The Harp and the Shadow

by Alejo Carpentier

  No. The ideal, the perfect way to join together the Christian faithful of the old and new worlds—as an antidote to the venomous philosophical ideas that had taken too firm a hold in America—was to find a saint whose acceptance was ecumenical, a saint whose fame was unlimited, incontrovertible, a saint of planetary wingspan, a saint so enormous, even larger than the legendary Colossus of Rhodes, that he could have one foot on the shores of this continent and the other on the banks of Europe, with a vision from above the Atlantic that embraced both hemispheres. A Saint Christopher, Christophoros, Porter of Christ, known and admired by everyone, universal in his works and in his prestige. Suddenly, Mastaï had a lightning flash of inspiration: he had thought of the Grand Admiral of Ferdinand and Isabella. With his eyes fixed on the dazzlingly starry sky, he waited for an answer to the question that escaped from his lips. And he thought he could hear the words of Dante:

  I will tell you nothing, so that you

  may find the answer within yourself

  But at this point he felt humbled by his awareness of his own insignificance: he would need the authority of a Supreme Pontiff or, at least, of a prince of the Church, to present a proposal to the Holy Congregation of Rites initiating the canonization of the Grand Admiral—too much time had elapsed since the death of the Discoverer of America, and, to be perfectly frank, his case was somewhat out of the ordinary . . . and he, Mastaï, was only an obscure canon, a mere servant of the court, a defeated participant in a failed apostolic mission. He put his hands over his face that night beneath the immense Cape Horn sky to drive away an idea whose very enormity was beginning to possess him . . . Yes. On that memorable night, he had covered his face with his hands, the same hands that now vacillated between the ink bottle and the quill, the hands of His Holiness Pope Pius IX Why was he hesitating? He had carried that dream for years, a dream that was on the brink of becoming a reality, that would make the canonization of Christopher Columbus one of the major works of his long papacy. He regarded the document the Primate of Bordeaux had submitted for his attention, slowly rereading a single sentence: Eminenttissimus quippe Princeps Cardinalis Donnet, Archiepiscopus Burdigalensis, quator ab hine annis exposuit SANCTITATI TUAE venerationem fidelium erga servum Dei Christophorum Columbum, enixe deprecans pro introductione illius causae exceptionali ordine.1

  He turned to the decree attached to the petition and endorsed it with a firm signature, authorizing the beginning of the instruction and process. With a sigh of relief and the feeling of having completed a great task, His Holiness closed the red binder containing the documents. Quietly opening the door, Sor Crescencia brought in a lamp whose soft light was diffused by a green shade, a nightly event announcing the approach of twilight. He gave the docket to the nun and asked her to see that it was delivered in the morning, through the customary channels, to the head of the Holy Congregation of Rites. Then the pope was alone. Because of his trip to America, he had long been considered the Vatican’s greatest authority on the problems of America; he had been consulted on all the thorniest cases and his opinions received with the greatest attention. He had boasted more than once of being the “first American, indeed, Chilean, pope.”2 (“Because I am interested in everything that occurs in those lands across the sea,” he said.) But now he had finally set in motion the intricate mechanism of a beatification and needed to name a Postulator, a Cardinal Chairman, a Promoter General of the Faith, a Prothonotary, and a Chancellor to participate in the process—the first step in the canonization of Christophoros—only to find himself worrying, once again, about the requirement for a “special procedure”: pro introductione illius causae exceptionali ordine. Rome always preferred that the process of beatification begin as soon as possible after the death of the candidate. When too much time had passed, there was always the danger that local devotion had exaggerated what had merely been a pious human life, in which case the Holy Congregation of Rites might grant only a beatification equipolente—diminished in force and extent—when what the Supreme Pontiff wanted in the case of Columbus was for the beatification to be universally proclaimed and widely discussed. Because of the passage of time, therefore, the “special procedure” was required. But . . . what about the rest of his case? There could be no doubt of its strength. Thirteen years before, he had requested that Count Roselly of Lorgues, a French Catholic writer, compose a true life of Christopher Columbus, using the most modern documents and information. And that biography—he had read it twenty times—clearly demonstrated that the Discoverer of America was worthy of a place among the major saints. Count Roselly of Lorgues could not have been mistaken. He was a scrupulous, rigorous, dedicated historian, completely trustworthy; and he maintained that the great mariner had lived his entire life with an invisible halo over his head. It was time to make it visible ad majorem Dei gloriam. The pope remembered that, just as he himself had, Columbus had belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis, and that it was a Franciscan who had been his confessor one afternoon in Valladolid . . . Oh, to have been there that afternoon, in Valladolid, to have been the obscure friar who had had the immense good fortune to receive the final confession of the Revealer of the Planet! How exciting! On that afternoon in Valladolid, how the cosmic images must have flowed, with Columbus’s words transforming the poor country estate into a veritable Palace of Marvels! . . . Surely even Ulysses’ tales in his allies’ courts could not have matched the splendid tales of adventure that emerged that afternoon from the mouth of Columbus, who would discover the mysteries of death before nightfall, just as, in life, he had discovered the mysteries of a geographic beyond, previously unknown, which men had imagined since the happy age and happy times that Don Quixote spoke of in his discourse to the goatherds, “the happy age and the happy times on which the ancients bestowed the name golden.”

