The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

by Rikki Ducornet

  I have been told that when Louis was confronted in his palace by the crowd, a butcher’s apprentice coiffed him with the red bonnet of the Revolution and made him drink to the Nation’s health from a bottle of cheap red wine. That day a butcher informed the king that he was lost, as the people filled the palace like cattle and clung to the windows like flies.

  It is dawning! Through the bars high above me I can see that it is snowing. May life be more generous to you, Sade, than it was to our foolish king. And your death more noble than his, more noble than my lost love’s; more noble than mine.

  Ton amie,

  Gabrielle

  Eight

  Several years ago, Gabrielle brought me Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain. These volumes she had procured after much effort from my family—they had once belonged to my uncle and were part of his marvelous library, most of it now destroyed. The friar’s books have been of great service in our joint undertaking, our own brief reverie on the “Things of New Spain.”

  This morning my eyes were less painful—how the body atomizes in confinement!—and I was able to read again. I was struck by a fragment from Book Six—the book devoted to Moral Philosophy. These are the words spoken by an elder to a new ruler:

  “O master, O ruler, O precious person, O valued one, O precious green stone…Pay special attention. Esteem thy self…Do not become as a wild beast, do not completely bare thy teeth, thy claws.”

  As he spoke, the elder wept. Perhaps because he knew how power corrupts. Perhaps the new ruler had already bared his teeth.

  And now, as the day draws to an end, the Revolution, in a convulsion of self-disgust, cuts off the head of one whose teeth and claws have not ceased, these many years, to worry Liberty’s throat with such hunger that even Robespierre feared for his life: I am speaking of the madman Hébert. His execution was impossible to ignore—Hébert bellowed and squealed like a gutted pig—and the crowd (and Restif was there, too, standing far off to the side), who had a week ago applauded him as he leapt over a basket heaped with heads, now roared with laughter to see him so flagrantly unmanned. Even Sanson quickened to their mood and made the blade dance above the naked neck before letting it drop with the sound of thunder and ice.

  Before he was silenced, Hébert screamed louder than anyone—even the comtesse du Barry, whose cries had pierced my heart with grief. (Poor creature! Cut down for having fucked a king!) They tell me all the Hébertistes will loose their heads today; the crowd is the biggest yet, the tower trembles with the people’s roars, and each time the blade comes crashing down I think I shall go mad. I attempt to write, cannot, put down the pen, pace, turn around and around my chamber pot like a Brahmin circumambulating a sacred shrubbery.

  Hébert today, Robespierre tomorrow or the day after. Like Sir Hugonin de Guisay, he will be undone by his own game. Ah—but perhaps you do not know Sir Hugonin’s exemplary story? Here it is then: He was a beast—vigorous, lusty, and of unprecedented temper. He liked to force the peasants in his path to crawl about on all fours, barking. One night, during Carnival, he painted himself with tar and rolled in black fleece to play the dancing bear for the king’s amusement. The disguise was perfect—Sir Hugonin was unrecognizable. A servant approached with a torch and, peering into his face, cried: “Speak, bear! In the name of the king! Tell us who you are!” The fleece and the tar caught fire, and in an instant the dancing bear was transformed into a human torch. Thus will the beast, Robespierre, be undone.

  God’s balls! How they carry on! Once the Revolution has gorged on the citizens of France and returned to her den to sleep for a century or two, what will happen to the triumvirate she whelped: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—that vast heresy! That near impossibility! That acute necessity! Will they, her tiger cubs, continue to quicken the long night of our ignorance? Will their bright eyes illumine the interminable Dark Ages of Man?

  Here is what I wonder on my worst days: If the guillotine exemplifies Nature—perpetual, blind, deadly, inescapable—and if Man is Her servant, and the Revolution too, then there is no hope. Then would I, and gladly, see the universe perish.

  In order to punish me for my rages (and I ask you: What caged animal does not succumb to rage from time to time?), my books, manuscripts, pens, and paper have been taken from me. Without them, I am lost. What is worse, I do not know if they will ever be returned.

