Explosion in a Cathedral, page 17
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The Loeuillets’ printing press worked frantically producing pamphlets destined for the French laborers on the neutral islands, promising them official positions and property if they recognized the advantages of revolutionary government. This strengthened the armed contingents, though weeks passed before they gathered the resolve needed to cross the Salt River. The situation remained unchanged until late September, when the Commissar was informed that yellow fever was wreaking havoc on the British side, and General Grey, fearful of the cyclones that lashed the Windward Islands at that time of the year, had taken much of his squadron to Fort Royal in Martinique, whose port offered greater protection from hurricanes. They debated how best to take advantage of the situation, deciding in the end that the French army should be divided into three columns under the command of De Leyssegues, Pelardy, and Boudet. They would try their luck with a landing at three different points in Basse-Terre. They confiscated canoes, boats, dinghies, even the Indians’ kayaks, and one night, they attacked. Two days later, the French were the lords of Lamentin and Petit-Bourg. On the morning of October 6, they laid siege to the entrenched positions at Berville . . . These were expectant hours in Pointe-à-Pitre. Some said that the siege would be long, because the English had had time enough to strengthen their positions. Others felt General Graham was demoralized by the resolve of the revolutionary government in Grande-Terre, where people scoffed at the volleys of cannon he fired with fury at the city from the heights of Morne Savon . . . Esteban met frequently then with Monsieur Anse, the guillotine’s custodian and operator, who was assembling a Cabinet of Curiosities, gathering gorgonians, bits of mineral, embalmed sunfish, roots with animal shapes, and luminous conches. They liked to take their rest on the splendid inlet of Le Gosier, with its island glimmering like a chalcedony heart. Monsieur Anse would bury a couple of bottles of wine in the sand to cool them down. Taking an old violin from its case and turning his back to the sea, he would play one of Philidor’s poignant pastorals, embellishing it with variations of his own. He was a good companion on excursions, capable of wonder at a chunk of sulfur, a butterfly of Egyptian outline, or any unknown flower that appeared in their path. At midday on October 6, Monsieur Anse received an order to load the guillotine onto a cart and to depart for Berville forthwith. The town square was theirs. Victor Hugues, before ordering an attack, had given General Graham four days to surrender. And when the Commissar set foot on the field full of trenches, strewn with rubbish abandoned in the stampede, he found there twelve hundred English soldiers who didn’t speak English: in his retreat, Graham had abandoned them on shore, taking with him only twenty-two monarchist settlers who were particularly close to him. Shocked at such perfidy from a man who had been their leader, the French who had fought under the British flag were sorted into pitiful groups before they’d even had time to remove their uniforms. “Some things just can’t be done,” Monsieur Anse said when departing, with an ambiguous gesture toward the carriage where the Machine lay hidden under sackcloth, to protect it from the rain the wind would soon bring in, which was falling already on Marie-Galante, changing the island’s color from bright green to leaden gray, its contours blurred by a scintillating cloud . . . “Some things just can’t be done,” Monsieur Anse repeated the next morning, soaked and shivery on his return, trying and failing to warm his body with rum from the inns. Slightly drunk, he told Esteban the guillotine couldn’t be used for mass executions. His work took time, proceeded according to its own rhythms, and it was hard to say how the Commissar, who was well acquainted with the Machine, had thought the eight hundred sixty-five men sentenced to death might pass one by one beneath its blade. Anse had done everything humanly possible to speed up the operation. But at midnight, only thirty of the disloyal prisoners had received their due punishment. “Enough!” the Commissar had shouted. And the rest were shot in groups of ten, of twenty, while the carriage dodged depressions in the road on its return to Pointe-à-Pitre. Victor Hugues had shown mercy to the few Englishmen captured in Berville, disarming them and letting them return to their defeated armada. To a young British captain reluctant to depart, he said: “I am bound by duty to be here. But you . . . who orders you to contemplate the French blood I am forced to spill . . . ?” The era of the White Lords was over in Guadeloupe. This was said, with a great roll of the snare drums, in the Place de la Victoire. “Some things just can’t be done,” Monsieur Anse repeated, pained at his poor performance on his first day with the Machine: “Eight hundred sixty-five there were. A colossal task.” Esteban listened to the tale and listened to it again, as if the man were speaking of a volcanic eruption in some faraway territory. Berville was, for him, just a name. And moreover, eight hundred sixty-five faces were too many to imagine a single one of them.
XXI.
