In his briefing on Santo Stefano, Ben recalled, the only mention of Jerome had been a passing reference to the fact that Bambas-Quincy had a son and two daughters, and that the son, like the son of any self-respecting Santo Stefano magnate, had been educated in the United States. Yet there might be more to it than that. Jerome might be a valuable piece in the game that was going to be played. The game had hardly started, it was too early yet to judge the value of each piece, much less the position it would take, but a smart player must make his calculations from the outset. And if I’m not a smart player, Ben asked himself, why the hell was I picked to handle this deal in the first place? Offhand, it would not seem to be a question worth considering. It annoyed Ben that it kept rising to his mind the way it did.
He put the question aside when Victor Bambas-Quincy held out a hand, palm up, as if the scene before them were being weighed in that palm for his inspection.
“The Plaza de Hermanos,” said Bambas-Quincy. “And the statue there in the center of it is, of course, Fernando Hermanos who first took possession of Santo Stefano.”
“Not that he had much trouble doing it,” remarked Jerome. “He didn’t have any man-eating Incas to contend with here, Mr. Smith. All he had was our poor rabbity Axoyacs.”
Bambas-Quincy raised his eyebrows at his son. “Nonetheless, in the year 1541 Hermanos sailed with only a dozen other men across two hundred miles of the Pacific to this island, and their boat itself was no more than a rowboat. And he was prepared to meet a great deal worse than Axoyacs, if need be. It is unjust to disparage a hero because the enemy he meets proves to be more rabbit than man. Rather disparage the enemy, I say. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Smith?”
“I do,” said Ben. “But why did he sail here in the first place? Wouldn’t he have been better off on the mainland where all the gold was?”
Jerome smiled wickedly. “Hardly. He was one of Pizarro’s closest friends, and when Pizarro was assassinated Hermanos and some other loyalists had to take it on the lam. Since the roads were blocked they took to the water, and that’s how they happened to wind up here. And despite what my father says, Mr. Smith, I’m not disparaging anybody. I cheerfully admit that thirteen against five thousand make long odds, even if the five thousand are rabbits.”
“They made brave men in those days,” said Bambas-Quincy heavily. “They feared nothing but God. Pizarro himself was undoubtedly the bravest. When he lay bleeding out his life in the dust he found strength to trace a cross in his own blood on the ground and kiss it. That is the act of a man both brave and devout. Hermanos and his followers were of the same breed. They could not have long survived here otherwise.”
Ben looked at the statue and considered the picture of Fernando Hermanos and his gallant cutthroats making their stand on this pile of rock and forest and swamp. Thirteen against five thousand, building their homes here, hacking out estates, enslaving the Indians and teaching them the virtues of the cross and the lash. Importing wives from the mainland, from Spain itself, and breeding prolifically. Now the Plaza de Hermanos was their memorial, and in the syrupy sunlight around it, in the thick, damp golden haze that flooded it, sullen Indian women in dingy cotton dresses, barefoot, the tall, round Axoyac hats set squarely on their heads, peddled bricks of ice cream from small carts; and ragged, scrawny Indian shoeshine boys, at least one boy for every pair of shoes in the city, called their wares in shrill desperation to passers-by; and the passers-by, soldiers in dress uniform and side arms, handsome girls in skirts two inches longer than the mainland styles, clerks, storekeepers, government workers, all went their way serenely, while the statue towered over them as a perpetual reminder of who they were and who the Indians were and why this was ordained.
And that, Ben reflected, is the kind of sticky sentiment that the naïve North American falls into when he finds himself in a place like this, and what he must guard against. We have Indians starving on reservations back home, he told himself. Who am I to start drawing fine moral conclusions here?
