The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

by Rikki Ducornet

  But Mother was like the Woman I Married, who, when I asked for Masters Boccaccio, Villon, and Rabelais to entertain my mind in jail, sent me psaltery claptrap as convivial as suet—the point being to keep me from thinking. (Like priests, pious wives are made uncomfortable by the functioning of gray matter—that of others and their own.)

  At the age of four, I decided that if God did not want me to think, I’d go to the Devil. And so it came to pass: I was made to spend my life pissing my heart out in prison! If this makes sense, then mankind should be ruled by imbeciles, which any fool will tell you is not the case. One of my fiercest enemies says: “Sade fills the heads of the innocent with ideas.” I should think so! “And ideas,” this bees’ barber continues, “are contagious.” I should hope so! But I ask you: Since the Church hates pleasure as much as it hates thought, why has God given us brains and, Heaven help us, a pair of fesses?

  Brains and fesses…I venerate both. To my way of thinking, the one leads inevitably back to the other. They circle each other like amorous butterflies. Brains and fesses! These are our most precious possessions.

  The Bible is a pile of dung. I ask you: Is it coherent? The words are recognizable: Nouns, adjectives, and verbs parade across the page like ants on their way to a moldering cracker. But the ideas are so incongruous, they might as well be written down in frass. The one thoughtful moment is Eve’s. Eve, the mother of Juliette. Eve, who never asks “Why have you forsaken me?” but who walks out of Eden and climbs into bed. Eve, who, in full knowledge, fucks and engenders a world. When as a child I read about that instance in Eden when tyranny was subverted, that exemplary moment, I cried out, “Eve was right!” and I hurled the book across the room. For this I was whipped and so it was revealed: Les fesses are endangered by the functioning brain.

  My earliest memories are not of hired buffoons or of riding pig-a-back upon a poor wretch hired for that service, but of Madame de Roussillon dressed in spangles and telling stories in a hushed voice; in one, Gargantua eats a salad of pilgrims, and in another, Gulliver dances a jig for a queen the size of Cheops. Later, after I nearly ripped the prince to shreds (he refused to play horsie unless I played the horse’s part), I was sent packing to my uncle’s castle keep, where I often slipped away to rustle up some village brats all rough and merry. I was as enchanted as they when, in the cobbler’s back room lit only by a candle, finger shadow-figures were made to dance upon the wall: Guignol and highwaymen; a witch on her way to Sabbath; La Fontaine’s raven, the cheese tumbling from its beak round as a fist; Jonah swallowed by the whale. Thumbkin! Puss in Boots!

  Or when Folle Blanche took us into her dark kitchen to feed us apples and omelettes and told us her “True Tales of the Infant Jesus,” in which the Son of God shared the womb with kings and comets and camels, and who, while still in the cradle, shat all the way to Rome and into the pope’s face.

  Here’s how Folle Blanche made an omelette:

  She’d sauté her marrows in butter till sizzling.

  With a splash of oil to keep them from scorching,

  then whip her eggs till foaming

  (She’d take a sip of wine.)

  She’d add some chives chopped very fine,

  sorrel, perhaps a pinch of thyme.

  (She’d take a sip of wine.)

  Now the eggs are in the pan!

  (She takes a sip of wine.)

  She sets them to shiver and shake to a man!

  (She takes a sip of wine.)

  Then roars: “Come, boys! Let’s sup! It’s time!”

  She takes a sip of wine and sprinkles the eggs with salt. (The poor know nothing of pepper.) And if we eat with our fingers, we feast like kings of Spain.

  The Romans made their omelettes with honey. If a savory omelette stuffed with lobster or ham—or both! or both!—is what I’d sell my soul for this minute if I had one, don’t think I’d scorn the Roman sort, or the jam omelettes of my youth, as delicate as the thoughts of an angel, amply dusted with confectioner’s sugar and disgorging strawberry jam.

  You’d think, wouldn’t you, they’d serve eggs in prison—a wholesome, inexpensive food and, if your sense is in your cranium and not in your navel, easy to prepare (although perhaps beyond the skill of prison cooks, who cannot boil noodles to save their lives). If I had a say in this, I’d assure each prison a poultry yard and, come to think of it, a trout pond, a vegetable garden, an orchard, a milk cow. Better still, I’d supply each prisoner with his own hen. She would afford companionship, keep the cell free of vermin, and provide those precious eggs, which, as every country bumpkin knows, are at their best within the hour of being laid—especially if they are to be soft-boiled.

