“You’re also embarking on the Santa-Fé,” he said, putting his elbows on the table that was in front of me.
It was not a question; he didn’t wait for a response.
“It’s a ship that holds well at sea, and it’s better to be on the Santa-Fé than the Saint-Philippe. We have her for at least six months of navigation! And then, one is never sure of arriving.”
“Perhaps we met in Toulouse,” I said, seeking to rediscover his face in my memories.
He shook his head, smiling, as if to dismiss words of no importance.
“If I have some good advice to give you, beware of the Inquisitors. They have spies everywhere and there are some on the Santa-Fé. What a breed!”
He spat in disgust. He had had dealings with the Inquisition’s tribunals several times. Those tribunals were more redoubtable in Goa and India than elsewhere. Their tyranny had redoubled since Portugal had fallen under Spanish domination. Out there, the governor and the functionaries were still Portuguese, but the Inquisitors were all Spaniards. An infamous race!
I objected that those words were very imprudent, since he did not know whether I myself….
He started to laugh.
“There are people whom one recognizes immediately,” he said, “as being of one’s family. I mean your family of men.”
I was not flattered.
“My name if Francisco Manoël, At least, I’m known by that name. You’ll see that I’ll be able to render you many services.”
I was about to respond that I did not like to be addressed in a familiar fashion and that I did not expect any service from anyone, but he got up and made a rather imperious sign to me to pay for that we had drunk. I did so without protest.
I followed him to the harbor. Night was about to fall. We passed negroes from Mozambique and Hindus from Goa, an entire bizarre population from Portuguese colonies, which gave Lisbon the appearance of a city of another word. I was an object of curiosity because of the bright colors of my costume and the feather in my hat. I hid my embarrassment beneath an arrogant appearance. My astonishment at everything became perceptible. For my companion said to me:
“I’ll wager that you’ve never seen the sea.”
It was true. The Tage seemed infinite to me.
There was a great dark mass in front of us. It was the Santa-Fé. My cousin had shown it to me on the day of our arrival, and I had wondered how, by virtue of what force, such a heavy construction was able to set forth across the waves. I had before me a cathedral with several slender towers and a multitude of windows. An extraordinary animation reigned on the deck. On the gangplank that linked the ship to the quay men were running, transporting bales.
“Do you know what scurvy is?” Francisco Manoël asked me.
I made a sign that I did not.
“Well, perhaps it’ll take your teeth.” And with a frightful grimace, he showed me that he had lost his own.
Suddenly, a man who had the appearance of a steward jostled us, throwing us against the gangplank. He was preceding a little group that was advancing more slowly. Several men were carrying lanterns, and I heard one of them say: “It’s this way. Be careful of those ropes.”
In the shadows, I thought I recognized two women in the middle of the group. One of them was fat, and was laden with packages, but the one marching ahead had a delicate and slender silhouette.
My companion tugged on my arm and I heard him snigger.
The little group hesitated for a few seconds, until a voice shouted: “Come on, the gangplank’s here.”
One of the servants had raised his lantern to the height of a young woman’s face.
She was wearing a wimple under which blue-tinted golden hair was parted over the forehead. A shawl made pleats over her shoulders and designed heir contour. She was clutching two or three roses preciously. She half-turned, doubtless to cast one last farewell glance at Lisbon, and the arc that her gaze followed passed over me like a living light. It seemed to me that when she walked, her dress made a silken music.
“Who’s that?” I asked my companion.
“I don’t know. I thought I recognized, however….”
His voice had the accent of a lie, but I didn’t perceive that at the time. He went on: “At any rate, that will occupy you during the voyage—if the scurvy leaves you your teeth.”
He started to laugh, and I understood that he would speak to me frequently about teeth and scurvy, for when men have found a disagreeable form of facetiousness, they never weary of repeating it.
I would have liked to launch myself on to the Santa-Fé, but my cousin had asked me to go back to the convent of the Order, where we were sleeping, before nightfall. It was the following morning at dawn that we were to embark with our baggage.
