Explosion in a Cathedral, page 8
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It was not even nine the next day when Sofía, awakened by the blows of hammers, the screech of saws and pulleys, the voices of workers resounding in the house, walked to the salon, where something strange was occurring. The Executor was seated in an armchair grinning, and in front of him, at a certain distance, like judges in a tribunal, stood Carlos and Esteban, frowning, exceedingly serious and expectant. Victor was pacing through the room, hands clasped behind his back. Now and then he would pause before the newcomer, glare at him, and return to his thoughts with a reluctantly groaned Oui! Finally, he sat in his own armchair in the corner. He looked into a journal where he seemed to have taken notes (Oui . . . !) and began to speak in a loose, indulgent tone, polishing his nails on his sleeve, toying with a pencil, or, taking a sudden interest in some aspect of the little finger of his left hand. He said he was not a man inclined to insert himself in other people’s affairs. He praised the diligence of Monsieur Cosme (Coooome, he called him, with a drawn-out circumflex) in satisfying the desires of his charges—in ordering them whatever they wished, in taking care that they wanted for nothing at home. But that diligence—n’est-ce pas?—might well serve as a convenience intended to quiet any suspicions in advance. “Suspicions of what?” the Executor asked, as if none of this concerned him, scooting his chair in little hops toward his charges to make his place in the family clearer. But Victor motioned to them, adopting an intimate tone that seemed to make of the other an intruder: “Since we have just finished reading Regnard, mes amis, let us recall those verses, which you yourselves could surely recite by heart: ‘Ah, qu’à notre secours à propos vous venez! / Encore un jour plus tard, nous étions ruinés.’ ” “So now we’re at the Comédie Française,” Cosme said, laughing at his own joke in the midst of an exasperating silence. “Sometimes on Sundays,” Victor continued, “while the young ones were asleep” (and he pointed at the door that led to the warehouse), he had entered the adjoining building, looking around, observing, counting, adding, notating. And—his was a merchant’s soul, that much he wouldn’t deny—he had established that certain of their wares failed to correspond with the inventories the Executor regularly delivered to Carlos. He knew (“Quiet!” he shouted to Don Cosme, who tried to speak) that business was harder now than before; that wiles and artifice were part and parcel of fair trade. But this was no justification (and here his voice swelled fearsomely) to present these orphans with a false notion of their accounts, particularly as it was clear they would never read them . . . Don Cosme tried to stand. But Victor outflanked him, strode toward him in long steps, index finger raised. His voice had turned metallic and hard; the state of the warehouse was a scandal—a scandal begun the day of the death of Carlos and Sofía’s father. With a simple look at the books, carried out in the presence of witnesses, he would demonstrate that this confidence man, this so-called protector, this embezzler-executor, was lining his pockets at the expense of unfortunate children, whom he swindled immorally in the knowledge that their inexperience left them incapable of managing their own property. Nor was that all: Victor was apprised of the risky speculations this second father had undertaken with his wards’ money; of purchases made through go-betweens he described as canes venatici, evoking, with deep indignation, Cicero’s In Verrem. Don Cosme tried to get in a word amid that verbal deluge, but Victor, raising his voice, prolonged his accusation, sweating, formidable, as though he had grown larger in the meanwhile. He had loosened his collar with a gesture so abrupt that its two loose tips hung over his vest, freeing a throat of dense cords, all engaged in the finale of a stentorian peroration. For the first time, Sofía found him handsome, even beautiful, with his bearing of a Roman tribune, with that fist he brought down over the table, marking the paroxysm of a period. He then walked to the back wall, leaning into it. He crossed his arms amply, and after a fleeting pause the Executor failed to make use of, he concluded, drily and peremptorily, in a tone of utter derision: “Vous êtes un misérable, Monsieur.”
