Explosion in a Cathedral, page 35
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Summer passed, creaking, laggard, its heat stretching into an autumn similar to any other autumn when, one Tuesday, in response to the bell struck to call the negroes to work, the silence was so prolonged that the sentinels walked to the barracks with their whips held high. They found the cabins deserted. The guard and bloodhounds lay poisoned in the foam of their last vomit. The cows, freed from the stables, stumbled like drunken beasts and collapsed. The horses, their bellies swollen, had their heads sunk in the mangers, blood draining from their nostrils. Soon people arrived from the neighboring farms: all over, the story was the same. Traveling down tunnels dug in the night, taking nails from walls so stealthily no one heard a single noise, distracting the guards with fires started here and there, the slaves had run off into the jungle. Sofía remembered the pounding of many drums in distant trees the night before. No one paid attention, thinking it might be Indians in the midst of some barbaric ritual. A messenger was dispatched immediately to Victor Hugues in Cayenne. In their fear of the growing shadows that swelled with affliction and menace, the colonizers fretted that a week should pass without the Agent returning; but one afternoon, a prodigious squadron of canoes, small ships, and light barges appeared on the river, loaded with troops, provisions, and arms. Victor Hugues went home to speak with those who could inform him of recent events, taking notes and consulting the few maps at his disposal. Surrounded by officers, in consultation with his General Staff, he gave orders and assigned punishments to be carried out ruthlessly and with haste against the Maroon settlements multiplying unacceptably in the jungle. From the doorway, Sofía saw a man who had recovered his vanished authority, clear in his explanations, sure in his proposals, once more the General of other days. But this General had placed his will, his rejuvenated drive, at the service of a contemptible and cruel enterprise. A look of scorn on her face, she left for the gardens, where the soldiers, who had refused to lodge in cabins that smelled too much of negroes, had set up their camp and bivouacs in the open air. Those soldiers were different from the meek, bovine men Sofía had encountered before. Sunburnt, arrogant, with scars across their faces, talking loud, stripping her naked with their eyes, they were a new sort of warrior whose insolence pleased her with its virile and brash self-possession. Alarmed at seeing her among that rabble, the young officer De Sainte-Affrique came to escort her, and he told her these men, survivors of the plague of Jaffa, had been sent to the colony after the Egypt campaign. Some were still in a bad state, but they were believed well-suited to the climate of Guiana, which was killing off the Alsatians in ever-increasing numbers. She looked now with astonishment at those soldiers come from a land of legend, who had slept in tombs carved with hieroglyphics, who had fornicated with Coptic and Maronite prostitutes, who boasted of knowing the Koran and of having laughed at the jackal- and bird-faced gods whose statues still stood in temples with colossal columns. They exuded a breath of Adventure from across the Mediterranean, from Abu Qir, from Mount Tabor, from Saint-Jean d’Acre. Sofía never tired of asking one or another what he had seen and thought on that strange quest that had taken a French army to the foot of the Pyramids. She wanted to sit with them in their canteens, to share the soup ladled generously into their bowls, to throw dice over the drum where the bones struck like hail, to drink the strong waters each of them carried in flasks marked with Arabic letters. “You shouldn’t be here, ma’am,” said De Sainte-Affrique, who for some time had acted the part of Sofía’s jealous, protective cicisbeo. “These men are loud and vulgar.” But the woman remained drawn to their stories and heroic deeds, secretly flattered—and she was not ashamed of it—to find herself craved, denuded, pawed at in the minds of those men rescued from a biblical affliction, embellishing their exploits to make her remember their boorish faces. “So you’re a serving girl now?” Victor asked, when he saw her return. “At least a serving girl has something to do,” she said. “Something to do! Something to do! It’s always the same rubbish with you. As if a man has any choice but to do what he must . . . !” Victor came, went, gave orders, set objectives, issued instructions concerning the positions of the troops along the river. Sofía almost came to admire his energy, until she remembered he was organizing a vast slaughter of negroes beneath his roof. She hid away in her room to conceal a sudden access of fury, and soon, she had broken down in tears. Outside, the soldiers of the Egypt Campaign burned tiny pyramids of dried coconut to ward off the mosquitoes. And after a night too full of noise, of laughter, of uproar, the morning reveilles were heard. The squadron of canoes, barges, and light ships moved upriver, dodging whirlpools and torrents.
