Again Schuster lost track of his thoughts. Since the boy had come to the monastery he’d been finding it hard to concentrate, had been affected by morbid broodings, woken up by nightmares that kept sleep at bay until the dawn light could be seen over the mountains. He couldn’t even play instruments any more; the joy had gone out of it as that boy began to delve ever deeper into the world of music. He was beset by doubt, but couldn’t understand where it came from or the reason behind it.
“I’m as anxious about him as about these recurrent sieges,” Kippenberg went on. “And you’re right, Schuster. No-one can learn to play the organ so quickly. He must have learned before they put him in the asylum. Where does he come from? That’s what we must find out.”
“Someone seems to have dumped him on the asylum steps,” Schuster said. “At least, so I was told. In the dead of night, during a snowstorm.”
“Poor creature . . .” The abbot lowered his voice. “We have every reason to worry about our novices. Only yesterday another disappeared without so much as leaving a letter of resignation. And you wouldn’t believe the things I’m being told in confession. Even our purest souls are losing their faith. Schuster, are you listening to me?”
He had broken out in a sweat. It was mid-August and the heat was inhuman. Taking a handkerchief out of his girdle pocket, he mopped the nape of his neck. A smell of freshly baked bread was coming from somewhere. The crowd’s murmurings had died down. It was true, he thought, what the abbot had pointed out: the novices were losing their faith, and this too he knew was because of the boy, though he didn’t understand how.
“Forgive me,” he said with a slight bow. “Permit me to withdraw to my room. I’ve neglected both the hours and the Mass. It is time for me to have a private conversation with our Lord.”
On his way to the dormitories Julian Schuster pondered whether there could be a link between the boy’s dumbness and the years he had spent in the asylum; and whether the explanation was to be found in the desperate harmonies he would extort from the organ pipes. It wasn’t unthinkable. Modern-day institutions defied description, and it was from among the Ratibor asylum’s idiots, those considered sane enough to carry out simple tasks, that the monastery was getting its kitchen boys. Schuster had gone there himself that April morning to find a replacement for a halfwit who had died of a stroke while preparing the unleavened bread for Easter.
Never would he forget that scene in one of the madhouse cellars. The boy was shackled like a wild beast to a hook in the wall. Beside him lay a wooden platter with leftovers unfit for the monastery’s pigs. The little bunch of straw he sat on was caked with faeces, its stench so foul it kept off even lice.
Once before, in Venice, he had seen a human monster, among the participants in a procession at Carnival time; and on another occasion, on an island in the Aegean to which the Greeks sent their poor. But never as horrific a creature as this.
“Why do you keep him chained up?” he had asked.
“He frightens the inmates,” the guard answered. But something told Schuster it was the warders who were really afraid.
Releasing him, Schuster asked himself what special plan the Lord could have had for this creation of His. The boy’s body was so deformed he did not at first notice the violent bruises, the gaping wounds, the scars, the putrefied sores where the manacles had dug so deep he could almost see bone. He had clearly been assaulted daily and Schuster breathed an Ave Maria, so upset was he by such brutality.
“What is your name?” he had asked him, in a whisper, there in the darkness. But the boy had merely shaken his head. When Schuster had questioned the management about the boy’s origins, he could only conclude that he had no history. An itinerant coppersmith was said to have found him starving to death on a country road outside Breslau, and sent him to the asylum. Noticing he lacked ear conchae, Schuster had assumed he could not hear at all; but later, when the boy had shown proof of musical talent, had supposed he couldn’t be completely deaf, or at least not from birth. Maybe this shortcoming was indeed an asset? He seemed to hear what others could not.
For almost an hour, as the crowds outside the monastery gates continued to grow, Schuster spoke in private with his God. And when the conversation was at an end, leaving him none the wiser, he remained sitting at his desk, leafing absent-mindedly through the pages of The Golden Legend, a text he’d been absorbed in during the past month, but now laid it aside with a sigh, and went over to the bookshelves.