  When the tedium of confinement proved too much to bear, the prisoner might blow out his eggs—just as the Russians do—and decorate them. The more I think about it, the more I like this idea. And a truly well behaved prisoner, although he might persist in thinking the sorts of thoughts that got him into trouble in the first place, might be rewarded for his manners at least with the gift of a goose. If he was given a potted fruit tree, the fowl could perch there. Its dung, falling as gravity dictates, would fertilize the tree, producing fruit of great quality. But for all this to be possible, a certain demand must be met: a large window, facing south, allowing the sun to enter and invigorate the living things inside the cell: bird, tree, and man.

  Before I end this letter, which has afforded me the pleasure of your company for near the entire afternoon, another recollection: the little feast you and La Fentine put on at The Red Swan, the savories—aspics, crayfish, cod tongues, and barquettes—and the little cakes were all shaped like fans. You were little more than a child and I a good deal your senior, yet still a youth and unaware of mortality and disease.

  I was broke. I had squandered my wife’s dowry in pleasures too many to list, and a beautiful woman sold her jewels to save my skin. I believed I lived a charmed life and knew nothing of remorse. Now, nearly thirty years later, I am old, broken, obese. But you—you are at the height of your powers, still as slender as you were, although one cannot help but notice with admiration how round your bosom has become, and how merry your eye—as if it could be merrier than it was then. How lightly you carry the years, mon amie, yes, how very lightly. I think it is because no one has ruled you, not man or god. If only you were a libertine, what a perfect specimen of a woman you would be!

  You asked about my eyes. I continue to be plagued by floaters, and this because rage is a constant practice of mine, rage and harrowing fatigue. Even asleep I do not rest but continue to hear the sound a head makes when, severed from the body, it falls into its basket. My nightmares are terrible. I see an eye blooming at the center of the bleeding neck, and so affected am I by the sight I am turned to stone, a clenched fist of black marble raised eternally in anger against the world. I shall replace my family’s crest with a mano in fica: that obscene hand making “the fig.” Te faccio na fica! May the evil eye do you no harm!

  The executions continue, and it is impossible for me to keep away. Standing at my window I am like Andrealphus; I am like a caged ocelot: I am all eyes. I thought I was a writer of fables; it turns out I am a writer of facts.

  Four

  —You have been, often secretly, supplying Sade with books, notes taken in your own hand, sketches of eccentric subject matter including criminal acts, word lists in a language unrecognizable to the Comité—perhaps a code. All this has entered into the production of a manuscript of dubious intention. The time has come for you to describe the nature of your scheme.

  —Scheme? It is only a book we are writing, citizen.

  —You are being asked to give an account of it.

  —Our book begins with a map-maker, a Franciscan named Melchor who had accompanied Landa to the Yucatán. Such is the map-maker’s faith, and such is his vanity, that he invents all that he does not know, all that is yet unknown; invents lands undiscovered, or thickly shrouded in forests, or made impassable by defiant Maya Indians who cont
inue to do battle with the Spanish, killing their cattle, their cats and dogs, and tearing their strange trees from the ground.

  The map-maker dares not leave his rooms, but no matter: He believes his hand is guided by divine inspiration. Melchor is a madman who imagines that there where he pens in a lake, a lake must be. Or a river. Or a range of mountains. Or, if not, that these things appear once he has designated them, summoned directly from the mind of God. Melchor is a Christian, not a kabbalist, but as he studies the heresies, this Jewish idea of things appearing as God thinks them appeals to him, and he is mad enough to believe that whatever he thinks, God conceives—or, perhaps with less vanity, that whatever God conceives, Melchor then imagines. Thus the bridge between divine conception and Melchor’s pen precipitates reality. Melchor is God’s vessel and God’s quill.

  —The map-maker is mad!

  —The map-maker’s vanity is contained only by his folly.

