Explosion in a Cathedral, page 16
Adieu, oh shawls and madras robes,
Adieu oh jewels and gold adored,
My darling’s left to cross the globe
And—lo—is gone forevermore.
Bonjour, Monsieur le Gouverneur,
I come to you on bended knee:
Use your powers to secure
My darling’s safe return to me.
Madame, I fear the hour is past
To bring your darling back to land
The sails are swelling on the masts
And on the deck he stands.
Drunk from the hearty helpings of punch, Esteban rose from his seat, inspired, calling for a toast to the doudou with the dulcet voice, but pleading the terms Monsieur and Madame be stricken from the song—as they clashed with its democratic spirit—and replaced with Citoyen Gouvernour and Citoyenne. Victor Hugues lowered his brows and stared down the young man, silencing the applause that had greeted that profoundly republican sentiment. By now, everyone was singing in chorus I’ve Lost It All and I Don’t Care, a new song by François Giroust that resonated splendidly with the feeling of recent victory:
Times were I had my table laid,
With fine capons and fattened hens,
And bread I’ll never see again,
And bread I’ll never see again.
Since the last days of the war
I’ve eaten crumbs and nothing more
And still, proud-hearted, I dare to roar
To George of England, tyrant, coward,
The shame is yours, the honor ours,
The shame is yours, the honor ours.
At dawn, everyone was asleep in armchairs and on benches, surrounded by half-empty glasses, trays of fruit, and leftover meat, while the Commissar washed before the open windows of his chambers, chatting with the barber, who already was stropping his razors . . . Soon, the reveilles sounded. Around eight, amid a hailstorm of hammers, masts, banderoles, garlands, and allegories rose up in the ci-devant Place Sartines, where the Huntsmen of the Pyrenees in their grand uniforms were playing raucous revolutionary airs with a bold racket of cornets and Turkish drums. Carpenters were building a stage for the authorities to preside over a public ceremony. Their homes abandoned and in ruins, the populace invaded the square, drawn by the oddity of a concert at the break of day. Esteban walked to the Grain Exchange, where he had a bed, to relieve his migraine with vinegar compresses and have a few teaspoons of rhubarb syrup to restore his liver, and he lazed for a while awaiting that which—as he knew from living in revolutionary Paris—always was long in coming. At ten, when he returned to the square, it was filled with an ebullient, picturesque multitude oblivious to its recent sufferings. The civil and military leaders were already on the dais, with Victor Hugues, Generals Pelardy and Boudet, and Captain De Leyssegues at the head. The people squeezed in around their new leaders, seeing them for the first time in their solemn vestments. Only the wing beats of doves in a nearby courtyard punctured the silence. After gazing around slowly, taking in the scene, the Commissar of the Convention began to speak. He congratulated the slaves of yesterday for passing over to the condition of free citizens. He praised the entirety of the people’s commitment during the fateful days of the bombardment, paying homage to the victims and ending that first verbal sally with an emotional elegy in memory of Chrétien, Cartier, Rouger, and Aubert—the last of whom had expired in the Military Hospital building only half an hour ago—waving a wrathful hand as if to say that death had slain the very best among them. Then he said a few words about Christopher Columbus, who had found that island, on his third journey to America, peopled by happy, simple creatures devoted to that wholesome way of living that constituted human beings’ state of nature, and had named it after the ship he was sailing in. But alas, there had arrived alongside the Discoverer Christian priests, agents of fanaticism and of an ignorance that had weighed on the world like a curse ever since Saint Paul spread the false teachings of a Jewish prophet, son of a Roman legionnaire named Pantera—Joseph of the manger was a mere legend, one the philosophers had dispelled. He lifted his arm toward the Morne du Gouvernement, announcing that the church there would be razed, to expunge all traces of idolatry, and the priests, whom he’d heard were still hiding out in the regions of Le Moule and Sainte-Anne, would be forced to say an oath to the Constitution. Esteban, attentive to the expressions of a mulatta whose three-button madras dress kept shouting to him, There’s room for you in here in that sartorial language instantly grasped by every inhabitant of the island, was too carried away by the contemplation of puckering lips, fingers toying with bracelets, shoulders forming hollows over a softly shadowed spine, to follow a speech that, at that moment, had christened the Place Sartines with the name Place de la Victoire. Victor’s voice, metallic and clear, reached him in bursts, and his emphatic tone made shimmer, now and again, a crucial phrase, a notion of Liberty, a quotation from Latin or Greek. There was