Odd Couple: Marriage of Hemispheres

They celebrate, next year, their 10th golden anniversary. Not quite a wedding anniversary, for their union has never been blessed, but the anniversary of their first, dumbstruck, mutually uncomprehending encounter.

He simply hadn’t been planning on a woman like her. He had had somebody quite different in mind. And she, why, she hadn’t planned on a man at all. But suddenly, there he was, advancing toward her, and what could she do about it?

It hasn’t been a happy union; better, maybe, in recent years, but she bears the scars of abuse, and it isn’t as if she has forgotten. “I wish I had never met him,” she has said more than once; “It may not have been paradise, what I had before he showed up, but whatever it was, it was mine. Since he came, nothing is mine. I myself am not mine.”

For his part, he used to be proud of making something of her, teaching her to read and write, breaking her of her bad habits, smartening her up, taking her to church.

Now, when he thinks of her at all, he is ashamed, and he hides his shame in sentimentality about her pristine beauty, her profound simplicity before they met. She was lovely back then, it’s true, and she knew things--may still know things--that he will never learn. Fragile as she was, defenseless as she was, she has changed the course of his life. “I can no longer even imagine myself without her,” he rightly says. She can imagine herself even less without him.

Oct. 12, 1991, is not the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in America. That anniversary will come exactly a year from now. This year, we may commemorate, if we will, the 500th anniversary of the last year in which the two major, inhabited portions of our Earth led separate lives; the last year before they began their momentous and irreversible exchange of plants, animals and people; the last year before the social world we now live in was physically conceived.

In this long year of commemoration, all the offspring of that union will have a chance to be heard: American Indians, like those gathered today on the Washington Mall to mourn, and with reason; Italian-Americans, from the country that was inventing Europe even as Europe was discovering America; Spanish-Americans, from the country that, in 15th-Century terms, put a man on the moon; African-Americans, whose story so mocks the very designations Old World and New World .

All should speak and all will. Today, perhaps, all may stand in silence before the memory of what we all were on the day before we were born.