Explosion in a Cathedral, page 31
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Esteban arrived home the next day at supper time expecting to find all the lamps lit. But when he entered the salon, he saw that something strange was happening. Dexter, nervous, was pacing from one wall to the other, offering strange explanations to a weeping, dejected Carlos, whose incipient obesity had something parodical about it as he writhed in grief: “There’s nothing I can do,” the North American shouted, opening his arms wide. “She’s a widow and has reached the age of majority. I must treat her as a passenger like any other. I’ve spoken to her. She won’t listen to reason. Even if she was my daughter, there’s nothing I could do.” He strayed off into details: She had bought her passage from Miralla & Co., paying in cash. Her papers, facilitated by a brother Mason, showed all the requisite stamps. She was traveling to Barbados, where she would abandon the Arrow to embark on a Dutch ship to Cayenne. “To Cayenne,” Carlos said, stupefied. “To Cayenne, you say! Not Madrid, not London, not Naples!” And noticing Esteban’s presence, he spoke to him as if he knew something: “It’s as if she’s lost her mind. She says she’s tired of this house, tired of the city. And she’s going abroad like this, without warning, without saying goodbye. She’s been on the ship for two hours now, with her luggage and everything.” He had gone to try and dissuade her: “It’s like talking to a wall. I can’t just drag her here. She’s determined to leave.” He turned back to Dexter: “You, as captain, have the right to refuse a passenger. Don’t tell me you don’t.” The other, irritated at a resolve that called into question his probity, raised his voice: “No moral or legal reason compels me. Let her do as she wishes. No one will stop her from going to Cayenne. If she doesn’t this time, she will soon. And if you lock the doors, she’ll crawl out the window.” “Why?” the others barked threateningly. The captain swiped them away with a firm palm. “Get it into your heads for once that she knows perfectly well why she wants to go to Cayenne.” And, index finger raised in warning like a preacher, he cited a Biblical proverb: “Weak seem the words of the heedless, but they invade even the secrets of the womb.” That phrase, its tone darkened by the final word, had the effect of a stimulus for Esteban. Grasping the seaman by the lapels of his frock coat, he asked for clear, firm explanations without circumlocutions. Dexter uttered a cold phrase that made everything clear: “While you and Ogé were out trawling for whores on the docks of Santiago, she stayed onboard with the other one. My sailors told me everything. It was a scandal. I found it so repugnant that I moved back the hour of our departure . . .” Now there was nothing more for Esteban to ask. Everything had come together. This explained that shipment of luxurious clothing soon after she’d heard that Someone had risen again, omnipotent in a nearby part of America. He understood the hidden intention of a thousand questions in the past: in exchange for a few denigrating adjectives about the other one, she’d managed to find out every relevant detail of his life, his achievements, his errors. Hypocritically, she called him a monster, an abomination, a political beast, to learn more and more, in snippets, in bits, in steps, about the yearnings, the doings, the peculiarities of the fallen and rehabilitated Plenipotentiary. That buried will had gone on working tenaciously in silence until it erupted in appetites not even stanched by the presence of a man in his death throes. In this there was something of the sordid promiscuity of mortuary flowers or funeral tapers, with wretched thoughts all too evident in the purchase of intimate garments made to adjust to the contours of her naked body. Sofía revealed herself to Esteban all at once as the ignoble, inadmissible larva of a woman devoted, acquiescent, luxuriant beneath the weight of a man who had known the pliancy of her uncorrupted flesh. Remembering the disgust she’d felt one night at that world of whores who were no more than ancillary protagonists—disinterested, perhaps—of human coupling, Esteban struggled to reconcile the two personalities inhabiting that same figure: the one, blushing with indignation and ire at an act that her religious education endued with filthiness, and the other which, not long later, had succumbed to desire, yielding to the play of deception and complicity. “It’s your fault for marrying her off to a cretin,” Esteban shouted, looking for someone to blame for what he took as a monstrous defection. “That never was a good marriage,” Dexter said, standing before a mirror to smooth the lapels the other man had wrinkled. “When husband and wife have an understanding in the bedroom, you can tell, even when they argue. What they had was a comedy. Something was missing. Just one look at his hands, and you knew: they were the hands of a Catholic nun, with soft little fingers that