The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Her plan seemed to me so low, so shameless, that I turned it down in disgust. The university arose in my mind with all the majesty of a temple whose white columns I was asked to defile with dung. I held forth at length, but Mouche was not even listening to me. She went into the studio to announce our trip. The news was received with shouts of joy. And, without paying any attention to me, she dashed from one room to another in a gay bustle, pulling out suitcases, taking down and putting back clothes, making up the list of things she had to buy. In the face of such insolence, which was more offensive than contempt, I left the apartment, slamming the door. But the street was particularly depressing that Sunday night, already revealing the Monday blues, the cafés deserted by those who were thinking about the next morning and fumbling for their door-keys by the light of the street lamps that cast glimmers of quicksilver on the wet pavement.

  I did not know what to do. At home what I would find was the disorder Ruth’s departure had left: the shape of her head on the pillow, the smells of the theater. And when the alarm went off, the pointless awakening would follow and the fear of meeting the person who emerged from myself and waited for me each year on the threshold of my vacation. The person full of reproach and bitter upbraiding whom I had glimpsed hours before in the Curator’s baroque mirror, ready to rake over the old ashes. The need to check the sound-track equipment and arrange for new soundproofed rooms at the beginning of each summer favored this meeting, which meant only shifting the load, for when I threw down my Sisyphean stone, my Doppelgänger climbed on my still-lacerated back, and I could not tell whether, at times, I did not prefer the weight of the granite to the weight of the judge.

  A mist drifting in from the waterfront hung over the pavement, refracting the street-lights to rays that pierced as with pinpricks the drip from the low clouds. The iron gates of the movie theaters were closed, and the floors of the long vestibules were littered with torn tickets. Farther along I would have to cross the deserted street with its chilly lights and ascend the ramp toward the shadowy chapel over whose grille I would run my fingers, counting its fifty-two bars.

  I leaned against a lamppost, thinking of the three empty weeks ahead of me, too short to undertake anything, whose days would slip past embittered by the sense of lost opportunity. I had not made one move to bring about the proposed mission. Everything had dropped into my lap, and I was not responsible for the exaggerated evaluation of my abilities. After all, it was not going to be a penny-out of the Curator’s pocket, and as far as the university-was concerned, it would be hard for its scholars, gone gray among books, and without direct contact with jungle craftsmen, to discern the fraud. In the last analysis, the instruments described by Fray Servando de Castillejos were not works of art, but the products of a primitive technique that still existed. Museums treasured more than one doubtful Stradivarius, so it could hardly be a major crime to falsify a savage drum. The instruments they wanted could be old or modern. . . .

  “This trip was written on the wall,” Mouche said when she saw me come back, pointing to the figures of Sagittarius, Argo, and Berenice’s Hair, their yellow outlines clearer now that the light was dimmer.

  In the morning, while she was visiting the various consulates, I went to the university, where the Curator, who had been up since early morning, was repairing a viola d’amore in the company of a lutanist wearing a blue apron. As he looked at me over his spectacles, he showed no surprise at my coming.

  “Congratulations!” he said, without my being sure whether he was congratulating me on my decision or whether he guessed that if at the moment I could think halfway straight, it was thanks to the drug Mouche had given me when I woke up.

  I was soon escorted to the office of the president, who had me sign a contract and gave me both the money for my trip and a list of the main objectives of the task assigned me. Somewhat bemused by the rapidity with which the arrangements had been made, and lacking any very clear notion of what might be in store for me, I was taken to a large empty room, where the Curator asked me to wait for a minute while he went to the library to greet the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, just returned from a congress in Amsterdam. I noticed with satisfaction that the gallery was a museum of photographic reproductions and plaster casts for the use of History of Art students. Suddenly, the universality of certain images—an impressionist nymph, the mysterious regard of Mme Rivière, a family by Manet—carried me back to the far-off days when I had endeavored to assuage the sufferings of a disillusioned traveler, of a pilgrim frustrated by the profanation of the Holy Places, in the almost windowless world of the museums.

  Those had been the months when I visited the shops of craftsmen, the opera, the gardens and cemeteries that evoked romantic vignettes, before I accompanied Goya in the clashes of the Second of May, or followed with him the Burial of the Sardine, whose disturbing masks suggested drunken penitentes, devils in a morality play, rather than the garb of merriment. After an interlude among Le Nain’s peasants, I had plunged full into the Renaissance in the portrait of some condottiere, one of those mounted on horses that seem of marble rather than flesh, against columns hung with banners. There were times when I liked to sojourn among medieval burghers, drinking deeply of their mulled wine, who had themselves painted with the Virgin whom they were honoring—to keep the gift on record—carving suckling pigs, setting their Flemish cocks fighting, and slipping their hands into the bosoms of waxy-skinned wenches who, rather than lewd doxies, seemed lasses making merry of a Sunday afternoon, free to sin again after absolution by their confessors.

