The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Only the birds met the test of truth by the frank identity of their plumage. The herons were not lying when they invented the question mark with the curves of their necks, or when, at the call of the male sentinel, they raised their fright of white feathers. Nor the kingfisher with its red topknot, so small and fragile in that terrible world, whose mere presence was in the nature of a miracle, like the magic vibration of the hummingbird. Everything lied, in that unending shift of appearances and imitations, in that baroque proliferation of lianas, where the playful howling monkeys suddenly shocked the foliage with their mischief, their indecencies, and their mowing, like overgrown children with five hands.

  And overhead, as though the wonders below were not enough, I discovered a new cloud world: those clouds so different, so unique, so lost sight of by man, which still pile up above the dampness of the vast forests, as rich in waters as in the first chapters of Genesis; clouds that looked like worn marble, straight at their bases, and which prolonged themselves to immense heights, motionless, monumental, with shapes that were those of the clay in which the form of the amphora can be discerned after a few turns on the potter’s wheel. These clouds, rarely joined together, were as though suspended in space, as though a part of the sky, resembling themselves since time immemorial when they watched over the separation of the waters and the mystery of the first coming together of the rivers.

  (Tuesday afternoon)

  XXI/ Taking advantage of the fact that we had stopped at noon in a wooded cove so that the rowers could rest and stretch their legs, Yannes went off by himself to explore a river-bed where, according to him, diamonds were to be found. For two hours we had been shouting for him without any answer but the echo of our voices around the bends of the muddy stream. In mounting indignation at the delay, Fray Pedro excoriated those who let themselves be blinded by greed for jewels and gold.

  I listened to him with a measure of uneasiness, fearing that the Adelantado, who was said to have discovered a fabulous lode, might take offense. But he smiled under his shaggy brows and asked the missionary in a malicious tone how it was that the chalices of Rome were such a gleam of gold and jewels. “Because it is fitting,” answered Fray Pedro, “that the most beautiful materials of Creation should be used to honor their Creator.”

  Then, to prove to me that if he approved of splendor for the altar he demanded humility of the officiant, he lashed out against the worldly priests, those he termed new sellers of indulgences, dreamers of cardinals’ hats, tenors of the pulpit.

  “The eternal rivalry between the infantry and the cavalry,” remarked the Adelantado, smiling.

  “It is evident,” I thought to myself, “that a certain type of urban clergy must seem unspeakably lazy, not to say evil, to a hermit who has served a forty-year apostolate in the jungle.” In the hope of finding favor with him, I agreed with what he said, adducing examples of unworthy priests and the money-changers of the temple.

  But Fray Pedro cut me short: “To talk of the wicked, one must know about the others.” And he began to tell me about people I had never heard of, priests torn limb from limb by the Marañon Indians; one Blessed Diego barbarously tortured by the last Inca; Juan de Lizardi, shot through with Paraguayan arrows; and forty friars who had had their throats slit by a Protestant pirate. In a vision the “Doctor of Ávila,” St. Teresa, had seen them charge into heaven, frightening the angels with their terrible saints’ faces. He spoke of all this as though it had happened yesterday, as though he had the power to move backward and forward in time. “Perhaps it is because his mission is carried out in a timeless setting,” I said to myself. But then Fray Pedro noticed the fact that the sun was sinking behind the trees, and he cut short his missionary hagiology to call Yannes again, in a threatening tone, accompanied by the epithets used by herders for a stray animal.

  When the Greek finally showed up, the friar’s blows with his staff against the stone were such that in a moment we were all huddled in the canoes. When we resumed the trip, I understood the reason for Fray Pedro’s anger at the miner’s delay. Now the channel was narrowing between banks that were like black cliffs, the harbingers of a different landscape. And suddenly the current flung us into the middle of a yellow river that ran through rapids and whirlpools to meet the Great River, on whose flank it would fasten, bringing it the torrents of one whole watershed of the Great Plateaus. The rush of waters had increased dangerously that day, swollen by rains that had fallen somewhere. Taking over the duties of helmsman, Fray Pedro, resting a foot on each side of the boat, steered the canoes with his staff. But the resistance of the current was tremendous, and night was descending upon us before we were out of the thick of the struggle.

