Explosion in a Cathedral, page 28
XXXVI.
There’s no use in shouting.
Goya
He began his tale in a cheerful tone, recalling his misadventures when crossing from Port-au-Prince to France in a ship packed with refugees who wound up being Masons almost to a man, members of a club of Philadelphians influential in Saint-Domingue. It was a picturesque sight, all those philanthropists, friends of the Chinese, the Persians, the Algonquins, swearing the most dreadful reprisals would come once the negro rebellion was crushed and they were free to settle accounts with the ungrateful servants who had hurried to set fire to their haciendas. Esteban told them sardonically of his Huronades in Paris, his dreams and hopes, his errancies and experiences, along with the story of the citizen determined to build a colossal monument on the French border covered in daunting, hostile symbols—with a bronze giant whose face alone inspired terror—so that the Tyrants, upon seeing it, would retreat with their frightened armies; or another about a man who, when the nation was in danger, had wasted the assembly’s time caviling about how Citoyenne, the title given to women, was objectionable, as it failed to make clear whether the women in question were married or not; he told them how the Misanthrope had been given a revolutionary finale, with Alceste returning suddenly reconciled to the human race; he mocked the enormous success in France after his departure of a novel that had reached him in Guadeloupe—Émile, in which a village boy is taken to Versailles and learns to his astonishment that even the Dauphin went pee pee . . . He tried to preserve his good cheer, but slowly the events, the spectacles remade in words, were bathed in darker and darker shadows. The red of the ribbons turned a dark fleshy carmine. The Day of the Trees of Liberty gave way to the Day of the Scaffolds. At an imprecise, indeterminate, but tremendous moment, an exchange of souls had taken place; whoever was meek the night before woke up fearsome; whoever had limited himself to rhetoric now put his signature to death sentences. A Great Vertigo arrived—a vertigo all the more incomprehensible when one considered where it had originated: in the very place where civilization had achieved supreme equilibrium; in the land of serene architecture, tame nature, incomparable artisanry, where the very language seemed made to the measure of classical verse. No people could be more alien to the tableau of the gallows than the French. Their Inquisition had been clement when compared with the Spanish. Their Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was a trifle beside the slaughter of protestants demanded by King Phillip. Reminiscing, Esteban imagined Billaud-Varenne, absurd against a backdrop of majestic columns, in the midst of gardens with discreet vegetation, surrounded by statues by Houdon, in the exotic, grisly posture of an Aztec priest raising high his obsidian knife. No doubt, the Revolution had responded to an obscure millenary impulse, and had occasioned the most ambitious undertaking humanity had ever known. But Esteban was shocked at the cost of it: “Too soon we forget the dead.” The dead of Paris, of Lyon, of Nantes, of Arras (and he went on naming cities, like Orange, whose tremendous torments had newly come to light); the dead in prison ships on the Atlantic, on the fields of Cayenne, in so many other places, not to forget the dead who would never be counted—those abducted, dismissed from their posts, disappeared—to whom must be added the walking corpses, the men whose lives had been shattered, frustrated in their callings, their labors cut short, forever dragging out a lamentable existence when they lacked the necessary resolve for suicide. He praised the ill-fated Babouvists, to his mind the last pure revolutionaries, faithful to the purest ideal of equality, tragic contemporaries of those in the colonies who still preached Fraternity and Liberty, ideals that for most were no more than political ruses to conserve their old lands or acquire new ones. The Jehovah of Old, whose churches and cathedrals were opening again in places formerly consigned to atheism, had emerged from the ordeal victorious. His adorers could say now that what had happened had been nothing more than a manifestation of His Rage against all those philosophes who, in this century that was now in its last weeks, had dared to