East, West by Salman Rushdie

like a horse and never gains an ounce.
    = The earth adores her footfall. Its shadows flee before the brilliance of her eyes.
    — Her face is a lush peninsula set in a sea of hair.
    = Her treasure chests are inexhaustible.
    — Her ears are soft question-marks, suggesting some uncertainty.
    = Her legs.
    — Her legs are not so great.
    = She is full of discontents.
    — No conquest satisfies her, no peak of ecstasy is high enough.
    = See: there at the gates of the Alhambra is Boabdil the Unlucky, the last Sultan of the last redoubt of all the centuries of Arab Spain. Behold: now, at this very instant, he surrenders the keys to the citadel into her grasp … there! And as the weight of the keys falls from his hand into hers, she … she … yawns.
    Columbus gives up hope.
    While Isabella is entering the Alhambra in listless triumph, he is saddling his mule. While she dawdles in the Court of the Lions, he departs in a flurry of whips elbows hooves, all rapidly obscured by a dust cloud.
    Invisibility claims him. He surrenders to its will. Knowing he is abandoning his destiny, he abandons it. He rides away from Queen Isabella in hopeless anger, rides day and night, and when his mule dies under him he shoulders his ridiculous gypsy-patchwork bags, their rowdy colours muted now by dirt; and walks.
    Around him stretches the rich plain her armies have subdued. Columbus sees none of it, neither the land’s fertility nor the sudden barrenness of the vanquished castles looking down from their pinnacles. The ghostsof defeated civilisations flow unnoticed down the rivers whose names – Guadalthis and Guadalthat – retain an echo of the annihilated past.
    Overhead, the arabesque wheelings of the patient buzzards.
    Jews pass Columbus in long columns, but the tragedy of their expulsion makes no mark on him. Somebody tries to sell him a Toledo sword; he waves the man away. Having lost his own dream of ships, Columbus leaves the Jews to the ships of their exile, waiting in the harbour of Cadiz. Exhaustion strips him of his senses. This old world is too old and the new world is an unfound land.
    ‘The loss of money and patronage’, Columbus says, ‘is as bitter as unrequited love.’
    He walks beyond fatigue, beyond the limits of endurance and the frontiers of self, and somewhere along this path he loses his balance, he falls off the edge of his sanity, and out here beyond his mind’s rim he sees, for the first and only time in his life, a vision.
    It is a dream of a dream.
    He dreams of Isabella, languidly exploring the Alhambra, the great jewel she has seized from Boabdil, last of the Nasrids.
    She is staring into a large stone bowl held aloft by stone lions. The bowl is filled with blood, and in it she sees – that is, Columbus dreams her seeing – a vision of her own.
    The bowl shows her that everything, all the known world, is now hers. Everyone in it is in her hands, to do with as she pleases. And when she understands this – Columbus dreams – the blood at once congeals, becoming a thick and verminous sludge. Whereupon the Isabella of Columbus’s weary, but also vengeful, imaginings is shaken to her very marrow by the realisation that she will never, never , NEVER! be satisfied by the possession of the Known. Only the Unknown, perhaps even the Unknowable, can satisfy her.
    All at once she remembers Columbus ( he envisions her remembering him ). Columbus, the invisible man who dreams of entering the invisible world, the unknown and perhaps even unknowable world beyond the Edge of Things, beyond the stone bowl of the everyday, beyond the thick blood of the sea. Columbus in this bitter dream makes Isabella see the truth at last, makes her accept that her need for him is as great as his for her. Yes! She knows it now! She must must must give him the money, the ships, anything, and he must must must carry her flag and her favour beyondthe end of the end of the earth, into exaltation and immortality, linking her to him for ever