Don Cosme seemed to have shrunk, huddled over deep in his chair, which was too plush to serve as a frame for his meager person. A tremor of rage moved his lips in silent agitation while his nails scratched the velvet of the armrest. Then he leaped up, barking a single word to Victor that sounded, to Sofía’s ears, like an explosion in a cathedral: “Freemason!” The word flared, burned out, and exploded again with magnificent percussion: “Freemason!” He went on repeating it in ever-louder and ever-changing tones, as if it sufficed to quash all accusations, nullify any indictment, exonerate whomever proffered it. Seeing a defiant smile was Victor’s lone reply, the Executor mentioned the shipment of flour from Boston that had never arrived and never would: a pretext to conceal the misdeeds of an agent of the Freemasons of Saint-Domingue in league with the mulatto, Ogé, a mesmerist and wizard, whom Cosme would refer to the Federation of Doctors for ensorcelling those youngsters with extravagant artifices Esteban would realize had been useless soon enough, when his illness returned. Now Don Cosme led the charge, circling the Frenchman like an incensed horsefly: “I am talking of men who pray to Lucifer; men who hurl insults at Christ in Hebrew; men who spit on the crucifix; men who slice open a lamb crowned with thorns on the eve of Maundy Thursday, its hoofs nailed down, its body stretched across the table for an abominable banquet.” For that, the Holy Fathers Clement and Benedict had excommunicated these blackguards, condemning them to burn in the fires of Hell . . . And with the horrified tone of a man revealing the mysteries of a Sabbath he himself had attended, he spoke of these heathens who rejected the Redeemer, who adored a certain Hiram Abiff, Architect of Solomon’s Temple, and paid tribute in their secret ceremonies to Isis and Osiris, regaling themselves with titles like King of the Tyrians, Raiser of the Tower of Babel, Knight Kadosh, Grand Master of the Knights Templar—as a testament to Jacques de Molay, a libertine found guilty of heresy and burned alive for adoring the Demon in the figure of an idol named Baphomet. “These men pray not to the saints, but to Belial, Astaroth, and Behemoth.” They were a mob who crept into all parts, opposing the Christian faith and the authority of legitimate government in the name of “philanthropy,” a pursuit of happiness and democracy that gave cover to an international scheme to destroy the established order. Looking Victor in the face, he shouted the word conspirator until his voice, weary from the effort, broke into a fit of coughing. “Is all of this true?” Sofía asked in a timid voice, astonished and appalled to hear of Isis and Osiris in such portentous settings as the Temple of Solomon and the Castle of the Templars. “The one true thing is that this house is falling into the ground,” Victor replied peacefully. And, turning toward Carlos: “The matter of unfit guardians was already dealt with in Roman law. We shall see him in court.” The word court violently reanimated the Executor: “We’ll see who goes to prison first,” he grunted. “From what I hear, they’ll soon be rounding up the Freemasons and undesirable foreigners. The foolish tolerance of earlier days is finally at an end.” And, grabbing his hat, he said: “Throw this charlatan out of the house before they arrest you all!” With a “Good day . . . to all,” he bowed, reiterating this threat, leaving the salon with a slam of the door so resounding it shook all the windows in the house. The young people waited for Victor to explain. But he instead began sealing with wax the thick string he had used to tie the warehouse’s books: “Keep them here,” he said. “This is your proof.” Then he strolled pensively out into the courtyard, where workers were finishing their repairs under the watchful eye of Remigio, who was pleased to find himself in the role of foreman. As though in need of some physical release, he picked up a brickmason’s trowel, stepped in among the workmen, and set to smoothing and filling in a wall in the courtyard damaged by falling tiles. Sofía watched him climb a scaffold, his face specked with plaster and mortar, and remembered the myth of Hiram Abiff: despite certain aspersions she’d heard in church; despite the lamb crowned with thorns, the blasphemies uttered in Hebrew, and the Popes with their fearsome Bulls, that Secret of which Victor—now envisioned a Builder of Temples—was a repository fascinated her, somehow. She saw him as an envoy from forbidden lands, versed in arcana; an explorer of Asia who had come upon an unknown book of Zoroaster—an Orpheus, traverser of Avernus. And she thought back to when he’d mimicked an ancient architect murdered treacherously by a mallet blow in one of their games of charades. She’d even seen him dressed as a Templar, in a tunic adorned with a cross, enacting the torments of Jacques de Molay. There was reality in the Executor’s accusations. But it was a reality that drew her, secret, mysterious, suggestive of occult powers. A life lived in service to a dangerous conviction was more alluring than one spent waiting chastely for a few sacks of flour. Better a conspirator than a merchant. The adolescent yen for disguise, for signs and countersigns, for dead drops, private codes, padlocked diaries, all reawakened with the adventure she had glimpsed. “Can these people really be as horrible as all that?” she asked. Esteban shrugged: defamation had hounded sects and secret societies throughout history. From the early Christians, who’d been accused of cutting children’s throats, to the Bavarian Illuminati, whose only crime was to wish for the good of humanity. “Of course, they oppose God,” Carlos said; “God is nothing more than a hypothesis,” said Esteban. Now, as though yearning to break free of an intolerable oppression, Sofía screamed: “I’m tired of God; tired of nuns; tired of guardians and executors, notaries and forms, robbery and filth; I’m tired of things, like this one, which I can’t stand the sight of anymore.” And jumping over an armchair pushed against the wall, she took down a large portrait of her father and threw it to the floor so violently that the canvas tore away from the frame. To the feigned indifference of the others, she stomped bitterly on the fabric, sending flakes of paint flying into the air. When the picture was destroyed, wounded, insulted, Sofía fell panting and scowling into a chair. Victor dropped the bricklayer’s trowel, a look of surprise on his face: Ogé was hurriedly entering the courtyard. “We must go,” he said, and told briefly all he’d found out while hiding in the house of a brother: the cyclone, calling the authorities’ attention to more pressing matters, had briefly interrupted a planned offensive against the Freemasons. The order to undertake it had come down from Spain. For now, nothing more could be done here. It would be wisest to take advantage of the present disorder. While people’s sole concern was restoring walls and clearing roads, they could leave town and observe from a distance what turn events would take. “We have a farmhouse that will do,” Sofía said with a firm voice, going to the pantry to prepare a basket of victuals. There, surrounded by charcuterie, mustards, and breads, they agreed that Carlos should remain at home to gather information. Esteban went to take down the tacking for the horses, while Remigio was sent to the line of hacks in the Plaza del Cristo to hire two beasts for remount.
