Suddenly, like a being out of the night, a harpist approached the counter. Barefoot, with his instrument slung on his back, hat in hand, he asked permission to play something. He had come from far off, from a town in the District of Tembladeras, where, as in other years, he had gone to fulfill a vow to play in front of the church the day of the Invention of the Cross. Now what he asked was a glass of good maguey liquor, in exchange for his art, to warm him up. A silence followed, and with the solemnity of one performing a rite the harpist placed his hands on the strings, giving himself over to the inspiration of a prelude to limber up his fingers, which filled me with admiration.
There was a solemn design in his scales, in his recitatives, broken by broad, majestic chords that recalled the grandeur of the organ preludes of the Middle Ages. At the same time, as a consequence of the arbitrary tuning of the village instrument, which limited the player to a range lacking certain notes, one had the impression that all this obeyed a masterly manipulation of the ancient modes and ecclesiastical tones, achieving, by way of authentic primitivism, the most valid objectives of certain contemporary composers. That solemn improvisation recalled the tradition of the organ, the viol, and the lute, discovering new life in the bowels of the instrument, conical in shape, which rested between the player’s scaly ankles.
Then came dances. Dances vertiginous in movement, in which binary rhythms ran agilely beneath three-beat measures, all in a modal system that had never been submitted to such tests. I felt like going back to the house and dragging the young composer down by the ear. But at that moment the lanterns and oilskin capes of the night patrol arrived, and the police ordered the tavern closed. I was informed that here, too, the curfew law would be in force for several days.
This unpleasant reminder that our disagreeable—for me, at least—visit to the painter would be even more confining suddenly translated itself into a decision that came to cap a whole process of thought and memories. It happened that the buses going to the port from which one could reach the great southern jungle by river set out from Los Altos. We would not go on with Mouche’s hoax, against which circumstances were militating at every step. As a result of the revolution, the exchange value of my funds had skyrocketed. The simplest, the most decent, the most interesting thing to do would be to keep faith with the Curator and the university, carrying out the mission I had been assigned. To make it impossible for me to change my mind, I bought two bus tickets for the next morning from the tavern-keeper. I did not care what Mouche thought; for the first time I felt that it was I who would call the tune.
Chapter Three
. . . it will be the time when he takes the road, when he uncovers his face and talks and vomits what he swallowed and lays down his load.
—The Book of Chilam-Balam
(June 11)
VIII/ The argument went on until after midnight. All of a sudden Mouche felt that she was catching cold; she made me touch her forehead, which felt cool, and complained of chills. She coughed until she had really irritated her throat. I went on strapping the suitcases without paying any attention to her, and before dawn broke we were in the bus, which was already filled with people huddled in blankets and with bath towels wrapped around their necks as mufflers. Up to the very last minute Mouche was talking with the painter, arranging to meet her in the capital when we returned from our trip, which, at the very most, would be about two weeks.
We finally began to move over a road that led to the sierra along a ravine so filled with mist that its poplars were but faint shadows in the morning light. I knew that Mouche would pretend to be sick for several hours, for she was one of those who wound up believing what they pretended, so I withdrew into myself, prepared to enjoy everything there was to be seen and to forget about her, though she was dozing with her head on my shoulder, sighing pitifully. Up to that moment the change from the capital to Los Altos had been for me a kind of return, through this renewed experience of ways of life, flavors, words, things, which had left a deeper brand on me than I would have believed, to the years of my childhood, to my adolescence and its first awareness. The pomegranate and the water jar, the playing-card figures, the courtyard with the sweet basil, and the blue door all had something to say to me. But now I was moving beyond the images that had met my eyes at a time when I ceased to know the world only through the sense of touch. As we emerged from the opalescent fog, which was turning green in the dawn, a phase of Discovery began for me.
The bus was climbing, climbing with such an effort, groaning through its axles, plowing through the chill wind, swaying over the precipices, that every slope it left behind seemed to have been achieved at the cost of unspeakable suffering to its whole disjointed frame. It was a sad-looking vehicle, with its red roof, climbing and climbing, holding on by its wheels, steadying itself against the rocks between the almost vertical sides of a ravine. It seemed to shrink in size amid the mountains, which loomed higher—for the mountains were growing. Now that the sun was fretting their peaks, the peaks multiplied, on each side, more pointed, more threatening, like great black axes, their blades turned against the wind that whistled through the passes in an interminable howling. Everything about us magnified its scale to a brutal affirmation of new proportions. After that climb, with its myriad twists and turns, when we thought we had reached the top, another slope rose before us, more abrupt, more winding than the other, between frozen peaks that piled their summits above the previous ones. Doggedly climbing, the bus dwindled to nothing in the passes, more kindred to the insects than to the rocks, pushing itself forward by its round hind feet.
