Explosion in a Cathedral, page 30
XXXIX.
The sick man continued to struggle. It beggared belief that this pallid, fragile creature, looking like the last of his line, could possess such reserves of vitality. Choking almost continuously, consumed by fever, he yet had the strength to shout in his deliria that he refused to die. Esteban had seen an Indian, a negro die several times: for them things happened quite differently. They lay prostrate without protesting, like wounded beasts, growing alien to their surroundings, wanting more and more to be left in peace, as if resigned in advance to eventual defeat. Jorge, on the other hand, twitched, pleaded, moaned, unable to accept what was evident to the rest. To such a degree had civilization dispossessed man of all composure before his death, despite the many arguments forged across the centuries to elucidate it and accept it with tranquility. Even now, when death was inexorably near and the clock was ticking down, one had to try and convince oneself that death wasn’t an end, but a journey, that beyond it lay another life one would enter with certain guarantees vouchsafed on this side of the barrier. Jorge himself solicited the presence of a priest, who took as a final confession what was nothing more than a babble of disjointed phrases. Seeing the doctors had given up, Rosaura persuaded Sofía to let her bring a very old black shaman to the house. “What’s it matter?” the young woman said. “Ogé too had respect for shamans . . .” The medicine man proceeded to purify the room with aromatic waters, threw shells on the floor, noting whether they fell faceup or facedown, then brought plants from an herb vendor whose stall lay near the marketplace. Whatever he had done, they had to admit he’d known how to calm the sick man’s gasps, reanimating a heart that showed, at times, an agonizing weakness . . . But little more could be hoped for. The mechanisms of Jorge’s body were failing, one by one. The negro’s concoctions gave only a passing relief. The Corpse-bearer and the Gravedigger lurked around the house at all hours. Esteban was unsurprised when he saw Carlos’s tailor arrive with mourning clothes. Sofía had ordered her own from her seamstress, in such abundance that they filled several baskets placed willy-nilly in a room in the back where the young woman had dressed and undressed since the beginning of her husband’s illness. Perhaps from respect for some private superstition, she refused to look inside them. Esteban understood: by having them send her these black dresses, she had carried out a rite of conjuration. Taking them out would mean accepting what she didn’t wish to accept. Everyone had to feign belief that black cloth would not need reappear under the roof of that house. And yet three days later, after his heart inevitably gave out, the black cloth made its entrance through the front door just past four in the afternoon; the black of nuns’ habits, the black of cassocks, the black suits of friends, customers, fellow Masons, acquaintances, and employees; the black of the Mortuary, of grave mound and shovels; the black of black persons, distant relatives from four generations back, ancillary kin like forgotten shadows who emerged from their faraway neighborhoods to form plaintive choruses beneath the arcades in the courtyard. In their ruthlessly compartmentalized society, the Vigil was the one ceremony that broke the barriers of class and race, allowing the barber who had once razored the cheeks of the deceased to rub elbows beside the coffin with the Captain General of the Colony, the Rector of the College of Physicians, the Count of Pozos Dulces, or the rich estate owner, recently granted the title of Marqués by Royal Proclamation. Overwhelmed by the hundreds of unknown faces—Havana’s traders and industrialists to a man had come that night to the house of tall timbers—Sofía, haggard from her vigils, hardened by that inner pain exempt from the need to show itself in plaints and tears, played the role of widow with a dignity and grace that even Esteban admired. Pallid, dejected, dizzy, perhaps, from the perfume of so many flowers, whose mingled odors transformed to a waxy stench amid the fetor of the tapers and altar candles and the medicinal vapors of mustard and camphor still lingering between the walls, Sofía retained in the detachment of mourning a beauty untouched by her imperfections. Her forehead was perhaps too willful, her brows too thick, her eyes too reluctant to commit, her arms too long, her legs too weak to sustain the architecture of her hips. But she exuded, even beneath the onerous demands of the moment, a glow of pure femininity that emerged from her inner depths, and as he glimpsed it, Esteban grasped the secret springs of her allure. He walked out to the courtyard to escape the hum of prayers that filled the salon where the body was laid out. He went to his room, where the marionettes offered a bizarre counterpoint to the present, resembling a drawing by Callot. He collapsed into his hammock, unable to free his mind of the stubborn realization that tomorrow there would be one man fewer in the house. Those imagined travels that had so troubled him days before were now the mere memories of words. A year of toilsome mourning would begin, with Masses said in memory of the deceased and mandatory visits to the cemetery. He had a year before him to convince the others of the need to change their lives. It would be easy to revisit that subject that had fed their conversations since adolescence. Carlos, obsessed with the