Mr. Eternity Read Online Free PDF Page A

mosquitoes, wherever they went.”
    “You’d take a T-shirt back with you?” I said. “A T-shirt, of all things?”
    “A light cotton T-shirt,” he said.
    “But look,” said Azar, tugging at his own shirt collar. “This T-shirt is actually made from merino wool. It’s a lightweight blend. It wicks away perspiration and it has natural antimicrobial properties to combat odor. Plus it hangs better. Cotton is terrible in the heat.”
    “A merino wool T-shirt, then, or rubber-soled shoes,” said the ancient mariner. “Or an assault rifle and lots of ammunition. Or a trunk of peppercorns. I’d fill it up at the store here in the twenty-first century and take it back and I’d buy huge parcels of land. I’d be a king. I was going to say penicillin, because once on the Mississippi River I was bitten by an enormous glowing ant, like a lobster, and my foot got infected and had to be cut off by some Indians, but in the end they also had a medicine that made it grow back, so I wouldn’t have needed penicillin after all. It would have saved me some grief but I wouldn’t have needed it.”
    Azar helped himself to more plantains. The ancient mariner ate nothing, true to his word. I wanted very badly to have more po, but already I felt jittery and unsound.
    “This stuff you’re telling us,” said Azar. “This is like smelling salts for a cynic like me.”

1560
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    One morning a Christian comes floating down the river in an Indian canoe. This is Diego Paez de Sotelo. His torso is twice as long as his legs and his beard hangs all the way to the ground. He is all skin and bones. He is all torso and no heart. He is the only other survivor of the Lopez y Barra expedition to the land of cinnamon, and he has been wandering in the forest since he was abandoned there by Daniel de Fo.
    For this abandonment he desires vengeance, so he comes to the alcalde’s residence and denounces Daniel de Fo for all manner of crimes against the Faith. He says that he saw Daniel de Fo eat unleavened bread during the recent expedition. He says that he not only amended a hymn of David but also insisted that the hymn was improved by his amendment. He says that he ate Indian roots for the purpose of divination, and that he had prophetic dreams, and that he did indeed make a certain conjuring in order to restore his missing left foot. He says that he made invocations of demons for the purpose of causing Pedro Avila to lose his wits and murder the captain general Lopez y Barra. He confirms the story that Daniel de Fo is one hundred years old and he says that his robust health is a result of a pact with the devil. He also says that he was observed reading a book that treated of profoundly deep spiritual things of the Faith, which, as an ignorant person and a soldier, he should have abstained from reading.
    I cannot stop laughing during this recitation. The alcalde laughs too, haha, but only because I’m laughing. These are serious violations of canon law and now, because there is no apostolic inquisitor in Santa Inés, it is for him to decide whether Daniel de Fo should be sacrificed to the Christian God or sent away for trial. When Diego Paez de Sotelo is gone, he orders his men to remove Daniel de Fo from the brothel and lockhim in the guardhouse down the street. Then he explains to me that Daniel de Fo is not a true Christian after all, but a converso, a Jew who lives as a Christian. He tells me that the Jewish heresy, which is also called the Mosaic heresy, is one of the greatest heresies, and there are those among the Christians who believe that a Jew can no more repent and become a Christian than a fish can become a monkey. He tells me these things because he believes it is his duty to instruct me in the precepts of Christianity.
    The alcalde wants peace more than anything, and all of this grieves him terribly. He puts his head in his hands. He sighs. He himself believes that anyone who loves God is a Christian, but in the eyes of the law this