It was now light, and between the frowning crags, harsh as carved flint, the clouds scudded by in a sky buffeted by the wind from the ravines. When, above the black ax-edges, the dividing compasses of the winds, and the still higher steps, the volcanoes emerged, our human prestige came to an end, just as that of the vegetable kingdom had ceased earlier. We were the lowest of beings, silent, benumbed, in a wasteland where all that existed was the presence of gray felt cactus, clinging like a lichen, like a flower of coal, to a soilless surface. Far below we had left the clouds that cast masses of shadow over the valleys; and less low-hanging, other clouds that men who moved among things drawn to their human scale would never see. We were on the backbone of the fabled Indies, on one of its vertebrae, there where the crests of the Andes, sickle-shaped among their flanking peaks, like the mouths of fish gulping the snows, broke and shattered the winds trying to pass from one ocean to the other. We were skirting the craters filled with geological ruins, frightening wells of darkness, or bristling with desolate crags sad as petrified animals.
A silent fear had come over me in the face of this multitude of peaks and abysses. Each mystery of fog, billowing on either side of the unbelievable road, suggested the possibility that depths as profound as the distance separating us from our earth lay beneath its filmy consistency. For from here, from the solid, unmoving ice that whitened the peaks, the earth seemed a different thing, with its animals, its trees, its breezes; a world made for man, unshaken by the nightly-bellowing of the organ played by the storms in gulches and chasms. A layer of clouds separated this rocky wasteland from our true earth. Shuddering at the telluric menace that lurked in every form, in these lava slopes, in the shale of the peaks, I noticed with immense relief that the poor, frail thing in which we were traveling was complaining a little less as we began to descend for the first time in several hours.
We were coming down the other slope when the brakes were suddenly jammed on halfway across a little bridge that spanned a stream so far below that its waters were invisible though the boiling of its torrent was deafening. A woman wrapped in a blue poncho was seated on a stone curbing, a bundle and umbrella on the ground beside her. She made no reply when she was questioned, as though she were in a state of shock, trembling, her eyes vague, her lips quivering, her head partly covered with a red handkerchief that had come untied.
One of our fellow passengers went over t
o her and pushed a bar of molasses into her mouth, pressing hard to make her swallow. As though she understood, the woman began to chew slowly, and little by little her eyes began to focus. It was as though she was returning from a great distance, discovering the world with astonishment. She looked at me as though she knew my face, and got to her feet with a great effort, steadying herself against the curb. At that very moment a distant landslide roared above our heads, churning up the mists that began billowing in puffs from the depths of a crater. The woman suddenly seemed to come to herself; she gave a scream, clutched me, and, almost inarticulate, begged us not to let her die again.
She had come there with people taking a different route who had assumed that she knew the dangers of drowsing off at that height, and it was only now that she realized how near death she had been. With dragging feet she let herself be led to the bus, where she finished swallowing the molasses. When we had descended a little, and the air took on more body, someone gave her a swallow of brandy, and she was soon making light of her terror. Conversation in the bus turned to anecdotes of persons overcome by the altitude, of people who had died in that very pass, episodes narrated as though they were everyday occurrences. Some stated that near the mouth of that volcano disappearing from sight behind the lower peaks eight members of a scientific expedition lay encrusted in ice as in a show window; they had succumbed half a century before. They sat in a circle, in a state of suspended animation, just as death had transfixed them, gazing out from the crystal that covered their faces like a transparent death mask.
We were now descending rapidly. The clouds we had left behind us as we climbed were once more above us, and the mist was breaking up, revealing the still distant valleys. We were returning to man’s earth, and breathing was resuming its normal rhythm after being the prick of icy needles. Suddenly a village emerged on a small round butte surrounded by swift streams. It seemed to me astoundingly Castilian in appearance despite its baroque church, its slope of roofs around the plaza into which winding, narrow mule paths debouched. The braying of an ass brought to my mind a picture of El Toboso—with an ass in the foreground—which illustrated a lesson in my third reader, and which had a striking resemblance to the hamlet that lay before me. “In a village of La Mancha, whose name I prefer not to recall, there lived not long ago one of those hidalgos with lance in rack, ancient buckler, lean nag, and fleet hound. . . .”
I was proud of my ability to remember a thing it had cost the teacher so much effort to teach the twenty of us. Once I had known the whole paragraph by heart, and now I could not remember beyond “fleet hound.” I was exasperated at my lapse, returning again and again to “village of La Mancha” to see if the second sentence would come back to me, when the woman we had rescued from the mist pointed to a broad curve on the flank of the mountain we were about to skirt, stating that it was known as La Hoya. “An olla with more beef than mutton, hash most evenings, eggs and bacon of a Saturday, lentils on Friday, and an occasional squab on Sundays, consumed three quarters of his revenue”
That was as far as I could get. But my attention was now attracted by the woman who had so opportunely mentioned the word “Hoya.” From where I sat I could see a little less than half her face, with its high cheekbone under an eye slanting toward the temple and hidden under the emphatic arch of the eyebrow. It was a pure profile from brow to nose, but suddenly, below these proud, impassive features, the mouth turned full and sensual, with lean cheeks rising toward the ear, the strongly modeled lineaments set in a frame of thick black hair held in place, here and there, by celluloid combs. Several races had met in this woman: Indian in the hair and cheekbones, Mediterranean in brow and nose, Negro in the heavy shoulders and the breadth of hips I had noticed as she stood up to put her bundle and umbrella in the luggage rack. There was no question but that this living sum of races had an aristocracy of her own. Her amazing eyes of pure black recalled the figures in certain archaic frescoes that gaze out so steadily, front and profile, with circles of ink painted on their temples.
