Explosion in a Cathedral, page 4
III.
Surrounded by nuns who urged her—tenaciously, but without haste; softly, but insistently—to make herself a maidservant to God, Sofía quieted her reservations by exerting herself on Esteban’s behalf, adopting the role of surrogate mother. Absorbed in her new profession, she didn’t hesitate to undress him and give him sponge baths when he was incapable of doing it himself. The afflictions of that young man she’d always looked on as a brother made her presence a necessity, and strengthened her instinctive resistance to retiring from the world. As for Carlos, he feigned to ignore his own rude good health, taking the least cough as a pretext to climb into bed, sending for boozy punches that put him in a superb mood. One day he strolled through the house’s several rooms, pen in hand—with the mulatta servant trailing behind him, holding the inkpot aloft like a sacrament—to take an inventory of useless debris. He drew up an exhaustive list of all that was needed to furnish a proper dwelling and passed it to the Executor—himself ever disposed to play the “second father” and satisfy any and all of the orphans’ desires . . . Just before Christmas, boxes and bales started arriving and were placed as they appeared throughout the rooms on the lower floor. From the salon to the carriage house stretched an invasion of items which were left resting in crates, a few slats torn away, cushioned by straw and shavings, waiting for some eventual imposition of order. A heavy wardrobe, carried in by six black porters, stood untouched in the vestibule, while a lacquered screen, set down next to a wall, remained nailed in the container in which it was shipped. The porcelain cups sat in the same sawdust that had cushioned them during their passage, while the books meant to form a library of new poetry and new ideas were unpacked, a dozen here, a dozen there, and left all round in piles, on armchairs and nightstands still redolent of fresh varnish. The baize of the billiard table was a prairie outstretched between the moon of a rococo mirror and the stern silhouette of a desk of English marquetry. One night, they heard gunfire in a coffer: the strings of the harp, which Sofía had ordered from a factory in Naples, were snapping in the humid air of their new clime. The mice from neighboring buildings made nests across the house, and cats came, filed their claws against the exquisite woodwork, and unraveled tapestries of unicorns, cockatoos, and harriers. The disorder reached its culmination in the artifacts of the Cabinet of Physics Esteban had ordered, intending to replace his automata and music boxes with entertainments that would instruct as well as delight. There were telescopes, hydrostatic scales, bits of amber, compasses, magnets, Archimedes screws, miniature hoists, communicating vessels, Leyden jars, pendulums and balances, tiny machines to which the manufacturer had added, to substitute for a few missing pieces, mathematical instruments of the most advanced sort available. On certain nights, the adolescents would devote themselves to the building of strange contraptions, lost in the pages of instruction manuals, calling theories into question, waiting for dawn to test the functioning of a prism, marveling as they saw the colors of the rainbow paint themselves across a wall. They had grown slowly used to living in the nighttime, following Esteban, who slept best during the day and preferred to stay up till dawn. The worst of his crises tended to come in the final hours of the night, waylaying him just as he was falling asleep. Rosaura, the mulatta cook, set the table for lunch at six in the evening and left out a cold dinner for midnight. From one day to the next, a labyrinth of boxes had filled the house, and each of the young people had a private corner, a stretch of floor, a place for solitude or discussion on the subject of some book or physics mechanism that had begun all at once to function in the most unexpected way. A sort of ramp or Alpine trail emerged from the doorway in the salon, scaled an armoire placed on its side, rose over the Three Crates of Crockery, one laid over the other, past which you could contemplate the landscape below before ascending, through craggy byways of broken boards and battens like nettles, to the Grand Terrace, made up of the Nine Crates of Furnishings, atop which the expeditioners felt the roof beams graze the napes of their necks. “What a beautiful sight!” Sofía would shout with a laugh, pressing her skirt into her knees when she reached the heights. But Carlos swore there were other routes, riskier ones that attacked the parcel massif from the other end, that required a mountaineer’s knack until the climber surfaced all at once on his belly, hauling his body up with the noble wheeze of a Saint Bernard dog. On paths and plateaus, hideaways and bridges, they read what their fancy dictated: newspapers from another era, almanacs, travel guides, a Natural History, a classical tragedy, or a new novel they kept stealing from each other, the action of which took place in the year 2240—unless Esteban, from some summit, was scornfully aping the tirades of a well-known preacher, elucidating a verse from the Song of Songs and savoring Sofía’s irritation as she plugged her ears and shouted that men were swine, the whole lot of them. In the courtyard, the sundial had transformed into a moon clock and marked the inverse of the hours. The hydrostatic scale allowed them to confirm the weight of the cats; the little telescope, poked through a broken pane in the skylight, gave a view of things in nearby houses that elicited equivocal laughter from Carlos, the solitary astronomer standing on