  An iron buckle, a crown bristling with hammered points, carried me back to Merovingian Europe, black forests, lands without roads, migrations of rats, wild animals brought slavering with fury to the city square on fair day. Then there were the stones of Mycenae, the funeral pageantry, the coarse pottery of a hardy, adventurous Greece before its own classic period, reeking of bullocks spitted over flames, of carded wool, of dung, of the sweat of rutting stallions. Thus, step by step, I came to the display of scrapers, axes, flint knives, where I stood rapt in the twilight of the Magdalenian, the Solutrean, the pre-Chellean, feeling that I had reached the frontiers of mankind, the limits of possibility, like the edge of the flat earth, where, according to certain primitive cosmographers, heaven, too, could be discerned below by peering into the sidereal vertigo of infinity. . . .

  Goya’s Cronos brought me back to our own time, by way of huge kitchens ennobled with wine cellars. The Mayor lighted his pipe with a coal, the kitchen scullion scalded a hare in a caldron of boiling water, and, seen through an open window, the spinning women chatted in a courtyard shadowed by an elm. Viewing these familiar images, I asked myself whether, in bygone days, men had longed for bygone days as I, this summer morning, longed for certain ways of life that man had lost forever.

  Chapter Two

  Ha! I scent life!—SHELLEY

  (Wednesday, June 7)

  IV/ For some minutes now, our ears had been telling us that we were coming down. Suddenly the clouds were above us, and the plane wavered, as though distrustful of the unsteady air that suddenly let it fall, picked it up again, left one wing unsupported, and then handed it over to the rhythm of invisible currents. To the right rose a range of moss-green mountains blurred by rain. Beyond, in the bright sun, the city lay.

  The reporter who had the seat next to mine—Mouche was stretched out asleep on the seat behind—was talking to me with a mixture of contempt and affection about that helter-skelter capital, anarchic in its layout, without style, whose first streets were becoming visible beneath us. In order to go on growing along the narrow stretch of sand cut off by the hills where Philip II had ordered fortifications built, the inhabitants had been waging a war of centuries against shoals, yellow fever, insects, and the immobility of the cliffs of black rock that rose, to one side and the other, unscalable, stark, polished, like aerolites thrown by some celestial hand. Those useless masses towered among the buildings, the spires of mode
rn churches, aerials, old bell-towers, nineteenth-century domes, falsifying the reality of proportions, establishing a scale of their own, like constructions designed for some unfamiliar use, the work of an unimaginable civilization lost in remote night.

  For hundreds of years a struggle had been going on with roots that pushed up the sidewalks and cracked the walls. When some rich property-owner went to Paris for a few months, leaving his residence in the care of lazy servants, the roots took advantage of songs and siestas to arch their backs, putting an end in twenty days to Le Corbusier’s best functional designs.

  They had done away with the palm trees in the suburbs laid out by the best city-planners, but the palms reappeared in the patios of colonial houses, giving a columnar air of boundary lines to the main avenues—drawn with the points of swords by the founders of the primitive city. Dominating the teeming business and newspaper district, the marble banks, the luxuriousness of the Stock Exchange, the whiteness of the public buildings, under a perennial dog-day sun rose the world of Justice’s scales, caducei, crosses, winged spirits, flags, trumpets of Fame, cogwheels, hammers, and victories, all proclaiming in bronze and stone the abundance and prosperity of the city, whose legislation was exemplary on the statute books. But with the rains of April the sewerage system proved inadequate, and the main squares became flooded, so snarling up the traffic that vehicles had to be detoured through unfamiliar neighborhoods, where they knocked over statues, got stuck in dead-end streets, or ran over the sides of gullies that were never shown to foreigners or important visitors, being inhabited by people who went about all day half-dressed, strumming the guitar, beating the drum, and drinking rum out of tin jugs.

  Electric power extended everywhere, and machinery throbbed under leaky roofs. Techniques caught on with amazing ease, certain procedures being accepted as a matter of course when they were still being cautiously tried out in countries with older histories. Progress was reflected in the close-clipped lawns, the pomp of the embassies, the multiplication of loaves and wines, the smugness of the merchants, whose senior members dated back to the terrible days of the yellow-fever mosquito.

  Nevertheless, something like a baleful pollen in the air—a ghost pollen, impalpable rot, enveloping decay—suddenly became active with mysterious design, opening what was closed, closing what was open, upsetting calculations, contradicting specific gravity, making guarantees worthless. One morning the ampoules of serum in a hospital were found to be full of mold; precision instruments were not registering correctly; certain liquors began to bubble in the bottle; the Rubens in the National Museum was attacked by an unknown parasite immune to sprays; people stormed the windows of a bank where nothing had happened, whipped to a panic by the mutterings of an old Negro crone whom the police were unable to find.

  When such things happened, one invariable explanation was accepted by all who were familiar with the secrets of the city: “It’s the Worm!” Nobody had ever seen the Worm. But the Worm existed, carrying on its arts of confusion, turning up when least expected to confound the most tried and trusted experience. Moreover, lightning storms were frequent, and every ten years hundreds of houses were destroyed by a hurricane that began its circular dance somewhere out at sea.

  By this time we were flying very low, lining up the runway, and I asked my companion about the huge, pleasant-looking house surrounded by terraced gardens whose statues and fountains descended to the shore. I was informed that the new President of the Republic lived there, and that I had missed by only a few days the celebration, with parades of Moors and Romans, of his ceremonious inauguration. But the handsome residence was now disappearing from sight under the left wing of the plane.

