The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Something gave way in me the afternoon I emerged from the abominable park of iniquities, which I had made myself visit to prove that such things could exist, with my mouth dry and feeling as though I had swallowed lime. I could never have conceived such total bankruptcy of Western man as that to which that residue of horror bore witness. As a child I had been terrified by the stories told of the atrocities committed by Pancho Villa, whose name was associated in my memory with a hairy, nocturnal vision of the Devil. “Culture oblige,” my father would say as he looked at the newspaper photographs of the firing-squad executions, voicing with this slogan of a new chivalry of the spirit his faith in the ultimate rout of evil by learning. A Manichean after his own fashion, he saw the world as a battlefield where enlightenment, represented by the printed word, was engaged in a struggle to the death with the dark forces of benightedness, the breeding-ground of every form of cruelty among those who lived without benefit of university, music, and laboratory. Evil, in his mind, was personified in this guerrillero, who, as he lined his enemies up against the wall, revived, after the lapse of centuries, the exploits of the Assyrian prince blinding his prisoners with the lance point or the savagery of the crusade that entombed the Albigensians in the caves of Mont Ségur. The last redoubt of evil, from which the Europe of Beethoven had freed itself, was on the Continent without History.

  But after the sight of the Mansion of Shudders conceived, created, organized by people who knew so many noble things, the bullets of Pancho Villa’s dorados, the cities breached house by house, the wrecked trains among the cactus and maguey, the rifle fire on moonlit nights, seemed to me gay pages from a novel of adventure filled with sunlight, feats of horsemanship, virile prowess, clean death upon sweated saddle leather, or clasped in the arms of a camp-follower who had borne her child by the roadside. And the worst of it was that on the night of my encounter with the most cold-blooded barbarism of history, the assassins, the caretakers, those who carried away the blood-soaked cotton in buckets, and those who made entries in their black oilcloth-bound notebooks, began to sing after supper in their prison hangar. Sitting up in my cot, brought wide awake by my amazement, I had heard them singing the same music as the chorus now brought to its feet by the director’s distant baton:

  Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

  Tochter aus Elysium,

  Wir betreten feuertrunken,

  Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

  At last I was hearing the Ninth Symphony, the reason for my previous journey, though, to be sure, not under the circumstances my father had described. “Joy! The most beautiful divine gleam, daughter of Elysium, drunk with your fire we enter, O celestial one, your sanctuary. . . . All men shall be brothers where you spread your gentle wings.” Schiller’s verses, with their unconscious irony, wounded me. They represented the goal of centuries moving steadily toward tolerance, kindness, mutual understanding. The Ninth Symphony was the gracious, humane philosophy of Montaigne, the cloudless blue of Utopia, the essence of Elzevir, the voice of Voltaire raised in the Calas trial. Now there rose, swelling with joy, the “All men shall be brothers where you spread your gentle wings,” as on that night when I lost faith in those who lied when they talked of their principles, quoting, like the Devil, Scripture to their purpose. To take my mind off the Dance of Death that was overwhelming me, I had let my comrades in arms drag me along with them to their taverns and brothels. I began to drink like them, sinking into a kind of soddenness that stopped short of complete drunkenness and enabled me to conclude the campaign without being taken in by words or deeds.

  Our victory left me vanquished. I was not even surprised the night I spent in the prop-room of the theater in Bayreuth, amid a Wagnerian fauna of swans and horses suspended from the roof, beside a moth-eaten Fafnir who seemed to be trying to hide his head under my invader’s cot. It was a man divested of hope who returned to the great city and made for the first bar to armor himself against every idealistic weakness. The man who tried to bolster himself up by stealing his neighbor’s wife, only to return, when all was said and done, to the loneliness of an unshared bed. The man who went by the name of Man, and who, only the morning before, had been willing to trick the person who had trusted him, bringing him fake instruments. . . . This Ninth Symphony suddenly began to bore me with its unfulfilled promises, its Messianic pretensions underscored with the carnival repertoire of the “Turkish music” so cheaply employed in the final prestissimo. I did not wait for the majestic “Tochter aus Elysium! Freude, schöner Götterfunken!” of the finale. I turned off the radio, wondering how I had been able to listen to almost the whole work, even forgetting myself at moments when the associations were not too overpowering. My hand reached for a cucumber, whose coolness seemed to come from inside the peel; the other closed around a green pepper, breaking the skin for the juice that fell so deliciously on the tongue. I opened the herb cupboard, taking out a handful that I sniffed deeply. The last embers, black and red like something alive, still glowed in the fireplace. I looked out of the window. The surrounding trees had disappeared in the mist. The goose in the courtyard took its head out from under its wing, opening its bill noiselessly, without quite waking up. A fruit fell in the night.

