Explosion in a Cathedral, page 3
But there he was anchored, hanging on one of the window’s uppermost bars, writhing gauntly from the effort, crucified, crestfallen, torso stripped bare, ribs rippling in relief, his lone garment a shawl curled around his waist. His breast exhaled a dull whistle, oddly tuned to two simultaneous notes, which died off at times in a groan. His hands searched the grating for a higher bar to hang from, as if his body, marked by violet veins, wished to stretch itself ever thinner. Impotent before an affliction that defied all potions and poultices, Sofía passed a cloth soaked in cool water over the sick man’s forehead and cheeks. Soon his fingers released the iron, slipping down the bars, and Esteban, aided by brother and sister in his descent from the cross, tumbled into a wicker chair, staring through dilated black pupils, absent despite their fixity. His nails were blue; his neck vanished into shoulders raised so high they almost hid his ears. Knees splayed, elbows thrown forward, the texture of his anatomy waxen, he looked like an ascetic in a painting by one of the Flemish or Italian primitives, entirely absorbed in some monstrous mortification of the flesh. “It was the goddamned incense,” Sofía said, sniffing the black garments Esteban had left in a chair. “When I saw him start choking in church . . .” But she fell silent, recalling that the incense, the scent of which the sick man couldn’t bear, had been burned during the solemn funeral rites of a man the Parish Priest had described in the eulogy as a dearly beloved father, an exemplary gentleman, the very image of benevolence. Esteban threw his arms over a sheet knotted into a noose between two rings set into the wall. His sorry plight grew crueler there amid the things Sofía had tried to use since childhood to distract him from his fits: the little shepherdess atop a music box; the band of monkeys with the broken cord; the balloon with the aeronauts hanging from the roof that rose and fell when you tugged on a string; the clock with the frog that danced on a bronze dais; and the puppet theater, its stage like a Mediterranean port, where Turks, gendarmes, waitresses, and bearded men lay scattered—one with his head askew, one with his hairpiece chewed away by roaches, another without arms, the butcher’s boy vomiting termite dust from his eyes and nose. “I won’t go back to the convent,” Sofía said, shifting to let Esteban rest his head in her lap; he had fallen to the floor softly, seeking the frigid safety of the flagstones. “This is where I need to be.”
II.
Their father’s death had certainly affected them. And yet, alone in the light of day, in the oblong dining room with the blackened still lifes—pheasants and hares nestled in clusters of grapes, lampreys with wine bottles, a pastry toasted to a golden brown a person could sink their teeth into—they might well have admitted that an almost sybaritic sense of freedom had overcome them during that meal ordered from the neighboring hotel because no one thought to send the servants to market. Remigio brought back cloth-covered baskets filled with almond-crusted seabream, marzipan, squab à la crapaudine, truffled this and confited that—a far cry from the minced meats and stews that generally graced the table. Sofía came down in her robe, eager to try a bit of everything; a Grenache that Carlos proclaimed excellent helped Esteban get his color back. The house, which they had always looked on with eyes accustomed to its character, at once familiar and strange, took on a novel and singular significance, imposing myriad demands now that they realized they alone were responsible for its stewardship. It was evident that their father—so taken with his business that he even went out before Mass on Sundays to close contracts and buy wares straight off the boat, outflanking those who waited for Monday to make their purchases—had left in a state of pitiful neglect the dwelling their mother abandoned long before, victim to the cruelest flu epidemic the city had ever known. Pavers were missing in the courtyard, the statues were covered in grime; mud rose up from the road and splashed into the vestibule; the odds and ends of furnishings in the sitting rooms and bedrooms seemed better suited to a rag-and-bone shop than to a mansion for decent people. Years back, the fountain with its mute dolphins had run dry, and panes of glass had been missing from the French doors. And yet, certain paintings, of varied subjects and dissimilar in style, lent dignity to those walls mottled with dark spots from the damp—pieces that had found no buyers at an auction of foreclosed properties and were sold off as a single lot. They might have been valuable, if they were the work of masters rather than forgers, but it was impossible to say in this city of merchants, which lacked experts able to discern the signs of a modern hand or distinguish the grandeur of a historic style beneath the craquelure of the mishandled canvases. Beneath a Slaughter of the Innocents, quite possibly by a disciple of Berruguete, and a Saint Denis, quite possibly by an imitator of Ribera, lay an open, sun-kissed garden of masked harlequins that captivated Sofía, even if, in Carlos’s estimation, those fin-de-siècle artists had abused the figure of the harlequin as a mere pretext for playing with color. His own preference was for realism, scenes of reaping and grape harvests, though he recognized that several of the pictures of static subjects hanging in the hall—a cauldron, a