He had a job to do for Seaways Industries and that was all. He was a junior executive with his future in the balance, and he had no intention of weighting that balance against himself. The besetting weakness in him had always been that habit of inwardly reacting with too much fervor, too much exercise of the intellect, to whatever he saw or heard, of making a philosophical cud of it and chewing over it endlessly. That was something to be restrained. It could be done, he assured himself. Just play the eternal tourist with the camera slung around his neck. See everything as picturesque. That was the word—picturesque.
“Picturesque,” said Ben, and smiled at the company around him. It was the right word. They were pleased by it. They smiled back at him. “Very picturesque.”
“And very warm,” said Adams, patting his brow with a handkerchief. From the look of him, Ben judged that he was suffering more from acute boredom than heat. “We sometimes have spells like this in December, but this seems worse than usual. I hope you don’t mind this kind of weather. I’d say we’re in for a stretch of it.”
“Well, considering that I left New York in the middle of a snowstorm,” Ben said, “I have no complaints. This is much more to my taste.”
“Better than a white Christmas, hey?” said Bambas-Quincy jovially. “True enough, there is no snow here at any time, but you must understand that this weather now is not truly seasonal. It’s brought by the current, you see. El Niño.”
“The what?”
“El Niño. That is the current of the ocean we call The Child, because it often comes near Christmas. In reality we are in the middle of the Peru Current, which is very cold, so that the heat is never unendurable here even at its worst. But then suddenly the current turns around, and we have El Niño bringing us very warm water from the equator.”
“It ought to make much better swimming,” said Ben.
“For everything but fish,” said Bambas-Quincy dryly. “Well, that’s business, and there’s no need to talk about business yet. Plenty of time for that, Mr. Smith. First you must see the more entertaining side of our little island.” He gestured with a courtly sweep of the hand at the museum and led the way through the great door of the building.
The museum was a huge circular vault, poorly lit, so that it took the eye a few moments to penetrate the gloom, and with a musty smell permeating it. On the floor in neat rows were display cases, and here and there among them rose the ghostly white shapes of classical statuary. Around the walls were mounted tapestries, pennons, suits of armor, and weapons—a handsome display, Ben thought, for a country which never in its history had engaged in battle, and among them he detected ornately framed pictures, large and small, the pictures evidently the least important part of the museum’s possessions.
The curator must have been warned of their coming. He appeared at the far end of the aisle where they stood and trotted toward them, his arms held wide in greeting, the clatter of his footsteps echoing from wall to wall. A small, fussy man, he hailed Bambas-Quincy like a long-lost brother, was affectionate to Jerome, polite to Adams, and overlooked Blas Something-or-other entirely. To Ben he was profusely cordial, pleased at his safe arrival in Santo Stefano, grateful that this distinguished visitor from North America should be interested in visiting this humble storehouse of the arts. It was flowery, but, thought Ben, it had the ring of sincerity to it. From the look of things the museum had few visitors. Its curator was probably grateful for the sight of any stranger entering his domain.
“These,” said the curator, nodding at the display cases, “are mostly pre-Columbian. Are you interested in pre-Columbian art, Mr. Smith?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”
“And no great loss,” said Bambas-Quincy. “To dignify crude pottery and ugly metalwork with the name of art is a joke.”
The curator was playfully reproving. “And I always tell you, Victor, it’s a matter of taste. There are experts who say that these Axoyac figures are masterpieces. Why challenge experts on
their own ground?”
“Theirs, mine, it doesn’t matter whose,” said Bambas-Quincy. He held up one hand in a fist and poked two fingers of the other hand into it. “I take a lump of wet clay and make eyes in it like this. Have I created art?”
“Maybe you have,” said Jerome, straight-faced. “You ought to try it some time, Papa.”
Bambas-Quincy threw back his head and laughed. “By God, I will,” he said. “I’ll work at it a whole day and turn out a thousand masterpieces. Better than that.” He wagged a finger at Blas. “I’ll have Blas do it. We’ll give him a place in the office to do it, so he can be a great artist instead of a hopelessly bad bookkeeper. What do you think of that, Blas?”
