Explosion in a Cathedral, page 11
Chapter Two
XII.
The healthy and the sick.
Goya
When he thought of his birth city, made remote and strange by the distance, Esteban could not help but evoke it in watercolor tones, its shadows accentuated by the prodigious light of all the illuminated things, the skies turning gravid with thunder and storm clouds, the narrow muddy streets where negroes bustled amid tar, tobacco, and salt meat. There was more coal than flames in that painting of a Tropic which from here appeared static, oppressive, and monotonous, with its endlessly reiterated paroxysms of color and its nights falling from the sky so one hurried to fetch the lamps—long nights stretched longer by the silence of people who drifted into sleep before the voice of the sentry chanted the hour, ten o’ clock, in the name of most blessed Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee . . . Here, in the sumptuous elucidations of an incipient autumn that was portentously novel for a boy from an island where the trees were ignorant of the passage from green to scarlet and sepia, all was a riot of banderoles, a flourish of cockades and rosettes, flowers hawked on corners, thin shawls and skirts worn in civic ostentation, with a prodigious array of reds and blues. Esteban felt—after long years of undisturbed seclusion—that he had fallen into an enormous fair, its characters and adornments the inventions of a stage manager. Everything spun, lured, caught one’s eye: the insistent din of chatty womenfolk, coachmen arguing across box seats, colossal foreigners, foul-mouthed lackeys, layabouts, blabbermouths, gossips, newspaper readers, debaters gathered in impassioned huddles with the spreaders of baseless rumors, the knows-better-than-anyones, the has-it-on-good-words, the saw-its, the was-there-and-now-is-here-to-tell-its—not to mention the ardent patriot deep in his cups, the journalist with three articles to his name, the policeman feigning a cold to justify his covered face, the anti-patriot in overdone patriotic dress hoping his attire won’t stink of deception—all of them, at all hours, stoking the down-and-out masses with some riotous bit of news or other. The Revolution had suffused the Street with new life—the Street, a matter of enormous importance for Esteban, because that was where the Revolution lived and was observed. “Joy and exuberance of a free people,” the boy thought, watching and listening; and he took pride in that title, Foreign friend of Liberty, that one and all bestowed on him. Another man might have soon grown used to this; but so suddenly pulled from the torpor of the tropics, he had the impression of being somewhere exotic—yes, that was the word—surrounded by an exoticism far more picturesque than that land of palm trees and sugarcane where he’d grown up, never thinking anything he saw was worthy of the term exotic. Exotic for him—truly exotic—were the flagstaffs and banners, the allegories and ensigns, the chargers with their wide rumps, as if pulled from a carousel dreamed up by Paolo Uccello, nothing like the bony, fickle nags—good sons of Andalusians, in the end—of his country. All was spectacle, pleasing to pause and admire: the café decorated in the Chinese manner, the tavern with a flag of Silenus mounted on a barrel. The open-air funambulists who copied the feats of famous acrobats and the dog shearer who’d set up shop on the riverbank. Everything was singular, unanticipated, amusing: the wafer vendor’s suit, the display case of pins, the red-painted eggs, and the turkeys praised as “aristocratic” by the woman plucking feathers in the Market. Each shop was a theater, with a window for a stage: of lamb hocks over paper lace; of a perfumer too pretty for one to believe she lived from the few articles on display; of a fan maker, and of another beautiful woman, her breasts resting on the counter, offering revolutionary symbols sculpted in marzipan. Everything was beribboned, swathed, adorned, with candied dyes: Montgolfier balloons, lead soldiers, a print illustrating The Death and Burial of the Invincible Marlborough, here pronounced “Mambru.” More than a revolution, he was in a gigantic allegory of revolution, a metaphor of revolution—a revolution waged elsewhere, based on hidden polarities, elaborated in underground councils, invisible to those most anxious to know. Esteban, apprised of names yesterday unknown, which moreover would change on the morrow, was unsure who was waging this revolution. In an instant, there emerged obscure figures from the provinces, former notaries, seminarians, lawyers without cases, even foreigners, and their stature grew within weeks. Too near to events, he was dazzled at the many faces newly arrived to the tribunes and clubs where he heard the bellows of youths little older than himself. The assemblies he attended, mingling with the public, offered no further information: unacquainted with the speakers, disconcerted by the torrential extravagance of their words, he marveled at them like a Laplander suddenly seated in the United States Congress. This one he admired for his adolescent impulsivity, the expedient severity of his steely verbiage; that one for the earthy inflections of his booming voice; the other, for an eloquence more caustic and incisive than the others’. Victor Hugues kept him poorly informed in those days, because they hardly saw each other. Both were living in a modest hotel, poorly lit and worse ventilated, where the stench of mutton, cabbage, and leek soup wafted in at all hours, along with the scent of rancid butter emanating from the threadbare carpets. At first, they had given themselves over to the pleasures of the capital, frequenting houses devoted to amusement and leisure, where Esteban, through many excesses and