Gloatingly, Landa recalled the subversive lispings of Copernicus, who in his folly believed in the sun’s preeminence; Landa’s Tophet was proof of the world’s centrality.
“So much for the ‘allegorical fires’ of the so-called philosophers!” Landa shouted to Melchor above the fire, the dog’s howlings, the screams of the damned. “My Tophet is the mirror of Hell, and it is God in His Infinite Glory who holds up that mirror today!” With a small gesture of his hand, Landa indicated that the sacred books, heaped together, should be fed to the fire. A column of smoke flooded the sky—it was so black, so thick, that Landa was certain God was watching. So great was the stench of burning flesh, of deerskin curling up like fingers, that surely God smelled the Tophet, too. And the cries of the damned. Surely He was listening. What these people were, Landa whispered, I alone will say.
Late that night, the sky tore open from the west to the east with such violence the walls of the friary shuddered and the belfry bell rang out. Prostrate with heat, Landa gazed toward the window in time to see a horizontal bar of lightning ignite the sky. For a moment the sky was sliced into two distinct portions: the top a muddy green, the bottom the color and consistency of curdled cream. It began to rain. If a flood should scour this land to the bone, that would be an act of Grace, Landa thought, and an act of Compassion.
The Inquisitor rolled over. So damp was his bed, in such disarray, and, to tell the truth, so smelly, it seemed like the nest of some lesser mammal. Landa did not approve of baths—a thing the Indians in their vanity and lechery were so addicted to that, despite fines and lashings, they continued to indulge in. As Landa lay in his own familiar stench, the rain fingered his mind. He sank into a dream as into silt. Dreaming, he saw a woman fucked by a goat right in the public square of Mani, and no one seemed to care. The woman and the goat were going at it eagerly; the woman was holding the goat by its horns, straddling him while he sat like a king on a dazzling throne, his balls like great velvet cushions.
“Does no one care?” Landa shouted to the crowd of Indians and friars who walked hither and thither occupied by banalities. “Am I the only one to see?”
In the most secret of places, a place known only to her, in the deepest of caves far beneath Mani, in a circular room built within a natural declivity of red stones and turtle-egg mortar, Kukum’s widow sits on the floor beside a candle, her husband’s inkpot, and his bundle of uncut pens. Twelve of her people’s most sacred books are here, wrapped in jaguar skin and buried in sand.
She burns incense to her husband’s special gods: Itzamná—the god of writing—and old, old Pawahtún. And she bums incense to the god of corn. For are not books like bread? Do they not nourish our spirits just as corn feeds our bodies?
It comforts her to know the books are near. She has some berries with her; these she eats slowly, one by one, because they are bitter. Then she lies down to die.
Ten
Today my papers were returned to me, among them Gabrielle’s last letter, which I had sorely missed. Here is a piece of it that I neglected to share with you before, gentle reader; I wish to do so now:
…The lessons began. If Olympe dictated with vivacity and eloquence, she was still prey to hyperbole, extravagant flourishes of speech that I, with care, attempted to tame. Her spelling was at best fantastical; she added letters to words she considered important. Or they were capitalized—a fault, you will agree, common to our age. To press a point she’d underline with such male energy she’d tear her paper.
The lessons took place in my rooms above the atelier, rooms recently transformed by some extravagant gifts from the Meanderer. A marvelous carpet of camel wool dyed with indigo and madder ignited the floor like a feu de joie.
One afternoon, Olympe said: “Would you, dear friend, take a dictation? For my head has been swarming with ideas ever since this morning, when I awoke having dreamed of a city unlike any the world has known, and yet it was Paris, Paris after the Revolution, perhaps.
“There were no famished crowds clamoring for bread, no lice-infested corpses lying in the streets. Glittering in the sunlight of full summer and studded with gardens, the city flourished within a ring of meadows—and beyond, a sprawl of Untouched Wildness many times larger than the city itself. These assured every quarter was perfumed by breezes (we underestimate the importance of the nose!). The city air smelled of pine needles, pollen, blossoms, rotting leaves. With the wilderness so near, the public gardens—buzzing with citizens planting rows of lettuce, seeding lupine, and poling beans—were bright with butterflies and birds. Deer grazed the parks, and pheasant roosted under the eaves.
