Explosion in a Cathedral, page 20
Now and then, a great silence was flung across the waters and the Event would occur—enormous, laggard, unwonted, a fish from other epochs would appear, its face placed strangely at one extreme of its mass, sealed in the eternal fear of its own languor; its skin like a hull in disrepair, crusted in vegetation and parasites; its spine rising long with a whipping of oars. With the solemnity of a galleon hauled up from the deep, of a patriarch from the abyss, of Leviathan dragged into the light, it cast foam across the seas in perhaps its second surfacing since the arrival of the astrolabe to these parts. The monster opened its pachydermic eyes, and, seeing a derelict sardine fisher’s dinghy row close by, it sank again, anguished and fearful, down to the solitude of its undercurrents, to wait another century before rising again to this world replete with perils. The Event past, the sea returned to its doings. Across the sand where the hippocamps lodged, the empty sea urchins, their spines worn away, dried out into apples of such geometric elegance they might be etched into one of Dürer’s Melancholies; the altar lamps of the parrot-fish lit up, while the angelfish and devilfish, the roosterfish and the Saint Peter’s fish submitted to the sacrament of the Great Theater of Universal Devoration, where all were eaten by all, consubstantial, forever imbricated in the unicity of the fluid . . . The islands were narrow in places, and Esteban, to forget his era, would walk alone to their other end, where he felt himself lord of all creation; the seashells and their music of the foreshore were his; his the turtles with their topaz armor hiding eggs in holes they would fill back in and sweep flat with scaly feet; his the splendors of the blue stones twinkling on virgin sand of flint never trod by human soles. His too were the gannets, scarcely wary of man because they scarcely knew him, flying haughtily in the lap of the waves, cheeks and gullet stuffed with mussels, then rising impulsively and diving straight down, beak driven by the weight of their bodies, wings retracted to hasten their descent. The bird lifted its head in triumphal boast, the bolus of its prey passed into its neck, then came a joyous shaking of abundant feathers, a testimony of pleasure, a thanksgiving, before it rose in low and undulating flight, gliding parallel to the movement of the sea as the dolphin swam vertiginously below. Lying nude on sand so soft that the smallest insect left tracks as it crossed it, Esteban, alone in the world, looked at the clouds, luminous, immobile, so slow to change their forms that at times, not even an entire day sufficed to efface a triumphal arch or the head of a prophet. Pure serenity, without place or epoch. Te deum . . . At other times, chin resting on the cool leaves of a grapevine, he would lose himself in contemplation of a snail—just one—arrect like a monument obscuring the horizon at the height of his brow. The snail was the Mediator of the evanescent, the fleeting, lawless immoderation of the fluid and the land of crystallizations, structures, and alternations, where everything was graspable and subject to ponderation. From the Sea subject to the cycles of the moon, fickle, open or furious, bundled or unwoven, eternally elusive to modules, theorems, or equations, rose those dazzling carapaces, symbols in cyphers and proportions of the very thing the Mother lacked. Fixed linear evolution, legislated volutes, conic architectures of marvelous precision, equilibria of volumes, tangible arabesques that intuited every baroque flourish that would ever come. Contemplating a snail—a single one—Esteban thought of the Spiral’s presence across millennia, gazed upon in fishing villages not yet capable of grasping or even perceiving its reality. He dwelled on the pulp of the sea urchin, the helix of the razor clam, the striations of the scallop, symbol of Saint James, awed by that Science of Forms so long ago revealed to a humanity that still lacked eyes to contemplate it. How much is there around me already defined, inscribed, present, that I still have yet to grasp? What sign, what message, what admonition lies in the fringes of chicory, the alphabet of mosses, the geometry of the rose apple? To look at a snail. Just one. Te deum.
XXV.
