The Galante was scheduled to sail at eight in the morning, and as the whistle began to sound its warning Thérèse said: ‘I must go,’ and then she betrayed the cry of her heart: ‘Dear God, I do not want to leave this island.’
Ranjit, awakened as he had not been since the murder of Molly Hudak, tried to prolong the parting. He was no longer slouching, no longer apologetic. Standing very erect, he listened as she told him at the gangway: ‘Oh, Ranjit, it’s been a magical two days. A seminar on the meaning of our sea,’ and with a boldness that surprised him he added: ‘And of our lives.’ Then the ship’s deep-throated whistle sounded for the last time, and they parted.
The Swedish Lines, in planning this unusual seminar cruise, had made provisions for a leisurely run to the west following Trinidad, in order for the teachers to provide intensive instruction prior to the featured stop at Cartagena, which was intended not only to be the final stop of the cruise but also the historical highlight. The plan was a good one, and during the first day at sea a lot of work was done in lectures and discussions. One of Thérèse’s students voiced the general opinion: ‘Whoever had the idea for this cruise came up with a winner.’
On the evening before the Galante arrived at the historic harbor of Cartagena, Professor Ledesma gave the master lecture of the cruise. Using a set of evocative slides, he explained how his natal city had once been the queen of the Caribbean and how ships heavy with silver and gold had gathered in its spacious harbor preparing for the dangerous run to Havana and Sevilla. He spoke of the great men who had frequented this harbor in their ships of war: Drake, Morgan, Vernon, the fierce French pirates, Sir John Hawkins, maybe the best seaman of them all, and then he said: ‘But I want you especially to appreciate a tough little Spaniard who helped one of my ancestors defend Cartagena against a massive English armada.’
First he used drawings of the 1741 period to show the awesome weight of the English invading force, then said: ‘Now you must imagine the two Spaniards who opposed this mighty fleet and army. My ancestor, Governor Ledesma, must have looked a good deal like me, so we can forget him. But he was assisted by a man no one should ever forget, Marine General Blas de Lezo, old in service … and what a service! Fought in twenty-three major naval engagements, always in the midst of the shooting. In a running fight off Gibraltar he lost his left leg. Off Toulon he was blinded in his left eye, and in a major battle defending Barcelona he gave up his right arm!’ As the professor listed these dismemberments he used his left arm like a meat cleaver, and he was so dramatic, he himself became this crippled old man fighting to defend his city.
‘Did he win?’ a student asked, and Ledesma said: ‘You won’t believe it, but with only a handful of men he held off the entire British armada. Kept the ships at anchor and wouldn’t allow the English soldiers inside his city. Like they boast in boxing: “They never laid a hand on him,” but that’s not quite right. In the fighting he received two more major wounds, and our victory bells had scarcely stopped ringing when they resumed to toll his death.’
When the lecture ended, students gathered about him for further interrogation and the conversations lasted till well past midnight, but in the morning Ledesma was down for an early breakfast, since he was to supervise what everyone hoped would be a gala day. The government of Colombia, damaged by reports of uncontrolled cocaine traffic in its inland cities, had made an extra effort to provide the Galante passengers, especially the students, with a memorable experience in Cartagena: small boats were made available for tours of the incomparable harbor; military helicopters stood by to enable geographers or historians to see the area as a whole, and Ledesma himself led walking tours of the ancient battlements upon which an earlier Ledesma had once accompanied Sir Francis Drake on midnight strolls.
Thérèse, who had no responsibilities this day, was among the first to take the helicopter ride, and the young naval officer serving as pilot invited her to occupy the seat beside him, from where she gained an incomparable appreciation of how this city had survived the many assaults made upon it. There below her was the glistening harbor with its two entrances, Boca Grande and Boca Chica, the former now marked by a roadway built upon the skeletons of the innumerable wrecks which had been sunk there in times past to prevent enemy ships from sneaking in. But what impressed her most was the view when the helicopter flew to the north, for then she saw that Cartagena really did sit upon an island, protected by swamp-ridden lands north and east, the Caribbean west and south, so that no enemy could easily assault it from any direction. It stood by itself, a walled city with a unique personality which had been neither destroyed nor altered by the floods of gold and silver that reached it from Porto Bello or by the heavy gunfire that came from British fleets. It was a free-standing city within a wall.
