Explosion in a Cathedral, page 36
Chapter Seven
XLVIII.
And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
Job 1:19
The sound of heels tapping in concert to the rhythm of guitars emerged from the upper floor as the traveler stretched a frozen hand from the folds of the Scottish blankets that enveloped him and lifted the heavy knocker in the shape of a sea god adorning the immense door that opened onto the Calle Fuencarral. Despite his knocks, like shots from a blunderbuss, the noise upstairs only intensified, with the ragged voice of a succentor trying in vain to catch the tune of the “Polo del Contrabandista.” His hand, burned by the frozen bronze, went on pounding. With feet shod in heavy boots, he kicked the wood of the door, knocking morsels of wax onto the icy stone of the threshold. Finally, there was a creak, and a servant opened, bathing the traveler’s face in the light of an oil lamp. Seeing that the stranger resembled a portrait hung upstairs, the servant, startled, let through the fearsome killjoy, outdoing himself in apologies and explanations. He hadn’t expected the gentleman so early; had he known he was coming, he would have waited for him at the Casa de Correos. It just happened that, being the First of the Year, his Saint’s Day—his name was Manuel—some acquaintances, good but boisterous people, had surprised him in bed after he had prayed to God for the gentleman to be safe in his travels; they wouldn’t listen to reason, and had started chanting and drinking whatever they had with them, but that was all, whatever they had with them and nothing more. The gentleman should wait a few moments while he ran the rabble down the service stairs. Pushing the servant aside, the traveler climbed the broad staircase to the salon. The furnishings had been moved, the carpets piled against the wall, and in the middle of the floor, Madrid streetwalkers and young men of dubious aspect were frolicking brazenly, dumping full glasses of wine down their gullets and spitting left and right. To judge from the number of bottles and flasks lying empty in the corners, the party must have been at its high point. One woman was hawking warm chestnuts, though there were none to be seen; a maja on top of a divan was shouting the “Song of the Marabou”; farther on, another woman groped a man, while a chorus of drunkards pressed in around a blind man whose throat was frayed from shouting soleares. A thunderous Get out! disbanded the merrymakers, who grabbed what bottles they could on their way at the sight of a distinguished-looking head emerging from the bundle of Scottish blankets. Stringing together inept laments, the servant hurried to return the furniture to its place, stretching carpets and taking away bottles with utmost diligence. He threw logs on the fire, which had been burning since morning, and brought brooms, feather dusters, and cloths to wipe away all traces of merriment from the armchairs, the floors, and the lid of the grand piano, which was stained with a liquid that smelled like brandy. “Good people,” the servant moaned, “People who would never dream of stealing a thing. But unpolished. Here it’s not like in other countries, where everyone learns respect . . .” Shedding the last of his blankets, the traveler walked over to the fire and asked for a bottle of wine. When the servant handed it to him, he saw it was the same sort the revelers had been drinking before. But he pretended not to notice. His eyes fell on a painting he knew well. It depicted an Explosion in a Cathedral, cured, if deficiently, of the long wound it was dealt one day by glues that rippled the canvas where it had been torn. Walking behind the servant, who held up a large candelabra with new candles, he walked into the next room, the library. Beside the bookshelves stood a panoply crowned with helmets and morions of Italian manufacture, but several weapons were missing, taken down with violence, to judge by the twisted hooks that had held them. Two armchairs were pulled close, as if for discussion, on the two sides of a narrow coffee table, where evaporated Malaga wine had left colored streaks in the glasses. “As I had the honor to communicate to the gentleman in writing, not a single thing has been touched since that day,” the servant said, opening another door. The traveler entered what appeared to be the untidy room of a woman just awakened. The sheets were still thrown aside where she had stretched out in the morning; the nightgown on the floor and the disordered garments torn from the wardrobe gave a sense of the haste with which she had chosen the apparel that was now missing. “It was a tobacco-colored dress, with lace,” the servant said. The two men stepped out onto a broad gallery whose outer windows were whitened by frost. “This was his room,” the servant said, searching for a key. The stranger was shown a narrow chamber furnished with almost austere sobriety, its sole adornment a tapestry hung on the wall opposite the bed, with a droll concert of monkeys playing claves, viol, trumpet, and flute. On the nightstand stood bottles of medicines, a water pitcher, and a spoon. “I had to dump out the water, it was putrid,” the servant said. Everything was clean and orderly, as in a barracks: “He always made his own bed and put away his things. He didn’t like the servants in here, not even when he was ill.” The traveler returned to the salon. “Tell me what happened that day,” he said. But despite his evident inclination to help, hoping to turn attention from the party and the wine with a flood of words interlaced with abundant praise for the kindness, the generosity, the nobility of his masters, the man’s tale was very dull. The details were familiar from a letter the servant had already sent him, written out by a public amanuensis who, though ignorant of the case, had added annotations in his own hand; the hypotheses these put forth were far more illuminating than the scarce facts remembered by the lackey who, in a word, could tell him nothing. On the morning in question, caught up in the enthusiasm that filled the streets, the servants had left the kitchens, laundries, pantries, and coach houses. Some returned later; others did not . . . The traveler asked for pen and paper, noting down the names of anyone who, for whatever the reason, had had dealings with the masters of the house: doctors, purveyors, hairdressers, booksellers, upholsterers, apothecaries, perfumers, merchants, artisans . . . He overlooked neither the fan seller who had come often to show her wares, nor the barber who kept his shop nearby and knew any and everything about the people who had lived in the Calle de Fuencarral during the past twenty years.