didn’t know how to grab hold of anything.” And Esteban remembered the excessive care Sofía showed in exercising at all times and places—even at the edge of the tomb—the functions of the good wife, with a submission, a solicitude, an opportuneness ill-suited to her independent and disordered cast of mind. It almost pleased him that she hadn’t entered as a virgin into that cheap wedding which for him was the most unpardonable capitulation to the customs of a detestable society. But thinking this evoked for him that Sovereign Presence that continued to weigh upon their house from so far away. Seeing the inertia of Carlos, who remained baffled and lachrymose, he rose and said, “I will bring her back, one way or another.” “You’ll get nothing from it but a scandal,” Dexter said. “She has a right to leave.” “Go,” Carlos said. “Make one last effort . . .” Esteban slammed the door and departed for the port. When he had reached the wharf where the Arrow was moored, the scent of recently caught fish made him gasp: he walked between hillocks of porgies, combers, sardines, whose scales glimmered by the light of firebrands. A fisherman sank his hand beneath a jute cloth and pulled out a handful of squid, throwing it on the scale. Sofía was standing high on the prow, still in her mourning clothes, dark, elongated, as though impervious to the stench of scaling, ink, and blood rising up toward her. There was in her something of the impassibility of a mythological heroine contemplating the offerings brought to her dwelling by some People of the Sea. Esteban’s fury was placated upon seeing that immobile woman who watched his approach impassively, her eyes disarming in their fixity. All at once, he was afraid. He felt helpless at the thought of hearing certain words which, in her mouth, would acquire a deafening eloquence. He didn’t dare climb up to face her. He contemplated her in silence. “Come,” he finally said. She turned toward the port, leaning on the gunwale. On the other shore glimmered the lights of neighborhoods never visited; further on lay the confusion of lights of the vast baroque candelabra that was the city with its red, green, orange windows, bright amid colonnades. To the left was the dark passage that led to the shadowy sea: the sea of exploits, of hazardous navigations, of wars and skirmishes that had forever stained red this Middle Sea with its thousand islands. She was traveling toward him who had made her aware of herself and who, in a letter brought her by that weepy child standing there below, had spoken to her of his solitude in the midst of triumph. Where he was, there was still much to be done; a man of his stature could not but commence great enterprises; projects in which all found their true measure. “Come back,” the voice repeated below. “You think you’re stronger than you are.” To go home would be to doubt that force; to consummate a second defeat. She had known too well nights of frozen flesh, of the pretense of an absent jubilation. “Come back.” In the distance, the old mansion, which clung to her body like a shell; beyond it lay the dawn, the lights of immensity, past the proclamations and bells. Here, the parish church, the alms box, the tedious transit of a life lived in the eversame; there, an epic world inhabited by Titans. “Come back,” the voice repeated. Sofía stepped away from the gunwale, hiding in the shadows on deck. The other went on talking, his voice louder now. But the din of the fishermen muffled that monologue ascending in gusts of words that spoke of a house built by all that would now be left in ruins. “As if a comity of brothers and sister sufficed to make a home,” she thought. Esteban, leaning against the ship’s keel, continued unheeded. That enormous wooden body, smelling of salt, of algae, of marine vegetation, was soft to him, almost feminine, with the smooth submissiveness of its damp flanks. Above, a figurehead on the prow, with the face of a woman, white plaster eyes surrounded by a thick blue line, stood in for the other woman who would depart at dawn, immensely wealthy, returned to desiring, freed of the black that diminished her beauty and enchained her bliss. She would leave the family circle to profane its secrets, telling them to another who perhaps was already waiting for her. Esteban felt miserable, denuded—denuded with a nudity too familiar to her to perceive it as such—when he saw that his will to violence had diminished into feeble imploration. Above, Sofía waited for the sails to stretch and the wind to swell them. She would advance toward that foreign seed, the furrow within her open; would be cup and ark, like the woman in Genesis who, joining hands with a man, was forced to leave her parents’ home . . . People were staring at him, listening in, laughing at what they thought they understood. He walked away from the ship and found Captain Dexter between the baskets of fish: “Is everything settled?” the seaman asked. “Completely settled,” Esteban responded. “Safe travels to all.”
XLI.