A few dens of resistance remained in Basse-Terre. But the men Graham had betrayed lost their valor no sooner than they’d got hold of a sloop that would carry them to a neighboring island. With the fall of Fort Saint-Charles, the campaign was said to be at an end. La Désirade and Marie-Galante—whose governor, a former deputy in the Assembly who had passed over to the English side, choosing suicide over armed resistance—were now in French hands. Victor Hugues was the lord of Guadeloupe, and announced to all that they would work together in peace. And looking for a symbolic gesture to give weight to his words, he planted trees that would one day give shade on the Place de la Victoire. Soon came the event they had all been waiting for, patiently but with anxious curiosity: the guillotine set to work in public. The day of its unveiling, for use upon the persons of two monarchist chaplains found on a farm with a cache of rifles and munitions, the whole city poured into the agora, where a large stage with a stairway up the side was built in the Parisian style over four posts of cedar. Republican manners having made their way into the colony, mestizos arrived dressed in short blue jackets and trousers with red stripes, while the mulattas wore new madras dresses in the colors of the victors. Never had such a raucous multitude been seen, merry in fabrics dyed indigo and strawberry that seemed to flutter in time with the flags on that clear sunny morning. The Commissar’s serving girls peeped through the windows, shouting and laughing—and laughed still more when an officer’s trembling hand climbed the backs of their knees. Many children had mounted the roofs of the buildings to see better. Fried food gave off smoke, pitchers overflowed with juice and garapiña, and light rum, drunk early, lifted the spirits high. And yet, when Monsieur Anse stood on the heights of the scaffold in his finest ceremonial garb—grave in his occupation, cleanly shaven by the barber—a profound silence took over. Pointe-à-Pitre was not Cap Français, where an excellent theater had existed for some time now, fed with novelties by traveling companies headed to New Orleans. Here there was no such thing, no one had ever seen an open stage, and through it, just then, the people were discovering the essence of Tragedy. Fate was there among them, blade at the ready, prompt and inexorable, stalking those who, with wicked inspiration, had turned their arms against the City. And the spirit of the Chorus came to life in every spectator, with strophes and antistrophes sounding and resounding over the scaffold. A Messenger appeared, the Guards opened a pathway, and the cart made its way into the vast pageantry of the Public Square, bearing two condemned men, hands tied, with a single rosary joining their bound wrists. The solemn rolling of the drums was heard; the bascule was checked and bore a corpulent man’s weight without buckling; and the blade fell in the midst of a clamor of anticipation. Minutes later, the first two executions were carried out . . . But the multitude remained there, while still-flowing blood dripped through the cracks in the stage, temporarily surprised, perhaps, that the dreadful spectacle had been so brief. Soon, to elude the horror that held them in a kind of stupefaction, many turned merry, hoping to lengthen the day, which already had the character of a festive reprieve. They had to call attention to their newly donned clothes, to do something to affirm life in the face of Death. And since figure dances put the garments on display best, throwing up the sunflowers of the carmagnole skirts, some lined up for contra dances, stepping forward and back, changing partners, bowing, and gripping each other’s waists, ignoring the self-declared masters of ceremony who tried in vain to maintain order among the rows and groups. With time, all that revelry, all that yearning to dance and frolic and laugh and clamor, brought them together in an enormous wheel, which broke again into groups that took turns around the guillotine, filed off into the neighboring streets, came and went, invading backyards and gardens, until nightfall. That day was the beginning of the Great Terror on the island. The Machine now labored continually in the Place de la Victoire, the rhythm of its slicing ever swifter. And in a place where everyone knew everyone on sight or from some dealings—and this man held a grudge against that one, and so-and-so could not fail to remember when so-and-so had humiliated him—there was always curiosity to see who was being executed, and the guillotine became the center of town life. The people of the Market moved slowly to that comely square in the port, with its windows and niches, its corner posts and sunny stalls, hawking their buns and their peppers, their soursops and puff pastries, their annonas and fresh porgies at all hours while there rolled the heads of those only yesterday respected and adored. An auspicious setting for the conduct of business, the plaza transformed into a moveable exchange for rubbish and abandoned objects, where a grille, a mechanical bird, or the oddments of a set of china were sold to the highest bidder. A harness might be traded for a metal pot; playing cards for firewood; elegant watches for Margarita pearls. In just a day, greengrocer and peddler were raised to the rank of wholesaler, dealers in mixed—extremely mixed—goods: cookware, emblazoned gravy boats, real silver, chess pieces, tapestries, and miniatures. The