Explosion in a Cathedral, page 14
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A concerted blast from the bugles, blown full-throated along the ship, told the soldiers one morning that the danger was behind them. The navigator upturned his hourglass, putting away the pistols that had weighed down his maps before then. Hailing the start of an ordinary journey with a swig of brandy, the men turned to their habitual labors with a jubilation that broke with the tension, the distress, the furrowed brows of recent days. The men sang as they tossed spadefuls of horse apples into the sea and the beasts sank their heads in the trough-boats. The men sang as they polished their arms. Singing, the butchers filed their knives to slaughter the rams later that day. Iron and grindstone, brush and saw, currycomb and shimmering flank all sang; the anvil under the awning sang to the rhythm of bellows and hammers. The last mists of Europe bled away under a sun still veiled, very white, but warm, which gleamed on all ends of the ship, on uniform buckles, the gold of braid, the patent leather, the bayonets, the saddle trees brought out into the light. The artillery was unpacked, not yet with haste to load it, but only to slide the ramrod down the bore and polish up the brass. In the aftercastle, the Huntsmen of the Pyrenees Battalion’s band was practicing one of Gossec’s marches, with a trio joining in for amusement and blowing a Basque fife; and the playing of the latter so outshone the rustic, poorly tuned rendition of the sheet music that the troops took to mocking the performance. Each person was absorbed in his doings, looking hopeful at the horizon, singing, laughing with a cheer that rose from the orlops to the crows’ nests, when Victor Hugues appeared in his commissar’s uniform, grandiose, face beaming, though not for that reason more approachable than otherwise. He crossed the deck, stopping to watch the repairs to the carriage of a canon and the doings of a carpenter further on; he clapped a horse on the neck, flicked a drumhead, asked after the health of an artilleryman with his arm in a sling . . . Esteban noticed the men fell suddenly silent when they saw him. The Commissar inspired fear. With slow steps, he climbed the stairs that led to the prow. On the waist, barrels were stacked side by side beneath a broad cloth kept in place by ropes on the gunwales. Victor gave instructions to an official, who immediately ordered the barrels taken elsewhere. Then a canoe with a pennant was lowered into the sea: the Commissar, on that first day of bonanza and peace, went to lunch aboard the Thétis with Captain De Leyssegues, head of the armada. Chrétien, seasick since their departure, remained closed up in his cabin. When the plumed hat of Hugues disappeared behind L’Espérance, which was navigating now between two frigates, jubilation reigned again onboard the Pique. The officers, freed from their worries, shared the troops’ good cheer, singing, and jeering at the band, which, with no more Basque aires or virtuoso blowing on the fife, couldn’t even manage a decent “Marseillaise.” “We’ve never practiced together before,” the director shouted back to the catcallers, by way of an excuse. But the men laughing at him would have laughed at anything: the urgent thing was to laugh, even more now that the drummers of the Thétis were saluting the Commissar of the National Convention when he was somewhere else, off in the distance. The Plenipotentiary was feared. Perhaps he enjoyed being feared.
XVI.
