Explosion in a Cathedral, page 19
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One morning, there was unusual commotion in the port. A number of light ships—sloops, above all—were being hauled onto land and put in dry dock. Carpenters, caulkers, and tar brushers set to work on the larger vessels; men labored in raucous concert with brushes, saws, and hammers, and gunners loaded light cannons into rowboats and carried them onboard. Looking out a window of the old Grain Exchange, Esteban saw more men engaged in the minor task of changing the names of the ships. The Calypso became the Tyrannicide; La Sémillante was renamed La Carmagnole; L’Hirondelle was transformed into La Marie-Tapage; Le Lutin into Le Vengeur. And painted in bright characters over seasoned timbers that had served the King so well, La Tintamarre, La Cruelle, Ça-ira, La Sansjupe, L’Athènienne, Le Poignard, La Guillotine, L’Ami du Peuple, Le Terroriste, and La Bande Joyeuse were born. La Thétis, cured of the wounds received during the bombardment of Pointe-à-Pitre, was now dubbed L’Incorruptible, surely at the behest of a Victor Hugues well aware that the epithet’s uncertain gender might shield him from a charge of sedition. Esteban was asking himself the cause of that commotion when Mademoiselle Athalie Bajazet informed him that he was urgently required in the Leader’s office. The glasses of punch one of his maids cleared away made it plain that the Commissar had been drinking, but he still possessed that self-assurance in gesture and thought which liquor often redoubled in him rather than diminished. “Are you committed to staying here?” Victor said with a smile. Caught off guard by the question, Esteban leaned against a wall, running a trembling hand through his hair. Before now, leaving Guadeloupe had been so evidently impossible that the thought of it had never crossed his mind. He asked again: “Are you committed to staying in Pointe-à-Pitre?” A ship appeared, sent by providence, in Esteban’s imagination, luminous, sails orange from the glow of a regal setting sun, navigating to some safe harbor. Perhaps a threatening letter, or the force of his inner anguish, had convinced the Commissar to abandon his post, traveling on to some Dutch port that would offer free passage to wherever he wished to go. The Robespierrists were fleeing in droves now, and it was known that many intended to reach New York, where there were French printers willing to publish memoirs and affidavits. In the colony, too, more than one man dreamed of New York. Esteban spoke frankly: as for him, he no longer saw what use he could be on the island, which would soon be under the control of Persons Unknown. The reaction would surely eliminate the present government in its entirety. (He looked over at the trunks and baggage already gathered in the office; porters brought more in, and Victor motioned for them to be placed in the corner.) Esteban wasn’t even French, and for that reason, they would treat him as they treated those foreigners from factions faithful to the enemy. He might share the same fate as Guzmán and Marchena. If offered a way to leave, he would take it without hesitation . . . Victor’s face grew exceptionally hard during the confession. By the time Esteban noticed, it was too late: “Poor idiot!” he shouted. “So you think the Thermidorian scum has beaten me, that they’ll push me aside, crush me? You too take secret pleasure in the thought of two guards bursting in and dragging me off to Paris? That mulatta you’re so fond of, she did well to tell me how you waste your time talking defeatist tripe with that old cur Loeuillet! I had to pay the whore a pretty penny to squeal! You want to leave before this is over, then? Well . . . It shall never be over! You hear me . . . ? It shall never be over!” “Rubbish!” Esteban shouted, frustrated that he had spoken openly with a man who had set him a trap, making the woman who shared his bed spy on him. Victor turned peremptory: “This very day, you are to take your books, your writing utensils, your arms and baggage, and board L’Ami du Peuple. This will give you respite from what you hypocritically refer to—don’t think I don’t know—as my inevitable cruelties. I am not cruel. I do what I must. That is something very different.” His tone softened as if he were talking distractedly with one of his lieutenants and, looking at the trees on the Place de la Victoire, new leaves already sprouting over their firm trunks, he told Esteban British pressure was still bearing down on the island; an enemy fleet was gathering in Barbados, and they would have to stay ahead of the developments. In the Caribbean, the only naval strategy that had produced real results was marque and reprisal—classic, grand, incomparable—with light mobile ships that could hide in shallow inlets and maneuver through the coral reefs that