Explosion in a Cathedral, page 12
XIII.
Brissot received Esteban at ten-thirty, and by eleven he was on a road to the Spanish border, one of the old routes of the Way of Saint James. “Freedom must give me sandals, and a ribbon shall be my scallop shell,” said the young man, satisfied with that sudden burst of rhetoric, when he learned what was expected of him. In those days, there was a need for men who wrote well in Spanish and could translate documents from French so that revolutionary writings could be disseminated in Spain. Printing was already underway in Bayonne and wherever else there were presses near the Pyrenees. Abbot José Marchena, who had the ear of Brissot and was widely praised for his talents and Voltairean sarcasm, advised haste in getting their doctrine to the Peninsula, to kindle at last a revolution that was imminent, and would flare up soon in other nations thirsting to break the odious chains of the past. For Marchena, Bayonne—not to disdain Perpignan—“was the ideal place to gather the Spanish patriots wishing to work for the regeneration of their country,” but they needed the collaboration of intelligent people who understood that “the language of regenerated Republican Frenchmen is not yet suitable for the Spanish,” who would have to “be prepared gradually,” respecting, for a time, “certain ultramontane prejudices, incompatible with liberty, but too deeply rooted to be destroyed with one blow.” “Is that clear?” Victor had asked Esteban, as if taking responsibility for his protégé before Brissot. The young man, clutching his staff, had replied with a brief but credible discourse laden with Spanish quotations which showed not only that he agreed with Marchena, but that he could moreover express himself as lucidly in the French language as in his own . . . And yet, after a few hours, considering his destination, it struck him that the mission they’d entrusted him with wasn’t an especially enviable one: departing from Paris just then was like abandoning the Grand Theater of the World for exile to the hinterlands. “This is no time to complain,” Victor said harshly, on hearing the young man’s misgivings. “Soon, I will be sent to Rochefort for a time. I, too, would prefer to stay. But we all must go where we are sent.” There followed three days of carousing, of lavish meals and dalliances with ladies, and this brought the two men closer once more. Esteban spoke openly to Victor, incapable of hiding that, despite the Frenchman’s admonition to forget about Freemasonry, his time with the Lodge of United Foreigners had left him with many pleasant memories. They had dubbed him Young Brother from America and given him a toga at his initiation. Nor could one say a healthy democratic mentality didn’t reign in a place where a Charles Constantine of Hesse-Rotenburg addressed as his peers a swarthy patriot from Martinique, an old Jesuit from Paraguay nostalgic for his communitarian mission, a Brabantian typesetter expelled from his country for publishing proclamations, or a Spanish exile, peddler by day and orator by night, who claimed Freemasonry had been active in Avila since the sixteenth century, as attested to by certain images of compasses, draftsman’s squares, and mallets found recently—so he said—in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, constructed by the Jewish master builder Robin de Braquemonte. They had heard music there by an inspired Mason composer, Mosar or Matzarth or something along those lines, when a Viennese baritone sang his hymns in the initiation ceremony, embellishing with rich fermatas the melodies of Oh heiliges Band der Freundshaft treuer Brüder or the invocation: “Die ihr des unermeßlichen Weltalls Schöpfer ehrt, Jehova nennt ihn, oder Gott, nennt Fu ihn, oder Brahma.” He had made contact with interesting men who saw revolution as a victory of a material and political order that would culminate in the total victory of Man over himself. Esteban remembered Ogé when certain brothers, Danish and Swiss, spoke of the splendid court of the Prince of Hesse—and Charles Constantine, always a great gentleman, confirmed their accounts—where somnambulists were asked about the Fall