“In times of Calamity—Famine, Plague, and War—the forests assured that a family, a group, or even the entire population could return to a State of Nature. Also, the wilderness, scattered with lakes and ponds, supplied the market year-round with trout and pike and eels.
“Every city square was planted with an orchard. The citizens came together in the fall to harvest hazelnuts, almonds, apples, and, in summer, cherries. Imagine an entire quarter planted with cherries! Every child with cherries dangling from her ears! Imagine the joy of children growing up in ‘the Almond Quarter,’ the pleasures of a city park shaded by one hundred walnut trees.
“At every crossroads, a fountain. The sound of water (we underestimate the importance of the ear!) lulling infants to sleep. A swamp,” she added, dreamily, “at a certain distance, several days’ journey perhaps, but well worth it because of the ibis nesting there.”
“Is there a slaughterhouse in your dream city?” I teased her.
“If there is”—she smiled, indulging me—“its great portal is in the shape of a gaping mouth to remind all those who enter there that they, too, will be eaten in the end.”
But this was not all. Her forest was “scattered with philosophers tending to matters of morality.” In times of crisis, a citizen might wend her way through the trees to a “philosophical tower” and there discuss matters of the mind and heart. These towers were provided with observatories “so that anyone may take a long look at her origins and be inspired, be amazed.
“I imagine the citizens of such a city intellectually and morally autonomous,” she said, “their talents and capacities multiple, as unwilling to be slaves as to see their children enslaved. I imagine such citizens knowledgeable in Law, Medicine, Philosophy, the Sciences, and the Arts, and so assured of their own well-being. I imagine them standing tall as trees.”
“There is one thing to be said for our city as it is,” I said, putting down my pen. Rising, I took the combs from Olympe’s hair one by one. “And it is that women have—and this for several generations, from the spirited marquise de Rambouillet to the exemplary atheist Madame du Deffand—opened their homes for debate. Yet it is extraordinary that after so much talk—of aesthetics, of politics, of ethics and morality—Parisians continue to rail at one another when they are not tearing out one another’s throats! Marat, for one, would have us butcher our enemies and eat the flesh raw!”
“Madame du Deffand would not have invited him to supper twice!”
“If everyone smelled as good as you do,” I said, planting a kiss on the crown of her head, “there would be no enmity among men.”
“I fear that is not so,” she sighed, “for I continue to cause a great deal of enmity.” After a moment’s reflection she added, “I’ve often wondered if Morality is an attribute of Reason. Of course, evil is always buttressed by ‘reasonable’ arguments. Yet, what if True Reason is an attribute of Morality, and True Morality an attribute of Reason?”
“You are imagining a New Morality,” I said. “One that remains to be invented.”
“Exactly.” Her smile was tender. “And this is why I dreamed a philosopher at the ready in each isolated tower, so that a citizen might contemplate Nature throughout the day and at night discuss Her virtues with a friend.”
Olympe’s lessons were punctuated by much laughter, cups of chocolate, and readings from Voltaire:
> We owe the theater to Shakespeare. Puissant and fecund, his genius was also artless and sublime, without an atom of good taste, without the least understanding of the rules.
“It gives me hope!” Olympe exclaimed. “For I, too, have not an atom of good taste; I, too, know nothing of the rules.”
She would always be a fanciful speller. She imagined that spelling was like pastry-making; one added flavors, raisins, and nuts at will. And how delicious beneath the tongue the phrase gold is malleable. “It brings butter melting on apiece of toast to mind!”
We relished words of particular resonance or potency, recalling how when we were children they evoked worlds, mysterious and entire, just as Cook’s ‘Otahiti’ caused us to yearn for his tale, to lean into it as one leans into a fragrant breeze.
“To read,” I told her, “I confused with ‘to reed.’ That is to say, to float in a little boat with my father among the rushes. Now, as I sit beside you and gaze into this open book, I have the mood of that day, its weather and sweetness before me. As the clouds sail past the sun, the water changes color. And now, as you read the title of this book aloud, dear Olympe—”
“To the Austral Pole and Around the World.”
“—my reverie deepens. Boat, sky, and water dissolve and give way to distant times, and places I have never seen but where I would travel gladly, if sometimes with sadness.”
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Portions of this novel were published in Conjunctions.
Copyright © 1999 Rikki Ducornet
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8779-8
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