Explosion in a Cathedral, page 13
XIV.
“I’ve had it with these frog eaters!” the Spaniard shouted, collapsing onto Esteban’s pallet. “More than had it! God damn every one of them!” He closed his hands over his face, remaining a long time in silence. The young man served him a cup of wine, and he drank it in one draft then asked for another. He stood and paced from wall to wall, talking chaotically of what had raised his ire. He had just been dismissed from his military post—relieved, re-lieved, by some commissar or other from Paris who had been granted unlimited powers to reorganize the troops in the region. His misfortune was an effect of the hostility against foreigners that had been growing in Paris and was now reaching the frontier: “First they defamed the Masons, now they’re trampling the best friends the Revolution has.” It was said that Abbot Marchena, in hiding from his pursuers, might find himself in the guillotine at any moment: “He, who did so much for the cause of freedom.” The French had overtaken the Bayonne committee, driving out the Spaniards—one for being too moderate, one because he was a Mason, another on account of his suspicious character. “Watch out, my friend, you, too, are a foreigner. In a matter of months, just being a foreigner in France will be a crime.” Martínez de Ballesteros continued with his unhinged monologue: “While they were dawdling in Paris, dressing their whores up like the Goddess of Reason, they lost their big opportunity to bring the Revolution to Spain. They were too inept for it, too invidious. Well, they can sit and wait . . . and as for their ideas of universal revolution, all that’s gone out the window! Now it seems the French Revolution is all that matters! As for the rest . . . let them rot! Everything we’re doing here is useless. They make us translate a Declaration of the Rights of Man into Spanish, and every day they violate twelve of its seventeen principles. They stormed the Bastille to free four forgers, two madmen, and a sodomite, then they built a prison in Cayenne far worse than any Bastille . . .” Esteban, afraid a neighbor might hear him, alleged a need to buy writing paper to get the frenzied man outside. Passing the former home of Haraneder, they went to the Librairie de la Trinité, which had opportunely remade its signage and was known now as the Librairie de la Fraternité. It was a poorly lit shop with low ceilings, and from midmorning on, an oil lamp hung lit from its beams. Esteban spent hours there leafing through new books in an atmosphere somehow reminiscent of the back of the warehouse in Havana, with those dusty accumulated objects they’d dug through to find the armillary spheres, planispheres, mariners’ telescopes, and physics contraptions. Martínez de Ballesteros shrugged looking at a collection of engravings that evoked the highlights of the history of Greece and Rome: “Today, every scoundrel thinks he’s made of the same stuff as the Gracchi, Cato, or Brutus,” he murmured. Walking to a battered pianoforte, he leafed through François Giroust’s latest songs, published by Frère, which were written in a simple-to-grasp notation and widely sung to the accompaniment of guitars. He showed Esteban the titles: “The Tree of Liberty,” “Hymn to Reason,” “Despotism Crushed,” “The Nursemaid of the Republic,” “Hymn to Saltpeter,” “The Rousing of the Patriots,” “Chant of the Thousand Gunsmiths.” “Even music must bow down to reason,” he said. “They think now whoever writes a sonata has failed his revolutionary duties. Grétry himself beats us over the head with the Carmagnole at the end of his ballets to show off his civic spirit.” And in a kind of protest against François Giroust’s offerings, he attacked the allegro of a sonata with infernal brio, discharging his fury on the keys. “I’d do well not to play music by a Freemason like Mossar,” he said, bringing the piece to an end. “There might well be an informant hiding under the lid.” Esteban purchased his paper and left, followed by the Spaniard, who didn’t wish to remain alone with his spite. Despite the frozen rain now falling, an executioner in a beret was uncovering the