Amerigo's Racial Reckoning

 

1.

Amerigo Vespucci rested on his bronze shoulders on the creek’s muddy bottom, collateral damage in what was called a moment of racial reckoning.  A few yards upstream, Columbus, stout and barrel-chested, but dressed in a floppy liver-shaped hat with breeches and hose and a mantle like a pig-butcher cast in a Shakespearian play, was drowned deeper in the ooze.  Skid marks in the river-bank showed where the statues had been dragged and, then, forced underwater.  Some malt liquor cans, flyers printed with demands for justice, crumpled potato chip bags and candy wrappers marked the site of the demonstration.  In the park, plinths for the statues stood forlorn, empty granite pedestals with rusting metal staples where the figures had once been fettered.  

The Admiral of the Ocean Sea was older than Vespucci and much more distraught about his watery fate.  In the hollow cavity of his bronze head, Vespucci heard Columbus raging about the injustice that he had suffered. – It is all based on a misunderstanding, Columbus cried, his indignation booming in the empty grotto of his chest and belly, sending a watery signal that reverberated in Vespucci’s own voids.  Columbus was vain and supercilious, easily offended. Amerigo was more equable.

Vespucci was the product of an eccentric Kiwanis club with some wealthy Italian members, cast in the fifties from a half-scale model of the figure gracing the facade of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  He was more compact and less readily angered and, in fact, was relieved to be submerged, the hot sun no longer stinging in his patina and birds no longer able to insult him with their sticky white lime.  The creek bed was cool and soft and little minnow were already kissing the algae that had formed on his outstretched finger-tips and smooth chin.  The anonymity of the stream didn’t bother him.  No one recognized him when he was upright on his pedestal.  In fact, with his yearning hands gesturing under his belly and his face upturned, as if to adore the sun and sky, many pedestrians had mistaken him for some sort of saint, casually approaching only to see the scroll of map at his side, marked “AMERICA”, and, then, wondering who he was and why he was so displayed.  The plate affixed to the pedestal named the Kiwanis club and listed some donors but was, apparently, otherwise incommunicative – Amerigo couldn’t see it because his face was elevated and cocked toward the distant horizon and, so, he wasn’t sure what it said; the only thing certain to him was the information inscribed on that bronze plate was uninteresting, since visitors only glanced at it and, then, walked away.  

When the crane came in the middle of the night, Columbus demanded that he be first saved.  Light searched the stream and blazed in Amerigo’s eyes.  Of course, no one could hear Columbus’ imperious commands.  The crew wore masks, although perhaps this was due to the pandemic, and they worked in haste.  A couple of friendly cops had been bribed, and, influenced by FOX News as to the Culture Wars in any event, they turned a blind eye to the men who maneuvered the hoist over the creek, swung its hooks and elastic cradle into the water, and fished out the statue of the cartographer.  Water poured off his fingers and drained down from his eye sockets, drizzling from his pointed nose.  A truck with hay bale bedding was waiting on the terrace above the stream and Amerigo was swung through the air and lowered into its freight hold.  As the self-propelled hoist backed away from the creek, Amerigo could hear Columbus shrieking imprecations.  Apparently, no one had told the rescuers that there were two bronze figures sunk in the river bed.  Crew members smoothed the ruts made in the lawn, raking out the furrows as the cops anxiously watched them.  Columbus continued to demand that he be retrieved from his watery grave, but, of course, only other statues can hear statues, and, when the grass was repaired, the hoist drove off and, with the policemen waving, the truck accelerated around the park lane’s looping curves and, then, exited from the preserve of trees and monuments onto an adjacent boulevard lined with fast food places and, finally, found the freeway westward.  

2.

