The Harp and the Shadow

by Alejo Carpentier

  That was in July. I had just turned forty Without claiming to be a handsome man, I felt I struck a good figure, with noble features and a Roman nose, clear eyes, my speech fluid and my gestures manly, my face smooth, and my skin unweathered by the marine air and the African sun, though my hair had already turned gray—which gave me a certain dignity, in addition to conveying an impression of experience and good judgment, attributed as it is, though often mistakenly, to something that merely marks the passage of the years. It was hot when I reached Santa Fe.

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  he too had just turned forty. And, excusing the absence of her husband, who was busy with matters of great importance—actually, questions of wine, women, and falconry—she received me by herself in her private room, amid Moorish furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which they had left behind in their retreat to Granada. It had been five years since I had seen her, in an unsatisfactory interview during which she had been peevish and inattentive and had seemed to me almost odious. But that time her headdress, with its veil that encircled her head, kept me from noticing that she was fair-haired and fair-skinned, like some Venetian women; her blue-green eyes were remarkably beautiful in a face so smooth and pink that it appeared that of a much younger woman, a face marked by an ironic and willful smile, owing perhaps to the many victories that her acute intelligence had produced in days of political discord and momentous decisions. She was no longer—as most people knew—a queen enamored of a man unworthy of such sentiment, since he had deceived her, in the sight and knowledge of his servants, with any maid of honor, woman of the court, saucy waiting maid, or attractive kitchen servant who happened to pass before him—when he wasn’t occupied with some converted Moor, hot-blooded Jew, or woman of the troops, if there was no better flesh in which to sink his teeth. Now the person to whom I was speaking of my great project was—as everyone also knew—the one who truly governed. The one who had followed the chancellor into the cathedral in Segovia, on the day of her coronation, brandishing a sword erect as a man’s member, grasped by the point, as a symbol of sovereignty and justice—and how they had criticized such a display of machisma!—now was the one who managed all the affairs of state with such energy. The Aragonese did nothing—except where his pack of hunting dogs was concerned, of course—without her consent. He had to show her his resolutions and decrees, and even his own letters, which she passed judgment on with such authority that if one of them displeased her she had it torn up by a secretary in the presence of her husband, whose orders—and everyone knew it—didn’t count for much, even in Aragon and Catalonia, whereas everyone across the country quaked in fear at the commands of the one who was the more vigorous, lively, intelligent, courageous, and wise of the two . . . In my first interview with that woman who had been born in Madrigal de las Altas Torres (and later I would have ample reason to love the name of that town), I spoke as I always did before the great and the powerful; once again I displayed my bag of wonders, my hallelujahs of dazzling geographies, but, as I began my recitation of possible marvels, a new idea began to take shape, based on my recent readings, and it seemed to delight my audience. Basing my argument on the concept of universal history developed by Paulus Orosius, I maintained that as the movement of the heavens and the stars is from east to west, so also the rule of the world has passed from the Assyrians to the Medes, from the Medes to the Persians, and then to the Macedonians, and then to the Romans, and then to the Gauls and the Germans, and finally to the Goths, founders of these reigns. It was fitting, therefore, that when the Moors had been driven from Granada—something that would soon be accomplished—we should look to the west, following the traditional expansion of the realms, governed by the movement of the stars, to reach the great and true empires of Asia-the Portuguese, after all, had only reached the outlying vassal states in their navigations along the Levantine routes. Naturally, I invoked Seneca’s prophesy, with such success that my royal listener arrogantly interrupted me to recite, from memory, some verses from the tragedy:

  Haec cum femineo constitit in choro,

  unius facies praenitet omnibus

  Kneeling before her, I repeated those verses, assuring her that she was the one of whom the great poet had been thinking when he said that “when she appeared from amid the chorus of women”—of all the women in the world—”all the others’ faces paled beside hers.” She gave me a slight but thrilling wink at that, and had me get up and sit next to her, and bit by bit we began to piece together the beautiful tragedy from memory . . . And that day, moved by the audacity of the woman who had thought me incapable of it, words came from me as if spoken by another—words that I will not repeat in my confession—until I was called from the room by the camp reveille beginning to sound. And ever since that happy day there has been only one woman for me in the world, the world that still waited for me to be fulfilled.