  T

  hey’ve gone to get the confessor. But it will take him a long time to get here, because my mule refuses to hurry when the road is bad (mules are fit only for women and clerics anyway); and to get that estimable Franciscan, who has vanquished moral confusion, they have to travel four leagues to the home of one of his relatives who is in need of extreme unction. Since I already have one foot in the grave, I’ll use the time to marshal my thoughts, because I’m going to have to talk for a long time to say what I have to say, and I’m more daunted, perhaps, by how much I have experienced than by my illness itself. . . I’ll have to tell him everything. Everything, simply everything. I’ll have to put my entire self into words and somehow convey even more than the words themselves say—because (and I don’t know if a friar can really understand this) taking action often entails impulses, constraints, excesses (I concede the word) that, act by act, step by step, are unworthy of the fine words that emerge out of the darkness, finally, and are inscribed next to your name on the tablet of history. The farmer who has shaken the fruit from his neighbor’s olive trees is almost innocent as he stands before the Throne of God, as is the whore (pardon my language, but I intend to speak plainly, addressing the highest of the high) who, for want of a better occupation, plies her trade on her back with a sailor in port, while above her hangs a picture of Mary Magdalene, whose holy effigy in Paris graces the banner of the Brotherhood of Rakes, which was recognized as a public treasure—signed and sealed by official decree—by King Louis of France. People like them can make their final confession in a few words. But for those like me who have seen things that were never even imagined before my adventures; for those like me who have sailed into the unknown (and, yes, I admit, I was not the first, I have to admit it; I called it Colchis, thinking that others would understand me better, but Colchis it never was); for those like me who have entered the realm of monsters, torn the veil from mystery, and defied the rages of man and nature—we have much to confess. Things that will be scandalous, unsettling, that will topple truths and expose falsehoods, if only for the friar who will hear me in the privacy of my confession. But at this moment, while I am alive—still—waiting for my final auditor
, I am two in one. One, lying down, his hands already folded in prayer, resigned—not so very!—to the death that is coming for him through that door; and the other, looking on from the outside, striving to free himself from the “me” who encloses and imprisons and tries to smother him, crying in Augustine’s voice, “My body can no longer bear the weight of my bloody soul.” Looking at myself through the eyes of the other who stands by my bed, I see myself like the curiosity I saw on the island of Chios, which a trader at fairs—who was wearing a hat with a zodiac painted on the hatband—showed to me, saying he had found it in the land of Ptolemy: it was a sort of box, in the shape of a man, which contained a second box, similar to the first, which in turn encased the body of a man, who almost looked alive, preserved as he had been by the Egyptians through their arts of embalming. So much vitality was retained in that dry, almost tanned figure, that I thought it might return to life at any moment . . . Stiffening, I still feel the woolen wrapping that envelops my defeated body like that first box; but inside my body, worn down by exhaustion and illness, resides the interior “I,” still lucid, keen, of sound mind and memory, witness to marvels, stained with weakness, hedged with caution, repentant today for what I did yesterday, tortured when I regard myself but calm when I face others, at once frightened and rebellious, a sinner by Divine Will, both actor and spectator, judge and advocate, my own counsel before the Tribunal of the Supreme Prosecution where I also occupy the magistrate’s bench and hear the arguments and look at myself face to face. And to raise my hands and cry; and indict and reply, and defend myself against the accusing finger that presses against my chest, and sentence myself and appeal my sentence, and reach the highest courts of a judicial system where, finally, I am alone with myself with a conscience that accuses me of much and absolves me of much—alone before the Auditor who hears our unending explanations; whose face we will never know; whose very name, for centuries and centuries, could not be uttered by faithful observers of His Law, people like my parents and grandparents; and who condescended to let it be said in His Book that we are made in His image and likeness, perhaps because He understood that imperfect beings born of His Infinite Perfection would need an analogy, in His own image, or their limited understanding would not even begin to comprehend the universal and ubiquitous image of the One who propels and regulates the prodigious mechanism of the planets every day, with infallible punctuality.

