We did not recognize them immediately. They were entirely naked, and the whiteness of their skin gave them, in the last rays of the sun, an appearance of repulsive larvae. It was only when they were close to us that we were certain of their identity.
They were full of fury as well as confusion. They had allowed themselves to be caught in an ambush and had been unable to put up any resistance. They had been stripped of all their garments by negroes, who had even plunged their hands into their hair to see whether it concealed any precious objet. Doubtless they had only been left alive for fear of reprisals.
Alvarez uttered many blasphemies and would have liked us all to set forth in pursuit of his attackers. The obscurity that was advancing rapidly in all directions rendered that project impossible. His fury was increased by the ridiculous quality that his nudity gave him. In spite of his rage he observed me from the corner of his eye and I did not fail to let a smile of pity stray over my face, for both the naked man and the leader who had allowed himself to be stripped without fighting.
He marched toward me, proclaiming that I must be very glad to have that pretext for avoiding the projected combat.
“The combat could, however, take place,” I responded.
“Of course! A naked man against a man who might have a coat of mail under his doublet.
“What?”
I thought I had misheard, but he really had formulated the insulting suspicion.
“Arm yourself, wretch. We’ll fight with equal weapons.”
In a matter of seconds I had taken off all my garments, including my shoes, for he might have had a disadvantage walking barefoot over the pebbles. I took a long sword from the belt of a stupefied soldier, which I lifted alongside mine to show that it was visibly of greater dimension, and I threw it at Alvarez’ feet, crying: “Defend yourself!”
I was about to make the gesture of pricking him in order to stimulate him, but there was no need for that. It was him who delivered the first thrust, powerful enough to run me through if I had not parried it.
We were at a place where the beach was not far from a barrier of trees and creepers. Night had fallen almost at a stroke, as if to give the two naked men to measure themselves at their ease.
It was then that a strange revolution was produced within me. I ceased abruptly to be myself, the Jean de Fodoas of familiar passions. I had just been stripped of my nature, as if it had been linked to my garments. My thoughts had departed with the lid of my hat. I had become a primitive man again. I had remounted the course of the ages.
That impression was so powerful that that the trees that were a short distance away were transformed, becoming a benevolent shelter, as if I were accustomed to sleep amid their branches. I was attempted to make use of my sword as a club, taking it in two hands, at the risk of cutting myself on the blade. The gesture I made was nearly fatal to me, for my adversary remained a modern man, skillful at taking advantage of an awkward gesture.
I don’t know how the combat would have finished, but I was suddenly grabbed around the midriff and thrown down on the ground. I understood that in front of me, Alvarez had been subjected to the same fate.
Among the passengers who had come shore with us, there was an individual of severe and taciturn appearance, but who enjoyed a great authority over us all, and whom the captain of the Santa-Fé surrounded with the greatest respect. He had the title of the Grand Prior of the Dominicans of India. Seeing us fighting, he had imperiously given the order to a few soldiers to seize us and disarm us.
He criticized Alvarez de Lima severely for his conduct. The launch was waiting, we might have been attacked at any moment by the natives, and he, who was in command of our troop, instead of seeking to dress himself decently and giving the necessary orders was fighting with a young madman whose folly only merited the rod.
The rod! As I got dressed, and retook possession of my sword, I thought that it had been between my hands merely a simple piece of wood. Thus, the thing that I had considered as my own soul and of which I was so proud, was very little! It had sufficed for me to take off my clothes and find myself in the posture of a primitive man, to become that primitive man again, a savage, almost an ape! And I remembered with horror that at the moment when I was about to engage in combat with Alvarez I had darted a nostalgic glance at the trees full of obscurity—nostalgic because of my confused desire to go and caper among their branches, biting fruits and suspending myself, head down, by the tail of a beast!
I shall not describe the sterile hours that I spent gazing at the door of a cabin from which I saw the woman who was similar to Catherine de Medici emerge far more frequently than the marvelous young woman. I shall not detail all the questions I asked in order to enlighten myself as to the mystery by virtue of which Inès de Saldanna saw all the men sailing with me on the Santa-Fé, with the sole exception of myself, as if I had been struck by the power of invisibility. Sometimes, she stopped to say something to a monk, sometimes she smiled at a mariner agape with admiration, but when she passed beside me it was exactly as if she had passed beside nothing, a void in the air. Imagination draws strange or odious things from its depths and I set about inventing an enormous incongruity that would have signaled my presence, but fortunately, I did not realize it, and I remained invisible, as if I had been touched by some magic wand with the power to confer that gift.
I shall only recall what Francisco said when I was stupid enough to complain to him about that invisibility.
“The pure don’t see the impure, those who are at the opposite pole of their nature, even if they have teeth like you and keep them in spite of the scurvy.”
And he burst into laughter that had as much joy in it as hatred. My teeth were a source of constant jealousy for him and he never wearied of talking about them.