tug his beard, calling Moses an imposter, Saint Paul a fool—even insinuating, as Victor Hugues had done in a speech that owed much to the Baron d’Holbach, that the true father of Jesus had been a Roman legionnaire. The narrator concluded bitterly, draining his last glass of wine: “This time, the Revolution has failed. Perhaps the next one will succeed. But, to get to me when it breaks out, they’ll have to look under every last stone. We must be wary of fine words: of the Better Worlds that words create. There is no more Promised Land than what man can find inside himself.” When he said this, Esteban thought of Ogé, who had so often quoted a phrase from his master, Martínez de Pasqually: The human being can only be illuminated through the development of the divine faculties made dormant in him by the preponderance of matter . . . The lights of dawn appeared in the windowpanes and mirrors of the salon. The first matins sounded on that Sunday, when the north winds began to lash the morning. The bells familiar from childhood mingled with the vulgar tocsin of the new cathedral. The night had ended, as in their happy days of disorder, with singular haste. And now, with no need to sleep soon, wrapped in blankets they had brought down throughout the night to bundle up in their armchairs, the four of them remained in silence, seeming absorbed in private reflections. “Well, we are not in agreement,” Sofía said abruptly, with a bittersweet little voice that foretold her readiness to argue. Esteban was obliged to ask her whom she meant by we. “The three of us,” Sofía responded, waving her hand in a circle, casting him out of the family domain. And, as though speaking to herself, she embarked on a monologue, and by their faces, it was apparent that Carlos and Jorge were in agreement with her. No one could live, she said, without a political ideal; the destiny of the race could not be fulfilled in one attempt; grave errors had been committed, surely, but those errors would serve as a useful lesson for the future; she understood Esteban had passed through certain painful experiences—and she commiserated with him deeply on that account—but he had perhaps been victim of exaggerated idealism; the excesses of the Revolution were deplorable, she admitted, but the highest human endeavors had only been achieved thanks to pain and sacrifice. In a word: nothing great was ever done on earth without bloodshed. “Saint-Just said that before you did,” Esteban exclaimed. “Because Saint-Just was young. Like us. It astonishes me, when I think of Saint-Just, how tightly he clung to his pupil’s desk.” She knew everything her cousin had told her—about politics, of course—and perhaps better than he, for he had only managed to gain a partial and limited view of the events, a view altered at times by proximity to minor inconsistencies, inevitable moments of naivety that in no way minimized the grandeur of that superhuman undertaking. “You mean that descending into Hell has served me for nothing?” Esteban shouted. All she intended to say was that from a distance, one had a more objective, less impassioned impression of events. She did deplore the destroyed monasteries, so beautiful, the lovely churches that had been burned, the mutilated statues, the shattered stained glass. But if the happiness of mankind required it, half the gothic could vanish from the face of the earth. The word happiness infuriated Esteban: “Careful! It’s the beatific believers like you, the gullible ones, devourers of humanistic writings, the Calvinists of the Idea, who raise the guillotines.” “If only we had one here, the sooner the better, right in the Plaza de Armas of this ignorant, putrescent town,” Sofía replied. Gladly she would watch fall the heads of all those inept functionaries, the exploiters of slaves, the smug and sordid rich, the wearers of gold braid who swarmed across the island, keeping Knowledge at bay, banished to the ends of the earth, reduced to an allegory for a tobacco box by the sorriest and most immoral government in contemporary history. “Here more than a few would have to go to the guillotine,” Carlos assented. “A good number indeed,” Jorge adjudged. “I might have expected anything,” Esteban said, “but to find myself in a Jacobin club here.” Jacobins—not exactly, they told him. But in any case, people who knew (hearing again this word Sofía had used threw Esteban into a rage), people