The air in the garden was cool and luminous with bird song.  Amerigo was wrapped in a tarpaulin and, then, hauled in that canvas cocoon out of the back of the heavy truck.  Straps yanked him upright and he felt his feet in their long pointy shoes pierced by metal bolts screwed into another big plinth, icy cold like a tombstone.  (Since he had no feet and no body, only a bronze shell of garments, of course, it is a misnomer to say that iron staples pierced his feet.  His elegant shoes with their narrow tapering toe enclosing his echoing void was the part of him fastened to his stone base.)  All around, from varying distances, Amerigo heard voices greeting him.  But the accent was that of the mariner from Genoa, a distinct twang in the dialect that was somewhat distasteful to Amerigo’s Florentine ear.  Apparently, he stood amidst a host of Columbuses (“Columbi”?) mostly hidden behind him or to the sides where he could not see.  Within his range of vision, Amerigo saw a steep slope where a slick-looking tar path wound in switchbacks among dark green pines.  Scattered among the trees on little stone shelves cut into the hillside, Amerigo saw bronze figures of Columbus, forms that would have been regal except for the ignoble floppy hats on the heads of the statues.  Flowers flared like torches in the bright sunlight, the attenuated air of these heights shimmering with bees and tiger-striped wasps and long, green and grey Western locusts that rocketed here and there in the slanting early morning sunlight.  Evidently, the slope ended at a precipice and the ravine dropped away into empty, glowing space.  Water was flowing in the green shadow and, somewhere, cascades whispered among the trees.  Far away, a city spiked glass towers into the sky, buildings floating over a vast tawny prairie.  It was a pretty view, freeways far below throbbing like arteries around the city’s shining steel edges.  The horde of Columbuses gathered in the gorge sang a Te Deum to the dawn, rejoicing as the light rose golden and abundant up the flanks of the mountain.  Bronze throats resounded and, down on the rolling brown plains, Amerigo saw jets rising and falling over the inscrutable diagram of runways.  It was a view to gladden the heart of a cartographer.

Amidst the murmurs of the assembled Columbuses, Amerigo heard voices behind him.  A handsome old man with a silver goatee stood at his feet.  A young woman, possibly an assistant, was next to the old fellow.  She carried a cell-phone and wore dark glasses.  Lips moved and flesh and blood spoke.

3.

Mr. Spellacy, the beer tycoon, said: “This one looks quite different.”  

The young woman nodded and, then, glanced back uphill where two dozen bronze figures of Columbus rescued from the looting and mayhem in the cities stood among the pines in the ravine cut through the side of the mountain.  

“Yes, he’s quite different,” the young woman said.  She had the faint, insolent drawl of someone who has attended an Ivy League college.  

“I wonder if there is some mistake,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“Well, he must br Columbus,” the young woman replied.  “You see that he is pointing down to a map marked “America’.”

“Indeed,” the beer tycoon said.

“I don’t suppose anyone knows how Columbus really looked,” she added.  

Higher up the slope, a peacock screamed, a high-pitched cry that sounded like a cat’s amplified meow.  Near the ruins of the old brick brewery, several of the birds had spread their tails and were slowly rotating with the intent, it seemed, of displaying their iridescent eye feathers to that other greater eye of the sun, now just peeping over the skyscrapers.  Some silky white pea-hens with little tufts on their heads like thin-stemmed mushrooms were scratching in the pine-needle litter.  In a stony trough, a stream dashed downhill and, then, plunged off the side of the mountain.

Mr. Spellacy pushed on the bronze figure’s ankle.  The statue was firmly set in place.

“This looks good,” he said.  “Go ahead and pay the invoice.” 

4.

