Explosion in a Cathedral, page 6
Victor returned, as was his custom, at nightfall. After a momentary reprieve, Esteban’s condition had worsened through the course of the day, his seizures turning so severe that they considered calling a doctor—in that house, this was an unusual response, because the invalid, chastened by past experience, knew that the remedies of apothecaries, if they had any effect at all, only ever made his condition worse. Hanging from his bars with his face turned to the courtyard, the adolescent had removed his clothing in desperation. His ribs and clavicles jutting out in relief, seeming to have penetrated the skin, brought to mind the cadavers in certain tombs in Spain, gutted and reduced to taut leather stretched across a frame of bones. Bested in the struggle for air, Esteban tumbled to the floor, slumped against the wall, face purple, nails almost black, looking at the others with eyes on the verge of death. His racing pulse pounded through his veins. A waxy sheen covered him, and his tongue, without a drop of saliva, pressed against his teeth, which trembled in his white gums. “We’ve got to do something!” Sofía shouted, “We’ve got to do something!” After minutes of apparent indifference, Victor asked, as if moved to a difficult decision, for the carriage, saying he would go for Someone with extraordinary powers who could treat the disease. He returned after half an hour in the company of a stoutly built mestizo in extremely elegant dress whom he presented as Doctor Ogé, an esteemed physician and distinguished philanthropist he’d known in Port-au-Prince. Sofía bowed slightly before the new arrival, but without extending him her hand. He could well have taken pride in the relative lightness of his skin: it was like a prosthetic hide, stretched over one of those faces with broad nostrils and dense, frizzy hair. But whoever was a negro, whoever had something of the negro about them, was for Sofía synonymous with servant, stevedore, coachman, or itinerant musician—it mattered little that Victor, noticing her contemptuous expression, explained that Ogé, scion of a well-to-do family in Saint-Domingue, had studied in Paris, and had degrees that attested to his intellect. His vocabulary was scrupulous, even affected—with antiquated or obsolete turns of phrase when he spoke in French, and an excessive differentiation of the c and z when he spoke in Spanish—and his manners betrayed his constant desire to preserve the impression of his urbanity. “But . . . he’s a negro!” Sofía hissed into Victor’s ear, her breath striking him like a soft blow. “All men are born equal,” he responded, shoving her slightly aside. The idea he’d expressed only aggravated her revulsion. This was admissible, perhaps, as a humanitarian conjecture, but she could never consider a negro a doctor worthy of her trust, let alone commend the flesh of her kin to an individual of the wrong color. No one would trust a negro to build a palace, defend a prisoner, arbitrate a theological dispute, or govern a country. Esteban, emitting death rattles, cried out in despair, and all of them hurried to his room. “Let the doctor do his work,” Victor said, brooking no resistance. “We have to get him through this attack one way or another.” The mestizo remained immobile, not looking at the ill man, not examining him or even touching him, instead sniffing at the air in a strange manner. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said after a moment. And he looked up toward a small oeil-de-boeuf window in the darkness of the wall, open high between two roof beams. He asked what lay behind it. Carlos remembered that there was a narrow, very damp lot there, full of broken furniture and rubbish, a sort of passageway separated from the street by a narrow fence covered in ivy, where no one had set foot for many years. The doctor insisted they take him there. After passing through Remigio’s room—Remigio himself was out searching for some tincture—they opened a creaking door, painted blue. What they saw at that moment was astonishing: in two long, parallel flower beds grew parsley, broom, nettles, mimosas, and wild herbs, with several clusters of mignonettes in splendorous flower. As though raised on an altar, a bust of Socrates that Sofía remembered seeing in her father’s office when she was a girl was nestled in a niche amid strange offerings of a kind benighted people used for their incantations: wooden bowls filled with grains of corn, brimstone, seashells, iron filings. “C’est ça,” Ogé said, contemplating the minuscule garden, as though it held some deep significance for him. And moved by a sudden impulse, he began to tear the mignonettes up by their roots and pile them between the flower beds. He then went to the kitchen, returning with a shovelful of lit embers, set a bonfire, and threw on it every bit of vegetation growing in that narrow strip of land. “Most likely we’ve found the origin of his illness,” he said, with an explanation that, for Sofía, resembled a lecture in necromancy. According to him, certain ailments were mysteriously related to an herb, plant, or tree growing in the vicinity. Every human being had a double in the vegetable world. And there were cases where this double stole the energies of the man it grew in concert with for the furtherance of its own development, condemning him to suffering whilst it flourished and shed its seed. “Ne souriez pas, Madamoiselle.” He had seen it many times in Saint-Domingue, where asthma afflicted the children and teenagers, and many died from asphyxiation or anemia. At times, merely burning the vegetation in the sick man’s vicinity—in his home or on the land surrounding it—sufficed for a miraculous recovery. “Sorcery,” Sofía said, “That’s what this