  . . . But it is not time for me to presume to unveil mysteries that surpass my understanding, it is time for a humility prompted by the nearness of the end—an end in which the summoned person, the one placed in the docket, asks himself whether he will soon be dazzled, consumed, by the fearful vision of the Likeness Never Seen, or whether he will spend millennia waiting in the shadows; it is time either to take the bench of the accused and be sentenced before the bar or to be lodged in a place of endless waiting by some winged usher, angel of the notary, with feathered pinions and quills behind his ears, who is the keeper of the register of souls. But then you remember that such speculations are gravely offensive to the spiritual rules of your religion, which objects to all vain questions and all immodest conjectures. You remember, seafarer, the words that are carved on the stone where every day the faithful tread in the greatest sanctuary of Toledo:

  Aquí yace:

  Polvo

  Ceniza

  Nada

  Here lies:

  Dust

  Ash

  Nothing

  Like that time, one day in January, in the clamor of a storm, when a voice—at once loud and clear, near and distant—sounded in his ears: Oh, foolish one, slow to believe and serve your God, the God of all men. Ever since you were born, He has had great designs for you. Do not fear, but trust in him: all your tribulations are inscribed in marble, and have their purpose.

  So I will speak. I will tell him everything.

  O

  f the cardinal sins there is only one that has always been foreign to me, and that is sloth. Because I suffered from lust, I lived a lustful life until I was freed from that sin by greater affairs, and until my soul was completely possessed by a woman with the singular appellation of Madrigal of the High Towers—a name that called to my mind a beautiful song, a regal epiphany, a supreme object of desire—so that even when I first looked upon those mountains that no Christian had ever seen before, their shape immediately reminded me of those other soft, heaving mounds etched in the most secret recesses of my memory . . . Ever since my father, without giving up his wool business, opened a cheese and wine store in Savona—with a back room where the customers could carry their glasses to the spigot and bang them together on a thick walnut table—I liked to listen to the stories of the seafaring men, emptying bottle after bottle of red wine, which they secretly shared with me—wine I’ve enjoyed so much ever since that many people later in my life were amazed that I always carried a huge quantity of wine casks on my seafaring ventures and that, when I came to think of agricultural endeavors, I always reserved the best lands that Divine Providence had granted me for the sowing and cultivating of wine. Noah, who was the ancestor of all navigators, was the first to set a bad example; and since wine heats the blood and incites lewd appetites, there was no brothel in the Mediterranean that didn’t know my youthful passion when I took to the sea, to my father’s disgust . . . I knew the women of Sicily, Chios, Cyprus, Lesbos, and other islands where the population was a mixture of half-converted Moors, new Christians who still refuse to eat pork, Syrians who make the sign of the cross in front of any church without knowing what denomination it is, and Greeks who are ready to sell their sisters at any hour, while the church bells chime, and don’t mind trafficking in sodomy and buggery if that’s what’s wanted. I penetrated them all: women who played the ambuca and timbrel to put me in the mood; “Genoans” dressed like Jewesses, who gave me a complicitous wink to whet my desire; women with alcoholic eyes who made the butterflies tattooed on their bellies flutter when they danced; others—almost always Moors—who held the money I gave them in their mouths to defend their tongues against other intruding tongues; and women who swore and blasphemed, who still looked young from behind, at least when some appreciable generosity led them to grant—rare favor!