Three more days passed. Each time the navigator flipped the hourglass, the sun seemed fuller and the sea smelled more of sea, speaking to Esteban now in its manifold effluvia. One night, to relieve the heat swelling in the orlop and holds, he stepped out on deck to contemplate the immensity of the first entirely clear sky he had witnessed during the crossing. A hand rested on his shoulder. Behind him was Victor, without his topcoat, smiling as he had used to before: “We could use a woman around here. Don’t you think?” And the young man, as if moved by yearning, by thirst, recalled those places the two of them had been to in Paris, where so many complaisant and attractive ladies could be found. Naturally, he hadn’t forgotten Rosamunda, the German from the Palais Royal; Zaïre with her Voltairean name; Dorina with her dresses of pink muslin, or the mezzanine where the successive and subtle arts of Angelica, Adela, Zéphyr, Zoe, Esther, and Zilia could be had for two Louis d’or. Each of them embodied distinct female types and played—in strict observance of a drama magnificently suited to the character of her beauty—the frightened demoiselle, the libertine bourgeoise, the down-at-heel ballerina, the Venus from the isle of Mauritius—that was Esther—or the drunken Bacchanalian—that was Zilia. After having been object of each Archetype’s astute solicitude, the visitor was thrown at last into the firm lap of Aglaé of the buoyant breasts pointing to a chin like that of an ancient queen, who stood at the top of a progressive scale of superbly consummated seductions. At another time, Esteban would have laughed at the somewhat silly reminiscence. But he remained uneasy, incapable of communicating—Victor hadn’t looked in on him since their encounter in Rochefort—and his repertoire of monosyllables soon faltered in the face of that unexpected garrulousness. “You sound like a Haitian,” Victor said. “There, they answer everything with an oh! oh! and you never know what any of them are thinking. Let’s go to my cabin.” The first thing one saw there, between the nails where Hugues hung his hat and tailcoat, was a large portrait of the Incorruptible, with a lamp like a votive burning at the foot of it. The Commissar set a bottle of brandy on the table and filled two glasses. “Salut!” Then he looked at Esteban with slight scorn. In a voice of perfunctory courtesy, he apologized for not calling on him since their departure from the Île d’Aix: he had worries, obligations, duties, and so on, and then again, their situation was hardly auspicious. True, they had evaded the English blockade. But there was no telling what the armada would have to face when they arrived. Their chief objective was to assert the Republic’s authority in France’s American colonies and suppress separatist sentiment with every means at their disposal, reconquering, if necessary, whatever territories might presently be lost. Long silences pierced his monologue, punctuated at times by that half-grunted, half-grumbled Oui! that Esteban knew very well. He praised the high tone of civility he had noted in the young man’s letter—it was that tone that had convinced him to take him on: “Anyone unfaithful to the Jacobins would be unfaithful to the Republic and to the cause of Freedom,” he said. Still, an irritable look crossed Esteban’s face. It wasn’t the words as such, but the fact that Collot d’Herbois had first uttered them, and had done so on repeated occasions; that old braggart, increasingly a slave to drink, struck him as the man least suited to dictate the moral precepts of revolution. Unable to swallow his objections, he exposed them at length. “You may be right,” Victor said. “Collot drinks too much, but he’s a good patriot.” Fired by the two glasses of brandy, Esteban pointed to the portrait of the Incorruptible. “How can this giant place his trust in a drunk? Collot’s very speeches stink of wine.” The Revolution had forged sublime men, it was true; but it had also given wings to a multitude of failures and grousers, exploiters of the Terror who, as a sign of their lofty civic spirit, had bound the Constitution in human skin. Those weren’t just rumors. He had seen those horrible books with their covers of tawny, porous leather—resembling withered petals, rag paper, chamois, or lizard hide. They had disgusted him, and his hands refused to touch them. “Lamentable, indeed,” said Victor, his expression going cold. “But we can’t keep an eye on everything.” Esteban accepted his obligation to make a profession of faith that left no doubt as to his revolutionary conviction. But he was exasperated at certain of the citizens’ rituals; at the unjustified promotions; at the satisfaction of superior men with many others who were mediocre. The most idiotic drama could have its hour on the stage, so long as a Phrygian cap appeared in the end; The Misanthrope was appended with a citizens’ epilogue, and Agrippina dubbed a citoyenne in the new version of Brittanicus at the Comédie Française; classical tragedies were censored while the state subsidized a theater offering the inept spectacle of Pope Pius VI feuding with scepter blows and tiara against Catherine II and a King of Spain who fell in the skirmish, losing his enormous cardboard nose. For some time now, contempt for the intelligentsia had been encouraged. More than one committee had heard the barbarous cry: “Trust no one who has written a book.” Carrier had famously shut down all the literary circles of Nantes. That fool Henriot had gone so far as to demand the Bibliothèque Nationale be burned to the ground, and the Public Health Committee was sending illustrious