not a few attempts on his money purse, managed to tame the concupiscence typical of the many foreigners who reached the banks of the Seine. But after a while, Victor, bankrupt apart from what little he’d earned in Cuba, began to think of tomorrow, while Esteban wrote to Carlos, asking him for a letter of credit through the mediation of Messieurs Laffon of Bordeaux, purveyors of the Conde de Aranda’s garnacha and moscatel. The Frenchman had acquired the habit of leaving early and disappearing until very late. Knowing his nature, Esteban refrained from asking questions; Victor was a man who would speak of achievements only once they’d been achieved and he had gone on to aspire to greater achievements still. Turning inward, Esteban let himself be guided by the rhythm of each day, following the drums of a parade of guards, entering the political clubs, joining impromptu protests, more French than the French, more rebellious than the rebels, clamoring for peremptory measures, draconian punishments, exemplary retribution. His favored newspapers were those of the extremists; his favored orators, the most implacable. Any rumor of a counterrevolutionary complot sent him out to the street, armed with the first kitchen knife he found. To the great irritation of the landlady at his hotel, he appeared one morning with all the neighborhood children in tow, carrying a fir shoot he planted solemnly in the courtyard, dubbing it the new Tree of Liberty. One day he took the floor in the Jacobin Club, shocking all present with the idea that it would suffice to bring the Revolution to the New World if they indoctrinated with the ideal of liberty the Jesuits expelled from the Overseas Possessions and wandering now through Italy and Poland . . . The booksellers in the neighborhood called him “the Huron,” and, flattered by this sobriquet that united the memory of Voltaire and the image of America, he flouted the urbane customs of the ancien régime with frankness, coarse words, and pitiless judgments that at times even wounded the revolutionaries. “I’m perfectly pleased to raise hackles, to talk about rope in a hanged man’s home,” he liked to say, relishing his own intolerable crudeness. And on he went coining huronisms from one assembly to the next, one gossip-mill to the next, even in the clubs where the Spanish in Paris gathered: Masons and philosophers, philanthropists and secularists conspiring actively to take the Revolution to the Iberian Peninsula. They never tired of taking an inventory of cuckolded Bourbons, lecherous queens, and cretinous scions, reducing Spain with its backwardness to a somber assortment of nuns with stigmata, tales of miracles and rags, persecutions and outrages that reduced the territory between the Pyrenees and Ceuta to a pestilent netherworld of reaction. They compared this slumbering, benighted country to enlightened France, whose Revolution had been greeted, applauded, acclaimed by men like Jeremy Bentham, Schiller, Klopstock, Pestalozzi, Robert Bruce, Kant, and Fichte. “But it’s not enough to take the Revolution to Spain; we must also bring it to America,” Esteban said in these meetings, to the approval of one Feliciano Martínez de Ballesteros, who had come from Bayonne and amused him with his witty anecdotes and his occasional whim of singing tonadillas by Blas de Laserna while playing the tune with panache on an old clavichord resting in the corner. It was a wonder hearing Spaniards gather around the instrument, each shouting over the other to intone the verse that ran:
In days of yore, Muhammad would take
His drinks with zeal, shouting one more pour,
He’d empty his cup and later would wake,
Hung over on the floor,
Hung over on the floor.
To a man, they flaunted a vest with the word Liberty sewn in its lining with red thread, forbidden by Royal Disposition in Spain and its American domains. There were plans for invasions, uprisings in the provinces, landings in Cadiz or the Costa Brava, the election of enlightened ministers, the printing of imaginary newspapers, the composition of proclamations—all of which filled their nights with discussion and gave each the pleasure of listening to himself prattle, shattering chrismons and hurling crowns to the floor in pure Castilian verbiage, deriding all the members of the Iberian Dynasty as whores and bastards. Some regretted that the Prussian Anacharsis Cloots, Apostle of the Universal Republic, had presented himself at the bar of the Constitutional Assembly as Ambassador of the Human Race without including a single Spaniard in his retinue of Englishmen, Sicilians, Dutch, Russians, Poles, Mongols, Turks, Afghans, and Chaldeans, all in their national costume, and had instead contented himself, as a suitable representative of that neighboring country moaning under the noose and chains of despotism, with a nameless stand-in. And so Spain’s voice had not been heard on that memorable occasion when even a Turk had taken the floor. “They can disdain us if they will, that doesn’t make us nothing,” Martínez de Ballesteros said, shrugging his shoulders. “Our time will come.” For now, he knew of very valiant men who were prepared to go to France and place themselves in the service of the Revolution. Among them, young Abbot Marchena, a superior soul, to judge by the tone of his letters and a few poems he had sent translated from Latin . . . But Esteban did more than walk aimlessly through the streets, go to parades and civic celebrations, debate frantically until late into the night. One memorable day, he was initiated into the Lodge of United Foreigners, penetrating the vast fraternal laboring world that Victor had only revealed traces of. They illuminated the Temple for him, resplendent and arcane, where surrounded by the glimmer of swords, he was made