The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  She got up from the bed, her disheveled hair hanging over her face, and lifted her little fists to my temples in a gesture of fury new to me. She screamed that she wanted to get to Los Altos as quickly as she could, that she needed the mountain coolness to get back her strength, that that was where we were going to spend the rest of my vacation. The name of Los Altos filled me with a sudden rage, recalling the suspicious attentions the Canadian painter had lavished on Mouche. And though I had always refrained from using rough words in my arguments with her, that night, finding pleasure in how ugly she looked by the light of the kerosene lamp, I felt a need to hurt her, to insult her, to rid myself of all the old grudges that had accumulated within me. As a start, I began to insult the painter, calling her a name that affected Mouche as though I had stuck a red-hot pin into her. She took a step back and threw the pitcher of brandy at my head, missing me by a razor’s edge.

  Frightened at what she had done, she turned to me with pleading hands; but my words, now justified by her violence, had broken from their moorings. I screamed that I had stopped loving her, that the sight of her was unbearable, that even her body revolted me.

  The impression that this strange voice—which astonished even me—made on her was so frightening that she darted into the courtyard, as though fearing that physical violence would follow the words. But, forgetting about the mud, she slipped and fell into the pool filled with turtles. As she felt the wet shells beginning to heave under her like armored soldiers fallen into a quagmire, she let out a scream of terror which aroused the dogs. To the sound of a universal concert of barking, I brought Mouche back into the room, stripped off her clothes, which reeked of rotten mud, and wiped her from her head to her feet with a coarse, torn cloth. I made her swallow a big drink of brandy, pulled the bedclothes around her, and went out of the room without paying any attention to her calls and sobbing. I wanted, I needed, to get her out of my mind for a few hours.

  In a near-by tavern I found the Greek drinking Homerically in the company of a little man with bushy eyebrows whom he introduced as the Adelantado, telling me that the yellow dog beside him, which was lapping beer from a cup, was a very unusual animal answering to the name Gavilán. The miner rejoiced at the workings of fate which had so effortlessly brought me into contact with a person rarely seen in Puerto Anunciación. Despite the vast area of the jungle—he explained to me—embracing mountains, abysses, treasures, nomad peoples, the remains of lost civilizations, it was, nevertheless, a world compact, complete, which fed its fauna and its men, shaped its own clouds, assembled its meteors, brought on its rains. A hidden nation, a map in code, a vast vegetable kingdom with few entrances. “Sort of like Noah’s ark, where all the animals of the earth could fit, but with only one small door,” the little man added.

  To penetrate this world, the Adelantado had had to find the keys to its secret entrances: he alone knew of a pass between two trees, the only one within a circumference of fifty leagues, leading to a narrow stairway of stones by which it was possible to descend to the vast mystery of immense telluric baroques. He alone knew of the withe footbridge under the cascade, the postern gate of brush, the entrance to the cave of the prehistoric stone carvings, the hidden trail that led to practicable passes. He could read the code of broken twigs, incisions on treetrunks, the branch not fallen but placed. He would disappear for months, and when least expected would emerge with his trophies through an opening in the vegetable wall. Sometimes it was a load of butterflies, or lizard skins, sacks filled with heron feathers, live birds that uttered strange whistles, or pieces of anthropomorphic pottery, poetic household articles, rare basketwork that might take the fancy of some foreigner. Once he had reappeared after a long absence followed by twenty Indians carrying orchids. The dog Gavilán owed his name to his ability to catch birds without disturbing one feather, bringing them to his master to see if they were of any value for their joint enterprise.

  While the Adelantado left us to go into the street to greet the Tuna-Fisher, who was out on an errand with several of his forty-two natural children, the Greek informed me in a low voice that it was generally believed that this amazing personage, in the course of his wanderings, had come upon a fabulous lode of gold whose location he naturally kept secret. Nobody could explain why, when he appeared with bearers, they returned at once with more cargo than the needs of a few men justified, including an occasional breeding boar, cloth, combs, sugar, and other articles that an explorer of remote routes could hardly need. He turned aside all questions on the matter and quickly herded his Indians back into the woods without letting them linger around the settlement. It was said that he was probably working the lode with the help of outlaws or with prisoners of war he bought from some tribe, or that he had made himself king of a group of Negroes who had run away to the forest three hundred years before and who, some said, lived in a stockaded settlement in which drums could be heard booming day and night.

