The Fan-Maker's Inquisition (6 page)
Read The Fan-Maker's Inquisition Online
Authors: Rikki Ducornet
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #Literary Fiction, #The Fan-Maker's Inquisition
—[Once the room has quieted, she continues:]
As he walks, fruit falls into the dust of the street with a wet, sexual sound
. The city of Mani is like a harlot in the first bloom of youth,
Landa thinks
, seemingly pure but harboring pestilence.
The city is like a metal mirror reflecting the blurred image of a hag who, cleverly painted, taking her distance and squinting, imagines herself fresh as a maiden. The city is like an appetizing meal, delicious and poisoned. It is a prayer to Jesus uttered by a Jew when beneath the blows of the Inquisitor’s hammer he begs for his life. The city is like a lagoon reflecting stars yet harboring a venomous serpent; it is like a dream in which the dreamer is seduced and cleaves to the beautiful body that appears to be natural and delightful to all the senses but that, upon awakening, is revealed to be an illusion, the handiwork of Satan, and so the dreamer himself is revealed to be Satan’s thing! Mani! Even the name causes dismay! For it is the name of that most seductive of all heretics, the eloquent Babylonian who claimed that the Living Paraclete had spoken to him, saying that Adam’s eyes were opened by the taste of the fruit Eve fed him, not closed. As if to taunt him, more fruit falls from the trees, splattering his sandaled feet with scarlet juice
.
In Spain, the Devil’s work was often carried out in concealment—in the dark woods at night, in attic chambers, in bell towers illumed by the stars, in barns while cattle slept, in cellars and graveyards. Here in the Yucatán, the Devil’s work is in evidence: brilliant, concentrated, and amassed. The people are not like dogs at all, but well formed and comely, perfumed, their eyes like fire; the markets overspill with gleaming and curious things tempting greed and imagination. The temples, so wonderfully executed, but brimming with their idols of wood and clay, spread out over the land like a pox. Even their music unsettles his spirit, evoking lassitude and sadness, a crippling regret. Shameful to say, the little girls, dressed only in a shell and incomparably charming, cause him to falter. It seems to him that everything in the Yucatán shifts shape and meaning. Nothing is fixed. Not his own moods, nor his own understanding. The sky, too, is mutable, unlike the sky of Spain. Burning hot, the stillness of the afternoon is shattered by thunder, and the heavens, splitting apart, inundate the land with a driving rain and even hail the size of fists—spectacular storms such as those conjured by witches and described by Saint Isidore. Once, without warning, the wind lifted his robes, and six little boys were dismayed by the amount of hair that grew in places no one was intended to see. Once he was picked up by the wind and held briefly airborne. Often the wind would carry pollen from the forests in such quantities it littered the streets for weeks on end, causing him to weep. Fruit like genitals and tongues tumbled onto the roof making it impossible to sleep. In broad daylight, spiders crossed the road like furry hands, and large snakes were often found cooling off in the basins of holy water
.
Sometimes, when he saw a bell rope hanging, Landa imagined himself dangling at the end. But then he recalled the nefarious influences under which the imagination—that most dangerous of human faculties—fell sway. Unchecked, it is the imagination that causes the most havoc, he would remind himself. And so he chased this image from his mind. Just as a man walking across a narrow bridge may fall into deep water and drown because of the fear the water inspires in his heart, so might he become glamorized by the idea of his own death
.
“I must never forget that I have been sent to the New World to battle Satan and destroy the lost tribes of Israel,” he scolds himself aloud. “I must be as strong as Cortés when he destroyed Tenochitlan, which was the most beautiful city in the universe.”
—Everything you have said thus far is an offense to the Truth, exotic and extravagant. Had there been cities in the New World, the Comité would know about them.
—Cortés’s words were: “a city so remarkable as not to be believed.” If he could not believe his eyes, citizen, why should you believe your ears?
—And you. “When you learned of Sade’s brutality, did you believe your ears?
—“Exaggerations,” Sade assured me, the inventions of his rival, Restif de la Bretonne, “who like a dog leaves his stench and his signature—which are one and the same—all over Paris,” and the lies of his mother-in-law, “a hag who likes nothing better than to chew on soiled linen.” Inspector Marais was already on his tail, too; of him Sade said: “Every outlandish thing I do, I do to flabbergast Marais!”