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Six weeks passed. And one night, beneath the loud, heavy rains that had been falling for three straight days, a number of boats returned. Men stepped forth from them, exhausted, feverish, arms in braces, muddy, stinking, wrapped in silt-colored bandages. Many were carried on litters, having been shot by Indian arrows or skinned by the negroes’ machetes. Victor came last, dragging his feet and trembling, his arms around the shoulders of two officers. He fell into an armchair, and kept asking for more blankets to bundle up in. But his shivering continued despite the layers of woolen coverings and vicuna ponchos. Sofía saw that his eyes were red and oozing pus. He struggled to swallow, as if his throat were swollen. “This is no war,” he said finally, in a hoarse tone. “You can fight against men. You can’t fight against trees.” De Sainte-Affrique, whose stubble cast a blue shadow over his ailing, greenish skin, spoke with Sofía alone after draining a bottle of wine in anxious swigs: “A calamity. The settlements were empty. But every hour, we ran into an ambush. They’d kill a few of our men, and then they’d disappear. If we returned to the river, they shot at us from the banks. We had to walk through swamps with water up to our chest. And still worse, the Egyptian Disease.” And he told how the soldiers who’d overcome the Jaffa Plague had brought back with them a mysterious ailment that had now infected half of France and was laying waste to the population. It was like a malignant fever, with pain in the joints that rose through the body, exploding through the eyes. Pupils grew inflamed; eyelids swelled with humors. Tomorrow more sick men would arrive, more wounded; more men bested by the trees of the jungle and by prehistoric weapons, darts of monkey bone, cane arrows, peasant’s machetes and picks, that had faced down modern artillery: “Shoot a cannon into the forest and nothing happens. You just find yourself buried in an avalanche of rotten leaves.” In discussion with the cripples and men hacked with blades, it was agreed that Victor would be taken to Cayenne the next day, along with those casualties in need of better care. Overjoyed at the expedition’s failure, Sofía gathered her clothes. The young officer De Sainte-Affrique helped her pack them in woven baskets that smelled of vetiver. She had the feeling she would never return to that house again.
XLVII.
The Egyptian Disease arrived in Cayenne. The Hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Chartres had no space for all the sick men. Prayers were said to Saint Roch, Saint Prudentius, Saint Charles Borromeo, always recollected in times of plague. The populace cursed the soldiers who had brought the new pestilence back with them from God knows what underground passage filled with mummies, God knows what land of sphinxes and embalmers. Death made his appearance in the city. He leaped from house to house, and his brusque, disconcerting entrance incited a dreadful proliferation of rumors and myths. It was said that the soldiers of the Egypt Campaign were furious at being called away from France, and meant to exterminate the population of the colony and take it over for themselves; they had compounded salves and liquids, macerated oils with filth, to mark the houses where they intended to spread the contamination. Every stain became an object of suspicion. If a man laid his hand against the wall, leaving behind traces of his sweat, passersby would pelt him with stones. A group of people keeping watch over a body beat an Indian to death with sticks one morning because his fingers were too black and sticky. Despite doctors’ protestations that its consequences were in no way comparable to the plague, all persisted in referring to it as the scourge of Jaffa. In expectation of infection—which would come to all, sooner or later—fear became the handmaiden of lust. Bedrooms were opened to all comers, bodies sought out on the verge of death throes, balls and feasts thrown amid pestilence. A man spent in a night what he had amassed through years of peculation. The self-declared Jacobin who had hoarded golden louis threw them down on the baize. Hauguard poured out his wines for the ladies in the colony, who waited for their lovers in the rooms of his inn. While funeral bells tolled throughout the town, orchestras played at dances and feasts until dawn, and the benches and tables set out in the street had to be pushed aside for the wagons, carts, and carriages that came past at daybreak carrying coffins oozing tar from the cracks between their boards. Two Grey Sisters, possessed by the Demon, prostituted themselves on the quay, while a former Acadian, his devotion to Isaiah and Jeremiah only growing as the flesh withered from his bones, shouted in squares and on corners that the hour of God’s Judgment had finally come.
