Explosion in a Cathedral, page 23
Chapter Four
XXIX.
The beds of death.
Goya
When Esteban, weary from walking from Porte de Rémire to Place des Armes and from the Rue du Port to Porte de Rémire, sat on a bollard on a street corner, discouraged by all he had seen, he had the feeling of plunging into the madhouse in The Rake’s Progress. Everything in this city-island of Cayenne struck him as unreal, unhinged, out of place. It was true, what he had been told onboard the Vénus de Médicis. The nuns of Saint-Paul-de-Chartres, who oversaw the hospital, walked through the streets in habits as though none of the events in France had ever occurred, ministering to revolutionaries who depended on their assistance. The grenadiers were all Alsatians with thick accents—who knew why—so ill-adapted to the climate that hives and boils covered their faces the whole year long. Several negroes, of the kind now called freemen, stood exposed, ankles fettered to an iron bar, in punishment for some act of idleness. There was a leper colony on the island of Le Malingre, but many of the dying strolled about at leisure, exhibiting their horrifying bodies in the hope of getting alms. The colored men’s militia was ragged; the people in general were, so to speak, oily; all the whites of any standing had an ill-humored appearance. Accustomed to the handsome attire of the people of Guadeloupe, Esteban could not but be shocked by the shamelessness of the negroes strolling about naked to the waist—a sight hardly pleasing to the eye in the case of the old women, whose cheeks were bursting with wads of tobacco. There was a novel presence there: the Indian with sylvan traits, who came to the city in a canoe to offer guavas, medicinal guaco, orchids, or herbs for infusion. Some brought their women to whore them out in the moats of the Fortress, in the shadows of the Munitions Depot, or behind the cloister of Saint-Saveur. Some had their faces tattooed, some slathered in strange inks. Most peculiar of all was the way, even as the sun burned Esteban’s eyes and its light lent notes of exoticism to the setting, that busy world of picturesque images remained sad and smothered, everything diluted in aquatint shadows. A Tree of Liberty, planted in front of the ugly and poorly maintained building that served as the House of Government, had dried up from lack of water. The colony’s officials had founded a Political Club in a large house with many galleries, but they were too enervated even to reiterate the speeches of yesterday, and the place had turned into a drinking den, with men cutting cards amid swarming flies at the foot of the Incorruptible’s portrait, which no one bothered to take down, despite pleas from the Agent of the Directory, because the frame had been nailed to the wall at each corner. The wealthy, those with administrative sinecures, knew no greater distraction than to drink and gorge at interminable feasts that started at midday and stretched on into the night. The bluster, the sunflowers of skirts, the new fashions that gladdened the streets of Pointe-à-Pitre were nowhere to be found. The men dressed in threadbare suits left over from the ancien régime, and the sweat soaked through the thick cloth of their tailcoats, leaving damp blotches on their backs and armpits. Their women’s skirts and finery resembled the costumes of the villagers in an opera chorus in Paris. There was not a single handsome residence, a lively tavern, a place to be. Everything was uniform and mediocre. Where a Botanical Garden seemed to have been, there was nothing but a stinking scrubland, a rubbish dump, a public latrine frequented by mangy dogs. Turning inland, one was faced with vegetation dense and hostile, more impenetrable than the walls of a prison. Esteban felt a kind of vertigo when he thought how the jungle that began there extended relentlessly, without clearings, to the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, to the Venezuela of the Spaniards, to Lake Parime, to remotest Peru. What had been pleasing in Guadeloupe’s Tropics turned aggressive, impenetrable, convoluted, and hard, with immense trees that devoured each other, fettered by climbing vines, gnawed through by parasites. For the wanderer come from lands with beautiful names like Le Lamentin, Le Moule, or Pigeon, the words Maroni, Oyapock, Approuague had a disagreeable, biting sound evocative of marshlands, pitiless floods, implacable proliferation . . . Esteban went with the officers from the Vénus de Médicis to pay his respects to Jeannet, giving him a letter from Victor Hugues that he read with almost ostentatious reluctance. The Agent of the Directory in Guiana—impossible, with that face, to believe he was Danton’s cousin—was a repulsive sight: his skin had a greenish tint from some disorder of the liver, and he’d lost his left arm, which they’d had to amputate after he was bitten by a boar. Esteban learned Billaud-Varenne had been sent to Sinnamary with the mass of deportees from France—many now imprisoned in Kourou or Counanama—who were forbidden entry to the city. Jeannet told him they had arable land in abundance and all they needed to serve in the most dignified conditions the sentences the various revolutionary governments had imposed on them. “Do you have many refractory priests there?” Esteban asked. “We have all sorts,” the Agent replied with studied indifference, “deputies, émigrés, journalists, magistrates, scholars, poets, French and Belgian churchmen.” Esteban felt it indiscreet to inquire as to the exact destinations of certain parties. The Captain of the Vénus de Médicis had advised him to send the moneys meant