Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  You have always had an appetite for salacious stories, brother, so here is one: a man at the presidio violated an Indian girl who worked in his home, a child of only eleven, and his wife, discovering them, made the matter public. But her husband is a powerful man, so when he asked the mission priests to help him regain his honor, they did, even though they usually complain about the soldiers’ licentious behavior. Fray Noriega, who is as ugly a man as I have ever seen, denounced the wife from the pulpit, and then she was taken bound from her home and held at the mission until she took back her accusations and returned home. I saw them, husband and wife, at a reception for our visitors, and they looked happy enough, but I could barely contain myself, for whose honor had been restored? On our way home that night I asked Fray Noriega what had happened to the Indian girl and he said, What Indian girl? The eleven-year-old Indian girl, I said, the one who was violated. There was no proof of that allegation, he said, and then he laughed and said that eleven-year-olds were quite capable of lasciviousness. All night long I lay sleepless on my pallet, plagued by foul, unbidden images of the man and his wife and the Indian girl. By morning I was sure they had placed me in the same cell that the woman had occupied. I could hear Fray Noriega exhorting her to forget her claim and threatening her with whipping if she did not, and I could smell the woman and her discharges of anger and hopelessness. I can smell it still though I have several times washed down the walls and floor.

  When the visitors came to the mission, I began to see through their eyes our shabby mud church and dwellings, the gardens that are pretty but too small to feed our community, the squalid Indian huts, the neophytes in stocks for missing Mass, the children running around naked, most of them coughing infectiously, and the adults shuffling with expressionless faces to their tasks, and I felt weighed down with terrible shame.

  One of the visitors saw how the women struggled to grind their corn, and he brought us a millstone to ease their work. He and the gardener whose name and face I can no longer recall asked Fray Noriega and me to help show the women how it worked. Remarkable, how quickly it reduced a basket of corn to usable meal! The women, who at first seemed resentful of our intrusion, began to smile and laugh. But Fray Noriega grew quieter and quieter, and some days later, after the visitors had sailed away, he bade me join him after Mass. We set off in a cart with two neophyte men from the mission and rode in silence till we stopped in gathering darkness at the top of a hill that pitched steeply away from us into the ocean. There the neophytes unloaded something from the back of the cart, and I saw it was the millstone. Fray Noriega made the two Indians roll the stone to the cliff edge, then bade me stand by it.

  Fray Solá, he said, do you remember what our Lord said of the man who brings offense to these little ones who believe in Him? He pointed to the two neophytes when he said “little ones.” I did indeed remember, but before I could reply, he said, quoting the Gospels, It were better for that man if a millstone were hung about his neck and he were cast into the depths of the sea. And then he fixed his gaze on me, and I cried, Oh, Father, how have I brought offense? but he would not answer. I had been afraid till then, but now I saw that he meant for me to die, and here at last was the cause of all my fear, and a strange calm came over me. I knelt to the ground and embraced the stone and prepared to fling it and myself over the edge, when Fray Noriega leaned over and said in my ear, Just the stone, Fray Solá. You are still needed here, whereas the stone will encourage indolence among the women. You must cast all your earthly attachments over with the stone. So I rolled the millstone, the visitors’ gift, into the darkness yawning at my feet, and I could neither see nor hear it when it landed.

  And now I must conclude, brother, for I am nearly late in meeting Fray Noriega. He has told me to meet him behind the granary with a length of chain. The granary is where we take the women to be punished, away from the others, where their men will not see or hear their cries. Fray Oramas told me this morning that the soldiers have brought back a neophyte woman who ran away. No doubt Fray Noriega means to punish her. Perhaps he means for me to punish her. Perhaps I will be the Lord this time, driving Eve out of the garden she has failed to appreciate. Or perhaps I will be the angel with the flaming sword, barring the way to the tree of life.

  EIGHT

  A MONOGRAPH ON PARASITES

  Macao, January 1787

  They did not even get his name right when they came to apprehend him.

  “Monsieur de Lamanon?”