scaffold was the mainstay of a bank, of an auction house that never closed. The haggling, disputes, and negotiations no longer stopped for the executions. The guillotine was an aspect of their everyday reality. There, between the parsley and oregano, tiny decorative guillotines were offered for sale, and many customers took one home with them. The children honed their intellect designing machines to behead cats. A beautiful mulatta, a favorite of one of De Leyssegues’s lieutenants, offered his guests liqueurs in wooden bottles of human shape that lay on a bascule and were uncorked—naturally, droll human faces had been painted on the stoppers—by the action of a toy blade brought down by a minute mechanical executioner. Many novelties and diversions arrived in those days to interrupt the island’s tranquil, pastoral life; nonetheless, some did notice that the Terror was descending the social staircase and starting to reap at the level of the ground. Informed that many negroes in the commune of Les Abysses had embraced their status as free men and were refusing to labor in the expropriated fields, Victor Hugues ordered the unruliest among them taken prisoner and condemned to the guillotine. With some perplexity, Esteban noted that, despite the Commissar’s words of praise for the sublime Decree of 16 Pluviôse of Year II, he failed to show much sympathy for the negroes: “They’re lucky we even recognize them as French citizens,” he often said bitterly. He retained certain racial prejudices from his long stay in Saint-Domingue, where the colonists had been harsh in their treatment of the slaves—who had the reputation of layabouts, idiots, shirkers, and thieves, propres-à-rien, among the men who worked them from sunup to sundown. The Republic’s soldiers, notwithstanding their weakness for dark flesh of the female sort, lost no opportunity to club and lash the negro men under the flimsiest of pretexts, even while admitting that there were magnificent shooters among them, like that stout leper by the name of Vulcain. Brothers in war, the blacks and whites were divided in peace. Soon, Victor Hugues introduced forced labor. Any negro accused of sloth or disobedience, of insubordination or rebellion, was condemned to death. This was a lesson the entire island had to learn, and so the guillotine was taken from the Place de la Victoire and began to wander, to travel, to roam: at dawn on Monday, it stood in Le Moule; on Tuesday it was at work in Le Gosier, where someone was convicted of idling; on Wednesday it chastened six monarchists hiding in the old Parish Church of Sainte-Anne. It was carted from village to village, paraded past the taverns. The executioner and his men accepted drinks and gratuities to bring the blade down over the empty air, so all could witness its workings. The band of drummers who drowned out the shouts of the condemned in Pointe-à-Pitre had been unable to accompany them; in their place, a large bass drum was loaded onto the wagon, and its pounding brought a festive sort of joy to the executions. The peasants, curious to see how powerful the machine was, laid the trunks of banana trees on the bascule—with its sheaf of damp and porous ducts, nothing better resembles a human neck than a banana tree’s trunk—to watch them being severed. To settle a bet, six sugarcanes were bundled beneath the blade, and even that didn’t stop it. When all this was over, the illustrious visitors continued on their way, smoking and singing to the beating of the bass drum, their red Phrygian caps turned chestnut brown by sweat. On their return, the bascule was so laden with fruits it seemed to be borne by a Car of Plenty.
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Early in Year III, Victor Hugues found himself raised to the summit of glory. Pleased with the notices they’d received, the Convention ratified the promotions of his officers, approved his nominations and decrees, congratulated him in panegyric prose and announced a consignment of reinforcements: soldiers, arms, and munitions. But the Commissar no longer needed them: through forced conscription, he’d created an army of ten thousand adequately trained men. Fortifications were being built on all the vulnerable points of the coast. Confiscated goods filled the chests, and the warehouses were bursting with all the necessities. On a journey to the island’s other side, Victor Hugues—remembering he had been there many years before—was taken with the beauty of the town of Basse-Terre, with its rumor of flowing water, its public fountains that cooled delightfully the avenues lined with tamarinds. It was nobler, more distinguished than Pointe-à-Pitre, with cobblestone streets, a shady esplanade, large stone houses that evoked certain corners of Rochefort, Nantes, La Rochelle. The Commissar would happily have moved his home to the calm and welcoming parish of Saint-François; but the port, well suited to receipt of cattle from the neighboring islands—cattle thrown overboard on arrival and left to swim ashore—could scarcely harbor his fleet. At the end his tour as victorious leader, he was acclaimed by the lepers of La Désirade, the little whites of Marie-Galante, even the Indians on that Caribbean island, whose chief communicated their request that they be permitted to enjoy the benefits of French citizenship. Aware that these men were magnificent seamen and knew everything about the archipelago, which they traveled through in swift boats long before the ships of the Great