This association of images brought to mind La Parisienne of Crete, and I thought to myself that this traveler of the wastelands and the fog was of no more mixed origins than the races that for centuries had come together in the melting-pot of the Mediterranean. I even asked myself whether certain blendings of minor races, without a transplanting of the parent stock, were not preferable to the fusion of Celts, Negroes, Latins, Indians, even “New Christians,” that had taken place on the great meeting-ground of America in that first encounter. For here it had not been the amalgam of related peoples, such as history had fused at certain crossroads of Ulysses’ sea, but of the great races of the world, the most widely separated, the most divergent, those which for centuries had ignored the fact that they inhabited the same planet.
The rain suddenly started up in a monotonous downpour, clouding the windows. The return to a quasi-normal atmosphere had plunged the travelers into a kind of stupor. I ate some fruit, and myself prepared to drowse, noticing as I did so that a week after setting out on this journey I had recovered the ability to sleep at any hour, as when I was a boy. When I awoke, twilight was closing in, and we had reached a village of limestone houses mortised to the hillside in the shadow of chilly forests where the cleared fields resembled parentheses in the thickets. From the treetops thick lianas swung over the road, sprinkling it with congealed fog. Lured by the long shadows of the mountains, the night was ascending the slopes. Mouche, exhausted, clung to my arm, complaining that the trip had worn her out with its changes of altitude. Her head ached, she felt feverish, and she wanted to take some medicine and go straight to bed. I left her in a whitewashed room whose fittings were a washbasin and a ewer and went down to the dining-room of the inn, an extension of the kitchen, where a wood fire crackled on a wide hearth.
After a supper of corn soup and a thick mountain cheese that smelled of goat, I was sitting lazy and comfortable in the gleam of the fire, watching the flicker of the flames, when the shadow of a silhouette came between me and them, taking its place across the table. It was the woman we had rescued that morning. She had changed her clothes, and it amused me to observe the details of her toilette. She was neither well nor badly dressed. Her attire was of no period, no time, with its fussiness of drawnwork, gathers, ribbons, in tan and blue, all clean and starched, as stiff as a deck of cards, something out of an old-fashioned sewing-box and a lightning-change artist’s trunk. She wore a velvet bow of darker blue pinned to her blouse. She ordered dishes whose names I had never heard, and began to eat slowly, without speaking, without raising her eyes from the oilcloth, as though gripped by some gnawing anxiety.
After a time I began to talk with her, and learned that she would be making a good part of the trip with us. She had come all the way across country, over deserts and highlands, islanded lakes, forests, and plains, to bring her father, who was very sick, an image of the Fourteen auxiliary Saints which had worked veritable miracles for her family, and which until now had been in the custody of an aunt in a position to display it on better-lighted altars. As we were alone in the dining-room, she went over to a kind of cupboard with drawers which gave off a pleasant perfume of wild herbs and which had filled me with curiosity. Along with bottles of infusions and vinegars, the drawers were labeled with the names of plants. Taking out dried leaves, mosses, and twigs, she crushed them in the palm of her hand and lauded their properties as she identified them by their smell. This was aloes macerated in dew for chest afflictions, and brier rose to make the hair curl, betony for coughs, sweet basil to ward off bad luck, bear grass, angelica root, night-blooming cereus and redbud for ills I cannot recall. She referred to the herbs as though they were beings from a near-by though mysterious kingdom presided over by grim dignitaries.
Through her lips the plants began to speak and describe their own powers. The forest had a ruler, a one-legged tutelary genius, and nothing that grew in the shade of the trees should be taken without payment. When one entered the shad
ows, looking for the health-giving shoot, fungus, or liana, one spoke a greeting and laid coins at the roots of an aged tree, requesting permission. And on leaving, one bowed deferentially, for millions of eyes were watching every gesture from the bark and the leaves. I could not have said why this woman suddenly seemed to me so beautiful as she threw a handful of pungent herbs into the flames, which brought out her features in strong relief against the shadows. I was about to make some trifling complimentary remark when she brusquely said good-night. I stayed on alone looking into the fire. It had been a long time since I had looked into a fire.
(Later)
IX/ As I sat on before the hearth, I heard faint voices in a corner of the room. Somebody had left an old-vintage radio on among the ears of corn and the cucumbers on a kitchen table. I was about to turn it off when out of that battered box came an all-too-well-known horn fifth. It was the same as that which had made me rush out of a concert hall not many days before. But this evening, beside the logs sending up showers of sparks and the crickets chirping in the dark rafters, this distant rendering took on a mysterious quality. The faceless, anonymous, invisible players were like abstract interpreters of the written notes. The score, falling at the foot of these mountains after flying across the peaks, reached me from some unknown spot with a sonority not of notes, but of echoes answering within me.
The Lost Steps Page 8
