Explosion in a Cathedral, page 25
Night was falling when Sieger, bored of waiting, told Esteban that they should visit the Detested One’s home, where Abbot Brottier was likely to be found. Up to now, Esteban had shown no interest in seeing the notorious deportee in person; but the news that he would soon hold some authority in Cayenne convinced him to accept the Swiss’s proposal. With a blend of curiosity and fear, he entered the crumbling house, which was, despite everything, extraordinarily clean, where Billaud, with eyes that reflected his months of tedium, was sitting in an armchair ruined by woodworms, reading old newspapers.
XXXII.
Fierce monster.
Goya
There was something of the dignity of a dethroned king in the slightly distant deference with which the Terrible One of days gone by received his dispatch from Victor Hugues. He seemed little interested in knowing the contents of the bundles or the lacquered envelopes, offering Esteban a seat at his table and a bed—which he shyly called Lacedaemonian—to pass the night. He asked them if they’d had news in Guadeloupe that had not yet arrived to the world’s pigsty, by which he meant Cayenne. Hearing Victor Hugues had been called to Paris to give an account of his government, he stood in a fit of rage and shouted: “Now this . . . ! Now this . . . ! Those cretins aim to destroy those who saved the island from falling into the English colonizers’ hands! Now they’ll lose Guadeloupe, in the hopes that perfidious Albion will overtake Guiana.” (“His language hasn’t changed much,” Esteban thought, recalling he had translated a famous discourse of Billaud’s in which he railed against “perfidious Albion” and its attempts to master the seas “spanning the oceans with floating fortresses.”) But just then, Abbot Brottier arrived, upset by something he’d seen: to bury the day’s dead faster, the soldiers from the negro barracks in Sinnamary were digging appallingly shallow pits—stamping on the bellies of the corpses to force them into holes hardly big enough for a sheep. In some places, they didn’t even bother to carry the bodies, instead dragging them by the feet to the burial grounds. “And they’ve left five to bury later, wrapped in their hammocks, already stinking, they said they were tired of hauling all that carrion around. Tonight the living and dead will stay together in the homes of Sinnamary.” (Esteban could not but think of another paragraph in that same speech of Billaud’s, uttered four years before: Death is a call to equality, which a free people should sanctify by a public act that constantly reminds them of this appeal. A Funeral Rite is a consoling homage that erases even the horrible handprint of death: it is nature’s final farewell.) “And to think we freed those people!” Billaud said, returning to an idea that had obsessed him since his arrival in Cayenne. “We needn’t persist in depicting the Decree of 16 Pluviôse as a noble error of revolutionary humanitarianism,” Brottier observed ironically, in the relaxed tone of a man at liberty to argue with the Terrible One. “When Sonthonax thought the Spanish were going to overtake the colony in Saint-Domingue, he announced the negroes were free, at his own risk and on his own account. That was a year before you all were weeping with enthusiasm at the Convention, declaring equality among the inhabitants of the overseas French possessions had finally come. In Haiti, they did it to get rid of the Spanish; in Guadeloupe, to be sure they could throw out the English; here, to bring to bay the landowners and Acadians, who would just as well have sided with the British and the Dutch to keep Pointe-à-Pitre’s guillotine out of Cayenne. It was colonial politics, nothing more!” “And the results were miserable!” said Sieger, who had lost his laborers as a result of the Decree of 16 Pluviôse. “Sonthonax has fled to Cuba. And now the negroes in Haiti want their independence.” “As they do here,” Brottier said, recalling that two liberationist conspiracies in the Guianas had been dismantled, and attributing, perhaps fancifully, the initiative for the second to Collot d’Herbois. (Esteban failed to stifle a giggle, inexplicable to the rest, at the thought of Collot trying to found a Black Koblenz in these parts.) “I still recall,” Sieger said, “that ridiculous proclamation Jeannet posted to the walls of Cayenne, when he announced the Great Event.” And, softening his tone: “No more are there masters or slaves . . . The citizens formerly called Maroons may return to be again with their brothers, who shall grant them the safety, protection, and joy that are the fruit of the rights of man. Those who were slaves