Now he was standing on a corner near the docks, wavering, ashamed at his defeat. He muttered phrases that he should have said before but that had failed to emerge from his lips. The ship was there close, surrounded by bollards, its silhouette malevolent in the night. The mermaid on the prow, her split tail clinging to the rails, emerged from the shadows when a lamp threw light across her face, which resembled a death mask, as if she’d been taken from a tomb. Esteban felt the welling of unuttered words that arranged themselves in speeches, reprimands, warnings, reproaches, violence that skirted insult and insults that ended with abominable words beyond which language is exhausted. If she stood firm through this verbal ambush—and her character suggested she could—Esteban would be left as defenseless as before. Now ill intentions reared their head. It was eight. Captain Dexter’s ship would depart at five in the morning. There were nine hours left; enough time to do something, perhaps. Esteban overlaid his spite, his resentment, with a theory of duty: it was his obligation to prevent Sofía from traveling to Cayenne. He must not shy before the most radical measures to prevent her moral suicide. Going there, for her, would be tantamount to a descent into Hell. Sofía had reached the age of majority. But Carlos had legal recourse to prevent her going. He could allege mental alienation. There had already been a case, months before, of a young widow with an illustrious name who had tried to run off to Spain with one of those actors who sang popular ditties in the Coliseum. The authorities were always well-disposed when the honor of honorable families was at stake. Colonial society took a dim view of fits of passion and was always ready to call the bailiff when a lovers’ quarrel or rebellious woman disturbed the peace. The Church, too, got involved in such matters, standing in the way of the guilty . . . Esteban, prepared to go to any length to bring this intolerable situation to a close, arrived home panting, sweaty from so much running, and burst in on a group of men of gruff, policemanlike appearance who had invaded the house and were busy opening wardrobes, inspecting cabinets and desks, walking back and forth between the stables and the upper floors. The detectives passed papers among themselves, making certain the texts Sofía had kept under her bed were indeed The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the French Constitution. Rosaura approached Esteban and told him, “Go. Señor Carlos escaped over the roof.” He crept back into the alcove soundlessly, with measured steps, and returned outside. But two men were already posted at the front door. “You’re under arrest,” they told him, ordering him to a corner of the salon where they could keep an eye on him.
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They had him wait for several hours before they interrogated him. They walked past him repeatedly, as though unaware of his presence, looking to see if there was anything hidden behind the paintings or under the rug. They sank iron bars into the soft soil of the flower beds to feel for boxes buried under the couch grass. Another took books from the shelves, staring at the covers and weighing them in his hand, before throwing to the floor the odd volume of Voltaire, Rousseau, Bouffon, and generally anything printed in French prose—verse being less worthy of preoccupation. Finally, at three in the morning, the search was deemed concluded. There was more than enough evidence that their home was a den of conniving Freemasons, spreaders of Revolutionary writings, enemies of the Crown who intended to seed anarchy and godlessness in the Overseas Domains. “Where is the lady?” they asked, being told by their informers she was one of the wickedest conspirators of all. Rosaura and Remigio replied that they had no idea. That she had left early. That she was rarely away from home, but that today, she was gone despite the late hour. Someone recommended they register the ships in the port to avert an attempt at escape. “You’ll be wasting your time,” Esteban said, speaking up from the corner. “My cousin Sofía has never had anything to do with all this. You’ve been badly informed. I put those papers in her bedroom this very afternoon without her knowing.” “Does your cousin often sleep away from home?” “That is a private matter of hers.” The investigators exchanged an ironic glance: “Husband dead in his hole, wife out on the stroll,” one said, laughing boorishly. And again they spoke of going to the ships. They instructed Esteban to write a few lines on paper. Their request struck him as strange, but the detainee scribbled down a few verses of Saint John of the Cross he had read in recent days, and which remained very present in his mind: Oh thou, given over to this loving love candescent . . . “The handwriting is the same,” one of the interrogators said, brandishing a copy of The Social Contract in the margins of which Esteban had noted down anti-monarchical ideas years before. Attention turned entirely to him: “We know you returned recently from a long voyage.” “That is true.” “Where were you then?” “In Madrid.” “That’s a lie,” one of them said. “In his cousin’s desk, we found two letters postmarked in Paris, which expressed, by the by, great enthusiasm for revolution.” “That could be,” Esteban said. “But afterward I went to Madrid.” “Let me talk to him,” one said, opening a path. “I’m no Galician nor Catalan.” And he began to ask him about streets, fairgrounds, churches, and other sites in the capital, none of which Esteban was acquainted with. “You’ve never been in Madrid