The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Leaning closer, I listened. The horn fifth was already winging into triplets on the second violins and the violoncellos. Two descending notes were suggested, as though dropped from the first violins and the violas with an indifference that suddenly became anxiety, longing for flight in the face of a suddenly unleashed force. And it was, in a rending of storm-tossed shadows, the first theme of the Ninth Symphony. I gave a sigh of relief at an affirmed tonality, but a swift muting of the strings, the magic collapse of what had been built up, brought me back to the uneasiness of the phrase in gestation.

  After all this time of trying to push it out of my mind, the musical ode was returned to me with the store of memories I was trying in vain to detach from the crescendo that was now beginning, still hesitant and as though uncertain of its way. Each time the metallic sonority of a horn supported a chord, I seemed to see my father, with his pointed beard, jutting his profile forward to read the music open before him, with that peculiar attitude of the horn-player who seems unaware of the fact, when he is playing, that his lips are pressed to the mouthpiece of the great copper swirl that gives his whole person the air of a Corinthian capital. By virtue of that strange mimetism which tends to make oboe-players lean and scrawny, trombonists gay and round-cheeked, my father had developed a voice of copper-toned sonority that vibrated nasally when he showed me, as I sat beside him in a wicker chair, engravings of the forerunners of his noble instrument: Byzantine oliphants, Roman buccina, Moorish añafiles, and the silver tuba of Friedrich Barbarossa. According to him, the walls of Jericho could have tumbled down only at the dread sound of the horn, and he pronounced the word with a rolled r that took on the weight of bronze as he uttered it.

  Trained as he had been in German Swiss conservatories, he upheld the superiority of the horn of metallic timbre, the descendant of the hunting horn that had echoed through the Black Forest, over what was known in French as le cor—the word took on a disdainful ring—for he was of the opinion that the technique taught in Paris made this male instrument resemble the feminine wood-winds. To prove his point, he raised the bell of his instrument and blasted out the Siegfried theme against the patio walls like Gabriel blowing his trumpet on Judgment Day.

  As a matter of fact, a hunting scene in Glazunov’s Raymonda was responsible for my having been born on this side of the ocean. The assassination at Sarajevo had caught my father in the middle of the Wagner cycle at the Royal Theater of Madrid, and, outraged by the unexpected bellicosity of the French and German Socialists, he had shaken the dust of the decaying Continent from his feet and accepted the position of first trumpet on a tour that brought Anna Pavlova to the Antilles. As the result of a marriage whose sentimental origins had always been obscure to me, my first steps were taken in a patio shaded by a huge tamarind while my mother, supervising the colored cook, sang about Sir Cat, who, seated in his gold chair, was asked if he wanted to marry a wild tabby, the niece of a gray cat.

  The prolongation of the war, the slight demand for an instrument whose services were needed only during the opera season when the wintry blasts blew, led my father to open a small music store. Overcome at times by nostalgia for the symphonic groups with which he had played, he would take a baton out of the window, open up the score of the Ninth Symphony, and begin to direct an imaginary orchestra, imitating the gestures of Nikisch or Mahler, singing the whole work with the most deafening reproductions of percussion instruments, basses, and brasses. My mother would quickly close the windows so that people would not think he had gone crazy, though with traditional Spanish wifely meekness she accepted as good, strange as it might seem, whatever this husband of hers did, he who neither drank nor gambled.

  In his baritone voice my father had always given a noble phrasing to this ascending movement of the coda, mournful, at once funereal and triumphant, which was now beginning upon a chromatic tremolo in the depths of the bass clef. Two quick scales broke into the unison of an exordium wrenched from the orchestra as though by blows. Then silence, a silence quickly seized upon by the rejoicing of the crickets and the crackling of the embers. But I was waiting impatiently for the opening shock of the scherzo. And I let myself be carried away, captivated, by the devilish arabesque painted by the second violins, removed from everything that was not music, when the doubling by the horns, with its peculiar sonority, injected into the Beethoven score by Wagner to correct a copyist’s error, carried me back to my father’s side in the days when she was no longer with us, with her blue velvet workbasket, who had so often sung me the adventures of Sir Cat, the ballad of Mambrú, and the lament of Alfonso XII for the death of his Mercedes: Four dukes bore her, Through the streets of Aldaví. The evenings then were devoted to the reading of the old Lutheran Bible that my mother’s Catholicism had kept hidden in the back of a closet for so many years.

