The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Yesterday I had amused myself with the thought that we were conquistadors searching for Manoa. It suddenly came to me that there was no difference between this Mass and those Masses which the seekers for El Dorado had listened to in similar wildernesses. Time had been turned back four hundred years. This was the Mass of the Discoverers who had just set foot on a nameless strand, who planted the emblems of their Sunwise migration before the astonished gaze of the Men of Corn. Those two—the Adelantado and Yannes—kneeling on either side of the altar, gaunt, sun-darkened, the one with the face of a peasant of Extremadura, the other with the profile of a bonesetter recently registered in the records of the Clearing House, were soldiers of the Conquest, used to a diet of jerked beef and all things rancid, scourged by fevers, bitten by vermin, praying with the air of donors, beside their helmets resting on the rank grass.

  Miserere nostri Domine miserere nostri. Fiat misericordia—intones the chaplain of the Expedition, in an accent that puts a stop to time. Perhaps this is the year of grace 1540. Our ships have been buffeted by a tempest, and the friar is telling us, in Biblical tone, how such a great movement sprang up on the sea that the ship was filled with water; He was sleeping, and His disciples came to Him and awoke Him, saying: Master, Master, we perish. And He said to them: Why do you fear, men of little faith? Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was calm. Perhaps it is the year of grace 1540.

  But no. The years are subtracted, melt away, vanish, in the dizzying backward flight of time. We have not yet come to the sixteenth century. It is much earlier. We are in the Middle Ages. For it was not the man of the Renaissance who carried out the Discovery and the Conquest, but medieval man. The volunteers for the great enterprise did not march out of the Old World through gateways whose columns were copied from Palladio, but under Romanesque arches, the memory of which they carried with them when they built their first churches this side of the Ocean-Sea, on the blood-stained foundations of the teocalli. Under the Cross, complete with pliers, nails, and lance, they marched to battle against those who employed similar implements in their sacrifices.

  Medieval, too, were the devil dances, the grotesque processions, the dances of the Peers of France, the ballads of Charlemagne, which lived on so persistently in the many cities we had recently passed through. And the amazing truth suddenly came to me: since the afternoon of Corpus Christi in Santiago de los Aguinaldos, I had been living in the early Middle Ages. An object, a garment, a drug belonged to another calendar. But the rhythm of life, the methods of navigation, the oil lamp, the cooking-pots, the prolongation of the hours, the transcendental functions of Horse and Dog, the manner of worshipping the Saints, all were medieval, like the prostitutes who traveled from parish to parish on feast days, like the lusty patriarchs, proud to acknowledge their forty children by different mothers clamoring for their blessing as they passed by.

  I realized that I had been living with burghers who were mighty trenchermen, always hungering for the flesh of the serving maid, whose jolly life I had so often envied in museums; I had carved suckling pigs with charred teats at their tables, and had shared their fondness for the spices that made them seek new routes to the Indies. A hundred paintings had familiarized me with their red tile-floored houses, their huge kitchens, their nail-studded doors. I knew their way of carrying money in bags at their waists, of dancing without touching their partners, their fondness for stringed instruments, for cockfights, for getting roaring drunk around a big joint. I knew the blind and crippled of their streets, the poultices, ointments, and balms with which they assuaged their aches and pains. But I knew them under the varnish of museums, as testimony of a dead past, irretrievably lost. When, behold, this past had suddenly become the present. I could touch and breathe it. I now saw the breathtaking possibility of traveling in time, as others travel in space. . . . Ite missa est, Benedicamus Dominum, Deo Gratias. The Mass was ended, and with it the Middle Ages.