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Victor Hugues, eyes sealed with thick bandages soaked in an infusion of mallow, walked blindly through his chambers in the House of Government, grabbing chair backs, stumbling, groaning, feeling around for objects. To Sofía he looked weak, fretful, frightened by the noise of the city. Despite a high fever, he refused to stay in bed, afraid of sinking forever into a denser, second darkness that would settle over the darkness of his bandages. He touched, fingered, weighed everything his hands discovered, simply to feel himself live. The Egyptian Disease had invaded his organism with a tenacity comparable only to the strength of the man struggling against it. “No better and no worse,” the doctor said every morning after examining the effects of some new medicine. A cordon of troops watched over the House of Government and impeded access to unknown persons. The servants, the guards, the functionaries had been sent away. Sofía was alone with the Leader—who complained of stiffness in his bones, of pains, of an unbearable burning in his eyes—in a building of walls pasted with edicts and proclamations, watching funeral processions pass through the windows. (Ils ne mouraient pas tous, mais tous étaient frappés, she recited to herself, remembering how Victor Hugues had read her La Fontaine at her home in Havana to improve her French pronunciation.) She knew that her presence there was useless temerity. But she endured the danger to convince herself of the substance of a loyalty of which in fact she was far from certain. She grew as she observed Victor’s fear. At week’s end, she felt sure the disease wouldn’t affect her. She was proud, with a sense of fate, imagining Death, lord of the land, had bestowed his favor upon her. In town, prayers were now said to Saint Sebastian, adding one intercessor more to the trilogy of Roch, Prudentius, and Charles. Dies Irae, Dies Illae. A medieval sentiment of guilt had wormed into the minds of those who remembered all too clearly their indifference to the horrors of Iracubo, Conanama, and Sinnamary—and because he reminded them too much of it, people chased the old Acadian through the streets with clubs. Victor, sinking deeper into his armchair, searching for objects in the night of his blindness, spoke already the language of the dying: “I wish to be buried,” he said, “in my suit as Commissar of the Convention.” And he felt around for it in the armoire, pulled it out, showed it to Sofía, then threw the jacket over his shoulders and placed the plumed hat over his bandaged forehead: “I always believed myself the master of my fate. And yet it took fewer than ten years for the others, for those who make and unmake us, even if we do not know them, to take me from one stage and place me on another, and so on and so forth until I no longer know on which I am meant to stand. I have worn so many suits, I no longer know which one fits me.” He struggled to expand his thorax and accommodate the flood of syllables: “But there is one that I prefer to all others: and it is this one. It was the gift of the only man I ever put above me. When they overthrew him, I ceased to understand myself. Since then, I have ceased to try and understand anything. I am like those automata that play chess, walk, blow the fife, or tap the drum when you wind them up. There is only one role I have not yet played: the blind man. And now I am doing so.” Then he added softly, counting on his fingers: “Baker, merchant, Mason, anti-Mason, Jacobin, war hero, rebel, prisoner, absolved by those who killed my champion, Agent of the Directory, Agent of the Consulate . . .” And his enumeration passed the sum of his fingers, fading into an unintelligible murmur. Despite the illness and the bandages, Victor, a half-dressed Commissar of the Convention, regained something of the youth, strength, hardness of the man who had one night pounded the door knockers at a certain house in Havana. The man present became the man past—the rapacious, cynical governor, unsettled now by the breath of the grave, eschewed useless riches, the vanity of honors, sounding like a priest uttering a Mass for the dead. “It was a beautiful suit,” Sofía said, smoothing out the feathers on the hat. “It’s out of date,” Victor responded. “Now it’s only fit to be my winding cloth.” One day, the doctor tried a new remedy that had worked wonders in Paris for those afflicted with the Egyptian Disease, applying slivers of fresh, bloody beef to his eyes. “You look like a parricide in an antique tragedy,” Sofía said, thinking of Oedipus, when she saw him return from the chamber where they had treated him. For her, the time of pity was over.