of the Angels, the building of the Temple, or the chemical composition of Aqua Tofana. In the court at Schleswig, miraculous cures were effected through magnetism, turning birches, walnuts, firs into streams of beneficent fluids. The doors that concealed the vision of the future were forced open, with consideration of the respective virtues of the oracles yielded by the eighty-five forms of traditional divination, which included bibliomancy, crystallomancy, gyromancy, and xylomancy. Extreme sophistication was reached in the interpretation of dreams. And automatic writing allowed dialogue with the deep self, aware of its former lives, that lay hidden inside every man. This procedure revealed that the Grand Duchess of Darmstadt had wept at Golgotha, at the foot of the cross, and that the Grand Duchess of Weimar had witnessed the Judgment of the Lord in the Palace of Pilate; and for years the philosopher Lavater had been certain he was formerly Joseph of Arimathea. On certain nights, the chandeliers of the magic castle of Gottorp—enveloped in mists that dampened the wrappings of its Egyptian mummies—descended over the tables where, with gentlemanly calm, a Count of Bernstorff, reincarnation of the Apostle Thomas, played cards with Louis of Hesse, who recalled his life as John the Baptist, and Christian of Hesse, who had been the Apostle Bartholomew in earlier days. Prince Charles was frequently absent from these evenings, preferring to lock himself away and work, gazing so intensely at a piece of metal the Greeks called the Electronum that tiny clouds appeared before his eyes, and he interpreted their shapes as warnings and signs from the Other Shore . . . “Balderdash!” Victor exclaimed, irritated at this talk of portents. “When there are so many real things to consider, wasting time on this swill runs counter to the Revolution. We were fortunate to see quickly what lay in back of that Solomonic masquerading: traitors eager to turn their back to the age, distracting the people from their most urgent obligations. Further, the Masons preach moderation in the name of their brotherhoods, and that is a crime. We must look upon all moderates as enemies . . .” Esteban made connections that resolved the mystery of Victor’s earlier relations with Freemasonry: his silk supplier, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, Grand Chancellor of the Convent of the Gauls, a man esteemed by the Princes of Hesse, was the leader of an order that had drifted toward mysticism and Orphism under the influence of the enlightener Martinez de Pasqually, who died in Saint-Domingue. This enigmatic Portuguese Jew had founded chapters in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne, winning over the minds of men who, like Ogé, were beguiled by esoteric speculation; but his hermeticism vexed the former merchant and others more inclined to political subversion. Respecting Willermoz’s prestige as a philanthropist and industrialist—he employed thousands of workers in his factories in Lyon—Victor had acceded to the essential principles of the doctrine and was initiated in accordance with the Grand Orient Rite; but—and this was the origin of his disputes with Ogé—he doubted Martinez de Pasqually’s spiritualist practices and his boasts of being able to communicate across great distances with his disciples in Europe using only the power of his mind . . . “Those magicians and seers were nothing but a band of emmerdeurs,” Victor said, and nowadays, he prided himself on being a man with his feet planted firmly on the ground. Often he took the floor at the Jacobin Club, where he rubbed elbows with Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois, and had even once or twice run across Maximilien de Robespierre, whom he held supreme among the revolutionary tribunes, rendering him an homage so impassioned that Esteban, hearing this immoderate praise of his eloquence, his notions, his carriage, even his sartorial grace in the otherwise slovenly and unrefined assemblies, joked: “I see he’s a sort of Don Juan, but for other men.” Victor, hostile to such raillery, replied with an irate obscenity, bringing his hand to the seam of his breeches.
