Explosion in a Cathedral, page 9
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They spent two days talking of revolution, and Sofía was astonished at how the subject roused them. Talking of revolution, imagining revolution, situating oneself mentally within the heart of a revolution, means making oneself, to some degree, the master of the world. Those who speak of revolution find themselves compelled to wage it. Plainly, this or that privilege must be abolished, and so the people proceed to abolish it; evidently, this or that oppression is odious, so they draw up measures against it; clearly, this or that person is a blackguard, so they condemn him unanimously to death. And when the earth has been purified, they set to building the City of the Future. Esteban advocated for the suppression of Catholicism, with exemplary punishments for all who reverenced those idols. Victor agreed, while Ogé thought differently; as man had always shown a tenacious aspiration toward something that could be called the imitation of Christ, that sentiment should be transformed into a drive to overcome, with man seeking to resemble Christ by raising himself to an Archetype of Human Perfection. Ill-disposed to transcendental speculations, Sofía brought the others back down to earth with her concrete interest in the situation of women and child-rearing in the new society. The discussion descended into shouts over whether a Spartan education was satisfactory and adaptable to the epoch. “No,” said Ogé. “Yes,” said Victor . . . On the third day, the dispute around the distribution of wealth in the new society had grown so heated that Carlos, arriving at the farmhouse after an arduous trip on horseback, thought those inside were quarreling. They fell quiet when he came in. His face spoke of grave news, and indeed, matters were grave: the campaign against the Freemasons and undesirable foreigners had begun. The government in the mother country may have tolerated liberal ministers, but it was determined to uproot advanced ideas from its colonies. All this had pleased Don Cosme, who informed Carlos he’d had word of an arrest warrant for Ogé and Victor. “Décidément il faut filer,” the merchant said, unperturbed. And fetching his luggage, he brought forth a map and pointed to a spot on the island’s southern coast. “We’re not far from here,” he said. And he told how, in his seaman days, he had dealt in sponges, coal, and hides around the harbor, and knew people there. Without another word, he and his companion gathered their things, leaving the others in pained silence. They would never have imagined they would be so moved by the departure of Victor, the stranger, the intruder who had come almost inexplicably into their lives. His appearance, with a thundering of door knockers, had had something diabolical about it—with his aplomb as he took over their home, sitting at the head of the table, rifling through their closets. As if in an instant, the contraptions from the Cabinet of Physics had worked; the furnishings had emerged from their crates; the sick had been made well, the inert had begun to walk. Now they were left alone, defenseless, without friends, prone to the depredations of a delinquent, vulnerable magistracy—they who, if they had a poor grasp of business, understood even less of the law. In cases of doubt as to the integrity of a guardian—Carlos had heard from a lawyer—the Courts would name a co-guardian or a Guardian Council who would remain in power until the male children reached the age of majority. In any case, they would have to act, with an appeal to justice. Carlos had an ally in mind in the person of a former bookkeeper, recently let go by Don Cosme, who boasted of knowing a great deal about the man’s machinations. While they dealt with these matters, the persecution unleashed on the Freemasons would most likely die down. Summer outbursts of this kind were a known feature of the Spanish administration; then the accusations were filed away, and the eternal torpor returned. They would stay in close contact with Victor. He could return for a few weeks to take stock of the warehouse and propose new directions for the business. It was even possible he might abandon his affairs in Port-au-Prince, which were less promising than those here. They saw in him the ideal administrator, and perhaps, with his talent for numbers, it would profit him to establish himself in a city with a great bustle of merchants. But for now, there was no avoiding reality: Victor and Ogé had to flee. Both were in danger of being captured and “expelled from the Dominions,” as other Frenchmen had been with no regard for their long residence in Spanish territories. Sofía and Esteban would accompany them to the harbor town . . . which they reached without incident three days later, thirsty, aching, stomping through dust, with dust in their hair, under their clothes, behind their ears, after a thankless journey through plantations whose hospitality they had shunned, sugar farms that had already finished their milling for the year, and wretched towns hardly distinguishable against a monotonous landscape of flooded