When the flight ended she wandered alone along the narrow streets of the old city, and as she threaded her way through what was little more than an alley, with the fronts of houses almost touching one another, she suddenly burst into the heart of a plaza so lovely that she exclaimed: ‘Oh, what a treasure!’
Two broad paths intersecting in the middle divided the plaza into four equal quarters, each with its own bubbling fountain, and in the center, where the paths met, rose a fine statue of Bolívar. The square was embraced on all sides by handsome buildings, each a different color, so that the effect was more of a fine painting than a work of architecture. Her first thought on finding herself at the heart of this walled-in excellence was: So formal compared to that great free square in Point-à-Pitre, this one so Spanish, that one so French, but each memorable.
Then at the shadowy end of the plaza she saw a majestic building that seemed to have been hiding like a master actor who wished to make an impressive entrance; tall and imposing like a church, its façade decorated with stately ornament and statuary, it breathed an air of mystery and power. When she crossed the plaza to inspect it, she found it to be the office from which officials of the Holy Inquisition had policed the religious orthodoxy and private morals of the city through the long years from 1610 to 1811, and she shivered to think of what anguish this building had witnessed.
But when she entered its forbidding doorway she learned that it was now a museum, and from its well-arranged and labeled displays she learned that in Cartagena the Inquisition had not run wild, for in the course of its long dictatorship, it had given death sentences to only five, which in those years would have been miraculously humane in an English or American county, and it burned alive only two of them, both renegade clerics.
Relieved to learn this, she was nevertheless saddened to read a detailed account of the first great auto-da-fé held in 1611 at which, during a vast celebration held in the plaza she had just left, nineteen men and women received notice of their punishments. With ominous frequency came the dreaded phrase ‘a los remos de galera por vida sin sueldo’—to the oars of a galley for life without pay. Often there was an order that the accused’s distinctive prison garb, his sambenito, be labeled with his name and displayed in perpetuity in the local cathedral so that all might be reminded of that family’s disgrace.
The nationality of the victims and the harsh nature of their sentences bespoke the religious hatreds which scarred all Spanish colonies: ‘Juan Mercader, a French peddler who was heard ridiculing a Papal Bull calling for a crusade; Marco Pacio, an Italian who claimed that breaking the sixth commandment is not a sin; Juan Albert, a German who also made fun of a Papal Bull.’ In Cartagena they had been suspicious of anyone who wasn’t Spanish.
The crimes of native-born sinners were indicative of what the church had feared: for not believing in purgatory, for having entered a sixteen-year pact with a devil named Buciraco, for having told fortunes with beans, for conjuring evil spirits, and for raising the dead from their graves.
To read these mournful records made Thérèse wonder if there had ever been a chance for the elysium of which Senator Lanzerac had dreamed, ‘a Caribbean with one nation, one language, one religion.’ Would not resolute s
ouls, she asked herself, have emerged to cry: ‘I’ll tolerate this domination no longer!’ with riots and revolutions resulting? So after a while we’d be right where we are today: many nations, many rules.
When she arrived back on the Galante she went directly to her cabin, propped on her knees the writing portfolio provided there and started a long-overdue letter to Dennis Krey in Concord. Actually, she started two, but her mind was so agitated by this day’s experiences that she could not concentrate. Crumpling the would-be letters, she went on deck to seek out Professor Ledesma, and when she found him she said: ‘Could we take a walk before dinner? Weighty decisions.’
‘I’ve been waiting for an invitation like this since we boarded,’ and they were soon walking along the ramparts and down narrow alleyways toward the center of town, where she guided him to the central plaza which had impressed her so favorably. There, sitting on benches facing the majestic Inquisition building, Ledesma spoke of the imperishable values that nurture a society and keep it vital, and he told her that Spanishness was one of the world’s permanent systems, like Islam and Christianity and Judaism, but when Thérèse asked: ‘Then why is Spanish culture in the Americas unable to produce stable civil governments?’ he parried: ‘Stability is overrated. Vitality, movement, the enjoyment of each day, that’s what really counts.’