—what they never granted anyone; and Alexandrians, their faces caked with powder, rouged and painted, like figureheads on a ship—like the dead portrayed on the outer lids of the sarcophagi that are still used in their country; and those from all over who howl that they’ll pass out, that you’re killing them, that they’re already dead, that there’s no one like you, and they finish you off in three bumps and three grinds, while they overcome your indifference by covering their loins with a succession of tales intended to cause a pleasure so vocalized that you would pay just to listen . . .All those I knew, and many more in rough Sardinia and Marseilles, city of extravagant vice, even though it wasn’t until years later that, sailing the African coast, I knew the dark-skinned women—always darker—until I reached the darkest ones of Guinea, of the Gold Coast, with their knife-inscribed cheeks, adorned with pearls threaded through their eight braids, woolly hair sticking out, and abundant buttocks, whom the Portuguese and Galicians so rightly favored—and I say “rightly,” because I seem to remember that if King Solomon was wise for his Solomonic judgments and learned governing, he was also wise in allying himself with the woman—nigra sum . . .—whose breasts were like clusters of grapes, of the black, swollen grapes ripened at the foot of the mountains, in sea breezes, and made into a heavy, fragrant wine that, when it is drunk, leaves its savorous imprint on the lips . . . But man does not live by flesh alone, and in my voyages I had the good fortune to learn the arts of navigation—although, to tell the truth, I put more faith in my ability to gauge the smell of the winds, decipher the language of the clouds, and interpret the changing colors of the water than in using calculations and instruments as my guide. I was fascinated by the flight of both sea and land birds, because they can be better informed than man in judging the directions
that are most favorable. I understood the wisdom of the Hyperboreans who—I’ve been told—carried two crows on their ships to be set free when they lost their orientation in some unfavorable navigation, because they knew that if the birds didn’t return to the ship, they needed only to set sail in the direction the birds had flown to find land in a few miles. This wisdom of the birds led me to study the peculiarities and habits of some of the animals of the universe that astonish us, with our limited understanding, by the ways they live and join and procreate. Thus, I knew that the rhinoceros—in nare cornus—in its rampages can be soothed only by a maiden who exposes her chest as he approaches, and “in that manner” (Saint Isadoro of Seville tells us) “the animal will grow calm and rest his head on the young woman’s breasts.” I had not seen this marvel of nature, but I knew that the basilisk, queen of the serpents, kills creatures that resemble it on sight, so that no bird can escape it. I knew of the saurian, a small lizard that crawls into a hole in a wall that faces east when it is old and blind, and then turns to the sun as it rises, and takes strength from it, and recovers its sight. I was also interested in the salamander, which, as everybody knows, lives in the middle of flames without being harmed or consumed by them; a fish called the stargazer, because it has an eye in its head that looks up at the sky; and the sucking-fish, schools of which can halt a ship so completely that it seems rooted to the ocean floor; and, like all creatures of the sea, I was particularly interested in the swallow that nests on the ocean in winter and raises its young there on the water—and Saint Isadoro also tells us that when the young birds hatch, the elements become calm and the winds die down for seven days, as nature pays tribute to that bird and its young. Each day I found more pleasure in studying the world and its wonders—and from so much study I became convinced that I had opened secret doors to reveal marvels and mysteries unsuspected by most mortals. I wanted to know it all. I envied King Solomon—”wiser than Heman, Kalkol, and Darda”—who was able to speak of all the trees, from the cedar that is from Lebanon to the hyssop that roots in walls, and who also knew the customs of all the four-legged animals, the birds, the reptiles, and the fish of the universe. And why shouldn’t he know everything? Wasn’t he informed about everything by his messengers, ambassadors, tradesmen, and seamen? From Ophir and Tarsus they brought him shipments of gold. In Egypt they bought his chariots, and in Cilicia they procured his horses; and his stables in turn provided chargers for the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Aram. Moreover, he was informed about an infinite variety of things—virtues of plants, relationships of beasts, and lewd and lascivious acts, and the contumelies, ignominies, and sodomies of different peoples—by his women, Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sondian, not to mention the Egyptians—and very fortunate was he, that wise, depraved man, that in his marvelous palace he could choose, according to each day’s whim, from seven hundred principal wives and three hundred concubines, not counting guests, travelers, unexpected visitors, the woman from