Explosion in a Cathedral, page 24
XXX.
A couple of days sufficed for Esteban to realize Victor Hugues had been too optimistic when he told him the journey from Cayenne to Paramaribo would be easy. Jeannet, envious of Guadeloupe’s prosperity, now had corsairs of his own: rapacious little skippers, none as skilled or admirable as Antoine Fuët, they threw themselves at any solitary or strayed vessel they came across, justifying the term The Brigands’ War the Americans used to describe the French naval campaign in the Caribbean. For his own enrichment, Jeannet sold in Suriname, at whatever price, all that these people brought him. The safe conducts needed to enter Dutch territory he reserved for men of his confidence, those who took part in his enterprises. He excused his sternness as needed to avoid the flight of deportees—months earlier, some had escaped thanks to the assistance of the regime’s enemies. Anyway, in Cayenne, they didn’t take kindly to new faces. Every stranger was seen in advance as a potential spy of the Directory. If Esteban failed to attract attention, it was because he was assumed to be another crew member of the Vénus de Médicis, which was still anchored, waiting for cargo, in the port. But soon its departure date would come, with the inevitable return to Pointe-à-Pitre, where civil war might already have broken out, or where the inquisition of the White Terror might well be underway. Just the thought of it occasioned a feeling of inner devastation in the young man. His pulse pounded dully, and a sinking in the middle of his chest took away his breath. A previously unknown fear took hold of him, dwelling inside like an affliction. He couldn’t sleep a whole night through. Soon after he lay down, he would awaken with the impression that everything was bearing down on him: the walls were closing in, the ceiling lowering, the air he breathed was turning thinner; the house was a cell, the island a prison, the sea and forest were walls of immeasurable thickness. The lights of dawn brought him a certain relief. He would get up bravely, thinking today something would happen, some unforeseen event would open a path for him. But as the day slipped past without incident, despair would creep in, leaving him drained and dispirited by nightfall. He would collapse onto his bed, so motionless—petrified, incapable of the least gesture, as if oppressed by the weight of his own body—that the negress Angesse, fearing him afflicted with intermittent fever, would pour spoonfuls of quinine syrup down his throat to revive him. Then, in dread of solitude, he would walk down to the dining room at the inn, where he would beg for company from Hauguard, some jovial drinker, the Acadian with the Biblical recollections, anyone, just to lose himself in talk. On one of these nights, he learned the Directory had dismissed Jeannet in favor of a new Agent, Burnet, who was said to hold Billaud-Varenne in great esteem. The officials in the colony received this news with fright. Fearing the inmates of Sinnamary would denounce their neglect and sufferings, they sent medicines and victuals to those personalities who held sway there, whose complaints might reach the ears of the new governor. Strange as it was, the last of the Jacobins, persecuted in France, were now raising their heads in America, inexplicably favored with powers and official posts. There was suddenly vigorous traffic between Cayenne, Kourou, and Sinnamary, and Esteban thought the time ripe to get rid of the letters and parcels he’d been entrusted with by Victor Hugues. He could just as easily have destroyed the contents of those bundles sewn in canvas, or kept for himself the money sealed in envelopes with wax. If he did so, he’d need no longer worry about compromising materials should the police come calling, as they did often in those days, or being called to account for his questionable mission, though now, when the fortunes of the Maximum Deportee were changing, it was not so questionable as before. Esteban felt an enduring distaste for Billaud-Varenne. But he was also well acquainted with the revolution’s methods, and this turned him superstitious. He believed that bluster about one’s health or luck could bring about illness or perdition. Fate, he felt, was hardest on all who trusted too naively in their good fortune. And he believed, moreover, that a task left incomplete, or in certain cases even the failure to aid the unfortunate, could produce a paralysis of favorable energies or currents, rendering one guilty of selfishness or torpor before some Unknown Force that judged one’s actions. And since he hadn’t found a way, not even an implausible one, of traveling to Paramaribo, he hoped circumstances might change in his favor if he punctiliously fulfilled the task Victor Hugues had assigned him. With no one else to confide in, he opened up to Hauguard, a man used to dealing with people of all stripes, who lived between his hearth and his negresses without losing sleep over politics. The latter told him that the general contempt directed at Collot d’Herbois had turned him to a drunk, a pathetic, histrionic whiner, a coward even, toward the end; but, far from cowing him, the hatred Billaud sensed from all corners stoked his pride, to the astonishment of those whom his indirect or forgotten orders had consigned to the rigors of deportation. In the midst of so many men crestfallen and penitent, the Implacable One of yesterday refused to back down in the slightest; alone, gruff, but entirely of a