Explosion in a Cathedral, page 21
XXVI.
Within months, revolutionary privateering had become a fantastically prosperous business. Ever more audacious in their raids, fired by their successes and profits, anxious for bigger prey, the captains from Pointe-à-Pitre journeyed farther—to the Continent, Barbados, or the Virgin Islands—unafraid to be seen in the vicinity of islands where they might well encounter a formidable squadron. As the days passed, they perfected their techniques. Drawing on older corsair traditions, the sailors chose to navigate in regiments composed of small vessels—sloops, cutters, lithe schooners—which were easy to maneuver and to hide, quick to flee, tough in battle, rather than manning large, slow-moving provision ships—easy targets for enemy artillery, especially for the British, who disdained the French method of dismasting and whose gunners preferred aiming for the wooden hulls when the waves made the bores of the cannons sink. Withal, the port of Pointe-à-Pitre was full of new ships and the storehouses no longer had room for so much merchandise, for such an abundance of things, and so sheds were built by the mangrove swamps on the edge of the city to receive the shipments that came back each day. Victor Hugues had gotten a bit fat, though he was no less active since his body had begun stretching the fabric of his tailcoat. Despite what many expected, the Directory, faraway and busy with its own affairs, confirmed the Commissar in his post, recognizing that his efforts at salvaging and defending the colony had been a success. In that part of the globe, the commander had come to embody a kind of unipersonal government, autonomous and independent, thus realizing to an astonishing degree his unconfessable aspiration to make himself one with the Incorruptible. He had wanted to be Robespierre, and he was a Robespierre in his way. Like Robespierre in other days, who had spoken of his government, his army, his squadron, Victor Hugues spoke now of his government, his army, his squadron. His erstwhile arrogance restored, the Plenipotentiary conceded himself, at the hour of chess and card games, the role of One and Only Perpetuator of the Revolution. He boasted of no longer reading the newspapers from Paris, which “stank of dastardliness.” Esteban saw that Victor Hugues, grown smug about the prosperity of the island and the money he kept sending back to France, was recovering that spirit of the affluent merchant who grins as he weighs his riches. When his ships returned with fine merchandise, the Commissar was there to see them unloaded, examining bundles, barrels, utensils, and armaments with an expert eye. He had opened a general store through intermediaries in the vicinity of Place de la Victoire, and maintained a monopoly on certain items available there at prices arbitrarily set. Late in the day, Victor inevitably passed through the shop to examine the books in the shadows of his office redolent of vanilla, its arched doors in their fine iron fittings opening onto two corner streets. Even the guillotine had adopted bourgeois manners, working nonchalantly, one day on and one day off, and Monsieur Anse left the work to his assistants, devoting his own time to completing the Collections in his Cabinet of Curiosities, rich in coleoptera and lepidoptera ennobled with impressive Latin names. Everything cost dearly, but there was always money to pay in that world of closed economy where prices rose continually, and currency returned to the same pockets again and again, debased, its metal diminished by rasping and filing readily apparent to the touch . . . During a stay in Pointe-à-Pitre, Esteban—so bronzed, he looked like a mulatto—was pleased to hear word, however late, of the peace treaty between Spain and France, which he imagined would reestablish communications with the Continent, Puerto Rico, and Havana. Great was his disappointment on being informed that Victor Hugues would not acknowledge the Basil accord. Determined to keep preying on Spanish vessels, he deemed them suspected of trafficking in English contraband of war and authorized his captains to requisition them and to use their own judgment as to the meaning of this term, contraband of war. Esteban would have to go on exercising his profession in Barthélemy’s squadron, watching slip his chance at abandoning a world that life at sea, timeless and governed by the Law of the Wind alone, had made increasingly strange to him. As the months passed, he resigned himself to living for the day—and the days were never counted—taking solace in the little pleasures he might encounter in a good day of work or a bountiful catch of fish. He had grown fond of some of his fellow travelers: Barthélemy, who held onto his officer’s manners from the ancien régime, and looked scrupulously after his garments even in moments of deepest crisis; the surgeon, Noël, working