The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (16 page)

But for the fact that I am no longer ready to die for
the
Revolution, but only for
mine
, the description fits my mood exactly: parched and terrified. But here! I’ll sing a little drinking song to remind myself that things could be worse. I’m not dead yet, after all, and there’s not a corpse in sight. Although the asses complain and the grave digger’s cart groans beneath the weight of the day’s accumulation of crimes, heads and bodies both are trundled off, and the cobbles—I see them now, shining in the moon—are washed with water.

In Montmartre, there used to be a little inn called
Les Mystères
. Its walls were made of polished cherry. My favorite table was beneath the stairway, where I was served those simple but toothsome Parisian suppers with civility and grace by the owner himself. His name? Monsieur Mirebalais. His mustaches bristled, his dish towel flapped with each gesture of his hand like a sail in the wind. I recall platters of oysters—the best in Paris—and an onion soup scalding hot beneath its weeping crust of cheese. I recall a door opening on the landing above me, the sound of an irresistible laugh, and a girl named Lélise stepping lightly down the stairs in a scarlet jacket.

“Lélise, you are the Queen of Sheba!” I tell her as she passes. She gives me a kiss. Then, her guitar balanced on her opulent bosom, she sings with a dizzying effrontery (and the words belong to Voltaire):

But wait! Here is Madame Mirebalais with a dish of her celebrated medallions of eel served on croutons of bread fried in Isigny butter! And here is Lélise again, standing there before me, as beautiful as if she had surged forth from the sea of my most tempestuous dreams! She sings a poem of the
abbé
Courtin’s that she has herself put to music:

Lélise! Olympe! Gabrielle, my dearest: I raise my glass to you and say: “To so much grace!”

Now Madame s dinner continues; I am served duckling as shiny as a new copper pot and nesting in savory peas.

We have been exiled, dear creatures,
hélas
. And not in the gardens of love, twice
hélas, hélas!
But in the prisons of the Revolution, Our Revolution, and in Death.

Lélise has a prodigious
répertoire;
she sings the ancient ballads of Provence and the songs of old Paris, marvelous songs that one day no one will sing. As midnight approaches, she sings the songs of the Revolution:

And everyone in the room joins in the refrain:

What Lélise sings is the truth: Ten thousand women had confronted the king and, in so doing, changed the face of France. Ten thousand strong, and Olympe and Gabrielle were among them.

The day of her arrest, Gabrielle had just completed a new series of fans. Freshly glued and open, they were laid out on the table to dry: the Games of Children—hoops and kites and skipping ropes, castles in the sand, kisses in the ring, knucklebones.…

Several years ago, Gabrielle brought me Sahagún’s
General History of the Things of New Spain
. These volumes she had procured after much effort from my family—they had once belonged to my uncle and were part of his marvelous library, most of it now destroyed. The friar’s books have been of great service in our joint undertaking, our own brief reverie on the “Things of New Spain.”

This morning my eyes were less painful—how the body atomizes in confinement!—and I was able to read again. I was struck by a fragment from Book Six—the book devoted to Moral Philosophy. These are the words spoken by an elder to a new ruler:

“O master, O ruler, O precious person, O valued one, O precious green stone…
Pay special attention
. Esteem thy self…Do not become as a wild beast, do not completely bare thy teeth, thy claws.”

As he spoke, the elder wept. Perhaps because he knew how power corrupts. Perhaps the new ruler had already bared his teeth.

And now, as the day draws to an end, the Revolution, in a convulsion of self-disgust, cuts off the head of one whose teeth and claws have not ceased, these many years, to worry Liberty’s throat with such hunger that even Robespierre feared for his life: I am speaking of the madman Hébert. His execution was impossible to ignore—Hébert bellowed and squealed like a gutted pig—and the crowd (and Restif was there, too, standing far off to the side), who had a week ago applauded him as he leapt over a basket heaped with heads, now roared with laughter to see him so flagrantly unmanned. Even Sanson quickened to their mood and made the blade dance above the naked neck before letting it drop with the sound of thunder and ice.

Before he was silenced, Hébert screamed louder than anyone—even the comtesse du Barry, whose cries had pierced my heart with grief. (Poor creature! Cut down for having fucked a king!) They tell me all the Hébertistes will loose their heads today; the crowd is the biggest yet, the tower trembles with the people’s roars, and each time the blade comes crashing down I think I shall go mad. I attempt to write, cannot, put down the pen, pace, turn around and around my chamber pot like a Brahmin circumambulating a sacred shrubbery.

Hébert today, Robespierre tomorrow or the day after. Like Sir Hugonin de Guisay, he will be undone by his own game. Ah—but perhaps you do not know Sir Hugonin’s exemplary story? Here it is then: He was a beast—vigorous, lusty, and of unprecedented temper. He liked to force the peasants in his path to crawl about on all fours, barking. One night, during Carnival, he painted himself with tar and rolled in black fleece to play the dancing bear for the king’s amusement. The disguise was perfect—Sir Hugonin was unrecognizable. A servant approached with a torch and, peering into his face, cried: “Speak, bear! In the name of the king! Tell us who you are!” The fleece and the tar caught fire, and in an instant the dancing bear was transformed into a human torch. Thus will the beast, Robespierre, be undone.