  Alone in my tower, disarmed, unmoored by pen and paper, my thoughts come unfixed (ink and fuck have always been the glue that holds my mind together); like the eggs of eels, my thoughts are dispersed by tides over which I have no control. In this state of rootless imagining, my mind seizes upon the most unexpected associations. Drops of fat suspended in my soup become the ocular devices of archons; a baneful spider stalking fleas exemplifies the pubic triangles of embalmed houris; a copple-crown turd warns of the Revolution’s collapse and the dawning of lethal systems of industry. Further, to conjure anxiety I pretend that the lines of my palms are the river systems of dead planets; when that proves tedious, I examine the frayed threads of my sleeves. These suggest astrological signs indicating the day, month, and year of my release. Days pass, and the more I grapple with despair, the more stupefying are the systems I invent. To tell the truth, they are more irritating than entertaining! But then comes the thought that saves me from the perils of this insalubrious necromancy: I will dream a book!

  The Book

  Almost at once I imagine a large book bound in red leather, its gilded title stamped deeply into the cover and spine. I recall how once with Gabrielle I had visited the workshops in the Latin Quarter, where wenches of all ages—and many of them were wonderfully fuckable—folded, stitched, and bound the printed sheets and, if the book was very fine, passed the edges through gold.

  I hand-print the sheets of my book, and so carefully do I reconstruct the process in my mind that I can smell the fresh ink as I lift each sheet from the press, and see the light of my mind’s eye there where the metal letters have pressed into the paper, sensuous indentations like the mark of a finger in damp sand. One by one I set them out to dry, and then, luxuriating, I fold the sheets by hand, feeling the paper bend like a body beneath my hands. When all the pages are thus prepared, I set them in a sewing frame and, as I saw the women do, sew them together with thick, strong thread. When this work is completed—and it takes me an entire day—I hold the book securely in a vise and with a brass hammer round the spine. This hammering I do lovingly, taking an entire morning, the book giving way little by little beneath my ministrations.

  Next I make the cover; the boards of ebony are sheathed with fine leather, the tide and decorations applied with delicate metal tools that I have heated with care beside the fire. Finally the book is glued to its cover, placed in a press, let to dry.

  After a restless night, I open it. The marbled endpapers are green and gold; they evoke the luxuriant forests of the Yucatán. The next few pages—of thick paper, stiff and creamy beneath the touch—are blank. But then comes the frontispiece: a little Maya tiger, her speech in suspension before her face like a materialization of the wind. And I see for the first time that my dreamed book is our book, Gabrielle—the one we are writing together, you and I. It seems the moment has come for me to complete it. And if I cannot take up my notes to study, nor paper and pen, I can, nonetheless, engage a reverie. What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

  Nine

  The Tophet

  The miraculous text had dissolved, blanketing Landa’s chamber in an acute malediction. Two friars were called in to carry the corpse from the room.

  After the fish was buried and blessed, the remains of the scribe Kukum were tossed on a pyre. Soon after, Kukum’s widow was sent away by the soldiers. They told her there was no need for her to return: Her flowers, the fragrant tixzula, had been fed to the Inquisitor’s pigs, and her husband’s body fed to the fire. Looking up at the sky, she sa
w smoke through her tears and knew they were speaking the truth.

  For a time she gazed at the sky and then at the church, which was the color of a sick person’s urine. Inside, the Mother of God—who wore a wheel on her head—was said to weep ceaselessly for the Maya, although the pope had sent word that Landa must find a way to make her stop. Her Son was in there, too, with a wheel on his head—just like the wheels of the carriages that sometimes crushed Indians to death; just like the wheels of the Inquisition, which broke bones and caused people whose common sense she had always respected to say crazy things without foundation in truth. As when Baltasar Puc said he had crucified a boy and a rooster and had with a knife cut out their hearts. With the same knife he had cut a cross into these hearts before offering them to the Old Gods, who were very angry but who refused to die. Everyone knew that the wheel had forced these lies from Baltasar Puc’s throat, and other lies more terrible, besides. Later it was said that the day the body of the scribe Kukum was set aflame, the Mother of God wept pearls of black blood. Kukum’s widow turned away from the friary gate weeping black blood, too.