  Downcast by his widowerhood, embittered by a loneliness that found no solace in the street, my father finally broke all his ties to the noisy, tropical city where I had been born, and left for North America, where he started up his business again, with very little success. The maxims of Ecclesiastes, of the Psalms, became associated in his mind with unforeseen longings. It was then that he began to talk to me about the workingmen who listened to the Ninth Symphony. His failure on this continent was turning more and more into homesicknesses for a Europe seen from the heights, in moments of apotheosis and rejoicing. This so-called New World had become for him a hemisphere without history, alien to the great Mediterranean traditions, a land of Indians and Negroes peopled by the offscourings of the great nations of Europe, not to mention the boatloads of prostitutes shipped out to New Orleans by tricorned gendarmes to the sound of fifes—this last detail seemed to me reminiscent of a well-known opera.

  In contrast he devoutly evoked the memory of the lands of the old continent, conjuring up before my wondering eyes the University of Heidelberg, which I could only see as green with old ivy. In imagination I moved from the lutes of the angelic concert to the famed blackboards of the Gewandhaus, from the contests of the minnesingers to the concerts of Potsdam, learning the names of cities whose mere spelling called up in my mind mirages in ocher, in white, in bronze—Bonn—in swansdown—Siena. But my father, for whom the affirmation of certain principles comprised civilization’s supreme achievement, made a special point of the sacred respect in which the life of man was held there. He spoke to me of writers who, from the quiet of their studies, could make monarchies rock without anyone daring to interfere with them. The memory of “J’accuse,” of Rathenau’s campaigns (consequences of Louis XVI’s capitulation to Mirabeau), always wound up with the same conclusions on the manifest course of progress, gradual socialization, collective culture, and the working-men who, in his native city, in the shadow of a thirteenth-century cathedral, spent their leisure hours in the public libraries, and on Sunday, instead of listening like dumb brutes to Mass—science was supplanting superstition—took their families to hear the Ninth Symphony.

  Thus I had seen them in my mind’s eye since early youth, those workers in blue smocks and corduroy pants, stirred by the breath of genius that flowed from Beethoven’s composition, listening perhaps to this very trio, whose heated, enveloping phrase now arose in the voices of the cellos and violas. So great had been the spell of this vision that when my father died I employed the meager funds of my inheritance, the product of the auction of sonatas and scores, to becoming acquainted with my origins. I crossed the ocean one day, persuaded that I was never coming back. But after an apprenticeship of wonder, which I would later jokingly describe as the adoration of façades, came the meeting with realities that contrasted sharply with my father’s teachings. Instead of turning toward the Ninth Symphony, people’s thoughts seemed rather to be fixed on keeping time to the parades that passed beneath hastily cobbled triumphal arches and totem poles adorned with old solar symbols.

  The transformation of the marble and bronze of ancient monuments into claptrap wastages of cheap pine, planks for one day’s use, a
nd emblems of gilded cardboard, should have served as a warning to those listening to the blaring words of the loud-speaker, I thought to myself. But this did not seem to be the case. Each and every one felt as though he had received the investiture, and many were those who sat upon the right hand of God to pass judgment on those of the past whose only crime had been not divining the future. I had myself seen a metaphysician of Heidelberg playing the bass drum in a parade of young philosophers goose-stepping to vote for those who had made a mockery of everything that could be called intellectual. I had seen the couples, on solstice nights, climb the Witches’ Mount to light old votive fires, now utterly meaningless. But nothing had made such an impression on me as this putting on trial, this resurrection for punishment and profanation of the tomb of him who had concluded a symphony with the chorale of the Augsburg Confession, or that other who had cried in that pure voice of his, facing the gray-green waves of the great north: “I love the sea like my soul!”

