The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Below, in the great rivers, were the monstrous saurians, the anacondas, the fish with teats, the big-headed laulau, the fresh-water dogfish, the electric eels, the lepidosirens, which still bore the stamp of prehistoric animals, a legacy from the great reptiles of the Tertiary. Here, though things slithered beneath the tree ferns, though the bee stored honey in the caves, nothing recalled living creatures.

  The waters have just been divided, the Dry Land has appeared, the green grass has come forth, and, for the first time, the lights to rule the day and the night have been tried out. We are in the world of Genesis, at the end of the Fourth Day of Creation. If we go back a little farther, we will come to the terrible loneliness of the Creator, the sidereal sadness of the times without incense or songs of praise, when the earth was without order and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  Chapter Five

  Thy statues have been my songs. . . .—PSALM CXIX, 54

  (Sunday, June 24)

  XXV/ The Adelantado raised his arm, pointing out where the Gold lay, and Yannes took leave of us to go in search of the treasure of the earth. Lonely is the miner who does not want to share his find; avaricious in his dealings, false in his words, erasing the path behind him like the animal who wipes out its tracks with its tail. There was a moment of emotion as we embraced this peasant of the Achaean profile, reader of Homer, who seemed to be attached to us. Today his lodestar was covetousness for the precious metal that made Mycenae a city of gold, and he took the road of the adventurers. He wanted to give us a present, and having nothing but the clothes he wore, he handed Rosario and me his volume of the Odyssey. Your woman accepted it with delight, thinking it was a story of the Bible that would bring us good luck.

  Before I could disillusion her, Yannes was gone, on the way to his boat, his chest bared to the dawn, his oar on his shoulder, a living Ulysses. Fray Pedro blessed him, and we continued our navigation through the waters of a narrow channel that would lead us to the wharf of the City. Because now that the Greek had gone, the secret could be told: the Adelantado had founded a city.

  I never wearied of repeating this to myself, ever since this matter of a city had been confided to me several nights before, lighting more stars in my imagination than the names of the most coveted gems. To found a city. I found a city; he founds a city—it was a verb that could be conjugated. One could be the Founder of a City. Bring into being and govern a city whose name was not to be found on maps, which was withdrawn from the horrors of the Epoch, which was born of the will of a man, in this world of Genesis. The first city. The city of Enoch, before the birth of Tubal-cain, the worker in brass and iron, or Jubal, the father of all who handle the harp and the organ.

  I rested my head in Rosario’s lap, thinking of the vast territories, the unexplored lands, the myriad plateaus, where cities could be founded on this continent on which nature had not yet been subdued by man. The rhythmic plashing of the oars lulled me into a pleasant drowsiness, there on the living waters, beside plants beginning to recover the fragrance of the mountains, breathing a thin air which knew nothing of the exasperating tormentors of the jungle. The hours slipped by as we skirted the plateaus, moving from one stream to another through little mazes of quiet waters which had us moving with the sun at our back first, and then, around a point covered with strange ivy, full in our face. The afternoon was falling when we finally tied up the boat and I could look upon the wonder of Santa Mónica de los Venados.

  But the truth is that I stood there disconcerted. What I saw in the hollow of a little valley was a space some two hundred yards wide, cleared by machetes, and at the back a big mud and wattle house, with a door and four windows. Two smaller houses, of construction similar to the first, flanked a kind of storehouse or stable. There were about ten Indian huts from whose hearths a pale smoke rose.

  The Adelantado said to me, his voice trembling with pride: “This is the main square. . . . That is the Government House. . . . There’s where my son Marcos lives. . . . My three daughters live there. . . . We keep grain and implements in the nave, and some animals. . . . Behind are the Indian quarters. . . .” And he added, turning to Fray Pedro: “Across from the Government House we shall put up the Cathedral.”

  He was still pointing out to me the gardens, the corn fields, the enclosure where pigs and goats were being raised, thanks to the boars and billy goats that had been brought with greatest difficulty from Puerto Anunciación, when the whole population began to pour out of the houses shouting greetings, and the Indian wives ran up, and the half-breed daughters, and the son who was Mayor, and all the Indians, to receive their Governor, accompanied by the first Bishop.