is.” Just then, Remigio reappeared, deeply upset by what he saw. Seething, out of sorts, he threw his hat to the ground, shouting that they had burned his plants; he’d been growing them a long time to sell them at the market, they were medicinal; they had destroyed his caisimón, which it had taken him great effort to acclimate, and which healed disturbances of the male parts when its leaves were applied while saying a prayer to Saint Ermenegildo, whose pudenda were tortured by the Sultan of the Saracens; all this was a grave offense to the lord of the forest, whose portrait, as he called it, with his characteristic wisp of beard—and at this, he pointed toward the bust of Socrates—blessed that place, which no one in that house had ever had any use for. And, bursting into tears, he groaned that if the master of the house had placed a bit more faith in his herbs—and he’d offered them when he saw the old man was going down a bad road, obsessed of late with bringing women into the house when Carlos was on the estate, Sofía off in the convent, and the other one too ill to notice—then he wouldn’t have died the way he had, hunched on top of some female, likely flaunting a vigor age had diminished. “Tomorrow, you are to leave!” Sofía shouted, bringing the odious scene to an end, dumbfounded, disgusted, incapable of coming to terms with that deafening revelation . . . They returned to Esteban’s room, and Carlos—who had not yet grasped the significance of Remigio’s words—lamented the time wasted on this pointless song and dance. But something strange was happening with the invalid: formerly drawn out and high-pitched, the whistling in his throat became intermittent, and now and then died away for a few seconds. It was as if he were drinking in short sips of air, and with the relief they brought him, his ribs and clavicles returned to their place, beneath and not above the surrounding tissue. “Just as there are men who die consumed by fire trees or Saint Benedict’s thistle,” Ogé said, “he was being slowly killed by the yellow flowers that were feeding from his essence.” And now, sitting down, squeezing the sick man’s knees between his own, he looked him in the eyes with imperious fixity, while his hands, with an undulating movement of the fingers, seemed to spill an invisible fluid over his temples. A stupefied gratitude crossed the patient’s face, a decongested face that went pale in places, leaving visible, here and there, the anomalous relief of a blue vein. Changing methods, Doctor Ogé rubbed the tips of his thumbs in circles around the patient’s eye sockets, his hands moving in concert. Then he stopped, bringing them in, drawing them closed and holding them at the height of his cheeks, as if in this way to conclude some ritual. Esteban slumped on his side on the wicker ottoman, overcome by sudden drowsiness, sweat welling from all his pores. Sofía covered his naked body with a blanket. “Give him an infusion of ipecac and arnica leaves when he awakens,” said the medicine man, carefully smoothing his suit in the mirror, and saw reflected the probing gaze of Sofía following him with her eyes. There was something of the magician, of the charlatan in his theatrical gestures. But with them, he had produced a miracle. “My friend,” Victor explained to Carlos, uncorking a bottle of Portuguese wine, “belongs to the Harmony Society of Cap Français.” “Is that a musical association?” Sofía asked. Ogé and Victor looked at each other and burst into laughter. Angered at their unexpected mirth, the young lady returned to Esteban’s room. The sick man was sleeping heavily, his respiration normal, and the color was returning beneath his nails. Victor waited for her in the doorway to the great room: “The negro’s honorarium,” he said in a low tone. Embarrassed at her obliviousness, Sofía hurried back to her bedroom, retrieving an envelope which she handed to the doctor. “Oh! Jamais de la vie!” the mestizo exclaimed, rejecting the gratuity with an indignant gesture, and talking of modern medicine, which for years now had been compelled to admit that certain forces, though still poorly understood, exerted an effect on man’s health. Sofía glared at Victor. But her gaze was lost in the void: the Frenchman was concentrated on Rosaura, the mulatta, who was crossing the courtyard with her hindquarters swaying beneath a light blue flowered dress. “How interesting,” the young woman murmured, as though following along with Ogé’s words. “Plaît-il?” the other man asked. A palm frond fell in the courtyard with a sound like a curtain being torn. The wind carried in the scents of the sea, a sea so near it seemed to drain into all the streets in the city. “We’ll have a hurricane this year,” Carlos said, looking at Albertus Magnus’s thermometer and trying to convert Fahrenheit to Réaumur. A latent distress filled the atmosphere. Words were divorced from thoughts. All were speaking through foreign mouths, even if the words emerged from above the chins of their own faces. Carlos had no interest in Albertus Magnus’s thermometer; Ogé had no sense that he was being heard; Sofía found no relief from the intimate resentment of an irritation turned against Remigio—laggard revealer of something she had suspected a long time, which made her detest the wretchedness of the masculine condition, incapable of the dignity or serene solitude of a spinster or a widow’s existence. And her exasperation with her indiscreet servant only grew as she realized the negro’s words gave her reason to confess that she’d never loved her father, whose kisses, stinking of licorice and tobacco and planted reluctantly on her forehead and cheeks when he took her back to the convent after those tedious Sunday luncheons, had been odious to her since puberty.
VI.
