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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780993108686 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Papillote Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2017 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.72(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
THE TALE OF THE FIRST HOUSE
LAVREN SURFACED into the first of his tales far out at sea, where the caravels were adrift. Their keels were entangled in sargasso weed that entrapped dolphins which had gone astray. Large fish were panting to be free, or floating bloated and rotting in the sun. Whales were unable to fathom because of the sludge. Sails were hanging limp for the lack of a breeze to billow and pull taut the rigging. Lavren surfaced for air in the hot and stagnant stillness up on the open deck among the motley crew, the old-world crew: criminals set free from dungeons and prisons. Poverty had clambered aboard in Cadiz, Le Havre or up the river in London-town to make a fortune. Priests who would be saints, to make Christians of savages and extend the mantle of Holy Mother Church, matching cross with sword, abandoned their monasteries of the old world. The cocksure aristocrat, nose in the air, smelling for a breeze and avoiding the stench below, embarked on a season of adventure. These and others he saw and heard: buccaneers, pirates, conquistadors, adventurers seeking a New World, drawn by tales of El Dorado which, for some, meant a glimpse of heaven, for others, gold in their pockets and pouches, the holds of ships and the coffers of old-world kingdoms. For the poet, it was booty with which to woo a queen. Lavren was drawn to a dreamer who rested his head upon the hairy chest of his mate and listened to the itinerant storyteller, the conjuror of the future. 'Listen to this one, lads!'
They huddled in the darkness under a canopy of stars which hung from a black vault. They sought the pointers, the outline of the gods. They needed a breeze, which would come to lift them to where the constellations pointed and the new maps indicated. Lavren nestled close to Gaston de Lanjou. He will soon change that name, when he follows his imagination, set free by the storyteller's tale. 'And listen to this other one, lads.'
'Wind!' a sailor in the poop shouts, the rigging and the tackle jangle and jingle; a breeze, and sails flap. The tale of the most beautiful girl in the world, who awaited them at the next port, is interrupted. 'A wind! Set sail!' The motley crew, like monkeys, scampered and scarpered up the ropes to unfurl the sails to billow and take the breeze for the New World. They begin to move, leaving the sargasso weed of the wide Sargasso Sea.
Lavren followed Gaston as he fulfilled the future in the tale told by the storyteller.
They landed at Margarita, the island of pearls, where Gaston purchased his collection of pearls as white as blanched almonds, dived for in a sea they called Mar Dulce, later called the Gulf of Sadness. With these moons, Gaston went in search of the storyteller's most beautiful girl.
Lavren begins with the dream of Eden where it began for Gaston de Lanjou and Clarita Monagas de los Macajuelos in the convent parlour of Aracataca on the savannahs of the Monagas on the continent of Bolivar. As he begins, the nuns chant his favourite music in Saint Gregory's composition, 'Salve Regina, Mater Misericordia ... for those who live in this vale of tears.
When Gaston arrived from Margarita with his dowry of pearls, Clarita was already in the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of the Nuns of Cluny. She was put there by her father as a gift to God for favours which Father Rosario, the parish priest, had given old-man Monagas: for indulgences, days off purgatory, or a place in heaven at the footstool of archangels. Who knows? She was not yet a novice, but still a postulant, though the rules of the enclosure nevertheless applied to her, and in particular, the rule that no man was to enter the walls of the convent to visit her without a special dispensation from the Archbishop in Margarita which had to be applied for by the parish priest in Aracataca, on the recommendation of the Mother Superior. On top of that, the dispensation had to have the papal seal. So given the lapse of time that voyages across the ocean took, and the inestimable difficulties to gain audience and hearing in Rome, it would have been impossible for Gaston to enter the convent legitimately. 'No man's desire can be expected to beat that long, unsatisfied,' said old-man Monagas. 'But why Clarita?' Old-man Monagas and his wife Angustia could not understand this obsession with the one daughter who was in the convent to be the bride of Christ.
'Why Clarita?' Angustia pleaded.
'I have other daughters,' the old father said, 'Jeanne Clara, Celestina, Louisa, Cecilia. But she will be a child for ever. There is Andresita and her twin sister Ursula. There is Elena, but she is still too young, and there are three babies. I keep those for your younger brothers whom I know will come one day with bags of pearls.' Old-man Monagas laughed, but Gaston did not laugh. He remembered the storyteller's description of Clarita while he was still at sea, crossing from the old world to the new.
'A sailor on the boat I worked on told me that an old man in the town of Aracataca on these dusty savannahs had a daughter so beautiful he had to lock her up in a convent, otherwise his own brothers, the poor girl's uncles, would molest her, and even her father had been tempted to touch her where it thrilled the most.' Gaston looked knowingly at the old man. Old-man Monagas turned to see that his wife and daughters were out of earshot.
'My boy , what is it that you want? And you bring such fine pearls, yes?'
