Explosion in a Cathedral, page 33
XLIII.
Told the rocks of Grand Connétable would be visible a little after dawn, Sofía emerged at daybreak on the deck of the Batavian Republic—an old Dutch merchant ship with a new name that traveled all year between the Continent, the Jungle, and deforested Barbados bringing mahogany for the carpenters of Bridgetown and timbers to adorn the houses of Oistins, famous for their gallery porches in the Norman style. For weeks, she had waited in her hotel in the port for the hour of departure, tormented by impatience, weary of walking through the tiny city’s streets, hearing with dismay of the peace treaty between France and the United States; had word reached her sooner, she could have arrived more quickly, traveling from Havana in one of the North American vessels that had already renewed trade with Cayenne. But she forgot all of this facing the crags and islets that presaged their arrival, graced in the morning by whorls of gannets and gulls. Now they sighted the islands of La Mère and Les Deux Filles, which Esteban had once described to her. In the meantime, the vegetation and settlements on the coast grew brighter and more bustling. Everything seemed sumptuous, fascinating, extraordinary to Sofía just then. The world’s greens seemed to welcome her in a single landscape. The military authorities were perplexed, when they came onboard, that a single woman from a city as alluring as Havana would wish to stay in Cayenne. But when Sofía spoke the name Victor Hugues, it sufficed to turn suspicion to deference. Night had fallen when she made her way into the city with sleepy streets, arriving at Hauguard’s inn, where she wisely concealed her relation to Esteban, sensing his departure for Paramaribo was an escape of some kind . . . The next morning, she sent a message announcing her arrival to the former Agent of the Directory, now the Agent of the Consulate. In early evening, she was handed a brief message scribbled on official paper: Welcome. Tomorrow I will come by coach to see you. V. Sofía was waiting for an impatient summons, and instead there came to her those cold words that plunged her into a night of confusion. A dog barked in a nearby pen, enraged by a passing drunk who walked down the street scratching his mange, shouting frightening prophecies about the scattering of the just, the punishment of regicides, and the appearance of all before the Lord’s Throne in a Final Judgment that would be held—but why?—in a valley in Nova Scotia. When the voice faded in the distance and the guard dog returned to sleep, invisible insects set to work in every wall in the building, drilling, scratching, eating away at the wood. A tree shed seeds as heavy as lead over several upturned troughs. In front of the inn, two Indians argued, their voices like something from a chronicle of adventures. Nothing was soothing for a person consumed in lucubrating conjectures. For that reason, when the coach arrived the next morning, Sofía stepped inside it exhausted, with swollen eyes. She had believed they would drive her with her trunks and suitcases to the House of Government, but instead the horses stopped at a quay where a canoe with slender railings waited, with cushions, awnings, and canvas wind screen. She was informed she would be taken to a hacienda a few hours away by boat. None of this was what she had envisioned, but she found flattering the courtesies extended her by the crew. The boat was captained by a young official named De Sainte-Affrique, who described the progress that had occurred in the colony since the arrival of Victor Hugues. Agriculture was flourishing, the shops were full, and peace and prosperity were in the air. The deportees had mostly returned to France, but there remained behind in Iracubo, as a testament to their sufferings, a vast cemetery with the gravestones of famed revolutionaries . . . In midafternoon, the canoe turned onto a river bordered by marshland; on its waters the leaves of a kind of water lily floated, with purple flowers that rose over the surface of the water. Soon they reached the dock of a large, Alsatian-style house standing on a hill amid lemon and orange trees. Attended by a swarm of solicitous negresses, Sofía installed herself in an apartment on the second floor, its walls adorned with delicate old prints that evoked events from the ancien régime: the Siege of Namur, the Coronation of the Bust of Voltaire, and the ill-fated Calas family, interspersed with pleasant seascapes of Toulon, Rochefort, the Island of Aix, and Saint-Malo. While the chirping maids placed her things in the wardrobes, Sofía peeked out the windows that opened onto the fields: a garden with abundant rosebushes soon gave way to orchards and sugarcane fields bounded by a dour wall of sylvatic vegetation. Mahogany trees with tall silvery trunks cast shadows on the paths edged with Balsam of Peru, nutmeg, and yellow pepper trees.