Blas smiled weakly. “It would be easier than bookkeeping,” he said, and the curator, seeing he had lost the unequal battle, sighed.
“Perhaps some of our paintings would interest you,” he said to Ben, almost pathetically hopeful. “Unfortunately for us, the really great masterpieces here are owned by the cathedral, especially two Zurbaráns, a St. Joseph and an Emmaus. Have you visited the cathedral yet?”
“No.”
“When you do you will see them. They are magnificent. Of course, we have nothing to equal them—”
“We should for all the money my father spent on these things,” said Bambas-Quincy.
“Yes,” said the curator warily, “we should. However, we do have some very skillful work here. Let us look at it.”
The procession moved along the walls with the curator leading the way. Close up, Ben saw that not only were the pictures badly lit, but that they were made almost indistinguishable by the darkness of age and the sheen of varnish that coated them with a mirrorlike film. And the gilt frames around them were so ornate and heavy that they dwarfed even the largest canvases.
At the base of each frame was a brass plate identifying the painting and the artist, and peering closely at the plates Ben recognized some familiar names—Corot, Meissonier, Gérôme, Zuloaga. Aside from these, the bulk of the paintings seemed to have been done by totally unfamiliar British artists, all of whom proudly bore the initials R. A. after their names as the imprimatur of their invisible talents. Skills yes, Ben thought, but talents no, and now he could appreciate the subtle phrasing of the curator in regard to his trove. Very skillful work, he had said, and that in the presence of Bambas-Quincy was a masterpiece of diplomacy.
The display did not take long to view. When they halted at the end of the circuit, the curator said, “You must know, Mr. Smith, that we are indebted for these pictures to the family Bambas-Quincy itself. The mother and father of my good friend here made the European tour at the turn of the century and bought these works as a contribution to our then new and improverished museum. That may explain to you certain features of the collection, such as—”
“No nudes,” said Jerome. “Grandmother didn’t believe in nudes. Still doesn’t, in fact.”
“Is there any reason she should?” his father asked.
“That was not my point,” the curator interposed hastily. “I merely wished to make clear the reason for the academic note which is so pronounced in the collection. In the stress on—ah—craftsmanship. Other times, other ways. That is all I was trying to explain.”
“Or other times, better ways, hey?” said Bambas-Quincy. “What do you think of all this, Mr. Smith?”
Ben had been prepared for the question. “Very interesting,” he said, and when he saw the curator regarding him with a little smile of understanding he could not resist adding, “You don’t see many pictures like this in New York.”
Bambas-Quincy nudged the curator triumphantly. “Did you hear that? Not even in New York, my friend.”
“Oh, Papa, for God’s sake,” said Jerome. “You don’t see them there because the museums keep them in cellars. They hide them. Nobody wants to see them.”
“Well, I want to see them,” retorted Bambas-Quincy. “I’m old-fashioned, I’m narrow-minded, I’m bigoted, so it pleases me to see things of authentic beauty. If I want to see ugliness and incompetence I can walk down any street and have it pushed into my face. Or I can look at this Indian stupidity here. Or even at those monstrosities you have hanging in your own room!”
“Picasso,” said Jerome pityingly. “The greatest painter Spain has ever produced.”
“Then he should know better. At least the Indians can plead ignorance as an excuse.”
“Please,” the curator said nervously. “After all, it’s a matter of tastes, Victor. One likes one thing, one likes another—why must it be a matter of right and wrong? Each to his own taste, that’s the way it goes.”
“And I don’t know if Mr. Smith is interested in this discussion to start with,” remarked Adams. “We were here for a different reason, weren’t we?”