  Suddenly there came an uproar in the sky. Under the lashing of a chill wind that raised huge waves, the trees loosed whirlwinds of dead leaves. A cyclone was upon us, and over the roaring jungle the storm broke loose. Everything turned a livid hue. The flashes of lightning came so close together that one jagged ray had not faded before another broke, opening in claws that buried themselves behind newly emerging mountains. The flickering clarity from behind, ahead, each side, cut off at times by the shadowy outline of islands whose tangle of trees rose over the boiling waters, this light of the Last Judgment, of a rain of meteors, filled me with sudden terror as it revealed the presence of obstacles, the fury of the waters, the multiplicity of dangers. There could be no possible salvation for anyone in this tumult that hammered, lifted up, shook our boat.

  My reason gone, unable to control my fear, I clung to Rosario, seeking the warmth of her body, no longer as a lover, but like a child clinging to its mother’s neck, and I let myself fall into the bottom of the canoe, hiding my face in her hair so as not to see what was going on about us, and to escape the fury that held us in its grip. But it was hard to forget, with a half foot of lukewarm water washing the inside of the canoe from stem to stern. The boats could hardly keep afloat as we moved from eddy to eddy, nosing through the gorges, riding over boulders, tacking quickly to skirt a rapid, always on the verge of capsizing, surrounded by foam, in tortured boards that groaned the length of the keel. And to make matters worse, the rain began. It added to my horror to see that the Capuchin, his beard standing out black against the lightning flashes, was no longer steering the boat, but praying. Rosario, her teeth clenched, protecting my head as though it were that of her newborn babe in a moment of danger, displayed an amazing fortitude. Lying face-down, the Adelantado gripped our Indians around the waist to keep them from being washed overboard, so they could give us the protection of their oars.

  The terrible struggle went on for a time that in my suffering seemed endless. I realized that the danger had passed when Fray Pedro once more stood up in the prow, bracing his feet against the sides. The storm was gathering up its last flashes as swiftly as it had brought them, bringing the terrible symphony of its wrath to an end with the chord of a prolonged rumble of thunder, and the night became filled with the rejoicing of frogs from bank to bank. Unwrinkling its back, the river pursued its way toward the distant ocean. Exhausted by the nervous tension, I went to sleep on Rosario’s breast. But in a moment the canoe pulled up on a sandspit, and when I found myself once more on solid ground, to which Fray Pedro leaped with a “Thank God,” I realized that I had come through the Second Trial.

  (Wednesday, June 20)

  XXII/ After hours of sleep I reached out for a pitcher and drank deeply. When I set it down and saw that it remained level with my face, I realized, though I was only half awake, that I was on the ground, lying on a thin straw mat. There was a smell of wood smoke, there was a roof over my head. I then recalled the landing on a spit, the walk toward an Indian village, the feeling of exhaustion and chill which had led the Adelantado to make me down several swallows of a powerful brandy, to which they give the name stomach fire and which I accepted only for its restorative powers.

  Behind me, several Indian women were kneading cassava bread, their breasts bare, and their genit
als covered by a brief white loincloth fastened around their waist by a string that passed between their buttocks. From the palm-frond walls hung bows and fishing and hunting arrows, blowguns, quivers of poisoned arrows, gourds of curare, and trowels shaped like hand mirrors, which I learned later were used to macerate a seed of intoxicating effect inhaled in powder form through a tube made of a bird’s breastbone. Opposite the entrance three thick fish, reddish-violet in color, were roasting on a grill of interwoven branches, over a bed of coals. Our hammocks hung out to dry revealed to me why we had been sleeping on the ground.