Sade, I knew, was turbulent, but then many like him frequented the
atelier;
such “turbulence” was not unique. It is well known that the great Abbé Prévost himself indulged in the intoxications of youth, as did the sublime Villon, the exemplary Rabelais. La Fentine and I were always eager to forgive Sade his escapades when they were stylish, and to avert our gaze when they were not. It is in my nature to forgive human folly, especially when orchestrated by the passions. Even after the world collapsed beneath his feet and Sade was accused of the crimes that sent him to the Bastille, I stood by him, convinced he had been undone by calumny. Stood fast, that is, until he sent me chapters from a book, the violence of which was, to my way of thinking, inexcusable. When I wrote him a letter of complaint, he replied that he was “merely exercising his capacity to reason.” I answered that the outrages he described so exhaustively could not be justified.
“The age belongs to the Encyclopedia,” he countered. “It is time that outrageousness was, as is all else, examined with a cool and enlightened eye.”
“You would write of pleasure,” was my answer, “and instead you propose a grocer’s list of cruelty. You would write of exhilaration, yet your book is as tedious as the inventory of a scullery.”
Sade was furious. I did not hear from him again, nor he from me. Years passed, and I often thought of him in prison, humbled and tormented by loneliness. I recalled how in our enchanted circle of scholars,
illuminés
, exquisites, gentle madmen,
drôlesses
, wits, and mystifiers, he had always been irreproachable. I decided to pay him a visit. How diminished were his circumstances! His good humor had fled, replaced by bitterness. To make matters worse, for the duration of the visit, the one he called “the Scrutinizer” sat in a corner searching his clothes for fleas—several of which gravitated to my person.
Sade was obsessed with the injustice of his case. For near an hour he reviewed the notorious criminals of the past who had been allowed to go free. As he spoke, I was moved to pity. And I thought: A book can be a shelter. For the one in prison, a book can be all that has been lost. I wondered: But what happens when the loss is felt so intensely it turns sour, becomes stubborn rage? Then, I supposed, a book may be called a machine of war.
“My cannon,” Sade agreed. “I like to force words into collision, to use them the way an executioner uses his bloody gears and blades.” With energy he added: “Writing is my way of defying God. Of spitting every conceivable ‘Thou shalt not’ into God’s face.” Later, alone, I reviewed this conversation in my mind. And because I was exhausted, I fell asleep at my worktable and dreamed. When I awoke, a phrase in my dream persisted in my mind:
How can a person learn vigilance in order to seize the tiger before she herself is seized, if she does not know how the tiger hunts?
—You have a tendency, citizen, to speak in riddles.
—Let me explain. Sade had dared take the imagination’s darkest path. I thought that if I could follow that path with my own mind, I would come to understand the forces that rage about us, the terror that, even in times of peace, is always a possibility. I knew that in order to read Sade, I would have to embark on a voyage, naked and alone, without the comfort of received ideas. That in order to have a knowledge of the storm, I would have to sail into its eye. And that to do this, I would have to learn a new way of reading. And so, the next time I visited him, I asked to see the book in its entirety. In the nights that followed, I read every word. Night after night it seemed to me that I had been dragged to a nameless place in a nameless hour from which I could not help but come away profoundly changed. Sade’s terrible book was like the key that opens Bluebeard’s closet, affording a glimpse of the truth. Recall, citizen, that if what Bluebeard’s bride sees terrifies her, it also frees and saves her.
Now many years have passed, and I have read all Sade’s books, even those he himself says are unreadable. Even those he insists he has not written! They say he is evil incarnate and that his books are a plague, but I have survived the torment, the tedium, and the exhilaration of the reading that, to tell the truth, gives me the courage to live unfettered a vivid and moral life.
A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.
—Are you a Christian?
—I’ve had since infancy an allergy to nuns and priests. One Easter, as my father stood beside his little bookstall in the street, he was cut down for neglecting to remove his hat when a religious procession passed. I knew then that the disgust I had always felt was a gift of temperament. My favorite word since the time of Father’s death is
insubordination
.
—And your mother?
—She went mad with grief and was taken to the Salpêtrière. There she perished. And now, whenever I see an execution, I say: “There’s an ecclesiastical mind at work!”
—A criminal exaggeration!
—When the Inquisition pulled the teeth from the mouth of a witch in preparation for greater torture, it evoked the same Supreme Being Robespierre now embraces to justify his cowardice. Is it not a demonstration of perversity that a revolution fought in the name of Reason punishes those who rely on Common Sense? Or who imagine things differently?
—[Enraged and waving the manuscript in the air:] This is no mere exercise in imagining! It is an act of war!
—You flatter me, citizen! So it was said of the Encyclopedia! However, you forget that unlike blood, ink has no stench.
—[Hitting the manuscript with his open hand:] Some ink has a powerful stench, and here is the proof!
—[From the assembled public, a shout:]
A stench is subject to no one but God and Justice!
[Then:]
Let us hear what she has written!