For a while he stood in front of the volumes trying to pick out some work that could divert his attention from recent events: Ludolf of Saxony’s Vita Christi, Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. But before he could select anything, weariness overcame him again. Sitting down on his bunk he looked around at the simple table, the stool, the crucifix on the wall.
The distant sound of organ music came from the chapel. It was the boy playing. When the bell rang for vespers he hardly noticed it: prime, tierce . . . he didn’t even register which of the hours it was ringing for.
Now he stood at the window of his cell. The crowds had settled on the slope beneath the kitchen building, hoping the boy would show himself. It was mainly young women, but there were also old people and cripples who had come believing the boy, in addition to his alleged second sight, could cure their aches and pains. By the well some children were playing. A cow strayed off to the brook. Some of the peasant families had brought along baskets with food. Enterprising local men were selling beer and pretzels. Over the last month the monastery had become a resort for pilgrims.
These people, Schuster thought, sweat running down the back of his neck, could not grasp the notion of a transcendent God. They demanded miracles if they were to believe. Over the years he himself, contemplating flowers, a river, a tree, had come to know how the soul could merge into and become one with the divine. In South America he had heard God’s voice in the jungle, had glimpsed His plan for creation in termite hills, in a jaguar’s eyes, in the Guaraní Indians’ wonder at musical instruments. But for these people it was utterly impossible to experience God in a tree, or to trace the kingdom of heaven in a watercourse. All they saw in a tree was timber for a shack. In a river, fish for food. In a cornfield only a loaf of bread. To win them over you had to teach them to read and write, or feed them during crop failures. It was through adaptability and practical work that the Society had won souls for the faith.
Suddenly he gave a start so violent he almost lost his balance. Clearer than ever he heard the ghost-voice.
Henriette, it said. Just that one word, Henriette!
To find a link between what was now happening here in the monastery and what he himself had witnessed half a generation ago at the other end of the world, Julian Schuster had of late more and more frequently returned to the years of his youth. The story had begun shortly after his twelfth birthday when he had joined the Order’s brethren as a novice at Jerez in Spain (then under the Bourbon monarchy). And since he’d been thought to be musical he’d been trained as choirmaster and organ builder by Santiago de Castellón, the famous musician-priest, regarded in his own day by the whole known world as master of the organ. During his novitiate, secretly wearying of the monotony of a monastic life, Schuster had applied to do missionary work, and been sent out on an Indiaman to the Spanish dominions overseas. But he hadn’t sailed alone. Also on board was an organ, dismantled but complete with its stops and stop-heads, ivory keyboards and gilded frontal pipes, a gift from Ferdinand IV to help the brethren win over the souls of the last of the Guaraní warriors.
Never would Schuster forget that May evening when, at the height of the monsoon, he had put into Asunción by riverboat and a drunken oarsman, whose Spanish was so mixed up with the Indian lingo that Schuster could hardly understand a word he said, had ferried him over to the quay. The red-hot breeze. The dust that seemed to make the air glow. The stench from the marshes where liberated slaves lived in huts raised on poles. Vultures and dogs fighting over the waste in the open s
ewers. Rats dashing in and out between the carriage wheels as he had made his way up to the Jesuit monastery in the company of Father Sepp. Formerly a member of the royal orchestra in Vienna it was he who, with his four decades of missionary experience, was to teach Schuster the trick of using music as a landing-net when catching souls.
Five nights he had stayed in the town while the organ was being shipped over to a smaller riverboat, resting up from a journey that had lasted almost three months, first wafted on by trade-winds across the Atlantic, then by mule caravans until they’d reached Paraguay, God’s own state in the heart of Spanish America.
The experience was unreal. He had never been homesick during the years of his novitiate, but the longing he felt then for the monastery’s ascetic comforts, for the ritual of the hours, for Santiago de Castellón’s diffident lectures on the organ’s harmonics, had been unbearable. Mosquitoes turned his nights into an inferno of itching and scratching. The daytime heat threatened to drive him out of his mind. The stink of carcasses and human corpses and the winds blowing in putrefaction from the marshes took away his appetite. He saw the town, with its fathomless poverty, its sick dying in gutters, its Spaniards the jungle had turned into savages and the Indians’ drummings and ecstatic cries that filled his sleep with nightmares, as a limbo, an antechamber to hell. And when at last Father Sepp and he had boarded the riverboat that was to take them up the Rio Apa to the primaeval forests of the north-east, he was seized by panic that he would never see the Old World again. Everything, the town, the jungle, the people, all was a premonition of the evil fortunes awaiting him at the end of his life.