who were determined to do something. To act with certainty in a changing world, to be aware of the age and have an object in life, that was what mattered. In recent years, Carlos had devoted himself to the creation of a small Androgynous Lodge—androgynous because there were too few right-thinking men to dispense with intelligent and eminent women—to the end of diffusing the philosophical writings the Revolution had produced, and with them some of its grounding texts: The Declaration of the Rights of Men, the French Constitution, important speeches, civic catechisms, etc. They brought him several broadsides and opuscules that betrayed—by their outmoded typefaces, the coarseness of the composition—their origins in the clandestine presses in New Granada or Havana, or perhaps the River Plate or Puebla de los Ángeles. Esteban was well acquainted with that prose. So much so that, by the personal touch in certain turns of phrase, the cleverness of certain transpositions, the presence of an adjective whose equivalent in Castilian he had struggled long to find, he could identify his own translations, undertaken in Pointe-à-Pitre at the direction of Victor Hugues to be printed at the Loeuillets’ shop. And now these texts were returning to him, reproduced by presses on the Continent . . . “Vous m’emmerdez!” he shouted, knocking over armchairs as he left. Crossing the courtyard, he saw a key in the lock of the door leading to the warehouse. He was curious to see that place which, in a certain way, belonged to him now. It was a Sunday and the workers were away. The scent of salt meat, of germinating potatoes, of onions, so unpleasant to him in days past, gathered in his nostrils like a rich and vivifying humus. This was the scent of shipyards, of grain exchanges, of well-stocked cellars. Hearty reds dripped from the taps; the rinds of the Manchego cheeses were going green; the lard stained the clay of its big-bellied tubs. Now there reigned an order here unknown in former days. Everything was layered, hung, placed in rows as best served it: the hams and the strands of garlic hanging from cedar beams above, the grain sacks lined up like low walls, the barrels of anchovies and pickles down below. Further on, beneath the new roof that now spanned the patio, there were locked cabinets exhibiting an assortment of the merchandise that had expanded the business’s scope: salt cellars, reliquaries, and candle snuffers of Mexican silver; fine English porcelain; graceful chinoiserie imported from Acapulco; mechanical toys, Swiss watches, wines and cordials from the former estates of the Conde de Aranda. Esteban went to the offices, where books, inkwells, penknives, trays, rulers, and balances stood in their appointed places, waiting for those who would use them the following day. Seeing two particularly imposing desks placed in the handsomest quarters, the young man imagined a third, perhaps destined for him, along a mahogany-paneled wall that featured an oil portrait of his father, the Founder—brow eternally furrowed, exuding honor, severity, the enterprising spirit. And he saw himself, on splendid mornings in the future, seated there among samples of rice and garbanzos, noting down, appraising, arguing with a late payer or some provincial retailer, while the sun shimmered outside on the waters of the bay and a clipper passed on its way to New York or Cape Horn. He knew that would never interest him enough to devote the best years of his life to it. Now that he’d been saved from Hell, he could not place himself—feel like himself—in this reality, in this normalcy regained. He went to his room. Sofía, sitting surrounded by the puppets and scientific instruments, was waiting for him with great sorrow reflected on her face, not yet able to go to bed. “You resent us,” she said, “because we have faith in something.” “Faith in something that changes its face by the day will bring you great and terrible disappointments,” Esteban said. “You know what you hate. That is all. And knowing it, you place your trust, your hope, in anything that is not it.” Sofía kissed him, as she used to do when he was a child, and tucked him into his hammock. “We can all think what we like, and we’ll go back to what we were before,” she said as she left. Esteban, alone now, realized that was impossible. Some epochs are made for decimating the flock, confounding languages, dispersing the tribes.
XXXVII.