an armoire. The new flute was drawn from its case in a bedroom lined in mattresses, like a madman’s cell, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. There, head cocked at the music stand, sheet music scattered over the carpet, the young man gave long nocturnal concerts that grew steadily more sonorous and skillful unless he gave in to the urge to play a rustic dance piece on a recently acquired fife. Often, suffused with tenderness for one another, the adolescents swore they would never part. Sofía, whom the nuns had inspired at an early age with a fear of men’s natures, angered when Esteban jokingly—and possibly to test her—spoke of her future matrimony, blessed by a gaggle of children. A husband, any husband brought into that household would have seemed an abomination—a transgression against the flesh they regarded as property held in common that must remain intact. They were going to travel together, and together they would know the wide world. The Executor was the one best suited to take care of “the stinking rubbish next door.” Moreover, he seemed favorably disposed to their yearned-for travels, assuring them that letters of credit would follow them wherever they went. “You must go to Madrid,” he said, “to see the Correos building and the dome of San Francisco el Grande. Architectural marvels of that kind are unknown in these parts.” In their century, the speed of communication had made distance a thing of the past. It was up to the young people to choose, after the last of the countless Masses purchased for their father’s eternal repose—Masses Sofía and Carlos attended every Sunday before bed, traveling on foot through still-deserted streets to the Church of the Holy Spirit. They hadn’t yet found the resolve to open the crates and bundles and arrange the new furniture. The task overwhelmed them before they’d begun—particularly Esteban, whose illness made strenuous physical activity impossible. Besides, a morning invasion of upholsterers, varnishers, and other strangers would have ill-suited their habits, which flouted all ordinary sense of time. It was early if one of them started the day at five p.m., rising to receive Don Cosme, who was more paternal and obsequious than ever, sending out orders, anxiously acquiring any and everything, unconcerned with costs. The warehouse business was flourishing, he said, and he always made sure Sofía had more than enough money to maintain their home in grand style. He praised her for taking on the responsibilities of a mother, keeping a close eye on the young men, and in passing tossed a subtle but spiteful dart at the nuns who convinced distinguished young ladies to lock themselves away so the church could get its hands on their property—and one was free to say as much while remaining a pious Christian. The visitor would depart with a bow, announcing that, for now, Carlos’s presence wasn’t needed at the firm, and the young people would return to their domains and labyrinths, where an arcane nomenclature reigned. They dubbed the pile of crates threatening to tumble “The Leaning Tower”; the chest that bridged two wardrobes was known as “The Druids’ Way.” Whoever spoke of Ireland meant the corner with the harp; whoever said Mount Carmel referred to the sentry post of half-unfolded screens where Sofía customarily retired to read her spine-chilling mystery novels. When Esteban set all his scientific apparatus in motion, they said Albertus Magnus was at work. Everything was transfigured in this perpetual game that marked new distances from the outside world through the arbitrary counterpoint of lives unfolding on three distinct planes: Esteban remained in the terrestrial, as his ailment inclined him little to ascension; he envied Carlos, who would leap in the heights from box to box, dangle from the girders of the Moorish-style ceiling, or sway in a hammock from Veracruz spanning the roof beams exposed between the plaster; Sofía’s existence proceeded in an intermediate realm, some ten palms’ lengths from the floor, her heels at the height of her cousin’s temples, where she shifted books to and fro among their assorted hiding places, their “warrens” as she called them, spreading out at ease, unbuttoning her blouse, removing her stockings, pulling her skirt up over her thighs when it got too hot . . . For the rest, their dinners took place at daybreak, by candlelight in a dining room invaded by cats, where, in rebellion against the rigidity always observed at family meals, they behaved like barbarians, each carving the meat more carelessly than the other, snatching the best morsels, breaking poultry bones to see what they augured, kicking each other under the table, snuffing the candles to better pilfer a pastry from their neighbor’s plate—slovenly, slumping, slouched on their elbows. When not hungry, they would eat while playing solitaire or building houses of cards; if in bad spirits, they would bring along a novel. When the two boys conspired to get under Sofía’s skin, she cursed like a mule driver; but in her mouth, a seedy interjection took on a surprisingly chaste air, shedding its meaning to become an expression of defiance—vengeance for the many, many meals in the convent, taken with eyes lowered to her dish after saying grace. “Where’d you learn that?” the other two asked, laughing. “At the whorehouse,” she replied naturally, like a habitué. Weary, after a time, of bad behavior, of trampling urbanity, of shooting bank shots with walnuts over a tablecloth stained from an upturned tumbler, they would say good night at dawn, taking to their chambers a piece of fruit, a fistful of almonds, a glass of wine, in an inverted twilight rife with proclamations and morning prayers.