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After a long and meandering voyage on muddy roads, with pinecones crunching under carriage tires, Esteban arrived at Bayonne and placed himself at the disposition of those who were preparing to incite revolution in Spain: the ex-sailor Rubín de Celis, the mayor Bastarreche, and the journalist Guzmán, a friend of Marat and contributor to L’Ami du Peuple. It struck him disappointingly that his unknown face, his yearning for immediate action, were unwanted in a place where many professed a Jacobinism hindered by Hispanic scruples, virulent with regard to whatever concerned France, but tame and wary when their eyes turned toward the River Bidasoa. They soon sent him off to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, now called Chauvin-Dragon to honor the memory of a son of the town, a heroic Republican soldier. The printing press there was small but energetic, devoted to issuing endless proclamations and revolutionary texts chosen by Abbot Marchena. Marchena was a skilled agitator, ever clutching his pen to follow the rhythm of events, but he rarely made his way to the border country these days and spent most of his time in Paris, where he had frequent meetings with Brissot. Believing himself friendless on those shores, Esteban was pleased one night to meet a solitary fisherman on the banks of the Untxin, and he greeted him with delight: the intelligent former Mason Feliciano Martínez de Ballesteros, raised to the rank of Colonel and overseeing a corps of Miquelets known as “the Huntsmen of the Mountains,” who would combat Spanish troops in any eventual incursions and incite them to join the cause of the Republic. “We must be prepared,” he said. “In our country, blackguardism is running rampant: just look at our Godoys and our Bourbon whores.” Esteban took long walks with that jocose man from Logroño through villages that had changed their names in recent days: Ixtasson was now called Unión; Arbonne, Constance; Ustarritz, Marat-sur-Nive; Baigorry, Les Thermopyles. In those first weeks, the young man admired the rustic Basque churches with their short, pugnacious belfries, their vegetable plots bordered with slabs of stone sunken in the dirt. He stopped to watch a herder goad a team of oxen, a sheepskin stretched over the yoke; they crossed the bridges with their backs arched, stomping vexed over torrents of water and snow, pulling up, as they passed, the orange-tinted mushrooms growing in the cracks between the stones. The architecture of the dwellings charmed him: indigo blue beams, softly sloping roofs, wrought-iron anchor bolts sunken in the masonry.
The mountains from the Carolingian romances, eroded to sharp counterforts on paths where harried flocks of handsome sheep roved around an outcropping the paladin Roland might have gazed on long before, and the pastureland—above all the pastureland, damp and soft, the bright green of a green apple while at the same time resembling nothing but itself—inspired thoughts in him of the bucolic destiny revolutionary principles would return to men. And yet, as he came to know them better, the people somehow disillusioned him; these phlegmatic Basques, with bulls’ necks and equine profiles, lifters of stones, fellers of trees, and navigators in no way inferior to the men who had searched for Iceland and were the first to watch the sea harden into floes, were unshakably loyal to their traditions. They could not be outfoxed: they carried wafers in their berets, hid bells in haylofts and kilns, and furtively built altars on farms, in the backrooms of cafés, in a cave guarded by sheepdogs—wherever one least expected—to hold their clandestine Masses. When ruffians shattered the idols in the cathedral of Bayonne, the Bishop found people willing to take him across the border to Spain with his monstrance, cincture, and baggage. It had been necessary to shoot a girl who took Mass at Villa de Vera. Accused of sheltering and protecting recalcitrant clerics, the population of the border towns was deported in its entirety to Landes. The fishermen who lived in Chauvin-Dragon went on calling it Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Saint Stephen went on protecting Baigorry in the minds of those who tilled its soil. La Soule never lost its zeal for bonfires on Saint John’s Eve nor its medieval-looking dances, and no one there would have dared to denounce a neighbor for praying the rosary or crossing themselves when they mentioned the witches of Zugarramurdi . . . Two months Esteban had spent in that alien world, insidious, shifting, surrounded by the Basque language, which he would never grasp and which could never be deciphered by examining the faces of its speakers, when he was stunned by the news of war with Spain. Now he would never cross over to Iberia to witness the birth of a new nation, as he had dreamed when he heard the hopeful words of Martínez de Ballesteros, with his endless predictions of imminent uprisings among the people of Madrid. He was prisoner in a France blocked by English squadrons on the Atlantic side, with no possibility of returning to the country of his family. Before now, he’d never thought of returning to Havana, wishing to play a part, however small, in a Revolution destined to change the world. But the thwarting of this mission was enough to ignite an almost painful longing for home and his people, for different lights and flavors from another world, and a hatred for the tasks assigned him—which were nothing more, in the end, than bureaucratic tedium. It wasn’t worth it, coming so far to see a Revolution and then not to see it; to remain the listener in a nearby park overhearing the fortissimos from an opera house he’d been barred from entering.