pipe, a fruit basket, a clarinet resting next to sheet music—did not lack for a certain beauty owing to the excellence of their execution. Esteban favored the imaginary, the fantastic, and dreamed awake before the works of contemporary creators, with monsters, spectral horses, impossible perspectives, a tree-man sprouting fingers, a wardrobe-man with empty drawers projecting from his abdomen . . . His favorite was a large piece from Naples, the product of an unknown hand, that negated every law of plasticity: an apocalyptic catastrophe in indefinite suspension. Explosion in a Cathedral was the title of that vision of a portico strewn in shards through the air—laggardly dissevering its parallel lines, hovering all the more dramatically to fall—poised to heap its tonnage of stone over the masses cowering in dread. (“I don’t know how you can just stand there looking at that,” said his cousin, but she too was oddly fascinated by that inert earthquake, that soundless tumult, that illustration of the end of time within reach and yet latent, dreadfully deferred. “It’s to grow accustomed to the idea,” Esteban answered, without knowing why, with that reflexive persistence that leads a person to repeat the same unamusing pun in the same circumstances for years on end without ever making anyone laugh.) At least the French master a few steps away, with his invented monument in the middle of an abandoned square—a kind of Asiatic-Roman temple, with arcades, obelisks, and finials—offered a sense of peace, of stability in the wake of tragedy, before one entered the dining room, which announced itself in costly still lifes and furnishings: two china cabinets of abbatial dimensions, impervious to termites and woodworms; eight upholstered chairs; and a long table on Solomonic columns. But as for the rest—“remains of a rubbish sale” was Sofía’s verdict as she thought of her narrow mahogany bed, she who had always dreamed of a mattress where she could toss and turn, sleep sideways, curled up, or with her arms and legs outspread, according to her whims. Her father, true to the customs inherited from his peasant grandparents, had always slept on a canvas cot presided over by a crucifix in a room on the second floor, between a walnut chest of drawers and a chamber pot of Mexican silver that he would empty at dawn into the drain in the stables with a sweeping gesture that suggested a farmhand nobly mowing wheat. “My people were from Extremadura,” he had often said, as though that explained everything. He was proud of an austerity alien to hand-kissing and soirees. Dressed in black as always since his wife’s untimely death, he’d been brought back by Don Cosme from the office, where he’d gone to endorse a document, after an apoplectic fit had left him lying in the ink of his own signature. Even in death he retained the hard, impassible expression of a man who had never asked for favors and never performed them for others. Sofía hadn’t seen him in recent years, apart from the odd Sunday, at the compulsory family luncheons that took her away from the Clarist convent for a few hours. As for Carlos, after grammar school, he was constantly sent off to the plantation with orders to fell, clear, or harvest. These could just as well have been issued in writing, for the lands were modest and almost entirely employed in the cultivation of sugarcane. “I rode eighty leagues to bring twelve heads of cabbage,” the young man observed, emptying his saddlebags after another journey to the country. “That’s how you raise a Spartan,” replied his father, who had a penchant for associating Sparta with cabbage, much as he accounted for the portentous levitation of Simon Magus with the bold hypothesis that the Samaritan had some knowledge of electricity. Carlos’s father’s plan of sending him off to study law was indefinitely postponed due to his fear of the new ideas and treacherous political enthusiasms that thrived in the halls of universities. The old man spared little thought for his weakly nephew Esteban; an orphan since boyhood, he’d grown up treating Sofía and Carlos as his siblings and never received less than they did. And yet, for the old merchant, who worked all year from sunup to sundown, there was something vexing about a man in frail health, especially in his own family. He would occasionally peek into the invalid’s room, furrowing his brow with disgust when he found him suffering one of his attacks. He’d grunt something about the damp, about people who were determined to sleep in caves like the Celtiberians of old, and, with a wistful recollection of the Tarpeian Rock, he would offer him grapes just in from the north, evoking the figures of illustrious cripples before departing with a shrug of the shoulders, muttering condolences, words of encouragement, proclamations about new medicines, and excuses for his inability to go on caring for those whose ailments left them stranded on the margins of a life the purpose of which was productivity and progress. After dawdling in the dining room, trying this and that with no concern for order, eating first a fig and then a sardine, or marzipan with olives and raw sausage, the little ones, as the Executor called them, opened the door to the adjoining building where the firm and warehouse lay, a door which had been sealed for three days of mourning. Past the desks and strongboxes, open roads cut through piles of sacks, barrels, and bundles of numberless provenance. At the end of Flour Street, with its fragrance of overseas mills, was the Avenue of