As I dip a coconut biscuit in my coffee, I see Odysseus is in despair because he can’t get out: ‘now I’ve crossed this waste of water, the end in sight, there’s no way out of the boiling surf – I see no way!’
So we still don’t know how to swim diagonally.
Did I tell you I’ve never had an electric pencil sharpener? As a girl I thought they were like a symbol of adult life. There was one on my father’s desk and one on my teacher’s desk. One of those emblematic objects from the world I didn’t belong to, the world of things that were too sharp or too heavy or too high. Like the flag of another country, where there were different objects, a different language, a different system. The foreign country of adult life. Mine was the world of flat things, plastic things that didn’t break, cheap things like the pencil sharpener I had. Manageable on my scale, now so distant in time. I never had an electric pencil sharpener but, like a sailor with an anchor tattoo, I could tattoo a blue pencil sharpener onto my arm. The anchor to a past which now seems made up.
Do you realise the pencil sharpener is like a nappy you lose sight of in the waves, which then suddenly pops up somewhere else?
We’re getting nautical now, so Bartolomé de las Casas enters the scene, picks up the microphone, taps it a few times and then announces who the star navigator was in days gone by: ‘Juan de la Cosa, from Biscay, the best pilot there ever was on those seas.’
Poseidon worked against Odysseus. He prevented his passage, whipped the sea into a frenzy, shipwrecked him time and again. Odysseus could be seen as a mediocre sailor because it took him ten years to get home. In contrast, Juan de la Cosa travelled with Christopher Columbus. On returning to Cadiz, Juan de la Cosa produced a map of the world for the Catholic Monarchs; the oldest map to feature the American continent. There’s an inscription in the margin: ‘Made by Juan de la Cosa in the Port of Santa María in the year 1500’.
Juan de la Cosa put Latin America on the map for the first time.
Tania on the phone: ‘But wait, the coolest thing is that you can’t tell what’s sea and what’s land on Juan de la Cosa’s map.’
The sea and the land get mixed up. Juan de la Cosa left an inconclusive ending, opening his map up to double readings: the sea merges with the land and we don’t know if the continent continues. The mother of all ambivalences, which is also the mother of us.