  From a high window, Melchor looked down and with a wildly beating heart stared at the sorceress who had bewitched him. He imagined her hanging by her breasts—a thing that caused many to repent.

  Earlier that week, a small stash of idols had been found in a cave just outside Mani, and Landa had arrested a large number of Indians who, having been savagely whipped, admitted that more idols—countless numbers, in fact (and, miraculously, their numbers multiplied by the minute)—were hidden away in the mountains. The friars and the constables had scoured the entire territory for days, making hundreds of arrests and flogging everyone they could, pouring burning wax or molten lead into their wounds, lashing them to wheels to be broken, forcing filthy water down their throats until the blood flowed from their ears and they drowned.

  The Indians described fantastic rituals; these confessions justified more arrests. Idols accumulated—some so ancient and weather-worn as to be barely idols at all, others surprisingly fresh-looking, clumsily carved: hideous things too ugly, even, for doorstops. Some were wonderfully beautiful, carved of jade or serpentine, cinnabar clinging to their etched surfaces like old blood. These things were dumped on the cobbles of the friary, at the feet of an exulting Landa.

  One evening, when the friars had found an ancient stone altar carved in the form of a thickly coiled snake and covered from head to tail in feathers, an old woman—one who had survived the plagues, a woman whose face had been so often branded with fire it looked like a page from a book—rushed at the friars and their constables shouting. In an instant, and before anyone had seen it happen, the soldier’s dogs were upon her and she had vanished beneath their paws and faces in a cloud of dust.

  Night after night, after the cries of the tortured had stilled, Landa examined the things he was so eager to destroy. The most curious were very old sculptures of human monstrosities: hunchbacks forced to their knees by the weight of humps rising like hills from their backs, dwarfs barely able to stand on withered legs, idiots grinning with cleft palates, a howling infant metamorphosing into a jaguar, a truly satanic figure with a snout and hooves. But one of these pieces was of particular interest to Landa; carved of copey wood and fragrant with copal, it showed two men embracing. For many long hours he looked at the thing with fascination, recalling Aristotle: To understand a thing is to suffer. Landa suffered because he understood the danger he was in. It took all his strength to keep from caressing the wood with his fingers, from pressing it to his burning cheek. Later, when he would be closely questioned in Spain, he would explain that the idols and other objects he had reduced to rubble had been alive with an irresistible vitality, capable of contaminating the staunchest hearts. To examine them was to come dangerously close to losing the eternal struggle that frets so ceaselessly the human soul.

  As Melchor continued to gaze out his window, the day’s second marvel occurred. As the sky thickened to night, friars, soldiers and constables, and a crowd of people approached the friary with what appeared to be…Yes! A great quantity of books! The blue books of the Maya, books fragrant with incense, books Kukum had guarded with his life; books with pages white with lime; books swarming with glyphs and stars and numbers: the Maya’s sacred library of black mirror days, days of smoke, of vanished moons; days of sun, of ocelots and fish; days of eyes, days of dreams: poetic days, priceless, tragic, baneful days. Red and black, they tumbled and spilled across the cobbles; they glowed like live coals, causing the eyes of those who look upon them to water and burn.

  The next day, and surely to quiet his anger, Landa was given a statue of the Virgin made of a paste of cornstalks and the roots of wild orchids. He complained the thing looked like a satanic pastry, fit for a witches’ sabbath. The Virgin had crossed eyes and a sluttish smile. But the Indian who had made her was known to be devout, and so the Virgin was placed in the chapel—already cluttered with such gifts, including a Christ made of the same dubious materials, a figure Landa feared was meant to convey intense rage against the Church. The Christ’s black lips curled back from teeth shattered by the violence of his agony, and a gnawed and ragged tongue. Worse: The Savior’s back was so violently arched it was clear He wished to tear Himself from the Sacred Cross! What could this mean if not that the Son of God did not wish to submit to God’s Will? But Landa did not chew on this for long; the Tophet was scheduled for the following week, and the friary needed to be made ready. The fountain and corridors were all draped in black cloth; a scaffold had been built—platforms, too; and shirts for the damned cut, dyed, and sewn.

