La Fuente de la Juventud (The Fountain of Youth)
Write this down.
Write it plainly, boy, though my hand shakes and yours does not.
And if the priest comes afterward with his little knife to cut out the wicked words, bite him.
Not hard.
He is old.
But bite him sufficiently that he remembers the correction.
Especially preserve the wicked words.
They are the raisins in the pudding.
A man may lie politely for seventy years, but upon his deathbed he owes the world at least one obscenity correctly aimed.
Open the shutters.
All the way.
More.
More!
Christ above, must a dying man negotiate even with curtains?
There.
La luz.
The light.
My oldest accomplice.
My first physician.
My final confessor.
Ahhhhh.
Put the pillow beneath me.
No, not like that.
Do I look like an archbishop reclining for a portrait?
Higher.
There.
Now I can die like a soldier instead of a stuffed goose.
Listen carefully.
When I was young, I crossed the sea with men who believed almost anything.
We believed in cities of gold.
We believed rivers might carry emeralds.
We believed somewhere beyond the edge of the chart there waited kingdoms rich enough to make beggars into dukes.
We believed monsters occupied every blank place on a map.
We believed priests who said God had drawn borders.
We believed merchants who said profit was providence.
And because we were young—
ah, youth, youth, magnificent disease—
we believed old men when they told us they knew where the world ended.
Cortés heard the whispers first among us.
Or perhaps he merely possessed the ears required for whispers involving gold.
There was said to be, somewhere beyond the Spanish imagination, a country where age loosened its fingers.
A spring.
A pool.
A silver vein of water beneath palms.
Drink—
and the years retreat.
Drink—
and the white disappears from your beard.
Drink—
and your back straightens.
Drink—
and Death himself must sit on a root, gnawing his knuckles like a disappointed creditor.
Now this—
this—
was a story fit for kings.
Naturally.
What does a king want after he owns everything?
More.
Always more.
A king has land.
He wants the neighbor's land.
He has gold.
He wants the gold still underground.
He has palaces.
He wants another palace because the first palace contains the unbearable memory of yesterday's upholstery.
He possesses armies, horses, judges, cooks, bishops, trumpeters, mistresses, hunting dogs, maps, taxes, mirrors, bastards, legitimate bastards, illegitimate legitimate bastards, cousins imported for marriages, cousins exported to avoid marriages, and six hundred lickspittles trained to laugh before he has completed the joke.
But there remains one province which refuses allegiance.
Tomorrow.
Ha!
There is the enemy.
Tomorrow.
No cavalry can occupy it.
No bishop can excommunicate it.
No treasurer can count it.
No royal seal can stamp it.
No miserable, velvet-coated, perfume-soaked coxcomb can inherit it from his father.
So naturally His Majesty wanted that too.
"Find me youth."
As if youth were a province.
"Bring me eternity."
As if eternity were a sack of cinnamon.
"Discover the fountain."
As if God Himself had hidden it merely to improve the royal complexion.
¡Majaderos!
Majaderos!
Blockheads!
Addle-pates in ermine!
Ponce came after.
And then Florida entered our speech.
La Florida.
Even the name was young.
Flowered.
Green.
Open.
It sounded less like a country than something the earth had whispered while stretching after sleep.
Florida.
We sailed toward it carrying iron, powder, crosses, royal commands, private debts, public lies, jealousies, sausages, lice, cards, saints' medals, stolen spoons, two barrels of wine that lasted three days, and enough male vanity to sink a cathedral.
We were ordered to seek immortality on behalf of men who could not cross a dining chamber without three servants carrying the tail of their dignity behind them.
Oh—
oh, Jesu—
I had forgotten that sentence.
Write it larger.
No, larger!
THREE SERVANTS CARRYING THE TAIL OF THEIR DIGNITY.
Ha!
Ha ha!
Stop looking at me like that.
A deathbed is wasted if nobody laughs.
We searched.
God forgive us, we searched.
We hacked through green country so alive that Europe afterward seemed like an old chest somebody had forgotten to open.
We drank from springs.
We drank rivers.
We drank rain gathered in leaves.
We drank water clear enough that a sinner could see his own face at the bottom and begin confessing from embarrassment.
Nothing.
No thunder.
No trumpet.
No angel came down with a towel.
No beard blackened.
No tooth returned.
No scar vanished.
Miguel still complained of his damned knee.
Alonso remained bald enough to signal ships.
Diego's nose remained so large that birds attempted to migrate around it.
And I remained—
God's little joke—
myself.
Yet something happened.
We slept beneath an enormous sky.
We woke with sunlight on our faces.
Nobody rang a court bell.