IX.
The carriage rolled on pitted roads, creaking, leaping, hobbling, beneath a late last drizzle that burnished the black oilcloth, seeped into the backseat with the reeling wind, and soaked the attire of Esteban and Ogé, who were seated on the box; at times it leaned so far to the side, it threatened to fall over; it descended in the waters of the ford until droplets splashed the lanterns; there was mud everywhere, and they only broke free of the red earth of the sugarcane fields to sink into the gray earth of fallow fields marked by cemetery crosses—and as he passed them, Remigio crossed himself, bringing up the rear on one of the remounts. The travelers sang and laughed despite the inclement weather, drinking Malvasia, eating sandwiches and shortbread and candies, rejoicing strangely at the new air that smelled of green pastures, cows with swollen udders, campfires of fresh wood—far from the brine, the jerked meat, the germinating onions that jousted with their vapors in the city’s narrow streets. Ogé sang a song in creole: “Dipi mon perdi Lisette / mon pas souchié kalenda, / mon quitté bram-bram sonnette, / mon pas battre bamboula.” Sofía intoned a beautiful Scottish ballad in English, paying no mind to Esteban, and even affected a hideous accent to irk him. Victor sang out of tune, but with a very serious demeanor, something that started with the words, Oh Richard! Oh mon Roi! But he never made it any further, because he didn’t know the rest. In the afternoon, the rain grew fiercer, the roads worse; Victor coughed, Esteban hacked, and Sofía shivered in her damp clothes. The three men took turns riding in front, and this constant entering and exiting of the carriage impeded their conversation. The great question—the great enigma—of Victor and Ogé’s doings remained in suspense; no one had broached the subject, and perhaps they had sung so much along the way awaiting the right moment to dispel these mysteries . . . They reached the house in the depths of night. It was a structure of unworked stone, poorly cared for, covered in cracks, with numberless rooms, long halls, multiple archways covered by a sloping roof sagging between decrepit beams. Despite her exhaustion and her fear of the bats flapping all round, Sofía arranged the sheets and blankets on the beds, filled the washbasins, mended the mosquito nets, and promised more comforts for the following night. Victor wrang the necks of two chickens, grabbing their throats and whirling them like feathered pinwheels in the air before dropping them in boiling water, plucking them bare, and chopping them into small pieces for a quick fricassée, its sauce dense with brandy and ground pepper—“pour réchauffer Messieurs les voyageurs.” After finding fennel grass growing in the courtyard, he beat eggs for what he called an omelette aux fines-herbes. Sofía bustled about the table, putting together a centerpiece of aubergines, lemons, and wild gourds. When Victor invited her to inhale the fine aroma of the fricassée, she felt his hand rest against her waist, but carefree this time, brotherly, neither heavy nor insistent, and she did not take it as an affront. Admitting she found the stew excellent, she whirled away from him in a pirouette and returned to the dining room unflustered. The dinner was merry, the talk afterward merrier still, with the ease, the security they felt under that roof in a house lashed now by harsher rains, which burst against the taro leaves as though striking sheets of parchment, and tore pomegranates and rose apples from the trees in the garden . . . Victor, adopting a more serious tone, spoke expansively of what had brought him to their country. Business, above all: silks from Lyon were subject to high taxes passing through Spain on their way to Havana and Mexico; a better line was shipping them from Bordeaux to Saint-Domingue, then bringing them over covertly on North American vessels that delivered wheat flour to the Antilles on their return. Hundreds of pieces were then taken to market in identical sacks, others through a sophisticated scheme employed by the forward-thinking creole merchants and their contacts in the port authorities as vengeance against the Spanish monopoly’s abusive levies. Working through his own firm as agent of the factories of Jean-Baptiste Willermoz (a very important personage, Esteban thought, since Victor forced his accent when pronouncing his name), he had sold great quantities of Lyon silk to shops throughout the city. “It’s not an especially honest business is it?” Sofía asked intentionally. “It’s a way of struggling against the tyranny of the monopolies,” Victor replied. “Tyranny in all forms must be resisted.” And