The Mapmaker's Wife (32 page)

Events unfolded slowly in eighteenth-century Peru, and so at first it was not too surprising to Isabel that Jean did not reappear in 1751 or 1752. Gossip had filtered back into Riobamba that Jean had safely passed through the Jesuit missions in the Peruvian Amazon. But after that? Nothing. Jean had simply disappeared. Every time her brother Juan came to town—he was a priest at a church in Pallatanga now—she would look to him for news, hoping that a bit of information had perhaps made its way up the missionary grapevine. But he never had any. No letter from Jean ever arrived,
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and when four years of separation turned into five, and then five into six, Isabel’s doubts grew. So did her loneliness. At times, she would walk to the top of the hill and look to the east, toward Mount Altar and Mount Tungurahua, as though she expected Jean to appear at any moment, climbing up out of the jungle. But other times she felt overwhelmed by her melancholy and remained for long hours in the darkness of her house. She heard too the crueler whispers in town, that the handsome Jean Godin, he of the great La Condamine expedition, had surely long since returned to France, having forgotten all about his Riobamban wife.

During this period, the Gramesón family as a whole suffered one setback after another. Their old way of life was slipping away. The decline in the textile industry caused by the flood of cheap imports from Europe was having a domino effect. Obrajes closed, and that meant the market for wool suffered, which in turn depressed trade throughout the colony. The Gramesóns kept their hacienda near Guamote, where Indian laborers harvested potatoes and fattened animals for slaughter, and family finances were good enough that in 1756, Isabel’s mother, Doña Josefa, was able to buy several homes in town, next to La Concepción Church. But that same year, in a legal filing dated July 20, Doña Josefa informed the town council that the wealth she had inherited was nearly gone. Her husband, “el General Don Pedro de Gramesón y Bruno,” had squandered her extensive dowry.

She died the following year, and Isabel was thrust into the role of the family matriarch, helping her father run Subtipud. She also had to manage the properties that she and Jean owned. But her mother’s death came just as she sent Carmen off to a convent school in Quito, and suddenly her house overlooking the town square seemed emptier than ever. Her family’s financial problems deepened in those years, too. In 1755, her father and her brother had won at auction a five-year right to collect (and keep) taxes from seven local villages, promising to pay 775 pesos annually for this privilege. But as a result of the economic depression that settled over the area, they were unable to recoup even this modest amount in 1758 and 1759. The final straw came when a former corregidor of Riobamba, Bruno de Urquizu, died owing them 1,200 pesos. Antonio and his father applied to audiencia authorities for relief, requesting that their annual fee of 775 pesos be lowered, but their plea was turned down, and Don Pedro was forced to cover the shortfall. Yet even this setback did not convince Antonio to give up the tax collection business, and in the early 1760s, as the economy continued to falter, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and beg the court for mercy:
“I will always better your fortune and will have property [in the future] with which I can do that,” he
declared. But the court decreed that such promises of future payment would not do and sent him to jail, his imprisonment an example of just how far the family’s fortunes had fallen.

Social unrest was also increasing throughout the central highlands. There had been eleven armed uprisings by Indians in the 1750s in colonial Peru, and in the early 1760s, such rebellions began occurring every six months or so. The Indians wanted better working conditions in the mines and an end to the mita system of forced labor. This was the early stage of a rebellion that would eventually claim the lives of more than 100,000 Indians, and in 1764, it erupted full-blown in Riobamba. Armed Indians from the countryside stormed into the city from the south and took over the Santo Domingo and San Francisco plazas, which became the scene of trench warfare. Blood spilled across bricked squares that were normally filled with boys playing ball, and everyone took the rebellion as a sign that the colonial order that had reigned for 200 years, one that had served the elite so well, was perhaps coming to an end.

As these many years passed, Isabel naturally came to think less often of Jean. She turned thirty-six in 1764, the year of the Indian rebellion. By colonial standards, she was no longer a young woman. Carmen had returned from convent school and was now of a marriageable age. Her childhood had passed, and with it their dream of moving to France. But they did have each other, theirs a mother-daughter bond that brought great comfort to them both. They attended mass daily, their servants always a step behind. Isabel’s faith had always sustained her: She recited her Hail Mary’s and felt reassured by the presence of the Virgin of Sicalpa, the statue high on the mountain, looking out over her town. And deep in her heart, she never gave up all hope that Jean would return. She knew that miracles could occur; she had even witnessed proof of that a few years earlier. In 1759, the image of a patron saint had suddenly appeared before the parishioners of San Sebastián Church. The apparition triggered a great celebration, the town council ordering candles to be lit in every square. Isabel felt the presence of God in her life, which gave her the strength to renew her prayers.

A
FTER
J
EAN
’
S ABORTIVE TRIP
to the Amazon, he settled down in French Guiana in a way that he had not previously. He needed to earn a living. He moved from Cayenne to Oyapock, a tiny village on the river that marked the boundary between French Guiana and Brazil. He built a house on stilts and hunted manatee, a large sea mammal that feeds on sea grasses and was abundant in the Oyapock estuary. The animal was highly prized for its meat, and it also gave a valuable oil. In addition to his manatee enterprise, he drew up plans for a timber business, which he put into operation in 1763.