  (Tuesday, the 12th)

  X/ When Mouche came out of her room shortly after daybreak, she looked more tired than when she had gone to bed. The discomforts of a day’s travel over rough roads, a hard bed, early rising, the hardships her body had to endure, had induced a kind of pallor of her whole personality. She who had been so sprightly, the life of the party in the disorder of our nights back there, was the living image of boredom here. The glow of her skin seemed dimmed, and from her kerchief locks of blond hair escaped which had taken on a greenish cast. Her disagreeable expression made her look amazingly old and haggard, gave an ugly droop to her mouth, which because of the bad light and poor mirror she had not been able to make up properly.

  To entertain her at breakfast, I told her about our fellow traveler I had talked with the night before. Just then the woman came in, shivering and laughing at herself for it; she had gone to wash at a near-by spring with the women of the house. Her hair, twisted in braids around her head, still dripped water over her pale face. She spoke to Mouche as though she had known her all her life, asking her questions that I translated. By the time we got into the bus, the two women had worked out a language of gestures and isolated words by which they managed to communicate. Mouche, already tired again, rested her head on the shoulder of Rosario—we had found out her name—who listened to her complaints about the discomforts of the trip with a maternal solicitude in which I could detect a touch of irony. Happy at being temporarily relieved of the burden of Mouche, I was in a gay frame of mind, with a whole seat to myself. That afternoon we would reach the river port where the boats set out for the jungle of the south, and as we wound around the mountainsides, downgrade all the way, we moved toward sunnier hours.

  We stopped now and again at quiet, pleasant villages surrounded by increasingly tropical vegetation. Flowering vines, cactus, bamboo began to make their appearance; a palm tree rose in a courtyard, spreading its fronds over the roof of a house where the women sat in the shade with their mending. Such a heavy, steady rain began to fall at noon, lasting until late afternoon, that I could not see a thing through the drenched panes. Mouche took a book out of her bag. Rosario, imitating her, produced one from her bundle, a volume printed on cheap paper, pure trash, its gaudy cover displaying a woman covered with a bearskin or something that resembled it, in the arms of a splendid knight at the entrance to a cave, while a gazelle looked on benignly: The Story of Genevieve of Brabant.

  The contrast between this and the best-seller Mouche was reading struck me forcibly. I had put the book down after the third chapter, depressed by a kind of melancholy shame at its obscenity. Opposed as I am to all sexual restraints, to all hypocrisy in things of the body, nevertheless I am irritated by any writing or language that degrades physical love with mockery,
sarcasm, or vulgarity. It seems to me that in his mating man should share the element of play that characterizes animals in heat, giving himself up joyously to his pleasant occupation in the knowledge that seclusion behind closed doors, the absence of witnesses, the mutual search for pleasure excludes everything that might give rise to irony or jest—certain physical difficulties, the animal quality of certain unions—in the embraces of a man and woman who cannot see themselves as others see them. For this reason I find pornography as intolerable as certain bawdy stories, double meanings, words metaphorically applied to the sexual act, and I am revolted by a type of literature greatly in vogue in our day which seems to have as its objective the degradation and distortion of all that might contribute, in hours of difficulty and discouragement, to a man’s finding compensation for his failures in the affirmation of his virility, achieving his fullest realization in the flesh he divides.

