Landfalls (27 page)

My dear
É
l
é
onore, tomorrow, if the winds are in our favor, we leave Monterey Bay in California, a place of unmatched natural beauty and abundance. The bay teems with life: indeed, right now outside my window, I see lines of pelicans flying low over the water, and earlier we were entertained by a group of curious sea otters that had gathered around the ship. The land is no less fertile and is home now to some fifty or sixty Spanish colonists as well as several hundred Indians. The Spanish reputation for hospitality, proven once already during our time in Chile six months ago, has been doubly confirmed here. The soldiers and missionaries in this remote outpost of New Spain have little of their own but give generously of it anyway. We leave with so much fresh livestock, vegetables, and grain that I fear we are leaving these good people to suffer later for their magnanimity. It was with difficulty that I persuaded them to accept payment for the provisions.

Here too I am called “Count”—indeed, I grow quite used to the title! Langle and I spent our first two days ashore as guests of the governor, Don Pedro Fages, a genial, urbane man in his fifties. In this newly conquered place it is a rough mud dwelling that passes for a governor's house, and though it was clean and furnished with taste and comfort in mind, there was no hiding the rough-hewn floors or the windows, which had no glass, only bars to keep out intruders and stretched hides to keep out the elements.

As is so common among Spaniards, Don Pedro's wife is nearly thirty years younger than he, younger even than you, my love. Sadly, Do
ñ
a Eulalia's beauty and charms, which must once have been considerable, have been worn down by tribulations and discontent. Her hardships may also have eroded discretion, for by the end of our first night ashore, when the governor hosted a reception in our honor, we knew altogether too much about this woman and her sad life. I will not sully this letter with a recitation of the more scandalous tales we heard, some from her own lips. Suffice to say that she misses the comforts of life in Mexico City—as indeed, what civilized woman would not?—and has lost two of her four children, one to a miscarriage suffered en route to Monterey four years ago, and the other, a newborn daughter, just a few months ago. This excited our compassion, of course, but we could not admire her. She seemed to have no friends among the wives of the men who serve under her husband, and fairly threw herself at each of us in turn, eventually landing on my botanist, Collignon, who had no underling on whom to fob her off. I persuaded our artist, Duch
é
de Vancy, to offer to paint her portrait. She sat for him for an hour while he tried valiantly to impart to her a grace she no longer had. The poor woman was pathetically happy with the result.

After two days, we were quite ready to accept an invitation to visit the Franciscan fathers at the nearby mission. There are many such establishments up and down the coastline of California. They are the bases from which the missionaries work among the natives, providing sustenance and employment to converts. It sounds noble enough, and I wish I could say the result was such as to make me glad to be a Christian. But alas, it reminded me too much of the sugar plantations in
Î
le de France, only with lower productivity and more morose slaves. On our arrival, we were warmly greeted by the pealing of bells and the five priests who are currently in residence. But the Indian converts were also arrayed before us, compelled to be there, I suspect, for a more listless group of human beings I have never before beheld. They showed neither surprise nor interest when we arrived, although I was given to understand that we were the first non-Spanish Europeans they had ever seen.

The good fathers are not content simply to convert the Indians. They demand a level of piety from them that no French priest would expect of a congregant raised in the faith from birth. The converts are whipped for missing daily prayers and whipped harder if they try to leave the mission. Father Lasu
é
n, who is not only head of this mission but president of all the California missions, assured me they discipline the Indians with the same gentleness a father would use on his child. (I was put in mind of some ferocious beatings I've seen men administer to their own children, but did not say so.) He also told me, candidly and without bitterness, that the Indians are ignorant and childish, often behaving in ways contrary to their own betterment. The lack of any native religion or system of governance among them, far from making them tractable, renders all but a few of them unable to understand authority or consequences or to plan for even the near future, much less eternity.

I came to respect and admire this humble, thoughtful man who has devoted his life to the nearly hopeless task of improving the lives of these people. But there is a medieval quality to the endeavor that I could not see without dismay. The mission is unnecessarily impoverished: They conduct farmwork with primitive—even broken—implements. The Indian men, who entertained us by demonstrating their ancient hunting techniques, are rarely allowed to leave the mission to use their native skills to procure fish or game. As a result, nearly every meal is a thin gruel made of corn, and people go hungry in a land of astonishing plenty. The women spend all day grinding corn between two rocks, a time-consuming, wasteful process, and are punished if they fail to meet their daily quotas. This last defect at least we were able to address. Monsieur de Langle gave them the spare millstone from the
Astrolabe
, and he and Collignon spent an afternoon demonstrating its use to the women and to the priests who oversee their work. In these small ways we hope to fulfill the king's directive to benefit everyone we meet.

If you've read my letters in order, my dear, you know of the calamity we suffered in Alaska. Only to you can I confess how much this loss continues to weigh on me. It is my last thought when I retire at night and the first when I awake. I had expected this stay among other Europeans to console me, but, if anything, it has had the opposite effect. Sailing on the open seas, away from Alaska, my grief had been held at bay; indeed, I could imagine that the accident had not happened at all, that the absent men were simply elsewhere on my ship. Here, however, I have had to relate our misfortune to solicitous men who sympathize with our loss and wish to ease our grief. Yet this telling and retelling only makes it more real. Every reception held in our honor reminds me of the men who are missing, men who charmed the colonists in Chile only six months ago and are now gone. I am grateful for the kindness of our hosts, but I will be even more grateful when we sail away. Oh, my love, if only I had some words from you to comfort me in the dark night! But the earliest I can hope for a letter to reach me is in Macao, or perhaps even later, in Petropavlovsk …

VI.
From Fray Faustino Sol
á
to his brother, Pablo Vicente de Sol
á
, Sergeant, Free Company of Volunteers of Catalonia, San Blas, Mexico

Brother, I worry you are no longer in San Blas but have been sent off someplace to wage war in the name of His Most Christian Majesty and that this letter will never find you. It seems years since you saw me off as I boarded
La Princesa
. Perhaps it
has
been years. I can scarcely remember the voyage except that I expected every day to be drowned, and once I arrived, I was taken to my cell, where I expected every night to be murdered in my bed by Indians. I don't know how many days I lay in that state. But by and by even one's dreads begin to bore one, so I made my way into the mission gardens. I wish you could see them. We have olive trees and roses, and it reminds me of Mondrag
ó
n and the villa where we grew up. As a boy I liked to walk in our gardens and pretend I was in the first garden, in Eden, and I do that here as well. Sometimes I am Adam, sometimes Eve, and sometimes the serpent.

But then the visitors arrived and it was no longer practical to pretend, as they seemed very real, with their scientific instruments and their notebooks and their curiosity. One of them became my friend, and when he left my heart ached, for I am sure we will never see each other again, but now I can recall neither his name nor his face. Is that not odd? He was a gardener, and we looked at plants together, both here and outside the mission, and I could not help but pretend we were in Eden, he and I, but I did not alarm him by saying so. One Sunday I was recovered enough to take part in a baptism, and then I was Adam, for the neophytes were brought forward one by one, and it was my duty to name them.

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 Sol
á
, 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 Sol
á
. 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
Lamartini
è
re
.” 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. Lamartini
è
re 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-ni
è
re,” he repeated to the young officer who had called him Lamanon.