  With aching limbs, I stepped out of the cabin, looked, and stood speechless, my mouth filled with exclamations that did nothing to relieve my amazement. Beyond the gigantic trees rose masses of black rock, enormous, thick, plummet-sheer, which were the presence and the testimony of fabulous monuments. My memory had to recall the world of Bosch, the imaginary Babels of painters of the fantastic, the most hallucinated illustrators of the temptations of saints, to find anything like what I was seeing. And even when I had hit upon a similarity, I had to discount it immediately because of the proportions. What I was gazing upon was a Titans’ city—a city of multiple and spaced constructions—with Cyclopean stairways, mausoleums touching the clouds, vast terraces guarded by strange fortresses of obsidian without battlements or loopholes whose role seemed to be to guard the entrance of some forbidden kingdom against man. There, against a background of light clouds towered the Capital of Forms: an incredible mile-high Gothic cathedral, its two towers, nave, apse, and buttresses situated on a conical rock of rare composition touched with dark iridescences of coal. The belfries were swept by thick mists that swirled as they broke against the granite edges.

  In the proportions of these Forms, ending in dizzying terraces, flanked by organ pipes, there was something so not of this world—the mansion of gods, thrones, and stairs designed for some Last Judgment—that the bewildered mind sought no interpretation of that disconcerting telluric architecture, accepting, without reasoning, its vertical, inexorable beauty. The sun was casting quicksilver reflections on that impossible temple suspended from heaven rather than resting on the earth. On different planes, defined by the light or shadow, other Forms could be distinguished, belonging to the same geological family, from whose edges hung cascades of a hundred falls that finally dissolved in spray before they reached the treetops.

  Almost overwhelmed by so much grandeur, I brought my eyes back to my own level after a moment. Several huts fringed a pool of black waters. A child came toward me, balancing on unsteady legs, to show me a tiny bracelet of peonies. There, where big black birds with orange bills strutted, a group of Indians appeared, carrying fish threaded on a stick through the gills. Farther off, several mothers were weaving, their babies clinging to their nipples. At the foot of a big tree, surrounded by old women pounding milky tubers, Rosario was washing my clothes. In the way she knelt beside the water, her hair loose over her shoulders, the rubbing stone in her hand, she took on an ancestral silhouette that brought her much closer to these women than to those whose blood, in generations past, had lightened her skin. I understood why this woman who was now mine had given me such a sense of race that day beside a mountain road when I saw her return from death. Her mystery emanated from a remote world whose light and time were unknown to me.

  All about me everyone was busy at his own work in a harmonious concert of duties that were those of a life moving to a primordial rhythm. Those Indians, whom I had always seen through more or less imaginary reports that looked upon them as beings beyond the pale of man’s real existence, gave me the feeling here, in their own setting, in their own surroundings, that they were complete masters of their culture. Nothing could have been more remote from their reality than the absurd concept of savage. The fact that they ignored many things that to me were basic and necessary was a far cry from putting them in the category of primitive beings. The superb precision with which this one put an arrow through a fish, the choreographic air with which the other raised the blowgun to his lips, the finished technique of that group as it covered the framework of a longhouse with palm fronds, revealed to me the presence of human beings who were masters of the skills required on the stage of their existence.

  Under the authority of an old man so wrinkled that he had not an inch of smooth skin left, the young men went through a rigorous discipline in the handling of the bow. The dorsal muscles of the men were powerfully modeled by the handling of the oar; the pelvises of the women were designed for motherhood, with wide hips that framed a broad, high pubis. Certain profiles had a stamp of singular nobility that came from the aquiline nose and the thick hair. Moreover, their bodily development was in keeping with their functional needs. The fingers, prehensile instruments, were strong and rough; the legs, made for walking, were sturdy-ankled. The skeleton was enveloped in efficient flesh. At any rate, here there were no useless callings like those I had plied for so many years.