  I was reading over the two women’s shoulders, establishing a kind of counterpoint between the saccharine and the bitter. But I soon had to give up the game because of the speed with which Mouche turned the pages and the pace at which Rosario read, her eyes traveling slowly from the beginning to the end of the line, her lips moving silently as she spelled out the words, following stirring adventures in words not always in the order she would have chosen. There were moments when she paused, with a gesture of indignation, over some infamous tribulation unhappy Genevieve had suffered; then she went back to the beginning of the paragraph, doubting that such wickedness could be. And then she went back over the lamentable episode once more as though dismayed by her own helplessness in the face of the evidence. Her face mirrored a deep anxiety, as Golo’s wicked designs became manifest.

  “Those are tales of other days,” I said to draw her out. She turned around, startled to discover that I had been reading over her shoulder.

  “These books tell the truth,” she answered.

  I looked at Mouche’s book, thinking that if what it related in words that the worried publisher had had to omit in various places was true, not on that account had it achieved—for all its efforts—the obscenity that Hindu sculptors or humble Incan pottery-makers had raised to a level of authentic grandeur.

  Rosario closed her eyes. “What these books tell is the truth.”

  For her Genevieve’s history was very probably something real, something that was happening in a real country as she read it. The past eludes the grasp of those ignorant of the trappings, the setting, the props of history. She probably saw the castles of Brabant as the great ranches she knew, which often had crenelated walls. The hunt and the chase were the custom of the country in these lands where deer and wild boar were followed by the pack. As for the style of dress, Rosario’s vision was probably that of certain early Renaissance painters who presented the figures of the Passion in the attire of their own day, hurling down to the pit of hell Pilates in the robes of a Florentine judge. . . .

  Night closed in, and the light became so dim that everyone withdrew into himself. After a long ride through the darkness, we rounded a hill suddenly and came out upon the illuminated expanse of the Valley of Flames.

  I had already been told, during the trip, of the town that had sprung up here in a few weeks when oil began to gush from the marshes. But the news had not prepared me for the fantastic sight that grew with every turn of the road. A bare plain was the setting for a vast dance of flames crackling in the wind like the flags of some divine conflagration. Run up by the escaping gases of the wells, they fluttered, came together, swirled, coiled around themselves, free and yet joined to the exhaust pipes—the flagstaffs of this hive of fire, this tree of fire, which emerged from the ground, flying yet unable to fly, a whistle of enraged reds. The air momentarily transformed them into lights of death, maddened firebrands, to bring them together in a cluster of torches, in a single red-black trunk that took on a fleeting resemblance to the human torso. But suddenly the burning body writhed in yellow convulsions, became a burning bush, teeming with sparks, all aroar before it licked hungrily toward the city as though to wreak punishment on its sinful dwellers. Alongside this chain of pyres the pumps worked on, tireless, monotonous, the pistons having the look of great black birds in profile, sinking their beaks isochronously in the earth like woodpeckers boring trees.

  There was something stubborn, obsessive, malefic in these silhouettes, which burned but were never consumed, like salamanders born of the flux and reflux of the fires that the wind whipped horizonward into waves. They seemed to call for names befitting devils, and I was amusing myself, dubbing them Flacocuervo, Buitrehierro, Maltridente, when our journey suddenly came to an end in a courtyard where black pigs, reddened by the reflection of the flames, wallowed in pools of water iridescent with oil. The dining-room of the inn was filled with men talking at the top of their lungs as though choked by the fumes of the grilling meat. With their gas masks still hanging around their necks, without having changed their work clothes, they looked as though gouts, splashes, stains, the blackest exudations of the earth, had settled on them. They were all drinking heavily, holding the bottles by the necks, and the tables were covered with cards and chips.