guillotine, waiting for some convict to stretch out his neck without any witnesses on hand, apart from the guards who were posted at the base of the scaffold. “Chop away,” Martínez de Ballestero raved, “extermination—in Nantes, in Lyon, in Paris, extermination.” “After it’s been bathed in blood, humanity will emerge regenerated,” said Esteban. “Don’t go quoting foreigners to me, I don’t want to hear a word about Saint-Just and his reddened Sea (Sen Yu he called him, he’d never gotten the pronunciation right), that’s cheap rhetoric and nothing more,” Martínez replied. They crossed the inevitable carriage, which was carrying a priest, hands bound, to the scaffold. Walking along the quay, they stopped at a fishing boat with sardines and tunas flapping on deck around a grayish ray straight from a Flemish still life. Martínez de Ballesteros pulled out an iron key he carried on his watch chain and threw it scornfully into the water. “A key to the Bastille,” he said. “Counterfeit, to boot. The bastard locksmiths forge them by the dozen. These talismans are all over the world now. We’ve got more keys to the Bastille than there are splinters of the true cross . . .” Looking toward Ciboure, Esteban noted an unusual movement of people on the road to Hendaye. In disorder, in scattered groups, soldiers from the Huntsmen of the Pyrenees regiment were arriving, some singing, but all of them so weary—so eager to climb up on a cart of some kind and rest their feet—that the carolers could only persist under the influence of drink. They looked like a stampede of deserters, undirected, ignored by the officers on horseback who had already reached this part of the bay and were dismounting in front of a café to dry their wet clothes by the heat of a hearth. Visceral fear overtook Esteban at the thought that those troops might be returning in defeat—routed, perhaps, by the enemy forces under the command of the Marquis of Saint-Simon, head of a band of émigrés that had been expected to attack audaciously for some time. Looking closely at the new arrivals, though, he saw mud and damp but little evidence of battle scars. While the sick and sniffling looked for shelter from the drizzle under the eaves or by pressing close to the walls, the rest reveled more raucously, passing around their rations of brandy, herring, and bread. The sutlers were setting up their grills, pulling dense smoke from the wet firewood, when Martínez de Ballesteros approached a cannoneer with a strand of garlic over his shoulder to ask the reason for that unforeseen movement of troops. “We’re going to America,” said the soldier, drawing out a word that immediately acquired a solar gleam in Esteban’s mind. Trembling, anxious, with the almost irritable expectancy of a person excluded from festivities on his own domains, the young man and the decommissioned colonel entered the tavern where the officers were resting. Soon they learned this regiment was destined for the Antilles. Others would arrive there to join an armada being formed in Rochefort. They would depart in small vessels on successive journeys, hewing to the coast; the English blockade made such prudence necessary. Two commissars from the Convention would join the ships: Chrétien and a certain Victor Hugues, who was, they said, an old sea dog, familiar with Caribbean waters, where even then a powerful British squadron was marauding . . . Esteban walked out to the square, afraid to miss an opportunity to flee a place he felt threatened—and aware that the futility of his duties would soon be evident to those paying him. He sat on a stone step, oblivious to the icy wind tautening his cheeks: “Since Hugues is your friend, do what you can to get him to take you. He’s a powerful man now that he’s got Dalbarade’s support—Dalbarade, we knew him when he was commissar in Biarritz. You’re going to seed here. The papers you translate are piling up in a cellar. And keep in mind, you’re a foreigner.” Esteban shook his hand: “What will you do now?” The other responded, with a resigned look: “The same as always, despite everything. Once you’ve waged revolution, it’s hard to go back to what you did before.”
