Vasco da Gama: A Private Life

1524, Cochin

The fever comes not as a single enemy, but as a procession, as if the Arabian Sea itself had learned the trick of entering a room by recurrence, each wave laying claim to a little more of the body, each retreat leaving behind a deeper proof that mastery may survive in title while deserting the flesh in detail. I lie here in Cochin smelling spice, wet wood, oil, paper, sweat, and the faint corruption that clings to all empires once clerks begin believing they can outlast the men who gave them shape. I know very well that already they are measuring me in Lisbon according to the forms most useful to them: conqueror, butcher, servant, scourge, founder, relic. They will choose whichever shape best fits the need of the next reign. That is how courts preserve themselves. A dead man does not argue back. He accepts whatever costume they press upon him, because he is no longer in the room to correct the pressing. This is the last insult and I feel it approaching: not death, which is only the end of one's own argument, but transformation into a figure drawn by others' purposes, fixed at the point most useful to those who come after. That is why I am still holding the pen.

I was not built for their tidy uses. I crossed too much water, broke too many doors, and wrote Portugal's name too deep into seas that had no wish to receive it for them to reduce me now to one painted posture and call the paint truth. If I leave them silence they will carve a saint for the timid and the pious and a monster for the righteous, and place my bones beneath whichever figure pays better. I would rather speak while the heat still lets me hold the line of my own shape.