  He is not alone. All times are foolish, including our own, which breaks sodomites on the wheel. I ask you: Why shouldn’t one mouth be as good as the other? But some times worse than others, and Landa’s was overswarming with murderously foolish men. Men who instead of delighting in new worlds drenched them in blood.

  The year is 1562, and Landa—who has impressed everyone with his uncanny capacity with language, his intelligence and zealousness—has been named First Provincial. He has gone to Mani to inquire into pagan practices the Church has not managed to purge. Already a number of Maya women have had their breasts cut away and fed to dogs in order to frighten their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons into submission. Infants stuck to pikes line the road to Mani. The book opens with this image: those bodies, that road. Entering Mani, Landa sees a Spanish mastiff gnawing a human hand.

  —All inventions of Sade!

  —Only Melchor is our invention. But to continue: Imagine now, if you will, how such a man as this map-maker, Melchor, responds when a Maya scribe named Kukum is made to bring his books and maps before Landa; imagine Melchor’s humiliation when Landa, to impress Kukum and, perhaps, to frighten him, unrolls Melchor’s map—it is so large that it covers the entire surface of a great library table set out in the center of the Inquisitor’s chamber—and Kukum snorts with disdain.

  Kukum is defiant and he is daring. He knows it is likely that he will die a horrible death. He has seen that, like everything Spanish, Melchor’s map is fantastical and false. He says: “My land is not a land of dreams. It is a real place, a tangible place supporting more temples and pyramids than can be counted, and each is as heavy as a hill. Your map-maker must take a long journey and, with his brushes and quills, put down what is truly there. But, see, he need not bother. The thing has been done. I, myself, have done it.” Then, from the bundle he carries, Kukum takes out one of those beautiful books of the New World, a book made of bark paper pasted to ribs of cedar wood, with covers of cedar carefully carved—a book that opens like a fan! There, to the wonderment of Landa and Melchor, lies the entire Yucatán peninsula, the whole of the north as free of lakes, rivers, and mountains as the summit of Landa’s own head. But there are tall forests clearly drawn and dry scrublands and planted fields. The sacred wells and salt pans are clearly marked, and the marshes filled with birds and fish; the cities of Ake and Chancenote, Campeche and Ichmul, Ecab, Izamal, and Chetumal are all in their places. Also marked are the ancient cities “where no one goes now,” Kukum informs them: Labna, Mayapán, Uxmal, Chicheniza.

  With refinement and spontaneity, Kukum had painted the features of his vanishing world. He had marked the roadways with footprints; the hills were bright with butterflies, the coastal waters filled with fish. Kukum points to these things, speaking their names with reverence: uzcay, or skate; zub, or hare; put, papaya; maxcal, yam; ixim, maize; ixlaul, laurel; nicte, plumaria.…Pointing to a bird painted above the towns he says: “This is the ixyalchamil, which is always there where people have planted gardens. And here is the magpie, who scolds the Spanish when they pass.” Landa chooses to ignore this discourtesy, at least temporarily.

  “It is painted fair,” Landa acknowledges, causing the color in Melchor’s face to rise. “The Indian’s touch is light and vivid. But tell me,” he says, turning to Kukum, “what is the significance of these signs painted at the border all around?”

  “The sacred and secular calendars circumscribe the map like two snakes sleeping side by side,” Kukum explains, “because the cities are all laid out according to celestial patterns and recall rituals that close and open the cycles of time.”

  “And these? “Where Landa points, his nail leaves a mark.

  “They identify geographical accidents: This one keeps alive the memory of a pestilence—one that foretold the present time; and this carries the thoughts back to a unique celestial event. Here one is in danger of being bitten by red ants, and here by snakes.”

  “How often their thoughts turn to snakes,” says Melchor darkly.

  “Nevertheless, how clever it is,” Landa responds. Taking the other things Kukum has brought, Landa has him escorted to a cell for safekeeping. “What you know is interesting and useful to me,” Landa tells Kukum as he is led away. “You will not be treated badly.”

  “My people’s memory is in your keeping now,” Kukum says with dignity, as if among gentlemen.

  Once Kukum has been removed, Landa asks Melchor why his map is so unlike the Maya’s. “For,” he says, “it is high time I told you that our soldiers have looked for the lake you have drawn so clearly and cleverly smack in the middle of the northern lowlands, and so far they have not found it.”