“Would you like to have an object, a talisman that will permit you to realize all your desires, especially evil desires?” Francisco Manoël had seized my arm, and was looking at me with an uncomfortable fixity. “Give me fifty reis, which I need to liberate my trunk tomorrow, and I’ll give you a part—only a part—of the one I have on my breast.”
I still had fifty reis and I gave them to him, for I have difficulty refusing money. But I thought that, our acquaintance being so slight, there was something premature about that request.
We had almost reached the door of the Order’s convent. My companion opened the top of his doublet wide and showed me a leather pouch that he was wearing around his neck like a scapular.
“What you take for a cord is the rolled skin of a snake, and in the pouch, see….”
He stared at me. I saw a milky disk, and I suddenly felt invaded by a great sadness. “What is it?”
“You don’t know anything about anything. It’s a consecrated host that I’ve stolen. An accursed host!”
And with that, he drew away with long strides.
THE CHIMERAS OF TRAVELERS
Pushed by favorable winds, the Santa-Fé had been traveling along an invisible road over the ocean for several day.
I was busy marveling at the astonishing genius of the pilot, which permitted that enormous mass to go straight ahead, with the help of sails, when my cousin emerged from the narrow cabin that we shared with two other members of the Order and came toward me. He put his hands on my shoulders and stared attentively into the depths of my eyes.
“No, your eyes haven’t changed color yet,” he said, “but it will come.”
“Why should my eyes be subject to a change?”
“Have you not noticed that all the men sailing with us on the Santa-Fé have a yellow gleam in their eyes?”
I replied that I had not noticed it.
“It’s because the soul is reflected in the eyes. The gold about which everyone is thinking, the gold that is the common objective, eventually fixes its fugitive nuance in the gaze of avid men. Everyone goes to India for the conquest of gold, everyone has the same desire. Once, I didn’t have the gilded eyes that I have now. There will come a time when your brown eyes of the sons of Toulouse will acquire the gleam of the metal that will become the motive for your actions.”
“We’re traveling,” I replied, “with many good missionaries, Jesuits, Dominicans or Franciscans. I’ve heard it said that one is going to join Père Ricci in Peking,6 that another counts on reaching the kingdom of Cathay. All of them are talking about nothing but pagans to convert. I imagine that it’s spiritual gold that is tinting their eyes.”
“Evidently, evidently, there are disinterested souls,” my cousin hastened to say, “but for all objectives, gold in necessary. If the Order of Saint Ignatius possessed the riches of the Orient it would be master of the world, and then…. You’re very young, Jean de Fodoas, and you’ll understand that a little later.”
And with that, he took a little notebook out of his pocket and he gave me a sign that he was about to resume his lessons in Hindi—for I was learning the rudiments of that barbaric tongue aboard the Santa-Fé, alternating it with the rudiments of Persian, the language of the liter
ate in India.
“And when you know Hindi it will be necessary for you to learn Sanskrit, which is the language of Hindu scholars—for there are pagan scholars. It will be necessary for you to learn the Persian language, in which poets write, the language of the people of the Marwari and that of the land of Gujarat, the Talenga that is full of redoubtable sonorities, the Bengali that is harmonious, Liti, Betoche, Kashmiri and the language of the mountain people that is called Pushtu or Pathan—for it seems that in the land of India, more than elsewhere, God has emphasized the division of languages.”
It was a familiar pleasantry of my cousin to threaten me with all those languages to learn; and I never failed to respond: “A man who handles a sword well is always able to express himself adequately.”
However, I showed an extraordinary facility for the study of languages, which amazed my cousin. Besides which, there were long hours of tedium, Great ships like the Santa-Fé only advance over the roads of the sea by the force of the winds, and there are absences of wind that last for several days. After having emerged from an atrocious condition known as sea-sickness, I had rediscovered the life that I had believed lost, and, as I could not escape my cousin’s exhortations, I had made the decision to learn Hindi as quickly as possible, at the same time as I perfected my Portuguese.
