The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Ah me! My beloved,

  Who detains him?

  The hour is past, noon strikes,

  But he comes not.

  A painful bitterness filled my throat at the evocation, through the language of my infancy, of too many things. Unquestionably, this vacation was making me soft. I drank the rest of the sherry and turned back to the window. The children playing under the four dusty fir trees in the Model Park left their gray sand castles from time to time to look wistfully at the street urchins swimming among scraps of old newspaper and cigarette stubs in the water of a municipal fountain. It gave me the idea of going to a swimming pool to get some exercise. I was bad company for myself in the house. I looked for my bathing suit without being able to find it in any of the closets. Then it occurred to me that it would probably be healthier to take a train and get off somewhere in the woods to breathe the pure air.

  I was on my way to the station when I stopped in front of the Museum, where an exhibit of abstract art had just opened, advertised by mobiles hung on rods, their fungi, stars, and wooden bows whirling in an atmosphere that smelled of varnish. I was about to walk up the stairs when I happened to notice that the bus to the Planetarium had stopped close by. A visit there suddenly seemed to me urgent to gather ideas for Mouche’s redecoration of her studio. But as the bus was slow in starting, I finally got out and began to walk aimlessly, unable to choose among so many possibilities, stopping at the first corner to look at the drawings a cripple, his breast covered with war medals, was sketching in colored chalks on the sidewalk.

  The disordered rhythm of my days interrupted, manumitted for three weeks from the enterprise that in return for feeding me had already bought several years of my life, I did not know what to do with my idleness. The sudden rest seemed to have made me ill. I walked the streets without knowing where I was, torn among subliminal desires. I was tempted to buy that Odyssey, or the latest detective stories, or, better still, the Comedias Americanas of Lope de Vega displayed in Brentano’s window—for the sake of the language I never used, though I could multiply only in Spanish, and add by the “and so many to carry” method. But there, too, was Prometheus Unbound, which suddenly made me forget the world of books: its title was too closely linked to that old project of a composition which (after a prelude concluding in a great chorale of brasses) had got no farther, in Prometheus’ opening recitative, than that defiant shout of rebellion:

  . . . regard this Earth

  Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou

  Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,

  and toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,

  With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.

  The truth was that now that I had time to stop in front of the stores after months of ignoring their existence, they had too much to say to me. Here was a map of islands bordered with galleons and mariner’s roses; there, a treatise on orthography; farther on, a picture of Ruth in borrowed diamonds advertising a jeweler. The recollection of her trip filled me with a sudden irritation; it was really she whom I was now pursuing, the one person I wanted to be with this sultry afternoon whose sky was darkening behind the monotonous flicker of the first electric signs. But once again a script, a stage, distance came between our bodies, which no longer found the joy of first knowledge in the Living-Together of the Seventh Day.

  It was too early to go to Mouche’s house. Disgusted at having to pick my way among so many people going in the opposite direction and tearing off tin foil or peeling oranges with their fingers, I wanted to go where there were trees. I had got clear of the people returning from the ballparks, miming in their discussions the sports they had seen, when a few cold drops touched the backs of my hands. After an interval whose length escapes me now—because of the seemingly brief course of a process of delay and recurrence which I could not have suspected at the time—I recall those drops falling on my skin in pleasurable pinpricks as though they had been the first announcement—which I did not understand at the time—of the encounter. A trivial meeting, in a way, as all meetings whose true significance becomes clear only later in the web of their implications appear to be. The origin of everything would have to be sought in the cloud that burst into rain that afternoon with such unexpected violence that its thunderclaps seemed those of another latitude.

  II/ The cloud had burst into rain as I was walking behind the great concert hall along that stretch of sidewalk which offers no protection whatever to the passer-by. I recalled that an iron stairway led to the musicians’ entrance, and as I knew some of those who were going in, it was no problem for me to get to the stage, where the members of a famous choral society were gathering by voices to take their places on the platform. With his knuckles, a kettle-drummer was testing his drums, which were too high-pitched because of the heat. Holding his violin with his chin, the soloist was striking B flat on the piano, while the horns, bassoons, and clarinets went on in that confused simmer of scales, trills, tuning, which precedes the actual notes. Every time I saw the members of a symphony orchestra seated behind their music racks, I waited impatiently for the moment when time should cease to pile up incoherent sounds and fall into an organized framework in response to a prior human will speaking through the gestures of the Measurer of its Passing. The latter was often obeying decisions made one century, two centuries ago. Inside the covers of the score were set down in signs the orders of men who, though dead in ornate mausoleums—or their bones lost in the dreary disorder of some potter’s field—still held author’s rights on time, imposing the measure of motion and emotion on future men. It sometimes happens, I thought to myself, that these posthumous powers suffer a decline or, on the contrary, are strengthened, depending on the taste of different generations. Thus, on the basis of performance, one could prove that in certain years the greatest beneficiary of time had been Bach or Wagner, whereas Telemann or Cherubini had had lean pickings.