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Months passed, and Esteban tried to make himself useful in his monotonous labors. In Spain, none of what was expected ever occurred. Even the war in that part of France had been languid and mundane, going no further than defensive patrols by the heavy contingents General Ventura Caro had placed along the border and refused to move despite his army’s numerical superiority. At night, rifle fire sounded in the mountains, but at most there were a few skirmishes or brief encounters between reconnaissance units. A long summer passed, sunny and tranquil; the autumn winds returned; the beasts went back to the stables with the first winter winds from the north. With time, Esteban found that the distance from Paris filled him with confusion, and he lost sight of the processes of a politics in constant mutation—inconsistent, self-devouring, prone to fits, complicated by committees and mechanisms that could hardly be grasped from afar, with news constantly arriving of unexpected developments, of the rise of unknown personages or the treacherous fall of some notable who only yesterday drew comparison with the great statesmen of ancient days. Regulations, laws, decrees rained down, annulled or contravened by emergency measures no sooner than the province had adopted them. Weeks were extended to ten days in length; the months were named Brumaire, Germinal, Fructidor, and didn’t correspond to the old ones; new weights and measures were instituted, disconcerting those accustomed to talking in terms of fathoms, palms, and bushels. No one could say what was actually happening, nor which men they should trust, in a place where the French Basques felt closer to the Spanish Navarrese than to the officials from the remote North who abruptly imposed strange calendars or changed the names of cities. The war would be a long one because it wasn’t a war like others, waged to placate a Prince’s ambitions or lay claim to foreign territories. “The kings understand,” men shouted in the Jacobin tribunals, “that the Pyrenees are no obstacle to philosophical ideas: there are millions of men on the march ready to change the face of the world . . .” And March came—for Esteban, March would forever remain March, however much he had liked the ring of the new calendar’s Nivôse and Pluviôse. An ashen March under lattices of rain that sheathed the Ciboure hills in diffuse silk, giving a ghostly aspect to the boats returning to port after fishing in the verdigris sea, shaken and sad, its unhorizoned distances dissolving in a misty, whitish sky, still entrenched in winter. Deserted beaches were visible through the window of the room where the young man carried out his duties as translator and corrector of proofs, surrounded by stakes where the ocean deposited dead algae, broken boards, shreds of sailcloth after evening storms that roared through the gaps in the shutters and whipped the creaking, lichen-covered weathervanes. In the former Place Louis XVI, now Place de la Liberté, they erected the guillotine. Far from the stage where it had taken part in a Transcendental Tragedy, far from the square splashed with the blood of a monarch, the machine, washed with rain—not frightful, merely ugly; not fateful, merely viscous and sad—gave the sorry impression, when put to use, of a makeshift theater in the provinces, with itinerant actors struggling to mimic the grandeur of productions in the capital. Fishermen carrying traps stopped to watch the executions, or three or four passersby with quizzical expressions, spitting tobacco juice between their teeth, or a boy, a maker of rope sandals, a squid vendor; they would go back on their way at the same pace as before when the body of whomever it was began to spit blood like wine from the spout of a wineskin. It was March. An ashen March under lattices of rain that made the hay swell in the stables, streaked goats’ fur with mud, sent up from kitchen chimneys acrid smoke clouds smelling of garlic and dense oils. Esteban had heard nothing of Victor for months. He knew he had occupied, with a cruel hand, the post of Public Accuser in the Revolutionary Tribunal of Rochefort. He had asked—and of this, Esteban approved—that the guillotine be placed in the same hall as the tribunals, to save time between sentence and execution. Deprived of Victor’s warmth, his rigor, his ardor, of the glow of direct contact with a Billaud or Collot—with one, with any of the leading lights of the Hour-he-was-living-through, which was not the same as the hour where he was stationed—Esteban had the sense he was diminishing, wilting, losing all personality; that Circumstance had absorbed him, and his humble contributions were irremediably anonymous. Feeling so negligible, he longed to cry. In his grief, he yearned for Sofía’s soft lap, where he had rested his head so many times, in search of that sustaining, maternal force that brimmed in her virgin entrails as if from a true mother . . . And then he really did start to cry, meditating on his solitude, his uselessness, just before he saw Coronel Martínez de Ballesteros enter his bedroom-office. The chief of the Miquelets of the mountains was agitated, stiff, his hands sweaty and trembling—recent news had evidently shaken him.