IV.
This always happens.
Goya
The year of mourning passed, and the year of half-mourning began, but little changed in the lives of those adolescents, who settled deeper into their new habits, absorbed in interminable readings, discovering the universe through books. They never left home, grew oblivious to the world, and found out the events of the day by chance, through some foreign newspaper that reached them months after the fact. Hearing word of the presence of a “good catch” in the locked mansion, certain people of standing had tried to approach them through overtures of all sorts, alleging sorrow for those orphans living in solitude; but their offers were met with cold evasion. The house’s inhabitants took mourning as a fitting pretext to stay aloof from all commitments or obligations, ignoring a society whose provincial intolerance tried to bind existence to ordinary norms—to appearing in certain places at certain times, dining in the same modish pastry shops, spending Christmas on the sugar plantations or on estates in Artemisa, where rich landholders vied with each other over the number of mythological statues they could place on the verges of their tobacco fields. They emerged from the rainy season, which filled the streets with new mud, and one morning, half-asleep, at the start of what he called his night, Carlos heard the loud thud of the knocker against the front door. He wouldn’t have paid it mind had another not come moments later, this time from the door to the coach house, and then more of them afterward, at each and every door to the building—and at last, the hand returned impatiently to the place it had begun, and the thundering repeated, door by door, a second time and then a third. It was as if some would-be intruder were running around his home in circles, in search of a crack he might slink into—and that impression of someone or something in orbit grew stronger the more the knocks resounded, echoing in the most recondite of corners, in places that offered no egress to the street. Being a holiday, Holy Saturday, the warehouse—often sought out by visitors in search of information—was closed. Since no one answered, he assumed Remigio and Rosaura were at the Mass of the Resurrection or else shopping at the market. “He’ll get tired of knocking,” Carlos thought, sinking his head into his pillow. But when the blows continued, he threw on a robe in fury and descended to the hall. He looked outside just in time to glimpse a man turning the nearest corner with a hasty step, an enormous umbrella in hand. On the ground lay a card, slipped beneath the wings of the door:
VICTOR HUGUES
Négotiant
à
Port-au-Prince
Cursing this unknown character, Carlos lay back down, not giving him any more thought. When he awoke, his eyes came to rest on that square of paper, tinted an odd green by the last ray of sun passing through the transom light. The little ones were gathered around the boxes and bundles in the sitting room, Albertus Magnus absorbed in his physics, when the same hand from that morning lifted the knockers again. It must have been ten at night—early for them, but late according to the customs of that city. Sofía grew suddenly afraid: “We can’t have a stranger in here,” she said, noticing for the first time the peculiarities of what had come to form the natural setting of her existence. Accepting an unknown party into the family labyrinth would have been like betraying a secret, handing over a relic, dissipating a spell. “Don’t open, for God’s sake!” begged Carlos, rising with an angry expression. But it was too late: Remigio, roused from the early hours of his slumber by a knock at the door to the coach house, guided in the foreigner, holding a candelabra aloft. The visitor was a man of indefinite years—thirty or forty perhaps, or maybe much younger—his face frozen in that imperturbability etched into every face when the wrinkles sink prematurely into the forehead and cheeks, molded by the movements of a physiognomy used to brusque transitions—as the first words he uttered would make evident—from extreme tension to ironic passivity, unrestrained laughter to hard willfulness, reflecting an overmastering dedication to imposing his ideas and convictions. His skin was leathery from the sun, his hair combed in a careful pretense of carelessness in keeping with the latest fashions, and altogether this gave him a look of robust health. His clothing clung too tightly to his vigorous torso, the swelling muscle in his arms, the sturdy legs that trod with certain steps. If his lips were loutish and sensual, his very dark eyes gave him an imperious and almost arrogantly intense glow. He was a man of bearing, but his first impression as likely aroused aversion as sympathy. (“A brute