may deal as equals with their former masters on those labors to be finished or begun.” And, lowering his voice: “All the French Revolution did in the Americas is give legal sanction to a Great Emancipation that began in the sixteenth century. There were countless occasions when the negroes didn’t bother waiting for you to declare them free.” And with a knowledge of the American chronicles unusual for a Frenchman (but just then, Esteban remembered he was Swiss), the farmer gave an inventory of uprisings of blacks that had taken place on the Continent with fearsome continuity. The cycle had opened in Venezuela with a thundering of drums, when the Negro Miguel, rising up with the miners of Buría, founded a kingdom on lands so white and dazzling they seemed formed of ground crystal. Organ pipes didn’t blow there, but shafts of bamboo pounded rhythmically against the ground in an act of consecration when a Congo or Yoruba Bishop, unknown in Rome but still furnished with mitre and crosier, placed a royal crown upon the temples of the Negress Guiomar, wife of the first African monarch in the Americas—and Guiomar was in no way Miguel’s inferior. Already then, the drums were pounding in Cañada de los Negros in Mexico, and along the coast of Veracruz, where Viceroy Martín Enríquez, to set an example for the Maroons, had ordered the castration of all fugitives “without any other proof of wrongdoing or excesses . . .” And if those attempts had been fleeting, the Quilombo dos Palmares, founded in the depths of the Brazilian jungle by the high chief Ganga Zumba, had endured for sixty-five years. Against its frail fortifications of wood and fiber, more than twenty Dutch and Portuguese military campaigns had foundered, their artillery useless against the wiles of the Numidian guerrillas, who even mimicked animals to instill panic in the white men’s souls. Zumbi, nephew of King Zumba, invulnerable to bullets, served as Marshal to an Army that walked over the roof of the forest, falling over the enemy armies like ripe fruit . . . Forty years were yet to pass in the War of Palmares when in Jamaica, the runaways took to the mountains, forming a free State that lasted nearly a century. The British Crown had to approach the highlanders and deal with them as one government with another, promising their leader, a hunchback named Old Cudjoe, the manumission of his people and the cession of fifteen hundred acres of land. Ten years later, the drums thundered in Haiti: in the Cape region, Mackandal the Mahommedan, a man with a missing arm, said to possess lycanthropic powers, undertook a Revolution by Poison, strewing mysterious venoms in homes and pastures that slew man and beast alike. And no sooner had the Mandinga been burned in the public square than Holland had to gather an army of European mercenaries in the forests of Suriname to combat the formidable runaway forces of three popular chiefs, Zan-Zan, Boston, and Arabay, who threatened to destroy the colony. Four exhausting campaigns failed to fully extirpate a secret world fluent in the tongue of wood, pelts, and fibers, that vanished into villages hidden in impenetrable forests, reverting to the adoration of ancestral gods. Only seven years ago, the Order of the Whites had seemed restored on the Continent when Bouckman, another black Mahommedan, rebelled in the Bois Caïman of Saint-Domingue, burning houses and devastating fields. It was just three years ago that the negroes of Jamaica had mutinied again to avenge the sentence of two thieves tortured in Trelawny Town. They’d had to mobilize the troops of Fort Royal and send packs of Cuban hunting dogs to Montego Bay to stifle the uprising. Even now, in the Revolt of the Tailors, the coloreds of Bahía were banging the drumheads, demanding, to the beat of the macumba, the privileges of Equality and Fraternity, the thuds of their Djukas now echoing in tune with the French Revolution. “It is perfectly evident,” Sieger concluded, “that the renowned Pluviôse Decree brought nothing new to this Continent, save perhaps one more reason to carry on with a Great Emancipation that had always been here.” “Think what a wonder it is,” Brottier said after a silence, “that the negroes in Haiti repudiated the guillotine. Sonthonax managed to raise it just a single time. The negroes came out en masse to watch it decapitate a man. Once they saw how it worked, they threw themselves on it enraged and broke it to pieces.” The Abbot had fired the arrow, certain of striking where it hurt. “Was there a great need for severity to reestablish order in Guadeloupe?” asked Billaud, who must have had a clearer sense of where matters stood