eternally away at a tedious treatise on the vampires of Prague, the women of Loudun possessed by demons, and the spastics of the Cemetery of San Medardo; the butcher Achille, a black man from the island of Tobago, who played astonishing sonatas on pots and basins of various sizes; citizen Gilbert, a master caulker, who recited long stretches of classical tragedies in a southern accent so strong that the verses, stuffed with extra syllables, never followed the alexandrine meters, with Brutus transformed to Brutusse or Epaminondas to Epaminondasse. For the rest, the world of the Antilles fascinated the young man, with its perpetual sunflower of lights at play over forms diverse, prodigiously diverse within the unity of a common clime and vegetation. He loved mountainous Dominique, with its profound verdures and its villages with names like Bataille and Massacre in memory of horrifying events badly told by history. He came to know the clouds of Nevis, which lay so motionless upon its hills that the Great Admiral, on seeing them, had taken them for impossible glaciers. He dreamed of someday climbing the pointed peak of Santa Lucía, which rose from the sea in a mass that from a distance resembled a lighthouse built by unknown engineers to await the ships that would one day bring the Tree of the Cross upon their masts. Soft and embracing when overtaken from the South, the islands of this endless archipelago turned abrupt, uneven, eroded by high waves that broke into foam where their shores defied the North Wind. A whole mythology of shipwrecks, sunken treasures, unmarked graves, deceitful lights that glowed on stormy nights, predestined births—of Madame de Maintenon, of the Sephardi miracle worker, of the Amazon who became Queen of Constantinople—was linked to these lands whose names Esteban repeated to himself softly, relishing the euphony of the words: Tortola, Santa Ursula, Virgen Gorda, Anegada, Granaditas, Jersualén Caída . . . There were mornings when the sea awoke so still and silent that the isochronous creaking of the ropes—the short ones high pitched, the long ones lower—combined to produce, from stem to stern, anacruses and up- and downbeats, appoggiaturas and plucked notes with the harsh fermata of a harp of tense hawsers suddenly strummed by a trade wind. On today’s journey, the soft winds had suddenly picked up speed, pushing the waves higher and thicker. The clear green sea had become ivy green, opaque, ever rising, turning now from ink green to smoke green. The seasoned sailors sniffed at the gusts, realizing they smelled different, amid black shadows that bore down on them and brusque moments of reprieve, and then came warm rains with drops so heavy they seemed composed of mercury. On the edges of twilight stood the walking column of a cyclone, and the ships passed from swell to swell, as if gliding over the tops of palm trees, scattered through the night, their beacons lost. They tumbled over the unpredictable roiling of the water, which rose willfully, struck them headlong and from the side, throwing volleys to the keel, and no rapid righting of the helm could keep the water from sweeping the deck when the boat turned away from the onslaught. Barthélemy ordered jacklines strung to ease movement: “There’s no way out,” he said as a classic October storm kicked up, and he warned them the worst would come after midnight, he was sure of it. The thought that he would have to endure the storm alarmed Esteban, who shut himself up in his cabin and tried to sleep. But he couldn’t, feeling that his viscera were shifting no sooner than he’d laid his body down. The ship was perforating a colossal roar that spanned the horizons, forcing creaks from each board, each rib. While the men struggled on deck above, the barque lurched unbearably onward, rising, rising, falling, keeling, heaving, penetrating deeper into the hurricane’s heart. Esteban had abandoned all attempts at composure, and pressed into his bunk, queasy, suffused with terror, waiting for the water to start pouring in through the portholes, filling the hold, forcing the doors . . . Then, a bit before daybreak, the sky’s bellowing seemed to abate, and the buffets to become less frequent. On deck, the seamen had gathered in a chorus, chanting a full-throated hymn to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, intercessor between men at sea and divine fury. Opportunely resorting to ancient French tradition, they called on the Mother of the Redeemer in her misery to placate the waves and calm the wind. Their voices, which had sung so many crude verses in counterpoint, pleaded for mercy now in the language of the liturgy from Her Who Conceived Without Sin. Esteban crossed himself and stepped onto the bridge. The danger was past: alone, without knowing the fate of the other ships—lost perhaps, perhaps sunken—L’Ami du Peuple steered toward a gulf teeming with islands.