  At least three years had passed since I had attended a symphony concert; when I left the studios I was so saturated with poor music used for detestable purposes that it seemed absurd to let myself become engulfed in time almost objectified by being subjected to the demands of fugue or sonata form. For that very reason I savored the pleasure of the unexpected at finding myself brought, almost by surprise, to the dark corner of the bass viols, where I could watch what was happening on the stage that rainy afternoon whose muted peals of thunder seemed to rumble over the puddles of the near-by street. After a silence finally broken by a gesture, a light fifth came from the horns, winging into triplets from the second violins and violoncellos, above which two descending notes stood out, as though fallen from the first violins and violas, with a reluctance that soon became anxiety, desire for flight, in the face of the onslaught of a suddenly unleashed force. . . .

  I got up in disgust. Just when I was in the best frame of mind to hear music, after ignoring it for such a long time, this had to burst forth, swelling now to a crescendo behind my departing back. I might have known it when I saw the chorus coming on stage. Still, it might have been a classical oratorio. If I had known that the Ninth Symphony was on the music racks, I would have kept on through the downpour. If there was some music I could not stand because of its association with childhood sicknesses, still less could I bear the Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium, which I had avoided ever since, the way one averts one’s eyes for years from certain objects that recall a death. Besides, like many of my generation, I detested everything that smacked of the “sublime.” Schiller’s Ode left me as cold as did the Last Supper at Montsalvat and the Elevation of the Grail. . . . Now I found myself in the street again, looking for a bar. If I had to walk very far to find a drink, I would soon be in the grip of a depression I had experienced before, which made me feel as though I were trapped in a locked room, exasperated at being unable to change anything in my life, always subject to the will of others, which barely left me free each morning to choose my breakfast meat or cereal.r />
  I began to run, for the rain was pelting down. As I turned the corner, I crashed head-on into an open umbrella. The wind snatched it from the hands of its owner, and it was flattened under the wheels of a car. The sight was so funny that I let out a roar of laughter. And just as I was expecting an insult, a cordial voice called me by name: “I was looking for you, but I had lost your address.” And the Curator, whom I had not seen for over two years, was telling me that he had a present for me—a wonderful present—in that old start-of-the-century house with its dirty windows and graveled flower beds standing out like an anachronism in that neighborhood.

  The unevenly collapsed springs of the armchair now tormented my flesh like a hair shirt, forcing me into an unwonted air of repose. In the familiar mirror with its heavy rococo frame crowned by the Esterhazy coat of arms, I saw myself sitting stiffly like a child taken visiting. Cursing his asthma, crushing out a cigarette that was choking him to light up one of stramonium, which made him cough, the Curator of the Museum of Organography trotted about the little room crowded with cymbals and Asiatic tambourines, making our tea, which was fortunately to be accompanied by Martinique rum. Between two shelves hung an Incan quena; on his desk, waiting to be catalogued, lay a sackbut of the time of the Conquest of Mexico, a beautiful instrument whose bell was a Tarascan head with silver scales, enamel eyes, and open jaws that turned a double row of copper teeth on me.

  “This belonged to Juan de San Pedro, royal trumpeter to Charles V, and one of Hernán Cortés’s famous riders,” the Curator explained, tasting the tea. Then he poured out glasses of liquor with the remark—comical in view of the person to whom it was addressed—that a little alcohol from time to time is a thing for which the body feels an atavistic gratitude because man, in all ages and climates, has always found a way to invent intoxicating beverages.

  As it turned out, the present he had for me was not on that floor, and a slow-moving deaf servant was sent for it. I looked at my watch, feigning sudden alarm at the recollection of an appointment. But my watch, which I had not wound the night before—as I now remembered—the better to accustom myself to the reality of my vacation, had stopped at twenty minutes past three. In an anxious tone I asked what time it was, but was told that it did not matter, that the rain had prematurely darkened the June afternoon, one of the longest of the year. Leading me from a Pangelingua of the monks of St. Gall to the first edition of a vihuela tablature, passing over a rare copy of the Oktoechos of St. John Damascene, the Curator was trying to soothe my impatience, which was roweled by my anger at having let myself be led to this floor, on which I no longer had anything to do among all those jew’s-harps, rebecs, flageolets, loose frets, splinted violin necks, and little organs with burst bellows, which I saw all piled together in the dark corners.

  I was just on the point of saying firmly that I would come back some other day for the present, when the servant returned, taking off her rubbers. What she had brought for me was a half-cut record without label, which the Curator put on a phonograph, carefully selecting a fiber needle. Anyway, I thought to myself, the suffering won’t last long, not more than two minutes to judge by the grooving. I had turned away to fill my glass when I heard behind me the warble of a bird.

  I looked in astonishment at the old man, who was smiling with a gentle, fatherly air as though he had just made me a priceless gift. I was on the point of speaking, but he enjoined silence on me, pointing a finger at the disk. Now something different was surely coming. But no. We were at the middle of the cutting, and that monotonous warbling continued, broken by brief pauses that all seemed of the same duration. It was not even the song of a very musical bird, for I could not identify the trill, the portamento, and it had only three unvarying notes whose timbre had the sonority of Morse code in a telegrapher’s cabin. The record was almost finished, and I could not understand where the vaunted present of my former teacher was, nor imagine what a document that could be of interest only to an ornithologist had to do with me.