  But the world was impatient to be fulfilled. And the most impatient of all was me, newly embroiled in arguments, controversies, reflections, demonstrations, sophistries, discussions—all crap!—of cosmographies, geographies, theologies, for those whom I was trying to convince of the validity and great profitability of my enterprise, although as always, as always, as always, without revealing my great secret: what Master Jacob had revealed to me in the diurnal nights of the Land of Ice. To have spoken of that—and more than once, from pure exasperation, I was on the point of doing so—would have refuted my most argumentative opponents. But then the aspirer to the World Atlas could have been any sailor, more a student of taverns than of Pavía, more a cheesemonger than a pilot of Coulon el Mozo—and then we would see if in the end it didn’t fall to someone else to command the fleet that I wanted for myself! Several months passed, Granada finally fell, the Jews were expelled from Spain—Hey, Jews, better pack your bags!—and everything was glorious for the double crown, but I remained in the doldrums . . . In the nights of our intimacy, Columba—as I called her when we were alone—promised me three caravels, ten caravels, fifty caravels, a hundred caravels, all the caravels I wanted; but, at daybreak, the caravels went up in smoke, and I was alone, walking at dawn, going home, watching the masts and sails that had been triumphantly erected in my visions of grandeur being lowered, returned, in the light of day, to the shadowy unreality of dreams that never come true . . .And so I began to ask myself whether my destiny was not to end up as no more than the object of the queen’s affections, like Don Martín Vásquez de Arce, the tender and gentle page of Sigüenza, who had perished in bizarre combat against the Moors because of his determination to prove his valor before his Dame—the inspirer of his labors and guide of his passions. (And how jealous I was, at times, of that young soldier poet to whom in my trials of love I perhaps attributed better fortune than he actually received from the one who never mentioned him, perhaps because he was so pleasing, so enormously pleasing, that she feared I would read in her eyes her preference for him!) Such torments afflict those of the race of common glass when they mingle with those of diamond! . . .