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Teeming with islands, but with the peculiarity that they were all very small, sketches almost, ideas of islands to come, massed the way studies, drafts, the hollow appendages of statues are massed in the workshop of a sculptor. None of these islands resembled the others and none was made of the same material. Some were of a sort of white marble, perfectly sterile, monolithic, and smooth, like a Roman bust submerged in water to the shoulders; others were mounds of schist scored with parallel fissures, with the multiple claws of two or three very ancient trees, withered antlers, clinging to their crests—or just one sometimes, like an enormous kelp, trunk white from the salt air. Some were so hollowed by the work of waves that they seemed to float without any apparent anchor; others were blemished by thistles or were collapsing in on themselves. Caverns opened in their flanks, and on their ceilings, giant cactuses hung upside down, red or yellow flowers elongated in festoons, like strange, theatrical chandeliers that gave sanctuary to the enigmas of rare, geometric, isolated forms mounted on plinths—a cylinder, pyramid, polyhedron—like occult objects of veneration, a stone of Mecca, a Pythagorean emblem, the materialization of some abstract form of worship. As the barque breached that strange world the navigator had never set eyes on and could not place after the previous night’s storm threw them horribly off course, Esteban expressed his astonishment at the things there were to see, inventing names for them: that must be Angel Island, with those Byzantine outspread wings painted like a fresco on the cliffside; here was the Gorgon Island, with its crown of green serpents, there the Shattered Sphere, the Anvil Incarnate, and the Soft Island, with its mounds of guano and gannet excrement that made it appear a bright bulk lacking in consistency, dragged along by the current. They went past the Votive Stairway and the Face-That-Seemed-to-Be-Looking; the Galleon-Stranded-at-the-Citadel plumed with sea foam left by waves that tore through its narrow vestibules and turned to enormous feathers when they broke high on a steep outcrop. They passed Brow Rock and the Horse’s Skull—with fearsome shadows in the eyes and nostrils—and the Ragged Islands: there were rocks so poor there, so old, so humble they brought to mind beggar ladies covered in rags, while other stones, younger by many millennia, were bright, shimmering ivory. They passed the Temple-Cave, devoted to the Triangle of Diorite, the Condemned Island, fractured by the roots of marine ficus that wove their arms between the stones like cordage, swelling from year to year before provoking a final catastrophe. Esteban marveled at this Gulf of Prodigies, a kind of forestage of the Antilles—a schema reuniting in miniature all that would be seen in the Archipelago on a larger scale. Here, too, volcanoes drove up through the waves, but fifty seagulls sufficed to cover them in snow. Here, too, they passed the Fat Virgin Islands and ones so thin that ten Venus fans grown side by side would suffice to gauge their breadth . . . After hours of slow navigation, constantly checking the plumb line, the barque found itself at a gray beach lined with posts where long nets were stretched out to dry. A fishing village was there—seven houses of thatched roofs with shared lean-tos to shelter the boats—dominated by a gravelly lookout where a watchman with a surly face awaited the appearance of a school of fish, with his shell at arm’s reach, ready to blow the summons. In the distance, on the crown of an embankment, a merloned castle was visible, somber and cyclopean, rising up over a wall of violaceous rocks. “The Araya salt mines,” the navigator told Barthélemy, who gave the order to veer off and avoid going near that mighty fortress, work of the Antonellis, military architects of Phillip II—the guardhouse of the Spanish treasury for centuries. Dodging sandbanks, the ship set off at full sail from what they now knew to be the Gulf of Santa Fe.
XXVII.
Months passed in the same tasks, the same labors. Barthélemy, preferring the certainty of success and practicable undertakings, unconcerned with styling himself the scourge of the seas, had an enviable instinct for finding the richest and worst-defended prey. Once they’d had a nasty encounter with a Danish craft from Altona whose crew defended itself with brio, refusing to strike their flag and ramming the ships that came in their path; but for the rest, life with the squadron was peaceful and prosperous, and the scribe, who lacked the makings of a hero and was much inclined to reading, was told often to run and hide in the hold, as a prank, when unknown fishing boats were sighted. But L’Ami du Peuple, continuously at sea, returning one day only to depart the next—its captain, roused by the sight of so many colleagues so quickly enriched, had been seduced by the demon of lucre—was showing signs of exhaustion. The first sign of bad weather was enough to turn the ship effeminate, plaintive, feeble, and dejected. Its every board creaked. Abscesses of paint blistered on the masts and beams. The railings looked filthy and battered. Repairs were needed, and Esteban was sent back to a Guadeloupe whose transformations he had seen little of in his brief stops in recent times. Pointe-à-Pitre was now the richest city in America. Even in Mexico, the land of legend, with its vast spinning mills, its silver- and goldsmiths, and its mines in Taxco, such prosperity was inconceivable. Gold shimmered in the sun here in an endless stream of louis tournois, single and quadruple, British guineas, Portuguese moëdas stamped with the faces of John V, Queen Maria, and Peter III. Silver they had in six-livre coins, Philippine and Mexican piastres, and eight or more sorts of vellon, notched, punched, and filed to suit their owners. Vertigo gripped the small shopkeepers of before, who now owned their own corsair ships, some thanks to their initiative, others with partnerships or joint-stock companies. The old India Companies, with their arks and chests, were born again on this remote edge of the Caribbean, where the Revolution was bringing joy to multitudes. A list of 580 vessels of all type and provenance—boarded, sacked, dragged into port by the fleets—now thickened the Registry of Confiscated Property. Few cared anymore what might be happening in France in those days. Guadeloupe