eloquence there, and there was nerve. And yet, in the end, the Word failed to harmonize with the spirit of the people, who had gone there as one attends a feast, and were jesting and rubbing against each other, the men against the women, and didn’t always bother to follow a language that differed greatly—with that southern accent, which Victor flaunted like a family crest—from the savory local patois. The Commissar was now finishing, leveling accusations against the French West India Company and the White Lords of Guadeloupe, and he announced that the struggle was far from over: they would still have to annihilate the English in Basse-Terre, and soon the final offensive would begin, bringing peace to a land freed forever now from slavery’s yoke. His speech had been clear, well delivered, without excesses of rhetoric; and the public was applauding a finale crowned by a quotation from Tacitus when De Leyssegues noticed a foreign vessel forcing its way into the harbor, drifting toward the nearest moorings. But there was no reason to worry over one miserable boat: it was an old sloop, so decrepit, chipped, and filthy, with sails made of badly sewn sacks, that it gave the impression of a ghost ship from a tale of stranded sailors. The sloop docked, and the crowd grew unquiet: men strode toward the Commissar’s tribune with shapeless hands and ears, toothless, hobbling, skin silvery with scaly welts. They were lepers from La Désirade there to swear an oath of fidelity to the Revolution. With well-timed aplomb, Victor Hugues treated them as ill citizens, handing them a tricolor ribbon and promising to go soon to their island to learn their needs and remedy their miseries. After this unexpected incident, the people’s regard for him grew further, and several times they called him back to the stage with shouting and applause. When he was done, he retired to his office, his military chiefs in tow. At intervals, the odd cannonball badly fired by enemy artillery still crossed the resplendent sky, landing harmlessly in the waters of the bay. In the city reigned a stench of carrion. But at nightfall, the lemon trees blossomed. And after so many Tenebrae, that was an Epiphany of trees.
XX.
Strange devotion.
Goya
Despite announcing an imminent offensive in Basse-Terre, Victor Hugues was hesitant to commence. Perhaps their paucity of arms troubled him; he feared the colored militia was undertrained, and was waiting, with evident impatience, for reinforcements he’d requested from France at the beginning of the siege of Pointe-à-Pitre. For weeks, enemy fire tore sporadically through the town. But after what they’d suffered, the people bore these lesser attacks with something like relief, shrugging their shoulders, uttering a curse, or lifting a hand in an obscene gesture. The guillotine, assembled and oiled, had remained prudently locked away, waiting for Monsieur Anse, former executioner of the Rochefort Tribunal—a mulatto of fine manners, educated in Paris, and a charming violinist, his pockets always stuffed with candies for the children—to set in motion that trusty mechanism invented by a piano maker. The Commissar knew the price France had paid in occupied neighboring lands for its excessively zealous use of the Machine. He would not have Guadeloupe turned to a little Belgium. For that matter, he had no cause for complaint from the inhabitants, whose tumultuous history had accustomed them to making peace with the master of the hour. He found solace in the great manumitted masses, jubilant at their status as new citizens, though this occasioned an early difficulty for the government: convinced they now needed obey no owners, the former slaves were loath to go work in the fields. Weeds overtook the arable lands, and no punishment was enough for those who alleged patriotic pretexts for refusing to bend their backs to clear stray twigs and infinite nettles from the soil packed into the tilled furrows beneath a sun that fed all species equally, oblivious to the preferences of man . . . Now the Bayonnaise appeared, bringing arms, provisions, and infantrymen—but far fewer in number than what the military leaders had requested. The Convention was short on men, and unable to sacrifice whole contingents to defend a remote colony. Esteban, surprised by a summons to Victor Hugues’s office to retrieve a set of proofs, found the Commissar absorbed in reading of what he had most anxiously awaited apart from the official dispatches: the press from Paris, which occasionally mentioned his name. Leafing through the papers the other had already set aside, Esteban was appalled to learn of the Festival of the Supreme Being, and even more disconcertingly of the condemnation of atheism as an immoral and, thus, aristocratic and counterrevolutionary posture. All at once, atheists had been deemed enemies of the Republic. The French People recognized the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul. The Incorruptible had said that even if the existence of God, of the soul, was nothing more than a dream, still, these