Despite his fright when they were first called to action and he’d sought shelter in the furthest corners of the ship—his vital importance as scribe allowed him to do so—Esteban soon realized that the profession of corsair as Captain Barthélemy, leader of the squadron, understood it, was, in the main, hardly abundant in adventure. When they came across a large and well-armed supply ship, they would pass without raising the colors of the Republic. If the prey was vulnerable, they would hem it in with the light boats while the barque fired a cannonball as a warning. The enemy flag would lower without resistance, in a sign of submission. They would grapple the other ship, the French leaping to the opposite deck, and take an inventory of the cargo. If it was trifles, they would seize the valuables—including the money and personal effects of the frightened crew—returning to L’Ami du Peuple with their booty. The humiliated captain would be escorted to his vessel, where he would go on his way or return to his port of call to report the misadventure. If there was significant valuable freight, they were instructed to seize it, ship and all—especially if the ship was worthy—and take it with its crew to Pointe-à-Pitre. But this hadn’t happened yet for Barthélemy’s squadron, whose books Esteban kept with bureaucratic rigor. More sloops and Bermuda boats with their three-cornered sails than proper merchants’ vessels plied those seas, and rarely was their cargo of interest. Certainly, they hadn’t left Guadeloupe to look for sugar, coffee, or rum, which they had more than enough of there. And yet, even in the worst maintained and most miserable looking craft, the French always found something they could lay hands on: a new anchor, weapons, gunpowder, tools, a recent map with useful directions for circumnavigating the Mainland. Then there was all one discovered ferreting around in trunks and dark corners. One man might find two good shirts and a pair of nankeen trousers; another an enamel snuff box, or the bejeweled chalice of a priest from Cartagena, which he would threaten to throw in the sea if the man didn’t make with the whole Mass get-up, the cross and monstrance, which might be made of gold. This chapter of private rapine necessarily escaped Esteban’s accounting, and Barthélemy pretended to know nothing of it to avoid quarrels with his people, realizing that nowadays, in a fight with the Republican navy, the captain was fated to lose, particularly one like him, who had served in the King’s armada. And so there appeared on the deck of L’Ami du Peuple an exchange for barter and sale, with items displayed on crates or hanging from ropes. The sailors from the Décade or the Tintamarre would pay visits after laying anchor in a cove to go cut firewood, and they too would bring whatever they wished to trade. Amid the garments, caps, belts, and kerchiefs, the most singular objects appeared: tortoiseshell reliquaries; cabaret dresses from Havana with lace like sea foam on their flounces; nutshells housing a wedding feast of fleas in Mexican dress; mounted fish with tongues of carmine satin; jaunty demons of wrought iron; boxes of shells, rock sugar birds, tres guitars from Cuba or Venezuela; aphrodisiac potions of yaw-weed or the famous guaco of Saint-Domingue; and any trophy vaguely associated with the idea of woman: hoop earrings, glass bead necklaces, petticoats, breechcloths, locks of hair tied with ribbons, nude drawings, licentious prints, and even a doll of a sheepherder girl that concealed, beneath her skirts, silky and well apportioned pudenda so perfectly executed despite their tiny proportions that the sight of them was a marvel. The owner of the figurine asked an exorbitant price, and those who couldn’t pay denounced him as a cutpurse; Barthélemy, fearing a quarrel, had the barque’s supercargo purchase it, thinking it would make a fine gift for Victor Hugues—who had, since 9 Thermidor, taken unconcealed pleasure in the reading of prurient books, perhaps to make it known that Paris and its politics no longer interested him . . . The crew was pleased one day to find, after giving chase to a Portuguese