Explosion in a Cathedral, page 32
Chapter Six
XLII.
The waves came from the South, calm and balanced, weaving and unweaving the lace of their slender foam, which resembled, over the waters, the nervure of dark marble. The greens of the coast were behind her, and they were sailing now in waters of a blue so deep they seemed made of molten, though hibernal and vitreous, matter, shaken by distant throbbing. Not a creature appeared in that entire sea that gathered over buried mountains and abysses like the First Sea of Creation, before murex and argonaut. Only the Caribbean, despite the swarming creatures within it, ever had that look of an abandoned ocean. As though called to mysterious duties, the fishes fled the surface, medusas sank, the gulfweed disappeared, and what remained before the eye was conveyed in infinite values: the eternally postponed boundary of the horizon; space, and beyond space, stars present in a sky the mere mention of which evoked the entire crushing majesty that word had once held for those who first uttered it—the earliest of all words, perhaps, save those that had only begun to describe pain, fear, or hunger. Here, on a barren sea, the sky took on an enormous weight, with those constellations seen since time immemorial, which human beings persisted in dividing and consecrating across the centuries, projecting myths on the unattainable, bending the locations of the stars to the contours of the figures that peopled the imaginations of those perpetual inventors of fables. There was a sort of infantile intrepidness in their crowding of the firmament with Bears, Dogs, Bulls, and Lions, thought Sofía, leaning on the railings of the Arrow, facing the night. That was a way of simplifying eternity; of sealing it in precious books of prints like the volume of star charts in the family library, the plates of which seemed to detail terrible combats between centaurs and scorpions, eagles and dragons. In naming the constellations, man returned to the primordial language of his ancestors so faithfully that when the people of Christ appeared, there was no place in a sky overrun with pagans. The stars had been given to Andromeda and Perseus, to Hercules and Cassiopeia. Their entitlements, passed down through bloodlines, were not transferable to the simple fishermen of the Lake Tiberias, nor did the fishermen have need of stars to guide their boats to the place where Someone, soon to spill his blood, would forge a religion heedless of stars . . . When the Pleiades paled and the light emerged, mottled helmets advanced toward the ship by the thousand, casting shadows over long red festoons that etched phantasmal medieval warriors beneath the water, the silhouettes of Lombard princes clad in chainmail—like chainmail were the filaments dragged across their path, running shoulder to hip, neck to knee, ear to thigh on the bodies, pierced by splinters of light, of those creatures Captain Dexter referred to as men-of-war. The submerged army opened to let the vessel through, closing rank afterward in their silent march from the unknown, which would proceed for days until their heads burst beneath the sun and their festoons were eaten away to nothing . . . At midmorning, they entered a new country: that of the Gorgons, open like the wings of birds, at the edge of a water whitened by their migration. And then little thimbles appeared in dun swarms, opening or closing in hungry contractions, followed by a band of vagrant snails, clinging to a raft of hardened foam . . . A sudden storm transfigured the sea, turning it glaucous and opaque. A saline scent rose from the water percussed by rain, drops of which the timbers of the deck absorbed. The sails’ canvas sounded of slate beneath hail, and every fiber of the taut lines creaked. The thunder traveled from West to East, pounded like a patient drummer over the ship, then marched off with the clouds, leaving the midafternoon sea bathed in a strange, auroral light, as calm and iridescent as a lake on a plateau. The prow of the Arrow ploughed the still surface, leaving foamy arabesques in its wake that divulged, for a few hours, the passage of a ship. At twilight, the wakes grew pale over depths replete with night, tracing paths and crossings over the newly deserted water—a map so deserted that those who looked upon it felt they were the lone navigators of their era. And until the morning, they remained in the Land of Phosphorescences, with light coming from below, open in fans, in trickles of brilliance, drawing shapes like anchors and grape bunches, anemones or heads of hair—or fistfuls of coins, or altar candles, or remote windows of stained glass, submerged cathedrals, pierced by the cold rays of abysmal suns . . . Years before, Sofía had leaned on the same gunwale, sucking in the breeze from the nose of the same prow—but this time, she was undisturbed by adolescent heartache. Her decision had matured her, and she was traveling toward something that could not be other than she imagined it. For two days, all she had left behind weighed heavily on her spirit. On the third day, she woke with an exultant sense of liberty. Her bonds were broken. She had escaped the quotidian and was penetrating a timeless present. Soon the great task, awaited for years, would begin in its chosen dimension. Again, she knew the joy of standing at the departure point, on the threshold of herself, just as once before she had climbed into this ship and begun a new stage of her existence. She rediscovered the acrid odors of pitch, jerk meat, flour, and bran, familiar from days whose evocation was enough to abolish time past. She closed her eyes at Captain Dexter’s table, acquainted again with the flavor of smoked oysters, English ciders, rhubarb pie, and medlars from Pensacola, reliving the sensations of her first voyage at sea. But their path was different this time. Despite Toussaint Louverture’s enthusiasm for establishing trade relationships with the United States, the North American merchants doubted the negro leader’s solvency, and left that risky market to the gunrunners, whose merchandise was always paid for in cash, even when the people had no flour to knead their daily bread. Departing the coast of Jamaica, they sailed for several days in the emptiest part of the Sea of Antilles, destined for the Port of La Guaira, where the last of