business, might only accompany them for two or three months. He would arrange to meet with Sofía somewhere in Europe, and he thought of Spain, a country now less threatened than before by the wars in France that had leaped past the Mediterranean and landed, preposterously, in Egypt. It was a matter of not rushing, of not falling prey to the impulses of a moment, of drawing on the inexhaustible resources of hypocrisy. Of lying when it was useful to do so. Of playing, but deliberately, the role of Tartuffe . . . He returned to the sullen vigil, shaking hands and accepting consoling embraces from the people who kept filing through the front door and filling the galleries. He looked at the coffin. The man that lay there was an intruder. An intruder who would be taken away tomorrow, on others’ shoulders, and Esteban had been freed from the intimate crime of longing for his physical elimination—as the philosophes of the Century Before had called the execution of a scoundrel. Mourning would close the house, reduce the family circle to its proper proportions, recreate the atmosphere of earlier days. Perhaps the old disorder would return, as if time had traveled backward. After the long night of the vigil; after the funeral with its orations, its cross-bearers, offerings, vestments, tapers, crepe and flowers, obituary and requiem, and who had come in pomp, and who had wept, and who had said that we were nothing . . . After the end of mourning, the duty of shaking a hundred sweaty hands under a sun that tormented the eyes with its reflections on the marble headstones, a natural bond would return with all they’d left behind . . . When the drear of the funeral obligations was done, they sat once more around the big table in the dining room, Carlos, Esteban, and Sofía—on a Sunday—before a dinner ordered from a nearby hotel. Remigio, who hadn’t been able to go to the market because he was at the cemetery, brought trays covered in cloth, bearing almond-crusted seabream, marzipan, squab à la crapaudine, truffled this and confited that, which Esteban had ordered personally, saying whatever they didn’t have should be found, irrespective of the cost. “What a coincidence!” Sofía said. “I seem to remember we ate almost the same thing after . . .” (and her voice trailed off, because they never spoke of their father in the house). “The very same,” Esteban said. “In hotels the food varies little.” And he noticed his cousin had placed her elbows on the table, and the slovenly manners of earlier years seemed to have returned. She sampled bits of everything in no particular order, looking at the tablecloth, playing mechanically with the glassware. She went to bed early, exhausted by the nights of vigil. There was no reason to expose herself to contagion now that Jorge was gone. She had her narrow spinster’s bed removed from a bedroom they used for storage and placed in the room where the baskets with her mourning clothes still waited, unopened. “Poor Sofía!” Carlos said when the two men were alone. “To be left a widow at her age!” “She’ll marry again soon,” said Esteban, fingering a gray seed on a golden thread that had been his personal talisman in his sailing days, to keep storms at bay and ward off disaster . . . In the days that followed, to make himself useful in some way, he went regularly to the storehouse, taking Jorge’s office—pretending the business now interested him a great deal. Daily contact with merchants in the square and people from the provinces kept him abreast of surprising events. Mute apprehension was spreading across the island. The rich landowners lived in constant distress, believing a conjuration of negroes was determined to repeat here what the negroes of Saint-Domingue had done there. Rumors circulated about the existence of an invisible, nameless mulatto chief, who roved the fields and provoked the crews at the sugar mills. Too many pockets hid the writings of the damned French. Anonymous placards, plastered by mysterious hands on the city walls at night, hailed the Revolution in the name of freedom of conscience, and announced the imminent erection of the guillotine in the public squares. Any act of violence committed by a negro—even a drunk or a madman—was attributed to subversive intent. At the same time, the ships brought news of political agitation in Venezuela and New Granada. All over, the winds of conspiracy blew. It was said that the barracks were on alert and that new cannons had arrived from Spain to reinforce the battalions of the Castillo del Príncipe . . . “Hogwash!” Carlos said when the news reached him, taking the conversation prudently back into the terrain of business. “In this overgrown hamlet, people have nothing else to talk about.”
XL.
Bitter presence.
Goya
One night when Carlos and Sofía were absent from home, attending some ceremony at the Androgynous Lodge, Esteban, with a slight cold, moved to the salon, placing a large glass of punch nearby, to read an old collection of predictions and prophecies published a half century before by Torres Villarroel, the Great Piscator of Salamanca. It shocked him to find that this man who boasted of being a Doctor of Chrysopoeia, Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Transmutation—all this to sell his almanacs—had foreseen, in terms of chilling accuracy, the fall of the Throne of France:
When you count to one thousand
With three hundred doubled
And fifty times two,
With nine more tens,
Then you will see,
Miserable France, calamity
Awaits you,
With your King and Prince,
And your greatest glory
Shall see its final end.