But Gaston continued the story he had been told at sea under the moon, on the loneliness of the ocean. 'Where it thrilled the most,' he repeated, 'that is what we sailors have been told, and it was only when the old man told the parish priest, Father Rosario, that they came up with the idea to put her in the convent.' Gaston winked. 'They would say it was because of some favour, in answer to a prayer, that she was being offered as a bride for Christ.' Gaston continued the tale he had been told, while old-man Monagas fingered some of the finest pearls from Margarita, which Gaston had emptied from a leather pouch on to the ledge of the veranda. He marvelled that the story told by this young man of himself and his daughters was already a legend, a story told on dark and lonely nights by sailors and travellers to fill the desire of their dreams and the passion of their sleep.
Old-man Monagas whispered with his fingers to his lips, 'Shush,' glancing round to see that none of his little daughters had crept up to listen to the grown-ups. But Gaston continued the story he had heard from the sailor, as he put more pearls on the ledge of the veranda, tempting the old man with these shadows of the moon.
Normally, old-man Monagas would have had to find dowries for all his daughters, but this was the New World and, since he had spread about the tale of their incomparable beauty, it was the suitors who had to find the dowries, and the dowry always had to be pearls. They came one after the other; Gaston, and in his wake another brother. 'If you want her for a wife you must bear my name and carry it to the ends of the world.'
Gaston ignored the old man with his plans. 'The world knew it was not because Clarita was holy. Her mama wept and railed against you, old man, but the priest quietened the sorrowing mama and reminded her of her duties to her husband. Do you say no to this tale I heard upon the wide Sargasso Sea, when our ships lay adrift under the scorching sun by day and the cold winds at night? This tale I heard by starlight, falling asleep against the hairy chest of my mate? Do you deny it, old man?' Gaston leant over to put the pearls back into his pouch. 'I must see Clarita. The storyteller said her name was Clarita.'
'Shush, man, what do you want? Do you want the confessional ears of the priest to burn?' Old-man Monagas stayed the hand of the sailor who had begun to eclipse the moons with his fingers.
'Where is that sweet-smelling priest?' Gaston had been thinking of this Father Rosario, whom he had met already, and who smelt of the rosewater he applied to his hands and face before morning mass to bewitch the women of the parish.
'Shush.' Old-man Monagas realised that this young man knew the truth, but his obsession was so great he was willing to pay for his daughter with the most perfect pearls, despite the fact that he could have blackmailed him instead. This mystified him.
But Gaston continued. He would only be satisfied with Clarita the most beautiful, in spite of the ugly rumour that Father Rosario had locked her up so that when the Archbishop came on confirmation days, there would be something to make his long journey from Margarita worthwhile. The young Gaston was even a little flattered that Clarita had had her hymen broken by an archbishop's bejewelled finger. Cric
Crac – it broke Gaston's heart, this tale, it broke the heart of Lavren –
Monkey break he back
For a piece a
Pomme arac ...
Now, that is the kind of comment that Lavren knows that Marie Elena, his muse and mother, would not like. It is lucky she is nodding off into eternity, and probably will never see the truest history in the world of the great and pythonic family of the Monagas de los Macajuelos. It would break her heart. On the other hand, she likes a good story.
Once Lavren gets tripped up with Marie Elena's tongue, language and words of the Holy Spirit, it is no knowing where the story will go, and the tale of Clarita, most beautiful girl in the New World, precursor of carnival queens, will not be told.
Ah, she's nodded off and Josephine has brought a bowl of chicken soup into the room with the bed by the Demerara window overlooking the Gulf of Sadness where Lavren sits, sometimes at the windowsill, sometimes at the foot of the bed, depending on the light. It will settle her stomach and be a palliative to the feet and feet of intestine wrapped inside of her. If she wakes she can be given the chicken consommé to stop indigestion and keep her telling stories.
The digressionary tale has become fashionable again; the delaying of the truth, if there is a truth to be told. But it is not for this reason that Lavren uses it. He is not a fashionable writer, merely a child of the New World: educated in a parody of Albion's culture; a failer of exams; a procrastinator of tasks; a fantasiser who would have liked to have danced on the stages of the world, a creole Diaghilev; been the prince of Elsinor; the Puck of an English forest; Cesario at the feet of her Orsino; Oberon and Titania, the two heads of the same dream with their changeling boy; Ganymede, a Rosalind wooing in disguise, wooed in disguise; a creole child from a creole house; the child of a silent father and a talkative mother who told too many tales. But all must be told at the appropriate time, the time when the hints can be abandoned and the clues made clear and Lavren appears in all his contradiction, levitating between genders and races. These digressions have more to do with the indigestion of Marie Elena than with literary sophistication to charm or confound critics at the end of the century. Some little country-bookie come to town would never presume to do that. Some little creole boy from the backyards and backwaters of great empires, boy, could only hope to imitate the great users of the one thing they left us, language. But with that we go mamaguy them, Lavren thought.
There is more he would have been, more he could have been: a pope with a triple tiara, a saint, a martyr lacerated and crucified upside down, Saint Lawrence on his gridiron ... Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur ...