surgeons, eminent chemists, scholars, poets, and astronomers to the guillotine . . . Esteban stopped, seeing that Victor was becoming impatient. “Another skeptic,” he said, finally. “This must be how they speak in Koblenz. Have you, by chance, asked yourself why the literary clubs in Nantes were shuttered?” He slammed his fist on the table. “We are changing the face of the globe and all you people worry about is the poor quality of the offerings at the theater. We are transforming human life itself, and you gripe because a few men of letters are unable to gather anymore to read their idylls or whatever shit they find worth their while. Those men would happily spare the life of a traitor, an enemy of the people, so long as he’d written a few pretty verses!” On the deck, they could hear men dragging wood. Now that paths were clear between the bundles, the carpenters were taking boards to the prow, followed by sailors bearing large, oblong crates. One of them, when opened, caught the light of the moon in a steely triangle, and the sight of it shocked Esteban. The men, outlined in silhouettes against the sea, seemed to be engaged in a mysterious, sanguinary rite, with the bascule, the braces laid out on the deck taking shape horizontally according to the dictates of a paper consulted in silence, by lamplight. They were giving form to a projection, the descriptive geometry of a vertical reality; a false perspective, a two-dimensional simile for that which would soon possess height, width, and abominable depth. Ceremoniously, the night-blackened men persevered in the labor of assemblage, removing beams, runners, hinges from crates that looked like coffins—coffins too long for human beings, but the proper width to accommodate their flanks, with a yoke or lunette destined to close a circle above the average human body as measured from shoulder to shoulder. Hammers struck in sinister rhythm with the immense disquiet of the sea, where clumps of gulfweed had already begun to appear . . . “This, too, has come with us then,” exclaimed Esteban. “Naturally,” replied Victor, turning back to his cabin. “This, and the printing press, are the most important cargo we have, apart from the cannons.” “La letra con sangre entra,” said Esteban. “Don’t pester me with your Spanish proverbs,” the other replied, refilling their glasses. He looked at his interlocutor with deliberate resolve, reached for a calfskin portfolio, and opened it slowly, taking a sheaf of sealed papers that he threw down on the table. “Yes, we’ve brought the machine with us. But you know what else I’m bringing the men of the new world?” He paused and added, stressing every word: “The Decree of 16 Pluviôse of Year II, which declares slavery abolished. From now on, all men living in our colonies shall be French citizens endowed with equal rights, without prejudice to race.” He peeked out the door of his cabin to observe the carpenters’ work, then continued talking, sure of being listened to. “For the first time, a squadron is advancing on America without raising the cross—the same cross Columbus’s fleet had painted on its sails. The cross was a symbol of the Slavery to be imposed on the men of the New World in the name of a Redeemer who died—the chaplains would say—to save men, solace the poor, and confound the rich. We,” and turning back brusquely he pointed at the decree, “without cross, without redeemer, without God, are coming in ships without chaplains aboard to vanquish privilege and guarantee equality. Ogé’s brother shall have his revenge.” Esteban lowered his head, ashamed of the objections he had uttered before, maladroitly, to alleviate his intolerable doubts. He laid his hand on the Decree, felt the several seals swelling the paper: “Still and all,” he said, “I’d prefer if we could accomplish our mission without making use of the guillotine.” “That depends on the people,” Victor said. “On them as well as us. Don’t think I trust all of our fellow passengers. We have to see how more than one of them behaves on land.” “Are you saying that because of me?” Esteban asked. “Because of you, because of others. My work forces me to trust in no one. Some argue too much. Some yearn too much. Some are still hiding their scapularies. Some say life was better in a whorehouse under the ancien régime. There are soldiers too friendly with one another, with dreams of turning on the commissars once they’ve drawn their sabers. I know everything said, thought, done onboard these godforsaken ships. Mind your words. Whatever you say, I shall soon know of it.” “Do you suspect me?” Esteban asked with a sour smile. “I suspect everyone,” Victor said. “Why don’t you try out the machine tonight on me then?” “I’d have to rush the carpenters. Too much bother for such a pointless lesson.” Victor began to remove his shirt. “Go to bed.” He gave Esteban his hand cordially, clapping it tight, as he used to do. When he looked at him, the young man was surprised by the resemblance between his face and that of the Incorruptible in the painting in his cabin, how evidently Victor imitated the other man’s stare, his expression, at once courteous and implacable, his way of holding his head. Glimpsing that weakness, that wish to resemble physically the person he admired above all, assuaged Esteban in a way, like a minor victory. Invested with power, his ambitions indulged, the man who had once disguised himself as Lycurgus and Themistocles at their home in Havana was now trying to mimic another, mindful of his superiority. For the first time, Victor Hugues’s dominance was humbled—perhaps unconsciously—before a Greater Dimension.
XVII.