were the highest conceptions of the human spirit. Godless men were now called “desolate monsters . . .” Esteban laughed so effusively that Victor, looking out over the top of his paper, furrowed his brow and asked: “What’s the joke?” “It was hardly worth ordering the chapel on the Morne du Gouvernement razed only to find this out now,” said Esteban, who had rediscovered, in the forgoing days, the good humor of his race in this place whose luscious fruits, maritime scents, and trees brought back to him his personality from before. “To my mind, everything is in order,” Victor said, not responding directly. “A man like Him cannot be mistaken. If he felt this was necessary, then I consider it well.” “And they’re even praising his actions in the tone of Te Deums, Lauds, the Magnificat,” Esteban said. “As suits his stature,” Victor said. “I must say, I fail to see the difference between Jehovah, the Great Architect, and the Supreme Being,” said Esteban. And he reminded the Commissar of his impiety of old, his sarcastic barbs about the Masons and their “Solomonic masquerades.” Victor didn’t listen: “There was too much Judaism in the Lodges. And as for the Catholics and their God, whom the friars marshaled for the evils of inquisition and tyranny, that’s irrelevant to the realization that an eternal, boundless Superior Being does exist, deserving of rational and dignified reverence of a kind whose exercise is commendable among free men. Let us invoke not the God of Torquemada, but the God of the philosophers.” Esteban was taken aback at the slavishness of a mind dynamic and energetic, but utterly subservient to politics, fleeing the critical examination of matters of fact, looking away from the most flagrant contradictions; faithful to the point of fanaticism—for this could indeed be called fanaticism—to the dictates of the man who had conferred on him his powers. “And what if they open the churches back up tomorrow, and the bishops are no longer thought ‘mitred bipeds’ and the saints and virgins are paraded through the streets of Paris?” the young man asked. “That would mean there was a compelling reason for it.” “But you . . . do you believe in God?” Esteban shouted, thinking he’d cornered him. “That is a personal question that in no way affects my revolutionary obedience,” Victor responded. “For you, the Revolution is infallible.” “The Revolution . . .” Victor said slowly, looking toward the port, where workers tried to righten the capsized hull of the Thétis, “the Revolution has given a purpose to my existence. I have been granted a role in the great enterprise of the era. In carrying it out, I shall try to rise to my highest stature.” He paused, and that made more sonorous the shouts of the sailors tugging a row of ropes in time with the shanties. “Will you institute the Cult of the Supreme Being here, then?” asked Esteban. For him, this notion of restoring God to the throne seemed the height of recantation. “No,” the Commissar responded, after a brief hesitation. “They haven’t even demolished the church on the Morne du Gouvernement. Now would be too soon. We must take things slower. If I were to suddenly speak of the Supreme Being, the people here would be toting icons of Him nailed to a cross, with a crown of thorns and a wound in his side, and that would get us nowhere. We are not in the same latitudes as the Champ de Mars.” Esteban felt the malicious satisfaction of hearing from the lips of Victor Hugues words Martínez de Ballesteros might well have uttered. And yet, over there, many Spaniards had been hounded and guillotined for objecting that methods dictated in Paris were ill suited to countries where certain traditions ran deep: “It would be a mistake to go to Spain preaching atheism,” they had counseled. In the cathedral in Zaragoza, the lovely breasts of Mademoiselle Aubry in the guise of the Goddess Reason could not be flaunted as they had been in Notre-Dame, before the church was put on sale, even if no one saw fit to acquire for their own use a building so gothic, so monumental and inhospitable . . . “Contradictions and more contradictions,” murmured Esteban, “the Revolution I dreamed of was nothing like this . . .” “Who told you to believe in things that weren’t?” Victor asked. “Anyway, this is all idle blather. The English are still in Basse-Terre. That is all we should be worried about.” And he added in a cutting tone: “Revolution is to be waged, not debated.” “When I think,” Esteban said, “how the altar on the Morne du Gouvernement could have been saved if only the dispatch from Paris had arrived sooner! If a stronger wind had blown over the Atlantic, God could have stayed in his house! Who knows what is being waged here, and by whom!” “Get to work!” Victor said, planting a heavy hand between his shoulders and pushing him toward the door, which closed so loudly the mulatta singer, busy polishing the handrail on the staircase, asked sarcastically: “Monsieur Victor faché?” Esteban crossed the dining room, followed by the twitter of the serving girls mocking him.