  Thinking all this, I was walking toward Rosario when the Adelantado appeared at the door of a hut, calling me with joyful shouts. He had just come upon what I was seeking on this trip, the objective and end of my mission. There, on the ground beside a kind of brazier, lay the musical instruments I had been commissioned to find. With the emotion of the pilgrim who reaches the shrine for sight of which he has journeyed on foot through twenty unknown lands, I laid my hand upon the fire-ornamented stamping tube with cross-shaped cover through which the rhythm cane passed in the most primitive of drums. I saw the ritual maraca pierced by a feathered branch, the deer-horn trumpets, the decorated rattles, and the clay conch to call the fishermen in the swamps. There were the sets of Panpipes in their original capacity of ancestors of the organ. And, above all, with that unpleasant solemnity which characterizes everything touching upon death, there stood the jar of uncouth, sinister sound, reminiscent of the hollow echo of the tomb, with the two reeds let into its sides just as in the book that described it for the first time.

  After concluding the barter that put into my possession that arsenal of objects created by man’s noblest instinct, I felt as though I had entered upon a new phase of my existence. My mission was accomplished. In exactly fifteen days I had achieved what I set out to do and, with justifiable pride, I savored the delights of duty’s reward. To have secured that roaring jar—a magnificent specimen—was the first outstanding, noteworthy act of my life to that moment.

  The object grew in my esteem, linked to my destiny, wiping out, in that moment, the distance between myself and him who had entrusted me with the task, and who perhaps at that moment was thinking of me, examining some primitive instrument with a gesture similar to mine.

  I stood silent for a time that my inner satisfaction made measureless. When I returned to the notion of reality, like a sleeper awakening, it was as though something within me had ripened, taking the strange form of one of Palestrina’s great counterpoints, which echoed in my head with the majesty of all its voices.

  As I stepped out of the hut to look for lianas to use as ropes, I noticed that a strange excitement had upset the rhythm of the village life. Fray Pedro was moving about with the speed of a dancer, going in and out of the hut followed by Rosario and a twittering group of Indian women. Opposite the door he had spread over a log table a worn-out lace cloth mended with threads of different thickness, and two jars crammed with yellow flowers. Between them he stood the black wooden cross he wore about his neck; Then from a scuffed, brown leather bag he always carried with him, he took out the liturgical objects and ornaments—some of them badly dented—rubbing the rust from them with his sleeve before arranging them on the altar. I observed with growing surprise the Chalice and the Host taking their place on the Altar; the Purificator unfolded over the Chalice, and the Corporal-cloth laid between the two ritual candles. All this, in a place of this sort, struck me as absurd and touching.

  Knowing that the Adelantado looked upon himself as an emancipated soul, I shot him an inquiring glanc
e. As though it was quite a different matter having little to do with religion, he told me that a Mass had been promised as an act of thanksgiving during the storm the night before. He approached the altar, where Rosario was standing. Yannes, a man of icons, went past me muttering something about Christ being one. The Indians watched from a distance. The headman of the village, a mass of wrinkles among his necklaces of teeth, stood halfway between them and the altar in an attitude of respect. The mothers quieted their children’s cries.

  Fray Pedro turned toward me: “My son, these Indians refuse baptism. I should not like them to see you indifferent. If you don’t want to do it for God, do it for me.” And, resorting to the most universal of all arguments, he added, in a harsher tone: “Remember that you were in the same boat, and you, too, were afraid.” There was a long silence. Then: “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

  My throat became painfully dry. Those ancient, unchanging words took on a portentous solemnity in the midst of the jungle, as though coming from the hidden galleries of primitive Christianity, from the brotherhood of its beginnings, taking on anew, beneath these trees which had never known the ax, a heroic meaning antedating the hymns intoned in the naves of the triumphant cathedrals, antedating the belfries towering aloft in the light of day. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth . . . The pillars here were treetrunks. Over our heads hung leaves that hid dangers. And around us were the Gentiles, the idol-worshippers, gazing upon the mystery from a narthex of lianas.