  But dates were still losing figures. In headlong flight the years emptied, ran backward, were erased, restoring calendars, moons, changing centuries numbered in three figures to those of single numbers. The gleam of the Grail has disappeared, the nails have fallen from the Cross, the moneychangers have returned to the temple, the Star of Bethlehem has faded, and it is the year 0, when the Angel of the Annunciation returned to heaven. Now the dates on the other side of the year 0 are back—dates of two, three, five figures—until we are at the time when man, weary of wandering about the earth, invented agriculture, when he established his first villages alongside the rivers and, needing greater music, passed from the rhythm-stick to the drum, which was a wooden cylinder with burned ornamentation, invented the organ as he blew into a hollow reed, and mourned his dead by making a clay jar roar. We are in the Paleolithic Age.

  Those who issued the laws here, those who had powers of life and death over us, those who had the secrets of food and poisons, those who invented the skills, were men who used stone knives and stone scrapers, bone fishhooks, bone arrowheads. We were intruders, ignorant outlanders—late arrivals—in a city born in the dawn of History. If the fire the women were now fanning was suddenly to go out, we would be unable to rekindle it if we had to depend on our own unskilled hands.

  (Thursday, June 21)

  XXIII/ I now knew the Adelantado’s secret. He had confided it to me the previous day beside the fire, taking care that Yannes should not hear us. They talked of his gold mines; they believed him to be the king of a colony of runaway slaves; they said that he had a harem of women in the forest, and that his stealthy journeys were so his women would never see other men. The truth was much more beautiful. When it was succinctly told to me, I was amazed at the prospect no one of my generation—I am sure of it—had ever before conceived.

  That night in the shed, to the gentle creaking of our hammock ropes, I whispered to Rosario, through the meshes, that we would go on for several days with our trip. Instead of the objections I feared—fatigue, discouragement, or just wanting to get back—she was in hearty agreement. It did not matter to her where we went, nor whether the lands we visited were near or remote. For Rosario the idea of being far away from some famous place where life could be lived to the full did not exist. The center of the universe for her, who had crossed frontiers without a change of language, who had never dreamed of the ocean, was where the sun at midday shone on her from overhead. She was a woman of the earth, and as long as she walked the earth, and ate, and was well, and there was a man to serve as mold and measure, with the compensation of what she called “the body’s pleasure,” she was fulfilling a destiny that it was better not to analyze too much, for it was governed by “big things” whose workings were obscure and, besides, were beyond man’s understanding. That is what she meant when she said that “it is not good to think about certain things.”

  She called herself Your woman, referring to herself in the third person: “Your woman was asleep; Your woman was looking for you.” And I found in this reiteration of the possessive a firmness of concept, an exactitude of definition, which the word “wife” never gave me. Your “woman was an affirmation that preceded all agreement, all sacraments. It had the pristine truth of that womb which prudish translators of the Bible render as bowels, muting the thunder of certain prophetic imprecations. Moreover, this terse simplification of vocabulary was customary in Rosario. When she made mention of certain intimacies which, as a lover, I should know, she employed expressions at once unequivocal and modest, which recalled the “custom of women” that Rachel used to her father, Laban. All Your woman asked that night was that I take her with me wherever I went. She picked up her bundle and followed her man without question.

  I knew very little about her. I could not decide whether she had a short memory or did not want to talk about her past. She did not hide the fact that she had lived with other men. But these represented phases of her life whose secrecy she maintained with dignity—or perhaps because she felt that i
t would be indelicate to let me think that anything that had happened before we met was of any importance. This living in the present, without possessions, without the chains of yesterday, without thinking of tomorrow, seemed to me amazing. And yet it was apparent that this attitude must lengthen the lapse of hours from one sun to another. She spoke of days that were very long and of days that were very short, as though they were in different tempos—tempos of a telluric symphony that had its andantes and adagios, as well as its prestos. The astonishing thing was that, now that time was of no concern to me, I noticed in myself different values of the intervals: the prolongation of certain mornings, the frugal elaboration of a sunset, and was lost in wonder at all that could be fitted into certain tempos of this symphony which we were reading backward, from right to left, contrary to the key of G, returning to the measures of Genesis.

