The Harp and the Shadow

by Alejo Carpentier

  Venient annis

  saecula seris quibus Oceanus

  uincula rerum laxet . . .

  Here I cut the verse short, because I had the disconcerting impression—perhaps I was mistaken—that Columba, giving me an almost imperceptible wink, was looking at me with an expression that said: Quosque tandem, Christoforo? . . . All the same, making my voice more dramatic, I moved to a higher register: And, through the grace of Your Majesties, I was the one who opened, I was the one who led the way to new horizons, making the world round, like a pear, like the breast of a woman with a nipple in the middle—and my eyes quickly sought those of my Mistress—the world that Pedro Aliaco, the illustrious chancellor of the Sorbonne and Notre Dame de Paris, had seen as almost round, almost spherical, creating a bridge between Aristotle and me. With me, the prophesy in the Book of Isaiah is fulfilled. Now it has achieved reality: “Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures, in a place of broad rivers and streams, where galleys with oars can go, and stately ships can pass.”

  When I had finished, I knelt down for vespers with a studied expression of nobility, the monarchs knelt down, all those present knelt down, choking back tears, as the six canons and subcanons of the Royal Chapel began the most solemn Te Deum ever heard this side of heaven. And when the celestial voices came back to earth, I ordered my seven Indians to begin instruction in Christianity, so that they could be baptized as soon as they had received enough knowledge. “Do not keep them as slaves,” said the Queen, “but take them back to their land in the first ship returning there . . .” And that night, I came to see my mistress in the intimacy of her private suite, where I knew the pleasures of seeing her again after a long and difficult absence—and damned i£ during those hours, I remembered either caravels or Indians. But a little before sunrise, when we were both lying sated, watching the sky begin to brighten, talking of one thing and another, I thought I noticed that Columba, having had time to reconsider the events of the day and recognize the realities I knew so well, did not seem as completely convinced by my words as I might have wished. I increased my rhetoric, the aptness of my quotations, the skill with which I manipulated images, but she was reserved, reticent, she wouldn’t commit herself or express a frank and full opinion about the importance of my enterprise. “So, in a word . . . what do you think of what you saw today?” I asked, to get her started. “What I think is, to bring back seven bleary-eyed little men, sick and sorrowful, a few sticks and leaves that aren’t good for anything but fumigating a leper colony, and gold that wouldn’t fill a cavity in a molar, it’s not worth having spent two million maravedis.” “And what about the value to your crowns?” I shouted. “We gained enough prestige with the expulsion of the Jews and the conquest of the kingdom of Granada. Real, lasting prestige comes from things that can be seen and touched, from laws that have repercussions as far away as Rome, from military victories that become part of history . . . But your prestige, if in fact you earn any, will be in the long term. Up to this point, nothing has happened in these countries, which we can’t even imagine, no battles have been won, no memorable triumphs have been achieved—in hoc signo vinces—for now, all we have is inspiration that makes blind men cheer and opinions that make your listeners swell up with pleasure, like the heroic feats Charlemagne recounted when he made his victorious entrance to Zaragoza, having humiliated the Babylonian king, when the truth was that, after a siege that was neither glorious nor arduous, he returned to France defeated, leaving a rear guard commanded by Roland the knight, who . . . well! . . . you know what happened . . .” “But I brought back gold!” I insisted: “Everybody saw it. There is a mine there, an enormous mine . . .” “If the mine is so big, your men should have brought back ingots, not the trifles that my jewellers say are not even worth a hundred maravedis.” I said it was impossible, in the short time we were over there, to undertake the real job of extraction; of the importance of returning as soon as possible to tell of my Discovery . . . “I had an expert in aromatic plants identify the plants you brought back: he didn’t find any cinnamon, or any nutmeg, or pepper, or cloves: therefore, you did not land in the Indies,” she said. “Always the imposter.” “Then where did I land?” “In a place nothing like any part of the Indies.” “And in so doing, I risked my honor and my life.” “Not really. Not really. If you hadn’t met Master Jacob in Ice Land, you wouldn’t have gone off so confidently. You knew that, no matter what, come what may, you would arrive at some country.” “A country that holds fabulous treasures!” “Apparently not, from what you have shown us.” “Then why in the devil did you write to me, ordering me to prepare for a second voyage?” “To screw Portugal,” she answered, calmly biting off a