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• • •
Hours of anxious waiting passed, then at last, a rowboat edged in toward the dock. In the evening shadows already darkening the avenue, in a dazzle of gold braid and finery, a suit of military cut emerged, crowned and, as it were, exalted by an extravagant plumed hat. Sofía, stepping forth from the vestibule, failed to notice in her haste a drove of black pigs just past the door rooting gleefully in the flower beds, digging up tulips and rolling with jubilant grunts in the recently watered soil. Seeing the door open, the animals stormed the house, their muddy bodies grazing Sofía’s skirts, and she waved her arms and shouted for them to stop. Victor ran home in a rage: “How dare they let them out! This is beyond the pale!” Making his way to the salon, he smacked his saber against the pigs filing through the rooms and climbing the stairs, and his servants and several negroes came from the rear of the house to help. Eventually, the beasts were sent away howling, dragged by their ears, lifted up, kicked out. The doors to the kitchen and the other rooms were closed. “Have you seen yourself?” Victor asked Sofía when the porcine commotion had died down, pointing at her mud-stained dress. “Go change while I have them clean up in here.” Seeing herself in her bedroom mirror, Sofía felt so miserable she began to cry, seeing the sad reality of this Great Encounter she had dreamed of during her crossing. The dress she’d had made for the occasion fell from her body, covered in mud, ripped, stinking like a pigsty. She threw her shoes into a dark corner and tore off her leggings in a rage. Her body reeked of the drove, of mud and filth. She sent for pails of water, however grotesque it felt to bathe just then. There was something ridiculous in having to splash around in that basin, knowing they must hear her below. Throwing on whatever lay close to hand, she limped down to the salon, unconcerned with her appearance, despairing like an actress who has botched her grand entrance. Victor had her sit beside him and squeezed her hands. He had traded his splendid suit for the loose garb of the prosperous yeoman: white breeches, broad-collared shirt buttoned low, and a calico jacket: “You must forgive me,” he said. “But this is how I always walk around here. A man needs a rest from all those ribbons and rosettes.” He asked about Esteban. He knew he had departed Paramaribo and assumed he had made it to Havana. And as if wishing her to know how he’d lived since the end of his administration in Guadeloupe, he told the story of his rebellion against Desfourneaux and Pelardy, which left him a defenseless prisoner, forced onto a departing ship. In Paris, his vigorous arguments had pulverized Pelardy’s accusations. Consul Bonaparte then selected him to take over the government of Cayenne . . . He spoke at length, with the glibness of earlier days, as if to unburden himself of a surfeit of words too long suppressed. On entering into certain details of his recent life, he frequently repeated the phrase: “This I am telling you alone, because there is no one else I can trust.” He listed off the servitudes of Power, the many disappointments he had suffered, the impossibility of having friends when one intended to command. “They will tell you I used a hard hand, hard indeed, in Guadeloupe and even in Rochefort. I had no choice. Revolution is to be waged, not debated.” While he talked relentlessly, only pausing to solicit a no?, a don’t you think?, a don’t you see?, a didn’t you know?, a didn’t they tell you?, or a do people know elsewhere?, Sofía noticed a number of obvious changes in his person. He was quite fatter, though his sturdy frame bore it well, and it appeared like muscle. His expression had hardened, despite the new fleshiness filling out his face. His somewhat earthy complexion still harbored the determination and health of other times . . . The doors to the dining room opened: two maids had placed candelabras on the table with a cold dinner, served in silver dishes so heavy they could only have come from the fleet of a Viceroy of Mexico or Peru. “Good evening,” Victor said to the servants. And in a more intimate tone: “Now, tell me about yourself.” But Sofía could think of no worthy tale, no interesting event from her own life, sadly impoverished compared with his, which was full of clamor and furies and feats with men who had given their name to the era. She had a merchant brother, a pusillanimous cousin whose counsels struck her as so hollow against the grandeur now before her that she preferred to conceal them from a sense