  Then came the pleasant return to earth, the bumping over solid ground, and the filing out to the customs office, where one answered questions with a guilty expression. Dizzy with the change in atmospheric pressure, waiting for officers who seemed in no hurry to examine the contents of our luggage, I was thinking that I was not yet used to finding myself so far from my familiar haunts. And at the same time there was something like a recovered light, the smell of hot esparto grass, of sea water that the sky seems to permeate to the depths of its green, and the breeze that carries the stench of rotted crustacea from some coastal shoal.

  At dawn, while we had been flying through dirty clouds, I had regretted having undertaken the trip; I had felt like getting off at the first stop and flying back as quickly as I could and returning the money to the university. I felt trapped, kidnapped, an accessory to some shameful crime in that flying cage, with a rhythm in three changing tempos, its motors fighting an adverse wind that flung a drizzle against the aluminum wings at intervals. Now a strange voluptuousness was lulling my scruples. And a force was slowly invading me through my ears, my pores: the language. Here once more was the language I had talked in my infancy; the language in which I had learned to read and sol-fa; the language that had grown rusty with disuse, thrown aside like a useless instrument in a country where it was of no value to me.

  Esto, Fabio, ¡ay dolor!, que ves agora. This, Fabio . . . There came back to me, after long forgetting, this verse, cited as an example of the use of the interjection in a little grammar put away somewhere with a picture of my mother and a blond lock of my hair cut off when I was six years old. And the language of this verse was that of the signs on the stores I could see from the windows of the waiting-room, laughing and deformed in the jargon of the Negro porters, caricatured in a ¡Biva el Precidente!

  I pointed out these mistakes of spelling to Mouche with the pride of one who, from now on, would be her guide and interpreter in this unknown city. This sudden sense of superiority over her dispelled my last scruple. I was not sorry I had come. And a possibility I had not thought of before occurred to me: somewhere in the city the instruments I was commissioned to collect must be for sale. It was unthinkable that someone—a seller of souvenirs, an explorer tired of roaming—would not have thought of making a good thing of objects so highly prized by foreigners. I would find a way to get in touch with this somebody, and then I could silence the kill-joy I carried within me.

  The idea seemed so good that when finally we were riding toward the hotel through the streets of the poor quarters, I ordered the car to stop on a hunch that we might have struck the very place I was looking for. It was a house with ornate iron grilles, old cats in all the windows, and on whose balconies puffy dusty-looking parrots drowsed like a mossy growth over the greenish facade. The old-junk dealer and antiquarian had no knowledge of the instruments I was looking for, and tried to call my attention to other objects, a big music box, in which gilded butterflies mounted on hammers played waltzes and redowas on a kind of psaltery. Pictures of flower-crowned nuns taking their vows stood on tables covered with glasses resting in hands of carnelian. One of the Saint of Lima emerging from the calyx of a rose in a joyous swirl of angels shared a wall with bullfighting scenes.

  Mouche took a fancy to a sea-horse she found among the cameos and coral seals, though I pointed out to her that she could find one like it anywhere. “It is Rimbaud’s black hippocampe,” she answered, paying the price of that dusty, literary object. I should have liked to buy a filigree rosary of colonial design in a glass case, but it was too expensive for me, as the cross was set with real stones.

  As we left the shop, with its mysterious sign, Rastro de Zoroastro, my hand grazed a pot of sweet basil. A rush of emotion came over me at this encounter with the perfume I remembered on the skin of a girl—María del Carmen, the daughter of the gardener—when we played house in the back yard under the shadow of a spreading tamarind while my mother ran through some new habanera at the piano.

  (Thursday, the 8th)

  V/ My startled hand fumbled on the marble-topped night-table for the alarm clock that perhaps was ringing back up on the map, thousands of miles away. And it took a few seconds, as I stared out at the square through the Venetian blinds, to realize that my habit—my morning routine, back there—had be
en mocked by the triangle of a street vendor. Then came the piping of a scissors-grinder, strangely mixed with the melismatic call of a gigantic Negro carrying a basket of squids on his head. The trees, rocked by the morning breeze, showered white fuzz over the statue of one of the fathers of the country whose carelessly tied bronze neckcloth gave him a certain resemblance to Lord Byron while his manner of presenting a flag to invisible revolutionists recalled Lamartine. In the distance the bells of a church were ringing out one of those parochial rhythms produced by swinging from the bell-ropes, the electric carillons of the fake Gothic towers of my country being a thing unknown here.

  Mouche lay asleep across the bed, leaving no room for me. At times, bothered by the unaccustomed heat, she tried to kick off the sheet, but only succeeded in getting her legs more entangled in it. I took a long look at her, somewhat put out by the fiasco of the evening before. A sudden allergy, caused by the odor of an orange tree whose perfume floated up to our fourth floor, had made impossible those physical delights I had promised myself for that first night together in a new climate. I had finally quieted her with a sleeping-pill, and had adjusted my black mask to help me forget my disappointment in sleep.