  “It is called Santa Mónica de los Venados,” Fray Pedro explained, “because this is the land of the red deer, and Mónica was the name of the founder’s mother, Mónica, who bore St. Augustine, herself a saint “who had been the wife of one man and herself had brought up her children.”

  I could not help confessing to him that the word “city” had suggested to me something more imposing. “Manoa?” asked the friar scornfully. It was not that. Neither Manoa nor El Dorado. But I had imagined something different.

  “The cities founded by Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Losada, or Pedro de Mendoza were like this at first,” Fray Pedro remarked. My silence of consent did not, however, eliminate a series of new questions which the preparations for a feast of haunches roasting over a wood fire prevented me from asking at the moment. I could not understand why the Adelantado, having this unique opportunity to found a city outside the Epoch, should have burdened himself with a church, which carries with it the crushing weight of its canons, interdicts, ambitions, intolerance, especially in view of the fact that his was not a very deeply grounded faith, and the Masses he preferred were those of thanksgiving for dangers overcome.

  But at the moment there was small opportunity to ask questions. I was filled with joy at having arrived somewhere. I helped roast the meat, I went for wood, I listened to the songs being sung, and I loosened up my joints with a kind of sparkling pulque tasting of earth and resin, which we all drank in gourds passed from mouth to mouth. Later, when all were gorged, and the Indians were asleep in their village and the daughters of the Founder had retired to their gynaeceum, I listened, beside the hearth in the Government House, to a tale that was the tale of routes.

  “Well, sir,” began the Adelantado, throwing a branch on the fire, “my name is Pablo, and my last name is just as commonplace, and if the title of Adelantado smacks of great deeds, you must know that it is only a nickname a group of miners gave me when they saw that I was always ahead of the others in cradling the river sands.”

  Under the sign of the caduceus, a youth of twenty, racked by a stubborn cough, looked out on the street through the glass jars filled with colored water in an old man’s pharmacy. It was a province of matins and rosaries, of convent sweetmeats and pastries; the priest walked past in his shovel hat, and the watchman still called out the hours in the clouded night with a “María Santíssima.” Far off lay the Lands of the Horse, leagues and leagues away; close by were the winding roads and the city of big houses where the only trades open to the youth were trades of darkness, of cassocks, of cellars, of sewers.

  Discouraged and sick, he had offered his services to the druggist, in exchange for medicines and a roof. There they taught him something about infusions and entrusted to him simple prescriptions whose ingredients were for the most part nux vomica, mallow root, and tartar emetic. At the siesta hour, when nobody walked beneath the shadow of the eaves, the young man sat alone in the dispensary, his back to the street, his hands asleep over grinding slab and mortar, and contemplated as in a reverie the leisurely flow of a great river whose waters came from the lands of gold.

  At times, from ships so old that they seemed of another age, came groups of heavy-gaited men who went tapping their sticks upon the rotten planks of the wharf as though even ashore they still feared the pitfalls and quagmires of t
he earth. They were malaria-shaken miners, rubber-gatherers who scratched their eczema, lepers from the abandoned missions, who came to the pharmacy for quinine, for chaulmoogra oil, for sulphur. And as they spoke of the regions where they had contracted their ailments, they rolled back the curtains of an unknown world before the wondering clerk. The defeated arrived, but there also came those who had wrested from the mud a wondrous stone, and for a week they gorged themselves on women and music. Those who had found nothing came, too, their eyes feverish with prospects. They neither rested nor inquired where there were women. They locked themselves in their rooms, examining the samples they brought back in bottles, and as soon as they were cured of a wound, or their buboes were relieved, they left by night, when all were sleeping, without revealing the secret of where they were going.