of pity. Even her marriage was a lamentable affair. She had been a housewife, but hadn’t found God in her pots and pans like the nuns of Avila. She had waited. That was all. The years had passed, indifferent, unmoving, from an Epiphany without kings to a Christmas without meaning in the impossibility of picturing the Great Architect lying in a manger. “Well, then?” Victor said, encouraging her to speak. “Well, then?” But a strange, indomitable stubbornness kept her silent. She forced a smile; she stared into the flame of the candles; she scratched the tablecloth with a fingernail; she stretched her hand out to a glass, but left it sitting there. “Well, then?” And Victor went toward her. The lights had changed; there were shadows where she felt him grasp her, squeeze her, with a hunger that rekindled her adolescent yearnings . . . They returned later to the table, sweaty, hair in disarray, stumbling, laughing at themselves. They spoke the language of before: the one they had spoken in the port of Santiago, contemptuous of the mariners’ prying, when they fled the heat and the stench of the bay for a narrow cabin between decks, between boards that smelled of fresh varnish, like the ones in this very house. The breeze, rising on the coast, filled the room with a breath of sea. Water ran audibly in a nearby weir. The house was a ship, thrashed by waves of trees that crashed against the window.
XLIV.
Sofía marveled at the discovery of her own sensuality. Her arms, her shoulders, her breasts, her flanks, her knee pits began all at once to speak. Lofty in submission, her body became aware of itself, in thrall to impulsive generosities and cravings that neglected to seek the mind’s consent. Her waist was delighted to be taken prisoner; her skin shook and tautened at the mere hint of an approach. Her hair, let down on nights of joy, was given to him who clutched it in handfuls. A supreme munificence emanated from this gift of the entire person; from the What can I give that I haven’t yet given? that in hours of embraces and metamorphoses delivered a human being to the extreme poverty of feeling nothing in the sumptuous presence of the other; so affluent in tenderness, in energy, in delight, that the mind seemed to melt in fear of failing to reciprocate these splendid gifts. In returning to its roots, the lovers’ language returned to the naked word, to the muttering of a word anterior to all poetry—a word of thanksgiving before the blazing sun, the river overflowing the tilled soil, the seed gathered in the furrow, the ear of grain swollen like the weaver’s spindle. The word was borne of tactility, elemental and pure, as was the activity that gave rise to it. With physical rhythms coupled to the rhythms of creation, a sudden rain, a blossoming of plants in the night, a change in the course of the breeze, the blossoming of desire at dawn or twilight sufficed for the bodies to seem to find themselves in a new clime, their embraces resurrecting the radiance of their first meeting. Everything was the same, the forms were present, and yet everything was eternally different. That night—the night beginning just then, still indecisive and laggard—would have its own pomp and exultation, and was not the night of yesterday, and would not be the night of tomorrow. Outside time, abbreviating or lengthening the hours, the two bodies lying there perceived as permanent, everlasting, a now externally manifested in what their senses, committed to the boundless task of understanding themselves, perceived in a remote and contingent manner; in the weight of a storm, the persistent cawing of a bird, the jungle scent borne on the morning breeze. It may have been just a gust, a whisper, a breath; but the presence of grace, between the ascent to ecstasy and the descent into slumber—joyous repose—seemed to last the entire night. The lovers recalled an embrace of hours, growing closer to the rhythm of a tempest, but they realized, when they awoke, that they couldn’t have heard the wind blow more than a few minutes, when the tree limbs trembled next to their window . . . In the light of the everyday, Sofía felt a supreme self-possession. She wished everyone could share in that blessing of love, contentment, sovereign calm. Flesh sated, her thoughts turned to people, books, things, with a quiet mind and an admiration of the intelligence of physical love. She had heard it said that certain oriental sects considered the gratification of the flesh a necessary step in the ascent to Transcendence, and she believed this on noticing in herself an unsuspected capacity for Understanding. After years of voluntary