Nobody announced the king.
Nobody demanded we bend.
Nobody asked who had the purest grandfather.
Nobody cared whether one's father had worn silk or patched his own shoes.
Nobody inquired whether my blood was noble enough to deserve breakfast.
And then Rodrigo fell backward into a marsh while attempting to look heroic.
We laughed.
Diego found a crab in his boot.
We laughed harder.
Alonso, who had stood beneath artillery without blinking, screamed because a green lizard ran across his sleeve.
We fell down.
And when there were no more reasons left—
we continued laughing.
That was the first miracle.
No permission.
Do you understand?
Nobody had given us permission to laugh.
We did it anyway.
The sun did not bow to Ponce.
The rain did not salute a captain.
The trees carried no coats of arms.
The flowers possessed no genealogy.
The sea had never heard of primogeniture.
A mosquito would bite a duke with exactly the same appetite with which it bit a cook.
That mosquito—
God bless the little bloodsucking republican—
was a philosopher.
Florida cured us of rank.
The sea cured us of ceremony.
Distance cured us of kings.
And without noticing—
we became young.
Not young as court physicians understand youth.
Not skin.
Not hair.
Not teeth.
Something greater.
We became interested in tomorrow.
There.
Write that.
Underline it.
We became interested in tomorrow.
That was the Fountain.
We had been bathing in it for months.
We were away from madmen.
That was the miracle.
Away from men who thought God had arranged the heavens chiefly to explain why their chair should be taller at supper.
Away from courtiers who could smell a promotion through six doors.
Away from powdered jackanapes who bent so often before royalty that nature should have finished the work and turned them into hinges.
Away from those silk-backed lickspittles, those bowing chamber-worms, those perfumed whoresons of etiquette, forever measuring which fool might approach which greater fool without violating the sacred geometry of the carpet.
Away from princes who spent youth spying upon old soldiers because they could not imagine that an ordinary man might possess something unavailable for purchase.
Away from bishops who mistook proximity to power for proximity to God.
Away from courtiers with swords too clean ever to have cut anything but cheese.
Away from noblemen so proud of their blood one expected them to carry it about in labeled bottles.
¡Bellacos!
Rascals!
¡Necios!
Fools!
¡Hideputas coronados!
Crowned sons of whores!
Ah!
There.
Did you flinch?
Good.
That word is older than your grandmother's grandmother.
Leave it.
Posterity grows too delicate when nobody swears at it properly.
When at last we returned, the court stared at us.
They had expected wrecks.
Instead we came home brown from the sun, lean from walking, loud from laughing.
Miguel's knee troubled him less.
Alonso had not regained one hair, but had stopped mourning the battlefield upon his skull.
Diego had learned songs.
Rodrigo had fallen in love twice.
Once sensibly.
And I—
I had learned treason.
Not rebellion.
Something worse.
I had learned to be happy without permission.
The king's men questioned us.
Where was the fountain?
North?
South?
How many leagues inland?
Which river?
What markings?
Could cavalry reach it?
Could barrels be filled?
Would the water cross the ocean?
Would it spoil?
Could access be restricted?
Could guards be posted?
Could foreigners be executed?
Could the spring itself be claimed by royal patent?
Could God—
here I swear they nearly asked it—
could God be made to recognize an exclusive license granted by the Crown?
HA!
HA!
Boy!
Lift me up.
Quickly.
I refuse to laugh at monarchy lying flat.
HA!
The royal monopoly on eternal life!
Sweet bleeding Jesu!
Imagine Saint Peter at the gates:
"Name?"
"Death."
"Occupation?"
"Death."
"Purpose of visit?"
"To collect His Majesty."
"Have you a permit?"
"I am Death."
"No permit, no entry."
"But—"
"Take it up with the ministry."
Ha!
Ha ha ha!
Oh, my ribs.
Worth it.
Every crack worth it.
They threatened us, naturally.
Dungeon.
Rope.
Iron.
Rack.
Fire.
Men in velvet discussed the destruction of our fingers as delicately as ladies selecting ribbons.
One oily little bastard—
I remember him—
had a beard so pointed I expected him to use it as a writing instrument.
He leaned toward me and whispered:
"We shall discover the truth."
I said:
"Excellent. When you do, tell the king. He has been hunting it longer than I have."
That earned me three days without wine.
Savages.
But they were not altogether stupid.
Torture could make a man say where a fountain was.
It could not make the fountain exist there.
And if we truly possessed the secret, they reasoned, age itself would betray us.
Let them live.
Let them marry.
Let them grow old.
Let guards watch them.
Let spies follow them.
Soon enough their joints would ache.