  When he saw the Adelantado coming back, the Greek, quickly changing the subject, began to talk of the purpose of my trip. Accustomed to dealing with people moved by unusual objectives, among them a strange botanist by the name of Montsalvatje, whom he praised highly, the Adelantado told me that I could find the instruments I was looking for in the first villages of a tribe that lived three days off by river on the banks of a channel called El Pintado because of the constantly changing color of its muddy waters. When I questioned him about certain primitive rites, he listed all the objects to make music he could recall, imitating, with brandy-stimulated onomatopoeia and the gestures of their players, various hollowed trunk drums, bone flutes, antler and skull horns, funerary roaring jars, and witch-doctor rattles.

  We were deep in this when Fray Pedro de Henestrosa appeared to tell us that Rosario’s father had just died. Somewhat shocked by the suddenness of the news, and at the same time eager to see the girl, of whom I had heard nothing since we arrived, I set out for the corner where the dead man had lived, along streets down which muddy brooks ran, in the company of the Greek, the friar, and the Adelantado, followed by Gavilán, who never missed a wake when he was in town. There still lingered on my tongue the hazelnut flavor of the agave brandy I had drunk with such relish in the tavern, whose flowery signboard displayed such a delightfully absurd name: Memories of the Future.

  (Friday night)

  XIV/ Death was still at work in that house with its eight grilled windows. It was everywhere, diligent, looking after all the details, making the necessary arrangements, placing the mourners, lighting the candles, taking pains to see that the whole town should find place in the vast rooms with deep window seats and broad doorways, the better to contemplate its work. On a platform covered with old, mildewed velvets stood the coffin, still ringing with hammer blows, studded with heavy, silver-headed nails, just come from the Carpenter, who never erred in his measurements of a corpse, for his photographic memory preserved the dimensions of all the town’s living inhabitants. Out of the night came flowers that were over-fragant, flowers of patios, window-boxes, gardens wrested from the jungle-tuberoses and thick-petaled jasmine, wood lilies, waxy magnolias—tied in tight bunches with ribbons that yesterday had graced a dance. In the hall, in the sitting-room, the men stood in solemn conversation while the women prayed antiphonally in the bedrooms, with the obsessive repetition by all of Hail, Mary, full of grace! the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women. The sound arose from dark corners among images of saints and rosaries hanging from wall brackets, swelling and receding with the regular rhythm of waves lapping the pebbles of a reef. All the mirrors, in whose depths the dead man had lived, were veiled with crepe and cloth.

  Various notables—the Rapids-Shooter, the Mayor and Schoolteacher, the Tuna-Fisher, the Tanner—had just filed past the corpse, first dropping their cigarette butts into their hats. At this moment a skinny girl in black let out a shrill scream and fell to the floor as though in a fit. She was carried out of the room. Now Rosario approached the bier. In deep mourning
, her gleaming hair combed tight to her head, her lips pale, she seemed to me breath-takingly beautiful. She looked all around her with eyes hollow with weeping, and then suddenly, as though she had received a mortal wound, raised her clenched hands to her mouth and let out a long, inhuman howl as of an arrow-pierced animal, a woman in labor, one possessed, and flung herself upon the coffin. In a hoarse voice broken with sobs, she cried that she was going to rend her garments, tear out her eyes, that she no longer wished to live, that she was going to throw herself into the grave and let them cover her with earth. When they tried to pull her away, she resisted furiously, threatening in mysterious, bloodcurdling words, which seemed those of prophecy or second sight, those who attempted to loosen her fingers from the black velvet. Her throat lacerated by sobs, she spoke of great misfortunes, of the end of the world, the Last Judgment, of plagues and expiations.