* * *
• • •
After composing a long letter to Victor Hugues—copied out several times and dispatched to the Naval Ministry, the Revolutionary Tribunal of Rochefort, and a fellow Freemason he’d once known, whom he urged to pass it along to its addressee wherever he might be—Esteban waited for his pleas to bear fruit. In plain terms, he depicted himself as a victim of administrative indifference, of disunion among the Spanish Republicans, blaming his work’s scarce impact on the mediocrity of the men who had succeeded one another in command. He complained of the climate, hinting that it might cause his former ailment to return. Tugging the cord of friendship, he invoked the memory of Sofía and the distant house where they “had lived together like brothers.” He ended with an exhaustive enumeration of his abilities and their use to the cause of revolution in America. “You know, moreover,” he concluded, “that the foreigner’s situation is far from enviable in these days and times.” He added, thinking of those who might intercept his letter: “Some Spaniards in Bayonne, it appears, have lapsed into deplorable counterrevolutionary errors. This has required a purge in which, lamentably, the just may find themselves paying for the sins of others . . .” There followed anxious weeks of waiting, with a relentless fear that kept him far from Martínez de Ballesteros or any others who might make unseemly remarks on recent events in the presence of third parties. Abbot Marchena’s whereabouts were unknown, and some said he had been guillotined. A Great Fear was poisoning the nights on the coast. Myriad eyes peered out into the streets from the cracked shutters of houses in shadows. Just before dawn, Esteban would leave his hotel on foot, taking to the nearby villages despite the falling rain, drinking rotgut in whatever inn he found, or in the seamstress shops where they sold bulk needles, a cowbell, a patch, buttons by the dozen, jars of marmalade packed in shavings—attempting in this way to overcome his apprehensions. He would return after nightfall, frightened of encountering an unknown visitor or a summons to report on some “matter of concern to him” at the Château-Vieux of Bayonne, now transformed into a barracks and gendarmerie. So weary he was of that hermetic, silent country, now suffused with danger, that whatever parts of it might be thought beautiful repelled him: the walnuts and holm oaks, the homes of the lesser nobility, the flight of the white-tailed kites, the cemeteries full of strange crosses carved with solar runes . . . When a guard entered bearing a document, his trembling fingers couldn’t tear the envelope. He had to break the seal with his teeth, which still obeyed his will. The handwriting was familiar to him. Giving precise instructions to hurry to Rochefort, Victor Hugues offered him a post as scribe in the armada soon to depart for the Île de Aix. Possessor of a document that would serve as a safe conduct, Esteban should depart Saint-Jean-de-Luz with a regiment of Basque huntsmen assigned to join the expedition—a hazardous expedition, committed to facing whatever challenges might arise, as they’d had no news from the French possessions in the Antilles and were uncertain whether the English had occupied them. Their destination, in theory, was the island of Guadeloupe, and if they were unable to disembark, they would sail on to Saint-Domingue . . . Victor embraced the young man coldly after their long separation. He was a bit thinner now, but his sculpted face reflected a vigor that had grown with his authority. Surrounded by officers, he was busy with the toil of the last preparations, studying maps and dictating letters in a room filled with weapons, surgeon’s utensils, drums, and furled flags. “We’ll talk later,” he said, turning his back to read a dispatch. “Go speak to the quartermaster.” Then he corrected himself, changing from tu to vous, though the former was generally embraced as a sign of revolutionary spirit. “Wait for my orders,” he added, and Esteban realized Victor had imposed on himself the first commandment of a Leader of Men: not to have any friends.
XV.
That’s tough.