savannahs. The fishing village stretched along a filthy strand coated in dead algae and tar patches, where crabs swarmed between broken boards and rotten ropes. A pier of planks, cracked from the weight of marble unloaded days before, led out into a sea that raised no foam, cloudy as though intermixed with oil. Amid the sponge fishing boats and coal barges, fishing schooners were visible, piled high with wood and sacks. One boat, its slender masts rising high over the posts of the other ships, lifted Victor’s mood after several hours of wordless weariness. “I know that ship,” he said. “We’ll have to find out if it’s coming or going.” And suddenly impatient, he entered a kind of tavern-general-store-ropeyard-inn in search of lodging. All they had were cramped rooms with pallets and washbasins, their whitewashed walls covered in more or less obscene inscriptions and drawings. There was a somewhat better hotel, but at a distance from the harbor, and Sofía was so fatigued that she preferred to stay there, where the floors were clean, the breeze was blowing, and earthen vessels of fresh water were on hand to wash away the dust. While the travelers settled in as best they could, Victor went to the docks in search of informants. Calmer now, Sofía, Ogé, and Esteban gathered around a table, where they were served a dinner of beans and fish beneath a lamp behind the glass of which insects clashed with a dry clatter. And they would have eaten with relish, had a plague of tiny mosquitoes not appeared, brought in from the nearby marshlands by the setting sun. They flew into their ears, nostrils, and mouths, and slid down their spines like cold grains of sand. Impervious to the smoke of dry coconuts laid on a clay oven’s grill to keep them at bay, the creatures rose up in clouds, leaving everyone’s faces, hands, and legs peppered with welts. “I can’t take it!” Sofía said, scurrying to her room and climbing under the netting after snuffing the two candles placed on a stool that served as a nightstand. But still, she heard the humming all around her. Beneath the coarse tulle eaten through with damp, full of holes, the storm continued: the faint sharp whistle from temple to shoulder, from forehead to cheek, with an interlude just before a landing was felt on the skin. Sofía turned, slapped herself, struck herself with the heel of her hand, here, there, on her thighs, between her shoulders, on her knee pits and flanks. Faintly, wings grazed her temple, then came closer with wrathful intensity. Finally, she curled up underneath a thick sheet, coarse as sackcloth, that covered her head. And eventually she fell asleep, drenched in sweat, over a bedspread sopping with sweat, cheek sunken in a miserable pillow soaked with sweat . . . When she opened her eyes, it was dawn; the trimmed and spurred fighting cocks crowed from the pit; the plague had dispersed, but she was so fatigued she believed she was ill. The idea of passing another day—another night—in that place, with its brackish waters, its heat already lurking in the light of dawn, its storms of insects, was intolerable. Wrapping herself in a robe, she went to the shop for vinegar to relieve the swellings covering her skin. She found Ogé, Esteban, and Victor sitting at the same table as the night before, awake, drinking black coffee from small, rough-hewn bowls, with a captain who, despite the early hour, had dressed in his uniform—blue fabric, gold buttons—to come on land. His patchily shaven cheeks bore the fresh marks of a dull razor. “Caleb Dexter,” Victor said. And added, lowering his voice, “He too is a philanthropist.” In his usual tone, he concluded peremptorily: “Gather your things. The Arrow lifts anchor at eight. We are departing for Port-au-Prince.”
X.
Now, the chill of the sea. The massive shadow of the sails. The breeze from the north which, passing over land, gathered in the vastness, bringing vegetal scents the sentries could distinguish in their lookouts, recognizing the smells of Trinidad, Sierra Maestra, Cape Cruz. With a tiny net attached to a rod, Sofía lifted wonders from the sea: a knot of gulfweed, the fruits of which popped between thumb and forefinger; a cluster of mangroves adorned with tender oysters; a coconut no bigger than a walnut, of a green so splendid it looked varnished. They passed over beds of sponges that painted dun splotches on the clear bottoms, floated amid cays of white sand, never losing sight of a coast dissolving in mist, which grew increasingly mountainous and craggy. Sofía had been pleased to agree to the voyage, which freed her from the heat, the mosquitoes, the thought of a tedious return to the day-to-day, the monotony—made more monotonous by the absence of him who could transfigure reality at all moments—accepting it as though it were a simple excursion across the waters of some Swiss lake edged with rugged, romantic cliffs; a promenade en bateau, unimaginable yesterday, which Victor, in his predicament, had pulled from his sleeve like a conjurer. Finding them places onboard, with a cabin below deck for the lady, Victor’s friend had welcomed them onto that vessel in thanks, he said, for the