like that,” thought Sofía, “only pounds on people’s doors if there’s something inside he wants.”) After greeting them with effusive courtesy that hardly expunged the discourtesy of his loud, insistent knocking, the visitor started speaking swiftly, leaving no time for others to interject, saying that he had letters for their father, and had heard wonders about the old man’s intelligence; that the time was ripe for new agreements and new transactions; that the merchants here, entitled to trade freely, should establish relations with the other Caribbean islands; that he had brought with him, as a modest gift, a few bottles of wine, of a quality not to be encountered in the local marketplace; that . . . When the three of them shouted that their father was long since dead and buried, the stranger—who expressed himself in an amusing patois, with some Spanish, a good deal of French, and a sprinkling of English turns of phrase—stopped short with an Oh! so wounded, so deceived, so inimical to his flowing verbiage, that the others burst into cackles, not even stopping to think how shameful it was to laugh just then. Everything happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, and the now disconcerted trader from Port-au-Prince joined in with their mirth. Sofía, coming back to reality, uttered the words For God’s sake! and everyone turned immediately downcast. And yet the tension from before was dispelled. The visitor walked forward without being asked, seemingly unaffected by the reigning disorder or Sofía’s extravagant dress—for a laugh, she’d donned one of Carlos’s shirts, the bottom hem of which grazed her knees. With an expert’s air, he tapped a porcelain vase, stroked the Leyden jar, praised the manufacture of a compass, twisted the Archimedes screw, muttered something about levers that could lift the world, and embarked upon the tale of his voyages, which began with him as a cabin boy in the port of Marseille, where his father—very much to his honor—had been a master baker. “Bakers are of great use to society,” Esteban remarked, pleased to be in the company of a foreigner who did not, upon setting foot in their land, set to boasting of his high birth. “Better to pave roads than make porcelain flowers,” the other said, availing himself of a classical quotation before mentioning his Martinican nursemaid, black, a true negress and a sort of omen of his future wanderings; though in his tender years he had dreamed of Asia, all the ships that took him on were bound for the Antilles or the Gulf of Mexico. He spoke of the coral reefs of Bermuda; of the opulence of Baltimore; of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, in no way inferior to the one in Paris; of the mint and watercress liqueurs of Veracruz; and so on, descending to the Gulf, passing Pearl Island and remote Trinidad. Promoted to First Mate, he had reached as far as distant Paramaribo, a town that might well be the envy of people given to bluster—at this, he pointed at the ground—for its broad avenues lined with orange and lemon trees, their trunks beautified with inlaid seashells. There were regal dances aboard the foreign vessels that dropped anchor at the foot of Fort Zeelandia, and the Dutch women, he said, with a wink to the young men, were prodigal with their favors. All the world’s wines and liquors could be tasted in that iridescent colony, served at banquets by bejeweled negresses in necklaces and anklets and clad in skirts of Indian textiles, their nearly transparent blouses cinched to their firm, throbbing breasts—and to calm Sofía, who was already furrowing her brow at the image, he dignified it with an opportune snippet of French verse alluding to Persian slave girls in similar garments at the palace of Sardanapalus. “How genteel of you,” the girl hissed in acknowledgment of his graceful volte-face. In any case—the man continued, now changing latitudes—the Antilles were an archipelago filled with wonder, where the strangest things existed: giant anchors abandoned on solitary beaches; houses held to the rocks by iron chains to keep the cyclones from dragging them off to sea; a vast Sephardi cemetery in Curaçao; islands inhabited by women who stayed alone for months and years on end while the men were off working on the mainland; sunken galleons, petrified trees, unimaginable fish; and in Barbados, the sepulcher of a grandson of Constantine XI, last emperor of Byzantium, whose ghost appeared to solitary travelers on windy nights . . . Then Sofía asked the visitor with great seriousness if he had seen mermaids in the tropical seas. Before the stranger could answer, the young woman showed him a page from Les délices de la Hollande, a very old book that told how some time after a storm had broken