It wasn’t Ellis Island, but the rough-and-tumble commerce in the mining camps that changed Giacomo Spallacci’s name to Jack Spellacy.  After working in saloons in the West for twenty years, Mr. Spellacy’s great-grandfather, an immigrant from Naples, accumulated enough cash to invest in a brewery.  The enterprise was owned by a Bavarian, Emil Oder, who, recognizing that all beer is more or less alike, imparted to his brew a certain Old World elegance by making the stuff in a brick castle perched high above the city (then just a glorified mining camp) in the ravine on Lookout Mountain.  A spring sprung from the hillside in the cleft in the mountain, a crystal fountain, that Oder enclosed under a brick arch with bright alabaster troughs that conveyed the precious water into the brewery.  He acquired peacocks and outfitted his beer hall adjacent to the castle with militant, jutting antler horns.  The walkway into the place was curbed with the bleached skulls of bison.  Ostentation on this scale was costly and Herr Oder found himself deeply in debt and, thus, sought investors to defray expenses.  Jack Spellacy, along with a couple of other men who were ambitious miners, purchased shares in the brewery.  After a decade, Spellacy had bought out the other investors to become Oder’s full partner.  Oder was moody and vacillated between mania and the deepest melancholy.  On a trip to the Alps with his 19-year old mistress, Oder threw himself into a crevasse in an ice field where he was buried so deeply in the blue bowels of the glacier that his body was never recovered.  Spellacy, who was frugal and industrious, purchased his partner’s half of the business from Frau Oder, a grim and embittered matron.  The mistress, content to be in Switzerland, never returned from Europe.  

During the next generation, the beer brewed in the canyon above the city was famous in the area, served at the spas catering to the wealthy along the front range, but not elsewhere in the State.  Mr. Spellacy’s father expanded the enterprise and shipped the brewery’s products throughout the Intermountain West.  But it was Mr. Spellacy, later the collector of abused and despised Columbus statues, that made the business famous throughout the United States and, then, expanded the market into Europe and Asia.  With his family, Mr. Spellacy still lived in the chalet next to the brewery but the old castle with its crypts full of spring water and mighty boilers and fermentation tanks was obsolescent.  The brewery on the mountain was closed, its operations moved into the valley.  The picturesque beer hall with its immense oak tables and sinister crests of pronghorn and elk antlers was dismantled, trucked down the hill, and reassembled next to the gleaming new factory.  (Tours of the brewery are available with complimentary tasting in the old beer hall that has been recently restored.)  For the first time in sixty years, the gorge in the mountain no longer smelled of yeast and sickly-sweet fermenting malt, the smells that Mr. Spellacy had inhaled all his life.  One night, the wood inside the castle caught fire.  It was winter time and the canyon road was inaccessible to fire trucks and so the flames continued unabated until the blaze burned itself out.  When the hillside thawed in April, crews cleared the fallen timbers and shattered bricks clogging the spring and cut channels lined with cobble-stones, freeing the bright water so that it could flow in cascades regulated by concrete through the steep inclined gardens to plunge over the cliff at the bottom of the ravine.     

Mr. Spellacy believed that he was living in End Times.  He hired men to erect an iron-walled bunker in a subterranean chamber cut into the living rock under his chalet.  From his eyrie, he could look up to the shining mountains and down to the city and its suburbs and the great columns of stainless steel tanks in his brewery below.  

5.

After a light mid-day repast, Mr. Spellacy strolled in his Columbus garden.  At his side was Prana Daruwala, director of marketing.  Mr. Spellacy was attired in a grey suit with a charcoal-colored shirt and green silk tie.  Mr. Daruwala wore a light jacket marked with the company logo, tailored jeans, and expensive cowboy boots.

They took the zigzagging asphalt trail from the ruined brewery downhill to the look-out at the precipice.  The treeless steppes stretching to the blue horizon were golden and the city was splendid with light glittering in the shards of its towers.  

Mr. Spellacy inquired as to the campaign to launch a new beer, Red White & Blue Brew.  

“Will we be ready to promote the product in June?” Mr. Spellacy asked.

Mr. Daruwala assured him that the advertising campaign was poised for marketing Red White & Blue Brew for the upcoming 4th of July.  

They turned from prospect over the city and the gush of the waterfall to trudge back up the gorge.  Mr. Daruwala climbed mountains on the weekends and so he was in excellent shape.  Mr. Spellacy huffed and puffed on the incline.

The two men paused to rest in front Mr. Spellacy’s new acquisition.  

“This one looks quite different,” Mr Daruwala said, gesturing at the impassioned holy-looking figure pinned to the featureless granite pedestal.

“Yes, it’s an interesting variant,” Mr. Spellacy replied.

“How many do you have?” Mr. Daruwala asked.  