piece, he declared that if History turned back and he were faced once more with the contingencies he’d lived through, he would act exactly as he had before. It was true that he raised parrots and cockatoos, but only to allow himself the sarcastic quip that his birds, like his people, repeated everything they were told . . . Esteban would have preferred to avoid traveling to Sinnamary, leaving his consignment to some trusted acquaintance of the innkeeper. Hauguard advised him, to his great surprise, to speak to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Saint-Paul-de-Chartres, whom Billaud-Varenne had held in high regard, referring to her as most esteemed sister since she had cared for him during a grave illness he contracted not long after arriving to the colony . . . The next day, the young man was led to a narrow room in the Hospice where he stopped, astonished, before a large crucifix hanging over a window open to the sea. Between four whitewashed walls, with two stools as the lone furnishings, one covered in cowhide and the other in braided horsehair—flesh of the Ox and of the Ass—the dialogue between Ocean and Symbol took on a sustained and perennial pathos situated beyond all contingency and place. All that might be said of Man and his World, all that Light, Procreation, and Shadow could accommodate, was spoken—spoken forever—in the projections from a bare geometry of black wood that entered the fluid and Unique immensity of the universal placenta, with a Body Interposed in an ecstasy of agony and rebirth . . . So much time had passed since Esteban had been in the presence of the Christ that he had the impression of committing a deeply fraudulent act when he looked at him now up close, as though reuniting with an old friend clandestinely returned to a common fatherland from which they had both been exiled. That personage had been witness and confidant of his childhood; was present at the head of every bed in his paternal home, faraway, where the return of the Absentee was awaited. And then, there was the memory of so much they both knew. No words were needed to invoke the flight to Egypt and the storied night in the stable with the kings and pastors (I remember now the music box with the shepherdess, brought to my bedroom on an Epiphany especially painful as a result of my ailment), or the merchants selling trinkets at the gates to the temple or the fishermen of the lake (with their beards and rags, they looked to me almost exactly like the men who hawked fresh squids in the city where I was born), or storms placated and green branches on a certain Sunday (Sofía brought me the royal palm fronds the Clarists had given her, spry and bitter, and for days they remained there, still damp, woven into the bars of my bed), or the great trial, the sentence, and the driving of the nails. “How long would I have held out?” Esteban had asked himself since he was a child, thinking that a nail puncturing the center of the hand must not hurt too much. And he had tried, a hundred times, jabbing himself with a pencil, a knitting needle, the spout of an oil can, pushing and sinking it, and hadn’t particularly suffered. His feet being thicker, the torture would certainly be more painful. Quite possibly, crucifixion was not the worst of the torments man had invented. But the Cross was an Anchor and a Tree, and the Son of God had to suffer his agony upon that form, which symbolized at the same time Earth and Water—wood and sea, whose eternal dialogue had entranced Esteban that morning in the narrow room in the Hospice. Drawn from his timeless reflections by the blast of a cornet in the heights of the fortress, he thought suddenly that the weakness of the Revolution, which had deafened the world with shouts of a new Dies Irae, lay in its lack of valid gods. The Supreme Being was a god without history. He had not produced a Moses of such grandeur that he could hear the words of the Burning Bush, building an alliance between the Eternal and his chosen tribes. The Supreme Being had not been made flesh and had not dwelled among us. Sanctity was lacking in the ceremonies celebrated in his honor; continuity of purpose was lacking, that resistance to the contingent and immediate that had endured across centuries, in the Stoned Man of Jerusalem and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste; the Archer Sebastian, the Pastor Irenaeus, the doctors Augustin, Anselm, and Thomas, the modern Philip of Jesus, martyr of the Philippines, honored with Mexican shrines adorned with Chinese Christs made of sugarcane fiber, their texture so fleshlike that, when the hand grazed it, it recoiled from the illusion of a throbbing still alive in the wound that the Lance—the only Lance so reddened—had opened in their side . . . Freed of the yearning for prayer, because he was a man without faith, Esteban savored the company of the Crucified, feeling returned to a familiar clime. This God belonged to him by heritage and right; he could reject Him, but He formed part of the patrimony of those of his race. “Good day,” he said to him jovially, in a muffled voice. “Good day” came the response from behind him, in the gentle voice of the Mother Superior. Esteban informed her without preambles of the object of his visit. “Go to Sinnamary as our emissary,” the nun said, “and look for Abbot Brottier, you can leave your dispatches with him. He is the only true friend Monsieur Billaud-Varenne has in the colony.” “It’s true,” Esteban thought, “strange things happen in these parts.”
