems to do little good now. Despite his perplexity, Columbus persists, tenacious as ever, more unrelenting than ever before:

. . . porque sobre el descobrir de las Indias se tomó el asiento y firmó la Capitulaçión y escrituras y en la ora que descobristes la primera isla fue descobierto las Indias y complistes vuestro asiento, y el Santo Padre dio bula de donaçión a Sus Altezas de las Indias y a conçiencia, estando Vuestra Señoría privado de sus oficios, Sus Altezas serían obligados a todo daño y menoscabo que por ello viniese.

Señores: Yo non demando nada, y todo esto que va aquí dicho, todo lo remito y pongo en las reales manos de la Reina, Nuestra Señora, que lo vea y haga en ello lo que fuere su servicio. Mis privilegios y cartas daré a Vuestra Merçed cada que los quisieren.

[. . . because agreement was reached on the discovery of the Indies and the Capitulations and writs were signed, and at the moment you discovered the first island the Indies were discovered, and, thus, you

fulfilled your agreement and the Holy Father by Bull of Donation gave the Indies to Their Highnesses and to their conscience, Your Lordship having been deprived of his offices, Their Highnesses would be liable for all ensuing damages and losses.

Lords: I demand nothing. And all I have said here, I take it all back, and put all of it in the royal hands of the Queen, Our Lady, so that she might consider it and do as she please. I shall turn over my privileges and letters to Your Worship as you might desire.]

The unmistakable discrepancy between the two paragraphs cited here is quite telling. The slippage from the second person to the first entails a passage from "You, Magnificent Lord" to "I, supplicant." The strong suit for contracted claims that, in the second person, holds the sovereigns to liability for contractual breach, turns to pathos of entreaty in the palinode that is the "I" of the shrinking self. We have seen this attenuation of ego deployed as cunning strategy in the letter to the queen discussed earlier. The last paragraph cited here may well have served as rehearsal for that letter. The juxtaposition of the two pronouns and their corresponding subjects here, however, makes patent the fact that Columbus as "I, myself" suffers an unmistakable diminution. This is the measure of self-alienation or anomie referred to earlier. Seen in the context of another draft, the one in the first person, this dissipation of self takes on an even more poignant abatement. Because, in that first-person draft, we witness a self that wanes into lacunae, a self whose self-reflexive discourse fades into blank spaces quite literally, as, for example, when Columbus wonders, even as his writing wanders off into space(s), whether he might be running the risk of being misunderstood. I shall indicate his blanks with bracketed ellipses:

Y que todo consiste en esto [. . .] así como de las cartas de marear, y me temo que yo no sea bien entendido, porque en esto yo sirvo asimismo en tener [. . .] pilotos como se [. . .] de mucho [. . .] me que otras generaciones han de ir allá . . .

[And that everything consists in this [. . .] just so, as with the navigational charts, and I fear lest I be misunderstood, because in this I well serve in having [. . .] pilots as [. . .] greatly [. . .] me that other generations must go there . . .]

Perhaps the most telling lacuna in this passage may be the blank space that follows the indexical declaration "And that everything consists in this . . ."

No need to belabor the fact that all indications point to a Columbus who, as first-person subject, as "I, myself," runs into a void, not just into language and its contorted mirrors, but through that spectral refraction and into the gallery of an intermittent space that augurs Néant. Call that augural discernment the ultimate form of dead reckoning. However, as an other to himself, as the second person we have just witnessed, and as the third person of yet another fragment, Columbus is, indeed, somebody else again. The "Magnificent Lord" of the previous draft becomes, in the third person, God's minister and righthand man, and only second to Himself in dispensing the Earth to its conquering occupants. Here is Columbus's third-person portrayal of Columbus:

Digo que el dicho Almirante descobrió y ganó a Sus Altezas las islas y tierra firme que son allende la línea sobredicha en la mar Océano, y las han habido por su mano e industria y son señores d'ellas, de las cuales non lo eran antes, porque en su mano estaba del dicho Almirante, después de Dios Nuestro Señor, de las dar a cualquer Príncipe con quien él se concertase.