I shall not say anything about Cap Sainte-Marie and the island of Madagascar, nothing about the isle nicknamed the cemetery of the Dutch, which nearly became the cemetery of the Portuguese, nothing about our stopover in Mozambique and the visit of a Muslim king who was accompanied by thirty pirogues crowned with parasols. I shall say nothing about the Indian seas, the waters of which are similar to those of other seas, but where an old mariner who had sailed all over the world pointed out to me blue phosphorescences that are seen nowhere else.
I shall say nothing about the Sanganian pirates who attack ships with a multitude of small boats and set them ablaze with fireships that run over the waves and of which they obtained the secret from one of their people who had gone to study sciences in China. Those pirates were the preoccupation and the terror of everyone for a week, especially the captain, although he pretended ardently to desire them to appear over the horizon, certain that he could exterminate them with stones and musket-fire. That certainty made him sweat anguish in large droplets.
I shall say nothing about the coasts of India looming on the horizon, the actions of grace sung by the crew, the soldiers and the monks kneeling on all the decks when the Santa-Fé felt the breath of a terrestrial wind blowing the odor of trees into the sails, and when she entered the little bay of Sualis, three leagues from Surat.
I shall merely report the last words that I heard from the mouth of Francisco Manoël on the Santa-Fé.
Men were transporting large boxes that belonged to Inès de Saldana. Those boxes made a pile near a suspended staircase that was connected the ship a little later to the quay. I felt a great melancholy, thinking that it would probably never be given to me to see again the woman who, for long hours, had been for me the beauty of the world.
Francisco approached me and he clasped my arms while winking, as if I were an accomplice.
“Rejoice,” he said. “I’ve labored for you. Yes, for you, for, in the final analysis, it’s the young, those who have teeth with which to bite, who profit from the effort of others.”
I looked at him in amazement. I was leaning on my sword, and I had the bizarre sensation, experienced before, that it was alive, that it was an animate individual th
at was attached to me.
“Thanks to me, the young woman with the rose-bush, the purest of the pure, is going to carry on her, on her body, next to her flesh, a tiny fragment of a soiled host, an accursed host, a diabolical host.”
“But how does that concern me?”
Francisco looked at me, with a second of surprise because of the sincerity of my voice. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
“Come on, don’t pretend to be stupid.”
And he drew away.
IN SURAT
In reviving in memory the days of my arrival in Surat, I can measure how great my stupidity was, and with what blindness it filled me. In truth, I cannot measure it exactly, because there is no balance for stupidity; it has no weight or value. I can only consider its mass and its obscurity. But the fruit of my experience is that, from the accumulation of stupidities, honest conduct and a clear conception of things was born. So, I have set aside the regret, as a gardener removes the weeds in his garden in order to permit the cultivated plants to grow freely.
It had been agreed that, in order to rest from the fatigues of the voyage, we would spend a few days in the vast establishments, both commercial and religious, that the Portuguese Jesuits possess in Surat. I had no fatigue, and I took advantage of that time to take account of all the admirable novelties that were around me, and to perfect myself in the knowledge of the Persian and Hindi languages.
A young Toulousan thus transported to the kingdom of Gujarat is cast into astonishment by the easy and placid manner in which elephants circulate in the streets; by the strange honors rendered to miserable cows, honors all the greater the older they are and the more extensively covered with pustules; by the manner in which the seashells are utilized that serve as panes in the windows of houses, as if they were decked out in honor of the sea; by the veils that a great many women wear over their faces, with the exception of the eyes, while others allow their faces to be seen, which are sometimes of incomparable beauty.
I was particularly astonished by the order that reigned in the streets and in the places known as bazaars, where a crowd circulates every hour of every day larger than the one that gathered in Toulouse for the visit of King François I, which was the largest that had ever been seen in that celebrated city. I ought to say that I experienced a certain mortification on seeing how perfectly organized the police were among a people that I was obstinate in believing, in spite of the stories told to me by men worthy of faith, like my people, to be more barbaric than those of the Occident. The simple guardians of the streets had sparkling suits of armor that would have filled the Cornusson son with pride if he had possessed one. They only had to raise the metal rod surmounted by a ball of steel that was the emblem of their power and people stood aside before them respectfully. I was assured that nocturnal aggressions were unknown, and that one could go abroad in the streets of Surat at any hour unarmed, even those where disreputable people lived, for it was about those of which I first sought information.
Charity, although not Christian, appeared to me to have a much greater development than it did in Toulouse and all the other cities through which it had been given to me to pass. At the principal crossroads and at the gates in the ramparts women of extreme ugliness stood, who had bags of a sort on their back. Their ugliness bore no relation to the character of their action. Those women considered the passers-by attentively. Sometimes, they chose one of them and ran toward him swiftly. I thought at first that they were the kind of creatures that one sees in all cities, and, seeing their procedure, I thought about avoiding them. But I noticed that instead of soliciting the most richly dressed men, who seemed to be to be designated to then, they only addressed themselves to the most wretched, contrary to what the strolling players and moors of Languedoc do.