XXXI.
The deportations had transformed Sinnamary into a strange place, with something unreal and fantastical lurking in the sordid reality of its poverty and purulence. Nestled in vegetation dating back to the world’s origins, it was like an Ancient State ravaged by the plague, overrun with funerals, whose men, in the manner of Hogarth, were engaged in an endless caricature of their professions and duties. The Priests, with their prohibited books brought once more into the light, celebrated Mass now in the Cathedral of the Forest: collective home of the Indians, its clearings like a kind of Gothic nave, with sloping joists holding up a high ceiling of palm fronds. The Deputies, divided, argumentative, schismatic, invoked History, citing classical texts, reigning over the Agora of a tavern’s back patio, surrounded by corrals where the pigs nudged their snouts between bars when the discussions became too heated. The Army was represented by the implausible Pichegru—Pichegru was someone Esteban couldn’t quite place in his reflections on the Guianese characters—who gave orders to an army of ghosts, oblivious to the Ocean that separated him from his soldiers. And in their midst, taciturn, detested like one of the Atrides, was the Tyrant of other days, whom no one directed a word to. He was deaf, absent, indifferent to the contempt his presence aroused. Children would stop in their tracks before the ex-President of the Jacobins, ex-President of the Convention, ex-Member of the Committee of Public Safety: the man who had approved massacres in Lyon, in Nantes, in Arras, signer of the Praedial Laws, advisor to Fouquier-Tinville, who sought without hesitation the deaths of Saint-Juste, Couthon, and even Robespierre, after pushing Danton toward the scaffold—none of which mattered especially to the negroes of Cayenne alongside the matricide they perceived in the decapitation of the Queen, who had been, in their imagination, Queen of Europe itself in all its grandeur. Strange as it was, that entire chronicle of tragedy, lived out on the vastest stage of the world, conferred a chilling majesty on Billaud-Varenne—a power of fascination that even those who hated him most were not immune to. While some, presumably his friends, made a great show of keeping their distance from him, others appeared on his doorstep with the most curious of pretexts: a shabby Breton priest, a former Girondin, a landlord ruined when the slaves were freed, or a shrewd abbot with an encyclopedist’s spirit, like this Brottier, whose door Esteban was knocking at now, after a tedious journey in a schooner along a low coast dense with marshlands and mangroves. The man who opened up to receive him was a Swiss farmer with a white wine drinker’s glowing nose. His name was Sieger, and he, too, was waiting for the Abbot: “He’s out tending to the dying,” he said. “That swine Jeannet has finally deigned to send them medicine, garbanzos, and anise, now that the deportees are dropping off at a rate of ten to twelve a day. By the time Burnel arrives, this will be nothing more than an enormous graveyard, like Iracubo already.” Esteban learned that Billaud was so confident of the new Agent of the Directory’s protection that he had stepped into an important role in the colony, redacting—in expectation of a formal appointment—a program of administrative reforms. Frowning, imperturbable, this Orestes walked at evening through the fringes of Sinnamary in scrupulous dress, marking a singular contrast with the growing carelessness of the other deportees, whose months of suffering could be counted at first sight by the shabbiness and filth of their garments. Recent arrivals shielded themselves behind a dignity their Uniforms enlarged in that world of beings huddled and nude. Surrounded by beggars and the defeated, a Magistrate raised his head, swearing he would soon be in Paris vexing and punishing his enemies; a disgraced General showed off his medals and braid, speaking of his officials, his infantry, his cannons. Forever deposed, the Representative of the People went on seeing himself as such; the vengeful Author, whose family presumed him dead, penned satires and vengeful songs. To a man they composed Memoirs, Apologies, Histories of the Revolution, countless Theories of the State, reading their pages in huddles