God’s balls! How they carry on! Once the Revolution has gorged on the citizens of France and returned to her den to sleep for a century or two, what will happen to the triumvirate she whelped: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—that vast heresy! That near impossibility! That acute necessity! Will they, her tiger cubs, continue to quicken the long night of our ignorance? Will their bright eyes illumine the interminable Dark Ages of Man?

Here is what I wonder on my worst days: If the guillotine exemplifies Nature—perpetual, blind, deadly, inescapable—and if Man is Her servant, and the Revolution too, then there is no hope. Then would I, and gladly, see the universe perish.

In order to punish me for my rages (and I ask you: What caged animal does not succumb to rage from time to time?), my books, manuscripts, pens, and paper have been taken from me. Without them, I am lost. What is worse, I do not know if they will ever be returned.

Alone in my tower, disarmed, unmoored by pen and paper, my thoughts come unfixed (ink and fuck have always been the glue that holds my mind together); like the eggs of eels, my thoughts are dispersed by tides over which I have no control. In this state of rootless imagining, my mind seizes upon the most unexpected associations. Drops of fat suspended in my soup become the ocular devices of archons; a baneful spider stalking fleas exemplifies the pubic triangles of embalmed houris; a copple-crown turd warns of the Revolution’s collapse and the dawning of lethal systems of industry. Further, to conjure anxiety I pretend that the lines of my palms are the river systems of dead planets; when that proves tedious, I examine the frayed threads of my sleeves. These suggest astrological signs indicating the day, month, and year of my release. Days pass, and the more I grapple with despair, the more stupefying are the systems I invent. To tell the truth, they are more irritating than entertaining! But then comes the thought that saves me from the perils of this insalubrious necromancy: I will dream a book!

Almost at once I imagine a large book bound in red leather, its gilded title stamped deeply into the cover and spine. I recall how once with Gabrielle I had visited the workshops in the Latin Quarter, where wenches of all ages—and many of them were wonderfully fuckable—folded, stitched, and bound the printed sheets and, if the book was
very
fine, passed the edges through gold.

I hand-print the sheets of my book, and so carefully do I reconstruct the process in my mind that I can smell the fresh ink as I lift each sheet from the press, and see the light of my mind’s eye there where the metal letters have pressed into the paper, sensuous indentations like the mark of a finger in damp sand. One by one I set them out to dry, and then, luxuriating, I fold the sheets by hand, feeling the paper bend like a body beneath my hands. When all the pages are thus prepared, I set them in a sewing frame and, as I saw the women do, sew them together with thick, strong thread. When this work is completed—and it takes me an entire day—I hold the book securely in a vise and with a brass hammer round the spine. This hammering I do lovingly, taking an entire morning, the book giving way little by little beneath my ministrations.

Next I make the cover; the boards of ebony are sheathed with fine leather, the tide and decorations applied with delicate metal tools that I have heated with care beside the fire. Finally the book is glued to its cover, placed in a press, let to dry.

After a restless night, I open it. The marbled endpapers are green and gold; they evoke the luxuriant forests of the Yucatán. The next few pages—of thick paper, stiff and creamy beneath the touch—are blank. But then comes the frontispiece: a little Maya tiger, her speech in suspension before her face like a materialization of the wind. And I see for the first time that my dreamed book is our book, Gabrielle—the one we are writing together, you and I. It seems the moment has come for me to complete it. And if I cannot take up my notes to study, nor paper and pen, I can, nonetheless, engage a reverie. What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

The miraculous text had dissolved, blanketing Landa’s chamber in an acute malediction. Two friars were called in to carry the corpse from the room
.

After the fish was buried and blessed, the remains of the scribe Kukum were tossed on a pyre. Soon after, Kukum’s widow was sent away by the soldiers. They told her there was no need for her to return: Her flowers, the fragrant
tixzula,
had been fed to the Inquisitor’s pigs, and her husband’s body fed to the fire. Looking up at the sky, she saw smoke through her tears and knew they were speaking the truth
.

For a time she gazed at the sky and then at the church, which was the color of a sick person’s urine. Inside, the Mother of God—who wore a wheel on her head—was said to weep ceaselessly for the Maya, although the pope had sent word that Landa must find a way to make her stop. Her Son was in there, too, with a wheel on his head—just like the wheels of the carriages that sometimes crushed Indians to death; just like the wheels of the Inquisition, which broke bones and caused people whose common sense she had always respected to say crazy things without foundation in truth. As when Baltasar Puc said he had crucified a boy and a rooster and had with a knife cut out their hearts. With the same knife he had cut a cross into these hearts before offering them to the Old Gods, who were very angry but who refused to die. Everyone knew that the wheel had forced these lies from Baltasar Puc’s throat, and other lies more terrible, besides. Later it was said that the day the body of the scribe Kukum was set aflame, the Mother of God wept pearls of black blood. Kukum’s widow turned away from the friary gate weeping black blood, too
.

From a high window, Melchor looked down and with a wildly beating heart stared at the sorceress who had bewitched him. He imagined her hanging by her breasts—a thing that caused many to repent
.

Earlier that week, a small stash of idols had been found in a cave just outside Mani, and Landa had arrested a large number of Indians who, having been savagely whipped, admitted that more idols—countless numbers, in fact (and, miraculously, their numbers multiplied by the minute)—were hidden away in the mountains. The friars and the constables had scoured the entire territory for days, making hundreds of arrests and flogging everyone they could, pouring burning wax or molten lead into their wounds, lashing them to wheels to be broken, forcing filthy water down their throats until the blood flowed from their ears and they drowned
.