piece of Toledan marzipan. “If we don’t establish a firm foothold now, the others will get in ahead of us—the ones to whom you almost sold your project, twice, the rulers of Castile and Aragón matter so little to you. They’ve already sent messengers to the Pope, claiming possession of the lands that your ships barely touched.” “So my voyage didn’t accomplish anything?” “I wouldn’t go that far. But, hell! . . . how complicated life is! Now I have to outfit ships, raise money, postpone the war in Africa, all in order to plant our flag—I have no choice—in countries that, as far as I’m concerned, are neither Ophir, Ophar, nor Cipango. Try to bring back more gold than you brought this time, and pearls, and precious stones, and spices. Then I’ll believe in some of these things that still smell to me like more of your tricks.” . . . When I left the royal bedchamber, I was really stung, I must confess. Some of the things she said made my ears burn. But I was not as upset as I had been before, when no one would finance my proposals. Once again the ocean was in sight. Within a few months, I would again feel the excitement of billowing sails, but with a luff more full and secure than before . . . And now I would have enough ships; now that scoundrel Martín Alonso was dead; now I would really command my crew, with the title of Admiral, my appointment as Viceroy, and the Don in front of my name . . . I returned to the dockyard where the Indians were shivering under their wool coverlets, and the parrots, having finished vomiting the wine they had gulped down, were lying with their feet in the air, with the glassy eyes of dead fish gone bad, droopy, their feathers ruffled, as if they had been chased by a broom . . . Soon they would all be dead. As would six of the seven Indians I had exhibited before the throne—some dying of a cough, some of measles, some of diarrhea—a few days after being baptized. From Diegito, the only one left, I knew that these men neither liked nor admired us: they thought we were treacherous, lying, violent, hot-tempered, cruel, dirty, and foul-smelling, since we almost never bathed, unlike them, who freshened their bodies several times a day in the rivers, streams, and waterfalls of their land. They said our houses stank of rancid grease; our narrow streets of shit; our finest horsemen of armpits; and that if our ladies wore so many bodices and ruffles and ribbons, it must be to hide some repulsive deformity or sore-or maybe because they’re embarrassed by their breasts, which are so fat that they always seem ready to pop out of their lace tuckers. Our perfumes and scented oils—and even incense—make them sneeze; they choke in our narrow rooms; and they think our churches are places of pain and panic because of the many filthy, crippled, pathetic dwarfs and monsters who clog their entrances. They can’t understand why so many men who are not part of an army go about armed, nor how so many richly dressed women on dazzling horses can look down without shame on the perpetual grieving demonstration of misery and purulence, of amputees and beggars in rags. Not only that, but our plan to inculcate in them the doctrines of our religion, before they would receive the lustral waters, had come to nothing. They didn’t say that they were unwilling to listen: they said, simply, that they did not understand. If God had created the world and the plants and the animals that populate it, and had pronounced everything in it to be good, they could not see how Adam and Eve, creatures of Divine Creation, could have committed any offense by eating the good fruit from the good tree. They di
d not think that going perfectly naked was indecent: if the men over there wore a loincloth it was because their fragile, sensitive sex, hanging exposed, had to be protected from spiny plants, sharp grasses, and from the attacks, blows, and cuts of predators; as for the women, it was better that they cover their nature with the little pieces of cotton I had seen, so that when the menses was flowing, that distasteful pollution would not be obvious. They did not understand the Old Testament books I showed them either: they could not see why evil was represented by a serpent, since the serpents in their islands were not dangerous. Moreover, the idea of a serpent with an apple in his mouth made them laugh uproariously because—as Diegito explained to me—“snakes don’t eat fruit” . . . Soon we will raise anchor once again and return to the outposts of Cipango that I discovered—although Columba, who was insufferable during this period, perhaps because she needed an outlet for her anxiety, said a hundred times that she had seen no sign of Cipango. And as for the indoctrination of the Indians, she should have employed men more capable than I to perform that mission! Saving souls is not my job. And don’t look for the vocation of an apostle in someone who has the gall of a banker. And now what she asked me to do—it was more an order—was to find gold, lots of gold, as much gold as I could, since now—thanks to me—a mirage had been created, a vision of Colchis and the Golden Chersonese.