Sheba, for example, who paid him to have her. (Secret dream of all true men!) And yet the world known by King Solomon was so vast and diverse that I couldn’t help concluding that his fleet of ships really went only to places that were known. They had never gone beyond, all they could bring back were tales of those monsters mentioned by the travelers and sailors who had crossed the thresholds of territories that even now are virtually unknown. According to witnesses of unquestioned authority, to this very day there are races of people in the Far East who have faces that are entirely flat, without any noses; and there are others whose lower lips are so prominent that they use them to cover their faces when they want to sleep or be in the shade; still others have such small mouths they have to ingest their food through oat straws; and there are some who have no tongues and communicate only by signs and gestures. In Scythia there are people known as Panotians, who have such large ears that they can wrap themselves i;i them, as in a cape, to keep themselves warm. In Ethiopia live the Sciopodes, who are remarkable for their legs and their swiftness in running; in winter they lie on the ground and shelter themselves with their feet, which are so long and broad they can use them as sunshades. In such countries, there are men who live only on perfumes, others who have six hands, and most marvelous of all, women who give birth to fully grown people—people who are rejuvenated and become children in their old age. And, without traveling so far, remember the story of Saint Jerome, that supreme doctor, who tells of discovering a faun or a goat-man who was exhibited in Alexandria and became an excellent Christian, against the expectations of everyone accustomed to consign such beings to the legends of paganism . . . What’s more, though many men may brag about knowing Libya, they’re probably quite unaware of the existence of the dreadful men born there without heads, with their eyes and mouths where we have nipples and navels. And it seems that in Libya there are also antipodes, who have the soles of their feet reversed and eight toes on each foot. But reports are divided about the antipodes, and some travelers say that they include an appalling variety of dog-headed men, cyclops, troglodytes, ant-people, and headless men, not to mention men with two faces, like the god Janus of the ancients . . . But I don’t really think that is how the antipodes look. I am convinced—although it is entirely a personal opinion—that the antipodes are completely different: they are simply the creatures mentioned by Saint Augustine, even though the Bishop of Hippo denied their existence and mentioned them only because of all the talk about them. If bats can sleep hanging by their feet, if many insects can move quite easily across the ceiling of the whore’s room where I am presently pursuing these thoughts—while the woman is out getting wine at a nearby tavern—then surely there can exist human beings capable of going without heads or with their heads underneath, whatever the venerable author of the Enchiridion may say. There are acrobats who spend half their lives walking on their hands without the sanguinary humors flowing into their temples, and there are people in the Indies who claim to be saints and rest on their elbows for months with their legs in the air, holding their bodies perfectly still. There is a portent to be found in the tales of men like Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of a whale, with his forehead plastered with seaweed, breathing as if he were in his natural environment. We deny many things because our limited understanding makes us think them impossible. But as I continued reading and educating myself I kept on finding that things I had thought were impossible were in fact real. To believe them one has only to read the reports and chronicles of the brave traders, the great navigators—especially the great navigators like Pitheas, the mariner from Marseilles who was trained in Phoenician rowing techniques and who pointed his vessel northward, ever northward, in an insatiable desire for discovery, until he reached a place where the sea congealed like the ice on mountain peaks. More and more I realized that I had still not read enough. I would have to read more books. Especially books that described voyages. I had heard of a tragedy written by Seneca about Jason leading a band of argonauts west of the Pontus Euxinus, where they discovered the golden fleece of Colchis. I would have to become familiar with Seneca’s tragedy, which, according to the ancients, contained so many valuable lessons.