  “It’s Lamartinière.” Oh, how many times had he corrected them in the last year and a half? Even Captain de Langle had done it a few times. Lamartinière looked around the paneled meeting room in exasperation, looking for a sympathetic face, but found none. They had all just met him, after all, a few junior traders and the staff of the French consulate, compelled by their superiors to attend a visiting scientist’s lunchtime presentation on marine parasites. They looked more interested now that he had been interrupted than they had for the previous fifteen minutes. “La-mar-ti-nière,” he repeated to the young officer who had called him Lamanon.

  “Of course,” the officer said, unembarrassed and unapologetic, as if Lamartinière’s insistence that he was not Lamanon were an idiosyncrasy that they all indulged. “We need to ask you to come with us, sir.”

  “Why? What’s happened?” Emergencies flashed through his mind: his collections on board, lost or stolen; the captain dead, or the commander; a declaration of war—with Portugal, Spain, no, England—naturally, it would be England; letters from France, finally, but with bad news, his mother—

  “Nothing’s happened, sir,” the officer said with a smile that was neither reassuring nor friendly. “But we do need to return you to your ship.”

  “On whose authority?” He took a step back and looked at the delegation before him—the young officer, whose round face he recognized but whose name he did not know, accompanied by two armed, nervous-looking marines he did not know at all. “You’re not from the Astrolabe.”

  “We’re from the Boussole,” the officer said. “Commander’s orders.”

  Lamartinière felt the heat rise in his face. “You’re arresting me?”

  “You can call it what you like, sir, but we still need you to come with us.”

  “Are you sure it’s me you want and not Monsieur de Lamanon?”

  “We’re collecting both of you.”

  “Both of us?” A niggling misgiving he had been trying to ignore all day suddenly bloomed into full-blown dread. He looked around again at his audience, eleven men seated around a great mahogany table. A few looked toward him with regretful bemusement; others looked down, embarrassed by the scene unfolding before them; and a couple of men stared with barely concealed glee, delighted that something unusual was afoot. The consul himself, Monsieur Vieillard, a wheezy, red-faced man who had been nodding off during the lecture, now pushed himself to standing and shook his guest’s hand as if this were an ordinary leave-taking. “Thank you so much for enlightening us about—” He stopped, clearly unsure as to the subject of his enlightenment. “Yes, well,” he rasped. “We’re sorry you cannot stay longer, Monsieur de Lamanon.”

  “It’s Lamartinière!” He scooped up his notes and drawings and stuffed them into his leather document case, then followed the officer out of the room. A Chinese servant with a black cap and a long braid down his back hastened to shut the heavy oak door behind them, but not fast enough to muffle the laughter of the traders and consulate staff.

  Out in the street, the genial Macao breeze and the bustle of humans unconnected to his plight softened the edge of his angry confusion. “Forgive me,” he said, turning to the officer, “it’s Ensign…?”

  “Lieutenant,” the officer said. He set off in the direction of the Outer Harbor. “Lieutenant de Boutin.”

  “Ah, of course.” Lamartinière hurried to keep up, determined to walk next to Boutin rather than being escorted between the lieutenant and the marines like a common criminal. “Monsieur de Boutin, can
you please tell me what this is about?”

  “You’ll have to discuss it with Captain de Langle,” Boutin replied, neither slowing down nor turning to look at his charge. “My orders are simply to return you to the Astrolabe.”

  A cluster of food stalls narrowed their passage, forcing Lamartinière to step back into the officer-prisoner-guards alignment he had wished to avoid. They attracted little enough attention from the diners, Chinese men dressed in the loose cotton clothes of porters and houseboys. Seated at round tables under bamboo umbrellas, they scarcely looked up from steaming bowls of noodles to watch the foreigners pass. If he had not been under duress, Lamartinière thought, he would have liked to sample the wares, which smelled delicious.

  He caught up with Boutin when the road widened again. “How about Father Mongez and Father Receveur?” he asked. “Are you rounding them up as well?”

  Boutin opened his mouth to reply, seemed to think better of it, then shrugged and said, “Yes. It’s the four of you.”