  At dusk we stumbled upon the habitat of people of a culture much earlier than that of the men with whom we had been living the day before. We had emerged from the Paleolithic—with its skills paralleling those of the Magdalenian and Aurignacian, with stone tools such as I had gazed on many times in collections with a feeling that I was at the very beginning of the night of ages—to enter a state that pushed the limits of human life back to the darkest murk of the night of ages. These beings I saw now with legs and arms that resembled mine; these women whose breasts were flaccid udders drooping over swollen bellies; these children who stretched and curled up with feline gestures; these people still without the primordial shame that leads to the concealment of the organs of generation, who were naked without knowing it, like Adam and Eve before the Fall, were nevertheless men.

  It had not yet occurred to them to utilize the power of the seed; they had not stayed in one place, nor could they imagine the act of sowing; they moved forward, without goal, eating palm hearts for which they fought with the monkeys hanging from the roof of the jungle. When the flood waters isolated them for a season in some deltal region, and they had stripped the trees like termites, they ate the larvae of wasps, munched ants, lice, dug into the earth for worms and maggots, then finally ate the earth itself. They hardly knew the uses of fire. Their skulking dogs, with eyes of foxes and wolves, were pre-dogs.

  I looked at the faces of the people, which were meaningless to me, realizing the futility of words, knowing beforehand that we could not even meet in the coincidence of a gesture. Taking me by the arm, the Adelantado led me to the edge of a muddy hole, a kind of stinking pigpen full of gnawed bones, where I saw before me the most horrible things my eyes had ever beheld. They were like two fetuses with white beards from whose hanging lips came sounds resembling the wail of a newborn child; wrinkled dwarfs, with huge bellies on which blue veins traced designs like those of an anatomical chart, and who smiled stupidly, with something fearful and fawning in their look, their fingers between their teeth. My horror of them was so great that I turned my back in disgust and fright. “They are prisoners,” said the Adelantado sarcastically, “prisoners of the others, who consider themselves the superior race, the sole rightful owners of the jungle.”

  A kind of dizziness came over me at the thought of other possible degrees of regression, that these human larvae, from whose loins hung virile members, like my own, might not be the lowest. Somewhere there might exist captives of these captives, who, in turn, had arrogated to themselves the status of a superior species, elect, empowered, who no longer even gnawed the bones left by the dogs, but fought over carrion with the vultures, and, in the rutting season, bellowed like beasts. I had nothing in common with these beings. Nothing. Nor with their masters, the eaters of worms, the swallowers of earth, who surrounded me. And yet, among the hammocks which were hardly hammocks, but rather reed cradles, where they lay and fornicated and procreated, there was a clay object baked in the sun, a kind of jar without handles, with two holes opposite each other in the upper part, and a navel outlined in the convex surface by the pressure of a finger when the clay was still soft.

  This was God. More than God, it was the Mother of God. It was the Mother, primordial in all religions. The female principle, genesial, womb, to be found in the secret prologue of all theogonies. The Mother, with swollen belly, which was at one and the same time breasts, womb, and sex, the first figure modeled by man, when under his hands the possibility of the object came into being. I had before me the Mother of the Infant Gods, of the totems given to men so that they would acquire the habit of dealing with the divinity, preparing the way for the Greater Gods. The Mother, “lonely, beyond space, and even time,” whose sole name, Mother, Faust twice uttered with terror.

  Seeing that the old women with wrinkled pubis, the tree-climbers, and the pregnant women were looking at me, I made a clumsy gesture of reverence toward the sacred vessel. I was in the dwelling-place of men, and must respect their Gods. But just then they all started to run. To my rear, under a tangle of leaves hanging from branches that served as a roof, they had just laid the swollen, blackened body of a hunter who had been bitten by a rattlesnake. Fray Pedro said that he had been dead for several hours. Nevertheless, the shaman began to shake a gourd full of pebbles—the only instrument these people know—trying to drive off the emissaries of Death. There was a ritual silence, setting the stage for the incantation, which raised the tension of the spectators to fever pitch.