in your life,” he concluded. “Possibly,” Esteban said. And then another stepped forward. “How did you make your living in France, seeing that the war with Spain meant your family couldn’t send you money?” “I was paid for translations.” “Translations of what?” “Various things.” The clock struck four. Again there was talk of Sofía’s inexplicable absence and the need to go to the ships . . . “This is idiocy,” Esteban shouted, striking his fist against the table: “You think you can search a house in Havana and put an end to the idea of Liberty in the world! It’s too late! No one can stop what’s already begun!” The veins swelled in his neck as he repeated what he’d already said, adding this time Fraternity and Equality, forcing the scribe’s pen to race across the page. “Very interesting. Very interesting. Now we’re starting to understand each other,” said the interrogators. And their Chief cornered Esteban, pelting him with questions: “Are you a Mason?” “I am.” “Do you deny Jesus Christ and the sanctity of our Religion?” “My God is the God of the philosophes.” “Do you share, and have you publicized, the ideas of the French Revolution?” “In full awareness of what that means.” “Where were the proclamations we found here printed?” “I am not a snitch.” “Who translated them into Spanish?” “I did.” “And these American carmagnoles?” “Those, too.” “When?” At that an officer who had remained upstairs, obstinately determined to find more, appeared before them. “The lady of the house had quite a collection of fans,” he said, opening one, which featured a scene of the storming of the Bastille. “And that’s not all. She has all sorts of jewel boxes and pincushions in the most suspect colors.” Esteban, seeing those tricolor trifles, thought tenderly of the adolescent enthusiasms that had driven a person as strong as Sofía to horde these trinkets that for years could be found anywhere in the world. “One way or another, we’ll have to get our hands on the bitch,” said the Chief. And again, they talked of going to the docks. Esteban then admitted everything, at length and in detail: he returned to the arrival of Victor Hugues in Havana, to draw out and add color to the tale that the scribe was passing to paper in flowery calligraphy. He spoke of his personal contacts with Brissot and Dalbarade; his propaganda work in the Basque Country; his friendship with those blackguards, the traitors Marchena and Martínez de Ballesteros; the departure for Guadeloupe; the Loeuillets’ printing press; the Cayenne episode, where he had worked hand in hand with Billaud-Varenne, the sworn enemy of the French Kingdom . . . “Note it down, scribe, note it down,” the Chief said, stunned at these revelations. “Billaud . . . is that spelled with a y?” the scribe asked. “With a double l,” Esteban replied, launching into a digression on French Grammar. “The repetition of the l is due to . . .” “We’re not going to get lost in debates about a consonant or two,” the Chief shouted, crossing his arms with frustration. “How did you return to Havana?” “For a Freemason, all doors are open,” Esteban replied, spinning a yarn that made him out to be a notorious conspirator. But his words turned farcical as the hands of the clock approached five. His interrogators couldn’t grasp why, instead of defending himself, he had volunteered a confession so replete with misdeeds that it could mean his death by garrote vil. Now, with nothing left to tell, Esteban repeated vulgar jokes about the Bourbon Messalina, the Prince of Peace cuckolding His Majesty, the rockets that would soon explode in King Charles’ backside. “He’s a fanatic,” the officers said. “A fanatic or a madman. America is teeming with Robespierres like this one. If we’re not careful, they’ll start cutting off heads left and right around here.” Esteban talked on, indicting himself for actions he’d never been part of, boasting of personally distributing revolutionary documents in Venezuela and New Granada. “Write it down, scribe, write it down. There’d better not be a single drop left in your inkpot,” the Chief said, his questions at their end . . . It was five-thirty. Esteban asked to be accompanied to the roof, where he had left an object of some personal significance in an antique vase on the balustrade. Eager to discover further evidence, several investigators followed him. But the vase contained nothing apart from a nest of wasps that tried to sting them. Ignoring their insults, Esteban looked toward the port: the Arrow had departed, the place where the ship had moored was empty. He returned to the salon. “May the good scribe note down the following,” he said. “I declare before God, my Lord and master, that everything I have said is a lie. You will find not a single proof that I did any of the things I said, other than that I was in Paris. No witnesses or documents will demonstrate otherwise. I said all that I said to aid a fugitive. I did this because it mattered to me to do it.” “You’ll save yourself from the garotte, perhaps,” the Chief said. “But nothing will keep you out of prison in Ceuta. We’ve sent people to the quarries in Africa for less.” “As if I cared now about my fate!” Esteban responded. He stopped before the Explosion in a Cathedral, where splinters of wood, thrown up by a conflagration, were suspended in a nightmare atmosphere: “Even the stones I will go to break now were already present in this picture.” Grabbing a stool, he hurled it against the painting, tearing the canvas, which fell loudly to the floor. “Take me away, damn it,” Esteban said, so exhausted, so needful of sleep, that all he cared for was to rest, even if he had to do so in prison.
