The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  I told myself that it was not worth while risking my life just to get rid of a doubt. And yet I could not bear the thought that she was there, in that drunken building, free from my vigilance. Anything was possible in that haunt of confusion, with its dark cellars and its myriad rooms indifferent to copulations that left no memory. I don’t know how the idea came to me that this riverbed of the street, which every shot widened, this moat, this abyss that every bullet made more unbridgeable, was like a warning, the shape of things to come.

  Just then something strange happened at the hotel. The music and the laughter were cut short. There was the sound of cries, weeping, shouts throughout the building. Some lights went off, others came on. There was a kind of muted commotion there; panic without flight. The shooting in the side-street started up again. But this time I saw several squads of soldiers with fixed bayonets and machine guns. They advanced slowly, under cover of the columns of the arcades, as far as the store. The snipers had abandoned the roof, and the regular troops were now guarding the section of the street I had to cross. Under the protection of a sergeant, I finally reached the hotel. When the grille swung open and I walked into the foyer, I stood rooted in my tracks: there on a long walnut table turned into a bier lay the Kappellmeister, a crucifix between the lapels of his evening coat. Four silver candelabra with vine leaf repousse held lighted tapers. The conductor had been killed by a spent bullet that struck him in the temple as he stood carelessly by the window in his room.

  I looked at the faces around him: unshaven, dirty, shocked out of drunkenness by the surprise of death. The insects were still coming through the drain pipes; there was the sour reek of body sweat. A stench of latrines filled the building. Drawn, haggard, the dancers looked like ghosts. Two of them, still in the tulle and tights of an adagio they had been dancing, sank sobbing into the shadows of the marble staircase. The flies were everywhere now, buzzing around the lights, crawling on the walls, getting entangled in the women’s hair. Outside, the carrion was multiplying. I found Mouche collapsed on the bed in our room with an attack of nerves.

  “We’ll get her to Los Altos as soon as it gets light,” the painter said. Roosters were beginning to crow in the patios. Downstairs, the undertaker’s paraphernalia was being lowered to the granite sidewalk from a black and silver hearse by men in black.

  (Saturday, the 10th)

  VII/ We got to Los Altos shortly after noon, by a little narrow-gauge train that looked like an amusement-park railway. I liked the place so much that for the third time that afternoon, with my elbows on the railing of the waterfall, I was looking out over what I had acquainted myself with on my earlier walks. Nothing that met the eye was monumental or impressive. Nothing had been transferred to picture postcards or been mentioned in guidebooks. And yet I found in this provincial corner, where every nook, every nail-headed door, spoke of a peculiar way of life, a charm that the museum cities, with their over-admired, over-photographed stones, had lost.

  Seen by night, the city became an illuminated strip of a city set upon a mountainside, with visions of glory and visions of hell created out of the darkness by the streetlights. Those fifteen lights, abuzz with insects, had the isolating function of picture illumination or theater spotlights, bringing into full relief the stations of the winding road that led to the Calvary of the summit.