Those first days, sitting on deck under a canvas awning, they had still seen villages and human life. Rowing boats lay moored by the bridges. Tame armadilloes were tethered to huts. Naked children were at play in the lagoons and had waved to them. But on the fourth day all humankind had suddenly vanished, and during the rest of their upriver voyage the only signs of life had been the caymans sunning themselves on sandbanks, catching butterflies in their wide-open jaws.
Three weeks it had taken them to reach their destination – a missionary station in the province of Conceptión, west of the crumbling mass of the Maracaju Mountains. The settlement consisted of a few timber shacks with roofs made of banana leaves and a church built of rough palmwood, embraced by jungle on three quarters of the compass. By then Schuster had lost ten kilos in body weight, and the humidity had rotted his linen shirts.
Another priest, Father Leander, met them at the pile bridge. Further up the slope, under a colourful canopy, stood a group of Indians, holding what he at first took to be blowpipes. But as the priest led the way up to the mission house the savages had begun playing a piece popular in Europe a few years before, in four-part harmony. What he had taken for blowpipes were in fact flutes. He couldn’t believe his ears. To hear music here, at Christianity’s last outpost, seemed to go against the grain of nature.
That same day the organ had been unloaded, then the riverboat and its crew of twenty-four Indian oarsmen, paid off in brandy, had continued upstream towards Asunción. Apart from a few iron fittings that had been attacked by rust most of the instrument was in good repair. There, in their huge cases, were the rückpositiv, the wooden manuals, the soundboards, the haupt-, brust- and oberwerk, the pipes, the pedals and two dozen Italian olivewood windchests which in a fortnight would be sending labial tones echoing out over the jungle to frighten the howlers and silence its parrots’ bellicose arrogance.
At that time Schuster was about to turn twenty. But sitting on the crates containing the Florentine bass-pipes in the shade of the dilapidated chapel, where the naked savages were taking their siesta, arrows laid across their chests, and with the jungle inching forward before his eyes like a huge green huntsman, he realised that his life was nothing he could take for granted. Ten miles inland began the area still controlled by the last of the Guaraní warriors. Three generations had gone by since the first Jesuits had begun tempting these savages out of the jungle. The heads of the Guaranís, who loved music, had been turned by the notes coming from spinets, violins and wind instruments. Some were said to have fallen into a trance at the sound of the Spanish trumpets, and certain tribes had taken the missionaries, who mastered all these instruments, whose sonorities no creature of the jungle could emulate, for gods. With music for bait, and by promising to teach the savages to play these instruments of paradise, the brethren had managed to baptise them and had founded hundreds of model villages along the watercourses. Large areas of jungle had been felled and turned into fertile arable land. Each village came to have its own – often exceptional – Indian orchestra. Further along the Paraguay River the clearings had grown into small towns, all presided over by Jesuit missionaries like Fathers Sepp or Leander, courageous men who feared nothing but their own terror during supernatural thunderstorms. The slave-hunters, so-called Mamelukes, had been forbidden to set foot on missionary soil. In this musical land across the ocean, the ideas of Louis Blanc and Karl Marx, which wouldn’t burgeon in Europe for another hundred years, were already in practice. No private ownership existed in the compounds. All property was held in common.
It had been Schuster’s job to build the huge instrument whose harmonies were to convert the last savage souls to the true faith, and he fell to his task with a dedication inspired as much by his fear of the wilderness as by God. During his second week there, aided by a dozen natives who had turned up in canoes from a compound a day’s journey further downstream – and who handled their machetes as skilfully as they did the instruments they had brought on which to play celestial music in the starry nights, or as skilfully as they caught the parrots they kept in cane cages and sold to German merchants – he cleared a four-kilometre pathway through the jungle up to the high plateau. Their mellifluous singing and their way of decorating their faces with colour from red bark to keep the jungle spirits at bay amazed him. But when he asked them about some savage Indians said to be still living in the district, they merely smiled their enigmatic smiles.