  “Each time our soldiers go into the country,” Melchor replies, “they are bewitched by devils disguised as daughters of men. I have seen them return from the country reeling and laughing like drunks, and all because of the deeds of witches. For weeks they are tormented by nightmares, or sexual fire, or seized by fits of outrageous laughter, and only after their ardor is cooled with aspersions of holy water, and their minds with prayer and fasting, may they proceed with things. The lake is there; it shall be found. I, myself, have seen it and walked its circumference, which took me a full day. “Melchor does not tell Landa that he had in fact seen the lake—and received it as a revelation—in a dream.

  “I believe you,” Landa says. “But still…” He fingers the map, folding and unfolding it, marveling at the cleverness of its construction. “What do you make of the apparent care with which it has been done? And this man, Kukum, is no fool, although…how oddly made these people are! All as ugly as dogs!”

  “Ugly as their own bald dogs!” Melchor agrees.

  —It is true that the natives of the New World are ugly, for I have seen a mummy on display in the gardens of the royal palace during the summer fair, and it was hideous.

  —[The fan-maker ignores this and continues:]

  “Such things have been found beside their altars spattered with blood,” says Landa. He lifts the map to his nose and frowns. “Just as I thought,” he says. “The map stinks of copal.”

  With growing excitement, Melchor tugs at the hair of his beard and twists and untwists it around his thumb. “A filthy thing,” he says. “Its red border may be poisoned. See the devils painted all around!” Pointing to things more unknown to him and so incomprehensible, Melchor adds with conviction: “Here are the seals and characters of Lucifer and Astaroth—and lo! Beelzebuth, too!”

  “Faith!” Landa agrees. “I know these well, and now I perceive them! Here is the obscene character of Clawneck—so like the male genital robbed of potency by means of sorcery or, by fire, tied into knots! And here the character of Muissin—so like the buttocks of a whore! And all just as they appear in the GrimoriumVerum.” The lid of his left eye twitches, as it always does when he is most displeased.

  “See here!” Melchor whispers, because the danger of uttering the names of demons aloud is great and because his own terror has exhausted him. “See the seal of Shax—the one who appears in the form of a dove and who, li
ke Kukum, speaks hoarsely. And look—the crest of Zepar, who makes females mutable so that their husbands fornicate with creatures of the deep, the meadows, the forests, and the air! And here: See those very creatures!” With a filthy finger, Melchor prods all the charming animals—the deer and turkeys and hares Kukum had lovingly scattered over his map.

  “It is so. “Landa sighs deeply. “The devices are all familiar. We have found them graven on the inner side of satanic rings and gnostical gems, or as red marks occurring spontaneously during torture beside the nipples, or upon the buttocks, or behind the knees of witches.”

  “And scratched upon the surface of magical rods,” says Melchor, “and once painted on the belly of a gold-finding hen.”

  “Did the hen truly find gold?” Landa asks. “I’ve always thought such hens the fabulations of peasants.”

  “One in Salamanca did,” Melchor assures him. “The gold it found was pure but very hot. If put into a pot of water, the water boiled. This is no map,” Melchor says with loathing, “but only another pestilence among those—the ants, the spiders, the snakes, the winds, the rainstorms, the fevers, the necromancers and harlots—that taunt us by the hour in this unholy place!”

  “If our soldiers are inseminating witches,” Landa muses, “what will become of the world?” He is feeling peevish. Whenever one of these heathens comes before him there is trouble, a stench of sulphur, sleepless nights, and the conviction that the task at hand is so vast it can never be accomplished.

  “It is like pulling teeth from a shark,” Melchor says to Landa, as if reading his mind. “The teeth grow back as many and as sharp.”

  Landa looks out the window across the courtyard, where twelve Indians are hanging by their necks. Despite the burning sun, the day is dark; the heat and light only worsen his mood. The road to Mani, as all roads through the province, has been littered with human bones; the stench of death still clings to his clothes even after rigorous washings. It is the stench of my own death, he thinks, made to humble me. Taking leave of Melchor, Landa puts on a wide-brimmed hat and steps into the street.