Explosion in a Cathedral, page 5
V.
Victor, as they called him, came every evening to their home, and proved adept at the most startling tasks. One night, he sank his hands into the kneading trough and molded croissants that revealed his skill as a baker. At other times, he blended magnificent sauces from combinations of the strangest ingredients. He turned cold meat into a muscovite delicacy with the addition of fennel and ground pepper, and boiled wine with spices to dignify any and all comestibles, consecrating them with ostentatious names in honor of illustrious chefs from the past. The discovery of El arte cisoria by the Marqués of Villena among a shipment of rare books from Madrid produced a week of medieval repasts, with pork loin standing in for the fruits of the hunt. He built the most complex contraptions with the Cabinet of Physics—nearly all of them were now assembled—to illustrate theories, analyze the spectrum, and raise sparks that enchanted the eye, and he expatiated upon them in that picturesque Spanish he’d acquired on his travels through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean isles, rich with novel words and turns of phrase. At the same time, he had the young people practice their pronunciation in French, reading aloud a page from a novel or, better still, a comedy for several voices, as if they were in the theater. Sofía laughed a great deal one twilight—which for her was the same as dawn—when Esteban declaimed, in that marked southern accent he owed to his new teacher, the following verses from Le Joueur:
Il est, parbleu, grand jour. Déjà, de leur ramage
Les coqs ont éveillé tout notre voisinage.
On a stormy night, they allowed Victor to stay in one of the bedrooms. When they awoke the next day at nightfall, not long before the neighborhood cockerels tucked their beaks beneath their wings, they were party to a spectacle hardly to be believed: bare-chested, shirt torn, sweating like a black stevedore, the Frenchman had pulled out all that was sitting in the boxes more or less untouched, ordering, with the help of Remigio, the furnishings, tapestries, and vases to his liking. At first, the impression they gave was melancholic and disconcerting. An entire choreography of dreams had collapsed. But slowly, the adolescents began to delight in that unexpected transformation, finding the spaces airier, the lights brighter—discovering the supple depths of an armchair, the fine inlay of a credenza, the warm tints of the Coromandel lacquer. Sofía went from room to room, as if in a new home, looking into unfamiliar mirrors which, placed one facing the other, multiplied her image into the inscrutable foggy distance. Climbing a ladder, Victor touched up certain corners here and there where humidity had left ugly blotches, and the paint stippled his eyebrows and cheeks. Possessed by a sudden fever for order, the others leaped on what was left in the crates, unrolling carpets, unfolding curtains, pulling porcelain from the sawdust it was packed in, and throwing whatever had shattered out into the courtyard—regretting, perhaps, that there weren’t more shards for them to hurl against the parting wall. That morning, there was a lavish dinner in the dining room, which in their minds took place in Vienna, as Sofía had for some time been reading articles praising the marble, crystal, and rocaille of that incomparably musical city watched over by Saint Stephen, patron saint of all those born on December 26 . . . Afterward, they held an Ambassador’s Ball before the beveled mirrors in the salon to the sound of Carlos’s flute, and he didn’t worry what the neighbors might think, in the midst of this extraordinary celebration. Foamy punch sprinkled with cinnamon, prepared by the Crown Minister, was served on trays, while Esteban, playing the haughty, decorated dauphin, noticed that each guest at the party danced worse than the others: Victor, because he hurtled around like a sailor on deck; Sofía because the nuns hadn’t taught her how to caper; Carlos, because he spun to the tune of his own music, like an automaton mounted on an axle. “Attack!” Esteban shouted, bombarding them with hazelnuts and birdshot. But the dauphin’s pranks came to a bad end; the whistling sounds from his trachea signaled the onset of a fit. In minutes, his face was furrowed, aged by a rictus of travail. The veins swelled in his neck, and he spread his legs and splayed his elbows, lifting his shoulders and clamoring for air that even in the vastness of his home he couldn’t find. “We need to get him somewhere cooler,” Victor said. (Such a thing had never occurred to Sofía. When her father, austere as she, was still alive, he would not have stood for anyone leaving the house after the hour of the