  As in every allegory of the righteous life and the wastrel life the wicked are always burning below, so the first light fell upon the tavern where the mule-drivers forgathered, with its rum, corn liquor, and brandy, its card games and bad examples, and drunks sleeping on the barrels at the entrance. The second light swung over Lola’s Place, where Carmen, Ninfa, and Esperanza, dressed in white, pink, and blue, sat under Japanese lanterns on a dingy velvet sofa that had belonged to one of the judges of the Royal Tribunal. Caught in the third light, the camels, lions, and ostriches of a merry-go-round revolved, while the hanging seats of a Ferris wheel rose into the darkness and returned from it—inasmuch as the light did not reach to the top—in the time it took the perforated roll of the Skaters’ Waltz to play itself through. As though fallen from the heaven of Fame, the fourth light whitened the statue of the Poet, the favorite local son, author of a prize-winning “Hymn to Agriculture,” who continued his versifying on a marble sheet with a moldy pen guided by the forefinger of a Muse who had lost her other arm. Nothing special took place under the fifth light, except that two donkeys dozed there. The sixth was that of the Grotto of Lourdes, a toilsome construction of cement and stones brought in from a distance, all the more noteworthy if it is borne in mind that before it could be built, a real grotto that existed on the same spot had to be walled up. The seventh light marked a somber pine and the rose that climbed over a doorway that was always locked. Then came the Cathedral, its heavy buttresses emphasized by the shadows under the eighth light, which, as it hung from a high post, illuminated the face of the clock, whose hands had been sleeping for the past forty years on the hour of half past seven, which according to the pious women was that of a not-too-distant Last Judgment at which the hussies of the town would have their accounts settled. The ninth light was that of the Athenaeum, seat of cultural acts and patriotic celebrations, with its little museum containing a hook from which the hammock of the hero of the Campaign of the Highlands had been hung for one night, a grain of rice on which several paragraphs of Don Quixote had been copied, a portrait of Napoleon typed in x’s, and a complete collection of the poisonous snakes of the area in bottles. Closed, mysterious, flanked by two dark-gray Solomonic columns supporting an open compass that stretched from one capital to the other, the Masonic temple occupied the entire zone of the tenth light. Then came the Convent of the Recollect Nuns, whose shrubbery emerged blurred under the eleventh light, darkened by too many dead insects. Then came the barracks, which shared the next light with a Doric pavilion, whose cupola had been struck by lightning, but which still was useful for band concerts where the young people circled, the men in one direction, the women in another. In the cone of the thirteenth, a green horse reared on its hind legs, mounted by a bronze caudillo on whom many a rain had fallen, his advancing sword dividing the fog into two slow-moving currents. Then came a dark strip picked out by the winks of candles or braziers, of Indian huts with their pictures of the birth of the Child and death-watch scenes. Higher up, under the last light but one, a cement pedestal awaited the sagittary pose of the Brave Bowman, who wreaked death upon the conquistadors, which the Masons and Communists had ordered from a stonecutter to annoy the priests.

  Then followed blackest night. And beyond it, so high that it seemed not of this earth, the light that illuminated three wooden crosses, set on mounds of stone, where the wind swept free. There the illuminated strip of the city came to an end against a background of stars and clouds, interspersed with smaller lights that were barely perceptible. All the rest was adobe roofs, which in the shadows became one with the mud of the mountain.

  Shivering in the cold descending from the heights, I made my way back through the winding streets to the painter’s house. Ever since we had left the capital, I was finding this woman—to whom I had paid little attention during the previous days, accepting our chance association as I would have accepted any other—more irritating by the minute, because of Mouche’s growing admiration for her. With every hour that passed, what had seemed to me at the beginning a colorless being was becoming more and more a blocking force. A kind of studied leisure, which lent weight to her words, informed the trivial decisions that affected the three of us with a kind of authority, subdued but nevertheless firm, which Mouche accepted with a humility that was out of character. She, for whom her caprices were law, always found our hostess right, though the minute before she might have been in agreement with me. She was always wanting to go out when I wanted to stay in, wanting to rest when I suggested climbing the mountain, revealing a constant desire to please the painter, watching her reactions, and falling in with them.

  It was apparent fro
m the importance Mouche gave this new friendship how much she missed—after such a short time—certain things we had left behind. Whereas the difference of altitude, the transparence of the air, the change of habits, the re-encounter with the language of my infancy, were effecting in me a kind of return—hesitant but already noticeable—to a balance I had long lost, it was evident that she was becoming bored, though she did not yet admit it. Nothing we had seen so far corresponded to what she had hoped to find on this trip, assuming that she had really hoped to find anything.