The Machine was still cloaked on the prow, reduced to one horizontal and one vertical plane, bare like the outlines of a theorem, when the squadron entered the warm waters that hinted at the presence of land, seconded by the appearance of tree trunks dragged away by currents, the bamboo roots, the mangrove branches, the leaves of coconut palms that floated on the clear green here, there over the sandy bottoms. Again, it was possible they might run into British ships, and unsure of events in Guadeloupe since the last reports they’d received on embarking, all were in a state of expectancy only heightened with every day of uneventful sailing. If they couldn’t anchor in Guadeloupe, the ships would be forced to travel on to Saint-Domingue. But the English might have taken possession of Saint-Domingue, too. In that case, Chrétien and Victor Hugues would take whatever route they could to reach the coast of the United States and seek refuge in the friendly nation. Aghast, almost disgusted at what he saw—when he looked at it coldly—as his own intolerable selfishness, Esteban still could not help but feel a stirring in his heart when it was said the squadron might dock in Baltimore or New York. That would mean the end of an already absurdly drawn-out adventure: no longer useful to the French armada, he would ask for his freedom—or would take it, which amounted to the same thing—returning full of history and histories to a place where they would listen in awe to the pilgrim back from Sacred Lands. With a paucity of action, but an abundance of experience, his first foray into the Great Wheel of the World would prove to have been his initiation for future exploits. For now, he had to do something that would give meaning to his existence. He wanted to write; to reach, through the medium of writing and its attendant disciplines, whatever conclusions might be drawn from all he had seen. He could not say what his work would consist in. Something important, at any rate; something the era demanded. Something that might greatly displease Victor Hugues—and the thought of this brought him pleasure. Perhaps a new Theory of the State. Perhaps a revision of The Spirit of the Laws. Perhaps a study of the mistakes of the Revolution. “Just what an émigré swine would write,” he told himself, abandoning the project before he’d begun. In those past few years, Esteban had witnessed a critical disposition growing inside him—unwelcome, at times, as it deprived him of the pleasure of those sudden enthusiasms everyone else shared in—that refused to submit to general opinion. No sooner was the Revolution presented to him as sublime, devoid of defects or failings, than it became, in his eyes, questionable and perverse. Yet, against a monarchist, he would have marshaled the same arguments in its defense that maddened him coming from the mouth of a Collot d’Herbois. He detested the boundless demagoguery of Le Père Duchesne no less than the émigrés’ apocalyptic harangues. He was a cleric among the anticlericals, an anticlerical among clerics; a monarchist when it was said every king—a James of Scotland, a Henry IV, a Charles of Sweden—was a degenerate, an anti-monarchist when he heard the praises sung of the Spanish Bourbons. “I am a skeptic,” he admitted, remembering what Victor had said to him a few days before. “But I am skeptical of myself, and that is worse.” When the Loeuillets, who had gradually loosened their tongues, informed him of the terror the Public Accuser had unleashed in Rochefort, he thought of Victor with a blend of spite and unease, of indulgence and envy. Spite, at being shut out from his domain; unease at his ruthlessness in the tribunal; almost feminine indulgence in gratitude at any sign of friendship he might ever deign to show him; envy at his possession of a Decree that would confer a historical dimension on that baker’s son, born among ovens and kneading troughs. Esteban passed days in inward dialogue with the absent Victor, advising him, asking for explanations, raising his voice, mentally preparing himself for an argument that might never take place and which would, if it ever did, modify the character of those discourses as he imagined them, adding sentimentality and even tears where as yet whispered reproaches, accusations, bold questions, and threats of rupture were voiced . . . In those days of uncertain expectation, Victor would go early to the Thétis in the canoe flying its flag to exchange impressions with De Leyssegues. Both leaned over maps showing the reefs and shallows where the squadron was navigating. Esteban tried to place himself in his path when he was coming or going, feigning absorption in some task or other when he passed by. But Victor never spoke a word to him when his captains and assistants were in tow. That plumed gathering, in gleaming braid, constituted a world he was barred from. Watching Victor depart, Esteban would gaze fascinated and incensed at his mighty back pressed against the sweat-soaked fabric of his tailcoats; the back of a man who knew the most intimate secrets of his home, who had penetrated his destiny like a hand of fate, taking him down ever more uncertain paths. “Don’t embrace frozen statues,” the young man told himself, quoting Epictetus with