rosary.) Lifting the asthmatic in his arms, Victor took him to the carriage while Carlos unhooked the horses’ harnesses and collars. And at last, Sofía found herself outside, between mansions that grew larger in the night, their columns higher, their roofs broader, their eaves stretched out over the grillwork capped by a lyre or a mermaid, or the heads of goats silhouetted against an iron coat of arms rife with keys, lions, and scallop shells in homage to Saint James. They emerged onto the Alameda, where some of the streetlamps were still lit. It looked strangely empty, shops closed, arcades in shadows, the fountain mute and the ships’ beacons swaying on the tops of the masts behind the jetty, tightly packed like trees in a forest. Over the murmur of the calm waters, broken against the pilings on the docks, there rose an aroma of fish, of oil and marine decay. A cuckoo clock sounded in some sleepy house, and the watchman called out the hour, announcing that the sky was clear and cloudless. After three slow turns, Esteban told them he wanted to go further. The carriage drove toward the Shipyard, where the vessels under construction recalled gigantic fossils with their rows of exposed ribs. “Not that way,” Sofía said, seeing they were already past the docks and the husks of ships, in a place where people of dreadful aspect were beginning to appear. Victor, paying her no mind, lashed the horses’ hindquarters softly with his whip. There were lights close by. And when they turned a corner, they found themselves on a street packed with seamen, where dance halls with open windows were bursting with music and laughter. Couples shimmied to the rhythm of drums, flutes, and violins with a licentiousness that brought blood into Sofía’s cheeks. Scandalized, dumbstruck, she couldn’t take her eyes off that tumult inside, presided over by the acid accents of clarinets. Mulattas wagged their hips, showing their haunches to their many admirers, then scurrying away from the fevered gestures they had provoked a hundred times over. Onstage, a black woman, skirts raised over her hips, tapped out the rhythm of a Cuban folk song that kept returning to the capricious chorus: When, my darling, when? One woman showed her breasts for the price of a drink, another one next to her lay back on a table, flinging her shoes toward the ceiling, her thighs emerging from her slip. Men of all colors and conditions walked to the backrooms of the taverns, hands buried in the dough of buttocks. Victor, who moved with a coachman’s finesse among the drunks, seemed to relish that depraved racket, distinguishing the North Americans by their stagger, the English by their songs, the Spanish because they sipped red from wineskins and porrones. At the doors to the shacks, the whores clutched at passersby, letting them paw, hug, and grope them; one woman, pressed into a pallet by the weight of a black-bearded colossus, hadn’t even had time to shut the door. Another stripped nude a bony cabin boy too drunk to manage it on his own. Sofía was about to shout from disgust and indignation, but more for Carlos and Esteban than for her. That world was so strange to her, she saw it as a vision of Hell unrelated to the worlds known to man. The promiscuities of the port denizens, who knew no creed nor law, were deeply alien to her. But in the expressions of her brother and cousin, she saw something murky, strange, expectant—acquiescent, even—that incensed her. It was as if that didn’t repel them as deeply as it did her; as if there were a glimmer of understanding between their senses and those foreign bodies, those inhabitants of another universe. She imagined Esteban, Carlos at that dance, at that house, writhing on those cots, mingling their pristine sweat with the women’s dense perspirations . . . Standing in the carriage, she tore the whip from Victor’s hands and brought it down so forcefully that the horse galloped away, its breeching upturning a vendor’s pots and pans. The boiling oil, the fish, the pastries, and empanadas spilled out, raising howls from a scalded dog that rolled back and forth in the dust, leaving scraps of skin on the broken glass and the bones of sea bream. Mayhem broke out all along the street. Several black women ran behind them in the night, armed with sticks, knives, and empty bottles, throwing stones that bounced off the roofs, kicking up chips of roofing tiles that had fallen from the eaves. The insults proffered, so exhaustive, so insuperable, so blasphemous, and so obscene, nearly moved them to laughter once the carriage had taken them away. “The things a young lady has to hear,” Carlos said as they followed a winding route back to the Alameda. Once home, Sofía vanished into the shadows, not even saying good night.