Guadeloupe’s corsairs appeared on occasional evenings, in sailboats christened the Napoléon, the Campo Formio, or the Conquest of Egypt. One morning they feared a skirmish, seeing a small ship rowing toward the Arrow with undue haste. But the disquiet of a moment soon turned to delight when they discovered it was the fabled Friar’s Sloop, sent by a French missionary of loose morals who had for many years dedicated himself to trafficking contraband in the Caribbean territories. Otherwise, they saw nothing but schooners filled with salt meat plying the route from Havana to New Barcelona and back, leaving behind when they passed the ineradicable stench of smoked flesh. To still her impatience to arrive, Sofía tried to lose herself in the English books in Dexter’s library next to the Acacia, the Pillars, and the Tabernacle of his Masonic apron, which he stored in the same vitrine as before. But the climate of The Nights was no less foreign to her mood than was the oppressive atmosphere of The Castle of Otranto. After a few pages, she closed them, not very sure what she had read, prey to every reflection that entered into her pores, imploring her senses rather than her imagination . . . One morning she saw a violaceous bulge on the imprecise verdures misting the horizon: “The Saddle of Caracas,” Dexter said. “We are some thirty miles from the mainland.” And the crew bustled in anticipation of a port of call: those not working just then freshened up, cut their hair, cleaned their nails, washed their hands. On deck appeared razors, combs, soap, clothes to be darned, perfumes to be splashed on faces. One man mended a torn shirt; another patched a ragged shoe; further off, a third gazed at his toasted face in a woman’s mirror. All were moved by a disquiet due not simply to their pleasure at seeing a happy journey through to its end: beyond that, at the foot of the hill stretching upward against the chain of mountains bordering the shore, was Woman—unknown, almost abstract, a Woman without a face, but already implicit in the Port itself. The sails of the ship swelled over the tumescent masts, signaling to her figure, towering solicitously over the roofs in the cove, that the men were on their way. Seeing those sails from the coast, the women in the houses in the port came and went, drawing up buckets from the wells, shaving, perfuming, splashing, and dressing chaotically. No words were needed for this dialogue across a sea already dotted with fishing boats. The Arrow veered parallel to the mountains that descended from the clouds to the water, sloping so drastically that not a single cultivated field was visible on their flanks. Now and then, a sheer face sank to reveal a hidden beach hugged in shadows between rock walls with vegetation so dark and dense that it seemed to harbor unused tatters of night within it. A wondrous damp scent from the still groggy Continent emerged from these bays where the sea’s progeny was cast ashore, thrown up by a final lashing of the waves. Then the mountains receded, but whatever lay behind them remained invisible, and there remained a narrow fringe of soil with roads and dwellings amid forests of hairy coconut palms, grape vines, and almond trees. They rounded a promontory that seemed carved from a block of quartz, and the port of La Guaira appeared, open to the ocean like a colossal amphitheater with terraced roofs for stands . . . Sofía would have liked to see Caracas, but the road was long and arduous, and the Arrow’s stay would be brief. She let the seamen on leave disembark—they knew where they were expected—then traveled to shore in a canoe with Dexter, who had routine formalities to take care of. “Don’t think you’re obliged to look after me,” she told him, seeing he shared in his men’s eagerness. And she took off walking toward steep streets that skirted a dry stream, marveling at the dainty plazas with statues between houses with wooden railings and shuttered doors that reminded her of Santiago de Cuba. Sitting on a stone bench, she watched the pack animals advance up the mountain paths in the shadows of mesquites, which thinned on the misty summits, past a castle crowned by merlons, like many that defended the Spanish ports in the New World—so similar each to each that they seemed the work of a single architect. A peddler from the Canary Islands, dead set on selling her satin ribbons, told her, “Until recently, some Masons come over from Madrid were imprisoned there. For something called the Saint Blaise Day Conspiracy. They tried to take the Revolution to Spain. And Miss, you won’t believe this, they kept on with their conniving right there in that very prison . . .” It was happening, then, and she hadn’t been wrong to sense that the Event was imminent. Now she was even more impatient to reach her journey’s end, and was afraid of arriving late, when the man destined to perform the Great Work would already have set forth, parting the verdure of the jungles like the Hebrews parting the waters of the Red Sea. What Esteban had told her so many times was true: in light of the Thermidorean reaction, Victor—with his American Carmagnoles, with his Constitution translated into Spanish—was bringing to the American mainland the lights that had gone dead in the Old World. To grasp this, she needed only look at the Wind Rose: from Guadeloupe, the squall had blown to the Guianas and from there to Venezuela, whence it would pass to the far edge of the Continent, to the baroque palaces of the Kingdom of Peru. It was there that the Jesuits had first raised their voices—Sofía was acquainted with the writings of Vizcardo y Guzmán—demanding an independence for this world conceivable only in revolutionary terms. Everything became clear: Victor’s presence in Cayenne was the beginning of something that would take shape in armies of horsemen crossing plains, ships sailing storied rivers, high mountains being scaled. An epic was being born, and what had failed in dying Europe would be carried to completion in these lands. Those who may defame her in her family home would learn that her longings were not, like those imposed on normal women, to be measured by dress patterns and diapers. Scandal, they might say, unaware that the scandal would be far vaster than they thought. This time she would play Attack, shooting generals, bishops, magistrates, and viceroys.