confinement among walls and objects she’d grown all too used to, her spirit was pouring outward, finding a motive for reflection in everything. Rereading classical texts that before now had spoken to her in the voice of fables, she discovered the original essence of myth. Casting aside writings steeped in the rhetoric of the age and the lachrymose novels so beloved of her contemporaries, she turned to texts that had fixed in enduring traces or symbols the profound ways Man and Woman lived together in a universe fraught with hostile predicaments. She made her own the arcana of Lance and Chalice that had been obscure cyphers for her before then. She felt that her being had become useful; that her life, at last, had a path and meaning. It was true that she let the days, the weeks, flow past, cleaving blissfully to the present without thinking of tomorrow. But she did not, for that reason, cease to dream of great endeavors she would one day commit with the man she had bound herself to. So powerful an essence—she thought to herself—could not endure long without a majestic undertaking to commit to. But his actions depended greatly on events in Europe. Things were happening so quickly that by the time the newspapers reached Cayenne, the information in them was well out of date, and occasionally even contrary to what was happening at the moment of reading. Bonaparte seemed little concerned with revolution in America; more immediate problems occupied his attention. For that reason, Victor Hugues spent the better part of his time on administrative tasks, ordering irrigation works built, opening up roads, signing commercial treaties with Suriname, and developing agriculture in the colonies. People called his government paternal and sensible. The old planters were satisfied. The winds of prosperity were blowing. Since the abandonment of the ten-day week and the return to the Gregorian calendar, the Leader went to the city on Mondays, returning home on Thursday or Friday. Sofía devoted several hours to the household each morning: giving orders, putting the carpenters to work, beautifying the gardens, having the Swiss businessman, Sieger, bring her tulip bulbs from Paramaribo. The rest of the time she spent in the library, where there was no lack of excellent works amid the annoying abundance of Treatises on Fortifications, the Art of Navigation, Physics, and Astronomy. Several months passed this way, and when he returned each week, Victor never brought news that might disturb the peaceful, flourishing life of the colony.
* * *
• • •
One day in September, Sofía went to Cayenne to make a few purchases, in a rare break from her discreet country retirement. Something strange was happening there. The shrill bells had been ringing in the chapel of the sisters of Saint-Paul-de-Chartres since dawn. Other bells chimed in, unknown, not yet hung, concealed, perhaps in attics and warehouses, pounded with hammers, with firebrands, with horseshoes across the entire city. Nuns and friars disembarked from a newly arrived ship. A motley army of the Faithful seemed to descend on the population, in habits, Flemish veils, black cloths, Carmelite, gray, filing down the middle of the streets, hailed by the passers-by, bearing forgotten adornments of rosaries, pious medals, scapularies, and missals. Passing priests blessed the curious who peered from their windows. Others tried to shout down the uproar with the verses of canticles, but their voices combined only poorly. Baffled at this spectacle, Sofía walked to the House of Government, where she was supposed to meet Victor Hugues. But his office was empty apart from Sieger, who was sunken in an armchair, with a bottle of tafia nearby. He greeted her with cheerful motions, buttoning his tailcoat: “A beautiful parade of Capuchins, indeed, my lady! A priest for every parish! Nuns for all the hospitals! The time of processions is upon us once more! We have a concordat! Paris and Rome have embraced! The French are Catholic again. A great thanksgiving Mass will be said in the Chapel of the Grey Sisters. All the lords of government will be present there in their finest uniforms, bowing their heads to the ecclesiastical Latin: Preces nostrae, quaesumus, Domine, propitiatus admitte. And to think that more than a million men died to destroy what’s been restored today . . . !” Sofía returned outside. Travelers were still stepping down from the Ship of Friars, opening big red and green umbrellas while black porters piled bundles and valises on their heads. In front of Hauguard’s inn, several priests were sorting their luggage and drying their sweat with