vessel, that the Andorinha was loaded to the brim with so much wine—reds, vinhos verdes, Madeira—that the hold smelled of a cellar. Esteban hurried to take a hasty inventory of the barrels before the thirsty mariners could get to them; already they had gotten hold of more than a few casks, dispatching their contents in long gulps. Alone in the shadowy cellar of the hold, away from disputants and greedy hands, the scribe served himself in a wide mahogany bowl, and the flavor of his draft mingled with the perfume of cool, dense wood, which had a fleshy feel when it touched his lips. In France, Esteban had learned to enjoy the great ancestral juice that flowed from the nipples of its vines and had nourished that stormy and sovereign Mediterranean civilization—carried on now in the Mediterranean of the Caribbean, where the Confusion of Traits initiated many millennia ago would go on in this region of the Peoples of the Sea. Here the descendants of the Lost Tribes came to meet, at the end of a long dispersion, mingling accents and headdresses, pledged to novel mongrelisms, mixed and intermixed, stripped bare and recolored, brightened then darkened again in a leap backward, an endless proliferation of new profiles, proportions, and inflections; reached in turn by wine, from Phoenician ships, from the storehouses of Gades, from the amphoras of Markos Sestios, handed down, with the vihuela and the tejoleta, to the caravels of the Discoverers to arrive at these shores ripe for the transcendental encounter between Olive and Maize. Sniffing his damp bowl, Esteban recalled now, with emotion, the aged casks, patriarchal, of the company in Havana—so distant, so estranged from his current itineraries—where the isochronous dripping of certain taps had the same sound he heard here. Suddenly, the absurdity of his present was so palpable—he was standing before a Theater of the Absurd—that he leaned into the bulkhead, stupefied, eyes frozen, as though overwhelmed by the vision of his own figure upon a stage. In these recent days at sea, physical life, the vagaries of navigation, had made him forget himself, in a way, in thrall to the animal satisfaction of his own growing vigor and strength. But now he found himself before a seaside vineyard unknown to him the day before, wondering what he was doing in such a place. He was searching for a path that was denied him, waiting for an opportunity that would not arise. Bourgeois by birth, a Corsair Scribe by profession—even saying this aloud was absurd. Nominally free, he was a prisoner de facto, whose situation tied him to a race of men combatted the world over. Nothing so resembled a nightmare as that place where he observed himself, sleeping but awake, judge and advocate, protagonist and spectator, surrounded by islands resembling the one island he couldn’t reach, and perhaps wouldn’t for the remainder of his life, barred from smelling the aromas of childhood, from finding in houses, in trees, particular casts of light (oh blurs of a certain orange, those doors of blue, those pomegranates edging over a wall!), from the frame of his adolescence, bereft forever of what was his, what had belonged to him since childhood and youth. One afternoon the Knocker at the Front Door of his Dwelling had echoed, and a diabolical operation was set in motion, upturning three lives that had previously been one, with games that would rouse Lycurgus and Mucius Scaevola from their tombs, before traveling to a city with its bloody tribunes, an island, several islands, a whole sea where the will of One Man, posthumous Executor of a Silenced Will, loomed over every single life. Since Victor Hugues had appeared—the first thing they noticed was that he carried a green umbrella—the I pondered on that stage of barrels and casks had belonged to itself no more: its existence, its becoming, were ruled over by the Will of another . . . It was better to drink and throw a fog over that unwanted lucidity, so maddening in those moments that it tempted one to shout. Esteban placed the bowl under one of the spouts and filled it to the brim. Above him, the men chanted verses from The Three Gunners of Auvergne.