Sofía felt alien, divested of herself, as if on the threshold of a period of transformations. On certain afternoons, she had the feeling that the light, falling here and not there, endowed things with a new personality. A Christ emerged from the shadows to stare at her with sad eyes. An object, unnoticed up to then, would announce the delicate precision of its manufacture. The veining of an armoire would summon forth a ship. A painting would speak another language, with a figure in it looking suddenly restored; with the harlequins emerging more visibly from the foliage in the parks, while the broken pillars, blown outward—but suspended interminably in space—of the Explosion in a Cathedral exasperated her with their arrested movement, their endless falling without falling. Books she had coveted months before and ordered impatiently from catalogs had arrived from Paris but remained now still partly wrapped on a shelf in the library. She moved from one thing to the next, abandoning practicalities to tinker with useless things, gluing bits of broken vases together, seeding plants that wouldn’t grow in the tropics, amused by a botanical treatise, bored by a reading full of Patroclus and Aeneas, setting both aside to dive into a trunk of scraps of fabric; incapable of persisting, of seeing her stitching to completion, or the household expenses, or a translation—utterly unnecessary, as far as it goes—of the “Ode to Evening” by the Englishman Collins . . . Esteban was also changed; his character and demeanor had undergone many alterations since the night of his portentous recovery—because the fact was, since the destruction of Remigio’s hidden garden, his illness had not struck again. No longer afraid of his nocturnal crises, he was always first to leave the house and awoke earlier and earlier each day. He ate when he felt like it, not waiting for the others. At all moments, a voracity—requital for all the diets the doctors had imposed on him—drove him to the kitchen to dig his fingers into the casseroles, to grab the first puff pastry from the oven, to devour the fruit just in from the market. Weary of pineapple juice and horchata, which recollected his ailments, he slaked his thirst at all hours with great glasses of red wine that imparted their color to his face. He was insatiable at the table, especially when lunching alone, at midday, sleeves rolled up, open shirt revealing his chest, in Arabian slippers, pouncing on a tray of shellfish, wielding his cracker so brusquely that bits of shell flew off toward the walls. Over his bare body, like a robe, he wore a bishop’s cassock taken from the wardrobe where the family’s clothes were stored; his hairy legs emerged beneath its amaranth folds, and its satin was delightfully cool beneath the rosary he strung around himself in place of a belt. This bishop was perpetually in motion, playing skittles in the gallery over the courtyard, sliding down the stair rail, hanging from the balusters, trying to revive the chimes of a clock that had been still for twenty years. Sofía, who had bathed him often during his crises without ever noticing the downy shadows darkening his anatomy, took care now, from a growing sense of shame, to avoid looking out at the terrace when she knew the boy was washing in the open air, then drying himself in the sunlight lying on the brick floor, without even a towel across his hips. “He’s turning into a man on us,” Carlos said with joy. “A man indeed,” Sofía joined in, because she knew that, for several days now, he’d been shaving off his peach fuzz with a straight razor. Restoring the temporal order, Esteban had given back their true meaning to the hours violated by the habits of the house. He rose earlier each day, until he was even sharing the morning coffee with the servants. Sofía contemplated him with astonishment, alarmed at the new figure growing inside that being who had been aching and pitiful a few weeks before; who now, in the air he deeply inhaled and exhaled, free of phlegm and congestion, found an energy still too potent for his bony shoulders, his slender legs, his silhouette, which remained scraggy after his long plight. The young woman felt the unease of a mother noticing the first signs of virility in her son—a son who grabbed his hat more and more frequently, taking any pretext to roam the streets, concealing that his wanderings always led him to the harbor streets or the edges of the Alameda, near the old church that marked the boundary of the Arsenal neighborhood. Timidly, at first, venturing to one corner today, tomorrow to the next, measuring the distance, he arrived slowly to the street with the saloons and dance halls, which was singularly peaceful in the afternoon. Already there were women there, just awakened, newly bathed, in the doorways blowing tobacco smoke and shooting mocking looks at the young man, who fled the most aggressive of them, slowing before others whose whispered overtures only he could hear. As the houses spoke to him, they exhaled a turbid perfume, of soaps and essences, of indolent bodies and warm bedrooms, and his pulse raced at the thought that the decision of a second would suffice to penetrate that world rich with enigmatic possibilities. Between an abstract notion of the physical mechanics and real consummation lay an enormous distance only adolescence could gauge—with the vague sensation of guilt, of danger, of the commencement of Something implicit in the grasping of a stranger’s flesh. For ten days, he walked to the end of the street, almost resolving to enter the place where a lazing girl, always sitting on a footstool, had chosen wisely to wait in unbroken silence. Ten times he passed her without daring, but the woman, knowing he had chosen, certain she would have him tomorrow if not today, watched him impassively. At last, one afternoon, the blue door of the house closed behind him. Nothing of what occurred in those warm, narrow chambers, with no adornments but a few petticoats hung on nails, struck him as especially significant or extraordinary. Certain modern novels, unprecedented in their crudity, had shown him that true delectation obeyed subtler shared impulses. And yet he returned every day for weeks to the same place: he needed to show himself he was capable of doing it without remorse or physical impediments—his curiosity to experience other bodies growing—just as other boys his age did quite naturally. “Who sprayed you with that abominable perfume?” his cousin asked one day, sniffing at his neck. Later, Esteban found a book on the nightstand in his bedroom that detailed the horrible diseases sent to man as punishment for carnal sins. The young man put the book away, not realizing it was intended for him.