  And yet Mouche had talked intelligently about a trip she had made to Italy before we met. For that reason, as I watched how mistaken or inept her reactions were to this country which took us by surprise, undocumented, without knowledge of its past or the preparation of the written word, I began to ask myself whether her shrewd observations on the mysterious sensuality of windows of the Barberini Palace, the obsession with the cherubim in the heavens of San Giovanni Laterano, the almost feminine intimacy of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, with its cloister all curves and shadows, had been anything more than apt quotations sipped from the fountain of clichés and set to the rhythm of the day, from reading, conversations. Her opinions were always in keeping with the aesthetic slogans in fashion at the moment. She became enthusiastic over moss and shadows when that was the thing to do. For that very reason, confronted by something she knew nothing about, a fact that lacked association, a type of architecture that had not been previously discussed in a book, she found herself disconcerted, hesitant, unable to formulate an opinion of any value, buying a dusty hippocampe because of literary references when she could have bought an authentic miniature of Santa Rosa with her flowering palm.

  As the Canadian painter had been the mistress of a poet well known for his essays on Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, Mouche returned ecstatically to the fields of surrealism, astrology, the interpretation of dreams, with all this carried in its wake. Every time she met a woman who (as she put it) talked her language—and this did not happen too often—she plunged into this new friendship with such utter devotion, such a display of attention, such breathlessness, as finally to exasperate me. These emotional crises did not last long; they would end as abruptly as they had begun. But while they went on, they aroused my worst suspicions.

  On this occasion, as on others, it was no more than a hunch, a misgiving, a doubt; there was no real proof of anything. But the gnawing idea had taken hold of me the afternoon before, after the Kappellmeister’s burial. When I returned from the cemetery, where I had gone with a delegation of hotel guests, petals of the over-fragrant funeral flowers were still scattered over the floor of the foyer. The street-cleaners were busy carting away the carrion whose stench had been so unbearable during our confinement, and as the legs of the horses, stripped fleshless by the vultures, were too long for the carts, they chopped them up with machetes, and scraps of hoofs, bones, and horseshoes flew among the swarms of bluebottles buzzing about the pavement. Indoors the servants, who had come back from the revolution to normalcy, were putting the furniture in place and polishing the doorknobs. Mouche, it seemed, had gone out with her friend.

  When the two of them came back after the curfew had sounded, saying they had been walking about the streets in the crowds celebrating the victory of the winning side, I seemed to notice something strange about them. They showed a kind of chill indifference toward everything, a new self-sufficiency—as of one returning from a trip to forbidden places. I kept a careful eye on them to see if I could surprise some glance of understanding; I weighed each word either one said for a hidden or surprise meaning; I tried to catch them off guard with disconcerting, contradictory questions, but to no avail. My long experience in certain circles, my boasted sophistication, told me that I was behaving like a fool. And yet I was suffering something far worse than jealousy: the unbearable sensation of having been left out of a game that such omission made all the more hateful.

  I could not bear the perfidy, the hypocrisy, the mental picture conjured up of this hidden and pleasurable “something” these women might be sharing behind my back. Suddenly my imagination gave tangible form to the most hideous physical possibilities, and in spite of the fact that I had told myself a thou sand times that the bond between Mouche and me was a habit of the senses, and not love, I found myself ready to play the role of outraged husband. I knew that when the storm had spent itself and I confessed my tortures to my friend, she would shrug her shoulders, saying that it was too ridiculous to make her angry, and would attribute the “animality” of such reactions to my early years in a Latin American atmosphere. But once again, in the silence of these deserted streets, my suspicions had flared up. I quickened my pace to get home as fast as I could, hoping for, and at the same time fearing, some concrete proof.

  But what I found was something wholly unexpected: a great hubbub in the studio, accompanied by copious libations. Three young artists had arrived from the capital a few minutes before, fleeing, like ourselves, from the curfew that shut them up indoors from twilight on. The musician was so white, the poet so Indian, the painter so black, that they brought to mind the Three Wise Men as they stood around the hammock where Mouche lay lazily stretched, answering the questions they asked her as though playing a part in an Adoration of the Magi scene. The conversation had a single theme: Paris. And I noticed that the three of them were questioning her as Christians in the Middle Ages might have questioned a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land. They were insatiable in their eagerness to learn every detail of what the leader of such and such a school, whose acquaintance Mouche claimed, looked like; they wanted to know if a certain café was still patronized by this or that writer; if two of them had made up after a quarrel about Kierkegaard; whether non-representational painting still had its former champions. And when their knowledge of French and English was insufficient for them to understand what Mouche was telling them, they cast supplicating glances at the painter, hoping that she would condescend to translate some anecdote, some precious phrase whose meaning eluded them.

