THE HORSE LATITUDES

It is in fact the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity; even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492, the year Columbus crosses the Atlantic Ocean. We are all direct descendants of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy begins, insofar as the word beginning has a meaning....

Tzvetan Todorov
The Conquest of America

1

When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters,
True sailing is dead.
Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned,
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop,
And their heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over

James Douglas Morrison
"The Horse Latitudes"

These are the first days of August 1492. If we go down to the docks in the great Spanish port of Cádiz we are overwhelmed, barely able to find a square inch on which to stand, scarcely able to glimpse the ships amassed in the harbor. The throngs of people are unbearable, particularly in the damp summer heat, and worst of all are the tears, the wailing, the ritual prayers, all those noises and smells and sights of departures. This is the day, the hour, the place, of a leave-taking more grievous and painful than that of death itself, an exodus inscribed in all the sacred texts, anticipated and repeated. For the Jews of Sefarad, what Christian nomenclature calls Spain, this is the last day in that most beloved of homelands, the one that had almost made them forget that it, too, was but a place of exile, a temporary home in a diaspora.

But the second diaspora did come, and the second day of August had been set, months before, in March, as its permanent marker. Indeed, the doubly poignant story, revealing the profound sense of redoubled history of the Jews on the eve of this diaspora, is that while the original Edict of Expulsion called for the final day in Spain to be exactly three months later—which would have meant the 31st of July—the visionary rabbis who had access to Ferdinand and Isabella pleaded for a slight but crucial change of date. It was thus that Isaac Abravanel (whose son Judah, eminent Neoplatonist author of the Dialoghi d'Amore, would live out his exile in Italy, known as Leone Ebreo), playing his final cards as influential courtier with the Christian monarchs, had the date reset to the 2nd of August. In the liturgical calendar this was the 9th of Ab, the anniversary of the Destruction of the Temple. With kabbalistic precision, then, the diaspora of 1492 would mimic the first Diaspora, and the tears for Sefarad would be indistinguishable from those for the first Temple. Exile on Diaspora. And, during that summer, all roads led to the sea, to ports such as Cádiz, to the desperately overbooked ships, and they were filled with the sounds of exile, that mingling of the vernacular sorrow of the women and the children with the liturgical chanting of the men.

But only one among the thousands of trips launched that summer, all begun on that same 2nd of August, would be remembered as that perfect marker of a rip in the fabric of world history, the one we commemorated at school every year, as children, the one whose centrality our own children now continue to commemorate, even as they question its "value." For, to lay yet a third anniversary onto the commingled exile and diaspora, it was on the same day—but from the inferior port of Palos because Cádiz, the natural first choice, was far too overcrowded with the "Jew-bearing ships"—that Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The scandalous suggestion has been made that Columbus himself was the most conspicuous of the exiles that day, one of the conversos, those converted Jews usually readily identified by their excessive devotions, their fanatical and public enactments, of the banal and ritualized pieties of Christianity. But what matters, for the recounting of that exodus, is not as much Columbus's profoundly enigmatic personal history—and whether he "really" was or not—as it is our ability to understand the intimate ties that do, in fact, bind the narration of the two seemingly opposite kinds of voyages to each other. What is conspicuous in the standard narrations, even those of 1992 that indulged in all manner of supposed soul-searching, is that the two are divorced to such an extent that it is only the suggestion that Columbus might have been one of the Jews himself that calls our attention to what we then call the "coincidence": the voyages of exile and the voyage of discovery begin at the same hour, in the same place. In all other versions it is no more than a coincidence, an odd coincidence, and it is not the role of our histories, literary or otherwise, to account for coincidence. The word itself, for which we can sometimes substitute something like synchronicity, suggests exactly that it lies outside our purview: an intersection that would be highly meaningful—if only it were not so fantastic and obviously meaningless, impervious to rational exegesis.

At the heart of our repression of this synchronism, of this meaningful layering of histories, of this knowledge that it is the very day, the precise day, that Columbus leaves Spain that is the beginning of the second diaspora—itself the most mournful of commemorations of the first Diaspora—is the simple fact that "Columbus" himself is the first to look away and ignore. In that most enduringly canonical of biographies of Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison notes with clear and considerable puzzlement in his tone that Columbus completely ignores the remarkable scene of the expulsion of the Jews that was not only the event of the season, and all around him, but which obviously complicated and even directly compromised his own obsessive mission. But Morison, and most other tellers of the story, are mesmerized by Columbus's gaze—and we have all looked away with him; we pretend not to see the others on the docks that day, although out of the corner of one eye, the scene is explosive and central and shapes everything Columbus does, beginning with the long-sought approval of the trip, granted only, conspicuously, in the aftermath of both the expulsion decree and the taking of Granada, that last outpost of Muslim Spain. (Indeed, into the first fistful of coincidences we must now begin to stuff others. It is at the beginning of that fateful year, on January 2 of that same 1492, that the closure of al-Andalus, of a certain kind of medieval Spain, is finally consummated, and from that will follow, as if written, the forced conversions and then expulsions of the Muslims; and with an irony few have noticed, the first grammar of Castilian is published, while the exact date of the expulsion is being bravely renegotiated. But that subject leads...