“I don’t know exactly.  I’ll have to count.  Maybe about 30.”

“Remarkable,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“I’m doing these municipalities a favor,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “I make their problems just disappear in the dark of the night.”

“And you’re preserving the statues for posterity,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“This is true,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “The time is short, but I still think that we’ll see the pendulum swing back to what is normal.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Mr. Daruwala said, with, however, a skeptical note in his voice.

“Columbus was a great man because he was bold and innovative,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “You know my motto – ‘Innovate don’t imitate’.”

“I do indeed,” Mr. Daruwala said and, then, he repeated the slogan in a soft, reverential voice.

“These fellows have been battered and abused,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “But they’re still standing proudly.  At least, that’s what I think.”

Mr. Spellacy said something about scripture and the End Times that Mr. Daruwala pretended not to hear.  

Then:  “Do we have the heroes on board?” Mr. Spellacy said.  

He was referring to ten soldiers, suitably diverse as to ethnic origin, color, and creed (as well as both male and female with a transgender warrior thrown in for a good measure), recruited to promote Red White & Blue Brew.  The soldiers had all been awarded medals for valor and Mr. Daruwala planned to film them toasting their country with foaming mugs of beer at a party staged under the noble profiles carved into Mount Rushmore.  A suitably munificent donation to the National Park Service had been arranged and a generous honorarium budgeted for the heroes.

“I will want to bring them here for a meet and greet,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“Are you sure?” Mr. Daruwala replied.  “I think it might be too soon.”

“Too soon?”

“Too soon after the racial reckoning,” Mr. Daruwala explained.

“But the time is growing short,” Mr. Spellacy replied.

“Not that short, boss,” Mr. Daruwala answered.

“No cameras,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “No publicity for the ‘meet and greet’.  I just want to bask in the presence of our heroes.  You have to humor me.”

“I understand,” Mr. Daruwala said.    

Above the bright, running water, the air seemed fresh and invigorating, like champagne one might have said if mention of that product had not been verboten in the park.  The wind sluiced down the ravine, entwining itself about the statues and they seemed to ring like bells.  

“I’ll make it happen,” Mr. Daruwala said about the meeting with the ten heroes.  

“You’re my right hand,” Mr. Spellacy said appreciatively.  “It’ll be a sort of test.”

“Test?”

“For our Legion of Honor.”

Mr. Daruwala looked up the passionate sacred-looking figure atop his pedestal.  Then, he eyed the figures of Columbus in the groves, each standing stalwart atop his plinths.  

“He really got it wrong,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m an Indian, you know, a real Indian.”

“You’re a true blue American, Prana,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“But those poor native people,” Mr. Daruwala said.  “Going under the wrong name entirely.  And just because this bloke didn’t know what he had really discovered.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

6.

Lunch was served buffet style in the formal dining room at the chalet.  Limousines lined the drive, parked under a flourish of aspens shivering in the wind.  The heroes ate with good appetite and, of course, there were frosted mugs of beer.  Toasts were proposed: to America! to Patriotism and Good Deeds! to the Flag and Thank you for your Service!  Mr. Daruwala tentatively proposed a toast to Columbus.  The heroes looked puzzled: Wasn’t Columbus a town in Ohio?

After they had eaten, Mr. Spellacy guided his guests through the solarium and past the old swimming pool embedded in marble like an immense bath tub under glass ceiling studded with solar panels.  The way was handicap-accessible, without steps and gently ramped from the house into the gardens between the great fins of slick-looking red rock lining the canyon.  Two of the heroes, a legless Marine and a paraplegic Navy Seal with mild brain damage, used wheelchairs and each had been assigned an administrative assistant to discretely steer them away from hazards – there were steeply sloped paths in the garden and those had been blocked with orange highway cones.  But the wheelchairs could, of course, roll off the edges of the mild inclines and it would be unbecoming to have a hero hung up on a curb surrounding a bed of flowers or an ornamental shrub.  