for Billaud-Varenne through intermediaries. Hoping to find some, he had taken lodgings in the inn of a certain Hauguard, the finest in Cayenne, where the wine was good and the food acceptable. “The guillotine has never been used here,” Hauguard told him, while the negresses Angesse and Scholastique, after clearing their plates, retrieved a bottle of tafia. “But our lot may be worse. It’s better to perish by a single cut than to die by installments.” And he explained to Esteban what Jeannet had meant by the arable lands the deportees were allegedly blessed with. If life was miserable in Sinnamary, where Jeannet had been exiled, there was at least a sugar mill and a few more or less prosperous estates in the region. By contrast, the mere names of Kourou, Counanama, Iracoubo were synonymous with slow death. Restricted to arbitrarily designated zones, not authorized to leave, the deportees were clustered in groups of nine or ten in filthy shacks, the sick with the healthy, as in the hold of a ship, on fallow soils unsuited to cultivation of any sort, hungry and impoverished—deprived of even the most basic medicines, unless some surgeon sent by the Agent of the Directory on an official inspection brought them a bottle of brandy as a crude panacea. “The dry guillotine, they call it,” Hauguard said. “A sorry state of affairs,” Esteban replied. “But more than a few of Lyon’s executioners, public accusers, and assassins wound up here; people who arranged the bodies of the judged in obscene postures at the foot of the guillotine.” “The righteous mingle with the sinners,” said Hauguard, whipping his fan to ward off the flies. Esteban was about to ask about Billaud when an old ragged man in a cloud of brandy fumes approached the table, yelling that any calamity that befell the French was more than deserved. “Leave the gentleman in peace,” the innkeeper said, but showing some indulgence toward the corpulent old man, whose profile, despite his penury, did not lack a certain majesty. “Time was we were like biblical patriarchs, surrounded by peasants and cattle, lords of farms and haylofts,” the intruder said in a strange, heavy, slightly sputtering accent Esteban had never heard before. “Our lands were Prée-des-Bourques, Pont-des-Bouts, Fort-Royal, and many more the likes of which you won’t find elsewhere in the world, because our piety, our great piety, brought God’s favor upon them.” He crossed himself slowly, with a gesture so forgotten in those days, it struck Esteban as the height of originality: “We were the Acadians of Nova Scotia, faithful subjects of the King of France, and for forty years we resisted putting our signatures to the accursed documents compelling us to recognize as our sovereign Fat Anne Stuart and a certain King George, both of whom the Archfiend will use to kindle the fireplaces of his mansions. And for that reason, we fell victim to the Great Upheaval. English soldiers came one day and threw us out of our homes, took our horses and cattle, emptied our coffers, and deported us to a man to Boston, or worse, to South Carolina or Virginia, where they treated us worse than the niggers. And despite our misery and the protestants’ malice and the hatefulness of those who stood by watching us walk through the streets like beggars, we went on singing the praises of our Masters: him who reigns in Heaven and him, from father to son, who reigns on earth. A hundred times they offered to restore our lands, our granaries, in exchange for loyalty to the British Crown; but Acadia would never be what it had been when the Lord Most High gave his blessings to our fields, and sir, a hundred times we refused. We were decimated, we’d scraped ourselves with Job’s potsherd and lain among ashes, then the French armadas came to our rescue. And we arrived to our county’s remote domains, sir, certain of salvation. But they scattered us across poor lands and wouldn’t listen to our pleas. And we said: ‘It’s not the good King’s fault, he may not even know of our tribulations, and he can’t imagine what Acadia meant to our fathers.’ Some, like me, were brought here to Guiana where the soil speaks an unknown tongue. Men of fir and maple, of holm oak and birch, we’re made to live here, where all that blooms and buds is malignant, monstrous; where the tilling of a day is undone at night by the Devil’s work. The Devil shows his presence here in the impossibility of establishing order. The straight turns crooked, what must be crooked turns straight. The sun, which was the life and joy of our Acadia after the spring thaw, is a curse here on the banks of the Maroni. There it multiplied the grain, here it’s a scourge that smothers and rots it. Still and all, I had one thing left, my pride, for I had never flagged in my loyalty to the King of France. I was among Frenchmen, and at least they viewed me with respect, because I’d belonged once to a people free like none other, and yet had chosen ruination, exile, and death before disloyalty. Ours, sir, were the lands of the Prée-des-Bourques, of the Pont-des-Bouts, of the Grand Prée. One day, Frenchmen like you,” the drunk said, pounding the knuckles of his clenched fist on the table, “dared to decapitate our King, producing the Second Great Upheaval, and stripped away our honor and our dignity. I was suddenly a suspect, an enemy of God-knows-what, hostile to God-knows-what—I, who suffered more than sixty years because I refused not to be a Frenchman; I, who lost my inheritance, who watched my wife die from the ravages of childbirth in the hold of a prison ship, all because I refused to forswear my fatherland and faith . . . the only true