Wines of Fuencarral, Valdepeñas, and Puente de la Reina, dripping red from the spigots in the barriques and exuding the aroma of cellars. The Road of Ropes and Riggings led to the fetid corner of cured fish, white flakes sweating brine onto the floor. Returning via Deer Leather Road, the adolescents found themselves back in the Spice Quarter, with its cabinets that conjured up, no sooner than you’d opened them, scents of ginger, laurel, saffron, and Vera Cruz pepper. Wheels of Manchego cheese reposed on parallel boards leading to Vinegar and Oil Court, past which, under vaults, the most miscellaneous items were kept: piles of playing cards, barber’s utensils, bundles of padlocks, green and red parasols, cocoa mills, Andean blankets brought over from Maracaibo, heaped dyers’ sticks and books of gold and silver leaf from Mexico. Nearer by were the platforms with their sacks of bird feathers—soft and swollen, like serge counterpanes. Carlos leaped over them abruptly, mimicking the motions of a swimmer. An armillary sphere, symbol of commerce and navigation, stood in the midst of that universe of things arrived on countless ocean routes, and Esteban spun its rings with a distracted hand. Everything, even here, was swathed in the stench of salt meat, but it was bearable now, as the meat was stored in the building’s furthest rooms. The siblings followed Honey Street back to the writing tables. “What garbage! What garbage!” Sofía murmured, her handkerchief pressed into her nose. Standing now on sacks of barley, Carlos contemplated the horizon below the roof, thinking with trepidation of the day he would have to set about selling, buying, reselling, negotiating, haggling, ignorant of prices, incapable of distinguishing one grain from another, forced to locate their purveyors in thousands of letters, receipts, invoices, proofs of purchase, appraisals all tucked away in drawers. A scent of sulfur constricted Esteban’s throat, swelling his eyes and bringing on an attack of sneezing. The effluvia of wine and smoked herring made Sofía faint. Giving her arm to her cousin, who was on the verge of another fit, she hurried home, where the Clarist Mother Superior was waiting for her with an edifying book. Carlos returned last, carrying the armillary sphere, which he placed in his bedroom. In the half-light of the salon with its covered windows, the nun spoke softly of the lies of the world and the solace of the cloister, while the men of the house amused themselves shifting the tropics and ecliptics around the terraqueous globe. A new life was beginning in the torpor of that afternoon, which the sun made unusually warm, lifting fetid evaporations from the puddles in the street. Gathered again for dinner among the fruits and fowl of the still lifes, the young people began making plans. The Executor counseled them to spend their mourning period on the estate while he took care of the deceased’s affairs—as was the custom, all instructions had been conveyed to him personally, with no record of the arrangements made apart from what was preserved in his memory. Carlos would find everything in order on his return, when he would embark formally on an apprenticeship in the ways of commerce. But Sofía recalled that previous attempts to take Esteban to the country “to breathe the clean air” had only aggravated his torments. Where he suffered least was, in the end, in his room with its low struts beside the stables . . . There was talk of other journeys: to Mexico with its thousand domes, which glimmered from the other end of the Gulf. But the United States, with its unceasing progress, fascinated Carlos, who longed to see the New York harbor, the battlefield at Lexington, and Niagara Falls. Esteban dreamed of Paris, its exhibitions of paintings, its intellectual cafés, its literary life; he wanted to take a course at the Collège de France, where they taught Oriental languages, the study of which—while not especially useful from a pecuniary perspective—must be invigorating for a man like him, who aspired to read the manuscripts of recently discovered writings from Asia. Sofía imagined performances at the Opéra and the Comédie Française, where the eye could admire a thing as beautiful and celebrated as Houdon’s Voltaire right there in the vestibule. In their itinerant imaginings, they gazed at the doves on Piazza San Marco and the Epsom Derby; visited Sadler’s Wells Theatre and the Louvre; stopped at storied booksellers, legendary circuses, the ruins of Palmyra and Pompeii, saw Etruscan miniature horses and mottled vases on display in Greek Street, yearned to take in everything and settle on nothing—and the men, their senses inflamed, were secretly attracted by a world of licentious diversions, and would know where to look and how to indulge when the young lady was out shopping or visiting monuments. After their prayers, without yet taking a decision of any kind, they embraced each other and wept, feeling alone in the universe, defenseless orphans in an indifferent, soulless city, estranged from everything that spoke of poetry or art, captive to the business, to fidelity. Overcome by the heat and the scent of salt meat, onions, and coffee coming from the road, they climbed to the attic wrapped in their robes, taking blankets and pillows with them, and fell asleep, their faces turned toward the sky, after a discussion of habitable and likely already inhabited planets where life might be better than it was on this earth, which was subjugated permanently to the workings of death.