others’ affection and generosity. They could spend a few weeks in Port-au-Prince and return on the same ship—with a fellow philanthropist as captain, they had no need of a safe conduct—as soon as the seaman had left Suriname, where he had a shipment to deliver. Viewing it all as an escapade, a return to the happy chaos of earlier days, they had written a letter to Carlos, with a description of this exploit which, for Sofía, was taking on a providential significance after all those dreams of travel, all those itineraries left on paper, all those departures never resolved. This, at least, was something new. Port-au-Prince wasn’t London or Vienna or Paris, but it did represent a change. They would land in France’s overseas possessions, where they spoke a different language and breathed a different air. They would go to Le Cap Français, to the Théâtre de la Rue Vaudreuil, to see a performance of Le légataire universel or Zemire et Azor. They would buy the latest sheet music for Carlos to play on the flute, and books, many books that dealt with the economic transformation of Europe in their century and the revolution—the one that was already underway . . . Sofía had lain fishing on her stomach on the prow, the sun reflecting off her skin. But now a clamor of voices roused her: in the aftercastle, nude apart from knee breeches cinched at the waist, Victor and Ogé were in a water-fight, lowering their pails on ropes, each struggling to fill his faster than the other. The torso of the mulatto was magnificent in its vigor, waist lean below shoulders that swelled potently, lustrous and firm. Victor was more robust, and his barrel chest revealed muscles in stiff relief—while those on his back seemed to ripple down his spine—each time he lifted a bucket hauled up from the sea to empty in his friend’s face. Esteban said, “This is the first time I truly feel young.” “I have to ask myself if we really ever were young,” said Sofía, turning back to her fishing. The water was flecked with iridescent jellyfish, their colors changing with the rhythm of the waves; but their indigo persisted, trimmed with red festoons. The Arrow clove slowly through a vast migration of medusas oriented toward the shore. Observing the multitude of those ephemeral creatures, Sofía was agape at the continual destruction of all that was engendered, the perpetual luxury of creation; the luxury of multiplying, all the better to suppress; the luxury of incubating in the most elemental wombs as in the lathes of man-gods, only to consign to the future the fruits of a world in a state of perpetual devourment. In sumptuous ceremonial garb, myriad lives emerged from the horizon, still suspended between vegetable and animal, sacrificial victims to the Sun. They would lodge in the sand, where their crystals dried little by little, clouded, shriveled, wizened to a glaucous tatter, a foam, a mere dampness effaced immediately by the heat. She couldn’t imagine an annihilation more complete, without trace or vestige—without proof, even, that the living had ever lived . . . After the jellyfish came glassy wanderers—pink, yellow, striped—in a diversity of colors reflecting the dazzling midday light over a jasper sea severed by the ship. Cheeks aglow, hair loose in the breeze, Sofía enjoyed a bodily serenity she had never known before. She could stay for hours below the shadows of a sail, watching the waves, thinking of nothing, servile to the voluptuousness of her entire body—soft, indolent, senses alert to any provocation. The crossing made a glutton of her: in her honor, the Captain had the table laid with fine foods, beverages, and fruits that startled her palate with new savors: smoked oysters, the famous Boston biscuits, English ciders, never-before-tasted rhubarb pies, juicy medlars from Pensacola, which ripened along the way, and melons from orchards in New York. Everything was different, extraordinary, and this held her in an atmosphere of irreality. When she asked after the name of a strangely shaped outcrop or an islet or canal, her geographical notions, taken from maps of Spanish manufacture, always conflicted with the nomenclature of Caleb Dexter: for him this was Caymanbrack, that the Nordest Kaye or Portland Rock. Even the ship had something enchanted about it, with its philanthropic captain from Victor and Ogé’s secret world—world of Isis and Osiris, Jacques de Molay and Frederick of Prussia—who kept in a vitrine with his navigation instruments an apron adorned with the Acacia, the Temple of Seven Steps, the two Columns, the Sun, and the Moon. At night under the awning on the stern deck, Ogé spoke of the marvels of magnetism, the collapse of traditional psychology, or the secret orders flourishing across the globe, with names like the Initiated Knights and Brothers of Asia, the Legion of the Black Eagle, the Elect Cohen Knights, the Philalethes Society, the Illuminati of Avignon, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, the Philadelphians, the Knights of the Rose Croix, and the Knights Templar, who pursued an ideal of equality and harmony while laboring for the perfection of the Individual, destined to