  So even the priests were in trouble. He was beginning to understand. Oh, they should never have sent that second note to the commander! He had advised against it. But no one ever listened to him. Even in Brest, before the expedition left, his altogether reasonable request for an assistant had been overruled by the commander, who sided with a common gardener over the claims of a proper botanist. In that disagreement he had lost not only the assistant but his berth on the flagship. As it happened, he preferred Captain de Langle to Commander de Lapérouse, but the snub still rankled. Especially as on the Astrolabe he was crammed into a space shared with three other men, none of whom he liked. Things had started out well enough; the four men had even called their shared space the “Savants’ Quarters.” But Lieutenant d’Aigremont had turned out to be a stupid, talkative bore; the other naturalist, Dufresne, a melancholic who knew nothing about science; and Prévost, the ship’s artist, a grouchy sluggard who refused to draw anything other than flowers. No importuning could persuade the man to draw the marine creatures Lamartinière had discovered in Alaska. In the end he had had to do his own drawing, a time-consuming task at which he did not excel.

  And now this—whatever this was. His stomach grew heavy as fresh resentments formed and swirled over the older, more chronic disappointments of the voyage. An unlucky step on a loose cobblestone sent a spray of muddy water over his shins and shoes. Even his case was not spared. Stifling the urge to swear, he let out instead a plaintive whine. His escorts ignored him, but a group of Chinese children stopped and stared, and above him he could hear a window opening and the rustle of a bamboo blind being raised. By the time the street ended, dumping them suddenly onto the Praya Grande, the wide crescent-shaped beach that faced the principal harbor in Macao, his feet were wet, his stockings ruined, and he, close to tears.

  They made their way to the water’s edge, where Boutin greeted a second, more senior officer, another man Lamartinière recognized but could not name. The two men leaned over to talk with the female drivers of two sampans drawn up to the shore. A moment later a wooden stool was lifted out of one sampan, and then a Chinese boy with an umbrella.

  “We’re likely to be here awhile, Monsieur de Lamartinière,” Boutin said. “You may wish to sit down.”

  He drew himself up resentfully. Stool and shade indeed! He was just a few weeks shy of his twenty-ninth birthday, surely no older than Boutin. “No, thank you,” he said. But within minutes he began to sweat under his hat and wig, and then to wonder just how long “awhile” might take. Where were the others? Why had he arrived first? He looked anxiously out at the harbor, filled with sampans, junks, the occasional European boat, and farther out, numerous ships at their anchorages. A low haze obscured details like flags, and he had no idea which ships were theirs. Not that he was eager to return to the Astrolabe. The tedium of the long Pacific crossing that had brought them here had nearly driven him mad. Still, it was disquieting to not recognize the ship that had been his home for seventeen months. A bead of sweat traveled down the nape of his neck, and the metal handle of his case dug painfully into his bent fingers. Nodding sheepishly at the boy with the umbrella, he ducked under its shelter and sat down.

  At length another officer and two marines appeared on the Praya Grande, this time flanking a sedan chair carried, with noticeable effort, by two Chinese men. Lieutenant de Boutin advanced on the group and spoke briefly with this third officer before returning with a frown. “It’s Monsieur de Lamentation himself,” he said to the others. Hearing it, Lamartinière laughed; he hadn’t heard Lamanon’s nickname before. But the officer went on: “He kept them waiting at the house for twenty minutes before he would agree to leave, then demanded they call him a sedan chair because of his ‘gout.’ Now he’s insisting we pay for it.”

  “For God’s sake,” the senior officer said. “Tell him no.”

  Boutin returned to the group and expostulated with the unseen Lamanon. Lamartinière watched the inaudible interaction and swallowed hard, his amusement over the nickname dissipated by a new resentment. They had found Lamanon at home in their rented lodgings? But Lamanon had told Lamartinière just that morning that he couldn’t attend the presentation at the consulate because he was being taken to see “an unusual rock formation” that afternoon. Never mind that Lamartinière had dutifully attended Lamanon’s presentation to the same group just a few days earlier. Or that he might have enjoyed visiting a rock formation himself. And to arrive in a sedan chair! The man did not have gout any more than he had a goiter. Just yesterday the four of them had climbed up to the Guia Fortress, the highest point in Macao, and Lamanon had suffered no more than a rare, brief spell of silence brought on by shortness of breath.