  The youth felt no envy of those his own age who, every Monday of the year, after listening to the last Mass in the church with the worm-eaten pulpit, set out in their best clothes for the distant city. Between flasks and prescriptions, he learned about new lodes; he knew the names of those who ordered demijohns of orange-flower water to bathe their Indian women; he memorized the strange names of rivers not mentioned in books; obsessed by the ringing sonority of Cataniapo or Cunucunuma, he dreamed before the maps, never wearying of the bare green-colored areas where no settlements appeared. And one day, at dawn, he climbed out through the window of his laboratory to the dock where the miners were hoisting sail, with a load of medicine that he offered in exchange for his passage.

  For ten years he shared the sufferings, disappointments > rages, doggedness of the treasure-hunters. Unfavored by fortune, he pushed farther and farther, always more alone, accustomed now to talking with his shadow. And one morning he found himself before the Great Plateaus. For ninety days he walked, lost among the nameless mountains, eating wasp larvae, ants, grasshoppers, like the Indians in times of famine. When he came into this valley, a worm-infested wound was rotting his leg to the bone. The Indians of the region—a sedentary people of a culture similar to that of the makers of the funerary jar—cured him with herbs. They had seen only one white man before him, and, like many of the jungle people, they thought us the last survivors of an industrious but weak species, once numerous but now on the way to becoming extinct.

  His long convalescence gave him a sense of solidarity with the privations and toil of these people among whom he had come. One night he found some gold at the foot of that cliff which the moon is now turning to quicksilver. When he returned from Puerto Anunciación, where he had sold it, he brought with him seeds, cuttings, and some farm implements and carpenter’s tools. On his return from his second trip, he brought back a pair of pigs tied by the feet in the bottom of his boat. Then came the goat with young, the weaned calf, for which the Indians, like Adam, had to invent a name, for they had never seen such an animal before.

  Little by little the Adelantado came to identify himself with the life that he had made to flourish there. When he bathed at the foot of a cascade of an afternoon, the Indian maidens threw white pebbles at him from the bank, as a sign that he should choose one of them. One day he took himself a wife, and there was great merrymaking at the foot of the cliffs. It then occurred to him that if he kept returning to Puerto Anunciación with gold dust, it would not take the miners long to pick up his trail and invade this lost valley and destroy it with their vices, their hatreds, and their ambitions. To keep from arousing their suspicions, he passed himself off as a dealer in stuffed birds, orchids, turtle eggs.

  One day he realized that he had founded a city. He probably felt the same surprise as I had felt when I realized that the verb “found” could be conjugated when it referred to a city. Inasmuch as all cities came to being in the same way, there was reason to believe that in the future Santa Mónica de los Venados would have monuments, bridges, arcades. The Adelantado laid out the Main Square. He erected the Government House. He drew up and signed a document, and buried it under a stone in a conspicuous place. He laid out the cemetery so that death itself should be an ordered affair.

  Now he knew where there was gold, but gold no longer lured him. He had given up the search for Manoa because he was now much more interested in the land and in the power of decreeing its laws. He did not pretend that this was the Garden of Eden, as stated on the old maps. There were diseases here, plagues, venomous serpents, insects, wild beasts that devoured the domestic animals reared with such hardship. There were times of flood and times of hunger and days of impotence resulting from a gangrened arm. But man, through long training, can endure these evils. And when he succumbs, it is in the age-old struggle that is one of the basic laws of existence.

  “Gold,” remarked the Adelantado, “is for those who go back there.” And there was a ring of contempt in his tone when he said “there” as though the concerns and ambitions of people “there” befitted inferior beings.

  There was no doubt that the nature surrounding us was implacable, terrible, in spite of its beauty. But those whose life was spent with it found it less evil, more friendly, than the terrors and alarms, the cold cruelties, the never-ending threats of the world back there. Here the plagues, the possible sufferings, the natural dangers were accepted as a matter of course; they formed part of an Order that had its severity. Creation is no laughing-matter, and they all knew this instinctively and accepted the role each of them had been assigned in the great tragedy of living. But it was a tragedy with a unity of time, place, and action; in it, death itself operated under the direction of known masters, attired in poison, scale, fire, miasmas, to the accompaniment of the thunder and lightning that the older gods who have long dwelt among us still employ on their days of wrath.