  I

  slands, islands, islands . . . A large one, a tiny one, a harsh one, a mild one; a bald island, a hairy island, an island with gray sand and dead lichens; an island with pebbles churned up, submerged, buried to the rhythm of each successive wave; a broken-up island—with a saw-toothed shoreline; a swollen island—as if pregnant, the pyramidal shape of a dormant volcano; an island within an arc of fish and parrots; an island with austere points, sharp snail shells, mangrove thickets with a thousand hooks; an island surrounded by foam, like a little girl in a lace skirt; an island with the music of castanets and an island with roaring gorges; an island to run aground on, an island to be stranded on, an island with neither name nor history; an island where the wind sings through the cavities of enormous shells; an island with coral-like water flowers; an island with an inactive volcano; a moss-green island, a chalk-gray island, a salt-white island; islands in such a tight and sunny constellation—I have counted a hundred and four—that, thinking what to call them, I have named them Gardens of the Queen . . . Islands, islands, islands. More than five thousand islands, the Venetian chronicles tell us, surround the great kingdom of Cipango. So I must be approaching that great kingdom . . . And yet, as the days go by, I see the color of gold receding from me, because, while the mineral keeps appearing, here, there, in the form of jewelry, figurines, beads, little bits—which are hardly ever even the size of a good Genoan hand—all of these are merely flecks, light traces, the barest hints of a great vein that has not yet appeared—and which was not found in Hispaniola, after all, as I had expected when I was under the illusion that it was an island of great riches. And now in my account of my second voyage, I begin to feel the need to make excuses. I send word to Their Highnesses that I would have liked to have sent them a great quantity of gold, but I can’t, because my men have been stricken by so many diseases. I claim that what I have sent should be regarded only as signs. Because there is more: there is surely much more. And so I go on, searching, hoping, anxious, avid, and always more disillusioned, unable to find the source mine, the Mother Lode, the great bed, the supreme asset of these lands of spices without any spices . . . Now, in this house where it seems to be getting dark before it should, waiting for the confessor who should have been here by now, considering the closeness of the miserable little village where they’ve gone to look for him, I keep turning the pages of the drafts of my journals and letters. And viewing myself through words I wrote years ago, I observe, looking backward, that a diabolical change was taking place in my soul. Angered by those Indians who did not divulge their secret to me, who now hid their women when we arrived at their villages because there were among us some lewd and lascivious men; vexed by those mistrustful and insolent people who still, from time to time, shot arrows at us—although without doing us much harm, to tell the truth—I stopped seeing them as kind, gentle, innocent beings, as incapable of malice as they were of seeing their nudity as shameful, which is the idyll I had painted for my sponsors when I returned from my first voyage. Now, more and more often, I call them cannibals—although I had never seen them eating human flesh. The India of spices has become for me the India of Cannibals. Not very dangerous cannibals—I insist—but cannibals who must not remain ignorant of our holy religion; cannibals whose souls must be saved (suddenly this becomes my obsession!), as millions of men and women in the pagan world were saved by the word of the Apostles of the Lord. But, since there is obviously no way of indoctrinating these cannibals, because we do not speak their languages, which I am discovering are many and distinct, the solution to this grave problem, which cannot be indifferent to the Church, is to take them to Spain as slaves. I have said: as slaves. Yes, now that I am at the gates of death the word appalls me, but in the account that I reread it is clearly written in my large, round hand. I requested a license for the slave trade. I maintained that the cannibals of these islands would be better than any other slaves, arguing, at the same time, that they can live on anything and that they eat much less than the blacks that are so numerous in Lisbon and Seville. (Since I cannot deliver gold, I think, I can substitute the irreplaceable energy of human flesh, a work force whose value lies in what it produces, which, in the final analysis, is of greater value than a mineral that comes in one hand and goes out the other . . .) Moreover, to prove my point, I sent several of those cannibals—whom I selected as the most able-bodied—along with women, boys, and girls, by ship to see how they would grow and reproduce in Spain, as had been done with the captives imported from Guinea. And I explained that with royal permission we could send caravels every year to obtain good shiploads of cannibals, whom we could deliver punctually in any quantity desired, hunting down the populations of the islands and keeping them in fenced camps until it was time to embark. And if it was objected that we lacked the manpower for such a task, I implored them to let me have some thousand men and a few hundred horses, so that I could begin tilling the earth and establishing wheat and grapes and grazing cattle. The people would have to be paid wages against the island’s yields, but it was my thought—an ingenious plan of which I was disgracefully proud at the time—that they would not have to be paid in money: some stores would be set up in the royal hacienda to provide clothes, cheap shirts and jackets, handkerchiefs, coats, trousers, and shoes, as well as medicines, cures, and miscellaneous pharmaceuticals, surplus goods and Spanish products that the people here would accept gratefully to alleviate their misery. (In short, they would be paid in our goods, which would be a profitable arrangement, since they would never see a penny, and, anyway, money would do them little good, they would quickly incur lifelong debts, signing for their purchases . . .) Considering, however, that the roundup of slaves that I proposed would be sure to meet with some resistance on the part of the cannibals, I requested—a prepared man is as good as two—the shipment of two hundred cuirasses, one hundred muskets, and a hundred crossbows, along with the materials necessary to maintain and repair them . . . And I concluded my catalog of shameful proposals, written in Isabella City on the thirtieth of January, 1496, by begging God to give me one good deposit of gold—is if I had not fallen, on that day, into His disfavor, by initiating the slave trade. (Instead of begging His pardon and doing penance, miserable one, I asked him for one good deposit of gold, the way a whore asks each day, facing the uncertain and long night ahead of her, to be favored by the providential apparition of a splendid and careless person with a free hand and a heavy purse! . . .)