the dikes of West Friesland, a sea-woman appeared, half-buried in the mud. She was taken to Haarlem, where they clothed her and taught her to sew. She lived for years without learning the language, her instinct driving her always toward the water. Her moans were like the plaints of a woman on her deathbed. The visitor, unmoved by the tale, spoke of a mermaid found in the Maroni River years before. Major Archicombie, a highly esteemed soldier, had described her in a report delivered to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. “An English major cannot be mistaken,” he added, with almost tedious gravity. Carlos, noting that the visitor had risen somewhat in Sofía’s esteem, turned the discussion back to the subject of voyages. But all that was left to speak of was Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, with its fountains of flowing water and its houses that recalled those of Rochefort and La Rochelle—had the young people not visited Rochefort or La Rochelle . . . ? “They must be horrible,” Sofía said, “I suppose we’ll be forced to spend a few hours in such places when we leave for Paris. Why don’t you talk to us of Paris, which you must certainly know from one end to the other.” The stranger looked at her askance, and instead of responding, said he had left Pointe-à-Pitre for Saint-Domingue with the aim of opening a shop, but had finally established himself with a prosperous general store in Port-au-Prince: a warehouse full of merchandise, leather, salt meat, and fish (“How awful!” Sofía exclaimed), wine barrels, spices—“More or less comme le vôtre,” he said, accompanying the French with a thumb pointed toward the parting wall, which the young lady considered the height of insolence: “We don’t deal with all that personally,” she told him. “It can’t be easy or leisurely work,” the man replied before telling them he’d come from Boston, the capital of big business, an excellent place to procure wheat flour for better prices than in Europe. He was waiting for a large shipment now, which he would sell part of in the square, dispatching the rest of it to Port-au-Prince. Carlos was about to dismiss the intruder, who had followed his interesting autobiographical prologue by straying into the odious subject of buying and selling, but the latter, rising from the armchair as if he were in his own home, walked toward the books piled in a corner. He grabbed one, and was emphatically pleased when the author could be somehow connected with advanced theories in politics or religion: “I see you all are very au courant,” he said, weakening their resistance. Soon they were showing him editions of their favorite authors, which the stranger handled with deference, sniffing the grainy papers and calfskin bindings. Then he approached the contraptions in the Cabinet of Physics, putting together an apparatus whose parts lay scattered across various pieces of furniture: “This is useful for navigation as well,” he said. Because it was hot, he asked permission to strip down to his shirtsleeves, astonishing his hosts, who were unnerved to see him penetrate so familiarly a world that had now turned tremendously strange with this addition of an unaccustomed presence in the midst of the Druid’s Way and the Leaning Tower. Sofía considered inviting him to eat, but was ashamed to tell him lunch was served at midnight in their home, with dishes better suited to midday; but the foreigner, adjusting a quadrant they’d had no notion of the purpose of before, winked toward the dining room, where the food had lain on the table since before his arrival, saying, “I’ve brought my own wines.” And after searching out the bottles he’d left in the courtyard upon entering, he placed them noisily on the tablecloth, telling the others to sit. Again, Sofía was scandalized at this impudent intruder who had burst into their home, arrogating the functions of the paterfamilias. But already the men were savoring an Alsatian wine with such abundant signs of gratification that, thinking of poor Esteban—who had been very sick recently, and seemed quite taken with the new arrival—she adopted the pose of a standoffish, courteous lady of the house, passing the dishes to the man she called “Monsieur Hyug” with a reedy accent, Huuuuuuuug, the other corrected her, putting a verbal circumflex on each U and ending in a curt G, with no appreciable effect on Sofía’s pronunciation. Rather than try to utter his surname correctly, she took malign pleasure in deforming it further, saying “Yug,” “Yuk,” “Ughez,” and concluded with a series of tongue twisters that degenerated into laughter chortled out over the pastries and marzipan Rosaura had brought for Holy Week, reminding Esteban all at once that today was Holy Saturday. “Les