In any case, the little bench where the lessons took place was situated on the second deck, in such a fashion that I could see a narrow door: the door of a cabin where, for me, the living soul of the Santa-Fé was.
When you go back in memory over the most significant moments in your life, you perceive that in those capital moments, absolutely nothing happened.
Of what islands were we in sight? I have not retained the memory. A bell had rung announcing the hour of the evening meal. The upper decks emptied instantly, the soldiers running forwards and the sailors toward the rear. A double rumor came from the two extremities of the ship, which seemed absolutely deserted. Very high up on a mast, there was only one man any longer, gazing through a telescope.
Why I had not got to my feet when the bell rang I don’t know, perhaps because I simply wasn’t hungry, perhaps because I wanted to see how the sun, larger and redder than usual was about to disappear into the ocean.
I was sitting on the little bench that I called the Hindi bench, and my eyes wandered toward the two staircases that connected the deck that I was on with the rear castle. The balustrade that united the two stairways was made of two chimeras of sculpted wood, whose heads met in the middle and whose long fish-like tails descended to the right and left along the steps—for the Santa-Fé was painted and sculpted with an extreme artistry in all her parts.
And leaning on that balustrade, holding the head of a chimera in each hand, was the most beautiful creature that it had ever been given to me to see: beauty incarnate.
She was not the same as the woman I had glimpsed on the quay in Lisbon—or rather, she was the same one and another at the same time. Perhaps the sea air and the contemplation of space had given her that ardent life. What color were her eyes? I sensed that question being posed within me at the same time as I said to myself: There’s a rose-bush on the Santa-Fé!—because she was holding a fresh rose in her right hand, and she was sweeping the heads of the chimeras with it, lightly. She had a broad white collar and the wind lifted the floating sleeves of her dress like two wings.
She seemed so devoid of density that when she came down the staircase I wondered why her feet were making movements to place themselves on the steps instead of floating. Her features had an ideal expression that I had not seen on any other face. She went past me without noticing my presence, and for a second, her head was exactly in the center of the circle of the sun, and she appeared to me to be aureoled with fire, like the heads of certain saints that I had seen in stained-glass windows.
Her name was Inès de Saldanna, and she was the sister of the Viceroy of India. What was she going to do out there? Join her brother, it was said, but in the familiar conversations that took place on deck in the evening I heard contradictory assertions in her regard.
The Viceroy was only appointed for three years, and he would soon be returning to Portugal. Why was he making his sister come when he was about to depart? And a sister he had never loved. Padre Pimenta7 had known the Saldanna family for a long time and in the evening, when we were sitting on deck, he never ran out of stories about Aryas de Saldanna,8 the most powerful man after the King of Spain.
When the kingdom of Portugal had become Spanish, he had immediately betrayed his own people and rendered homage to the new masters. He had an appetite for wealth to an extraordinary degree—like everybody else, in fact; like all those who were going to the Indies and were not missionaries of a holy order. But that was not in order to enjoy life, to assuage is passions. He did not drink. He scarcely ate. He only desired wealth in order to buy sculpted dressers. He had filled the Saldannas’ castle with them, to the point that the rooms were overflowing with dressers; he had placed them in all the pathways in the park. A park of sculpted dressers! Padre Pimenta had no doubt that he had solicited the position of Viceroy of India in order to have more facility in obtaining dressers from China, Macao and all the Spanish possessions in the Orient.
As for the beautiful Inès de Saldanna, Padre Pimenta deemed her a proud woman. Proud! He could not find any other word. Irreproachable surely, but proud! And how could it be explained that she did not like the Jesuits and that it had been necessary to send with her a Dominican, her confessor? Were there a young woman’s sins that only a Dominican could hear? And that caricature of a ruined marquise that accompanied her like her shadow! And the rose-bush that she transported with her as if the roses that flowered between the sculpted dressers of the Saldanna park were more beautiful than the flowers of India!