Frenchmen left in the world, sir, are the Acadians. The rest have turned to anarchists, defying of God and all others, and they dream of mixing with the Laplanders, Moors, and Tartars.” He reached for an old bottle of tafia and stumbled off, pouring a long draft down his gullet and flopping down on some sacks of flour where he fell asleep on his stomach, grumbling about trees that wouldn’t grow in this soil . . . “They were great Frenchmen indeed,” Hauguard said. “The problem is they’re still alive in an age that is no longer theirs. They’re like people from another world.” How ludicrous, Esteban thought, that these Acadians in Guiana, convinced of the unalterable grandeur of a regime embodied in pomp and allegories, in portraits and symbols, should live alongside others who had grown intimately aware of the weaknesses of this regime and had devoted their lives to destroying it—Martyrs at a Remove who would never understand the Martyrs in the Thick of It. Those who had never seen a Throne imagined it as monumental and unblemished. Those who had laid eyes on it knew its chinks, and where the gold had rubbed through. “What must the angels think of God?” Esteban said, in a question that must have struck Hauguard as the height of incoherence. “That he’s a solemn idiot,” the other man responded, laughing, “though you know, at the end of his life, Collot d’Herbois did nothing but plea for His intercession.” Esteban was now told of the squalid last days of the executioner of Lyon. When he arrived at Cayenne, he was lodged with Billaud in the nuns’ hospice, occupying, in a cruel coincidence, a cell called the Saint-Louis Room—he, who had pleaded for the condemnation sans sursis of the last of the Louises. From the beginning, he had taken relentlessly to the bottle, scratching out, in the taverns, disjointed fragments of the True History of the Revolution. On drunken nights, he would bemoan his ill fortune, his solitude in this Hell, grimacing and raving like an aged actor of the stage, and exasperating the austere Billaud: “You’re not in the theater,” he would shout. “Do like me, hold onto your dignity at least, in the certainty that you did your duty.” The whip of the Thermidor reaction, arriving late to the colony, had driven the negroes to turn against the former members of the Committee of Public Safety, who couldn’t step outside without jeers and insults coming their way. “If we had to do it over,” Billaud would hiss between his teeth, “I wouldn’t grant liberty to men who don’t know what it’s worth; I would abrogate the Decree of 16 Pluviôse, Year II.” (“How proud Victor was that he brought it to America,” thought Esteban.) Jeannet removed Collot from the city, exiling him to Kourou. There, Père Gérard turned to alcohol, wandering the streets in a torn coat, his pockets full of filthy papers, haranguing people, lying down in the ditches to sleep, starting trouble in bars when they refused to give him credit. One night, perhaps thinking it was brandy, he drank an entire bottle of medicine. Poisoned half to death, he was dispatched by a field doctor to Cayenne. But the negroes charged with transporting him left him on the roadside, calling him a murderer of God and of men. Afflicted with heatstroke, he eventually found himself in the Hospice of the Sisters of Saint-Paul-de-Chartres, where he was laid for a second time in the Saint-Louis Room. He shouted for the Lord and the Virgin, begging forgiveness for his faults. Such was the racket that an Alsatian guard, outraged by his late penitence, reminded him of how, just a month before, Collot had induced him to curse the sacred name of the Mother of God, and called the legend of Saint Odile a tall tale invented to bamboozle the common man. Collot pleaded for a confessor, soon, as soon as possible, sobbing and shaking, moaning that his entrails were in flames, that the fever was devouring him, that he would not be saved. In the end, he rolled on the floor, and perished vomiting blood. Jeannet got word of his death while he was playing billiards with a group of officials: “Bury him. He deserves no more honor than a dog,” he said, not loosening his grip on the cue, which he’d lined up for a cannon shot. But on the day of the funeral, a festive clatter of drums filled the city. The negroes, well informed that something in France had changed, had recently gotten the idea of celebrating the Carnival of the Epiphany, forgotten during the years of official atheism. In the morning, they dressed as Kings and Queens of Africa, as devils, sorcerers, generals, and buffoons, filing into the streets with gourds, rattles, and whatever could be pounded or shaken in honor of Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar. The gravediggers, feet tapping impatiently in time to the distant music, dug a squalid pit as quickly as they could, shoving in the casket with its cracking boards and badly nailed lid. At midday, while the people were dancing all round, several pigs appeared, gray, hairless, with big ears; rooting in the tomb, they found tasty flesh beneath the wood, which the weight of the soil had splintered. The sordid, avid beasts rooted and shoved, unearthing the body. One of them carried off a hand, which crackled like acorns between its teeth. Others ravaged the face, the neck, the flanks. The vultures, already posted on the cemetery walls, waited to finish off what was left. And so ended the tale of Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois beneath Guiana’s sun. “A fitting death for such a bastard,” said the old man, who had heard the tale to its end, sitting on a flour sack and scratching at his mange.