XLIX.
So it happened.
Goya
With information turned up in stores and workshops; with the talk in a nearby tavern, where the heat of brandy refreshed many a clouded memory; with the accounts of people of every class and condition, a story came together in traces, with lacunae and paragraphs cut short, like an ancient chronicle reborn from an assemblage of scattered fragments. The House of the Condesa de Arcos—according to the account of the Notary who, unwittingly, was prologist to the cento—had stood empty for a long time, being the setting for strange and scandalous occurrences involving phantoms and apparitions. Time slipped past, but still, the noble mansion remained abandoned, isolated by its own legend, and the merchants of the neighborhood missed the days when its masters held feasts and soirees that had required substantial purchases of adornments and lamps, fine delicacies and exquisite wines. For that reason, the afternoon when lights appeared in the windows was greeted with excitement. The neighbors approached curiously, watching the drudgery of servants carrying trunks and bundles from the coach house to the attic and hanging new chandeliers from the smooth ceilings. The next day came painters, paperers, and plasterers with ladders and scaffolds. Cool air blew through the rooms, dispersing the spells and enchantments. Bright curtains enlivened the bedrooms, and a liveried stable hand brought two splendid sorrel horses to the stalls, which smelled again of hay, oats, and grass peas. Word spread that a woman of Spanish blood had rented the mansion, not one to be intimidated by tales of sprites and phantoms . . . The chronicle passed now to the lips of a lacemaker from the Calle Mayor: Soon the lady of the Casa de Arcos became known as the Cuban. She was pretty, with big, dark eyes, and lived alone, receiving no visitors and never bothering to meet with the people of the Villa y Corte, as the metropolis was known. Constant worry shadowed her gaze, and yet she sought no consolation in religion: it was a known fact that she never attended Mass. She was rich, to judge by the number of her servants and the ostentation of her housewares. And yet, she affected sober dress, though when she did buy a kerchief or a bit of lace, she demanded the best, with no concern for price . . . As the lacemaker had nothing more to say, he turned to Paco, the jocular barber and guitarist, whose shop was thought one of the city’s premiere gossip mills: the Cuban Lady came to Madrid with a delicate mission: seeking a pardon of a cousin of hers who had been jailed years before in Ceuta. Her cousin, it was said, had been a conspirator and Freemason in the Americas; a Gallophile, a devotee of Revolutionary ideas, a printer of subversive writings and songs meant to undermine royal authority in the Overseas Domains. The Cuban Lady must have had something of the conspiracist and atheist about her, too, living in isolation as she did; she was indifferent to the processions that passed before the Casa de Arcos with the Holy of Holies held high, and never bothered to peek at them from one of the mansion’s many windows. Some alleged the impious pillars of a Lodge had been raised in the Casa de Arcos, and even that Black Masses were held there. But the police, apprised of these rumors, surveilled the mansion for several weeks, and reported that it could not be the site of any reunion, whether of conspirators, Freemasons, or the godless—indeed, no one gathered there at all. The Casa de Arcos, once a house of mystery on account of its hobgoblins and ghosts, remained a House of Mystery in the possession of this beautiful woman highly coveted by the men who saw her on occasion when she stepped out to a nearby shop or to buy, for the Christmas holidays, marzipan from Toledo in the vicinity of the Plaza Mayor . . . Word passed now to an old doctor who had frequently visited the Casa de Arcos for some time: he had been called on to treat a man of formerly vigorous constitution whose health had been ravaged by his imprisonment in Ceuta, a place he had just returned from after being freed by royal pardon. His legs bore the marks of shackles. He suffered from intermittent fevers and from occasional asthma that had tormented him since childhood, though his crises abated when he smoked cigarettes rolled with petals of Angel’s Trumpet that he ordered from Cuba through an apothecary in the Tribulete neighborhood. Submitted to a revitalizing regimen, he had slowly recovered his health. The doctor wasn’t called to the Casa de Arcos again . . . Now it was the turn of a bookseller: Esteban had no interest in philosophy or the work of economists, or any writings that examined the History of Europe in recent years. He read travel books; the poetry of Ossian; that novel about the sorrows of Young Werther; new translations of Shakespeare; he remembered the young man’s enthusiasm for The Genius of Christianity, a work he qualified as simply extraordinary, and had ordered bound in velvet covers with a tiny golden lock, to keep secret the personal annotations he made in the margins of the text. Carlos, who had read this book by Chateaubriand, could not grasp why Esteban, man devoid of faith, had taken such an interest in a text frequently blustering, lacking in unity, and unconvincing to those who lacked true faith. Looking all over, Carlos found one of the five volumes in Sofía’s room. Leafing through it, he noted with surprise that this edition