The Harp and the Shadow

by Alejo Carpentier

  T

  he hoarse, echoing, drawn-out notes of the trumpets descend cheerlessly from the top of the smaller mast of the slow-moving ship, lost in billows of fog so thick that from the sterncastle you can’t make out the prow The sea, extending unbroken in all directions, looks like a lake of lead, with calm ripples describing diminutive crests that flatten out without ever breaking into whitecaps. The watch shouts out his call, but no one answers. Again the questioning cry is raised and then lost in the lulling silence of the cloud that closes in upon me, twenty varas away, and I am left alone—alone with a sailor’s phantoms—in tense anticipation. Because of the emotion raised by the watch’s cry, because of my anxiety to see, I press myself against the gunwales as soon as the sextant’s bell sounds. And though I have sailed all over the world, today I find myself on an unknown course on a voyage that retains the flavor of heroism—and I can’t say that about my one-day runs in the Mediterranean. I am impatient to catch a glimpse of this strange land—they say that it is strange indeed!—which marks the end of the earth. Since leaving Bristol we have had favorable winds and favorable seas, and it seems there will be no repetition of my ordeal off Cape San Vicente where, by the divine will of the Lord, I was rescued, clinging to an oar, after the horrible wreck of a flaming storeship. In Galloway we picked up Master Jacob, foremost authority on these aquamarine routes, who worked for Spinola and Di Negro, guiding their ships full of lumber and wine. It seems that since there are neither trees nor grapevines on the island we are approaching, wood and wine are the things its inhabitants value most: lumber for building their houses; wine for raising their spirits during the interminable winter when the very ocean congeals around them, its waves frozen into ice—the drifting mountains that Pitheas of Marseilles had reported seeing—shutting them off from the world. At least that’s what I was told, but Master Jacob, who knows these regions well, maintains that the sea did not freeze at all this year—nor did it in several other years—because certain currents from the west temper the rigors of the season . . . This Master Jacob is a pleasant, jovial companion, who now resides in remote Galloway, where he lives with a beautiful Scottish woman, young, freckled, and large-breasted, who is not too concerned with questions of the purity of bloodlines that so preoccupy the rulers of Spain these days. It has long been rumored that soon—next month, one of these days, no one knows when—the tribunals of the Inquisition will begin to investigate and record the past, the progenitors, the origins of the new Christians. It will no longer suffice to forswear apostasy, but each convert will be called to account, retroactively, for anything he has been seen doing that raises the suspicion of fraud, dissimulation, indifference, or falsehood, to the delight of any debtor, any coveter of a neighbor’s goods, any cunning enemy—of any seamstress of hymens or caster of the evil eye, interested in turning attention from his own business of charms and love potions. But there is more: a saying that started no one knows where, a joke that has been passed from mouth to mouth, foretelling unhappy times ahead. The saying—as I’ve heard it—goes Hey, Jews, better pack your bags . . . It may be meant as a joke, but the joke could get rough and turn into the reality of a new exodus—which my Lord certainly cannot want, since so many riches proceed from the Jews, and the Santángels, those great financiers, have filled the royal tills with a “loan” of thousands and thousands of coins stamped with the die of their circumcisions. Master Jacob believes that a prudent man counts for two, that it’s time to begin the diaspora, and so, with the aid of the firm of Spinola and Di Negro, he has decided to put down stakes in Galloway, where he runs their supply store by the side of his buxom, freckled, big-breasted girl, who makes his life sweet, even i-f she sometimes smells too strong, like a lot of redheads. Moreover, he possesses a skill that has made him indispensable: his prodigious ability to learn a language in a few days. He speaks Portuguese as easily as Provençal; the language of Genoa or Picardy as fluently as the English of London, the jargon of Britain; he is even conversant with the abrupt language, bristling with consonants, stutters, and snores—“the language of sneezing inward” he calls it—that is employed in the gloomy island toward which we are sailing—an island enveloped in fog, though the dark outlines of its shape begin to appear on the horizon now, a little after the last canonical hour. We have reached the end of the earth! . . .