there. “At the beginning especially,” Esteban said, “when the guillotine was in the Place de la Victoire.” “A harsh reality, clement neither with women nor with men,” Sieger added in an ambiguous tone. “I don’t recall a woman ever being guillotined there, though,” Esteban said, realizing immediately how inopportune his observation was. The Abbot, impatient to take the conversation elsewhere, lost himself in commonplaces. “Only the whites submit women to the most extreme rigors of the law. The negroes wreak havoc, rape, disembowel, but they would never execute a woman in cold blood. I, for one, know of no example of their doing so.” “For them, a woman is a womb,” Esteban said. “For us, a woman is a head,” replied Sieger. “Having a womb between your legs is mere destiny. Having a head on your shoulders is a responsibility.” Billaud shrugged, to suggest that the Swiss’s conclusion had failed to impress him. “Let us turn back to our clocks,” he said, a slight smile crossing his otherwise immobile face, so aloof that it was never clear if he was following the conversation or ruminating on other matters. The Swiss returned to his record of desertions: “What I know for certain is Bartolomé de las Casas was one of the greatest criminals in history. He created, nearly three centuries ago, a problem of such a scale that it dwarfs even the magnitude of the Revolution. For our grandchildren, the horrors of Sinnamary, of Kourou, of Cananama, of Iracubo, will seem no more than the insignificant vagaries of human suffering, but the problem of the negro will still stand. We give legal status to the fugitives in Saint-Domingue, and right away they throw us off the island. Next they’ll claim the right to live in full equality with the whites.” “They’ll never achieve it,” Billaud shouted. “And why not?” Brottier asked. “Because we are different. I’m quite weary of philanthropic dreams, Monsieur L’Abbé. A Numidian has a long way to go before he becomes a Roman. Nor is a Garamantian an Athenian. And this Euxine Sea they’ve exiled us to is no Mediterranean . . .” At this moment appeared Brigitte, Billaud’s serving girl, whose comings and goings to and from the kitchen and the disordered hovel that served as a dining room had caught Esteban’s eye, her fine features being rare in a woman without a drop of white or Indian blood. She couldn’t be more than thirteen, but her small body was already shapely, its round forms stretching the coarse cloth of her dress. In a soft, respectful voice, she announced that dinner—a teeming pot of rotten yams, bananas, and salt meat—was served. Billaud went for a bottle of wine, an extraordinary luxury he had enjoyed for just three days, and the four of them sat facing each other, while Esteban struggled to grasp the extraordinary chain of circumstances that had occasioned this strange friendship between the Detested One, an Abbot whose deportation he may well have ordered, and a Calvinist farmer who’d lost everything as a result of ideas the master of the house incarnated. They began to speak of politics. It was said that Hoche had died of poisoning. That the Bonaparte’s popularity was growing by the day. That revealing letters had been found among the Incorruptible’s papers, exposing his plans to go abroad, where he had property in good hands, when the events of Thermidor had struck him down. For some time, Esteban had grown tired of this eternal prying into the affairs of today’s upstarts or yesterday’s lords. Every conversation turned on the same subjects. He missed the possibility of peaceful dialogue about the City of God, the life of beavers, or the marvels of electricity. Overwhelmed by a powerful urge to sleep, he excused himself early, before eight o’ clock had struck, reluctant to continue sitting there nodding and assenting, and asked permission to lie down on the straw mattress Billaud had offered him. He took a book someone had left on a stool, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents, a novel by Ann Radcliffe. He felt alluded to personally in a phrase he came on by chance: Alas, I have no longer a home, a circle to smile welcomes upon me. I have no longer even one friend to support, to rescue me! I—a miserable wanderer on a distant shore . . . !
* * *
• • •
He woke not long after midnight. In the adjoining room, Billaud-Varenne was writing by candlelight, shirtless on account of the heat. Now and again he would kill with a potent swipe the insects that landed on his shoulders or the nape of his neck. Young Brigitte, nude, was stretched out next to him on a pallet, fanning her breasts and thighs with an old issue of La décade philosophique.
XXXIII.
