Felipa had been warned countless times that men were demanding and unfaithful, and she was prepared for that. But what was wrong with her husband? She was the only lady available to him, and Diego should have a brother or sister, but Columbus hardly seemed to want her. "He cares for nothing but charts and maps and old books," she complained to her mother. "That and meeting pilots and navigators and men who have ever had or might someday have the ear of the king."

At first Dona Moniz counseled her to be patient, that the insatiable lusts of men would eventually conquer Columbus's seeming indifference. But when that did not happen, she eventually gave her consent for them to move from isolated Porto Santo to a house the family owned on Funchal, the largest city on the main island of the Madeiras. The theory was that if Columbus could satisfy more of his hunger for the sea, he might, in his satisfaction, turn to Felipa.

Instead he turned even more devotedly to the sea, until he became one of the best-known men in the port of Funchal. No ship came into port without Columbus soon finding his way aboard, befriending captains and navigators, noticing the amounts of supplies taken aboard and how long they were expected to last, noticing, in fact, everything.

"If he's a spy," said one ship's captain to Dona Moniz, the widow of his old friend Perestrello, "then he's a clumsy one indeed, since he gathers his information so openly, so eagerly. I think he simply loves the sea and wishes he had been born Portuguese so he could join with the great expeditions."

"But he wasn't, and so he can't," said Dona Moniz. "Why can't he be content? He has a good life with my daughter, or he would have, if he simply paid attention to her."

The old fellow merely laughed. "When a man gets the sea in his blood, what does a woman have to offer him? What is a child? The wind is his woman, the birds his children. Why do you keep him here on these islands? He is surrounded by the sea all the time, and yet can't sail free. He's Genovese, and so he won't get to sail into the new African waters. But why not let him -- no, help him -- join with merchant voyages to other places."

"I see that you actually like this white-haired man who makes my daughter feel like a widow. "

"A widow? Perhaps a half-widow. For there are three types of men in the world -- the living, the dead, and sailors. You should remember. Your husband was one of us."

"But he gave up the sea and stayed home."

"And died," said the gentleman, with brutal candor. "Your Felipa has a son, hasn't she? So now let her husband go out and earn the fortune that he will pass on to that grandson of yours someday. It's plain that you're killing him by keeping him here."

So it was that two years after coming to the Madeira Islands, Dona Moniz at last suggested that it was time for them to return to Lisbon. Columbus packed up his father-in-law's books and charts and eagerly prepared for the voyage. Yet he knew even as he did so that for Felipa there was far less hope. The voyage to Porto Santo had been a dreadful one for her, even filled with hope in her new marriage as she was at the time. Now she would not be pregnant -- but she had also despaired of finding happiness with Columbus. What made it all the more unbearable was that the more aloof he became, the more hopelessly she loved him. She could hear him speaking to other men and his voice, his passion, his manner were captivating; she watched him poring over books that she could barely understand and she marveled at the brilliance of his mind. He wrote in the margins of the books -- he dared to add his words to the words of the ancients! He dwelt in a world that she could never enter, and yet she longed to. Take me with you into these strange places, she said to him silently. But the silence with which he answered her was not filled with longing, or if it was, his longings did not include her or little Diego. So she knew that the voyage back to Lisbon would not bring her closer to her husband, or farther. She would never touch him, not really. She had his child, but the more she hungered for the man himself, the more she reached out to him, the more he would push her away; and yet if she did not reach out, he would ignore her completely; there was no path she could see that would lead her to happiness.

Columbus saw this in her. He was not as blind to her needs as she supposed. He simply had no time to make her happy. If she could have been content to share his bed and let him be with her whenever he was weary of his study, then he might have been able to give her something. But she demanded so much more: that he be interested in -- no, delighted about -- every clever childish thing that the incomprehensible Diego did! That he care about the gossip of women, that he admire her needlework, that he care what fabrics she had chosen for her new gown, that he intervene with a servant who was being lazy and impertinent. He knew that if he took interest in these things it would make her happy -- but it would also encourage her to bring even more of this kind of nonsense to distract him, and he simply had no time for it. So he turned away, not wishing to hurt her and yet hurting her all the same, because he had to find a way to accomplish what God had given him to do.

During the voyage back to Portugal, Felipa was not so terribly seasick, but she nevertheless stayed in her bed, bleakly staring at the walls of her tiny cabin. And from this sickness of heart she would never recover. Even in Lisbon, where Dona Moniz hoped that her old friends would cheer her up, Felipa only rarely consented to go out. Instead she devoted herself to little Diego and spent the rest of her time haunting her own house. When Columbus was away on a voyage or on business in the city, she wandered about as if searching for him; when he was there, she would spend days working up the courage to try to engage him in conversation. Whether he politely listened or curtly asked her to let him alone so he could concentrate on his work, the end was the same. She went to her bed and wept, for she was not part of his life at all, and she knew no way to enter it, and so she loved him all the more desperately, and knew all the more surely that it was some failing in her that made her unlovable to her husband.

The worst agony was when he brought her along to some musical performance or to mass or to dine at court, for she knew that the only reason he was accepted among the aristocrats of Lisbon was because he was married to her, and so he needed her on these occasions and they both had to act as though they were husband and wife, and all the while she could barely keep herself from bursting into tears and screaming to everyone that her husband did not love her, that he slept with her perhaps once in a week, twice in a month, and that even that was without genuine affection. If she had ever allowed herself such an outburst, she might have been surprised at how surprised the other women would have been -- not that she had such a relationship with her husband, but that she found anything wrong with it. It was very nearly the relationship that most of them had with their husbands. Women and men lived in separate worlds; they met only on the bed to produce heirs and on public occasions to enhance each other's status in the world. Why was she so upset about this? Why didn't she simply live as they did, a pleasant life of ease among other women, occasionally indulging their children and always relying upon servants to make things go easily?

The answer was, of course, that none of their husbands was Cristovao. None of them burned with his inner fire. None of them had such a deep gravity of passion in his heart, drawing a woman ever closer, even though that deep well in him would drown her and never yield anything, never give off anything that might nourish her or slake her thirst for his love.