  I don’t know why Master Jacob looks at me askance every time I talk about the “end of the earth.” And now that we are on land, in a sturdy pine house, passing the resined wineskin back and forth, Master Jacob, his voice a little loud from drink, makes fun of the notion that this is the end of the known world. He says that even the bald-headed infants in soggy diapers who crawl in the streets of this port whose name they can’t even say, even they would laugh at me if I told them that this ground we’re standing on is the limit or end of anything. And, recounting marvel after marvel, he tells me that these men of the north (Normans, they are therefore called, it seems), when we had barely emerged from the womb to make our first tentative search for new sea routes, had already traveled to the land of the Russes in the east, and having turned their light and well-armed boats to the rivers of the south, had already reached the kingdoms of Gog and Magog and the sultanates of Arabia, where they obtained coins that they are proud to display, such trophies obtained in some Chersonese peninsula . . . And to show he wasn’t lying, Master Jacob showed me some denarii and dirhams from the districts where the remote ancestors of these tribes had traveled, which he kept like talismans in his mariner’s handkerchief—even though his religion, as I know so well, prohibits the practice of such superstitions. The Master takes the wineskin, squirts a large draft of wine down his gullet, swallows, and turns his eyes to the west. He tells me how, long ago, as much as several centuries ago, a redheaded man from these parts, condemned to exile for a murder he had committed, had undertaken a voyage that led him far from the usual routes, to an enormous country he called “Green Land,” because of the green trees he found there. “Impossible!” I tell Master Jacob, citing the greatest cartographers of the age, all of whom are ignorant of that Green Land, which has never been mentioned by our greatest sailors. Master Jacob gives me a shrewd look and tells me that more than two hundred years ago there were already a hundred ninety farms in Green Land, two convents of nuns, and even a dozen churches—one of them almost as large as the grandest the Normans had built in their lands. And that was not all. Lost in the fog, sailing phantasmal ships through hyperborean nights without dawn, cutting through the clouds by candlelight, those men dressed in hides had traveled even farther to the west, and then still farther, discovering islands, unknown lands, which had been mentioned in a treatise entitled Inventio fortunata, which I didn’t know, but which Master Jacob seems to have studied closely. But there was even more. Sailing ever westward, farther and farther westward, a son of the redheaded mariner, called “Leif the Lucky,” reached an immense land that he named “Wood Land.” In that land salmon abounded, fruits and berries were plentiful, the trees were enormous, and—a marvel at that latitude—the vegetation did not die back in winter. Moreover, the coast was not craggy and forbidding, nor was it plagued with underwater caves where the ocean roared and terrible dragons dwelled . . . Leif the Lucky traveled inland in that unknown paradise until a German sailor named Tyrkir disappeared from his party. Several days passed, and just when his companions had concluded they would never see him again, that he had been devoured by some unknown, ferocious monster, Tyrkir reappeared, as drunk as a lord, announcing that he had discovered enormous wild vines whose grapes had started to ferment and had produced a wine that, well, just look at me, no one here can challenge me, I’ll just sleep it of£ this is Valhalla, and I’m not going to leave, don’t anyone try to stop me, because if they do I’ll lop their heads off the way Beowulf decapitated that dragon with the poison fangs, I’m the king here, and anyone who says different . . . And then he fell fiat on the ground and vomited and wailed that all Normans are sons of bitches . . . But
from that day on the Normans knew that past Green Land lay “Vinland” . . . “And if you think I’m lying,” says Master Jacob, “consult the writings of Adam of Bremen and Oderico Vital.” But I don’t know where to find those books, which are probably written in a language I don’t understand. What I want is for him to tell me, to relate the stories they are still telling here—on this island where jets of boiling water spew out of holes in black rocks—singing and playing the harp, those preservers of memories of ancient sagas called skalds. And my dark friend tells me that when the men here learned of the existence of Vinland, they soon made another voyage there, a hundred and sixty men, under the command of a certain Thorvald, another son of the redheaded outcast, and his brother-in-law Thorstein, who was married to a woman who wore a sword in her belt and a knife between her breasts, and who was named Freydis. And again they found the abundant salmon, the acidic wine with its pleasing intoxication, the vegetation that never died back, the young larches, and they even discovered, farther inland, vast fields of wild wheat. And everything seemed pleasing and delightful, when suddenly there appeared boats that seemed to be made from the hides of water creatures, which were paddled by small men with coppery skin, prominent cheekbones, rather elongated eyes, with hair like the manes of horses, whom the large, coarse, fair-skinned men considered quite ugly and malformed. At first they entered into trade with them and things went well. They made magnificent exchanges that worked to their advantage. They obtained valuable skins in return for whatever seemed new to those men with whom they communicated by signs: cheap brooches, amber beads, glass necklaces, and, especially, red cloth—because it seemed that they were particularly attracted by the color red, which was highly prized by the Normans as well. And everything was fine until the day a bull, which had been brought along in one of the ships, escaped from his pen and began to roam the coast. No one knew what happened to the little men: they began a frantic flight, as if something had driven them mad, perhaps some sign of evil according to their pagan religion; but the little men came back later, swarming, climbing, fast-moving hordes of them, hurling stones, showers of pebbles, avalanches of gravel, upon the fair-skinned giants whose axes and swords proved useless in this kind of warfare. It was no use for the woman Freydis to expose her breasts to shame those men without balls who were fleeing for the ship. And, taking the sword of a fallen warrior, she threw herself upon the stone-flinging hordes, who were terrified by the cries of the dreadful woman and soon fled in turn . . . But that night, gathered together in council, the Vikings—as they were sometimes called—agreed to return home to outfit a new expedition with more men, better armed. That project, however, kindled little enthusiasm among people who dealt with the known world year after year, sending their ships to Paris, Sicily, and Constantinople. Nobody in those days wanted to risk the dangers of an inauspicious foothold in a land where their enemies—men, beasts—are not as frightening—since they are a danger that is known—as the mysteries of the mountains that had barely been glimpsed, rising abruptly out of the plains; of caves that might hold monsters; of the endless empty spaces; of brushlands where they heard wails, cries, and laments in the night, proving that there were spirits in the land-a land so vast, extending so far to the south, that it would take thousands and thousands of men and women to explore and populate it. So they did not return to the vast western land, and the image of Vinland has faded into the distance, like a mirage, lingering only as a marvelous memory in the legends of the skalds, so that its real existence is consigned to the great book by Adam of Bremen, historian to the Archbishop of Hamburg, who was charged with carrying the cross of Christ to the hyperborean lands, either known or not yet discovered, where the word of the Gospels had never been heard. And it was good that the Word be heard in those lands, since there are men living there, many men, who are ignorant of Him who died for their sins—and there are other men like them, or so they say, who ride in sleds pulled by dogs to travel to the land of eternal night . . . I asked Master Jacob for the name of those beings—surely the dupes of treacherous idolatries—who had the courage to throw the fair-skinned giants of the north out of their kingdom. “I don’t know what they call themselves,” the mariner replied. “In the language of the discoverers they are called skraelings, which means—how would we say it?—something like deformed, humpbacked, bandy-legged people. Yes. That’s it: bandy-legged. Because of course the Normans are tall and handsome. And those people, short, squat, flat-faced, seemed deformed to them. Skraelings. That is: bandylegged.” “I’d say manikins.” “That’s it, that’s it,” exclaimed Master Jacob, “manikins. That’s the very word!”