Explosion in a Cathedral, page 10
XI.
What uproar is this?
Goya
Victor, leaning on the prow, looked incredulous when the ship dropped anchor in the port of Santiago. He saw the Salamandre, the Vénus, the Vestale, the Méduse, vessels that plied routes between Le Havre, Le Cap, and Port-au-Prince. With them was a multitude of smaller craft—hulks, schooners, sloops—which he knew belonged to the merchant fleets from Léogâne, Les Cayes, and Saint-Marc. “Has every ship in Saint-Domingue gathered here?” he asked Ogé, who failed, like him, to guess at the reasons for this unusual migration. Anchors cast, they hurried to land in search of news. What they discovered shocked them: three weeks before, the negroes had revolted in the North. The uprising had spread, and the authorities had lost control of the situation. The city was full of refugee colonists. There was talk of massacres of whites, of arson and torture, of horrifying rapes. The slaves had brutalized the daughters of the families, subjecting them to unspeakable cruelties. The country was given over to extermination, pillage, and lubricity . . . Captain Dexter, who had a small cargo bound for Port-au-Prince, would wait a few days, hoping for news to ease his mind. If the disorder continued, he would go directly to Puerto Rico and Suriname, avoiding Haiti. Victor, worried over the fate of his possessions, was uncertain what to do. Ogé, however, was calm: no doubt, the whole affair had been overstated. The correspondences with other events of far-reaching scale were too many for this to be a simple rebellion of barbarians in a fervor of rape and arson. People had likewise spoken of frenzied mobs, drunk on blood, after a certain July 14 that was now transforming the world. Among the most distinguished officials in the colony was his brother Vincent, like him educated in France, a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris, an esteemed philanthropist; he would have known to contain these insurrectionary masses if they were pouring into the streets and fields clamoring for something other than their just due. Many of these men were like Vincent, steeped in philosophy, conscious of what the times demanded. There was nothing to do but wait a bit; as the days passed, what had happened would become clear. If Dexter was insistent that he wouldn’t travel to Port-au-Prince, no matter, the ships now seeking safe harbor in Santiago soon would. A journey to the neighboring island onboard one of them would be a pleasurable jaunt . . . In the meanwhile, they would have to deal with the heat, which seemed to seep up from the orlop, from the hold, from the hatches, from the very timbers of the Arrow, when the ship, sails furled, stood anchored in the harbor—the harbor of Santiago, and moreover in the month of September. An inescapable smell of warm tar invaded the cabins and passageways, but not enough to mask the vapors of potato peels, rancid fat, and waste water from washing dishes, which rose up to the deck from the kitchens. Worst of all, there was no way to take refuge onshore. No lodging was available in the city: refugees had filled the pensions, the hostels, and inns, contenting themselves with a billiard table in place of a bed or even an armchair shoved into a corner where they could pass the night. People mobbed the cathedral stairway and defended tooth and nail that stretch of cool stone that served them as a mattress. Ogé and Esteban slept on the Arrow’s deck, waiting for dawn to take the first boat to land in the hope of finding relief in the streets and their little houses painted pink, blue, or orange, with wooden railings and studded doors that evoked the early days of colonialism—when Hernando Cortés, still a modest mayor, sowed the first vines brought from Spain in the recently discovered Antilles. They would lunch in some tavern on whatever they could find—even the staples were lacking—before seeking out the picturesque shelter with thatched palm roofs that French swindlers, shrewd in profiting from turmoil, had raised in the port of Santiago like an afternoon fairground. Esteban was surprised that neither Sofía nor Victor cared to accompany him on his rambles through the city. But even with the stifling heat, they chose to stay onboard the Arrow, which remained empty otherwise in those days of forced immobility; at the first opportunity, the crew went to shore, returning at nightfall or sometimes well after, drunk and uproarious in their canoes. Sofía said the temperature kept her awake till dawn, when she’d drag herself to bed just as the others were starting to wake. At sunrise, Victor would sit in the forecastle, facing the city, at work on the voluminous correspondence related to his company. And so various days passed—with some on land, others onboard, some maddened by the fetor of the ship, others failing to notice it—until, one morning, Dexter announced that a North American vessel had arrived the night before from Port-au-Prince