wounded ire, considering the distance that separated him now from his companion of other days. He had seen that frozen statue carousing with women of experience—women selected in light of their experience—on countless escapades during their early days in Paris, when they sought nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure. That unclothed Victor Hugues, preening and flexing before his lovers of an evening, prey to wine and coarse humor, retained a freshness of character invisible now in the furrowed brows of the Glittering Man, proud of his Republican insignia, who reigned today over the fate of the armada, usurping the functions of admiral with an aplomb that alarmed even De Leyssegues. “Your Uniform’s gone to your head,” Esteban thought. “Beware the intoxication of the Uniform; it is the worst intoxication of all.” At dawn one day, two gannets lighted on the boom of the Pique. The breeze smelled of pasture, of molasses, of firewood. The squadron, sailing slowly, sounding the depths, was approaching the feared reefs of La Désirade. Since midnight, all of the men had been on alert, and now, gathered on the gunwales, they looked at the island with its sullen profile, which appeared at dawn like an enormous shadow stretching from the sea to a very low mass of clouds that lay motionless over the terrain. The water then, at the beginning of June, was so still that the arcing of the flying fish was audible from a distance; so clear that the paths of the needlefish were visible below the surface. The ships stopped on an abrupt coast without a trace of homes or planted fields. A canoe with several sailors left the Thétis and rowed full speed toward the island. Captain De Leyssegues and Generals Cartier and Rouger soon boarded the Pique to wait for news with Chrétien and Victor Hugues . . . After two hours, at the peak of expectation, the canoe reappeared. “What, then?” the Commissar shouted to the sailors when he thought they were within earshot. “The English are in Guadeloupe and Santa Lucia,” one shouted, raising a black Sabbath of curses on the decks of the ships. “They took the islands just as we were leaving France.” Bitterness followed tension. The uncertainty of prior days returned: now would come another hazardous departure across seas populated by enemy ships, toward an island of Saint-Domingue most likely occupied by forces aided by rich colonialists, monarchists who had gone to the English side along with their hordes of negroes. They would avoid the English danger only to try their strength against the Spanish one, with a hundred detours taking their squadron near the Bahamas at the worst time of year—and Esteban recalled some verses from The Tempest that spoke of the hurricanes of the Bermudas. Defeatism overtook the men. Since nothing could be done in Guadeloupe, it was best to depart as soon as possible. Some were frustrated by the stubbornness of Victor Hugues, who made each of the messengers repeat over and over the story of their brief forays onto land. There was no doubting. They’d heard the tale from different sources: a black fisherman, a farmhand, the waiter from a rundown tavern, and last, the guard at a small fort. All had glimpsed the ships of the squadron, but, seeing them from a distance, they confused them with the vessels under the command of Admiral Jarvis that were meant to depart, or had departed already, or were departing just then from Pointe-à-Pitre en route to Saint Kitts, an island hedged by reefs that was dangerous in the extreme: “I don’t believe we should wait any longer,” Cartier said. “If they find us here, they’ll do us in.” Rouger shared his opinion. But Victor refused to cede. Soon their voices rose violently. The chiefs and commissars argued with a grand racket of sabers, braids, sashes, and rosettes, invoking Themistocles and Leonidas with as many foul words as a Frenchman in Year II could level. Victor Hugues silenced his fellows with a cutting phrase: “In a Republic, soldiers don’t argue: they obey. They sent us to Guadeloupe, and to Guadeloupe we will go.” The others bowed their heads, as though cowed by a lion-tamer’s whip. The Commissar gave the order to depart, without delay, toward Les Salines in Grande-Terre. Soon Marie-Galante came into view in a blur of opalescent mists, and then all Hell broke loose. As the racket of rolling gun carriages, the creak of cables and pulleys, shouts, preparations, harried formations drowned out the whinnies of the horses smelling nearby land and fresh pasture, Victor Hugues had the typesetters bring him several hundred documents printed in bold letters during the crossing, reproducing the text of the Decree of 16 Pluviôse, which proclaimed the abolition of slavery and granted equal rights to all the inhabitants of the island without prejudice to race or status. Then he crossed the waist with a firm step, approaching the guillotine, and tore away the tarred cloth covering it, so that it shone for the first time, blade bare and well honed, beneath the light of the sun. Immobile, stony, flaunting the emblems of his Authority, right hand resting on the Machine’s stanchions, Victor Hugues had transformed suddenly into Allegory. Alongside Liberty, the first guillotine had arrived in the New World.