At the end of the pathway a glade was cleared. The heavier sections of the organ that could not be carried without risk of dropping them caused a certain amount of trouble, until Father Sepp suggested they be put back into their boxes and rolled along on logs, using ropes and tackle where the slopes were too steep. It took yet another week to get the parts into place and assembled under Schuster’s supervision, the whole beneath a roof of plaited bast matting. By then the Indians had gone quiet, and their silence as they squatted at the forest fringe whisking away mosquitoes with palm leaves was so foreboding it brought him out in goose pimples.
Here, sheltered somewhere behind a wall of verdure, in an area that for centuries had been a blank spot on the Viceroy’s maps, lived the last of the Guaraní warriors. In Asunción Schuster had heard drunken mestizos talking about savages whose magical tricks bent the minds of even the most hardened soldiers, and about others who preserved human flesh in snake poison and grilled missionaries’ hearts over an open fire, spicing them with chilli fruits. Not that he believed them, except during the night when the jungle filled with ominous noises and jaguars’ eyes gleamed out of vegetation, and the weeping of persons drowned long ago could be heard down by the river.
The day the organ was finished the Indians abruptly vanished: something Schuster could never explain. He turned round, and they were gone, seemingly swallowed up by the jungle. Father Sepp had gone back to Asunción to receive a delegation from the Vatican, and Leander was at the missionary station with two women who had gone down with malaria. All he heard was the squawking of parrots, the insects’ symphony, the eerie knocking sound from the jungle that never ceased swelling and contracting. And it was at that moment, faced with the magnificence of Creation, he sat himself down at the organ and began to play – played for hours on end, tramping wind into the windchests, improvising his way up and down the manuals’ aliquots, mixtures, reeds and flue stops; fugues, chorales, a minuet. He tried to im
agine what this strange object might look like to a pair of eyes that from their jungle hideout might never have seen a white man before. Like a strange throne? Or a rumbling monster with a human being on its back, as in the last hours of the Apocalypse? By the time he stopped playing darkness had fallen, and the jungle seemed suddenly emptied of sound.
Schuster fell to his knees and prayed his way through the entire rosary. Then, after committing himself to God’s mercy, after quenching his thirst from a jug of molasses, he had fallen asleep in a hammock strung beween two rubber trees.
When he opened his eyes it was dawn and the howlers were performing their lascivious serenade. He got out of his hammock, before falling to his knees and praying for courage to endure his fear.
At the forest edge, around the organ, a group of naked Guaraní warriors were standing with blowpipes in their hands.
That morning sixty years ago had remained in his mind with a clarity of detail rare in his later memories. Defying his secret homesickness, Schuster had stayed in the jungle for almost fifteen years. Becoming a legend in the Jesuits’ missionary strivings, he founded four thriving compounds, the largest counting three thousand souls. So perfectly had he taught himself the savages’ languages, he’d been appointed editor of the two-volume dictionary put together at the request of the Congregation, in which each word, even from the remotest Indian dialects, had been transcribed and translated into Latin. Only a man of his constitution could have withstood life at this last outpost of Christianity. He survived two cholera epidemics, one bloodthirsty Indian uprising, a severe bout of scurvy, jungle fevers that had lasted for months at a time, four poisonous snake bites and half a year’s enslavement by the Mamelukes after they burned down his last compound and he elected to yield himself up, a captive to the slave-hunters together with the savages he loved as dearly as the children he would never have. When the Brotherhood was gradually forced out of the state to which they’d brought the light, hidden it under a bushel and so painstakingly protected, his grief was all consuming. Power-crazed kings drove them away from their Terra Divina in the depths of the primitive jungle, scotched their attempt to build a new Eden from a fresh shoot of the tree of mankind: create an Adam and Eve of the Indian race.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 7