  I cut into the conversation with the malicious intention of breaking up Mouche’s big scene, asking the young men about the history of their country, the first manifestations of its colonial literature, its folk traditions; and it was evident that my changing the subject was most distasteful to them. I asked them, to keep my friend from recovering the conversational ball, if they had ever been in the jungle. The Indian poet, shrugging his shoulders, answered that there was nothing to see there, and that such trips were for foreigners who wanted to collect bows and quivers. Culture, observed the Negro painter emphatically, was not to be found in the jungle. In the musician’s opinion, the artist today could live only where thought and creation were really alive, returning to that city whose intellectual topography was engraved on the mind of his comrades, given, they confessed, to dreaming with open eyes before a Carte Taride, whose subway stations were marked by heavy blue circles: Solferino, Oberkampf, Corvisard, Mouton-Duvernet. Between these circles, above the tracery of the streets, intersected from time to time by the clear artery of the Seine, ran the routes themselves, crisscrossed like the web of a net.

  The Three Young Wise Men would soon land in this net, led by the star shining above the great manger of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Depending on the color of the day, the topic of conversation would be the longing for evasion, the advantages of suicide, the need to slap the face of corpses or of taking a shot at the first passer-by. Some high priest of delirium would initiate them in the cult of Dionysus, “god of ecstasy and fear, of brutality and liberation; a mad god whose mere sight throws living beings into a state of delirium,” though without telling them that the one who invoked this Dionysus, the officer Nietzsche, had had himself photographed on one occasion in Reichswehr uniform, sword in hand, and helmet on a console table of Munich style, like a prophetic prefiguration of the god of horror whom reality would unleash in the Europe of that Ninth Symphony.

  I saw them growing gaunt and pale
in their unlighted studios—the Indian turning green, the Negro’s smile gone, the white man perverted—more and more forgetful of the sun they had left behind, trying desperately to imitate what came naturally to those whose rightful place was in the net. Years later, having frittered away their youth, they would return, with vacant eyes, all initiative gone, without heart to set themselves to the only task appropriate to the milieu that was slowly revealing to me the nature of its values: Adam’s task of giving things their names.

  That night as I looked at them I could see the harm my uprooting from this environment, which had been mine until adolescence, had done me; the share the facile bedazzlement of the members of my generation, carried away by theories into the same intellectual labyrinths, devoured by the same Minotaurs, had had in disorienting me. I was weary of dragging the chain of certain ideas, and I felt a lurking desire to say something that was not the daily cliché of all who considered themselves au courant with things that fifteen years from now would be contemptuously cast aside. Once again the discussions that had at times amused me in Mouche’s house had caught up with me. But now, leaning out of the window, over the stream purling through the ravine, breathing the sharp air redolent of moist hay, so near the creatures of the earth crawling through the russet green of the alfalfa with death in their fangs; at this moment, when night enveloped me like a living presence, I found certain “modern” themes unbearable. I would have liked to silence the voices at my back to catch the diapason of the frogs, the shrill tonality of the crickets, the rhythm of the creaking axles of a cart above the Calvary of the Mist.

  Furious with Mouche, with the whole world, longing to write something, to compose something, I left the house and went down to the bank of the brook to gaze once more on the stations of the town altarpiece. Above me a clashing of chords came from the painter’s piano. Then the young musician—his hard touch revealed the presence of the composer behind the chords—began to play. Just for fun I counted up to twelve notes, without a single repetition, until he came back to the E flat with which the tortured andante had begun. I would have bet on it: atonality had reached the country; its formulas were employed here. I kept on to the tavern for a glass of berry brandy. Tightly wrapped in their ponchos, the mule-drivers were talking about a tree that bled when the ax was laid to it on Good Friday, and of thistles that grew out of the bellies of wasps killed by the smoke of a certain wood in the hills.