Chapter II #2
“Victoriano died with an enormous amount of debt in his name. As his only son, it is now yours,” Abuelo Arcadio said.
“Bring your mercury to Nueva Espana. Become azoguero in Victoriano’s place and refine enough silver to repay the debt.
Any silver refined from the mercury that remains will be fifty percent yours. ”
“That mercury is not mine,” Elías said.
“It is in your bags,” Abuelo Arcadio said. Again, that jackal smile played across his face. “Is it not?”
The trust on his friends’ faces flitted through his mind.
How easily they had counted coins into his palms. The way they waved to him from the docks as the ship pulled away.
Casually, then returning to their coffee as clouds of gulls rose around them, obscuring them from sight.
As if Elías were merely crossing the city and not the Mediterranean. For they knew he would return.
Wouldn’t he?
Or was it not possible that he could have perished in a storm, sinking to the bottom of the sea, weighed down by all the coins sewn into his jacket?
Was it not possible that he could be captured by corsairs and sold?
Or, once he reached Spain, could he not be caught in the act of purchasing mercury on the black market and again condemned to Almadén?
Months would pass. His friends would mourn him as dead. Perhaps even forgive him, one day.
Greed was less a deadly sin than family creed, as inescapable as the name he bore or the way he recognized his father’s gestures in his own hands.
He swore he was different from his cousins, his uncles, his grandfather.
His greed was different. It buried him in tomes and equations and experiments, for it was a lust for knowledge that drove him to seek more. It was a noble greed.
But that much silver…
He could sail to China, or Persia, and live as a scholar prince for the rest of his days. He could turn his back on the Monterrubios, for he would never need them. He could put every sin he had ever committed to his back and become someone new. Unburdened. Free.
“Seventy-five percent,” he countered.
“Seventy,” said Abuelo Arcadio, extending his right hand to shake.
Elías took it in his. Shook it once and firmly, before he could change his mind. “Done.”
—
At the port of Cádiz, Elías boarded a galleon in the fleet bound for the setting sun.
After six days at sea, just before they passed las Islas Canarias, a storm struck.
For hours, the fleet was tossed across waves higher than a cathedral’s spires like pearls cast from a fist. In the hold, crushed against other immigrants as they retched and cried out between repetitions of the rosary, he pulled a small bag of mercury to his chest and shut his eyes, for the darkness he could control was better than the gloom of the hold.
He bit his tongue as he and the bodies around him rose with the next wave; breath cracked from his lungs as they were slammed back down against the walls of the hold and mercury struck his chest.
The squall quieted. In the end, it was a miracle only one man died, the sailors agreed as they tied an earthenware jug to the corpse’s feet. And of fright, to boot. That was his heart’s fault, not the captain’s. It was an auspicious start to the crossing, was it not?
Each funereal shot of the cannon over the glassy sea rang in Elías’s bones. One, two, three.
They sailed on.
Bile and thirst ravaged his throat. Hunger drew flesh tight as provisions staled and went to rot.
The sun rose and beat on his back, on his skull, blistering his nape and the backs of his hands as he tried to read.
El Libro de San Cipriano had stowed away among his belongings, still forgotten as he pored over Juan de Cárdenas’s Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias and studied amalgamation diagrams from José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias .
His mind bent and folded with each blistering day.
He swore he saw his mother in the faces of other passengers.
He swore he heard the voices of the dead as he leaned against the side of the ship, enduring the exaggerated rise and fall of the swell—was it not better than being trapped in the airless hold below, among the sweat and chanted prayers and the stench of vomit?
—and the punishing blaze of a cloudless sky.
Salt spray stung his eyes and lips. Waves beat against the bow.
Ghostly fingertips grasped at his shoulders, desperate, as if trying to pull him back from a precipice.
Why are you never content? All you ever do is leave.
The galleon sailed on, into the setting sun, into a horizon turned to molten metal.
—
Fifty-five days brought them to a port called Cartagena, where the fleet split in two. Elías sailed on to Nueva Espana.
In Veracruz, he stepped foot onto sand. The earth swept up to meet him. He heard the roar of sailors’ laughter from the docks as he lurched forward and stumbled, a victim not of seasickness but its inverse.
Palms swayed in a breeze. Clouds swung heavy and low overhead; the air smelled of rain, of wet soil.
Perhaps he felt a first, reluctant curl of forgiveness for his father. For as he looked over his shoulder at the bay, at the galleons docked with their sails slack and exhausted, he knew in his bones that he would never return to Spain.
There was only forward.
And so forward he walked.