He then turned to Villarroel’s biography, very amusing for the picaresque adventures and winding roads the poet passed through. He was a guide for blind hermits, a student and bullfighter, a barber surgeon, a dancer, a watchman and a mathematician, a soldier in Porto and a professor, before ending his days serenely in a monk’s habit. He reached the mysterious episode of the phantom knockers that disturbed the peace of a mansion in Madrid, tearing paintings from the walls, when he noticed that the early evening storm had turned to a heavy rain whipped by harsh winds. He resumed his reading, paying no attention to an upstairs window that sounded to have been left open; and it amused him to hear its shutter clacking just as he reached those pages that told of horrors and apparitions. But the noise soon grew irritating, and Esteban went upstairs. The open window was in the room where Sofía slept. It had been foolish not to close it before, as the rain had poured straight through it, soaking the floor as if thrown from buckets and soaking the bedroom carpet. Next to the armoire, a puddle was forming over uneven floorboards. And in it lay the still-unopened wicker baskets full of mourning clothes, avidly soaking up water. Esteban set them on a table. But they were so wet, he thought it best to remove the garments inside them. He opened the first, expecting to stick his hand into the darkness of black cloth, but instead found a fiesta of bright fabrics, satin and silk, with showy adornments of a kind he had never seen in Sofía’s wardrobe. He lifted the lid of the next one and saw a costly display of flounces, Valenciennes lace, fine fringes, blouses, and extremely delicate intimate wear. Stupefied, feeling guilty for violating a secret, Esteban closed the baskets, leaving them there on the table. He took down several blankets to dry the floor. As he did so, he couldn’t take his eyes off the wicker baskets, which had arrived at the house with their contents while Jorge was sweating out his final fever in the adjoining room. At the vigil, his cousin had worn her mourning clothes, it was true. But they amounted to no more than three dresses, which she donned one after the other, and even then, it seemed strange that Sofía should choose to wear something so humble and lackluster—Esteban had supposed her to be guided by a will to mortification. But this sentiment he’d imagined before was impossible to reconcile with that other will, seen only now, to have made for her garments as costly, unseemly, and useless as those he had just discovered. There were dresses there meant for drawing the eyes of crowds at balls and theaters; leggings by the dozen; embroidered sandals; sumptuous gowns destined for urbane ostentation, but also for the deepest intimacy. He lifted the top of the one basket that was still unopened. Inside it were more normal, more understated dresses, unceremonial, meant for wearing out, with robes of fine texture—bright and merry—and garish details. But the enigma was the same: nothing he had found there was black, and nothing spoke of mourning or any expression of grief. Sofía knew how quickly women’s fashions changed, in those times particularly. In the city, which was thriving economically once again, the women kept up with what was worn in Europe. It was unthinkable that Sofía would buy so sumptuous an array of clothing, knowing that when her year of mourning was over—and when the burden of half-mourning still lay ahead of her—her garments would be out of style . . . Esteban was tormenting himself with questions, resorting to the most excruciating suppositions—imagining his cousin led a double life, unsuspected even by her brother—when he heard the carriage entering the gate. Sofía appeared on the threshold of the bedroom, where she stopped, looking surprised. Esteban, wringing a blanket over a pail, told her what had happened. “Your clothes must be soaked,” he said, pointing at the baskets. “I’ll take them out. Leave me alone,” she said, accompanying him to the door. After she had told him goodnight, she locked the door behind her.
* * *
• • •
The next day, Esteban was in the storehouse, unable to concentrate on his tasks, when a tumult broke out in the street. Windows slammed shut as shouts proclaimed that the negroes had risen up as they had in Haiti. The peddlers carried off their chests, going home in a wild retreat, some with carts full of toys, some with sacks full of religious paraphernalia. In the doorways, old women talked of death and rape in the midst of voices shouting to be heard over the commotion of a carriage overturned after taking the corner too quickly. Choruses formed here and there and conveyed the most contradictory notices: that two regiments had been sent to the city walls to repel the advance of a column of slaves; that the coloreds had tried to blow up the gunpowder depot; that French agitators had come from Baltimore by boat and were causing havoc in the city; that fires had broken out in the Arsenal neighborhood. Soon it came to light that the uproar was down to a dust-up between troublemakers and American sailors who, after enjoying all the women, liquor, and cards that the famous dive bar La Lola had to offer, had tried to leave without paying, beating the dealer, kicking the barmaid, and breaking the furnishings and mirrors. A battle erupted when a gathering of Congo negroes got involved, stopping on their way to the Church of Paula, torches raised, preparing to render homage to a patron saint. At the end of a clash with clubs and machetes, made worse when the watchmen hurried in, several of the wounded were left lying on the ground. An hour later, order was restored in that always unruly quarter. But the Governor, intending to use the moment to put an end to other conflicts, issued a proclamation announcing measures against anyone suspected of spreading subversive ideas, pasting up placards—this was a frequent occurrence—advocating for the abolition of slavery, or making remarks injurious to the Spanish Crown . . . “They’re still playing at Revolution,” said Esteban at home that evening. “Better to play at something than at nothing,” Sofía replied abrasively. “At least I have no secrets to hide,” Esteban said, staring her down. She shrugged, turning her back to him, her expression hard and willful. During dinner she remained silent, dodging all interrogating looks—not with the shame of one caught acting unsuitably, but with the haughty manner of a woman resolved to keep her reasons to herself. That night, while Esteban and Carlos played a desultory game of chess to checkmate, Sofía hid her face behind an enormous tome of star charts. “The Arrow arrived this afternoon,” Carlos said, moving his bishop toward Esteban’s last remaining knight. “Tomorrow we’ll have the Yankee over for lunch.” “I’m glad you remembered,” Sofía said from the distance of her constellations. “We’ll put another setting on the table.”