and informed him that the island was in the grips of revolution. They could wait no more; he would set sail in midafternoon, traveling on without stopping at the island of Saint-Domingue. After gathering their things and lunching on Westphalia ham washed down with beer so warm the foam clung to the glasses, the travelers took leave of the philanthropist captain and the rest of the men from the Arrow. Sitting on their luggage at one of the gateways to the port, they considered their situation. Ogé knew of a rickety Cuban sailboat leaving for Port-au-Prince the next morning with a fleet of local merchants to bring back refugees. It would be best for Sofía to stay in Santiago while the three men departed. If the situation was different from what it seemed—and Ogé insisted that the events must correspond to something more complex and nobler than the zeal for pillage—Esteban would return on the same ship and retrieve his cousin. Ogé was confident, moreover, in the authority of his brother Vincent, whom he’d had no word from for months but who held, he knew, a very important post in the colonial administration. For Victor, there was no question of staying: his business, his home, his merchandise were all in Port-au-Prince. Sofía asked them angrily to take her, promising not to be a burden; she wouldn’t need a cabin of her own; she wasn’t afraid. “It’s not a matter of fear,” said Esteban. “We can’t expose you to the dangers hundreds of women there have faced.” Victor agreed. If life was possible on the island, they would come back for her. If not, he would leave Ogé behind to manage his affairs and would return to Santiago to wait out the storm. With all the French refugees in the city, no one would bother to see if the Victor Hugues there was the same one denounced in Havana as a Mason. Santiago was harboring hundreds of members of Lodges from Port-au-Prince, Le Cap, and Léogâne. Accepting the men’s judgment, she stayed behind with Victor and their scattered luggage while Ogé and Esteban addressed the problem of finding her decent lodging. On board the Arrow—svelte and magnificent, with its slightly slanting rigging, its slender shrouds, its trembling ensigns—preparations were being made to depart, with a great bustling of sailors on deck.
* * *
• • •
The next morning, an old Cuban sloop with patched sails and a parlous appearance departed the port of Santiago, setting course along a coast where the hills grew ever higher. The ship seemed less to advance than to luff in struggle against the contrary currents . . . An interminable day slipped past, then a night with a moon so full that Esteban, at the foot of the mast in fitful sleep, thought twenty times that it was dawn. The sloop entered the maws of the Gulf of Gonâve, and soon sighted the coasts of an island where, Ogé said, the cascades’ water granted women the power of orphic clairvoyance. Each year, they made a pilgrimage to that gleaming altar of the Goddess of Fertility and the Waters, submerging themselves in the foam that fell from the high rocks. Some would begin writhing and shouting in a trance, possessed by a spirit that dictated omens and prophecies—and these prophecies were fulfilled with startling veracity. “I’m surprised a doctor would believe all this,” Victor said. “Doctor Mesmer,” Ogé replied sarcastically, “has miraculously cured thousands in your cultured Europe, magnetizing water in vessels and inducing a state of inspiration in his patients of a kind the negroes here have known since time immemorial. It just happens he charges a fee for it, whereas the gods of Gonâve work for free. That’s the only difference . . .” They traveled on along nebulous coasts as dusk proceeded. Victor, who had been impatient throughout the day, slept heavily—as though needing to recover from his expenditure of nervous energy—after a scant dinner of herring and biscuit. Esteban woke him just before dawn. The sloop was entering Port-au-Prince. The city center was in flames. A giant inferno reddened the sky and hurled ash over the surrounding hills. Victor told them to send down a boat right away, and soon he had stepped onto the fishermen’s dock. Trailed by Esteban and Ogé, he crossed streets full of negroes carrying clocks, paintings, and furnishings salvaged from the flames. They came to a bare lot where charred boards stood smoking with scales of ash between tiny bonfires. He stopped, trembling, tense, sweat dripping down his forehead, his temples, and the nape of his neck. “Allow me to welcome you to my home,” he said. “That was the bakery; this was the storehouse; behind it was my bedroom.” He grabbed a half-burnt oaken board: “This made an excellent counter.” His foot tripped against the plate of a scale, blackened by fire. He picked it up and gave it a long look. Then he threw it to the ground, where it clanged like a gong, lifting up a swirl of soot. “Pardon me,” he said, and burst into sobs. Ogé left in search of family he had in the city.