to walk, tremulous and dazzled, toward the Columns of Jachin and Boaz, the Delta and the Tetragram, the Seal of Solomon, the Star of the Golden Ratio. There, enveloped in aureoles and emblems, were the Knights Kadosh, the Knights of the Rose Croix, the Knights of the Brazen Serpent, and the Knights of the Royal Arch, the Princes of the Tabernacle, the Princes of Lebanon, the Princes of Jerusalem, and the Grand Master Architect and the Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret; and, flooded by emotion, feeling unsuited to such honors, he initiated his ascent toward their degrees, advanced toward the mysteries of the Grail, the transformation of Rough into Perfect Ashlar, the Resurrection of the Sun in the Acacia conserved, recovered in the heart of a tradition which, regressing vertiginously in time, stretched from the great initiatic ceremonies in Egypt to Jakob Böhme, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, and the Secret of the Templars. Esteban had felt One with All, illuminated before the Ark that he now must rebuild in his own being, in homage to the Temple constructed by the master Hiram Abiff. He was in the center of the Cosmos; the Firmament opened over his head; his feet trod the path from Occident to Orient. Emerging from the shadows of the Chamber of Reflection, chest naked to reveal his heart, right leg bare, left foot exposed, the Apprentice responded to the three ritual questions of what Man Owed to God, Himself, and Others. Then, the lofty lights of a Century grew—a marvel he had walked toward blindly, as though borne by a superior will, from the time of that afternoon of Great Fires in Port-au-Prince. He grasped now the exact meaning of his hallucinated voyage—like Percival’s journey in search of himself—toward a Future City which, lay not in America, like Thomas More’s Utopia or Campanella’s City of Sun, but instead in the very cradle of Philosophy . . . That night, unable to sleep, he walked until morning through the old quarters with their patina of damp, over tortuous and unfamiliar streets. Peaked roofs loomed over him on unimagined corners like the prows of giant ships without masts or sails, capped with chimneys that stood out against the sky with the ancient elegance of knights bearing arms. Scaffolds and signs emerged from the shadows, iron letters, drowsing flags in the penumbra, only hinting at the exact nature of their forms. Here stood lines of wagons for the market; there a wheel hung over the tangled wicker of half-woven baskets. The muzzle of a ghostly Percheron twitched in the heart of a courtyard where a cart raised its shafts in a ray of moonlight with the unsettling immobility of an insect aiming its barbs. Following the route of the old pilgrims to Santiago, Esteban stopped at the end of the street. The sky seemed to be waiting for someone to top the hill, bequeathing the scent of reaped wheat, the good augur of clover, the warm, damp breath of wine grapes trampled in vats. He knew it was an illusion; that further up lay other houses, and many more where the suburbs wove together. And so, stopping where he had to stop to retain the privileges of this celestial perspective, he contemplated what men had contemplated for centuries, singing canticles with their scallop shells, pilgrims’ staffs, and pelerines, dragging their sandals over this route, feeling the Portico of Glory nearer as the days separated them from the Hôpital à Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers, the resinous Landes, the repose of Bayonne, the convergence of the Four Paths at Puente de la Reina, beyond the Valle de Aspe. They had passed through there year after year, generation after generation, driven by irrepressible fervor, marching toward the sublime work of Master Mateo, who had certainly been a Mason—about this there could be no doubt—like Brunelleschi, Bramante, Juan de Herrera, and Erwin Steinbach, architect of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Dwelling on his initiation, Esteban felt ignorant and frivolous. An entire literature essential to his perfection was unknown to him. Tomorrow he would buy the necessary books, supplementing for himself the elementary lessons he had received . . . No longer so sensitive to the revolutionary tumult that shook the streets at all hours, he spent long nights studying, learning more of the occult but undeniable transit of the Ternary across time. One day—around seven—Victor found him already awake, dreaming of the star Wormwood from Revelations; earlier he had immersed himself in the prose of The Coming of the Messiah in Majesty and Glory by Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, an author whose name, beneath its Arabic flourishes, concealed an active brother in their cause from the Americas. “Are you willing to work for the Revolution?” a friendly voice asked him. Snatched from his distant meditations, returned to the immediate reality which was, in essence, no more than the first of the Great Traditional Aspirations, he said yes, proudly, enthusiastically; he would brook no doubts as to his fervor, his longing to strive on Liberty’s behalf. “Ask for me at ten in the office of Citizen Brissot,” said Victor, in a finely tailored suit and boots that still squeaked like sheets of cordovan leather in a storehouse. “Ah! And if it comes up, not a word about Freemasonry. If you wish to join us, you’d best not set foot in another Lodge. We’ve wasted too much time on that hogwash.” At the sight of Esteban’s astonished expression, he added: “Freemasonry is counterrevolutionary. This is not open for discussion. Jacobin morals are the only morals.” Grabbing an edition of the Apprentice’s Catechism lying on the table, he broke it along the spine and dropped it into the wastebasket.