  They finally got her out of the room half-fainting, her legs limp, her hair disheveled. Her black stockings, which had been torn in her attack of nerves, her recently polished shoes with run-down heels, the toes dragging along the floor, caused me intense suffering. But now another of the sisters was clasping the coffin. Appalled at the violence of their grief, I suddenly thought of the ancient tragedy. In these large families, where each one keeps his mourning garb folded away in the drawer, death is a common occurrence. Mothers who bear many children are familiar with its presence. But these women who shared the customary duties involved in the death agony, who from childhood had helped lay out the dead, cover mirrors, say the appropriate prayers, were protesting against death in keeping with a rite that had come down from remote times. For all this was, primarily, a kind of desperate, defiant, almost magic protest at the presence of Death in the house.

  Over the corpse these peasant women were playing the role of a Greek chorus, their hair falling like thick veils over the menacing faces of daughters of kings, keening Trojan women cast like dogs out of their burning palaces. The insistence in this despair, the admirable dramatic sense with which the nine sisters—for they were nine—appeared one after the other in the right and left doors, preparing the entrance of the Mother, who was Hecuba, cursing their bereavement, lamenting the ruin of a house, crying that there was no God, made me suspect that there was something of the theater about all this. A relative standing near me observed admiringly that it was a pleasure to see how these women mourned their dead. Yet at the same time I felt myself caught up, dragged along, as though what was taking place had awakened in me obscure memories of funeral rites that had been performed by men who had been my forerunners in the kingdom of this world. From a crevice of my memory there emerged the lines of Shelley, which seemed to utter themselves, as though entwined in their own meaning:

  . . . How canst thou hear

  Who knowest not the language of the dead?

  The men of the cities where I had lived all my life were unaware of the meaning of these words, for they had forgotten the language of those able to talk to the dead. The language of those who know the final horror of being left alone and divine the anguish of those who beg not to be abandoned in this unknown bourne. When they screamed that they would throw themselves into their father’s grave, the nine sisters were carrying out one of the noblest forms of a millenary rite, in observance of which the dead were given gifts and promises impossible of fulfillment, to mitigate their loneliness. Coins were put in their mouths; figures of slaves, women, and musicians were laid about them; they were provided with passwords, credentials, safe conducts for the Ferrymen and Lords of the Other Shore whose fees and requirements were not even known.

  I recalled, at the same time, what a sordid, petty thing death had become for the men of my Shore—my own people—big business, bronzes, pomp, prayers that all failed to conceal, beneath the funeral wreaths and the beds of ice, the fact that it was nothing but a business of black-gloved employees, professional solemnity, articles of common use, and hands reaching across the corpse for payment. Some might smile at the tragedy being performed here. But in it one could see the earliest rites of mankind.

  I was thinking this when the Diamond-Hunter came up to me with a meaningful look, saying that I ought to go and find Rosario, who was alone in the kitchen making coffee for the women. The ironic tone of his words annoyed me, and I told him that it seemed an inopportune moment to intrude on her grief. “You go in there and don’t be afraid,” he said as though reciting a lesson. “It’s boldness that sees a man through, even if he comes from different country.”

  I was on the point of telling him that I did not need such advice, when he added, in a declamatory voice: “As you go into the hall you will see first the queen, whose name is Arete and who comes from the same line as King Alcinoüs.” And in the face of my stupefaction at words that had taken me by surprise, he fixed his birdlike eyes on me, said, laughing: “Homer Odysseus,” and shoved me toward the kitchen.

  There, among water jars standing in their rack, clay pots, and wood fire, Rosario was busily pouring boiling water through a flannel cone stained by years of coffee grounds. The violence of her outburst seemed to have relieved her grief. In a quiet voice she explained to me that the Fourteen Auxiliary Saints had arrived too late to save her father. She then described his illness to me after the manner of a legend, revealing a mythological concept of human physiology. It had all begun with a quarrel with a friend, aggravated by too much sun as he crossed a river, which had brought on a rise of humors to the brain, congested by a draft, which had left half his body without blood, thus bringing on an inflammation of the loins and privates which, after forty days of fever, had turned into a hardening of the walls of the heart.