That October—an October of cyclones, of violent nocturnal rains, unbearable heat in the morning, and sudden midday storms that did nothing but swell the damp air with vapors smelling of mud, brick, wet ash—was, for Esteban, a moment of unceasing moral crisis. The death of Abbot Brottier, brought down during a brief stay in Cayenne by a plague from Sinnamary, affected him deeply. The young man had hoped the influence of that bustling, affable churchman might help him find his way to Suriname. Now, with no one to confide in, Esteban was left a prisoner, with an entire city, an entire country, for a cell. And that country’s forests were so dense that the only door out of them was the sea, and that door had been locked with enormous keys of paper, and those were the very worst kind. Those days saw a universal proliferation of papers, stamped, sealed, signed, and countersigned all over, exhausting all possible synonyms of permission, safe conduct, passport, and whatever words might signify authorization to move between countries, between territories—at times even between cities. The collectors of taxes, tariffs, and imposts, of duties and fees such as he had encountered in the past, were a mere picturesque foretaste of the entourage of officials and policemen now diligently working wherever one turned—some fearing Revolution, others Counterrevolution—to constrain man’s liberty as it related to the primeval, fertile, creative possibility of moving across the planet he was fated to inhabit. Esteban lost his composure, kicking and shouting with fury, when he saw how a human being could be stripped of his ancestral nomadism and made to submit his sovereign will to move to a piece of paper. “Clearly,” he thought, “I was not born to be one of those we presently describe with the term good citizen . . .” For that month, Cayenne was all confusion, racket, and disorder. Jeannet, furious at his destitution, rallied the negro militias against the Alsatian troops, who were demanding months of back pay. Then, dismayed at the turn events were taking, he predicted an imminent blockade by American forces, with starvation as a possible consequence; in alarm, the people lined up outside the grocers’ doors. “With that, he finally sold off the merchandise he had in store before anyone else could get to it,” said Hauguard, a seasoned observer of colonial swindles . . . And at the beginning of November, tensions were eased with Burnel’s arrival aboard the frigate L’insurgente, which was greeted from the fort with volleys of cannon fire. Immediately upon moving into the House of Government, the new Agent of the Directory—unmindful of the people convening in his chambers to inform him of endless matters—sent for Billaud-Varenne in Sinnamary, hugging and embracing him affectedly to the horror of those who had thought the Terrible One of earlier days long forgotten. In Cayenne it was said the two men had been shut in an office together for three days, and had their wine and cheese brought to them between meals while they remained there discussing problems of local politics. Perhaps they had also considered the situation of the deportees, as several of the sick men from Kourou were taken unexpectedly to Sinnamary. “A bit late for that now,” Hauguard hissed between his teeth. “In the best months, mortality in Kourou, Conanama, and Iracubo is thirty percent. I know of a group of fifty-eight people the Bayonnaise took there a year ago, and only two of them are still alive. One of the latest to die was a scholar, Havelange, rector of the University of Louvain.” The innkeeper was right: exile had outdone itself in those fields of death, replete with black vultures, skeletons, and tombs. Four great rivers of Guiana had lent their Indian names to vast cemeteries of whites—many of whom perished for their abiding devotion to a faith the white man had failed for three centuries to instill in the Indians . . . The Swiss Sieger, who had come to the city with the object of discreetly purchasing an estate for Billaud-Varenne, revealed something to Esteban, to the latter’s surprise, that made plain how far a certain Jacobin spirit, cordelier and enragé, was reasserting itself in the government of Cayenne: Burnel, who secretly had the Directory’s support, intended to dispatch secret agents to Suriname in order to provoke a general uprising among slaves in the name of the Decree of 16 Pluviôse, in order thereafter to annex the colony—a crime beyond compare, particularly when one considered that for now, Holland was the only true ally France had in those parts. That night, Esteban invited the Swiss to his room to share with him the finest wines at the inn with the maids Angesse and Scholastique. Neither of the ladies needed much cajoling to take off their blouses and skirts once Hauguard, whose guests’ predilections didn’t scandalize him in the least, left for bed. When the revelry was over, Esteban opened himself to Sieger, begging him to use his influence to get him a passport for Suriname. “I could be useful there as a propagandist or agitator,” he said with a knowing expression. “You’re wise to try and get out of here,” the other man told him. “This country’s no longer of interest to anyone but speculators, friends of the government. Either you’re a politician or you’re a lackey. You were good to Billaud. We’ll try to get you the paper you need.” A week later, the Diomède disembarked under the new name L’Italie Conquise, sailing to the neighboring colony to try and sell there, this time for Burnel’s benefit, merchandise seized by Jeannet’s corsair captains.