[I say that the said Admiral discovered and conquered [note the return to the dual verb construct of the founding charter, the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe] for Their Highnesses the islands and mainland beyond the above-said line in the Ocean Sea, and they have acquired them by his hand and industry and they are their owners, which they were not before. Because it was in the hands of said Admiral, after God Our Lord, to give them to any Prince with whom he should concert.]

And, once again, in a fourth draft, also in the third person, a third person that Caesar and Captain John Smith of our fifth chapter could envy, Columbus holds the world's destiny in his hands, much as he is caricatured in patriotic monuments in public parks and plazas, still clamoring for his due and for vindication:

Las Indias son de Sus Altezas. Descubrióselas y ganó el Almirante contra opinión de todo el mundo y él tiene en ellas la terçia parte, ochavo y diezmo; en su mano parece que estaba a las desobrir y dar a

cualquier otro Príncipe; y pues él servió con ellas, justo es que aya d'ellas la parte que se asentó, la cual ha de gastar en servicio de Dios y de Sus Altezas.

[The Indies belong to Your Highnesses. The Admiral discovered and conquered them for you against the opinion of the whole world. And he has in them the third part, the eighth, and the tenth. It was manifestly in his hands to discover them and give them to any Prince. Thus, he has served with them. It is just that he should have from them the portion agreed upon, a portion which he is to spend in the service of God and of Your Highnesses.]

In the last folio of the Lettera Rarissima, his shipwreck's memorandum on his final voyage, Columbus will articulate this compelling necessity for justifying all ends and balancing all books. For, he says, "it is well to give God His due and to Caesar what belongs to him. This is a just sentence, and of the just. [Bueno es de dar a Dios lo suyo y a César lo que le pertenece. Esto es justa sentencia y de justo]."^[13] From the beginning of his enterprise, Columbus not only felt that he was "called," but he also held the conviction that he was "justified." Justification, in terms canonical and theological, takes on greatest emphasis when the just feel jilted. So profoundly does Columbus seem to feel that he has been betrayed by justice itself that he can only countenance his own predicament as that of someone else. So thoroughly did he identify himself with his prophetic calling and worldly enterprise that the waylaying of this providential itinerary becomes for him an insurmountable self-negation. His self-fragmentation into drafts that somehow will not cohere, and into subject pronouns that take on referential coherence only in relation to someone else ("you" or "he") is a measure of the abyss that divides the self from the self, the Columbus of scriptures (capitulations, contracts, memoranda, royal directives, epistles) and Scripture (the providential agent of prophetic ends) from the Columbus who is now reduced to reading his scribal other as a second- and third-person character of a paper reality.

At the end of the day, this paper reality proves not only more real, but it also becomes Columbus's most avidly sought connection to the world, his ultimate umbilical cord to reality that he

more and more desperately feels must lie elsewhere. Hence the persistent and obsessive leitmotif of his final letters to his son Diego, his last connection to a passing world: on 3 December 1504 he writes, "I marvel greatly at not seeing any letter from you or anyone else. Everyone who knows me is equally amazed at this. Everyone here receives letters, and I who am most entitled to them, see none. It were cause for great worry. [Muy marabillado estoy de non ver carta tuya ni de otro. Esa marabilla tienen todos los que me coñosçen. Todos aca tienen cartas, e yo, a quién más cumplía, non las veo. Era de tener sobre ello gran cuidado]"; then on 29 December he writes, "Let everyone write to me and often, for it grieves me deeply that everybody should have letters everyday from there and I none from so many of you who are there [que cada uno me escriva y muy a menudo, que gran pesar tengo que todo el mundo tiene cada día cartas de allá, y yo nada de tantos como alí estais]"; and on 18 January 1505, "I wait for letters everyday from there. [De alí espero cada día cartas]."

"There" for Columbus is the royal court, but in reality it could be anywhere he himself is not. His presence, like the personal subject pronoun of his writings, passes progressively into legendary status, into the impersonal subject of writing. And writing itself as life-extending activity becomes, in Columbus's own words, the plaintive act of a nocturne: on 1 December 1504 he writes, "My illness does not allow me to write except by night, because by day it deprives me of the strength in my hands. [Mi mal non me consinte que escriva salvo de noche, porque el día me priva la fuerça de las manos]." These are, of course, the hands that, as Columbus wrote, held the world and the world's ends, and did so with a discretionary power for their dispensation next only to God's.