Unwilling to allow what she considered a misguided judgment to pass, Thérèse cried: ‘Professor Ledesma! This week gunmen from the Medellín cocaine cartel murdered two more judges in that city and three political leaders in Bogotá. Is that what you call the flowering of Spanish culture?’
Ledesma mumbled: ‘One of the judges was my cousin. I admit that these are terrible times, but isn’t your America having its own problems?’
Eager to give this crucial discussion some substantial footing, she took from her handbag a small book that dealt philosophically with these matters: ‘Since this was written by an outstanding French scholar who was predisposed to neither the Spanish nor the English cause, we can expect impartiality.’ Translating from the French, she read:
‘ “If either Sir Francis Drake in 1586 or Admiral Vernon in 1741 had pressed his advantage and not only captured Cartagena but taken permanent possession of it, the history of the Caribbean, Central America, South America and perhaps the entire world might have been radically altered. With the great harbor of Cartagena in English hands, the Spanish silver fleet from Peru would not have dared to transport its wealth to Porto Bello, and with that umbilical cord severed, the one between Mexico and Havana would have become untenable. No more galleons freighted with gold and silver would have made their way across the Atlantic to Sevilla, and Spain’s loosely bound and chaotic empire in the New World would have crumbled. In its place would have risen an orderly English colonization, so that great land areas like Argentina, Chile and Brazil would have evolved into stable nations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, perhaps to the betterment of the world.” ’
Closing the book with precise movements, as if she were conducting one of her seminars, she asked Ledesma: ‘Now, what do you and I, as good Catholics, say to that?’ and he replied with considerable vigor: ‘English-style order in government is not the world’s greatest boon,’ and he continued in words that the first Ledesma in Cartagena might have used: ‘To see your family prosper, all members of it. To know a religion which gives you solace. To feel your spirit free to soar. To burst with poetic idealism, those are the abiding virtues.’ He paused, stared at Thérèse, and asked: ‘Do people in Gary, Indiana, have it as good as we do here in Cartagena?’
‘You make a persuasive case for the elegance of Spanish custom,’ Thérèse said, ‘but not for Spanish government,’ and he bristled: ‘You young scholars infected by English interpretations of history should remember one basic fact. We Spaniards held the New World from 1492 through 1898, when you stole Cuba and Puerto Rico from us. Four glorious centuries of achievement. England held her empire only from the 1630s to the 1950s, pitifully short in comparison. And you cowardly Americans have been afraid to assume the burdens we laid down, so you have no right to lecture me. We were the great successes. And we’ll be so again one of these days. You can rely on that.’
Reluctant to proffer any further observations which might distress this elderly gentleman, she gazed about her at the handsome plaza, and the sadness which comes with the passing of old values assailed her, so that she dropped her head, a gesture which Ledesma noticed immediately: ‘What is it, Dr. Vaval? What’s happened to disarm you?’ and she said: ‘This cruise. This intimate view of the sea in which my people slaved and triumphed and knew despair. It’s made a violent impression on me.’
‘Disorientating?’
‘Very.’
‘That’s why we go on voyages. You’ll sort it out.’ He stared at the lovely patterns made by the late-afternoon sun on the façade of the Inquisition building, then asked: ‘It’s a personal problem—your fiancé, I suppose?’
‘Yes. I’m on the verge of marrying a lifelong New Englander. But I feel a growing sense of doubt … I find it impossible even to write to him.’
He bent way over and picked up some pebbles from the plaza, bouncing them up and down in his right hand. ‘My family has been on this spot for four and a half centuries, and it’s an act of faith with us that never in that time were any of us charged with heresy or united in marriage with an Indian or a black. It’s the way I was brought up, and believe me, if I had a son of marriageable age and you came around, I’d hustle him off to Salamanca for a graduate degree and a Spanish wife. That’s the way we are.’