ascend, with the aid of Reason and Light, to spheres where mankind would be forever freed of fears and doubts . . . Sofía saw that Ogé was not an atheist like Victor, for whom Christian priests were “mere black-dressed harlequins tugging the strings of marionettes,” and the Great Architect a passing symbol to be tolerated while science worked to clarify the enigmas of creation. The mestizo referred to the Bible often, accepting some of its mythical assertions, the same way he used terms from the Kabbalah and Platonism and talked often of the Cathars, whose princess Esclaramunda Sofía knew from a captivating novel she’d recently read. For Ogé, the carnal act was not a perpetuation of Original Sin, but its expurgation. In discreet euphemisms, he affirmed that Coupling was a return to Primal Innocence; from total, Edenic nudity came a placation of the senses, a joyous and tender quietude that eternally reenacted the purity of Man and Woman before the Fall . . . Victor and Caleb Dexter, respecting each other as colleagues, conversed about navigation, discussing a Rocky Shoal that various treatises indicated was dangerously hidden four fathoms deep, but that neither of them had encountered in their travels along the coast. Mr. Erastus Jackson, the ship’s mate, joined the group, telling horrifying tales of the sea—such as the time Captain Anson lost his bearings and strayed through the Pacific for a month, unable to find the Juan Hernández Islands; or when a schooner was found near Grand Caico without a single crew member on board, but with the fires in the kitchen still lit, freshly washed clothing stretched out to dry, soup warm in its tureen on the officers’ table. The nights were sumptuous. The Caribbean Sea was filled with phosphorescences drifting tamely toward the coast, visible against the profiles of the mountains softly lit by a waxing quarter moon. Sofía was entranced by the spectacles this journey offered to her eyes, with its straying vegetation, peculiar fish, green lightning, and prodigious sunsets throwing allegories across a sky where every cloud resembled a sculpted frieze—warring Titans, Laocoön, chariots, fallen angels. Here she marveled at a coral reef; there she saw the snoring islands, the low deep voice of their caverns resonant of gravel that would never stop rolling. She was unsure whether to believe the holothurians swallowed sand, or if it was true that whales descended to the tropics. But everything seemed plausible on this journey. One evening, they showed her a strange fish, the Sea Unicorn, and it reminded her of Victor’s first appearance in the House with the Door Knockers. She had asked him jokingly back then if there were mermaids in the Caribbean Sea. “That night, I was nearly sent packing,” Victor said. “More than once I was tempted,” Sofía said, letting the phrase remain ambiguous, and not confessing how painful this realization was now when, each time they brushed past each other in the narrow hallways or on the steep stairs, she would slow her pace, waiting absurdly for him to seize her again. In the end, that, brutal as it was, had been the one truly important thing—the only revelation—she had ever known. She descended to the cabin and stretched out on her pallet. An irksome sweat soaked her bunched leggings; her blouse twisted aside and tugged unpleasantly at her breasts; the wool blanket on her bed chafed her skin; and she heard shouts and running on deck. Arranging herself as best she could, Sofía hurried to the gunwale to see the nature of the commotion. The ship was passing through a bale of turtles; two sailors, recently lowered in a boat, were trying to trap the largest of those slick swells. But the fins of sharks had appeared in the midst of their opulent carapaces, and now they were ramming the boat. The fishermen returned, cursing bitterly of all they might have had: brushes and combs, costly bookmarks and buckles. They took to hurling harpoons out of spite—as if the deaths of a few sharks could placate their timeworn rage against the species. The sailors bent over the railings, throwing fishhooks on chains, and the beasts bit them voraciously, snagging on barbs that poked through from their eye sockets. Dragged up from the water with tremors and a terrible flapping of tails, they flopped over the gunwales, and the crew pounded them with sticks, staffs, iron rods, even the bars from the capstan. Blood ran from their ruined hides, stained the water, speckled the sails, drained off toward the scuppers. “It’s a good thing, what they’re doing,” Ogé shouted, striking them as well, “those fish are monsters.” The whole crew had come out—some straddling the yardarm, others leaning toward whatever their hands could reach, armed with stakes, adzes, saws, brutally whipping chains or jabbing a hand drill, waiting for their chance to strike and wound, to sink in a hook. Sofía returned to her cabin to take off her blouse, stained by oil and bile in the tumult. In the little mirror beneath the window that served as a skylight, she saw Victor coming in. “It’s me,” he said, shutting the door. Above them, the shouting and blasphemy continued.
