Explosion in a Cathedral, page 18
XXII.
When the old Camisard Loeuillet was told he would have to print texts in Spanish, he realized with horror he had brought no ñ in his cases of type. “Who would ever think of disguising that sound in its own letter?” he asked, furious with himself. “Can you imagine the noble, even majestic word swan spelled ciñe rather than cygne?” That no one had advised him that this character might prove necessary only showed the disorganization of these men who intended to govern the world. “It never crossed their mind that they use the tilde in Spanish!” he shouted. “Band of fools!” Eventually he chose to replace the tildes with circumflex accents trimmed from other letters, greatly complicating the work of typesetting. But soon they had printed a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Spanish, handing in their edition to the Commissar’s offices, where the atmosphere was thick with disconcertment and grief. The wind of Thermidor blew over many consciences. Criticisms some had kept to themselves were aired now in secret meetings that kept all outsiders at bay. When Esteban gave Loeuillet his Spanish version of the Constitution of ’93, the typographer railed against the cynical contrivances of propaganda that vaunted its ideals to create the illusion of realities that were the very thing these ideals had failed to achieve—in a land where, moreover, the finest intentions had produced the most atrocious consequences. Should the Americans now put into practice those same principles the Terror had transgressed almost to the letter, violating them once more in turn in response to the political demands of the moment? “No one here says a word about starvation or barges,” said the Camisard, alluding to the vessels sitting in every French port on the Atlantic bursting with their cargo of aggrieved prisoners—like the notorious Bonhomme Richard, named sardonically after Benjamin Franklin’s famous almanac. “Let’s get back to printing,” Esteban would tell him. For now they had a task to get through each day, and the young man performed it conscientiously, finding solace, a relief in his ruminations, in his attempts to translate as best he could; he grew meticulous, almost a purist, in his search for the exact term, the truest synonym, the right punctuation, and bemoaned that the backward Spanish of the day failed to accommodate the concise and modern turns of phrase of the French. He found a kind of aesthetic pleasure in translating well, however indifferent the content of the phrases in question. For whole days, he polished his version of Billaud-Varenne’s report concerning “The Theory of Democratic Government, and the Need of Inspiring Love for the Civic Virtues Through Public Festivals and Moral Institutions,” even if the turgid prose of a man who ceaselessly evoked the names Tarquin, Cato, and Cataline struck him as no less passé, no less false, no less irrelevant to the present era than the lyrics of the Masonic anthems he had been taught to intone years ago in the Lodge of United Foreigners. The Loeuillets, father and son, sought his help in the arduous work of typesetting texts in a language unknown to them, asking for explanations of accents and spelling or where a word should break at the end of a line. The old Camisard worried over the pages’ appearance with the care of a good artisan, bemoaning the absence of a colophon or an allegorical vignette to bring a piece of writing to a beautiful close. Neither the editor-translator nor the typographers had any particular faith in the words their labor would multiply and diffuse. But if a man must work, he must do so properly, neither running roughshod over the language nor disparaging the material it was written on. They proceeded with the impression of a carmagnole américaine, a variant of an older version written down in Bayonne and destined to the peoples of the New World:
Verse:
I am one of the shirtless
I’ll dance wherever I’m found
And in place of guitars
The cannons will resound,
The cannons will resound,
The cannons will resound.
Chorus:
Let the shirtless dance
And let us hear the songs of the poor
Let the shirtless dance
And long live the cannons’ roar.
Verse:
If anyone should ask me
Why my chest is bare,
Well, the king he taxed me
Till I’ve got nothing left to wear,
Till I’ve got nothing left to wear,
Till I’ve got nothing left to wear.
Chorus:
Let the shirtless dance . . .
Verse:
All the kings across the world
Are tyrants fit to curse,
But of all the kings across the world
Charles must be worst,
Charles must be worst,
Charles must be worst.
Chorus:
Let the shirtless dance . . .
