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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Font of Youth
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I came to live among the Calusa from La Navidad, Columbus’ doomed colony, built from the remains of the Santa Maria. My peers mistreated the native peoples, and the natives destroyed La Navidad. They let me live, though not there, and I cobbled together a raft of what remained of La Navidad and sailed for the mainland.
When I arrived I was found by the Calusa. In translation something was lost, and they believed I arrived by shipwreck- and I realized the wisdom in preserving this confusion, even as the years passed and their language became natural to me. I feel bad for Juan, and always have. His entire life he dreamed, of something, and someone, always beyond the reach of his fingers. And in his whole life, he had but one opportunity to seize it. I spoke to him in 1513, when he arrived on the coast of Florida. He attempted to speak with the Calusa, and that was when he saw her, and knew her. But negotiations for trade did not go well that day; I had lived among the Calusa for nearly twenty years but spoke enough Spanish still to translate, but the Spaniards wanted too much, and they left with nothing that day. Before the next morning, an attack occurred. I believed, then as now, that the attack was orchestrated by the Calusa nobility, who feared the threat of another power in their lands, and feared most strongly that the Spanish Catholics would replace their three gods, and in doing so remove their divine place among the Calusa people. Whatever the case, the Spaniards repelled the attack, and a larger assault at noontime was also inconclusive. So Juan sailed away, back to Puerto Rico. But he did not forget the woman he saw- a simple woman, as he could tell, unlike the adorned nobles. He knew her in his heart and in his dreams- knew her more than he could possibly have understood. He was not a young man, then, thought not yet an old one, even by the standards of that day. When he returned in 1521, he was a changed man. His earlier expeditions had brought him wealth, and notoriety, but his health was failing him. And his dreams, his dreams of the woman, were full of imagery of youth and beauty, and always among the lush lands of the Calusa, where that woman told him to seek out the waters of life. He understood that the way to the heart of a woman, and a people, is proximity, and organized a colony that would coexist nearby. The Calusa, by contrast, were not a changed people. If anything, the years between had hardened them, as rumors of Cortes’ excesses and further exploration and colonization by the Spanish unnerved them. A colony they could never tolerate. Juan came by boat to the shore; it was eerily alike the events of eight years previous, only this time the Calusa didn’t put up an amiable front, and shot arrows at Juan’s boat. One of the arrows, dipped in the poisonous sap of the mancinella tree, struck Juan in the shoulder as the boat turned to flee. That night, I snuck away from the Calusa, and sailed out to Juan’s ship. I was nearly shot by his first mate, until they discovered I spoke Spanish, and he recognized me as the man they’d met eight years earlier. He took me to Juan. I told him the Arawaks made a poultice of arrowroot that could save him, and he set sail for Cuba. Enroute, he told me I had not aged a day in eight years, that I was proof enough that the woman he sought was the font of youth. He told me he’d kept as separate a journal, about that woman he’d seen in his dreams, and twice on the beach among the Calusa. He explained, “The men, you see, the lot, are superstitious, cowardly. Were they to know we sought not treasure, but legend, they would mutiny. This font has brought me not but ruin; I will die, and when I do, burn the journal, that no souls follow me to the hell of knowing paradise, and being denied it.” Juan died in Havana, never knowing the woman who haunted him. I remained with his ship to its return to Puerto Rico, and burned the journal as I said I would. Then I returned to the Calusa; I’d lived as a Calusa for thirty years- twice as long as I’d been with the Spanish. Of course, I could not help but hear Juan’s words when I saw her, a woman who lived in the village at least as long as I had, and who had not aged a day for it. And the explorer’s dreams visited me, and I saw her as he saw her. Still, I might never have approached her; I was Calusa more than Spanish, but still separate, held at an arm’s distance. I lived with one of the village elders, Calos, who had taken me in when I was still young. His wife had died before I arrived; his son moved into a home of his own shortly after. But one evening, Calos was away visiting his sister, who had taken ill. I was meant to stay the evening with Calos’ son, but I ate too heavily at dinner, and fell to sleep too early. When I awoke in the dark, she was there. She told me her name was Lilu. She staid into the morning, and even after Calos’ return, she did not leave. Neither he nor anyone seemed disturbed in the least by the turn. After a few months, Calos’ sister died. By the end of a year, he joined her, out of grief, I suspect. I noticed that Calusa women aged more quickly than the men, and that some of the men appeared to age more slowly than others. These men, I noticed too, smiled at Lilu, where others merely nodded. I did not ask how she knew them- I simply understood it. Calos’ home became mine. I thought of a family of my own with Lilu, but though we both appeared young enough, she bore no children. In fact, unlike the other women of the village, she did not bleed on the month; she did not bleed at all. But I loved her enough that her barrenness was a trifling matter, and time passed, forty years, in fact. The Calusa believe a person has three souls, the soul in the pupils of the eyes, the soul in a shadow cast, and the soul in a reflection. I found myself marveling at the soul still burning brightly in Lilu’s eyes, and the face still soft and young and unchanged. I marveled more at my reflected soul in a pool of water we used for drink- as young as when I’d first drank there. And I knew, somehow instinctually, that it was not this water, nor any other pool, which kept me youthful, but the woman Juan had chased all his life. And then one night she moved on. My neighbor’s wife had taken ill from a disease I would later learn to fear as smallpox. She died in bed beside him, and he woke beside Lilu instead. I saw her when I emerged from my home in the morning, and my anguish showed on my face. An old man walked slowly to me, and smiled, and it is a smile I know now came from experience. “It’s simply her way,” he said. But it was not, and could not, be mine. I had become Calusa, but for me, she had become what Calusa meant, and so I had to be something else, and thought I’d try to be a Spaniard again. Havana was the epicenter of the Spanish trade with the Carribean, and it wasn’t long before I secured passage on a ship; after all, I knew enough of sailing to come along on the Santa Maria. In Spain I spent a time as a translator, but I hadn’t been a Spaniard for too long; this wasn’t home anymore, either. I crossed the ocean again. Planning to set across the continent, I stopped among the Calusa, and though I knew myself a fool, inquired after Lilu. The man whose wife had died of smallpox died of it, too, and there was nothing left to keep her there, so she moved on. I thought perhaps then, that I would stumble upon her, as I had before; but I knew from Juan that to chase her was to embrace a sad oblivion. If it were fated, I knew that in the time I must still have that we would meet again, and if it were not, then I had already lived a lifetime’s worth. How little did I know then; I have lived four hundred years since. I have loved, I have lied, fought, stolen, murdered, worked my hands to bone. I have fathered and raised several children, and known many women and men, but I have never seen a soul like Lilu’s. And what I’ve learned, perhaps what I’ve known since very near to the beginning, is she was the source of my youth and my longevity, and only because I let her go was she not my ruin also. She was the font of youth Juan sought so desperately, and loved so disastrously. Font comes from the Latin fontis, meaning basin; I would not be the first to compare the womb to such an object. But the feminine word also means fountain, as a life-giving spring whose presence brings health in a community. Through my years, I have entertained many wild imagings, including that Lilu was the Apocryphal Lilith. She was not goddess nor daemon as my eyes could tell, though through a lover’s eyes she was as perfect as any woman could be. I’ve seen her once since then, in a crowd in a picture taken in Paris, in the 1970s, and I am certain she exists even still. I’ve been called Escalante Fontaneda, among many other things. I’m dying now, as Juan was, then, as much from lack of her as anything else. |
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