had hindered the heavy Spanish galleons before and would now hinder the English ships with their loads of heavy armaments in turn. The Corsair Fleet of the French Republic would operate in small squadrons with complete autonomy in a zone delimited by the Mainland, including all English and Spanish possessions in the Antilles without prejudice to latitude. The Dutch would be left undisturbed. Naturally, a ship or two might fall into enemy hands, bringing joy to traitors of the Revolution. (“And these exist, yes they do,” said Victor, patting a thick bundle of confidential reports, denunciations written on rag paper then recopied in an anonymous hand, with subtlety, without spelling errors, on fine filigreed sheets.) There had been no end to the indulgence shown to those deserters who had known to tear off their Phrygian caps at just the right time. They presented themselves to journalists as victims of an intolerable regime, especially if they were French. They rambled on about their disappointments and sufferings beneath a tyranny worse than any ever known, and they were given means to return home and ruefully retell their misadventures on the summits of impossible utopias. Esteban was aghast to find himself accused of harboring such intentions. “If you think I would ever lend myself to such treachery . . . why would you put me on one of your ships?” Victor stuck his nose in Esteban’s face, as though mimicking a fight between marionettes. “Because you are an excellent scribe and we need one for each fleet to compose the Letter of Marque and Reprisal and take inventory quickly, before some rascal can sink his nails into the Republic’s rightful possessions.” Taking a pen and a ruler, the Commissar traced out six columns on a broad sheet of paper: “Come here,” he said, “and don’t look so glum. You will compose the Record of Confiscations in the following way: First column: Total seizures; Second column: Earnings from sales and auctions (assuming there are any); Third column: Five percent for any invalids onboard; Fourth column: Fifteen centimes for the invalids’ treasurer; Fifth column: Owed to the corsair captains; Sixth column: Legal expenses related to the shipment of liquidations (in case, for whatever reason, they must be sent to another squadron). Is this clear?” Just then, Victor Hugues looked like a canny provincial shopkeeper, busy with his end-of-the-year accounting. Even his way of holding his pen had something in it of the former merchant and bread baker in Port-au-Prince.
Chapter Three
XXIV.
They take what they can.
Goya
In a vast eruption of salvos, tricolored flags, and revolutionary music, the little squadrons departed from the port of Pointe-à-Pitre. After lying a last time with Mademoiselle Athalie Bajazet, biting her breasts with a savagery that owed much to his rancor, Esteban slapped the buttocks of the informer, the tattler, till they bruised—her body was too beautiful for him to bring himself to strike her elsewhere. The woman was left moaning, regretful, and perhaps in love for the first time. She had helped him dress, calling him mon doux seigneur and now, onboard the barque, which had already passed the Îlet à Cochons, the young man looked back at the distant city with a delightful feeling of relief. The squadron—two small ships and the larger one he was assigned to—struck him, in all honesty, as feeble resistance for the stout English luggers or their narrow-beamed, agile cutters. But he preferred this to remaining in the increasingly demonic world of a Victor Hugues determined to grow to fit the hypostatic prominence assigned him by the American press, which already referred to him as “the Robespierre of the Islands . . .” Esteban took a deep breath, as if to empty his lungs of mephitic inhalations. He was going to sea, past the sea, into the immense Ocean of odysseys and anabases. The further they were from the coast, the greater the depths of blue the sea displayed, and he passed into a life governed by its rhythms. Onboard was a maritime bureaucracy, with each person devoted to his duties—the steward up to his nose in the storeroom, the carpenter tinkering with the oarlocks of a canoe, one man slathering tar, another setting clocks, while the cook hurried to be sure the fresh hake was on the officers’ table at six and the immense tureen of leek, cabbage, and sweet potato soup was poured into bowls on the trestle tables before the twilight glow went dim. That afternoon, normal existence seemed to envelop them, the long day’s events unpunctuated by the dreadful scansion of the guillotine—as though they’d emerged from frenzied temporality and entered the immutable and eternal. They would live without newspapers from Paris, without readings of pleas and allegations, without refractory shouting, instead looking at the sun, discoursing with the firmament, questioning