  I had seen the royal standard raised over the towers of the Alhambra; I had been present at the humiliation of the Moorish king, wrested from his vanquished city and made to kiss the hands of my monarchs. And now they were hatching grander schemes: now they were talking about carrying the war to Africa. But all I heard was, We’ll see, we’ll think about it, we’ll talk about it, it’s better to wait a while, because there’s always another day, and patience is a great virtue, better the evil we know than the evil we don’t know . . . I had raised a million maravedis from the Genoans of Seville and the banker Berardi. But I still needed another million to set to sea. And it was this other million that Columba promised me every evening only to take it back at daybreak—she didn’t even have to say so—when she told me “time to go” and bade me farewell. But one night I blew up. I was seized by a rapidly mounting fury, and I shouted at the top of my voice that as deferential and submissive as I had been to her, mindful that a royal purple, even if it’s invisible, always clo
aks the body of a queen, still I felt that I was the equal of any monarch and was just as important, for though I lacked a jeweled crown, I wore the aura of my great idea, the way they wore the crowns of Castile and Aragón. “Pig!” she screamed at me. “You’re nothing but a pig!” “Pig yourself!” I shouted back. “And you know better than anyone what I am and what I have been!” And then I could no longer keep the secret I had carried for years, and I told her what I had heard in Ice Land about the voyages of the redhead and his son Leif and their discovery of Green Land and Wood Land and Vinland; I told her about the marvelous country of fir trees, wheat fields, and waters shimmering with salmon; I described the manikins with their gold necklaces, gold bracelets, gold breastplates, gold helmets, and I told her how they also worshipped golden idols, and I said that in their rivers gold was as plentiful as pebbles on the Spanish plain . . . And in the face of Columba’s astonished silence, I shouted that I was going away and never coming back and that I would offer my great enterprise to the king of France, who was anxious to finance it, because he was one king who had an intelligent wife, a queen who was drawn to the sea like a good Breton, worthy descendant of Hélène of Armorica, daughter of King Clohel, wife of Constantine the Elder, who had been chosen by the Lord to exhume the Cross, which was buried twenty hands underground in Mount Golgotha in Jerusalem. One can count on people like them, and so I’m going to take my proposition to them! . . . This seemed to infuriate Columba: “Pig! Filthy swine! You would betray Christ for thirty denarii!” she screamed, as I left the room, slamming the door behind me. Outside, hitched to some trees, my good dappled mule was waiting for me. Angrier than I could remember ever having been before—and doubly so for having let out the great secret that I ought to have kept to myself—I rode a good two leagues before I stopped at a tavern, intending to drink as much wine as my belly would hold. It was the beginning of April. In the sunlight, the green of the fields took on the orange tint that is peculiar to the vegetation of Granada. The finches were singing. There was a wild scene in the tavern, which was already filled despite the early hour, with peasants enjoying their Sunday. The bells of the church were calling the faithful to Mass. But I was in a black mood; each glass instead of lifting my spirits threw me deeper into the despair of one who has committed an irredeemable error. I had lost everything. Everything. The favor of the queen and the hope that had at least been alive a few hours before, even if it hadn’t been realized. And I had drained a pitcher of wine when I saw a constable come in, who, to judge from his sweat-drenched, filthy uniform, must have ridden hard to get here. He headed straight for me as soon as he saw me: Her Majesty asked me to return to her at once, begging me to give up my journey . . . A little after midday, having washed my face and changed my clothes, I appeared before my royal Mistress. “You have the million maravedis,” she told me. She had gotten them from the banker Santángel using the persuasiveness that I knew so well. As collateral she had given him some jewels that were actually worth much less. “I’ll take them back when I please,” she said, “and without returning the million.” She gave me a hard look. ‘We have expelled the Jews. It’s worth a million for Santángel to remain in this country where his business is so good. So now, pack your bags! Good luck. And send all the gold you can so we can carry on the war in Africa.” “And even reconquer the city of Jerusalem the way we have reconquered the kingdom of Granada,” I said. “Perhaps,” she replied. “But tell no one about my great secret,” I said, suddenly alarmed at the thought that Santángel might have been informed about what . . . “I am not that stupid!” she said. “In that secret is glory for both of us.” “The Holy Spirit has inspired you,” I said, kissing her hands. “Perhaps that is what future books will say,” she said. “Of course, those books will be written only if you discover something.” “So you still have doubts?” “Alea jacta est . . .” Outside I heard the shouts of a Moorish water vendor, dressed in a tasseled hat and a coat of many colors that barely covered his balls; he was praising the freshness of the bags of water that hung around his neck and was so absorbed in his business of pouring out streams of water that he kept at it as if the Kingdom of Granada had not changed rulers.