[This is followed by a clamor of voices:]
Let us hear it!
—Well, then; take up your weapon,
madame
. [The manuscript is handed to her.]
—[The fan-maker opens it at random and begins to read:]
Smoke rises from the square, where bodies have been burning since early morning. Some idolaters had first been condemned to the stake, others had their throats torn out by dogs, and others were hanged. One, a great lord, had been drawn and quartered
.
—[To the Comité and, with a broad gesture encompassing the room, the public:] I ask you if it does not already stink!
—[The citizens shout:]
We are all laborers, after all! We’re used to bad smells!
I stink, therefore I am!
Oh, what fine times, this age of smells!
Let the citizen continue!
—[The fan-maker resumes:]
In the dark room, a room as still as a tomb, Bishop Landa’s white paper fan shudders like a crazed and failing bird. Landa is propped up in his bed on a number of pillows, his shutters closed against the heat of the day—but not the reek of hair and flesh and bone that insinuates itself into everything, and this despite the incense consuming in each corner of the room
.
But for his hand that agitates the fan, Landa lies very still, so overwhelmed with heat he can barely breathe. All around him, devils rage, for he is hunting them down and routing them out. Yet they are inextinguishable, as unstoppable as fruitflies
.
“Sancta Maria, adjuva!”
Landa whispers from time to time as Lilith’s eighteen names, put to paper and hanging from the ceiling, float in the quiet of the evening air
.
The truth is this: The New World shimmers and bristles with demons. One oversees the beekeepers, another the bees, another the ballplayers, another the moon. There are the demons of travelers, the demons of tricksters, of merchants and government officials. Astrologers are protected by demons, as are fools, go-betweens, and thieves. Demons oversee garden parties, funerals, weddings, and copulation. The more the bishop drums them out, the more there are: demons of Excessive Anger and Excessive Love, demons of Sour Temper, Hair Loss, and Envy. Stupidity has a demon, as do Cupidity and Revenge. The penis is ruled by a demon, as are the vagina, the anus, and the eye. Some demons wear their noses like branches of coral, some blow smoke out of their skulls, some carry their heads in their hands, and some smoke cigars
.
The battle, which is interminable, has exhausted Landa, but the great black bed, like a bark moored in shadow, keeps him safe: Sewn to each corner of the mattress are little paper packages marked with three crosses; each contains exorcised salt, olives, frankincense and myrrh, blessed wax and bitter rue. The bed, unlike the one he had been given when he first arrived, is of solid mahogany—nothing is concealed anywhere within. The other bed, the first bed, the one that might have killed him, was laced with
maleficum.
He had spent his first night in Mani with his balls in a vise, unable to swallow or sleep. In the morning, when the First Provincial had the bed hacked to pieces, special devices the size of thumbs had tumbled out: coarse figures of terra-cotta—although he was certain some were made of human semen voided
contra naturum
and dung. One of these was the figure of a man bound and kneeling, the flesh of his face cut away, and another, larger, the size of a child’s fist, showed a man overcome by a jaguar, his skull shattering within the creature’s jaws. It was essential—in fact the entire project depended upon it—that the Eucharist and chrism be kept safely locked away at all times else these figurines be baptized by the witches—a thing that under torture they willingly admitted to—and, like the mares of Portugal, be impregnated by the wind. Yet, even now as he attempts to sleep, he knows that somewhere and in secrecy, women bring black hens to sooty altars. Boys—one to each corner—squat beneath, croaking like frogs. This croaking recalls the names of their gods, the demons Chak, Ek Chuah, Ix Chel, Itzamná. Above all, Itzamná—Lizard House—he who invented writing. He is their favorite, and when Landa has their hellish books stacked together with kindling and set on fire, the pagans shriek as though their bodies are being torn with hot pincers
.
Sometimes, under the impulse of air, a book will open like a fan, and for an instant the fire is animated by imps; they swarm in the pyre as ants swarm over a corpse. Black and red, their books are so beautiful that did he not know better he would wish to keep them, to hoard them like jewels—so brightly do they shine. In truth he is awed by their splendor, their “glamour.”
Landa knows he is causing the collapse of a world. He is burning the past, present, and future time. The people of the Yucatán will no longer know the names of their ancestors, or how to make wine out of honey and the bark of trees, to read the potencies of flowers and smoke, to pave roads and find water, to locate the places where medicinal plants grow, to tell an auspicious from an evil hour, to cure a body in pain. It is here, in Mani, that the New World will be purged of its demons. Mani means “the end,” and truly God has decided it is to be the place of endings. For verily Yahweh is the God of Endings, and Death is a Power. Is it not so?