DOMENICO
Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale of
life in Genoa goes on without him very much as before, except that
Domenico has one apprentice less, and, a matter becoming of some
importance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boy less to feed
and clothe. For good Domenico, alas! is no economist. Those hardy
adventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; the
tavern does not pay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at any
rate, things are not going well. And yet Domenico had a good start; as
his brother Antonio has doubtless often told him, he had the best of old
Giovanni’s inheritance; he had the property at Quinto, and other property
at Ginestreto, and some ground rents at Pradella; a tavern at Savona, a
shop there and at Genoa--really, Domenico has no excuse for his
difficulties. In 1445 he was selling land at Quinto, presumably with the
consent of old Giovanni, if he was still alive; and if he was not living,
then immediately after his death, in the first pride of possession.
In 1450 he bought a pleasant house at Quarto, a village on the sea-shore
about a mile to the west of Quinto and about five miles to the east of
Genoa. It was probably a pure speculation, as he immediately leased the
house for two years, and never lived in it himself, although it was a
pleasant place, with an orchard of olives and figs and various other
trees--‘arboratum olivis ficubus et aliis diversis arboribus’. His next
recorded transaction is in 1466, when he went security for a friend,
doubtless with disastrous results. In 1473 he sold the house at the
Olive Gate, that suburban dwelling where probably Christopher was born,
and in 1474 he invested the proceeds of that sale in a piece of land
which I have referred to before, situated in the suburbs of Savona, with
which were sold those agreeable and useless wine-vats. Domenico was
living at Savona then, and the property which he so fatuously acquired
consisted of two large pieces of land on the Via Valcalda, containing a
few vines, a plantation of fruit-trees, and a large area of shrub and
underwood. The price, however, was never paid in full, and was the cause
of a lawsuit which dragged on for forty years, and was finally settled by
Don Diego Columbus, Christopher’s son, who sent a special authority from
Hispaniola.
Owing, no doubt, to the difficulties that this un fortunate purchase
plunged him into, Domenico was obliged to mortgage his house at St.
Andrew’s Gate in the year 1477; and in 1489 he finally gave it up to
Jacob Baverelus, the cheese-monger, his son-in-law. Susanna, who had
been the witness of his melancholy transactions for so many years, and
possibly the mainstay of that declining household, died in 1494; but not,
we may hope, before she had heard of the fame of her son Christopher.
Domenico, in receipt of a pension from the famous Admiral of the Ocean,
and no doubt talking with a deal of pride and inaccuracy about the
discovery of the New World, lived on until 1498; when he died also, and
vanished out of this world. He had fulfilled a noble destiny in being
the father of Christopher Columbus.