Admiral of Isabella and Ferdinand had arrived in those parts, he passed around rosettes and promised them everything they asked for. Victor Hugues was kinder to the Caribs than to the negroes: he valued their pride, their aggression, their haughty assertion that the Caribs alone are true men—and his esteem only grew now that they’d hung tricolor cockades from the cords of their loincloths. In Marie-Galante, the Commissar asked to visit the beach where those frustrated lords of the Antilles had impaled the French buccaneers who had made an attempt on their women years before. The skeletons, bones, skulls were still there on stakes planted next to the sea: transfixed by wood like an insect pierced with a naturalist’s pin, within days the corpses had attracted so many vultures that the coast, seen from a distance, seemed obscured beneath boiling lava . . . The Commissar did not forget, among such copious acclaim, that the English were still marauding in nearby waters in the hopes of imposing a blockade. Victor liked to pass his evenings shut away with De Leyssegues, who now sported the insignia of rear admiral, tracing out a naval strategy that would encompass the entire Caribbean. The project was kept secret, and they were in the midst of their machinations when Esteban entered the Commissar’s office one day and found him unkempt and sweating, his face tense with rage. He was walking around a long table, stopping behind the officials, who had abandoned their work and were fighting over the pages of the recently delivered newspapers. “Have you heard?” the young man shouted, pointing with a trembling hand at an article relating the incredible events that had taken place in Paris on the ninth of Thermidor. “The bastards!” Victor shouted. “They’ve struck down our finest men.” The ruthlessness of the affair left Esteban speechless. And the distance made these impressions doubly dramatic. Like a man carrying in his mind the image of an object long contemplated, keeping it present even when the object itself has disappeared, they had spoken, in that room, with reference to immediate and future reality, of a man who had ceased to exist several months before. While they had argued, in this very place, over the Cult of the Supreme Being, its founder had already unleashed at the scaffold’s foot the terrible cry provoked when the executioner tore the bandage from his broken jaw. There was no limit to Victor Hugues’s indignation, and the implications were such that the mind refused to lay boundaries to conjecture. Not only had the giant fallen whose portrait hung there showing him at the height of his glory, standing as an example to all; not only had the Commissar lost a man who’d put faith in him, with grants of power and authority; still worse, he would have to wait for weeks, maybe months, before knowing the direction things had taken in France. Likely, the forces of reaction would seek merciless revenge. Perhaps a new government would step forth and destroy all that the earlier one had wrought. In Guadeloupe, there would be new Plenipotentiaries with gruff faces and contrary expressions, obedient to inscrutable orders. Victor Hugues’s report to the Convention on the massacre of Berville might now be used against him. Perhaps he had already been relieved of his duties, or put on trial in absentia, and his career, his life might already be over. He read and reread the list of those fallen on 9 Thermidor, as to decipher therein the keys to his fate. Some of those present insinuated meekly that they might now enter a period of leniency, of indulgence, with religion reestablished. “Or the monarchy might be restored,” thought Esteban, and the idea brought him at once a sense of relief, of peace regained after so many storms, and of revulsion, of contempt for the Throne. If men had gone to such lengths, if so many had prophesied, suffered, acclaimed, fallen in the fires and triumphal arches of a vast apocalyptic dream, then at least Time should not turn back. The tarnished gold of royalty was too paltry a payment for blood spilled. There was still hope for justice; one fairer, perhaps, than that justice that so quickly ceased to be so when words—all that talk was one of the evils of the age—meandered into abstraction. Hope for a Liberty less proclaimed than enjoyed; for an Equality brought about rather than frittered away in talk; for a Fraternity that eschewed denunciations and was manifest in the restoration of real tribunals, manned once more by juries. Victor went on pacing through the room, calmer now, hands behind his back. At last he came to rest before the Incorruptible’s portrait. “Here, at any rate, all shall continue as before,” he finally said. “I take no notice of this news. I do not accept it. And Jacobin morals remain the only sort I acknowledge. No one shall move me from here. And if the Revolution is lost in France, may it continue in the Americas. The time has come for us to turn to the Mainland.” And addressing Esteban: “You are immediately to translate into Spanish the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the text of the Constitution.” “The Constitution of ’91 or ’93?” the young man asked. “The one of ’93—the only one I recognize. From this island shall proceed the ideas that will shake Spanish America to the core. If we have partisans and allies in Spain, then we shall have them on the Continent as well. Perhaps even more, because dissatisfaction is more abundant in the colonies than in the metropole.”