“True,” said Bambas-Quincy, “true,” and Ben had to admire the way temper could be so smoothly controlled, the sun so deftly drawn from behind lowering clouds. “Our visitor here,” Bambas-Quincy told the curator, “found himself wondering about what seems to be our national obsession with hangings. He tells me that the stewardess on the plane from Lima asked him if he intended to be present at the hangings. And the hotel clerk asked him the same intriguing question. What made it even more mysterious—” and Ben saw that everyone around him was enjoying a private joke—“was the fact, as I explained to him, that we do not have capital punishment in Santo Stefano. Then what about the hangings, hey, Mr. Smith?”
“Some kind of display here?” said Ben, looking around. He didn’t relish being made the butt of the joke, but if that’s what was needed to help wrap up the future in a golden package he’d be the best-natured butt they ever saw. “Something I’m looking at but can’t see?”
“Not bad,” said Bambas-Quincy.
“Our national monument,” said Adams.
“Our national disgrace, if you believe Father Bibieni,” Jerome commented. He was in the same good humor as his father now.
“Either way,” said the curator, “a great work of art.”
It was a statue at the far end of the museum, a long walk from where they were. It stood half hidden in a deep alcove, a chain looped through the posts around it to bar anyone’s coming within arm’s reach. And nearby sat a man in a rumpled uniform. He sat watching sleepy-eyed as they approached, his arms folded on his chest. He nodded at them but did not move from the chair, a pudgy Cerberus.
“A great work of art,” the curator said in whispered admiration. He looked at Ben. “Can you view it that way or do you find it too shocking?”
It was a fair question. It was not one to be answered offhand. The statue was of a naked figure, a small, wiry male figure, in the process of strangulation. The body rested on the points of its toes, it arched backward in rigid agony, every muscle showing taut beneath the skin, and, shocking enough at first glance, the penis protruded in full erection like an angry serpent ready to strike. The arms of the man were flung wide, and in one hand was clenched a thin-bladed knife.
But all of this, Ben saw, was nothing compared to the sight of that carved head. Above the braided noose which constricted the throat, the Indian face was a mask of horror and ecstasy. The horror was in the eyes which started from their sockets, the swollen tongue which thrust between the writhing lips, but the ecstasy was there, too. It could not be traced in any line, it could not be defined or explained, but it was there.
And all of this was highlighted, made literal, by the way the statue had been painted. It was the multicolored image of death by strangulation. The trunk was gray, the face and extremities livid, the bulging eyes, white and glistening, turned up in the head so that only the whiteness of them showed.
If art was supposed to be this literal, this agonizing, Ben thought, then this must be great art. But why was it necessary to grade these things? For himself, what he felt was a terrible identification with this carved and painted object. He could feel that rope constricting around his own throat, could feel his muscles tightening, r
esisting it. Was that what he was supposed to feel in the presence of this image?
He put this to the curator, and the man shrugged. “Who knows what response a true artist intends to draw from the viewer? And, of a certainty, Domingo Quetzan who did this was a true artist. He was one of our own, an Axoyac. In the year 1800 he was sent by our bishop to Brazil to work with Aleijadhino and be a student of his. Do you know about Aleijadhino?”
“No.”
“Well, he was a great sculptor and did much work for the church. Our bishop’s intentions were that Domingo would learn how to do such holy figures and then help decorate the cathedral that was being built here. Unfortunately, Domingo had other visions. The story goes that he lasted only a little while with Aleijadhino and then drank himself to death not long afterward in Brazil. He never returned here but sent this statue to the bishop as a gift. It must have been a highly embarrassing gift, too, because it was hidden away for a century until my father discovered it and placed it here when the museum was founded.”
Adams cocked his head at the sleepy-eyed man in the chair nearby. “You can see it’s still an embarrassment,” he commented wryly to Ben. “This thing has to be guarded day and night because of the way the Axoyac women feel about it. They like to slip in when no one is looking and rape themselves on it.”
“Only the childless women,” amended the curator. “They believe that the phallus of this image has a magic power to help them conceive. It’s not an unusual superstition. Many peoples have believed that the sperm of a strangling man had a great potency.”
The Panama Portrait Page 3