could manage on its own. On the mainland, the Spanish were well-disposed to, even envious of the colony, whose propaganda reached them through their Dutch possessions. It was an exhilarating sight when the ships returned from a profitable exploit and the adventurers emerged from the belly of the ships bearing their glittering goods through the streets. Holding up samples of calico, of orange and green muslin, Masulipatnam silks, turbans from Madras, Manila shawls, and every precious fabric they could wave in the women’s eyes, they dressed in miraculous garments that soon became the local fashion, barefooted—or in stockings but forgoing shoes—beneath sunflower dress coats with braided trimming, shirts lined with fur and ribbons at the collar, and their crowning glory—absolutely mandatory, by now this was a question of amour propre—the extravagance of a felt hat, brim half turned down, with feathers dyed in the colors of the Republic. Vulcain, the negro, hid his leprosy beneath such regalia that he seemed an emperor borne in triumph. Joseph Murphy, the Englishman, standing on stilts, pounded cymbals at the height of the balconies. Leaving their ships behind, escorted by the hurrahs of the multitude, they went one and all to the Morne-à-Cail neighborhood, where an invalid companion had opened a café: Au rendez-vous des Sans-Culottes, with a cage of toucans and mockingbirds by the counter and walls covered in allegorical caricatures and obscene drawings traced out in charcoal. The revelry, once sparked, would last for two or three days in a haze of brandy and women, while the ship owners stayed behind to watch their goods unloaded, placing their merchandise on tables lined up beside the ships for examination. Esteban was surprised to find Victor Hugues in the café in Morne-à-Cail one afternoon, surrounded by captains who were speaking of grave matters, for once. “Sit down, my boy, and order something . . .” the Agent of the Directory said. Though he had been in that post for some time, his tone—of a man trying too hard to get assent—indicated he was not yet universally accepted. Repeating numbers and details, citing fragments from more or less official reports, he accused the North Americans of selling arms and ships to the English with the aim of expelling France from her American colonies, despite all France had done for them: “The mere word American,” he shouted, repeating what had been written in a recent proclamation, “inspires feelings of contempt and horror among our likes. After deceiving the world with their Quaker dumb show, the Americans have turned reactionary, enemies of every ideal of liberty. The United States is committed heart and soul to its haughty nationalism and opposed to anything that might call its dominion into question. The same men who fought for their independence now refuse to others the very thing that made them great. We must remind that perfidious people that without us—without the blood we shed, the money we spent to give them their independence—George Washington would have been hanged as a traitor.” The Agent crowed that he had written the Directory, pressing them to declare war on the United States. But their responses had revealed a lamentable ignorance of reality, recommending prudence first, then anxiously calling for order. The blame lay—Victor said—with career soldiers like Pelardy, whom he’d tossed out of the colony after violent disputes. They meddled in what didn’t concern them and were now in Paris conspiring against him. He referred to his successful initiatives, the purge of the Island, the prosperity now reigning. “For my part, I remain hostile to the United States. The interest of France demands it,” he concluded, with an aggressive insistence that revealed his intent to muffle all objections beforehand. For Esteban, it was evident that Victor, who up to now had exercised absolute authority, was sensing the presence around him of others spurred on by their own achievements and wealth. Antoine Fuët, a mariner from Narbonne whom Victor had assigned a splendid ship with American-style rigging and mahogany gunwales sheathed in copper, had become a legend, acclaimed by the masses, since firing on a Portuguese ship with cannons loaded with gold coins for lack of other ammunition. The surgeons of the Sans-Pareil had struggled over the dead and wounded, salvaging the currency lodged in their bodies and entrails at the point of a scalpel. This same Antoine Fuët—nicknamed Captain Moëda—had the audacity to forbid the Agent, who was a civil authority and not a soldier, from entering a club the powerful captains had opened in a church and jokingly called the Palais Royal. Its gardens and dependencies covered an entire city block. And Esteban was astonished to hear of the rebirth of Masonry, which was thriving among the French corsairs. Their Lodge was in the Palais Royal, where the Jachin and Boaz pillars were erected once more. Through the fleeting recourse of the Supreme Being, they had returned to the Great Architect—the acacia and the mallet of Hiram Abiff. Captains Laffite, Pierre Gros, Mathieu Goy, Christophe Chollet, the renegade Joseph Murphy, Pegleg Langlois, and even a mestizo named Petréas the Mulatto served as masters and knights, devotees of a tradition revived thanks to the zeal of the brothers Modeste and Antoine Fuët. Far from the fire of the short-bored rifles of corsairs commandeering a ship, fine ritual swords clashed in rites of initiation, held by hands that had once dug into the flesh of corpses to pull out coins black with coagulated blood . . . “All this confusion,” thought Esteban, “is because they are yearning for the Cross. No one can live as a bullfighter or corsair without a Temple to turn to, a place to thank Someone that one is still alive. Soon enough we’ll see ex-votos to the Virgin of Perpetual Help.” And inwardly, he was pleased to see that hidden forces had begun to eat away at Victor Hugues’s power. Active in him was a kind of inverse affection that makes one wish for the humiliation or fall of one admired when he has become too prideful or arrogant. Esteban looked toward the guillotine, always erect upon its stage. Aghast at himself, he succumbed to the temptation of thinking that the Machine, now less active than before, sometimes remaining in its sheath for weeks, was sitting in wait for the Plenipotentiary. Precedents weren’t wanting. “I’m a swine,” he said softly. “If I were a Christian, I would confess.”