  Under the light of the sun or beside the hearthfire the men who lived out their destinies here were content with simple things, and found happiness in the pleasant warmth of a morning, the abundance of fish, the rain that succeeds the drought, in a burst of collective rejoicing, with song and drums, motivated by such simple events as our arrival. “Life must have been like this in the city of Enoch,” I thought to myself, and there returned to my mind one of the questions that had perplexed me when we landed.

  At this point we stepped out of the Adelantado’s house for a breath of air. The Adelantado pointed out to me high on a cliffside certain signs carved by unknown workmen—workmen who had been hoisted to the level of their task by a scaffolding impossible in their state of material culture. The light of the moon made visible figures of scorpions, serpents, birds, among other signs that were meaningless to me, and which may have been astral symbols. A surprising explanation suddenly came to clear up my doubts. One day when he returned from a trip—the Founder related—his son Marcos, who was a boy at the time, amazed him with the story of the Flood. During his absence the Indians had told the boy that those petroglyphs we were looking at had been carved during the time of a gigantic flood, when the river rose to that height, by a man who, when he saw the waters rising, had saved a pair of every kind of animal in a great canoe. Then it had rained during a time that may have been forty days and forty nights, after which, to know whether the flood had ended, he sent out a rat, which came back with an ear of corn in its paws.

  The Adelantado had not wanted to teach his children the story of Noah, for he regarded it as a fabrication; but when he discovered that they already knew it, the only departures being the rat instead of a dove and an ear of corn instead of an olive branch, he told the secret of his nascent city to Fray Pedro, whom he looked upon as a man because he traveled alone through unknown regions, and knew how to cure ills, and could tell one plant from another. “Since they are going to be told the same stories anyway, let them learn them the way I did.”

  Reflecting on the Noahs of so many religions, it struck me that the Indian Noah was better adapted to the reality of these lands, with his ear of corn instead of a dove with an olive branch, here in the jungle where nobody had ever seen an olive tree. But the friar interrupted my train of thou
ght, asking me in a challenging tone if I had forgotten the matter of the Redemption: “There was one who died for those who were born here, and the news must be brought to them.” And, making a cross of two twigs fastened with a liana, he planted it with a kind of fury on the spot where tomorrow the building of the round hut that would be the first temple in Enoch was to begin.

  “He is going to plant onions, too,” the Adelantado informed me by way of excuse.

  (June 27)

  XXVI/ Dawn rose over the Great Plateaus. The mists of night still lingered between the Forms, spread veils that grew transparent and disappeared as the light was reflected from a cliff of rosy granite and descended to the level of the great sleeping shadows. At the foot of the green, gray, black walls whose summits seemed to melt into the fog, the ferns shook off the light hoarfrost that enameled them. In an opening that could hardly hide a child, I observed a life of lichens, mosses, silvery pigments, and vegetable rust on a minute scale, a world as complex as that of the great jungle. This plankton of the earth was like a patina that thickened at the foot of a cascade dropping from a great height, and whose boiling water had dug a pool in the rock. It was here we bathed naked, we, the Couple, in water that splashed and flowed, descending from heights already warmed by the sun, and ran below in beds that the tannin of the tree roots turned yellow. There was no Edenic affectation in this clean nakedness, different from that which panted and struggled in our nights in the hut. Here we gave ourselves up to a kind of playfulness, amazed at finding that the breeze and the light fell so pleasantly on parts of the body which people there die without ever having exposed to the touch of the air. The sun darkened that strip from hip to thigh which is white among the swimmers of my country, even though they have bathed in sun-drenched seas. The sun got between my legs, warmed my testicles, ran down my backbone, broke against my breast, darkened my armpits, covered my neck with sweat, possessed, invaded me; its ardor hardened my seminal ducts, and I felt once more the tension and the throb that sought the dark palpitations of vitals plumbed to their depths in a boundless desire of oneness which became the longing for the womb.