  That week, Melchor was plagued by a recurrent dream: He had been running in terror for a long time and, exhausted, sat down upon the roots of an old tree. He had been running because Mani was on fire, afire so hot that buildings exploded with a sound like thunder and the bodies of people, Spanish and Indian alike, were thrown up into the air. As they were hurled across the sky by the force of the explosion, they grew wings or, like witches, straddled brooms. The fire caused a terrific wind, and all about him the air was filled with domestic animals, crockery, and blankets. Melchor realized with horror that what remained of Mani was now airborne: forks and spoons and pots of beans, boots and stools and frying pans.

  Suddenly he was surrounded by strange figures: dwarfs and sows in dresses, and witches showing their breasts or lifting their skirts to fart black smoke and blue butterflies in his face. And then he saw what all the commotion was about: Kukum’s widow, dressed not in her little white shift embroidered with flowers, but in a gown of scarlet silk and approaching swiftly with a retinue of giant hares.

  Landa’s public burning was preceded by a parade: first, a flock of chanting friars carrying black flags and crosses swathed in black raised above them like standards; then the schoolchildren, their eyes to the ground and singing in voices hesitant and hollow; last of all, a throng of Indians so disfigured by torture their own children could not recognize them. Some wore stiff yellow shirts marked with red crosses; others were dressed in blood-soaked paper. A number had been so badly beaten the tendons and muscles of their backs had ruptured. Shaking, they walked bent in two, their hands, twisted into claws, hanging at their sides.

  Landa, flanked by four judges and his principal lieutenants, stood on a high platform and bowed to the Spanish dignitaries, secular and regular clergy, lesser officials, and individual colonists who had come from as far away as Mérida, Izamal, Valladolid. A crowd of Indians stood apart, held back by soldiers and their dogs, which in their excitement howled and barked ceaselessly, submerging the sobs and cries that filled the air with a palpable throbbing. The faggots were prepared, the prisoners bound, hanged by their hands, and lashed for the last time.

  Landa unfolded a large piece of parchment embellished with the watermark of the Inquisition: the cross, the sword, and the palm branch. In a voice hoarse with ranting, so that he sounded more like a raven than a man, he cried:

  “I, R
everend Father Fray Diego de Landa, First Provincial, Apostolic Inquisitor Against Heresy, Humors, and Emptiness of Mind, Charms, False Opinions, Tittle-Tattle, and Evil Effects; Sorcery in All Its Three Thousand Forms, Vexations, Infections, Befoulment, and Unlucky Things; Subtlety of Nature; Satyrs and Fauns; and by Virtue of His Holiness’s Bulls, and Apostasy in His Majesty’s Dominions of the Province of Yucatán, New Spain; having appointed a fit house for the Audience and prisons and torture chambers of the Holy Office, make it known to all assembled here today, July the eleventh, in the year 1562 of the Incarnation of the Redeemer:

  • That these Indians—nobles, lords, and peasants—beneath the lashes and iron of the Holy Inquisition, have admitted to Witchcraft, evoking a demon named “Angel of Light”

  • Have offered prayers to skulls and idols smeared with the blood of their bodies

  • Have taken itinerant sorcerers into their homes and fed them and also kept hidden for them their bundles of necromantic tools

  • Have ridden on horseback or on occasion worn forbidden things such as gold, silver, silk, coral, and pearls

  • That they have manufactured and sold in the market of Mani obscene snuffboxes, indecent crosses, and the like

  • Have painted their bodies with the stripes of tigers and, drawing blood from their ears, cursed God

  • Have crucified small children, cut out their hearts, roasted them, and fed them to their idols—crimes so terrible they were acknowledged only after the most rigorous investigation

  • Finally: They have hidden their blasphemous books and lied about them and continue to revere them and hold them precious above all things

  The prisoners, little more than meat, were bound and heaved into the fire, now raging. So great was the Tophet it eclipsed the sun and for a time became the lamp of the universe. Landa, too, outshone the sun. Beneath him, the last of his enemies, the last Lords of Mani, the last heretics, librarians, and sorcerers, writhed and wormed their way into Hell.