‘My family says the same about being African, but this light skin testifies they wavered somewhere.’ When she laughed at the preposterousness of her situation, he said: ‘Let’s walk to the far end where the lookouts stood,’ and when they had climbed to that eminence he said: ‘Here we served in darkness, Miss Vaval, staring at the Caribbean, watching for the enemy or the pirates or the hurricane, and never for three years in a row were we able to relax in assumed safety. That’s still the honorable task of a good man or woman. Man the watchtower, look for the enemy, and flash the signal. Not a bad assignment for a professor, either.’
It was exciting, that time she spent with Professor Ledesma, and as he said farewell that evening, for the ship would leave the harbor early in the morning, she took his right hand in her two and brought it to her lips: ‘I’m so glad that it was this cruise that you elected to take,’ and in farewell he said: ‘Our first great Ledesma claimed that the Caribbean was a Spanish Lake. You’ve proved that a lot of good blacks have come in since then, but the color of the sea itself hasn’t changed. It’s still golden.’
He was about to leave with those appropriate words hanging in the air, when she suddenly cried: ‘Professor, stay one moment. I want you to mail a letter for me,’ and she dashed to her cabin, grabbed paper, and scrawled: ‘Dear Dennis, It would be most improper for you to marry me, and entirely wrong for me to marry you. I’ve just discovered the world of which I’m a part, so goodbye, with love and regret. Thérèse.’
During the swift passage back to Miami, Thérèse was so nervous and confused that she stayed by herself, avoiding even her students and sometimes standing at the rail for long spells, staring at her newly discovered Caribbean as if she were never again to see its glorious waves. Remembering the suspicions she’d had that night prior to her arrival at Trinidad, she thought: This amazing cruise really has been a turning point in my life. It introduced me to contemporary Haiti as it actually is, and gave me the courage to write the letter terminating my engagement to Dennis Krey. And now I’m on the eve of starting a new life at Wellesley. All were part of the watershed: I did the right things in the right way, so let them stand. But then her cockiness left her, for the real reason for her anxiety emerged as an image in the passing waves. It was Ranjit Banarjee’s grave face surrounded by the vibrant scenes of Carnaval, and she whispered: ‘Finding him was like finding a cove of calm water after thras
hing around in turbulent waves,’ and suddenly, exultant, she flung her arms wide as if to embrace the entire Caribbean: ‘You are my sea! Your people are my people!’
Then she heard a man’s voice: ‘Talking to yourself?’ It was Michael Carmody, and when she made no reply, he said: ‘Let’s take these chairs, because we should talk. You’re in trouble, Dr. Vaval. It’s been obvious to anyone who watched you from the start of our trip.’
‘Who are you to presume …?’ she snapped. But she knew immediately that this was the wrong tack: ‘I’m sorry. For you this voyage has been a working vacation; for me, a leap into a maelstrom.’
‘No need to explain. From what I saw of Haiti, this trip must have started with a shock.’
‘It did,’ and he said quickly: ‘You’re right. I was presumptuous, but you’ll learn that teachers are that way when they fear time’s running out.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I came to Trinidad when I was about your age, as penniless as you were when you landed in Canada. I’ve always spent my life, my dreams in Trinidad, always hoping I would come upon that one brilliant lad who would justify my sacrifices …’
‘Teaching’s never a sacrifice.’
‘Professor Vaval, you know that people like you and me could earn vastly superior sums if we applied our energy to business or law.’
‘Ah, but we’re not interested solely in sums.’
‘You’re so right, and it’s good of you to voice it, because it makes what I have to say much easier.’ He brought his forefingers to his lips, hesitated, and said: ‘We search endlessly to uncover that one resplendent intellect, and you’ll find that years will be wasted, and then you begin to despair …’ He found it difficult to continue, but then words came in a rush: ‘For me, Ranjit Banarjee was that boy. Heavenly sonnets, essays of great brilliance, he had the world before him.’