large checked kerchiefs. Then something strange happened: two Sulpicians, the last to disembark, were greeted by their colleagues with furious shouts. “Jurants!” the others shouted to them. “Judases! Judases!” And they pelted them with pineapple skins pulled from the gutter, with stones and other rubbish. “Out of here! Go sleep in the jungle! Jurants! Jurants!” The Sulpicians, not intimidated in the least, tried to enter the inn, throwing punches and kicking, and a menacing storm of black habits engulfed them. The priests who had sworn loyalty to the Revolutionary Constitution were hurled against a wall, and gave confused responses to the charges leveled against them by the insubmissives, the true priests the Concordat had suddenly ennobled as Soldiers of Christ, resisters of persecution, men whose clandestine worship made them fitting descendants of the Deacons of the Catacombs. Guards came and dispersed the churchmen with blows from the butts of their muskets. Order appeared reestablished when a young priest emerged from a nearby butcher’s and threw a bucket of fresh blood from a recently slaughtered cow at the two Sulpicians, who stood now haloed by a large spot of red that had broken on their bodies and struck the tavern’s white wall, leaving behind fetid clots and splatters. Again the bells tolled deafeningly. After hearing the thanksgiving Mass, the regally dressed Victor Hugues left the Chapel of the Grey Sisters with his officials . . . “Have you heard?” he asked Sofía when he found her in the House of Government. “It’s all quite grotesque,” she responded, telling him what had happened with the Sulpicians. “I will have them sent back to the ships; here people will make life impossible for them.” “It seems to me it’s your duty to protect them,” Sofía said, “you must think more highly of them than of the others.” Victor shrugged his shoulders: “Even in France, no one cares anymore for the jurant priests.” “You smell of incense,” she told him . . . They returned to the estate, not talking much during the journey. When they arrived, they found the Billauds—as they called them—installed there since midday, along with their faithful hound, Patience. For several days, they had known they would turn up there uninvited: “Once more, Philemon and Baucis are here to abuse your hospitality,” the former Terrible One said, using an image he had been fond of ever since marrying his servant Brigitte. Sofía had noticed in recent months that Baucis’s influence over Philemon was increasingly evident. Craftily, the negress coddled Billaud-Varenne, with loud, affected declarations of her admiration of his every word and deed. Detested by the neighbors of his country house near the coast of Orvilliers, the ex-President of the National Convention had for a time been subject to sudden fits of melancholy. In the evenings, anonymous figures in the colony sent him newspapers from Paris; now and then, he saw his name mentioned there with revulsion. When this happened, he would fall into despair, shouting that he was the victim of dreadful calumnies, that no one understood the historic role he had played, that no one sympathized with his sufferings. Brigitte, seeing him desperate and weepy, had a phrase at the ready, which comforted him like none other: “How, my lord, after conquering so many dangers, do you let the writings of these vermin upset you?” The smile would then return to Billaud’s face. And that smile would allow Brigitte to make and remake the farmhouse in Orvilliers, to act haughty with the staff and authoritarian with the farmhands, to keep a keen and critical eye on everything, Mistress of a domain whose bounties she oversaw astutely . . . Sofía found her in the kitchen giving orders for supper to be prepared, just as if she were in her home. Her dress was as fine as any to be found in Cayenne, and she wore gold bangles and filigreed bracelets. “Oh, dear,” the negress exclaimed, dropping the wooden spoon she had just brought to her lips to taste a sauce. “You’re just radiant! How could he keep from falling in love with you more every single day?” Sofía responded with an evasive grimace. She didn’t care for Brigitte’s familiarities, which cast her as little more than the consort of a powerful man. “What will we be having?” she asked, employing, despite her esteem for la petite Billaud, the tone of a mistress addressing her cook. In the salon, Billaud-Varenne had just heard of the Concordat and that morning’s events in Cayenne: “That’s just what we needed,” he shouted, pounding his fists in time with his words on the table of English marquetry. “We’re sinking into shit.”