The days passed, but Esteban could not resign himself to starting work in the storehouse. “Tomorrow,” he would say by way of excuse to those who had asked nothing of him. And when tomorrow came, he would spend it wandering through the city, or would cross the bay to the village of Regla by boat. There, the bar tops were laid with sugarcane liquor, harsh sangrias, and roasted suckling pigs that reminded him of the boucans of before. In a niche in the bay, docked close like beggars huddled on a winter night, the sail boats with their luster of green, abandoned for having grown old and rickety, shook in the tame waves that climbed their corroded gunwales, covered in barnacles and violet algae. Somewhere still stood the ruined barracks where the Jesuits expelled from the Kingdoms of Spain were confined for months after arriving via Portobelo from remote convents in the Andes. Hawkers of prayer books, ex-votos, occult objects—magnets, bits of jet, iron, and coral—sold their goods in the open. Every Christian church had its counterpart in a temple for runaway slaves consecrated to Obatalá, Oshun, or Yemayá. These stood behind the sacristy, and the parish priests couldn’t protest, because the free blacks reverenced the old gods of Africa using figures indistinguishable from those placed on the altars of the Catholic houses of worship. At times, on his way back, Esteban would enter in the Theater of the Coliseum, where a Spanish company brought to life, to the tune of tonadillas, a world of majos and chisperos, evoking a Madrid made inaccessible by war . . . Around Christmastime, Jorge’s family invited Sofía, Carlos, and Esteban to spend the Christmas holidays on one of the most prosperous and flourishing estates on the island. Too busy at year’s end with buying and selling to leave the warehouse, Carlos and Jorge decided Sofía should depart earlier with Esteban, and they would follow eight days later, once their dealings in the city were done. The idea didn’t displease Esteban, who always had the sense that Sofía’s husband pushed him away from her; moreover, he no longer felt the same camaraderie as before with Carlos, who was too attached to the firm, and at night set off for the Masonic Lodge or was so weary from the workday that all he could do was doze off in some armchair in the salon after dinner, pretending to listen to the others’ discussions . . . “Now is when I meet you again,” Esteban said to Sofía when he found himself alone with her in the intimacy of the carriage driving to Artemisa. Sitting as though cradled beneath the oilskin roof, they were jolted side to side by bad roads. They ate in roadhouses and inns, reveled in ordering the most rustic or rare dishes—potato stew with dark broth or grilled squabs—and Sofía, who avoided wine at family dinners, treated herself to fine-looking bottles, nothing like the usual strong waters and bitter reds. Her face would light up, her temples sweat, and she laughed with the laugh of former days—less ladylike, less housewife-like, as though freed from a tolerated but active censure. Along the way, she begged Esteban to speak of Victor Hugues. He asked Sofía about the letter he had brought her. “Nothing,” she said. “I expected more. You know him: jokes that lose their charm when written down. Little more than sorrow, really. He claims he has no friends.” “His punishment is his solitude,” Esteban said. “He believed it necessary to renounce friendship for the sake of greatness. Not even Robespierre went that far.” “He was always driven to ask too much of himself,” she responded. “And when he aimed to rise above his station, he showed his lack of mettle. He hoped to be a tragic hero, but he remained a bit player. Even the stages he stood on were execrable. Rochefort, Guadeloupe . . . The service stairs of the Revolution!” “He’s an inferior sort of man. He revealed that in many ways.” Esteban searched in his memory for anything that could diminish Victor’s haughty bearing: an inept phrase overheard one day; a trivial expression; a trifling adventure; a show of weakness—like that famous day he’d fallen silent, smiling scornfully, when Antoine Fuët threatened to have him lashed if he appeared uninvited at the Corsairs’ Lodge. Then there was his worship of Robespierre, insistent to the point of parody . . . Esteban’s accusations against his friend of yesterday mounted, and his erstwhile love for him made these weaknesses all the less admissible: “I’d like to speak well of him, but I can’t. There is too much that soils his memory.” Sofía listened, assenting in her way, with little grunts that could be taken as manifestations of surprise, of shock, of alarm at some cruelty, some mistake, some meanness or abuse of power: “Let’s leave Victor be. He was a monster borne of a great revolution.” “A monster who made his money and married rich, when all was said and done,” Esteban observed, “unless they’ve jailed him in Paris for embezzlement. Or perhaps for sedition. And we have yet to consider what the magistracy of the new Terror may have done.” “Let’s leave Victor be.” But after two leagues of road, they turned to Victor Hugues again, energetically condemning him in commonplace terms: “He’s vulgar . . .” “I don’t know how we could ever find him so interesting . . .” “A philistine: his speeches are mere citations of the most recent book he’s read . . .” “A mercenary . . .” “That’s all he ever was, a mercenary . . .” “He charmed us because he came from elsewhere and had traveled . . .” “Brave, there’s no doubt of that . . .” “And audacious . . .” “Fanatical from the first, but that may have been a cover for his ambition . . .” “A political animal . . .” “Men like that discredit a revolution . . .”