* * *
• • •
The next day, he disembarked on a deserted, wooded coast, where the navigator of L’Ami du Peuple—a Caribbean and black half-breed born in Marie-Galante, whose familiarity with the Antilles was thorough beyond question—knew where to find wild pigs to make boucan, a fit accompaniment for the wines, which they would put to cool in the mouth of a stream. The hunt was soon organized, and when the beasts were brought back, their snouts wearing the same scowl as when they were cornered, the men handed them off to the cooks. They took scaling knives to their bristles and black hairs and stretched their bodies over grilles piled high with glowing coals, their backs to the heat, their bellies turned toward the sky, the cavity held open by thin wooden rods. Soon, a fine rain of lemon juice poured over their flesh, and bitter orange, salt, pepper, oregano, and garlic. A bed of green guava leaves scattered over the embers raised a white, quivering smoke—aspersion from above, aspersion from below—and the scent of green enveloped the skin toasted tortoiseshell brown, which split in long fissures with an occasional dry crackle, releasing fat that dripped down, raising flickers from the pit’s depths, so that even the soil smelled of scorched pork. When the pigs were nearly done, their open bellies were stuffed with quail, squab, moorhens, and other freshly plucked birds. Then the rods that held them open were removed, and the ribs closed on the fowl, an elastic oven that accommodated their forms, the flavor of those sparse dark meats permeating the fat pallor in what Esteban called the Boucan of Boucans—the song of songs. Wine flowed into gourds in time with the gluttony—with barrels shattered by drunken hatchet blows; barrels hurled down gravel hills, staves flying when they struck a sharp rock; barrels broken by men rolling them back and forth in mock combat; barrels caved in, riddled with bullets, stamped on by a dismal flamenco dancer, a part-Spanish Ganymede who served as scullion on the Décade, and had made his way on board as a friend of Liberty—so profusely that the crew fell asleep gorged and moribund, at the foot of grape trees or on the sand, which conserved the heat of the sun . . . Stretching laboriously at dawn, Esteban saw many of the sailors walking toward the shore, gazing at the ships, which now were five, counting the Andorinha. The recent arrival, with its half-broken figurehead, its quarterdeck filthy and chipping, was so old, so outmoded, that it seemed emerged from another century, the ship of men who still believed the Atlantic opened onto the Mare Tenebrosum. Soon a caique took off from the battered vessel and was rowed to the beach by a group of nearly naked negroes who paddled to the rhythm of a savage river shanty. The man who seemed to be their chief jumped onto land, genuflecting in what might be seen as a gesture of friendship, calling out to one of the black cooks in a dialect that the latter—born, perhaps, in the regions of Calabar—seemed somewhat to understand. At the end of a dialogue punctuated with much waving of the hands, the interpreter told them the old ship was a Spanish slave vessel. The mutineering slaves had thrown the crew overboard and were now seeking the protection of the French. Word had spread across the coasts of Africa that the Republic had abolished slavery in the American colonies, where the negro lived as a free citizen. Captain Barthélemy shook the chief’s hand, then passed him a tricolor ribbon, which his fellows received with jubilant shouts and passed from man to man. The boat returned and brought back more and more negroes, and others, the impatient ones, even swam to shore to hear the news. Unable to restrain themselves, they leaped at what was left of the boucan, gnawing bones, devouring discarded offal, sucking at the cold fat, frantic after weeks of starvation. “Poor men,” Barthélemy said with misty eyes. “This alone will cleanse many of our wrongs . . .” Esteban, feeling generous, filled his cup with wine, offering it to those who just yesterday were slaves, and they kissed his hand in reply. In the meanwhile, the supercargo of L’Ami du Peuple, who had gone to take an inventory of the ship, came back with the news that there were women, many, still onboard, hiding in the orlop, trembling with misery and fright, with no idea of what was happening on land. Barthélemy prudently gave the order that they stay where they were. A canoe took them meat, biscuit, bananas, and a bit of wine, and the crew did as they had the night before, setting off in search of more swine. Tomorrow they would return to Pointe-à-Pitre with the Portuguese ship, the miscellaneous merchandise they’d pilfered, the shipment of wines, and the negroes, who would be useful filling the ranks of the colored men’s militias, ever in need of hands for the arduous fortifications intended to safeguard Victor Hugues’s domains . . . In late afternoon, they resumed the feast from the day before, but now their spirits were much changed. When the wine rose to their heads, the men grew vexed