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  n the third day of August at eight o’clock in the morning, we left the Bar of Saltés. A strong sea wind bore us sixty miles to the south, which is fifteen leagues; then southwest and south by west, which was the course for the Canary Islands . . . Little of interest or importance occurred until the sixth of September, when we set sail from the island of Gomera. Now our great adventure began. I forced myself to put the best face on things throughout the voyage, always to appear pleased with the way things were going, but I have to admit that at night, when I tried to sleep, I found that I couldn’t. I grappled until dawn with the difficulties that lay ahead on this hazardous voyage to far-off Vinland—or to the land that lay to the south of it—which I had described to my Mistress as a province, based on the reports I had received, of a kingdom ruled by the Grand Khan or some other prince of the Indies, for whom she had given me letters; and, in case my invention turned out to be true, I had brought aboard ship a certain Luis de Torres, who “used to be” a Jew (this “used to be” was often heard in those days), and who said he knew not only Hebrew but also Aramaic and a little Arabic. But I had drawn a bad crew. They were recently baptized Christians, criminals fleeing justice, circumcised men about to be thrown out of the country, rogues and adventurers, rather than men of the sea who knew how to raise the sail and luff with the wind, who had experience manning these ships. They did the ship’s work poorly, they executed my commands poorly. And I knew that if the voyage took much longer than I had projected—which could easily happen—the men, aware that with each passing day they were farther from the continent they had left behind, unable to see land ahead (and they were all anxious to see it, since the crown had offered a reward often thousand maravedis to the man who gave the first alert), would be easy prey to discouragement, disobedience, and the desire to turn back. In many minds the image of the dark ocean was still very much alive, an image of endless seas, of currents dragging ships irresistibly toward the point where the waves meet the sky, endless seas that had been identified for centuries with the very waters we were passing through, so that if we took too long those images would flood the sailors’ minds, weakening their wills, and tempting them to insurrection. So I resorted to a lie, a deception, the constant fiction I had promulgated since Sunday, the ninth of September (and this I will tell the confessor), which was to record fewer leagues than we had actually traveled, so that the crew would not be shocked or alarmed if the voyage went on too long. And so, this Monday, having gone sixty leagues, I said we had gone forty-eight. And likewise on Tuesday—a calm day—I counted twenty and said sixteen. At first I had lowered the figure by three or four a day. But as the month wore on, noticing a growing anxiety on the faces of my crew, I began to subtract more and more leagues from the true total we had traveled. By the eighteenth, fifty-five had become forty-eight . . . And on the first of October, my real total was seven hundred and twenty leagues, whereas I showed a highly fictitious count of only five hundred eighty-four . . . It was true that we encountered unusual vegetation, which might have floated away from islands ahead of us, things like pine sprigs, or yellow-green plants like floating bunches of grapes—but grapes that looked more like mastic berries. We also saw birds overhead that could have come from land, such as pelicans and petrels, and some that were white like seagulls, and others that seemed to belong to the frigate family, all of which I greeted with wild demonstrations of joy. But many of the crew members said that these birds didn’t prove a thing, that each winter storks flew over the Mediterranean, leaving German realms where they would have been exposed to snow and storms, seeking sunlit Arabian minarets. Not only that, but there are birds that can sleep on the waves, and even nest and hatch their eggs in the middle of the ocean, as is the habit of the alcyone bird. And there was grumbling and plotting among the men. As t
he days passed, fear spread from caravel to caravel. Treachery that started on one ship quickly passed to another, leaping from ship to ship as if by magic—and I have no doubt that the ones who started the worst talk were the ones with some education, the sad fact being that insolent talk, petty gossip, and even slander sprang up like weeds among the men who had some learning and thought they knew it all, who seemed to take particular pleasure in sharpening their tongues on others’ backs, especially if the other was the one who gave the orders. I suspected that Rodrigo de Torres, who called himself a doctor; and the new Christian Luis de Torres, who claimed to speak Chaldean and Arabic; and even the loud-mouthed Andalusian Martín Alonso, in whom I had placed so much confidence, but whom I was beginning to like less and less, were the three who started spreading the story that I didn’t really know how to use an astrolabe—which might have been true years ago, I have to admit, when I made a serious error in determining the latitude of the kingdom of Mina in Africa. (But, I repeat, that was years before.) They also said, when they got together in their slanderous circles, that the map drawn by Toscanelli that I kept in my cabin wasn’t good for anything but was just for show, since I was incapable of following the mathematics of that lofty thinker—which might have been true, but I had reconciled myself to that long ago, knowing that Toscanelli, so proud of his science, had invalidated the mathematics of Nicholas of Cusa, the friend of Pope Pius II, whose Historia rerum held the place of honor among my books. (As for me—and this is something the Spaniards who were traveling with me could not understand, those men who were too smart by half philosophers of the tar brush and the caulk pot, great thinkers of seawater and tuna fish—I felt that if Nicholas of Cusa was weak in mathematics, as the pedantic Toscanelli claimed, he remained the proponent of the docta ignorantia, which I hold as my own: the docta ignorantia that easily open the doors to the infinite, in contrast to scholastic logic, with its ferrules and mortarboards, which puts blinders, gags, and earmuffs on bold thinkers, seers, the gatekeepers of the ideal, the true cephalophoros, eager to transcend the limits of the unknown . . .) And, not content to turn the crew against me with their slanders and lies, those rogues insinuated that I had confused the Arabic miles of Alfagán with the Italian miles I employed. This last accusation, despite the vexation it caused me, began to seem true, a source of private embarrassment, since, despite having intentionally falsified my daily account of our movements by mixing up the miles, as those shit-assed Spaniards claimed, I had gravely underestimated the earth’s circumference, which meant that the trip would take much longer than expected, to the great consternation and apprehension of my crew.