Padre Pimenta had a bitterness of the soul that came from his sadness in becoming fat. He had already made the voyage to India twice, he fasted as best he could and only consumed a derisory nourishment, but in spite of that, his plumpness augmented with regularity that drive him to despair. He paced back and forth along the deck of the ship with the aim of struggling against the mysterious genius that he carried within him, and labored on the incessant augmentation of his form.
The Padre’s face brightened with a smile of malign satisfaction when he added, lowering his voice: “And it is, at any rate, one of our friends, Seigneur Francisco Manoël, who is charged with watching over her.”
The members of the Order smiled in an understanding fashion, my cousin Du Jarric made an ambiguous grimace, and I had the desire then to cry out bluntly: “Do you know that he’s carrying in his breast, in a rolled snakeskin, a stolen and profaned host?”
But I did nothing, my cousin having repeated several times that among eminent religious men, some of whom are saints, the duty of a young layman is to listen in silence.
“Have you not noticed,” my cousin Du Jarric said to me one day, “that the Santa-Fé advances over the sea even when there isn’t a breath of wind?”
No, I had not noticed any such thing. I had, on the contrary, just seen the ship remain in the most dismal immobility for two days.
“That is attributable, on the one hand, to Providence, and on the other to the great winged chimeras that are in certain souls and which aid matter to move. Look at that dry little man with the weather-beaten face, Benoît de Goës.9 He’s animated by a dream of discovery. He intends to reach Agra with us, the Emperor Akbar’s capital. From there, all alone, on foot, he’ll start marching northwards. He’ll traverse the fabulous mountains that circle India; he’ll advance through pagan lands where no Christian has ever set foot; he’ll skirt an ocean of sand as vast as this ocean of water that we’re traversing, and he’ll attempt to reach the kingdom of Cathay, where a legend says that there is a baptized king who has a cathedral for a palace and who recognizes the divinity of Jesus.”
“And what if that king doesn’t exist?”
“Providence will bring him b
ack among us. You’ve traveled for many days along the roads of Spain with our brother Octave of the Zaalberg family. You complained of not being able to get a word out of him. He doesn’t speak to anyone and lives in his dream. He believes, secretly, that God has made the bones of his face stand out and has given him that skeletal appearance in order to recall the idea of death to the minds of those who might be tempted to forget it. He lived an ascetic life for a long time in a convent in Flanders, only committing the sin of pride—the pride of having a cranium like a death’s-head! But he has quit his convent, traversed France and is sailing with us to India because of a story he had heard. He is going to find the Cross of Bartholomew.”
“Bartholomew? Are you talking about the apostle who gave his name to a mountain in Ariège?”10
“The same. That apostle is reputed to have evangelized the Orient, and particularly India. When one finds oneself among the pagans who inhabit that land, one is obliged to observe that there is scarcely any trace of that distant evangelization, but one of our brothers, who traversed India from west to east, claimed that there exists somewhere, on a mountain, a ruined church that had once been built by Bartholomew. A few savage men who live in the vicinity have retained a vestige of Christianity. Above the altar of the church there is a great wooden cross, a massive cross, carved by the hand of Bartholomew. It was been transmitted through the ages that the cross in question has the miraculous power of converting pagans. Where is it? In what region?
“The brother who knew that must have given the silent Octave a few indications as to the direction it is necessary to take in order to find that cross. He hasn’t said anything about it. He obtained authorization from the general of the Order to depart, because the latter thought, with reason, that it was necessary to show the pagans a true Christian ascetic, as true as those provoked out here by strange divinities called Vishnu or Siva. Our clergy in Goa exhibit a liking for material enjoyments and luxury, alas, equal to that of the Spanish clergy. That the Christian capital of the Orient will one say see a living skeleton appear, carrying the Cross of Bartholomew, is Octave’s secret dream.”
Jean de Fodoas Page 4