cloches! Les cloches!” the guest bellowed, pointing up with a quivering index finger to suggest how long the bells, small and large, had resounded in the city that morning. Then he went for another bottle—this time from Arbois—and the boys, somewhat tipsy, greeted it uproariously, blessing it with the sign of the cross. Their glasses drained, they walked out into the courtyard. “What’s up there?” Monsieur Hyug asked, stepping toward the broad stairway. He took the stairs two by two, and made it soon to the second story, looking out from the gallery beneath the roof, where a wooden balustrade ran between the pillars. “If he dares enter my room, I’ll send him out with a kick,” Sofía murmured. But the indifferent visitor did approach this last door, half-closed, and push it softly. “That’s a kind of attic,” Esteban said, holding his light up, and entered a room he hadn’t visited for years. Trunks, crates, chests, and suitcases were pushed against the walls, their order marking a comical contrast to the disorder reigning below. In the back stood a sacristy cupboard, and its splendidly veined wood caught Monsieur Hyug’s eyes: “Sturdy . . . exquisite.” To boast of its hardiness, Sofía opened it, showing him the thickness of the doors. But the stranger was more interested in the old suits hanging from a metal rod: garments that had belonged to members of her mother’s family, who had built their home; to the academic, the prelate, the ensign, the magistrate; grandmothers’ dresses, faded satins, austere frocks, festive lace, muslin gone green from the salt air, percale, calico; costumes worn once and put away: of a shepherdess, a card reader, an Incan princess, a distinguished lady of old. “Wonderful for play-acting!” Esteban exclaimed. And taken all at once with the very same idea, they took down those dusty relics, amid a great whirl of moths, hurling them downstairs over the waxed mahogany handrail. Not long afterward, in the Great Room transformed into a theater, they took turns mimicking and guessing the object of each other’s buffoonery: it was enough to change out the different pieces of outfits, to pin up parts of them with needles, to don a nightshirt as a Roman peplum or an ancient tunic, and they embodied heroes from history or novels, with escarole woven into a laurel crown, a pipe for a pistol, a cane slid into a mended belt making do for a sword. Monsieur Hyug, evidentially a lover of antiquity, played Mucius Scaevola, Gaius Gracchus, and Demosthenes—a Demosthenes identified swiftly when he hurried off to the courtyard in search of stones. They all recognized Carlos, with flute and cardboard tricorne hat, as Frederick of Prussia, despite his protests that Quantz, the flautist, was who he had in mind. With a toy frog brought from his bedroom, Esteban parodied the experiments of Galvani, but cut his performance short when the dust from the clothes brought on a severe attack of sneezing. Sofía, sensing Monsieur Hyug’s scant acquaintance with things Spanish, gave mean-spirited renditions of Inês de Castro, Joanna the Mad, and the Illustrious Kitchen Maid, making herself as ugly as possible, her features twisted into moronic semblances to bring life to a last, unidentifiable personage who turned out, amid shouts of protest from her audience, to be “a Bourbon princess, whichever one, take your pick.” When dawn was near breaking, Carlos proposed a great massacre. Hanging the suits from delicate threads on a wire stretched between the trunks of two palm trees, adorning them with grotesque faces drawn on paper, they threw balls at them and tried to knock them down. “Attack!” Esteban shouted, calling them to the charge. And prelates fell, and captains, ladies of the court and pastors, amid laughter bellowed in the narrow courtyard, which could be heard all along the street . . . Day surprised them in the midst of this, in a trance of rabid joy, far from sated with their play, hurling paperweights, tureens, flowerpots, encyclopedias at the suits they hadn’t managed to fell with stones: “Attack!” Esteban shouted, “Attack . . . !” At last, Remigio was obliged to bring out the carriage and take the visitor to his nearby hotel. The Frenchman took his leave reluctantly, with great shows of affection, promising to return that evening. “He’s quite a character,” Esteban said. But now the others had to dress in black to go to the Church of the Holy Spirit, where another Mass would be spoken for their father’s eternal repose. “Suppose we didn’t go?” Carlos ventured with a yawn. “Either way, they’ll still deliver it.” “I’ll go myself,” Sofía replied sternly. But after some hesitation, alluding to the imminence of a perfectly routine indisposition, she pulled the curtains to her room and got into bed.