Goya
In Year II, on Floréal 4, without tumult or blasts from the bugle, their small squadron departed: two frigates, the Pique and the Thétis, the barque L’Espérance, and five regiments of troops, among them one artillery company, two companies of infantry, and the Battalion of the Huntsmen of the Pyrenees, which Esteban had accompanied to Rochefort. Behind them stood Île d’Aix with its turreted fortress and a convict ship, Les Deux Associés, where more than seven hundred prisoners were writhing in the hold, weary, sick, and mangy, pestilential, with suppurating wounds, unable even to lie down as they waited for deportation to Cayenne. The ships had set sail under a bad sign. The latest news from Paris did nothing to rouse the enthusiasm of Chrétien or Victor Hugues: the islands of Tobago and Santa Lucia had fallen into English hands; in Martinique, Rochambeau had been forced to surrender. Guadeloupe was subject to continual attacks that were exhausting the military government’s resources. Besides, everyone knew the colonists in the French Antilles were a band of monarchist bastards; they had openly opposed the Republic since the King and Queen’s execution, and were favoring the enemy’s designs in the hopes of a decisive occupation by the British. The squadron set forth, slipping past the English blockade on the coast in a swift departure from Europe. Their orders were clear: lighting lamps after sunset was forbidden, and soldiers were to retire early to their hammocks. They lived in constant distress, arms ever at the ready, awaiting the probable confrontation. But the weather favored their undertaking, lowering obliging fogs over a placid sea. The ships were packed with firearms and provisions, crates, barrels, bundles, and sheaves, and the men had to share the scant free space on deck with horses that ate hay from boats used as troughs. The bleating of the sheep rose at all hours from the hold; and radishes and vegetables destined for the officers’ tables grew in boxes of soil piled up on platforms. Esteban hadn’t managed to speak with Victor Hugues after their departure, and had passed the time in the company of two typesetters traveling with the armada—Loeuillet, père et fils—with a small press for publishing bulletins and proclamations . . . As the ships drifted away from the continent, the Revolution behind them grew simpler in the men’s minds; far from the vociferous huddles in the street, the high-flown rhetoric, the oratorical clashes, the Event was reduced to its outlines and disburdened of its contradictions. Danton’s recent condemnation and death shrank to a mere misfortune in the course of developments that seemed to each individual from afar as though cut to the measure of his longings. Naturally, it wasn’t easy all at once to recognize the infamy of tribunes who just yesterday had been beloved as idols, acclaimed as debaters, as leaders of men. But once the storm was over, something would arise that accommodated everyone: for the Basque, en route with his scapular, the future would be more tolerant of religion; for him who ached for his Lodge, it would be less hostile to the Masons; more egalitarian, communitarian, sensed the man dreaming of a final reckoning with hidden powers that would put an end to all privileges. But first, their task as Frenchmen was to wage war against the English, and away from the citizens’ taverns and gossip mills, their old misgivings dissolved. Just one nagging doubt continued to torment Esteban: when he thought of Marchena—who had to fall, given his collusion with the Girondins—it pained him that so many foreigners, threatened with death in their home countries for their love of liberty, should face suppression for the crime of believing too readily in the Revolution’s power to spread. There was too much trust in the confidences and accusations of persons of little standing. Even Robespierre, addressing the Society of Friends of Liberty and Equality, had condemned ill-considered denunciations as plots dreamed up by adversaries of the Republic to discredit its finest men. Esteban had left at the right time, he thought, being himself among those who had fallen into disgrace. And yet he yearned to work in a Higher Dimension, to take part in Something Great, as ardently as when Brissot had sent him to the Pyrenees, telling him he was laying the foundation for Great Events—Great Events that halted, in the end, at the foot of the Pyrenees, where Death, faithful to his medieval temper, remained governed by theological allegories from the Flemish paintings Phillip II had hung in El Escorial . . . In those hours, Esteban would have liked to approach Victor Hugues to share with him his doubts. But the Commissar rarely revealed himself. And when he did, it was unexpectedly, to impose discipline by surprise. One night, showing up on the orlop deck, he caught four soldiers playing cards by the light of a candle shoved into a cone of rag paper. He marched them across the deck, the tip of his saber pointed at their buttocks, and made them throw their cards into the sea. “The next time,” he said, “you will be the Kings in this game.” He slipped under the hammocks of men asleep to see if the fabric betrayed the outlines of a pilfered bottle. “Lend me your rifle,” he would tell a guard, as though anxious to fire at a fin emerging in outline over the sea. Then, abandoning his target, he would look the weapon over, inevitably finding it dingy and badly oiled. “You’re a swine!” he would shout, throwing it to the floor. The next day, the artillery would shimmer as though freshly retrieved from the armory. At times, at night, he would climb up to the crow’s nest, wedging his boots in the rope ladder, swaying in the void when he lost his footing. Then he would stand there next to the lookout, ostentatious, magnificent, his figure less visible than guessed at in the shadows, like an albatross presiding over the whole of the ship, stretching out its wings. “Theatrics,” Esteban thought. But theatrics that gripped him as they did every other spectator, giving him a sense of the dimension of the man who took on such a role.