included, in its second part, a sort of novel-like tale entitled René that didn’t appear in the other, more recent copy acquired in Havana. Most of the pages were free of notes or marks, but there was one series of phrases, of paragraphs, underlined in red ink: This life, which at the beginning had so enchanted me, was not long in growing unbearable. I became weary of the same scenes and the same ideas. I plumbed my heart and asked myself what it was I wanted . . . Without parents, without friends, and without, so to speak, having yet loved on this earth, I was overwhelmed by a superabundance of life . . . I descended the valley and climbed the mountain, calling with all the strength of my desire to the ideal object of a future flame . . . You must recall she was the only person in the world I had ever loved and that all my feelings came to be mingled in her with the pain of the memories of my childhood . . . A movement of pity had brought her toward me . . . A suspicion formed in Carlos’s mind. He questioned a waitress who had served Sofía for some time, with oblique overtures that might lead her to reveal some confidence while concealing his interest in the case: There was no doubt Sofía and Esteban cared greatly for each other, and lived in a quiet and tender affection. On the harsh winter days, when the fountains of the Retiro froze, they would have their meals in her room, pulling their armchairs close to a brazier. In summer, they took long carriage rides, stopping to drink horchata at the stalls. They were seen more than once at the Feria de San Isidro and found the people’s capers highly entertaining. They held hands in the way a brother and sister might. She didn’t remember ever seeing them quarrel or argue heatedly. Never. He called Sofía by her name, and she called him Esteban, that was all. The wagging tongues—which are always present in kitchens and pantries—had never suggested any untoward intimacy between the two of them. No. At any rate, no one had ever seen anything. When his illness made the nights hard for him, she had more than once remained by his side until dawn. For the rest, they were just brother and sister. It did surprise people that a woman of her beauty would not resolve to marry. Had she wished to, there would have been no lack of well-bred and attractive suitors . . . “Certain things we can never learn the full truth of,” thought Carlos as he reread the phrases underlined in the red velvet book, which could be interpreted in so many different ways. An Arab would say I was wasting my time, like a person searching for the tracks of a bird in the air or of a fish in water.
* * *
• • •
He still had to reconstruct the Endless Day; the day when two existences apparently dissolved into a tumultuous and bloody All. Only one witness to the initial scene of the drama remained: a gloveress who, not suspecting what would soon happen, had gone early to the Casa de Arcos to deliver to Sofía several pairs of gloves. She was surprised to observe only one old manservant in the mansion. Sofía and Esteban were in the library, leaning out the open window, listening attentively to what was coming to them from outside. A frantic uproar was filling the city. Though nothing seemed out of the ordinary on the Calle de Fuencarral, a handful of stores and taverns had suddenly closed their doors. In back of the houses, in the adjoining streets, a dense multitude was congregating. Suddenly, chaos broke out. Groups of men from the village, followed by women and children, appeared on the corners, shouting “Death to the French.” People left their homes armed with kitchen knives, boards, and tools: anything that could cut, wound, harm. Gunfire was audible all over as the human mass, driven by inner impulses, poured toward the Plaza Mayor and the Puerta del Sol. A vociferating priest, walking at the head of a group of manolos and brandishing a razor, turned back every now and then to shout: “Death to the French! Death to Napoleon!” The entire population of Madrid had taken to the streets in a sudden, unanticipated, and devastating revolt, with no need of printed proclamations or rhetorical artifices to provoke them. The faces; the yammering and shoving of the women; in the unrelenting instinct of the collective march; the universality of rage—these were eloquence enough. All at once, the human tide seemed to pause, as if trapped in its own whirlpools. The musket fire worsened, and for the first time, severe and thunderous, the voice of a cannon rang out. “The French have brought their cavalry,” some shouted, retreating, already wounded, with saber wounds on their faces, their arms, their chests from the first skirmishes. The blood, far from frightening those who advanced, drove them toward the place where the artillery and musket fire was thickest . . . It was then that Sofía turned away from the window: “Let’s go!” she shouted, tearing down sabers and daggers from the panoply. Esteban tried to stop her: “Don’t be a fool! They’re firing muskets. You won’t do a thing with that scrap of metal you’re holding.” “Stay if you want! I’m going!” “Who are you fighting for then?” “For those who have taken to the streets!” Sofía shouted. “We have to do something!” “What?” “Something!” Esteban watched her leave the house, impetuous, inflamed, one shoulder bare, hoisting a blade with unprecedented force and determination. “Wait for me,” he shouted. And he grabbed a hunting rifle and hurried downstairs . . .