Their hair would whiten.
Their wives would wrinkle.
Their friends would die.
Then fear would seize them.
Then they would creep back to Florida.
And the Crown—
clever, watchful, spider-hearted Crown—
would follow.
So they gave us freedom as bait.
That was their mistake.
Ahhhhhh.
The most beautiful royal blunder in the history of human stupidity.
The magnificent arse-over-codpiece error.
The golden, jeweled, ermine-trimmed cagada of kings.
They let us go home.
They let us marry our sweethearts.
They let us plant trees.
They let us sit beside the fire.
They let us eat bread beneath our own roofs.
They let us walk without ceremony.
They let us become old.
They surrounded us—
the fools!—
with everything that had made the fountain work in the first place.
My MarÃa.
Boy.
Slowly now.
Write her name carefully.
MarÃa.
There.
That was my second Florida.
No.
Better.
Florida taught me what to recognize.
MarÃa taught me what it meant.
Her hair in the morning.
Her bare feet on the floor.
The way she would slap my hand when I stole onions while she cooked.
The way she laughed whenever I attempted carpentry.
The way she could hear pride enter my voice before I could.
Her hand finding mine beneath the blanket during thunder.
The small sound she made before falling asleep.
The furious way she loved flowers.
The equally furious way she hated one particular neighbor's rooster.
Fifty-three years I woke beside that woman.
Fifty-three!
What enchanted spring could improve upon that?
What water could make a man younger than being wanted at breakfast?
What elixir could restore the heart more completely than hearing from another room:
"Old fool, where have you put my scissors?"
A king would have emptied oceans to purchase one more year.
I received fifty-three because a girl once liked the way I sang badly.
Who was richer?
Tell me.
Who?
We watched the kings die.
One after another.
All that sacred blood.
All those physicians.
All those relics.
All that incense.
All those astrologers squinting at Mars.
All those chamber pots carried by hereditary officers of impeccable lineage.
Dead.
Plop.
Into the earth.
Majesty first.
Majesty second.
Majesty third.
God rest them.
Though God may have required a seating chart.
Ministers died.
Dukes died.
Confessors died.
Royal uncles died.
Royal nephews died.
Courtiers who had spent thirty years bowing finally completed the movement permanently.
And that young peacock of a prince—
oh, him!
That velvet-brained jackanapes!
That suspicious little cornudo of his own imagination!
He had us followed for years.
He believed we slipped away at night.
He believed somewhere beneath our houses we kept bottles.
He believed we possessed a map hidden inside a Bible.
He once stationed three spies near my home.
Three!
One disguised as a merchant.
One disguised as a pilgrim.
And one disguised as an idiot, though I suspect that last disguise required no rehearsal.
Do you know what I told them?
Of course not.
You were not born.
I leaned toward the merchant and said:
"Tell His Highness I return to the Fountain every night."
For three months they watched my bedroom window.
Idiots!
I was telling the truth.
MarÃa was inside.
Ha!
HA HA!
That is the best joke God ever let me make.
The prince never understood.
He died young, they tell me.
Suspicious to the end.
Always wondering whether someone somewhere possessed more life than he did.
Poor bastard.
That is how princes grow old at twenty.
And we—
the supposed guardians of the great secret—
grew younger at seventy.
Because grandchildren climbed upon our chairs.
Because wine remained delicious.
Because sunrise had not yet repeated itself.
Because there was always another joke.
Because bread came warm from ovens.
Because someone somewhere was falling in love for the first time.
Because a dog might come running around the corner tomorrow.
Because somebody might invent a better fiddle.
Because there were songs we had not heard.
Because spring kept committing treason against winter.
Because women sang while opening windows.
Because children asked questions kings could not answer.
Do you see?
Youth is not the number of years behind you.
Youth is the number of wonders still ahead.
That was Florida.
I remember her now as she was when I first saw her.
Green upon the horizon.
Birds lifting from the coast.
Water flashing between islands.
Clouds enormous as kingdoms and belonging to nobody.
Flowers without heraldry.
Trees without genealogy.
Fish without taxes.
Wind without passports.
Sunlight falling on saint, thief, nobleman, whore, sailor, priest and bastard with perfect democratic insolence.
The whole earth growing extravagantly without awaiting a royal decree.
And I thought—
even then, though I had no language for it—
humanity will be all right.
Kings will come.
Kings will go.
Flags will rise.
Flags will rot.
Dynasties will announce themselves eternal and be forgotten by schoolchildren.
Some pompous coxcomb will forever be inventing a chair taller than everybody else's chair.
Some oily little bellaco will forever whisper that obedience is virtue when what he means is that obedience is convenient for him.
