Explosion in a Cathedral, page 37
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• • •
That much could be known. Then afterward, the furor, the roar, the tumult, the chaos of collective convulsion. The mamelukes charged, the cuirassers charged, the Polish guard charged at the multitude that fought back with knives and clubs, at the women and men who ran to the horses and sliced their flanks with razors. Platoons emerged from four streets at once, and surrounded, the people went inside or ran, jumping over walls and across rooftops. Firebrands, stones, and bricks rained from the windows; cauldrons and pots of boiling oil were dumped over the attackers. The cannoneers fell one by one, but the guns went on firing, wicks lit by raging women when there were no more men left to do it. An atmosphere of cataclysm, of telluric disturbance, reigned across Madrid—with fire, iron, steel, all that cut or exploded, now turned against the masters—in a tempestuous Dies Irae . . . Then came night. A night of grim slaughter, of mass executions, of extermination in Manzanares and Moncloa. The rifle fire had grown thicker, less diffuse, concerted in a fateful rhythm that responded to orders against the sinister ulcerated backdrop of walls reddened by blood. That night in early May, the hours swelled, their passing clotted with blood and horror. The streets filled with corpses—with wounded beings who wept and were finished off by patrols of bleak myrmidons, their ragged dolmans, lacerated braid, and torn shakos bespeaking the disasters of war in the light of a timid lamp, carried alone across the city in the impossible search for the face of a single body among countless other bodies . . . Neither Sofía nor Esteban ever returned to the Casa de Arcos. Not another trace of them or their final resting place was ever found.
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• • •
Two days later, after learning what little there was to learn, Carlos ordered sealed the crates where he had placed certain objects, books, and clothes which, by their shape, their scent, or their folds, still spoke to him of the existence of the departed. Downstairs, three carriages were waiting to take him and his luggage to the Casa de Postas. The Casa de Arcos would be returned, again empty, to the hands of its owners. One after another, the keys turned in the locks of the doors. Night moved into the mansion—night fell early that winter—as the fires inside died down, and the half-burnt logs were pulled away from the rest and doused with water from a pitcher of gilt red glass. When the last door was closed, the painting of the Explosion in a Cathedral, forgotten—perhaps willfully—ceased to matter, and erased itself, leaving a shadow on the dark carmine of the brocade dressing the walls of the salon, which seemed to bleed where damp had marked the fabric.
Guadeloupe, Barbados, Caracas
1956–1958
Concerning the History of Victor Hugues
As Victor Hugues has been almost ignored by the history of the French Revolution—which is far too occupied with describing the events that took place in Europe between the days of the Convention and 18 Brumaire to turn its gaze to the remote domains of the Caribbean—the author of the present book believes it useful to clarify certain matters concerning the historical truth behind this figure.
It is known that Victor Hugues was from Marseille, son of a baker—and there are even reasons to believe he had distant ancestors who were black, though this would be far from easy to prove. Drawn by a sea that has been—particularly in Marseille—an eternal summons to adventure since the times of Pythias and the Phoenician captains, he set sail for America, as a cabin boy, voyaging several times to the Caribbean. Rising to the rank of navigator of commercial vessels, he traveled through the Antilles, eventually leaving the wanderer’s life behind to open a large general store—a comptoir—in Port-au-Prince, with diverse merchandise acquired, gathered, collected, through trade, smuggling, or barter, exchanging silks for coffee, vanilla for pearls. Such places still exist in abundance in the ports of that luminous, glimmering world. His true entry into history dates from the night when Haitian revolutionaries burned this establishment to the ground.
From this moment, we can follow his trajectory step by step, just as it is narrated in the book. The chapters concerned with the reconquest of Guadeloupe follow a precise chronological schema. All that is said about his war against the United States—what the Yankees of the day called the Brigands’ War—as well as the action of the corsairs, with their names and the names of their ships, is based on documents the author has consulted in Guadeloupe and in libraries in Barbados, as well as on short but instructive references found in the works of those Latin American authors who mention Victor Hugues in passing.
Concerning Victor Hugues’s actions in French Guiana, abundant information exists in memoirs of the deportation. In the period after this novel’s end, Victor Hugues was brought before a military court in Paris to answer for handing the colony over to Holland, following a surrender that was, in truth, inevitable. Absolved with honor, Victor Hugues turned back to the political realm. We know he had dealings with Fouché. We also know he was in Paris when the Napoleonic Empire collapsed.
But here his trail goes cold. Some historians—the few who have looked into his case by chance, in addition to Pierre Vitoux, who dedicated to him, more than twenty years ago, a still unpublished study—say he died near Bordeaux, where he “possessed some properties” (?), in the year 1820. Didot’s Bibliographie Universelle places his death in 1822. But in Guadeloupe, where the memory of Victor Hugues remains very present, people say he returned to Guiana after the Empire fell, taking possession of his properties once more. It seems—according to researchers in Guadeloupe—that he died a slow, painful death, of an illness that may have been leprosy, but that evidence indicates was most likely some form of cancer.[*]
What was the end of Victor Hugues? We still do not know, just as we know very little about his birth. But there is no doubt that his hypostatic action—firm, sincere, heroic in the first phase; wavering, contradictory, predatory, even cynical in the second—presents the image of an extraordinary man whose behavior reveals a dramatic dichotomy. For this reason, the author has seen fit to reveal the existence of this neglected historical character in a novel that has, at the same time, the whole of the Caribbean as its subject.
A.C.
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*Author’s note: These pages were already published in their first edition in Mexico when, finding myself in Paris, I had the opportunity to meet the last living descendant of Victor Hugues, who possesses important family documents concerning him. He informed me that the grave of Victor Hugues lies not far away from Cayenne. In one of the documents I examined, I came upon a remarkable revelation: Victor Hugues was loved faithfully for years by a beautiful Cuban woman who, even more shockingly, was named Sofía.
Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral
