God Carlos (22 page)

 

* * *

 

Hartley woke up around noon, and the first thought that popped into his conscious mind was his rejection by the widow. He lay in bed for at least an hour, sloshing through the swamp of impressions from the night before. He tried his best to think of another approach he might yet use on the widow, but he could come up with nothing. His heart was heavy as he regarded the road ahead. His mind roamed over all the possibilities, and he even began to daydream about his brother becoming sick and dying, which would automatically elevate Hartley to the position of the first son. Since Alexander his brother had no children of his own yet, he had only to die for Hartley to have uncontested rights of primogeniture. If something like that could happen to his father, why couldn't it happen to him too?

Well, he didn't want to start the day with a pessimistic frame of mind, but he thought it highly unlikely that God would intervene on his behalf and strike down Alexander. Yet the prospect was so appealing that he lay in bed going over the grisly details. He ran the scenario lovingly through his imagination, heard his brother coughing one evening, watched as he became progressively worse, until finally he was forced into bed by a debilitating lung ailment. A doctor was summoned who pronounced his brother ill with a virulent pneumonia and bled him of two pints of blood. A day later, the poor fellow had the decency to die.

There was a funeral that Hartley attended in his imagination looking as grim as a starving vulture. Neighbors and friends of the family expressed their condolences to him, and he mingled among his guests looking every bit the bereaved sibling and modestly muttering "Thank you's" to mournful comments directed his way. The next day, he would wake up the first son with every expectation of inheriting his father's property. It was that simple; it could happen that quickly.

But as things looked right now, it would not happen if it were left up to God. His brother would not be struck down. And no matter how badly Hartley desired it, there would be no lung ailment, no ornate funeral, no line of sympathizers, and no change in the order of succession.

Like a wet gray animal, the bleak winter day nuzzled the windows of the room in which Hartley had slept. The prospect was so gloomy and dreary that he began to daydream about giving God a hand by murdering Alexander himself. He lay with his hands folded under his head, stared at the canopy of the four-poster bed, and began fantasizing about the best way of murdering his brother.

As a second son who stood to most benefit from the crime, he would be the chief suspect. He would need an ironclad alibi, one that put him miles and miles away from the scene of the crime. While he lay in bed thinking about the murder, he saw that the plot was an impossibility, nothing more than a pipe dream. Feeling frustrated and stymied at every step, he rolled himself up in the sheets of the bed like a cocoon and tried to think. But he could not think, and thinking when he was in no mood to think only made him feel peevish and ill-used.

He rang for a servant to help him dress, and a few minutes later a middle-aged uniformed man rapped on the door and glided into the room smoothly with the oily unctuousness of someone steeped in long servitude.

"Good morning, sir," crooned the butler.

"Good morning, George," replied Hartley with a yawn. "Is the master at breakfast?"

"No, sir. He left early this morning."

"Where did he go?"

"I'm not sure, sir."

"Help me get dressed, will you, please?"

"Certainly, sir."

Hartley dressed, with the valet's help. The process took him nearly half an hour because his clothes were tight fitting and snug, as none of the modern convenient clothing fasteners had yet been invented. Chicago mechanical engineer Whitcomb L. Judson (1836–1909), for example, would not patent his invention of the zipper for another eighty-six years. So Hartley wore a simple gray outfit that had no fly or zipper and consisted of an ensemble of gray tight-fitting
pantaloons
—which had become a symbol of democracy since the French Revolution—a simple shirt, and a tailored coat.

Recently, the two revolutions—the American (1774–1781) and the French (1789–1799)—had contributed to the democratization of fashion reflected in the relative simplicity of Hartley's outfit. Before these two upheavals, so-called sumptuary laws had dictated rigorous standards of dress to differentiate between an aristocrat and a commoner. Distinctions between the classes were still being signaled in their respective styles of dress, but these differences had become more muted and existed not so much in design as in the use of particular fabrics. The clothing of an upper-class man, for example, was often trimmed in silk and lace, while the lower classes wore simple trousers known as
sans-culottes
(without breeches), made of homespun fabrics.

Having dressed, Hartley had breakfast by himself, sitting with a bemused air about him as if he hadn't quite decided who he was and what he was about to do. He was served by a man who was not particularly conscientious and whose attitude Hartley found annoying. Servants were notoriously sensitive to the power centers in a household and had a keen sense of whom to butter up and whom they could safely ignore. It was plain that the man had decided that Hartley was just another sponging second son.

Halfway through breakfast, Hartley beckoned to the servant to come to him. The man ambled casually across the room.

"Yes, sir," he muttered indifferently.

"Tell the stable boy to saddle my horse," Hartley said.

"And which horse is yours, sir?"

"The same one that was mine yesterday."

"Yesterday the stable boy asked me this same question, sir. Which is why I'm asking you."

Hartley said through gritted teeth, "Tell the boy to saddle up the horse I rode yesterday."

"Very good, sir," the man replied in a voice whose tone suggested that Hartley was something of a nuisance. Then he loped off toward the kitchen and disappeared.

A few minutes later Hartley was cantering the horse down a narrow bridle path that threaded through the woodlands of the property.

 

* * *

 

The English countryside, then as now, was a profuse garden of loveliness that rivaled the biblical splendors of Eden. Spring was still two months away, but by April a gaudy explosion of blossoms and flowers would ignite the land with a spectacular beauty that would make Englishmen scattered all over the globe yearn for their homeland and moan a variation of the plaintive words that would one day be written by the yet unborn poet, Robert Browning (1812–1889): "O, to be in England / now that April's there . . ."

It was too cold to be riding, and Hartley knew that the moment he mounted his horse and trotted down the bridle path. But he also knew that to turn around and go back would make him look ridiculous before the servants, which was the one thing in the world upper-class Englishmen most dreaded. So he rode on bravely, his nose leaking, the cold air stinging his lungs, and to take his mind off the wintry conditions, he began once again to rehearse last night's encounter with the widow.

The landscape around him looked like it had been shorn; everywhere sprouted the stubble of denuded trees and bushes and twiggy bramble. Now and again a blast of winter air would sweep over the bridle path, making the bare trees shudder as if spasming from the cold.

As he trotted his horse through the woods, Hartley, with a little effort, might have glimpsed scraps of childhood memories dangling from the bushes and trees. All around him was the stage in which he had reveled during the best years of his childhood. As a boy, he used to ramble through these woodlands, his imagination seeding the dense foliage with fantasy dragons, prowling highway men, knights errant looking for trouble, and in this very spot he had left many a villain bleeding to death after a fierce and savage sword fight. His sword, which the unimaginative world thought was made of wood, to his mind's eye had been forged from the finest tempered steel, invisible to the probing eye of the intruding adult. But no adult living could have been in the place he was at that time, for then he had been adrift in that estuary of childhood where imagination and reality mingled like river and sea as they do only in the mind of the very young. Those years when he played alone and carefree in this world of make-believe had been the happiest of his life. And now that he looked back and could see the imaginary and playful splendor that was once his, he could no longer partake of it without feeling ridiculous—a certain and dismal sign of adulthood. Then he had been a lighthearted child; now he was a scheming man.

Hartley broke through the trees at a trot and saw the house towering majestically over the bare fields and felt a pang of regret. If he'd only been born some few years sooner, all of this would be his, and the thought of missed opportunity through blind fate galled him into a rage that shook him like a tremor. The horse, meanwhile, had also got a glimpse of the house and broke into a run for the stables. Hartley pulled brutally on the reins, not wanting to appear as if he were fleeing the cold, and in response, he felt the animal shiver and tremble under him as it slowed down reluctantly with a noticeable muscular spasm.

"That's a good girl," murmured Hartley, patting the horse on the neck and feeling the tendons and striated muscles stretching with the effort.

A few minutes later, horse and man cantered into the paddocks at a leisurely pace as though the bitter cold did not exist. The horse was emitting steam like an overheated engine, but the man sat on its back looking as if it were a beautiful spring day.

"A bit chilly, isn't it, sir," the stable boy greeted him as Hartley dismounted.

"Is it?" Hartley responded as if he had no idea. Then without another word, he patted the horse on the withers and headed toward the main house, hoping with all his heart that he would find a brisk fire blazing in the drawing room.

 

* * *

 

In 1805 the physical world was something of a
terra incognito
, meaning that much about it was unknown and much of what was known was wrong. Of course, a hundred years from now people will no doubt say the same about us and what we presume to know. Yet there were measurable and major differences between the generation to which Hartley belonged and us.

Hartley and his contemporaries, for example, had no telephone, no electricity with all its conveniences, no airplanes, no mechanical means of transportation, no television, no computers, and no Internet. The year before, 1804, had seen the invention of the first steam locomotive by British engineer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833), who had demonstrated its practical uses for heavy hauling and the transporting of passengers.

Britain was in an expansive, almost boisterous mood as she acquired dominion over a substantial chunk of the globe. The world had weathered the puffed-up sterility of the eighteenth century, and its chief windbag, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), had gone kicking and screaming into the salons of the afterlife where he could spend eternity hectoring and bullying the saints with his glib opinions on every issue under the sun. The poetry of the day was written in rhymed couplets that to the modern ear would sound like an advertising jingle.

Not that Hartley could tell a poem from the oink of a pig or cared in the least about either one. What he cared about was London, where he lived as one particle of the floating population in the most populous city on earth. Of London Dr. Johnson said in one of his more memorable apothegms, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Hartley Fudges was neither tired of London nor of life. The wonder was that neither was he tired of wallowing in an overcrowded wasteland of raw sewage, offal, and filth.

 

 

End of Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

___________________

 

 

1.
In telling the story of a sailor who disappeared on a voyage to Patria in the Ionian Sea, what ancient literary technique is the author using and to what end?

 

2.
What does Carlos's treatment of the whore tell us about him and his view of the world?

 

3.
The text specifies in great detail exactly what each word in Carlos's several names means and how each memorializes some real or mythological significance to his family. What other purpose does this detailed analysis of Carlos's name accomplish?

 

4.
What single word do we use nowadays to describe the quality that Carlos is seeking in his interactions with his contemporaries?

 

5.
Why does Carlos stubbornly persist in maintaining the hoax of his divinity for the village mothers whose babies were sick? What motive did he have for doing so?

 

6.
How would you characterize the religious feelings of Orocobix for the zemi? What can you infer was the difference between the faith of Orocobix and that of Catholics of his day?

 

7.
What narrative point of view does the writer use to tell the story of the drowning death of God Carlos? What are the benefits of using that point of view?

 

8.
What do you suppose would have been the reaction of the Spanish seamen to the customary nudity of the Arawaks?

 

9.
De la Serena confides to Carlos that there is no God. What do you think was his reason for making this confession?

 

10.
What do you suppose is the difference in outlook between the members of a society that is literate and one that is not? What difference in religious beliefs is literacy likely to make?

 

11.
What can you make of that strange figure whom Orocobix encountered in the woods where Brayou died? What is the most likely explanation of his identity?

 

12.
What economic system did the Indians implicitly seem to practice among themselves?

 

13.
If there is an epigram for this book, it is voiced by Colibri, nicknamed the hummingbird: "There is no truth. There is only explanation." What does this mean in the context of the novel?