In the later verses, the anonymous author, apprised of what was happening in the Americas, gave the Governors, Magistrates, and Mayors their just due, along with the Trial Judges and Superintendents and Administrators in league with the Crown. Nor could the versifier be unaware of the Cult of the Supreme Being when he wrote further on: God protects our creed, / Our hand is guided by the Lord / The King with his misdeeds / Shall feel his righteous sword. It concluded: Long live love for the Fatherland!/ And long live liberty! / May the despots perish / And with them the tyranny of kings! That was precisely how the Spanish conspirators in Bayonne had always spoken. Esteban had only vague news of them. He was certain that Guzmán, Marat’s friend, had been guillotined. It was hinted, but without certainty, that Abbot Marchena might have escaped the massacre of the Girondins. As for the good Martínez de Ballesteros, he’d have found another reason to live—to survive—lending his services to a Revolution unconnected to the one that had fired his early enthusiasms. In those times, an acquired haste, a persistent impulse, led many to continue striving for a world very different from the one they’d previously hoped to forge, bitter, disappointed, but, like the Loeuillets, incapable of flagging in their faithful execution of their prescribed duties. They offered no more opinions: to live, that was what mattered—to have a task that permitted one to return to the peace of work day after day. They lived for the day, envisioning the reward of a late afternoon drink, a swim in cool water, the breeze brought by nightfall, the flowering of orange blossoms, the girl who might come, even today, and pamper them. In the midst of events so grave they overwhelmed the powers of the average man to grasp, to measure, to assess, there was wonder to be found in observing the transformations of mimetic insects, the nuptial maneuvering of a beetle, a sudden multiplication of butterflies. Never before had Esteban taken such an interest in the minute—quivering tadpoles in a barrel of water, the maturation of a mushroom, ants that gnawed at the leaves of a lemon tree until they resembled bobbin lace—as in those days invested with the eternal and momentous. One day, a handsome mulatta in luminous bracelets and pressed skirts, her swishing petticoats smelling of vetiver, entered his bedroom with the empty pretext of borrowing a pen and ink. A half-hour after their bodies had mingled in delicious complication, the woman, not wearing even a single scrap of fabric, had introduced herself with a graceful bow: Mademoiselle Athalie Bajazet, coiffeuse pour dames. “What a marvelous country!” the young man exclaimed, forgetting his worries. Since then Mademoiselle Athalie Bajazet had slept with him every night. “Whenever she takes off her skirt, she presents me with two tragedies by Racine . . .” Esteban told the Loeuillets amid laughter . . . Called by his accountant’s duties—needing to take an inventory of certain shipments in the island’s ports—the young man went occasionally to Basse-Terre, driving his horse down uneven roads where the vegetation was particularly lush due to the many streams and torrents that drained over the eternally mist-capped mornes. On these journeys, he discovered a vegetation like that of his home country, which his illness had prevented his getting to know well back there, and which he now took in fully, redressing a lacuna from his youth. He sniffed lustily at the mellow fragrance of the annonas, the gray acidity of the tamarinds, the fleshy gentleness of so many fruits with red and yellow pulp, which harbored, in their recondite folds, sumptuous seeds with tortoiseshell textures, the color of polished ebony or mahogany. He sank his face in the cool white of the soursops; he scratched the amaranth violet of the star apple, the glassy swan shot hidden in the depths of its flesh. One day, while his unsaddled horse was kicking its four hooves and lurching through the waters of a stream, Esteban ventured to climb a tree. And having prevailed in the initiation rite he perceived in the struggle to reach its branches, he ascended to the crown along an increasingly dense staircase of thin limbs, footholds arrayed grandly with leaves, a green hive, a sumptuous gable seen from the inside for the first time. A strange, profound, inexplicable exaltation brought Esteban joy as he straddled a fork at the peak of that quivering edifice of wood and verdure. Climbing a tree was a private mission he would perhaps never undertake again. Whoever embraced the high breasts of a tree realized a sort of