  While Rosario was talking, I moved closer to her, attracted by a kind of warmth that emanated from her body and reached my skin through our clothing. She was sitting beside a huge tub on the floor, her elbows resting on the rim in such a way that the bulge of the vessel arched her waist toward me. The hearth fire shone in her face, bringing out strange lights in her somber eyes. It filled me with shame to feel that I desired her with a longing I had not known since adolescence. I do not know whether that abominable impulse which has given rise to so many fables was at work in me, which makes us desire the living flesh in the presence of the flesh that will never live again. The look with which I divested her of her mourning must have been so hungry that Rosario pushed the tub between us, turning it with a slow movement, like a person clinging to the curb of a well, and rested her elbows on the edge again, but across from me, looking at me from the other shore of a black pool of water, which gave an echo of the nave of a cathedral to our voices.

  At times she left me alone, went to the room where the wake was being held, and then, drying her tears, returned to where I was awaiting her with the impatience of a lover. We spoke very little. With a passivity that had something of surrender about it, she let me watch her across the water of the tub.

  The clocks began to strike the dawn hour, but it did not dawn. In surprise we all went out to the street, to the patio. In the quarter where the sun should have appeared the sky was covered by a strange reddish cloud, like smoke, like hot ashes, like a dark pollen that had arisen swiftly, stretching from one horizon to the other. When the cloud moved overhead, it began to rain butterflies on the roofs, the water jars, our shoulders. They were little butterflies, deep amaranth in color, striped in violet, which had come together by myriads in some unknown spot behind the immense jungle, frightened, perhaps, driven away, after multiplying frenziedly, by some cataclysm, some awful occurrence, without witnesses or record. The Adelantado told me that these swarms of butterflies were nothing new in the region, and that when they took place the sun was almost blotted out for the whole day. The burial of the father would have to be carried out by candlelight in a day that was night, reddened by wings. In this corner of the world, great migrations were still a fact, like those described by chroniclers of the Dark Ages when the Danube turned black with rats or packs of wolves invaded the mar
ketplaces of the cities. The week before, he told me, a huge jaguar had been killed in the church portico.

  (Saturday, June 16)

  XV/ Overgrown by underbrush that had scaled its walls, the cemetery where we buried Rosario’s father was a kind of prolongation and dependency of the church, separated from it only by a rude gate and a flagged walk like the shaft of a thick cross with short arms, on whose gray stones have been carved the emblems of the Passion. The church was low, with thick walls, its volume of stone apparent in the depth of the niches and the weight of the buttresses, which looked more like abutments of a fortress. Its low, rough arches, the roof of wood with beams resting on rough-hewn corbels, recalled primitive Romanesque churches. Inside, at midmorning, darkness prevailed, reddened by the flight of butterflies, which still continued between earth and sun. Thus, surrounded by votive candles and tapers, the old saints became more like figures on a reredos, in a religious print, each of them plying his traditional trade, so that the whole church resembled a workshop: St. Isidore with a spade in his hand so that he can dig his pedestal covered with real grass and cornstalks; Peter with a huge key-ring on which a new key is hung every day; George lancing the dragon with such fury that it seems a goad rather than a weapon that he brandishes against the enemy; Christopher holding fast to a palm tree, such a giant that the Christ Child barely reaches from his shoulder to his ear; Lazarus, on whose dogs real hairs have been pasted to make them seem more lifelike as they lick his wounds.

  Rich in the powers attributed to them, overwhelmed by-demands paid in kind by votive offerings, carried in procession at any hour, these saints took on, in the daily life of the village, a quality of divine officials, of wholesale intermediaries, of celestial bureaucrats always on call in a kind of Ministry of Requests and Complaints. Every day they received gifts and candles that were a kind of rogation for the forgiveness of some one of the major sins. They were entreated; problems of rheumatic attacks, hailstorms, strayed animals were submitted to them. Gamblers invoked them when making a discard; prostitutes lit a candle to them the days when business was good. This, which the Adelantado smilingly recounted, reconciled me to a divine world which, with the fading of the golden legends in metal chapels, the mannered posturings of modern stained-glass windows, had lost all meaning in the cities I came from. Before the black wood Christ, who seemed to be bleeding to death over the high altar, I discovered the atmosphere of a miracle play, of a mystery, of a stirring hagiology that would have impressed me profoundly at one time in an ancient chapel of Byzantine construction, before images of martyrs with scimitars cleaving their skulls from ear to ear, of mailed bishops whose horses’ bloody hoofs trampled pagan heads.