The day was born beneath low clouds dense with smoke, embraced by the mountains encircling the gulf. Sitting on the oven from the bakery—the one thing identifiable amid the formlessness—Victor and Esteban watched the city recover its rhythms within the annihilation of the city itself. Peasants came in with fruits, cheeses, cabbage, and sheaves of cane to lay out in a market that had ceased to be a market. They arranged themselves where their posts had once stood, at open-air stands that obeyed an order, a topography now destroyed. The insurgents, after setting everything alight, appeared to have vanished. The calm of extinguished coals, cinders, and embers on the rubble-covered earth gave a bucolic aspect to the men hawking milk from their piebald goats, praising the fragrance of their jasmines and the excellence of their honeys. The giant at the end of the breakwater, holding up an enormous squid for sale, was transfigured into Cellini’s Perseus. Several priests, quite far off, were pulling down the singed scaffolds of a church still under construction. Freighted pack mules followed their usual itineraries on streets that were no longer streets, veering off where going straight was no longer possible, pausing at the illusion of a corner where the tavern keeper had arranged his liquor bottles over boards propped on bricks. Victor surveyed and resurveyed with his gaze the site of his annihilated shop, strangely taken, in his suppressed rage, with the liberating feeling of owning nothing, of being left without a single belonging, without furniture, contracts, a book—without a yellowing letter whose words might give him solace. His life was at the zero point, without commitments to fulfill or debts to pay, suspended between a shattered past and an unimaginable tomorrow. New fires had broken out on the mornes: “Burn what’s left to be burned, everything, and be done with it,” he said. And he was still there, at midday, beneath the white splendor of the clouds stretching from hilltop to hilltop, when Ogé arrived. His face was hard, cut through with new wrinkles, and Esteban didn’t recognize him. “Well done,” Ogé said, his eyes sweeping over the vicinity of the fire. “You got exactly what you deserved.” And at Victor’s questioning, angry expression: “My brother Vincent was executed in the Place d’Armes at Cap Français: they beat him with iron bars until his body was broken. They say his bones sounded like a hammer cracking walnuts.” “The insurgents?” Victor asked. “No. Your people,” the doctor responded with eyes of immobile sternness, looking without looking. And in that deserted lot, he told his younger brother’s dreadful tale. He had been selected for an important administrative role but had been stymied by the French colonialists’ refusal to accept the decree of the National Assembly that had authorized educated negroes and mestizos to carry out public functions in Saint-Domingue. Weary of arguments and petitions, Vincent had taken up arms, leading a squadron of malcontents similarly aggrieved by the intransigence—the insubordination—of the whites. With the aid of another mestizo, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, he marched on Cap Français. Routed in their first encounter, Vincent and Jean-Baptiste sought shelter in the Spanish part of the island. But there, the authorities took them prisoner, laid them in irons, and returned them under escort to the Cape. Placed in a cell in a public square, they were humiliated for days on end: insulted and spit on by all who didn’t throw rubbish and buckets of waste on them as they passed. Soon, a scaffold was raised; the executioner grasped his iron rod, unleashing his fury on the legs, arms, and thighs of the captives. When he’d finished, they brought out the axe. To set an example, the young men’s heads were placed on lances and paraded along the road to the Grande Rivière. The passing vultures, flying low, picked at the faces bruised from torture, which soon lost all human aspect—left mere sponges of flesh with scarlet pits, flourished by dissolute guards who stopped for a drink at every inn . . . “There is still far more to burn,” Ogé said. “Tonight will be terrible. Leave as soon as you can . . . !” They went to the