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Victor woke without fever and asked for a glass of cordial. His dressings of bloody meat fell away, leaving his face bright and clear. The world’s beauty astonished, even dazzled him. He walked, ran, leaped through halls of the House of Government, joyous after his descent into the night of blindness. He stared at trees, creepers, the cats, objects, as though they were newly created and, like Adam, he was tasked with naming them. The Egyptian Disease was claiming its last victims, who were taken quickly to the graveyard without handbells or funerals, their risible burials brought quickly to an end. Lavish Masses were uttered in praise of Saints Roch, Prudentius, Charles, and Sebastian, though the impious, forgetting their prayers and entreaties of before, began hinting that a strand of garlic around the neck had done more than any appeals to the saints. Guns saluted two ships entering the port. “You were sublime,” Victor said to Sofía, ordering preparations made to return to his country home. But she looked askance at him, picked up a book of travels to Arabia she had read the previous days, and showed him a paragraph from a Koranic text: “The plague was devastating Devardan, a city of Judea. Many of the inhabitants took flight. God told them: Die! And they died. Years later, they were revived at the pleading of Ezekiel. But all preserved on their faces the mark of death.” She paused. “I’m weary of living among the dead. It matters little that the plague has left the city. You’ve all worn the mark of death on your face for some time now.” And she turned her back to him—painting a dark silhouette over the luminous rectangle of a window—and talked a long time of her desire to leave. “You want to go home?” Victor asked, astonished. “I shall never return to a house I left in search of one better.” “Where is this better house you’re looking for now?” “I don’t know. Wherever men live differently. Here everything stinks of corpses. I want to return to the world of the living; of those who believe in something. I can hope for nothing from men who hope for nothing.” The House of Government was overrun with servants, guards, functionaries, who were busy again ordering, cleaning, attending. The light coming through windows with their curtains pulled aside raised a tiny cosmos of dust, which floated up through slanting columns of light. “Your army will return to the jungle,” she said. “It can be no other way. Your post demands it. Your authority requires it. But I refuse to stand by and watch this spectacle.” “The Revolution has changed more than one of us,” Victor said. “That, perhaps, is the great achievement of the Revolution: to change more than one of us,” Sofía said, beginning to take down her clothes. “Now I know what I must reject and what I can accept.” Another ship—the third that morning—was greeted by cannonfire. “It’s almost as if I’d sent for them,” Sofía said. Victor struck the wall with his fist: “Take your shit and go wherever you damned well please!” he shouted. “Thank you,” Sofía said. “I prefer seeing you like this.” Grasping her arms, he hurled her through the room, bruising her, throttling her, finally dragging her off into bed. He fell on her, clutched her without encountering resistance: she offered him a body cold, inert, and distant, acquiescent to anything so long as it would soon end. He looked at her as he had before when they were done, eyes so close to hers that the image of them blurred. She turned away. “Yes, you’d better go,” Victor said, rolling over, still panting, unfulfilled, invaded by enormous sorrow. “Don’t forget my safe conduct,” Sofía said placidly, sliding away from the bed and approaching the writing table where the forms lay. “Wait, there’s no ink in the inkpot.” She smoothed out her leggings, arranged her disarrayed garments, found a fresh bottle, dipped the pen inside, and handed it to Victor. And she went on gathering her things while she waited for his hand, quivering with rage, to finish filling in the papers. “This is it, then?” he asked. “There’s nothing left between us?” “There is. A few images,” Sofía responded. The Leader walked to the door wearing a dreadful, conciliatory smile. “You won’t come?” When she didn’t speak, he concluded: “Bon voyage.” And his steps echoed down the staircase. A carriage was waiting below to take him to the harbor . . . Sofía was left alone with her dresses strewn about. Past the garments of satin and lace lay the uniform of the Commissar of the Convention that Victor was so anxious to show her in his blindness. The tailcoat with the tricolor sash lay on the back of a tattered armchair. With the breeches below it, the hat resting against absent thighs, it recalled one of those relics—an empty suit without skeleton or flesh—that families kept in frames to recollect a departed ancestor who had been notable in his day. All over Europe, the attire of illustrious figures from the past was displayed in this way. Now that the world was so changed, that memoirists’ once upon a time had been replaced by the phrases before and after the Revolution, museums had become very popular. That night, to ease her return to solitude, Sofía gave herself to the young officer De Sainte-Affrique, who had loved her with Wertherian modesty since her arrival to the colony. Once more she took possession of her body, closing with a willful act the long cycle of self-estrangement. New arms would embrace her before she boarded the ship that would set sail for Bordeaux the following Wednesday.