nuptial, deflowering a veiled world never seen by other men. All at once, the gaze takes in every beauty and imperfection of the Tree. Two tender branches open like the thighs of a woman, hiding a handful of green moss in their juncture; round wounds are revealed, left behind by the shearing off of dry progeny; the splendid ogees open high, strange bifurcations that have driven sap to a favored stretch, leaving others emaciated and suited like tinder to the flames. Reaching his lookout, Esteban grasped the arcane relationship between Mast, Plow, Tree, and Cross. He recalled the text of Saint Hippolytus: “This wood belongs to me. I eat of it, it sustains me; I shelter in its roots, I lie on its branches; I give myself to its breath as I give myself to the wind. This is my narrow path; this is my narrowed road; Jacob’s ladder, and at the top, my Lord.” The great signs of the Tau, of the Cross of Saint Andrew, the Brazen Serpent, the Anchor, and the Ladder, were implicit in every Tree, with Creation foretelling Construction, giving proportions for the Builder of future Arks. The shadows of evening found Esteban swaying in the heights of the trunk, caught in a somnolent luxury he might have prolonged indefinitely. Then he noticed novel silhouettes, certain vegetal beings from below: papayas with udders hanging from their necks seemed to come to life and march off into the lush distances of La Soufrière; the ceiba, mother of all trees, as the black wisemen called it, turning to an obelisk, a rostral column, monument and elevation over the fading light. A dead mango tree transformed into a coil of serpents poised to bite; or a live one, swelling with sap that oozed down its bark and the mottled skin of its fruits, burst into flower, suddenly glowing yellow. Enthralled, Esteban observed the life of these creatures as he might have the evolution of a zoological being. First appeared germinating fruits that looked like green glass beads, their sour juice tasting of frozen almonds. Then that hanging organism would take on form and contour, stretching out to cast a shadow like a witch’s crescent chin. Color came into its face. It passed from moss green to saffron yellow and ripened in ceramic splendor—sometimes Cretan, sometimes Mediterranean, but always Antillean—before the first black circles of decrepitude ate into its flesh reeking of tannin and iodine. And one night, coming loose and falling with a dull thud amid the grass damp with dew, the fruit made its impending death known, with freckles that spread and sunk until they erupted in wounds and the flies nestled inside them. Like the corpse of a prelate in an exemplary danse macabre, the fallen matter shed its skin and entrails, leaving nothing but a streaked, colorless seed, enveloped in the tatters of its shroud. But here, in this world without winter deaths or resurrections on Flowery Easter, the cycle of life began again posthaste: in weeks arose, from the seed in repose, like a tiny Asiatic tree, a sprout of pinkish leaves, soft like human skin, which hands dared not to touch . . . At times, a storm surprised Esteban in his travels through the brush. In his aural recollections, the young man would compare the differences between the rains of the Tropics and the monotonous drizzle of the Old World. Here, a potent and vast noise, its tempo majestic, drawn out like the prelude of a symphony, announced the downpour’s advance from afar as the mangy vultures, flying low in ever tighter circles, finally abandoned the landscape. A coaxing scent of wet forest, earth overrun by humus and sap, expanded out toward the universal scent, swelling the ruffs of the birds and making horses prick up their ears—infusing Esteban with a rare sensation of physical yearning, an ill-formed desire to press against a flesh that shared his longings. Dry flicks in the highest branches accompanied the rapid shadows cutting across the light. A frigid joy descended, drawing singular resonances from all matter—striking clear notes on the vines and banana trees, on the tuning fork of membranes, percussing when it struck the larger leaves. The water broke up high in the crowns of the palm trees, which scattered it like cathedral gutters until it resonated, grave and drumming, over the lower fronds. Drops ricocheted off the patches of tender green before falling on foliage so dense that when it reached the level of the eddoes, tense as the skin of a tambourine, the various levels of vegetal matter had divided, fragmented, atomized it a thousand times, and then, as it touched the soil, it made the Bermuda grass and esparto rejoice in a hail of voices. The