A Letter from Columbus

Dearest Diagio,

Come stai?

Durante la notte mi sogno di frutteti selvatici.

Isn’t that strange?

Maybe not so strange, knowing what we know.

Diagio, vecchio amico, I can feel you shift in your seat from here.

This letter is reaching you at the breakfast table, no doubt, where you will read it while Selana regales you with tales of how extravagant your wedding will be.

Queens take less time to plan their nuptials, but Selana is Selana.

Potete cambiare la terra stessa prima potete cambiare una donna.

You may ask yourself how you are receiving this letter since it is 1508, and I’ve been dead for two years.

I was sorry to hear about your first wife, or rather, meet her last week.  You’ll be happy to know she’s no longer in pain.  She’s been saying prayers of thanks to our good Lord for receiving her even though we all tell her that it’s pointless.  A prayer in Heaven is like money in a coffin.  What good will it do you now?

Still, she’s a nice, pious woman.  Selana will be a rude interruption after her, I’m afraid.

Poor Diagio.  Born a man and expected to remarry even at an old age.  If you were a woman you could don a black shroud and carry out the rest of your days pretending to mourn.  I hear you telling people that Selana is breathing new life into you.  How ironic, considering the wedding itself may kill you.

Please don’t mind me.  I am having a bit of fun at your expense.

Una risata per ogni lacrima.

How I miss you, Diagio.

Even basking in the light of our Lord, I yearn to sit across a table from you and discuss the texture of an eggplant or the flexibility of a chambermaid.

I miss you yelling at me for my poor pronunciation.

I miss the back of your neck.

Are you shifting again in your seat, Diagio?

I promise no one will see this letter but you.

If someone were to walk by you right now, such as Selana’s busybody dressmaker, all she would see is a letter from your brother regarding a cow he’d like to sell you.

So read on with pleasure while Selana yelps on about wild geese carrying white lilies.

Fidarseli, Diagio, you don’t want to know.

I saw wild geese like the one she wants a day away from landing on the islands.  They flew over my head and I started to scream, because the sun was so hot that day and the crew was especially temperamental.  I knew they’d take the geese as a sign of good luck, even though I wasn’t aware geese could fly that far out from land.

There was so much I didn’t understand then.  So much I still don’t.

Dying doesn’t give anything more than you have, Diagio, it just makes you accept the things you did.

Do you know the first thing most people do when they arrive in Heaven?

Shrug.

Talvolta grido.

But mostly they just shrug and shuffle along.

The first thing I did when I got to the island was write your name in the sand when nobody was looking.  The water rushed up and filled in the letters, and I could see my reflection in your name.

We were joined in that way, as we hadn’t been for months.

When I came back, and you wouldn’t receive me, I didn’t understand why.  I didn’t know that your first wife had found my letters to you.  I wrote one for every day I’d be gone, but I miscalculated, and so you ended up with far fewer than you should have had.  I see the pages were oily from your hands, reading and rereading all those promises and poor jokes.

You were probably correcting my grammatical errors, were you not?  Commenting on how sloppy my handwriting is.

I’m sure the candle burned out before you were through with my first sentence.

That's why I went back to the islands.  But this time when I arrived I was full of rage and disappointment, and when I wrote your name in the sand, the water didn't fill it up--it washed it away completely.

The Indians became sick, my men grew despondent, and I was summoned back--or arrested?--and I died in disgrace.

Disgrace I don't mind.  As long as I'm at peace with myself, what do I care what others think of me?  What I couldn't reconcile was dying without love.  I am an Italian after all.

Every day that I was in jail, I thought you'd come.  If only for a moment, to grant me forgiveness for showing you who you were.  I would rather have been a criminal than a mirror, Diagio, but alas, I was what I was.

And what were you for me?

Would it be a cliche to say that you were a new world?

My new world?

Perhaps.

As soon as you're done reading this, it will fade completely, and you'll be holding a blank piece of paper.

Keep it or dispose of it.  It bears no value aside from the fact that a dead man wrote on it.

It's still just paper.

An object that has experience magic is not, in itself, magical.

People are the same way, you know.

Still just people even after sailing for months across dangerous waters, discovering new worlds, falling in love...

After its all said and done, we may enter history books, but we're still no more than people.

I wanted to let you know that I see you at night.  I see you look at that letter you managed to take away from your first wife before she burned the others.  I see you pray for me over burning candles.  I hear you pray for yourself--for abandoning me.

Stop praying, Diagio.

Te perdono, mi amico

I forgive you

And for what it's worth, so does your first wife

There are no grudges in Heaven

Perhaps that's what makes it Paradise

I suppose I could have waited until you were here with me to say all this to you

But I wanted you to enjoy the time you have left on Earth

As best you can

And when your candles have burned out

I'll be standing here

In the sand

With your name written in big letters

All across the shore

And here, mio amore

When the water fills up your name

And I look into it

I see you

Staring back at me