Mr. Spellacy paused with his entourage at the ruins of the old brewery, now half-collapsed and ancient in appearance, like a Anasazi cliff-dwelling, some crumbling masonry towers tucked under the overhang of rock beside mysterious brick cellars, one them foaming with the spring, dark in the shadows but moving with mysterious intent to pump out a thick foamy rope of white water coursing down the hill. Two peacocks standing like sentinels flanked the asphalt trail and the heroees marveled at them.

Blinking in the bright sunlight (Mr. Spellacy thought it disrespectful to wear sunglasses in the presence of these warriors), the beer tycoon said that his great-grandfather had come as an immigrant to this country and that he had hefted 100 pound blocks of ice with tongs and on his shoulder, hauling the frozen stuff up mountain gorges to mining camps.  Then, he had peddled beer from a wagon and pulled draughts in saloons greasy with tobacco spit.  Italian immigrants were despised on the frontier – they were said to be lazy and corrupt, stupid, criminal, rotten with Catholicism and obedient to evil priests, their women whores and infected with social diseases.  

“It was prejudice of the worst kind,” Mr. Spellacy said to the heroes.  Then, he pointed to brewery ruins.  “But he prevailed and built this.  This brewery is his monument.”

A female Special Forces officer, a heroine among the heroes, said that her parents had come from a poor village in the mountains of Mexico and so she understood what he was saying.   The brain-damaged 

Seal seemed baffled and he muttered: “USA!  USA!  USA all the way!”

“Let us continue,” Mr. Spellacy said.  He lead the way deeper into the gorge, along a relatively level path that curved between pines to the first statue of Columbus.  From this place, the mouth of the ravine was visible and the drop-off down to the lower foothills and the glass skyscrapers below.  Statues hulked on terraces below, bronze shoulders and heads partly obscured by the pines that enclosed them.  From this perspective, the garden looked like a cemetery with tombs at intervals amidst mournful, flame-shaped green trees.  

The heros looked around suspiciously.  The sun broke through the clouds and cast a theatrical beam of light on the upturned face of Amerigo Vespucci standing on the ledge near the cliff and the waterfall.  Vespucci’s suffering seemed exemplary, his slender form with gesticulating bronze hands poised at the brink over which the silver strand of water poured.  

Mr. Spellacy pointed to the figure of Columbus, a bronze giant towering over them. “This was the first figure in my collection,” Mr. Spellacy announced.  

“Who is it?” a burly female soldier asked.

“Columbus,” Mr. Spellacy said.  Mr. Daruwala averted his eyes, seeming to take notes on a legal pad clipped to a clipboard that he held against his belly.  

Silence.  The shriek of a peacock.  Water pouring over rocks with a sound a bit like the comb of a woman brushing her hair only louder, amplified by the amphitheater of red rocks.

Mr. Spellacy said that his grandfather was the founding member of the city Italian-American League, an association devoted to improving the plight of recent immigrants and promoting their culture.  There was much xenophobia at the time of the First World War, Mr. Spellacy said, and, so, his grandfather, with other prosperous Italian-Americans donated money so that a statue of Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America and the Admiral of the Ocean Sea could be erected in the park near the State House downtown.  A fine bronze figure was cast and ceremoniously installed on an expansive plinth of Carrara marble quarried in Italy.  Ten-thousand people attended the festive occasion and bands played and Enrico Caruso sang arias by Verdi.  Then, the festival orchestra played the chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco and choirs assembled from four Methodist and Episcopalian churches sang and, as the sun set, fireworks adorned the sky.  

“My grandfather was very proud of the statue and, when I was a little boy, he took me downtown to see it.  There was my family name written in bronze letters with a greenish patina on the base of the statue.”  Mr. Spellacy said that he was thrilled to see the big figure of Columbus scowling over the lawns that rolled downhill to the Capitol building itself and that the statue made him feel bigger and more comfortable in his own flesh and more confident of his ability to do great things.

“I like to think that Columbus would approve of my company’s motto,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “That is, ‘Never imitate, always innovate’.”

A couple of the soldiers, chests all abuzz with medals and decorations, saluted the statue and cried “Hurrah!”