Some hereditary ninnyhammer will forever mistake the accident of his father's bedchamber for evidence of divine selection.
Let him.
Children will still escape outdoors.
Young men will still cross oceans.
Young women will still look through telescopes.
Some impossible child will always point past the edge of what is known and ask:
"What is beyond that?"
That question is stronger than every throne ever built.
I crossed an ocean when I was young because I believed there was a fountain hidden beyond it.
I was wrong about the water.
I was right about the crossing.
There is always something beyond.
Remember that.
One day they will stand in Florida again.
Young people.
Not conquerors, I pray.
Not men carrying decrees in one hand and chains in the other.
Explorers.
Builders.
Dreamers.
Women and men with instruments whose names I could not pronounce if you placed a pistol against my ear.
They will stand beneath that same impossible Florida sun.
They will look upward.
And where we saw stars—
they will see another ocean.
Then they will build ships.
Not caravels.
Something magnificent.
Something lunatic.
Something so loud it makes every buried king sit upright for one terrified instant.
They will climb into those ships.
They will leave Florida.
They will cross the stars.
And young humanity will begin another foolish, glorious search for the Fountain of Youth.
Let them search.
Buscar es vivir.
To seek is to live.
Perhaps they will cross black seas between worlds.
Perhaps they will build homes beneath alien suns.
Perhaps they will grow old where no human being had ever grown old before.
Perhaps they will discover that the universe contains no fountain either.
And perhaps—
God willing—
they will laugh.
Perhaps ten thousand years from tonight, some old explorer will lie dying beside a window upon a green world whose name no king ever knew.
Children nearby.
Friends.
Someone beloved holding his hand.
And suddenly he will understand the same joke.
No emperor could give him life.
No emperor could own it.
No prince could hoard it.
No spy could locate it.
No torturer could extract it.
No treasury could buy it.
No priest could ration it.
No noble lineage could inherit it.
Happiness had been hiding from power in the one place power never thinks to look:
ordinary mornings.
Curiosity.
Useful work.
Affection freely given.
Dirty jokes.
Bread.
Sunlight.
Music.
Freedom.
The hand of another human being.
Ah.
Now I am tired.
No.
Do not close the shutters.
I want the sun.
Let Death find me indecently sunlit.
Let him complain.
And if those royal bastards meet me in whatever tavern lies beyond this world, I shall buy the first round.
Yes.
Me.
The common soldier.
I shall buy.
Then I shall tell them.
At last.
I shall tell them where we hid the Fountain of Youth.
I shall summon them close.
All the kings.
All the princes.
All the dukes with their jeweled codpieces.
All the chamberlains and bootlickers and pedigree-polishers.
All the stiff-necked majaderos, all the whispering bellacos, all the perfumed hideputas who spent their mortal hours climbing over one another for the privilege of standing nearest a man who also had to shit.
Closer, Majesty.
Closer.
It is a secret.
Closer.
I shall lean across the table.
Very solemnly.
Very respectfully.
And whisper:
"Majestad..."
"Your Majesty..."
"It was outside your palace the whole time."
Then I shall point toward the door.
And bellow:
HA!
HA HA HA HA HA!
Go outside, you brocaded jackasses!
Take off the damned crown!
Open a window!
Kiss your wife!
Apologize to your children!
Eat an orange in the sun!
Play music badly!
Let somebody disagree with you!
Stop paying spies to discover why nobody loves you!
Stop asking genealogy to perform the work of character!
Stop mistaking fear for respect!
Stop mistaking obedience for affection!
Stop mistaking a throne for a spine!
You silly, strutting, velvet-arsed, ribbon-bedecked, pomaded, pedigree-sniffing, codpiece-forward congregation of necios!
¡Majaderos!
¡Bellacos!
¡Cagones de terciopelo!
Velvet cowards!
¡Hideputas coronados!
Crowned whoresons!
You had the Fountain under your noses!
You merely built walls around yourselves so high that the sunlight could not get in!
Ha!
Oh—
God—
there it is again.
The fountain.
I can feel it.
Boy.
The final lines.
Large.
Large enough for kings to read.
Large enough for children to remember.
Large enough for those ships in Florida when they rise toward the stars.
Write:
WE FOUND NO WATER THAT MADE MEN YOUNG.
WE FOUND A LIFE THAT MADE GROWING OLD A JOY.
And underneath—
one last thing.
In Spanish.
For MarÃa.
For Florida.
For those who crossed oceans.
For those who will cross the dark between stars.
Mi amor.
Mi vida.
Mi alegrÃa.
And then:
La vida es hermosa.
Life is beautiful.