  Weary of having to recite Heine’s “Intermezzo,” under my breath and of hearing about corpses gathered up in the streets, of coming terrors, of new exoduses, I took refuge, like one seeking sanctuary, in the museums, making long journeys through time. But when I came out of the museums, things were going from bad to worse. The newspapers were shrieking for blood. The believers trembled before the altar when the bishops raised their voices. The rabbis hid the Torah, while pastors were thrown out of their meeting houses. Before one’s eyes the destruction of the rites and the shattering of the Word were taking place. At night in the public squares the students of distinguished universities made bonfires of books. At every step on that continent one was confronted by photographs of children dead in the bombing of open cities, by reports of scholars sentenced to salt mines, of unsolved disappearances, assassinations, defenestrations, peasants machine-gunned in bullrings.

  I was astounded, outraged, wounded to the heart by the difference between the world my father had sighed for and the one whose acquaintance I was making. Where I sought the smile of Erasmus, the Discourse on Method, the spirit of humanism, the Faustian aspiration, and the Apollonian soul, what I found was the auto-da-fé, the court of some Holy Inquisition, the political trial that was merely a new form of ordeal. One could no longer view a famous carved pediment, a campanile, gargoyle, or smiling angel without hearing it said that they were forerunners of present-day philosophies and that the shepherds of the Nativity adored something that was not really what lighted up the manger. The age was tiring me. And it was dreadful to think that there was no escape outside the mind from that world without hiding-places, amid that nature subdued for centuries, where the almost total synchronization of life had concentrated all struggle around two or three problems raised to white heat. Speeches had taken the place of myths; slogans of dogmas. Bored with clichés forged in iron, with expurgated texts, with teachers dismissed from their posts, I turned once more toward the Atlantic with the idea of retracing my route.

  Two days before I left I found myself studying a dance of death whose motifs were set forth upon the beams of the ossuary of Saint-Symphorien in Blois. It was a kind of rustic courtyard overgrown with weeds, impregnated with ages of sadness, above whose pillars there was spelled out, once more, the endless theme of vanity, all is vanity, of the skeleton beneath the lustful flesh, the rotted rib-case beneath the priestly chasuble, the drum beaten with two femurs in a xylophonic concert of bones. But here the poverty of the stable surrounding the eternal Example, the presence of the roiled, muddy river, the proximity of farms and factories, the pigs grunting like those of St. Anthony, at the foot of skulls carved on wood grown greasy with centuries of rain, gave a strange force to this reredos of dust, ashes, nothing, setting it in the midst of the present. And the kettledrums in the Beethoven scherzo took on a gloomy resonance now that they were associated in my mind with the vision of the ossuary of Blois. When I emerged, the afternoon papers informed me that war had broken out.

  The wood was now embers. On a hillside, beyond the roof and the pines, a dog howled in the fog. Detached from the music itself, I returned to it by way of the crickets, listening for a B flat that already sounded in my ear. And now, at the quiet invitation of bassoon and clarinet, came the admirable melody of the adagio, so profound in the modesty of its lyricism. This was the only passage of the symphony whose slow measures my mother—more given to habaneras and opera arias—had managed to play at times from a transcription for piano she had found in one of the shop drawers. On the sixth beat, placidly ending in an echo of the wood-winds, I was just coming from school, after running fast to slide over the poplar seed-pods that covered the sidewalks.

  Our house had a broad porch of whitewashed columns standing like a stairstep among the neighboring porches, one above another, all cut by the rising plane of the sidewalk leading to the Church of Jesus del Monte, which towered above the roofs, its terrace of trees encircled by-railings. The house had formerly belonged to people of quality; its furniture was heavy, of dark wood, with deep wardrobes and a crystal chandelier whose prisms turned to little rainbows under the last rays of sun filtering through the blue, white, red lozenges that encircled the archway of the living-room like a great glass fan. My legs stuck out stiffly as I sat back in the rocking-chair, too tall and broad for a child, and opened the abridged grammar of the Royal Academy which I had to review that afternoon. Estos, Fabio, ¡ay dolor!, que ves agora . . . read the example that had come to my mind not long ago. The colored cook, amid the soot of her pots, was singing something that had to do with the days of the colony and the mustaches of the Civil Guard. As usual, the F sharp of the piano my mother was playing had stuck.