“When I saw on TV that mobs were desecrating Columbus,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “I knew that the End Times were upon us.”

Mr. Daruwala cleared this throat nervously.

“I knew that I had to act,” Mr. Spellacy continued.  “Not to oppose the protesters because they were merely exercising rights for which you all fought and bled.  No, I didn’t try to stop the expression of sentiment, as it were, about my forefather, but, later, after a few days had passed, I sent a crew to rescue the statue from the river where it had been thrown.  And this is the result.”

Mr. Spellacy pointed up to Columbus.  He had been dragged over concrete and part of his nose was abraded so that a hole on one nostril opened into the dark hollow inside the figure.  The corner of his floppy, clownish-looking hat was knocked off.  The mob had painted the words “murderer” on him and dowsed his belly and thighs with red paint and some scaly traces of that pigment could still be seen adhering to the bronze.  

“I now have retrieved thirty, I think thirty-one of these statues from all around the country,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “This is private property and I am preserving here.”

“Preserving them for what?” a Black lieutenant asked.

“Well, the End-Times are coming and –“ 

Mr. Daruwala coughed.  If the End of the World was, indeed, upon us, selling Red White & Blue Brew seemed like a foolish enterprise.

“Things will change,” Mr. Spellacy said.  “The pendulum always swings back.”

A Navajo sniper (National Guard from Window Rock, Arizona) raised his hand.

“Thank you for your service,” Mr. Daruwala said preemptively.

The Navajo sniper, reputed to have killed over a 100 Iraquis in the battle of Fallujah, asked: “Do you see, sir, how this statue might be offensive to some people?”

“Well, I have thirty, or is it thirty-one, of them,” Mr. Spellacy said.

“It’s actually 29,” Mr. Daruwala said.

“But do you see how these statues could bother some people?” the Navajo sniper asked.

“Of course,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “But this is private property and so I have the right —“

“The right to what?” the Navajo asked.

“To celebrate my heritage, just like you have the right to celebrate your heritage,” Mr. Spellacy said.

Columbus’ lips were set and he seemed to scowl fiercely at the heros and Mr. Spellacy.

“But –“ the sniper began.

A peacock shrieked and, then, one of the women hovering over the two heroes in wheelchairs screamed.  The legless Marine, bored by the conversation, had pushed himself a little down the trail to inspect a shrub florid with pale blue and white snowball hydrangeas.  The marine reached forward to pluck a blossom, releasing his hand from his brake, and the wheelchair rolled down the incline, dividing the two orange cones that fell away to the side and, then, careened down the steep trail.

The woman responsible for guarding the man ran over the terraced lawn, hoping to intercept the wheelchair at the first curve on the downgrade.  She reached the sharp turn just before the wheelchair but it ran over her foot.  The young woman howled and fell forward into the flowers.  

The Marine deftly negotiated the first turn and, then, the second and, in fact, it seemed that he was enjoying his wild ride because he let out an exuberant yelp.  Mr. Daruwala pulled out his cell-phone and called 911, certain that this would not end well.  The brain-damaged paraplegic, enthused by the spectacle, shouted “USA!” and followed the Marine down the trail, but he was less adroit and crashed on the second switchback, flung against an evergreen with the wheelchair bouncing violently through the trees and crashing against the base of one of the Columbus statues, tilted sideways with silver wheel still spinning.  

The heroes dashed down the trail and Mr. Spellacy was left alone standing under his grandfather’s Columbus blinking in the bright sunlight.

At the bottom of the twisting trail, the Marine saw that the path ended at the outlook beneath the tall, rail-thin saint with the map nestled against his thigh.  Beyond Vespucci, the cliff dropped into the valley, a column of feathery white water falling onto rocks below.  The Marine was traveling too fast to stop himself and so he veered sharply, smashing into the plinth supporting the bronze cartographer.  The wheelchair spurted out from under him and he fell into a bramble thicket.  

Mr. Spellacy told Mr. Daruwala to fire the Administrative Assistant who had been minding the Marine.  In the gorge, the siren of an ambulance wailed.