about the women, whose griddles could be seen burning against the lights of the setting sun and whose laughter was audible from the shore. Details were sought from the sailors who had been onboard the slave ship. Some of the women were very young, they reported, some strapping, some comely—the slavers didn’t traffic in old women, as they were impossible to sell. Heated by drink, they delved into fine points: Y’en a avec fesses comme ça . . . Y’en a qui sont à poil . . . Y’en a une, surtout . . . Suddenly ten, twenty, thirty men ran for their boats and rowed toward the old ship, ignoring the shouts of Barthélemy, who tried to detain them. The negroes stopped eating and gestured frantically as they stood. The first negresses arrived in the midst of truculent greed, crying, begging, frightened, but seeming to submit to the men who dragged them to the nearby underbrush. No one listened to the officers, even when they unsheathed their sabers. In the midst of the tumult, more negresses arrived, then more, and chased by the seamen, they ran across the beach. Believing they were assisting Barthélemy, who was shouting futile curses, threats, and orders, the negroes grabbed stakes and threw themselves on the whites. There was a bitter struggle, with bodies rolling in the sand, stomped, kicked; bodies raised in midair and hurled onto the gravel; people falling into the sea, tangled, wrestling, one trying to drown the other, heads shoved underwater. Finally, the negroes were cornered in a rock hollow, and chains and clamps were brought from their ship to manacle them. Disgusted, Barthélemy returned to L’Ami du Peuple, leaving his men to their violence and orgies. Esteban, sure to take a damp cloth to lie down on—he knew what the sand could do—led one of the slave girls to a kind of cradle of dry lichen he had discovered among the boulders. Very young, very docile, preferring this brutality to worse ones, the girl unwound the torn cloth that covered her. Her adolescent breasts, the nipples broadly colored ochre; her thighs, fleshy and hard, able to squeeze, to stand, to bring her knees to the level of her breasts, yielded their tension and suppleness to the young man. A concert of muted laughter echoed across the island, exclamations, murmurs, and at times a vague roaring above it, like the cry of an ill beast hidden in some nearby lair. Now and then came the noise of a quarrel—two men arguing over one woman, perhaps. Again, Esteban found that scent, those textures, the rhythms and panting of the One who had revealed to him, in a house in El Arsenal in Havana, the paroxysms of his own flesh. Only one thing mattered that night: Sex. In its rites, Sex multiplied into a collective liturgy, wild, oblivious to all authority or law . . . Dawn broke amid a symphony of reveilles, and Barthélemy, determined to impose his authority, ordered the crews to return to their ships immediately. Whoever remained on the island would be left behind. There were renewed disputes with sailors who wanted to hold onto their negresses, considering them legitimate spoils and their personal property. The Squadron’s Captain eased their minds with a formal agreement to release the women only upon their arrival at Pointe-à-Pitre. Manumission would take place there and not before, in accordance with the legal procedures of nomination and registration that would transform the slaves to French citizens. The negro men and women returned to their ship and the squadron set a course for their return. But no sooner had they raised their sails than Esteban, whose sense of direction had grown sharper in recent days—and who had, moreover, acquired a rudimentary knowledge of navigation—seemed to notice that the route the ships were taking was not one that would lead them to Guadeloupe. Barthélemy furrowed his brow when the scribe spoke. “Keep it to yourself,” he said. “You know damned well I can’t keep the promise I’ve made to these bandits. Just think of the precedent it would set. The Commissar wouldn’t stand for it. We’ve set course for a Dutch island, and we’ll sell the shipment of negroes there.” Esteban looked at him stupefied and invoked the Decree of the Abolition of Slavery. The Captain removed from his effects a sheet of instructions written in Victor Hugues’s hand: France, by virtue of its democratic principles, cannot engage in the slave trade. But the captains of corsair ships are authorized, if they deem it convenient or necessary, to sell in Dutch ports those slaves they may acquire from the English, the Spanish, or other enemies of the Republic. “But this is vile!” Esteban exclaimed. “We’ve abolished the trade but we can sell slaves to other nations?” “I’m simply following what’s written,” Barthélemy replied dryly. And sensing the obligation to appeal to a jurisprudence now abolished: “We are living in a world that’s lost its mind. Before the Revolution, a slave ship used to ply these waters that belonged to a philosophe owner, a friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And you know what that ship was called? The Social Contract.”