in the shadows of a carob tree or a clump of bamboo. This exhibition, in the midst of the tropical undergrowth, of pride, animus, spite, was a new Danse Macabre, with those who flaunted their Rank and Distinctions already succumbing to hunger, illness, and death. One put his trust in some well-placed party’s friendship; another in his lawyer’s tenacity; a last one in an imminent appeal of his case. But back in their huts, they saw their feet devoured by insects that burrowed under their toenails, and every morning, their bodies emerged from sleep with new wounds, abscesses, and scabies. At first, it was always the same: a new batch would come in with a bit of energy still left, and would join in Rousseauian communities, doling out tasks, imposing schedules and discipline—citing the Georgics, to instill themselves with valor. They repaired the huts left free by the death of their previous tenants; some went out for firewood and water while the rest felled trees, tilled the soil, and sowed. They hunted and fished while waiting for the first harvest to come. And since the Magistrate could not soil his only tailcoat or the General besmirch his uniform, they donned crude canvas suits and serge smocks, which were stained with resin and sap that resisted soap and bleach. Soon they all looked like farmhands from Le Nain, with thick beards and eyes that sank ever deeper into their faces. Diligent, assiduous, Death was already at work where they labored, weeding, lending a hand with the hoe, pushing the seeds down in their furrows. One man felt feverish; another vomited green bile; a third, with a swollen stomach, began to retch. In the meanwhile, the jungle plants invaded the cleared land, and the newly sown crops were ravaged by a hundred species of vermin. They were already gaunt beggars by the time they managed to tear something from the soil; then the rains broke out, so thick and relentless that people woke in the morning to find the water in their homes risen to midcalf. The rivers flooded their banks, the pastures couldn’t absorb another drop. It was then that the negroes chose to cast spells on the would-be settlers, whom they saw as intruders, banished arbitrarily to lands they considered their own. Upon rising, the Magistrate, the General, the Representative of the People, discovered menaces as frightful as they were inscrutable: a cow skull with horns painted red; gourds filled with tiny bones, grains of corn, and iron filings; stones in the shape of faces, with embedded shells resembling eyes and teeth. Pebbles were wrapped in bloody cloths; black hens hung head-down from doorjambs; locks of human hair were hammered soundlessly to doors with nails of uncertain provenance in a place where every nail was precious. An atmosphere of malice enveloped the deportees, beneath black clouds weighing down on their roofs. To soothe themselves, some thought of the witches of Brittany or the dragon of Poitou, but peaceful sleep eluded them as they were surrounded, watched over, visited by nocturnal officiants who left no trace and affirmed their presence with mysterious signs. Eaten through by an invisible moth, the uniform of the General, the tailcoat of the Magistrate, the Tribune’s last decent shirt, were picked up one fine day and found to be mere rags, unless a rattlesnake hidden in the underbrush had already made short work of their owners, shooting forth like a spring with a powerful flick of its tail. In mere months, the Magistrate, the conceited General, the former Tribune, the Representative of the People, the refractory Priest, the Public Accuser, the loose-lipped-Policeman, the Man-of expired-influence, the Shyster, the Backsliding Monarchist, and the Babouvist determined to abolish private property had turned into lamentable creatures in rags, dragging themselves to a tomb of cold, damp earth, with a stone whose cross and epitaph would be washed away with the coming rains. Worse still, vile colonial officials circled the devastated fields, extortionists who would seize a wedding band, a pendant, a medallion with a family’s coat of arms—belongings defended to the point of collapse as a last justification for living—in exchange for posting a letter, the promise of sending for a surgeon, of getting hold of some tincture, a bottle of rum, or a bit of food.