docks, where the wooden wharfs were charred for long stretches, and stepped across struts of fireproof quebracho. Underneath them floated corpses devoured by crabs. The Cuban sloop, full of refugees, had left without waiting another hour—as they heard from an old negro stubbornly mending his nets, as if even in the midst of this vast horror a tear in the weave were a problem of capital importance. All the ships were gone save one recent arrival whose crew had just learned of the events in Port-au-Prince; it was a frigate, a three-master with high gunwales, and countless boats were rowing toward it from the shore. “This is your only chance,” Ogé said. “Go, before they eviscerate you.” In a canoe so poorly built they had to bail it out with gourds, the black fisherman rowed them out to the Borée, but the captain, leaning overboard and hurling imprecations, refused to let them onboard. Then Victor made a strange sign—a sort of drawing in empty space—that quieted the seaman’s oaths. He lowered a rope ladder, and soon they were on deck next to the man who had understood the ruined merchant’s abstract imploration. The ship, bursting with refugees—stinking, feverish, sleepless, weary, sweating through their garments, scratching their scabs and lice; one beaten, one wounded, one raped—would set sail immediately for France. “There’s no other solution,” Victor said, seeing Esteban wavering at the magnitude of this unplanned journey. “If you stay, they’ll kill you this very night,” Ogé told him. “Et vous?” Victor asked. “Pas de danger,” the mulatto responded, pointing at his dark cheeks. They embraced. And yet, Esteban had the impression that the doctor was less affectionate than on other occasions. There was a stiffness, a distance, a measure of seriousness between their bodies. “I’m sorry for what’s happened,” Ogé said to Victor, as if, of a sudden, he represented the entirety of the country. And with a brief gesture of leave-taking, he returned to the boat, where the fisherman was pushing against the body of a horse with an oar, struggling to shove it away. Soon, a thunder of drums broke out over Port-au-Prince, rising to the peaks of the mornes. New fires grew in the redness of the twilight. Esteban thought of Sofía, who must be waiting pointlessly in Santiago—where she had lodged in the home of some honorable merchants, former suppliers to her father. But it was best this way. Ogé would get a sense of what had happened. Carlos would go find her. The strange adventure beginning today was not the kind you could undertake with a woman on a ship where whoever had to wash up would do so in the open, in view of everyone—and there were many other things that, necessarily, would be done in view of all. In part unsettled, in part remorseful, Esteban was yet thrilled at the incredible adventure ahead of him. He felt more robust, more complete, more a man beside Victor Hugues. Back turned to the city, as though proud of abandoning his past under a mountain of ash, the Frenchman grew more French, speaking French with another Frenchman, apprising himself of the latest news from his country. All of it was interesting, unusual, extraordinary. But nothing was so remarkable, so sensational as the King’s flight and his arrest in Varennes. That was so tremendous, so hard for any mind to grasp, that even the words King and arrest failed to coincide or constitute an immediate, admissible possibility. A monarch arrested, shamed, humiliated, prisoner to a people he claimed to govern, but was unworthy of governing! The highest crown, the most illustrious power, the loftiest scepter in the universe, with a gendarme to either side of him. “To think I was dealing in contraband silks while such things were happening in the world,” said Victor, bringing his hands to his head. “Just as back there, people were witnessing the birth of a new humanity . . .” The Borée, pushed by the night breeze, drifted beneath a sky of stars bright where the painted shadows of the Eastern mountains converged with the pure drawing of the constellations. The fires of before were now behind them. In the Orient arose, erect and magnificent, glimpsed by the eyes of understanding, a Pillar of Fire that guided the departed to every Promised Land.