I enquired as to the causes of that way of acting and learned that they were rich ladies who had made vows to gods bearing strange names and were giving poor people objects, nourishment or money. I had known charitable ladies, and my mother was one of them, but I had never seen such a large number of them choosing with so much care those who were to receive their charity, and devoting their entire day to it.
My astonishment increased when I discovered that charity was devoted as much to animals as to humans, and even extended to insects. But many travelers have described the mores of Hindus, their way of living and the beauty of their land. I refer those who are avoid to know more to the work that my cousin Du Jarric has just concluded, and for which he has gone to Bordeaux in order to reach an understanding with a skillful printer. That work will comprise three quarto volumes and will cause a great deal of astonishment. Pierre Du Jarric had made enquiries a painter in order to illustrate the historic episodes but I told him that the most beautiful illustrations are those one composes oneself with the brush of the imagination. Even the greatest Italian masters often diminish the beauty of scenes, which they represent with an excess of exactitude. He yielded to my arguments, and the book will appear without images.
There are many important facts that I am not reporting but I shall pause to retrace a minimal incident, to which I shall only attribute a significance much later. When one looks backward, one perceives that it is very trivial incidents that are the luminous reference points of existence.
I had not addressed a word to Brother Octave since the night when I had thought about seizing him by the foot and tipping him off his mule because he had responded to the request I had made him to lend me his gourd. I had not known that a great saint does not carry a gourd. Now, it appeared that Brother Octave was a great saint. Everyone repeated that on the Santa-Fé, but with a slight hint of irony, a suppressed smile. It was understood when one talked about him that he was slightly mad. We had traveled side by side on the roads of Spain for long days, and had been neighbors on the Santa-Fé without him paying the slightest attention to my existence. I had made observations about that rudeness several times to my cousin, but he had always replied that a man who can see God cannot see a young Toulousan laden with sins at the same time. In truth, his immeasurably skeletal physique inspired an unacknowledged dread in me.
The third day after our arrival in Surat, there was no talk of anything in the house of the Portuguese Jesuits of anything but the departure of Brother Octave. He should, in principle, have waited for the authorization of the co-administrator of his order, who was in Goa. Doubtless he found the time long, even though he was perpetually plunged in prayer. It seemed to me that, for such an activity, it was of no importance whether one did it in one place rather than another.
It appears that he sincerely believed in the possibility of finding the church and the Cross of Bartholomew. He had decided to head eastwards, as the saint had done at another time. He had just procured an enormous piece of wood larger than himself, and had resolved to carry it on his shoulder until he could exchange it one day for the Cross of Bartholomew.
It was morning, in front of the harbor of Surat that the Portuguese house overlooks, with its great metal portal, whose solidity had been so useful a few years before, when Surat was nearly captured by the Sanganians. Brother Octave had just made his adieux with few words, as was his custom. The Grand Prior of the Dominicans of India was there; I was going out at the precise moment when he was concluding a final futile exhortation to persuade him to remain. Brother Octave already had his piece of wood on his shoulder. I found myself face to face with him and thought too late how misplaced my presence might be in that gathering of eminent religious men.
A frisson ran through me. Brother Octave had immediately fixed me with the hollow eyes of his skeletal head, and his eyes widened. I had the sentiment that I was about to be subjected to some mortification to which it would be impossible for me to respond; and that sentiment augmented when Brother Octave dropped his piece of wood at his feet.
Suddenly, before I had time to slip away, he enveloped me with his long arms and hugged me against his breast, and I felt wrinkled lips on my forehead.
“I recognize
you now. It’s you, and you alone, who are my brother.”
I perceived that a great surprise ran through the audience, all the greater because he had emphasized the word “alone.”
When I had recovered from my own astonishment, Brother Octave was drawing along the quays with long strides. He was heading eastwards.
I thought about the sort of fraternity that Francisco Manoël had recognized in me, a man who occupied in the globe of souls the pole opposite to that of Brother Octave, and I remained perplexed.
The wonder caused by the novelty of things was not sufficient to take away a great melancholy that came to me from the sudden sentiment of my insignificance.
When I was in Toulouse and when I saw a woman whose beauty struck me with admiration I had the internal conviction that it would always be possible for me, by devoting time and obstinacy to it, to get to know her and make her love me. The nobility of my family could, strictly speaking, counterbalance my poverty, if it were a young woman of high birth, and as for the others, I knew that one arrived at one’s goal by means of bold actions. The celebrated Marie Cose had dismissed, in order to receive me, magistrates and judges of the Parlement, and I possessed a little key to a hidden door to her house overlooking the Quai de la Dalbade. As for Bérangère de Palassol, I had only had to meet her gaze; I knew that when she had returned to her Château de Lauragais she would elude the surveillance of her brothers, jealous and deformed lords, in order to meet me at a bend in some sunken road or beneath the poplars of the Hers.
Jean de Fodoas Page 6