the almucantar and the North Star . . . No sooner had L’Ami du Peuple set out on the open sea than a whale calf, spitting water with the elegance of a fountain, rose up and sank again suddenly, wary of being rammed by one of the sloops. And above the almost violaceous water of the afternoon, the enormous fish’s silhouette in a water made darker by its shadow was for Esteban the immediate metaphor of an animal from centuries before that had strayed through foreign latitudes, perhaps, for some four or five hundred years . . . The squadron—the Décade and the Tintamarre, as well as the barque—saw no other ships for several days, as though it had set forth on a pleasure jaunt rather than a bellicose assignment. It laid anchor in some inlet, the sails went slack, and the seamen left for the shore, some for firewood, some for clams—so abundant you could find them half a palm’s length beneath the sand—and they idled there lying among the grape vines and bathing in the coves. The clarity, the transparency, the coolness of the water in the early morning hours gave rise to a physical exaltation in Esteban that resembled lucid drunkenness. Frolicking wherever he stepped, he soon learned to swim, and could never bring himself to return to land when it was time to do so; he felt so happy, so enveloped and saturated with light, that at times, on terra firma, his gait was dazed and hesitant like a drunkard’s. When this happened, he said he was “water-addled,” and would offer his nude body to the sunrise, belly in the sand or face-up, legs opened, arms outspread, with such delight in his expression that he seemed a beatific mystic blessed with an Ineffable Vision. Stirred by the new energies that suffused him with such life, he spent hours exploring the cliffs, climbing, leaping, splashing around—marveled by all he discovered at the foot of the rocks. There were forests of madrepore, the speckled and harmonious apples of cowries, the cathedral-like suppleness of sea snails which, with their teeth and spines, could not be seen as other than gothic inventions; the rocaille frizz of tentacles, the Pythagorean spirals of shells—which deceptively, beneath a poor semblance of plaster, concealed the luminosity of a palace draped in gold. There was the sea urchin stilled its purple darts, the timid oyster closed, the starfish shrank before the human’s step, while the sponges, clinging to a submerged crag, swayed in the wavering reflections. In that prodigious Island Sea, even the Ocean’s pebbles had style and charm; some were so perfectly round, they seemed to have been polished by the hands of a gem cutter; others had abstract, dancing forms, yearning, levitating, slender, arrowlike, prey to an impulse birthed by matter itself. The transparent stone with alabaster radiance, and the stone of purple marble, and the granite covered with glimmers that shifted under the water, and the humble stone stippled with sea urchins—Esteban dug their algae-flavored flesh from their tiny, blackish-green shells with the spine from a cactus. Prodigious cactuses stood guard on the flanks of those nameless Hesperides where the ships arrived amid their exploits; tall candelabras, panoplies of green helmets, green pheasants’ tails, green sabers, green blotches, hostile melons, vile quinces, spikes lingering in treacherous taut skins—a world not to be trusted, poised to wound, but torn open in the birthing of red or yellow flowers offered to man as a gift with the thorny prickly pear and nopal, whose flesh could be had at the cost of tearing through still more agonizing bristles. Foil to that armed vegetation, coated in nails, which kept him from climbing the crests layered with ripe soursops, there lay below in that Cambrian world forests of corals with textures of flesh, lace, or wool, infinite and always diverse, their flaming trees transmuted, auriferous; trees of Alchemy, of grimoires and hermetic treatises; nettles of untouchable soils, flamiferous ivies, woven in counterpoints and rhythms so ambiguous as to abolish all demarcation between inert and throbbing, vegetal and animal. In the coral forest lingered, amid a growing economy of zoological forms, the first baroque movements of Creation, its early luxuries and squanderings: hidden treasures man might never see without mimicking the fish he had once been before the womb gave him form, and he would yearn for gills and a tail to penetrate those extravagant landscapes he might choose as his eviternal home. Esteban saw in the coral forests a tangible image, an intimate yet ungraspable figuration of Paradise Lost, where the trees, still badly named, with the clumsy and quavering tongue of a Man-Child, were endowed with the apparent immortality of this luxurious flora—this monstrance, this burning bush—for which the sole sign of autumn or springtime was a variation in tone or a