  The sedan chair porters having been paid—Lamartinière could not see by whom—the group, led by Lamanon, who was taller and broader than the rest, made its way toward the water. One of the porters followed behind with what Lamartinière recognized as Lamanon’s valise. Lamartinière groaned with the realization that he was leaving the peninsula with nothing but the clothes on his back and the drawings and notes in his case. Most of his wardrobe and books remained—safely, he hoped—in the rented house. He leaned forward and squinted. Was Lamanon limping? A fresh heat rose in Lamartinière’s face despite the shade of the umbrella.

  “Lieutenant de Clonard!” Lamanon cried, addressing the senior officer when he came within earshot. “Now we’re rounding up savants and priests? What will the minister say when he learns of this? Or His Majesty?”

  Clonard regarded his charge with what looked like forced impassivity. “No doubt they would agree with the commander that insubordination cannot be tolerated aboard His Majesty’s ships.”

  “We are none of us actually aboard anything at the moment,” Lamanon said.

  “This is exactly what the commander is talking about, Lamanon.” A muscle twitched in the lieutenant’s cheek.

  Lamanon shrugged and looked over at Lamartinière, taking in, it seemed, his colleague’s sodden stockings, the mud-splattered document case, the stool, and the umbrella, before looking back at Clonard. “Where are Mongez and Receveur?” he said.

  “Fathers Mongez and Receveur are saying Mass with the bishop,” Clonard replied after a pause. “They’ll be here soon.”

  “So,” Lamanon drawled, “a natural philosopher’s rare opportunity for experimentation is interruptible, but religious rites that happen every day the world over are not.”

  What experimentation? Lamartinière wondered. Since landing, Lamanon had busied himself organizing outings for the four of them, ingratiating himself with local dignitaries, and writing up his findings about “atmospheric tides” to send to Buffon and Condorcet. What could he have been up to just now? Lamanon caught his eye and, as if reading the inquiry there, raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated leer. Oh! Lamartinière shrank back into his shade, suppressing a cry of dismay. Surely he did not mean Sophie, the woman they had discovered living in the rented house?

  The house, a narrow th
ree-story structure wedged in among more luxurious dwellings on the Rua de São Lourenço, had previously been occupied by another Frenchman, a longtime functionary in the consulate called Thérien who had shot himself just a few months earlier. The man’s Portuguese landlord had been delighted to find short-term tenants, as potential local renters were unnerved by the house’s association with a suicide. Indeed, Lamartinière and the two priests had exchanged uneasy glances on learning the house’s history, but Lamanon had been all bluster: “Every house is witness to human misery,” he declared. “That’s what a house is for.” Father Mongez timidly inquired if the unfortunate gentleman had died in the house? “No, no,” the agent for the landlord assured them. He mimed shooting himself in the head. “At the water. The beach.”

  “We’ll take the house,” Lamanon had declared.

  Lamartinière could hardly object when the priests remained silent. The whole venture was Lamanon’s idea, after all. He was also covering most of the expense. He had invited his particular friend Father Mongez, the Boussole’s chaplain and occasional naturalist, who in turn invited Father Receveur, Mongez’s counterpart on the Astrolabe, who invited Lamartinière. The unspoken hierarchy, from Lamanon at the top to each invitee in turn, governed everything that followed.

  The house came with a watchman, a cleaning woman, a cook, and a comprador who bought their food and anything else they required. Their first night there, the watchman, a tiny, ancient man, also introduced them to “Sophie,” who lived in a small room in the back and “do whatever you want very nice.” She stood before the four astonished men, a lovely, slender woman in a blue European dress remarkable only for its very low-cut bodice. Her coral lips were smiling, but her large brown eyes, with their hybrid Chinese and European qualities, stared back at them with a languid defiance that Lamartinière found both stirring and unsettling. Mongez and Receveur explained that they were priests and that she had nothing to concern herself with during their stay. But she either did not understand French very well or did not see how their being priests made any difference, for she continued to stand and smile before them. Lamartinière could not tell whether she was relieved or disappointed when they finally persuaded her to leave.