Spellacy and Daruwala hurried down the trail.  A couple soldiers paused to inspect the brain-damaged paraplegic who was worming his way through another flower bed of hydrangeas.  “USA!” he shouted, clearly pleased with himself.

The Marine lay in a truncated heap at the foot of the bronze figure of Amerigo Vespucci.

The Navajo sniper knelt over the injured man.  The Marine said that it was fun ride while it lasted.  He gripped the arm of the Navajo and said that his back hurt.

The Navajo National Guardsman said: “Do you see what I mean?  Do you see what I mean?”

But no one seemed to see what he meant.

“These racist statues have to be taken down,” the Navajo sniper cried.

“How can a statue be racist?” Mr. Spellacy asked.

“They must be removed,” the sniper said.

“Before I take down my statues,” Mr. Spellacy said, “I’ll invite them to supper and these lads will come and dine with me.”

“You said it,” the sniper replied.

“I have said it,” Mr. Spellacy said.

7.

Amerigo Vespucci couldn’t see the commotion under his bronze feet.  His eyes were resolutely fixed on the sky and the little oculus in the clouds from which a beam of sunlight rained down.  

But he heard Mr. Spellacy’s speech and the words resounded in his hollow head.

Statues are always awaiting permission from their human masters to leave their plinths and stalk about. But, such permission is almost never given.  But here the words had been spoken.

Vespucci passed along this intelligence to the other statues.  

The casualties were picked out of the flower beds and brambles and pushed uphill on ambulance gurneys.  Mr. Spellacy demanded that a written report be submitted to him by noon the next day.  Mr. Daruwala contacted the company’s insurance broker. 

8.

After the day’s excitement, Mr. Spellacy dined alone.  His newest wife had gone to Monaco.  Both of his daughters lived in Manhattan where they attended college.  Mr. Spellacy worried about his daughters and was afraid, that, in an unguarded moment, they would run afoul of the wrong people, be abducted, and held for ransom.  New York City was a dangerous placed.  

Guadalupe prepared a simple meal for Mr. Spellacy: pan-fried rainbow trout with pozole soup.  Of course, a frosty mug of Red White & Blue Brew sat beside his plate and soup bowl.  Mr. Spellacy ate in a small room with green tile walls next to the kitchen and pantry.  There was no need for the formal dining room with its dark-paneled walls and long heavy table with many place-settings, thirty chairs in all padded with red velvet under a barbed chandelier fashioned from deer antlers.

The green-tiled room had a little nautical-looking porthole.  Mr. Spellacy sensed that something was moving outside –a shadow lumbered by the window and, then, another.  Then, he heard a heavy knock on a far away door.  The sound echoed through the chalet’s empty corridors and rooms.

Mr. Spellacy took his cell-phone from his breast pocket and texted Guadalupe that she should come to where he was eating.  Another loud thud sounded at the front of the house.  

Guadalupe appeared in the doorway.  Flour used in breading the fresh trout marked her dark apron.  Jose, the kitchen assistant, stood a little apart from her with downcast eyes, careful to avert his gaze from the big boss.

“Someone is pounding on the front door,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

Guadalupe replied that, for her part, she had heard nothing but admitted that she was playing the radio in the kitchen.  Jose just shook his head.

Another bang sounded, this time so loud that it seemed to shake the walls, causing the china in the kitchen cabinets to click together, a sound like dice being rolled.

“There!” Mr. Spellacy cried.  “You must have heard that.”

“It might be a bird flying against the windows in the over the pool,” Guadalupe said.

“No, no,” Mr. Spellacy replied.  “Someone is at the front door.  You! Jose, go and see.”

Jose nodded his head and, still looking down at his shoes, shuffled away.

But it was too late, the heavy door at the front of the house creaked as it opened.  Mr. Spellacy heard the rusty hinge squeak.  Then, something heavy dragged across the marble floor in the distant reception hall.  

“They’re coming,” Mr. Spellacy cried.

“Who’s coming?” Guadalupe asked.  

“The statues,” Mr. Spellacy said, half-whispering as if to himself.  Guadalupe looked at him quizzically.