  But suddenly the games were interrupted and the players rushed toward the courtyard with a jubilant shout. Transported by some mysterious conveyance, women appeared in evening dress and high-heeled slippers, with bright ornaments in their hair and at their necks. Their presence in that slime-filled back yard flanked with stalls seemed to me nothing short of magic. The sequins, the beads, the trimmings of their dresses reflected the light of the flames, which gave new emphasis to their finery with every shift of the wind. Carrying bundles and suitcases, these scarlet women rushed busily among the dark men with a jabbering and gabbling that sent the donkeys into a panic and awoke the sleeping hens on the rafters. I learned that the next day was the festival of the patron saint of the town, and that these women were prostitutes who traveled about all year, from one place to another, from fairs to processions, from mines to pilgrimages, making the most of the days when men feel generous. Their route was that of the church spires, and their fornications observed the saints’ calendar—St. Christopher, St. Lucy, the Blessed Dead, the Holy Innocents—in ditches, beside cemetery walls, on the beaches, or in the cubby-holes of rooms with washbasins on the dirt floors in the backs of taverns.

  What most amazed me was the welcome these women received from the upright citizens, without the least sign of contempt on the part of the decent women of the house, the wife and the young daughter of the innkeeper. It seemed to me that they looked upon them as clowns or gypsies or amusing lunatics, and the kitchen maids laughed as they watched them jump, in their evening dresses, over the pigs and the puddles, some of the miners helping them with their bundles to speed up matters. It occurred to me that these wandering prostitutes we had come upon, in this our modern world, were kin to those trollops of the Middle Ages who journeyed from Bremen to Hamburg, from Antwerp to Ghent, at fair time, to relieve masters and journeymen of their evil humors, giving comfort on the side to some pilgrim from Compostela in return for being allowed to kiss the cockleshell emblem of his distant travels.

  After they had collected all their baggage, the women made their noisy entrance into the dining-room. Mouche, all wonderment, urged me to follow them to get a good look at their dresses and hair-dos. She, who until that moment had been contemptuous and bored, was transfigured. There are people whom the presence of sex brings to life. Indifferent, complaining since the night before, my friend came awake in the murky atmosphere that had sprung up around her. According to her now, these prostitutes were formidables, unique, the like of which no longer existed, and she moved closer to them. Rosario, seeing her seat herself on a bench beside the table where the new arrivals had gathered, looked at me in surprise, as though trying to tell me something. To avoid an explanation that she would probably not have understood, I picked up our luggage and set out to find our room. The writhing flames gleamed above the cour
tyard walls.

  I was trying to figure out how much I had spent these last days when it seemed to me that I heard Mouche calling me in a terrified voice. In the mirror of the wardrobe I saw her pass, at the other end of the hall, as though running from a man who was pursuing her. When I reached them, the man had her by the waist and was trying to push her into a room. When I hit him, he turned swiftly, and his punch threw me against a table covered with empty bottles, which fell with a crash. I threw my arms around my opponent, and we rolled on the floor, fragments of glass biting into our hands and arms. After a short struggle, in which I was left powerless, I found myself between the man’s knees, flat on the floor, while two broad fists rose, poised to fall on my face like hammers. At that moment Rosario rushed into the room, followed by the innkeeper.

  “Yannes!” she cried, “Yannes!” grabbing him by the wrists. The man slowly got to his feet as though ashamed of what had happened. The innkeeper was explaining to him something that in my nervous excitement I could not catch. My opponent looked sheepish. He was saying to me in an apologetic tone: “I not know. . . . It was mistake. . . . She should have said she had husband.”

  Rosario wiped my face with a cloth wrung out in rum. “It was her fault. She was there with the others.”

  The worst of it was that it was not the man who had hit me whom I was furious with, but Mouche. It was just like her to have gone and sat down with the prostitutes. “Nothing has happened . . . nothing has happened,” the innkeeper announced to the spectators crowding into the hall. And Rosario, as though really nothing had happened, made me shake hands with the other man, who was babbling excuses. To calm me completely, she told me about him, saying she had known him for a long time, that he was not from this place, but from Puerto Anunciación, the town near the Jungle of the South, where her sick father was waiting for her and the miraculous scapulary. The name she used, Diamond-Hunter, made me suddenly interested in my erstwhile mauler. A few moments more; and we were at the bar with half a bottle of brandy inside us, the stupid fight forgotten. Deep-chested, slender-waisted, with something of the look of a bird of prey, the miner had a face, shadowed by a line of beard, which might have stepped out of an arch of triumph in the energy and vigor of its profile.