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The Arrow set sail two days later, navigating along Margarita Island to pass between the British protectorates of Granada and Tobago and on toward Barbados. And at the end of a tranquil journey, Sofía found herself in Bridgetown, discovering a different world from the one she had known previously in the Caribbean. The atmosphere she breathed in that Dutch city was different, the architecture different from the Spanish, the ships different, framed with broad timbers from Scarborough, Saint George’s, or Port of Spain. Newly minted coins with gracious names, the Pineapple Penny and the Neptune Penny, circulated there. She felt transported to a city on the Old Continent when she noticed a Masonic Street and a Synagogue Street. She lodged in a clean inn owned by a sweating mulatta that Captain Dexter had recommended. At the end of a goodbye lunch in which the overjoyed Sofía tried everything, not disdaining the bottles of porter, the Madeira, and the French wines on offer, the two of them took a drive through the outskirts. For hours, they rolled over the roads of the tame Antilles with their softly undulating fields—here nothing was big, nothing prodigious, nothing menacing—that were cultivated right down to the seashore. The sugarcane here resembled green wheat, the grass was neat, even the palms no longer had the air of trees from the tropics. There were silent mansions, hidden in the brush, their columns like those of Greek temples soaring up to pediments obscured by moss or ivy; their windows opened onto the pomp of salons, the varnish on the portraits hung there gleaming under bright lights; there were homes covered with tiles, so small that when a child peeked out the window, he hid the large family gathered for dinner in a room where a chess table would have been an obstacle; there were ruins shaggy with creepers, where ghosts met to moan on windy nights—the whole island, the coachman said, was overrun with them; and there were, beside the sea, nearly mingled with the beaches, eternally deserted cemeteries in the shadows of cypresses, their gray stone tombs—modest when one thought of the ornamented mausoleums of Spanish cemeteries—telling of a Eudolphus and Elvira died in a shipwreck who must have been heroes of a romantic idyll. Sofía remembered La nouvelle Héloise. The Captain thought rather of The Nights. And though it was far, and the horses were tired, and the need to find replacement mounts meant they would not return till late into the night, Sofía, whose entreaties struck the North American as overdone, had the coachman take them to the rocky bastion of St. John. Behind its church was a gravestone, and surprisingly, the epitaph referred to the death on that island of a person whose name was heavy with the crushing presence of centuries: HERE LYETH YE BODY / OF FERDINANDO PALEOLOGUS / DESCENDED FROM YE IMPERIAL LYNE / OF YE LAST CHRISTIAN EMPERORS OF GREECE / CHURCHWARDEN OF THIS PARISH / 1655-1656 . . . Somewhat maudlin after draining a bottle of wine on the way, Caleb Dexter respectfully removed his hat. As the lights of dusk reddened the waves breaking in dense foam against the craggy monoliths of Bathsheba, Sofía laid bougainvillea cut from the presbytery garden on his grave. During his first visit to her home in Havana, Victor Hugues had talked a long time of the tomb of this unsung grandson of a man fallen during Byzantium’s last stand, who preferred dying to profanation by those Ottomans who overthrew the Ecumenical Patriarch. Now they had found it, in the designated place. Above the gray stone marked with the cross of Constantine, a hand followed now the itinerary of another hand from the faraway past, which also had sought the hollow letters with its fingertips . . . To interrupt this unforeseen ceremony, which had gone on too long, Caleb Dexter observed: “And to think the last legitimate proprietor of the Hagia Sophia ended his days on this island. . . .” “It’s getting late,” the coachman said. “Yes, let’s go back,” Sofía replied. It was strange to her to hear her name in the captain’s idiotic reflection, a coincidence too extraordinary not to be taken as a revelation, a message, a premonition. A prodigious destiny awaited her. Since the day the bearer of that Will pounded the door knockers of her house, a future had been gestated for her. Those words hadn’t appeared by chance. A mysterious power shaped them in the mouth of an unwitting oracle. Sophia.