soft migration of shadows . . . From one surprise to the next, Esteban discovered the multiplicity of beaches where the Sea, three centuries after the Discovery of America, deposited the first shards of polished glass; glass invented in Europe, unknown in America, from bottles, flasks, cylinders, shapes foreign to the New Continent; green glass with opacities and bubbles; fine glass destined for nascent cathedrals, hagiographies now erased by the waters; glass fallen from boats, salvaged from shipwrecks, thrown on the Ocean’s shores like a mysterious novelty, rising now to the earth, polished by waves with the skill of a jeweler or goldsmith bringing light to its tarnished facets. There were black beaches of pulverized slate and marble, where the sun shed trickles of sparks; yellow beaches of variable slopes, where every wave traced out an arabesque in an endless smoothing out and redrawing; white beaches, so white, so splendorously white that in places the sand was a kind of impasto over the vast cemetery of shells shattered, whirled, battered, ground away—reduced to a powder so fine that they slipped through the hand like a fluid impossible to grasp. It was marvelous, amid the multiplicity of Oceanids, to see the ubiquity of Life, roiling, sprouting, creeping over withered rocks as over trunks of driftwood, in a perennial confusion of plant and animal; of things adrift, stranded, hurled onto the shore, and things moved by their own impulse. Here were reefs that forged themselves and grew, aging rock, an immersed crag devoted for centuries to the task of sculpting itself in a world of fish-plants, fungus-medusas, fleshy stars, wandering plants, ferns that took on saffron, indigo, or purple tints at certain hours. On the submerged wood of the mangroves, a white dusting of flour appeared. And the flour made sheetlets of parchment, and the parchment swelled and hardened, transforming to scales clinging with their feet to a stalk, until, one fine morning, an oyster in its dressing of gray shell was visible against the wood. And the boatmen brought in these oysters on branches, hacking away a limb with a machete: a shrub of shellfish, branch and root, a handful of leaves, shells, and salt crystals, offered to human hunger like the strangest, most inexplicable of delicacies. No symbol better expressed the Idea of the Sea than the amphibious females of ancient myths, whose softest flesh offered itself to men’s hands in the pink hollows of the conches, the sound of which had echoed for centuries when the oarsmen of the Archipelago pressed their lips to the shell, to tear from it the coarse sonority of the sea storm, the roar of the Neptunian bull, the solar beast, blowing over the immensity of the Sun’s vast domains . . . Transported to the symbiotic universe, sunken to the neck in wells whose waters were endlessly frothed by collapsing ribbons of waves broken, lacerated, shattered by the bite of the living rock of dog’s tooth calcite, Esteban marveled at how language on these islands had resorted to agglutination, verbal amalgam, metaphor to translate the formal ambiguity of matter that partook of several essences. There were trees called acacia-bracelets, pineapple-cowries, wood-ribs, ten-brooms, clover-cousins, pine-nut jugs, philter-clouds, and iguana-sticks, and many marine creatures were given names that fixed an image contrary to reason, yielding up a fantastical zoology of dogfish, ox-fish, tiger-fish, snorers, blowers, flyers, red-tails, stripers—some tattooed, some with mouths on their back or jaws on their abdomen—lions, white-bellies, broadswords, and kingfish; one was known to devour men’s testicles, another was herbivorous; the morays of the sandbars were mottled in red, and one was venomous when it had eaten the fruit of the manchineel; then again, there was the old lady fish, the captain fish with its sparkling throat of golden shells, the woman-fish—the mysterious and elusive manatee, glimpsed at the mouths of rivers, where salt and sweet water mingled, with feminine appearance, mermaid breasts, frolicking nuptially in waterlogged plains. But nothing was comparable in joy, in eurythmia, in grace of impulse, to the play of dolphins, slung from the water in twos, in threes, in twenties, their disparate forms beneath a wave emphasizing its arabesque. In twos, in threes, in twenties, the dolphins turned in unison, integrated into the essence of the wave, living its movements in consonant pauses, leaps, and dives as though they bore it over their bodies, impressing upon it time and measure, pattern and sequence. Loss and diffusion followed, a search for new adventures, but with time, a meeting with a ship would once more draw up from the sea these dancers that seemed only to know how to turn in pirouettes and tritonades that gave visual testimony to the myths that surrounded them . . .