a man had to start somewhere, because here the people were dormant, inert, trapped in a timeless world on the margins, tobacco and sugar the only things they could think of. Whereas “philanthropy” held sway in Saint-Domingue, a place in touch with all that was happening in the world. Believing the movement would spread as far in the colonies as it had in Spain, he’d been tasked with establishing relations with local affiliates, to create a conventicle of the kind that existed in other places. But his disappointment had been great. The philanthropists in this wealthy city were few and apprehensive. They seemed ignorant of the significance of the social question. They were sympathetic toward the movement, which was gaining adherents worldwide, but they themselves did nothing to help it prosper. From timidity, from cowardice, they let legends circulate about spitting on crosses, insulting Christ, sacrilege and blasphemy, all of them disaccredited elsewhere. (“Nous avons autre chose à faire, croyez-moi.”) They couldn’t grasp the universal importance of events now taking place in Europe. “Revolution is on the march, and no one can stop it,” Ogé said with that impressively noble accent he reserved for certain affirmations. This revolution, Esteban thought, could be reduced to four lines about France published between a listing of plays and an advertisement for the sale of guitars in the local newspaper. Victor admitted that since his arrival in Havana, he had lost all contact with the recent events so passionately followed in Saint-Domingue. “To begin,” Ogé said, “a recent decree authorizes men of my color (and with a finger, he pointed to his cheeks, which were darker than his forehead) to take up any and all public appointments. This is a measure of enormous importance. E-nor-mous.” Now, prompting each other, their voices changing, each interrupting the other’s words, Victor and Ogé dove into an explanation both intriguing and confusing, from which Esteban extracted a few clear concepts: “We have left the religious and metaphysical eras behind us; now we are entering the era of science.” “The stratification of the world into classes is irrational.” “We must strip from mercantile interests the horrible power to unleash wars.” “Humanity is divided into two groups: the oppressors and the oppressed. Custom, necessity, and the lack of leisure prevent the oppressed, in their majority, from ever recognizing their condition. When they do, civil war will break out.” The words freedom, happiness, equality, human dignity came up repeatedly in that halting exposition as justification for the imminence of a Great Conflagration that Esteban accepted that night as a vital purification; as an Apocalypse he yearned to witness, the sooner the better, to begin his life as a man in a new world. And yet, he seemed to sense that Victor and Ogé, though joined by the same words, were not in agreement about things, men, methods of action that related to the coming events. The doctor mentioned a Martinez de Pasqually, a noted philosopher, deceased some years before in Saint-Domingue, whose teachings had left a profound mark on men’s minds. “A fraud!” Victor said, with ironic reference to Him who attempts to make spiritual connections beyond the earth and seas, his disciples kneeling in unison on the solstices and equinoxes in magic circles traced out in white chalk, surrounded by lighted candles, kabbalistic signs, aromatic smoke, and other Asiatic paraphernalia. “Our intent,” said Ogé irritably, “is to cultivate the transcendental forces dormant in mankind.” “Start by breaking their chains,” Victor said. “Martinez de Pasqually,” the doctor replied violently, “has taught that Humanity’s evolution is a collective act, and that individual action perforce implies the existence of collective social action: he who knows more will do more for his neighbors.” This time, Victor nodded softly, acceding to a notion not wholly in accordance with his convictions. Sofía expressed her perplexity before this movement of ideas that adopted such diverse and contradictory forms. “Questions this complex cannot simply be grasped outright,” Ogé said vaguely, giving her a glimpse of the mists of an underground world whose arcana remained secret. Esteban felt now he had lived as though blind, ignorant of the most stirring realities, failing to recognize the only thing worth seeing in that era. “And there is much we have yet to receive news of,” Victor said. “And we shall go on without news, because the governments are afraid, deathly afraid of the spirit sweeping across Europe,” Ogé concluded in a prophetic tone. “The time has come, my friends. The time has come.”