wind imposed its rhythms on the immeasurable symphony, which soon transformed stream beds into flash floods, stridently dislodging pebbles that collapsed in an avalanche. Tumultuous descents hollowed out the bottoms of the streambeds, dragging stones from higher up, the dead trunks of trees, barbs, roots wound with tassels and tatters that lodged in the silt like stranded ships. And then the sky grew calm, the clouds dispersed, twilight settled in, and Esteban continued on his way, his horse wet and vigorous, under a dew of trees, their voices each distinct, amid a vast Magnificat of scents . . . When Esteban returned to Pointe-à-Pitre from such journeys, he felt that the era was foreign to him, that he was a stranger in a bloody, remote world where everything seemed outlandish. The churches remained closed there, while in France, they might well have reopened. The blacks had been declared free citizens, but those who hadn’t been conscripted as soldiers or sailors bent their backs from sunup to sundown beneath the lashes of their overseers, same as before, except that now there loomed over them the merciless azimuth of the guillotine. Newborn children were named Cincinnatus, Leonidas, or Lycurgus, and taught to recite a Revolutionary Catechism that no longer coincided with reality—and in the recently founded Jacobin Club, they spoke of the Incorruptible as if he were still alive. Fattened flies swarmed over the sticky boards of the scaffold, and Victor Hugues and his officers were getting all too used to taking long naps under tulle mosquito nets with mulatta mistresses watching over their repose and cooling them with fans of palm.
XXIII.
Esteban suffered from Victor Hugues’s growing isolation with an almost feminine tenderness. He watched as the Commissar played his part with implacable rigor, spurring on the tribunals, giving the guillotine no rest, bellowing yesterday’s rhetoric, dictating, editing, legislating, judging, always in the middle of everything; but whoever knew him well could see that the motive for his immoderate activity was a recondite desire for self-abnegation. He knew many of his most obedient subordinates dreamed of seeing the arrival of a sealed letter decreeing his dismissal in the elegant hand of some faithful amanuensis. Esteban would have liked to be by him, to accompany him, to soothe him in those moments. But the Commissar grew more elusive, shutting himself away to read until dawn, or else riding at evening to the cove of Le Gosier in a coach occasionally shared with De Leyssegues. Dressed in nothing but linen breeches, he would row to the uninhabited island, not returning until the nocturnal swarms of insects emerged from the mangrove swamps on the coast. He reread the works of classical orators, wishing, perhaps, to make a show of his elegance, should he be forced to speak in his own defense. He gave orders hastily and often with contradictions, was prone to unpredictable accesses of rage, and would suddenly sack his allies or ratify a death sentence all had assumed would be commuted. One inauspicious morning, he ordered the remains of General Dundas, former British governor of the island, disinterred and scattered in the public thoroughfare. For hours, the dogs fought over the best pieces of carrion, dragging from one street to another the putrid human residue still clinging to the ceremonial uniform in which the enemy leader had been buried. Esteban wished he could placate that man’s perturbed soul, alarmed by the first unexpected sail that flickered on the horizon, his solitude only growing in concert with his historical dimension. Harsh and hard, determined like few others, endowed with military genius, Hugues’s success on the island outstripped in many ways the other achievements of the Revolution. And yet, a faraway turn of the political tides had taken place, with White Terror following Red, unleashing unknown forces that would likely bring to the colony people incapable of governing it. And moreover, it transpired that Victor Hugues’s protector, Dalbarade, whom Robespierre had defended tooth and nail when they’d accused him of friendship with Danton, had passed over to the Thermidorian side. Disgusted by these events, reacting to tidings and rumors that poured in by the day, the Commissar accelerated the first stages of undertaking he had spent months preparing with Rear Admiral De Leyssegues. “To Hell with them all!” he shouted one day, thinking of those in Paris who held his fate in their hands. “By the time they show up with their papers, I’ll be powerful enough to wipe my ass with them and shove them in their face.”