  At the back of the house there was a room whose window grille was covered by a squash vine. I called to María del Carmen, who was playing among the potted palms, the roses, the carnation seed-beds, the callas, the sunflowers in the patio of her father, the gardener. She crawled through the hole in the hedge and lay down beside me in the laundry basket that was the ship of our travels. We were enveloped by the smell of esparto grass, rushes, hay, of this basket delivered each week by a sweaty giant named Baudilio, who devoured huge plates of beans.

  I never got tired of hugging María del Carmen. The warmth of her body filled me with a delicious laziness I should have liked to prolong indefinitely. As lying still like that bored her, I quieted her by telling her that we were at sea and that we were soon going to reach the dock, which was that trunk with rounded lid, covered by bright-colored tin, to whose handle the boats tied up.

  I had been told at school about dirty things that go on between men and women. I had indignantly refused to listen, knowing that they were disgusting inventions of the big boys for teasing the little ones. The first day they told me about it I was ashamed to look my mother in the face. I now asked María del Carmen if she wanted to be my wife, and as she answered yes, I squeezed her a little tighter, imitating the sound of a ship’s siren so she would not go away from me. I found it hard to breathe, my heart throbbed, and yet this discomfort was so agreeable that I could not understand why, when the cook surprised us there, she got mad, dragged us out of the basket, threw it up on a cupboard, and said I was too big for such games. But she did not tell my mother, to whom I went to complain and who told me it was time to study. I went back to the abridged grammar, but the scent of rush, willow, and esparto grass haunted me.

  At times this scent wafted back from the past became so strong that it made me tremble. Tonight I encountered it anew, there beside the cupboard of wild herbs, as the adagio ended on four chords pianissimo, and a ripple, perceptible over the air, ran through the chorus about to enter. I sensed the energetic gesture of the invisible conductor opening the way for Schiller’s Ode. The thunder of bronzes and kettledrums unleashed, later to echo itself, served as the framework for the summing-up of the themes already stated. But these themes were broken, maimed, twisted, merged into a chaos that was the gestation of the future, each time they attempted to express, af
firm themselves, become once more what they had been.

  This type of symphony in ruins, which at this point cut across the entire symphony, would furnish a dramatic accompaniment—the thought was the fruit of my professional deformation—for a documentary retracing of the roads I had traveled as military interpreter at the end of the war.

  They were the routes of the Apocalypse, winding between walls so shattered that they seemed the letters of an unknown alphabet; roads with holes filled in with pieces of statuary, which crossed unroofed abbeys, marked by headless angels, turning off before a Last Supper that howitzer shells had exposed to the weather, to debouch into the dust and ashes of what for centuries had been the greatest library of Ambrosian Chant.

  But the horrors of war are the work of man. Every period has left its own etched in copper or in the dark shades of a mezzotint. What was new here, unprecedented, modern, was that cavern of horror, that ministry of horror, that preserve of horror whose acquaintance we were to make as we advanced: the Mansion of Shudders in which everything bore witness to torture, mass extermination, crematories, all set in walls spattered with blood and ordure, heaps of bones, human dentures shoveled up in the corners, not to mention even worse deaths accomplished coldly by rubber-gloved hands in the neat, bright, aseptic whiteness of operating-rooms. Two paces away, a sensitive, cultivated people—ignoring the smoke pall of certain chimneys from which, shortly before, prayers howled in Yiddish had risen—went on collecting stamps, studying the racial glories, playing Mozart’s Eine kleine nachtmusik, reading Hans Christian Andersen to their children. This, too, was new, sinisterly modern, terrifyingly unprecedented.