  And in the vast jungle filling with night terrors, there arose the Word. A word that was more than word. A word that imitated the voice of the speaker, and of that attributed to the spirit in possession of the corpse. One came from the throat of the shaman; the other from his belly. One was deep and confused like the bubbling of underground lava; the other, medium in pitch, was harsh and wrathful. They alternated. They answered each ocher. The one upbraided when the other groaned; the belly voice turned sarcastic when the throat voice seemed to plead. Sounds like guttural portamenti were heard, ending in howls; syllables repeated over and over, coming to create a kind of rhythm; there were trills suddenly interrupted by four notes that were the embryo of a melody. But then came the vibration of the tongue between the lips, the indrawn snoring, the panting contrapuntal to the rattle of the maraca. This was something far beyond language, and yet still far from song. Something that had not yet discovered vocalization, but was more than word.

  As it went on, this outcry over a corpse surrounded by silent dogs became horrible, terrifying. The shaman now stood facing the body, shouting, thumping his heels on the ground in the paroxysm of a fury of imprecation which held the basic elements of all tragedy—the earliest attempt to combat the forces of annihilation which frustrate man’s designs. I tried to remain outside, to establish distances. And yet I could not resist the horrid fascination this ceremony-held for me. . . .

  Before the stubbornness of Death, which refused to release its prey, the Word suddenly grew faint and disheartened. In the mouth of the shaman, the spell-working orifice, the Threne—for that was what this was—gasped and died away convulsively, blinding me with the realization that I had just witnessed the Birth of Music.

  (Saturday, June 23)

  XXIV/ For two days we had been crawling along the skeleton of the planet, forgetting History and even the obscure migrations of the unrecorded ages. Slowly, always upward, through stretches of river between cascade and cascade, by quiet channels between one fall and another, forced to portage our boats from level to level to the music of chanteys, we had come to the land of the Great Plateaus. Denuded of their covering—when they had it—by thousands of rainfalls, they were Forms of bare rock reduced to the awesome elementality of a telluric geometry. These were the first monuments that arose upon the surface of the earth before there were eyes to see them, and their age, their ancestry without equal, lent them an overwhelming majesty. Some resembled huge bronze cylinders, truncated pyramids, long quartz crystals poised between the waters. Some were wider at the summit than at the base and were pitted with cavities like gigantic corals. Some had a mysterious solemnity as though they were Gates to Som
ething—Something unknown and terrible—to which the tunnels gouged in their flanks, a hundred feet above our heads, must lead.

  Each plateau had its own morphology, consisting of groins, sheer drops, straight or broken edges. The one not adorned with the incarnation of an obelisk or a basalt headland had a flanking terrace, beveled edges, sharp angles, or was crowned by strange stone markers resembling the figures in a procession. Suddenly, in contrast to this severity, a stone arabesque, some geological flight of fancy, conspired with the water to give a touch of movement to this land of the unmovable. A mountain of reddish granite poured seven yellow cascades over the battlements of its crowning cornice. Or a river hurled itself into space and became a rainbow on the cutback stairway of petrified trees. The foam of a river boiled under enormous natural arches with deafening echo before it divided and fell into a series of pools emptying into one another. One sensed that overhead, at the summit, in this series of stairsteps to the moon, there were lakes, neighbors to the clouds, whose virgin waters had never been profaned by human eye.

  There were morning hoarfrost, icy depths, opalescent banks, and hollows filled with the night before twilight. There were monoliths poised on the edge of peaks, needles, crosses, cracks that breathed forth mists; wrinkled crags that were like congealed lava—meteors, perhaps, fallen from another planet. We were overawed by the display of these opera magna, the plurality of the profiles, the scope of the shadows, the immensity of the esplanades. We felt like intruders who at any moment might be cast out of a forbidden kingdom. What lay before our eyes was the world that existed before man.