Mr. Spellacy listened intently, cocking his head, eyes closed.  A brazen fist pounded on another door, now closer to the little room where he had been eating.  Then, he heard bronze boots scraping across the floor in the hallway next to the formal dining room.

“Surely, surely, you hear that?” Mr. Spellacy muttered, but Guadalupe just shook her head.

“Call security,” Mr. Spellacy demanded.  

Guadalupe fumbled for her cell-phone.  The clatter in the next rooms was confused, metal on metal..

Out-of-breath, the two security guards hurried into the small room.  Mr. Spellacy asked them to escort him to the safe room, the security bunker in the chalet’s cellar.  

“It’s an emergency ,” Mr. Spellacy said.  

“But –“ one of the security men began.

“Do as I say!” Mr. Spellacy cried.

With the two guards flanking him, Mr. Spellacy hurried through the dark corridors.  As he passed the formal dining room, the door to the chamber was open.  The antler chandelier was dark, a great hooked spider hanging over the immense table where Mr. Spellacy thought he glimpsed giants squatting over the velvet-padded chairs.  One of the security guards took a walkie-talkie from breast pocket and whispered something.  

The cellar beneath the chalet was vaulted with heavy stone arches, some of them encrusted with tiny white pimples where mineral-laden water dripped down onto the concrete floor.  Light bulbs burned at intervals and, in the corner of the crypt, between two iron columns, there was a big metal box, windowless like a safe in a bank.  One of the security guards tapped a code into the key pad next to the iron door.  The other guard whispered again into his walkie-talkie.  Mr. Spellacy heard heavy bronze footsteps thundering in the joists overhead and the brick barrel vaults shook down a fine mist of mortar and milk-colored grout.  Mr. Spellacy felt the stuff in his hair and on his shoulders.  

The door to the iron chamber sprung open and Mr. Spellacy pushed past the plump sacks of rice, the tubs of peanut butter, and the gallons of water in sealed metal barrels.  Some tuns of beer in round kegs like propane cylinders were pushed against the back wall, a hovering arch of reddish rock that was part of the mountain. The security guard shoved the door shut and it made a loud, clanging sound, like an iron bar dropped heavily on the concrete.  

“What was that all about?” the guard with the walkie-talkie asked.

“Some kind of anxiety attack,” the other man said.

“The End Times he’s always talking about?”

“I suppose,” the guard replied.

The intercom spit static into the air.  “Boss, can you hear us?” one of the men asked.

A weird high-pitched scream came from within the metal box, vibrating in the little speaker affixed to the door.

“What is that?” the other security guard asked.

“A peacock,” the security guard said.  “He must have a peacock in there.”          

“How could that be?” the guard with the walkie-talkie asked.

“Go figure,” the other guard said.

   

9. 

In the moonlight, Amerigo Vespucci saw the Columbus figures lumbering through the garden.  They moved with the stiff, clumsy gait of old monks marching to Mass in their cloister.

Columbuses 1 through 28 had found the formal dining room and taken their places around it, but there were no plates set, no goblets nor any cutlery and the guest of honor was absent.  The big cheerless table was like the New World that the Admirals of the Ocean Sea (numbers 1 - 28), an ocean island that he had expected to be graced by the Great Khan and the princesses of Cathay and the lords and ladies that Marco Polo had met during his travels.  But there were no dignitaries to meet him, no temples and no bright harbors scented with spices.  There were just empty sand beaches, clotted with flotsam and the miserable naked cannibals, the poor people of the Indies.  It was a great disappointment, but Columbus was always being disappointed and so the fact that there was no banquet for him (or them) and no host awaiting them at the mansion-house was not a surprise.

Amerigo Vespucci was more skillfully wrought and he had no difficulty ascending the plinth of his monument.  He had seen the city below, streets outlined in pale orange lights and the grid of the towers and the planes at the airport rising and falling over a geometry of red beacons.  It was all very beautiful and could be charted to make a very fine map.  Without maps, Vespucci thought, we are helpless.