  The ridiculous audition came to an end, and the Curator, transported by a joy I was at a loss to understand, asked me: “Do you realize? Do you realize?” And then he explained to me that the warbling was not that of a bird, but of an instrument of fired clay with which the most primitive Indians of the hemisphere imitate the song of a bird before they set out to hunt it—this in a possessory rite to make the hunt propitious.

  “It is the first proof of your theory,” the old man said to me, almost embracing me, as a fit of coughing choked him.

  And just because I understood only too well what he was trying to tell me by means of the record (which was playing again), I was filled with a growing irritation to which the two drinks I had tossed off added fuel. The bird that is not a bird, with a song that is not a song, but a magical imitation aroused an unbearable resonance in my breast, bringing back the memory of the work on the origins of primitive music and organography I had done such a long time before—it was not the years that frightened me, but the futile rapidity of their passing.

  Those were the days when the war had interrupted the composition of my ambitious cantata on Prometheus Unbound. After I got back I felt so different that the finished prelude and the first draft of the opening scenes had been left where they were, packed away in my closet while I let myself drift into the techniques and drudgery of the movies and radio. In the specious enthusiasm I put into defending those arts of the century, insisting that they opened up unlimited vistas to the composer, I was probably trying to assuage my feeling of guilt toward the work I had abandoned, and to justify my association with a commercial enterprise after Ruth and I had destroyed with our fugue the existence of a fine man. After we had drained the hours of amorous anarchy, I quickly became convinced that my wife’s vocation was incompatible with the type of life I aspired to. I had tried to make her absence during performances and seasons more endurable by undertaking something that could be done on Sundays and holidays without that fixity of purpose creative work demands.

  Thus I had discovered the house of the Curator, whose Museum of Organography was the pride of a time-hallowed university. Under this very roof I had made the acquaintance of the elementary percussion instruments—hollow trunks, lithophones, animal jawbones, rattles, and anklets—from which man had drawn sound in the protracted days of his emergence on a planet still bristling with gigantic skeletons, on his ascent of the road that would lead him to the Mass of Pope Marcellus and The Art of the Fugue. Moved by that peculiar form of laziness which consists in bringing great energy to tasks not precisely those we should be doing, I went wild over the methods of classification and the morphological study of those objects of wood, of fired clay, of kitchen copper, of hollow reeds, of gut and goatskin, the original forms of methods of producing sounds which persist down the ages beneath the marvelous varnish of Cremonas or in the sumptuous theological Panpipe that is the organ.

  Disagreeing with the accepted ideas on the origins of music, I had begun to elaborate an ingenious theory that explained the beginnings of primitive rhythmic expression as an attempt to imitate the movement of animals or the songs of birds. If we bore in mind that the first cave drawings of reindeer and bison were hunting magic—a means of taking the quarry by previous possession of its image—I was not too far afield in my belief that the elementary rhythms were those of trot, gallop, leap, warble, and trill imitated by the hand on a resonant surface or by the breath in a hollow reed.

  Now, watching the revolving disk, I felt a kind of rage at the thought that my ingenious—and perhaps correct—theory was being relegated, like so many other things, to a dream attic, and that the daily tyrannies of the world I lived in would not allow me to complete it. Suddenly the arm was lifted from the groove. The clay bird stopped singing. And what I had most feared happened: the Curator, cornering me affectionately, asked me how my work was coming on, saying that he had plenty of time to listen and to discuss it with me. He wanted to know what I had brought to light, my new resear
ch methods, and to hear my conclusions about the origins of music on the basis of my theory of mimetism-magic-rhythm.

  Pinned down and unable to escape, I began to lie, inventing difficulties that had interfered with the progress of my work. But, my technical vocabulary being rusty, I made ridiculous mistakes, got the classifications confused, could not recall basic information that I knew perfectly-well. I tried to take refuge in bibliographical references, only to learn through my interlocutor’s ironic corrections that specialists had already discarded them. And while I was grasping at the feigned need of examining certain primitive songs recently recorded by explorers, I could hear my own voice echoing with such lying resonance from the copper of the gongs that I completely bogged down in the middle of an unforgivable gaffe in organography terminology.

  The mirror showed me the rueful face of a cardsharper caught with marked cards up his sleeve, my own face at the moment. I looked so disgusting to myself that, suddenly, my shame turned to rage, and I vomited a flood of obscene words at the Curator, asking him how many he thought could make a living today from the study of primitive musical instruments. He knew how I had been uprooted in my early years, dazzled by false values, led into the study of an art on which only the worst hucksters of tin-pan alley battened, dragged for months as an army interpreter through a world in ruins, and then tossed back on the asphalt of a city where poverty was harder to bear than anywhere else in the world. I knew from having lived it the Calvary of those who wash out their only shirt at night, walk through the snow in shoes without soles, chainsmoke, and cook in a closet, finally becoming so obsessed by hunger that the one thought in their mind is eating. That was as sterile a solution as selling the best hours of your life from sunup to sundown.