'Amen,' Marie Elena hiccupped, choking on her chicken soup. Lavren is reminded to avoid the tendency to digress. He must get back to the tale of history.
Gaston, in the meantime, had wavered in his intention the night before, and had almost changed his mind when he saw the ten-year-old Isabella, Clarita's younger sister, playing with her Amerindian servant girl in the yard in front of the veranda where he was sitting with old-man Monagas. Old-man Monagas detected the gleam in his eye, seduced by the beauty and innocence of the child. It was this in the end which made him think it better that Gaston go to the convent the next morning. He clapped his hands and said, 'She's too young, my boy,' and then, 'Children, go and play at the back.' The vision, which had momentarily eclipsed the beauty of Clarita, vanished into child's play, and Gaston returned to his obsession with Clarita, which was just what old-man Monagas wanted. Isabella was too young.
Mama was crying in the bedroom all that night surrounded by her daughters: 'My children, my children, is this your destiny, so rudely awakened and weaned so quickly for the desires of men?' Her voice had always been one of lamentation. Angustia, her name lives on, given to a pain that all Monagas have in their legs. They say it is because she stood for so long each evening searching the horizon for her vanished daughters. Lavren must not hasten too quickly.
When Gaston arrived at the convent, the echo of Clarita's mother's lamentation was still in his ear, to remind him, young as he was, that there was another's sorrow amidst his joy. I'll give your daughter heaven, old woman.' Then he put the old woman's voice from his mind and fixed his eye on the prison of the convent, as it seemed to him: this walled garden, this cloister, pretending to be Eden or a piece of heaven. The Sister Porter would not allow him to enter. She merely showed her eyes through the grille in the door and said:
'Mother Superior has not given permission, nor the Holy Father in Rome. So, off you go, young man.'
Gaston made such a racket at the door, banging and crying out, 'Clarita, Clarita,' that they eventually allowed him into the parlour, maintaining that he did not possess the official edict from Rome with the papal seal which would allow him to breach the enclosure of the nuns, and see Clarita in the garden where the fountain played among the bougainvillaea bushes and the frangipani trees. He continued to make a racket like a peevish boy, 'Clarita, Clarita.' His mother had told him how he used to lie on the floor and kick his legs in the air in order to get what he wanted, and she would always relent. One day he even did a shit in his pants. Gaston knew he would eventually have his own way and so began to bang on the door. But then he grew strangely silent, and this seemed to have more power than the noise to terrorise the nuns. Intermittently, he would cry out with a great lamentation as before: 'Clarita!' – which made the poor postulants who were scrubbing the corridor overthrow their buckets and run away to the scullery.
'Diabolus!' they screamed, letting their divine reading concerning the Prince of Darkness take hold of their imaginations.
Gaston spent most of that day pacing the parlour whose walls were adorned with murals depicting the overshadowing of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. These had been painted by one of the nuns, who was famed for her calligraphy in gold lettering and was an illuminator of extraordinary beauty in the New World. She had inscribed the words, Maria, integra et casta: without stain and unbroken.
Even after a special meal of vegetables cooked in herbs and spices which the nuns had prepared for Gaston from the convent garden, he would not relent, and vowed to spend the night on the floor of the parlour. 'I will root myself to the ground and grow like a strong vine against your walls, until I see the face of the most beautiful girl in the world. Clarita!' The name of the most beautiful girl in the world echoed through the vaults of the cloister.
After compline, when the nuns, in the darkness of their choir, implored that they be saved from the diabolus, their adversary like a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour, the Mother Superior opened the grille and spoke to the impetuous young man who had travelled from the old world and came with stories heard upon the ocean of the most beautiful girl. 'This young girl you seek, my man, has been given as a bride for Christ, but since you have come from so far and persist so strongly, I will give you a glimpse of heaven, but then you must leave our town of Aracataca and go on your travels. And you must not be so noisy, young man. Come back in the morning.' The Mother Superior spoke with a wisdom often gained by women who live for a long time without men. She was not sure, however, that Gaston would agree to come in the morning, have his glimpse of heaven and then leave. After admonishing him again for his behaviour, she said he might see Clarita through the grille in the morning after lauds.
Gaston went off cheerily into the town, feeling that he had won the first round. He caroused at a neighbouring hacienda with the servant girl Cigale, so called by her master and mistress because she had such a piercingly high voice like a cicada crying for rain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Witchbroom"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Lawrence Scott.
Excerpted by permission of Papillote Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
An Overture – Fugues, Fragments of Tale,
THE HOUSES OF KAIRI: The Carnival Tales of Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos: 1,
The Tale of the First House,
The Tale of the House on the Plains,
The Tale of the House in the Cocoa,
A Journal,
THE HOUSES OF KAIRI: The Carnival Tales of Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos: 2,
The Tale of the House in Town,
The Tale of the House in the Sugar,
The Tale of the Last House,
J'Ouvert,
Postscript,