Archival records provide only a smattering of details about his life during this period. Oyapock was a miserable frontier town, with only a few other white colonists, and Jean lived there isolated from most of the world—even Cayenne was several days away by boat. He appears to have given up any hope of gaining recognition for his scientific investigations or for his grammar of the Incan language, and there are hints, in a letter written by Governor Fiedmont (who had replaced d’Orvilliers), that he became somewhat quarrelsome, bitter over his fate. This was not a life that he had ever imagined for himself, staring night after night across the river at the dark forest that separated him from his family. He would stew like that for months on end, and then he would take out his feather pen and once again plead for help:
“I renewed my letters every year, four, five, and even six times, for the purpose of obtaining my passports,” he wrote years later, “and constantly without effect.”

Not even La Condamine wrote back. The silence of his friend and mentor was almost too much to bear. Perhaps, Jean reasoned, La Condamine’s failure to write was due to the war that had erupted on three continents. France and the other European powers were battling over their colonial territories, a fight that was also taking place on the open seas. His letters must have been getting “lost or intercepted,” and La Condamine later confirmed that such
had been the case. During the Seven Years’ War, which concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, La Condamine did not receive a single one of Jean’s many missives. Jean was writing letters that disappeared into a void, and yet he continued to take pen in hand, as though by sheer obsessive persistence he could get someone to respond to him.

France exited from the war a humiliated nation. In the Paris accord, it was forced to cede Canada and all of its territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, and it also lost several of its islands in the West Indies. Great Britain had emerged as the world’s foremost colonial power, while France’s overseas empire had dramatically shrunk. The bitter defeat demanded that France do something to regain its pride, and in 1763, Étienne-François de Choiseul, who had replaced Rouillé as minister of foreign affairs, decided that new resources should be devoted to French Guiana, which was one of its few remaining colonial possessions in the New World.
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He sent 12,000 colonists to settle the mouth of the Kourou River, northwest of Cayenne, but this enterprise was so badly planned—and the arriving settlers so naive—that they brought ice skates instead of farm tools. Within two years, most had died from fever and starvation.

The arrival of the new colonists, however, stirred Jean’s hopes. France was in need of a triumph and a way to reassert its power and influence. It held just a tiny corner of South America, a mere speck on the map, while lowly Portugal was the master of the Amazon. There was a new and compelling reason to dust off his old plan for seizing the Amazon, and this time, in a letter he wrote to Choiseul on December 10, 1763, he was very blunt about what it would require. As he later confided to Fiedmont,

I provided [Choiseul] with a very detailed account of how, in the blink of an eye, without giving [the Portuguese] the time to know what had happened, one could take over one side of the river, taking precautions to keep it. I also gave him the means of doing this according to the nature of the place. I would intercept the navigation of this river and all communication with the city of Pará until peace has been made.

Jean, of course, had an ulterior motive. France’s seizure of the northern banks of the Amazon would enable him to go upriver to get Isabel. But no sooner had he sent the letter than he started feeling nervous about it. He lived on the border with Portugal; what if his neighbors discovered his plan? He had entrusted the letter to a missionary who was returning to France, and he had begged the man to deliver it “by hand to Choiseul.” But he knew well that letters crossing the Atlantic had a way of not arriving at their destination, and when the king’s vessel returned to Cayenne five months later, without a word of reply from the minister, his worries flared. On June 1, 1764, he begged Choiseul for a reply:

Sir,

In December 1763, I had the honor of writing you a letter, which contained a project that might be of interest to you. Not having received any news, I am anxious to know if you received it, as it may have had the misfortune of taking another route and falling into the hands of foreigners, which would be most unfortunate for the trip I have to make, and for the project itself. If you have received the letter, you will understand why I have taken the liberty to send you this and why I also dare to ask that you inform me as to its status.

Respectfully,

Your most humble and obedient servant, Godin

Over the next several months, his fears grew into full-blown paranoia. He began to cast about for someone new to write to, anyone
who might comfort him, and in his desperation, he seized upon a bit of idle gossip he had heard. There was a certain Count d’Herouville who was said to be “in the confidence of Monsieur Choiseul.” On September 10, 1764, Jean wrote to d’Herouville, and for once, he succinctly summarized his plight:

I was, Sir, associated with the gentlemen of the Academy of Sciences who, in 1735, undertook the mission in Peru. I went down the Amazon in 1749 in order to reach Cayenne. Mr. De La Condamine, of the same Academy, and whom you surely know, will speak on my behalf. It is necessary that I go back up this river to fetch my family in the province of Quito and to bring them here. Dare I, Sir, hope for the good fortune of a moment of your attention?

There was little reason for Jean to believe that this letter would elicit a response. D’Herouville did not know him; he was just grasping at yet another flimsy straw. He had urged France to seize the northern banks of the Amazon, he had volunteered to lead a military boat up the Amazon in order to do “research,” he had offered himself as a spy and a bounty hunter, and he had built his own boat—all to no avail. His letter to d’Herouville was little better than tossing a bottle containing a message into the ocean.

Yet a year later, Governor Fiedmont hurriedly called him to Cayenne. A Portuguese boat had arrived in port with a story that Jean would want to hear—and one that Fiedmont did not at all trust.

The boat, a decked galliot with sails and “manned with thirty oars,” was commanded by a captain of the garrison at Pará. His name was Rebello, and he had come, he said, upon the order of the king of Portugal, to transport Jean up the Amazon “as high as the first Spanish settlement,” where he would wait until Jean returned with his family. He would then bring them back to Cayenne. Fiedmont had listened to this and, as he reported to Choiseul, concluded the obvious: Rebello was a spy.
“This behavior by our
touchy and cruel neighbor on behalf of [Godin] did not surprise me, as I am persuaded that it is nothing more than a pretext to cover up their curiosity about what is going on here and to prevent us from using a similar pretext for going there to learn about their side. I thought it was my duty, nevertheless, to receive this officer.”