The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Out of the town meeting had come several immediate decisions and a Law—a law whose infraction “will be punished,” so read the Adelantado’s prose. This disturbed me so much that I asked him if he had already had the disagreeable duty of meting out punishments in the City. “So far,” he answered, “the deliquents have been punished by not speaking to them for a time, making them feel the general disapproval; but the day will come when there will be so many of us that more severe penalties will be called for.”

  Once more I was amazed at the serious problems to be dealt with in these regions, as unknown as the blank terrae incognitae the old cartographers, in which the men back there saw only alligators, vampire bats, deadly serpents, and Indian dances. During the time I had been traveling through this virgin world, I had seen very few snakes—a coral snake, a moccasin, what may have been a rattlesnake—and I had known wild animals only by their roaring, though more than once I had thrown stones at some sly alligator disguised as a rotten log in a treacherously quiet pool. My experience had been meager as far as dangers were concerned, aside from the storm in the rapids. But at every turn I had found stimuli to thought, motives for meditation, forms of art, poetry, myth, more helpful to the understanding of man than hundreds of books written by men who pride themselves on knowing Man. Not only had the Adelantado founded a city, but, without realizing it, he was creating day by day a polis that would eventually rest on a code of laws solemnly entered in Notebook . . . Property of . . .

  And the moment would come when severe punishment would have to be imposed on anyone killing an animal in the closed season, and it was apparent that this little, soft-spoken man would not hesitate to sentence the violator to being driven from the community to die of hunger in the forest, or to establish some spectacular, terrifying penalty like those of certain peoples who condemned parricides to being thrown into the river tied in sacks with a dog and a viper. I asked the Adelantado what he would do if one day a gold-hunter were to appear in Santa Mónica, one of those who spread their fever wherever they go.

  “I would give him one day to get out,” he answered.

  “This is not the place for those people,” added Marcos, and there was a quiver of resentment in his voice. I learned that the boy had gone there some time back against his father’s wishes. Two years of bad treatment and humiliation by those with whom he had tried to establish a relationship of friendship and respect had brought him back with a hatred of all he had seen in that world. And he showed me, without offering any explanation, the scars of the fetters that had been welded on him in some remote frontier outpost.

  Father and son fell silent; but behind that silence I sensed that they both fully accepted the stern responsibilities engendered by Reasons of State, as in the case of the gold-hunter determined to return to the Valley of the Plateaus, who would never come back from his second trip.

  “Lost in the jungle,” those interested in his fate would conclude.

  This added another subject for thought to the many already filling my mind. What had happened was that after days of absolute mental sloth, during which I had been the physical man, oblivious of all that was not sensation—sunning myself, taking my pleasure with Rosario, fishing, accustoming my palate to totally new taste sensations—my brain had begun to work at an impatient, headlong pace, as though this rest had been essential. There were days when I would wish to be a naturalist, a geologist, an ethnologist, a botanist, a historian, so that I could understand all this, set it down, explain it so far as possible.

  One afternoon I learned with surprise that the Indians here preserved the memory of a confused epic, which Fray Pedro was reconstructing bit by bit. It was the account of a Carib migration moving northward, laying waste everything in its path, and filling its victorious march with prodigious feats. It told of mountains moved by the hand of fabulous heroes, of rivers deflected from their courses, of singular combats in which the planets intervened. The amazing unity of myths was borne out by these accounts, which dealt with the abduction of princesses, stratagems of war, memorable duels, animal allies. On nights when in a religious ceremony the Headman of the Indians intoxicated himself with a powder inhaled through a bird’s bone, he became a bard, and from his lips came fragments of the epic poem, the saga, which the missionary took down. The poem lived in the memory of the generations of the jungle.

  But I knew that I must not think too much. I was not here to think. The daily tasks, the frugal fare—mainly tapioca, fish, and cassava bread—had thinned me down, firming my flesh to my bones. My body had become lean, defined, its muscles girded to its framework. The unnecessary fat I had carried, the pale, flabby skin, the fears, the groundless anxieties, the forebodings of disaster, the throbbings in the solar plexus, had disappeared. My body, adjusted to itself, felt good. When I came into contact with Rosario’s flesh, the tension it aroused in me, rather than the stirrings of desire, was the uncontrollable urge of primordial rut, the tension of the taut bow, which, having released its arrow, resumes the laxity of its accustomed form. Your woman was at hand. I called her and she came. I was not here to think. I must not think. I must feel and see.

  And when from seeing I turned to looking, strange lights sprang up and everything took on meaning. Thus I suddenly discovered that a Dance of the Trees exists. Not all of them possess the secret of dancing in the wind. But those to whom this grace has been given arrange dances of leaves, branches, twigs about their own swaying trunk: the rhythm that begins in the leaves, a restless, ascending rhythm—with the surge and breaking of waves, with gentle pauses, rests—which suddenly becomes a storm of rejoicing. There is nothing more beautiful than a bamboo thicket dancing in the breeze. No human choreography can equal the eurhythmy of a branch outlined against the sky. I asked myself whether the higher forms of the aesthetic emotion do not consist merely in a supreme understanding of creation. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.

  XXIX/ It had been raining steadily for two days. There was a prolonged overture of bass thunder rumbling over the ground, between the plateaus, filling the empty spaces, roaring in the caves—and then, suddenly, the water. As the palm-frond roofs were dry, we spent the first night moving our hammocks from place to place, looking in vain for a spot on which it did not leak. Then a torrent of mud began to swirl under us on the floor, and, to save the collection of instruments, I had to hang them from the roof beams. By morning we were all irritable, our clothing was damp, and mud was everywhere. It was hard to light the fire, and the rooms filled with smoke, which made the eyes water. Half the church had collapsed as a result of the downpour on the mud and wattle mixture, which had not yet hardened. Fray Pedro, with his habit girded up around his waist, was trying to shore it up as best he could. He was indignantly upbraiding the Adelantado for not having helped to get the job finished by declaring it an emergency.

  Then the rain started up again, and it was rain and more rain until dark, and then it was night once more. I did not even have the consolation of Rosario’s embraces: she “couldn’t,” and when this happened she became nervous, morose, as though every sign of affection annoyed her. I had trouble getting to sleep, what with the incessant drone of the water drowning out every sound not its own, as though the forty days and nights had set in. After finally dozing off—it was nowhere near morning yet—I awoke with the strange feeling that something great had taken place in my mind: something like the ripening and coalescing of chaotic, scattered elements, senseless when dispersed, but suddenly, when ordered, assuming clear meaning. A work had been constructed in my spirit; a “thing” before my eyes, open or closed, which rang in my ears, amazing me by the logic of its order. A work inscribed in me, which could easily be transferred to words, score, something that all could handle, read, understand.

  Many years before, I had once yielded to the curiosity of smoking opium. I remember
ed that the fourth pipe produced a kind of intellectual well-being that brought with it the sudden solution to all the creative problems torturing me at the time. Everything became clear, thought out, measured, complete. When the effects of the drug wore off, I would have only to sit down with staved paper and in no time there would come from my pen, without difficulty or hesitation, the Concerto I was trying to work out. But the next day, when I emerged from my lucid sleep and really wanted to go to work, I made the mortifying discovery that nothing of all I had thought, imagined, decided under the influence of the drug amounted to anything. They were stock formulas, ideas without substance, ridiculous inventions, impossible attempts to transfer plastic emotions to sounds that the bubbling pellets had sublimated under the warmth of the lamp.

  What was happening to me now, in the darkness, the water dripping all around me, was similar to that other delirious elaboration; but this time the well-being was accompanied by awareness; the ideas themselves were seeking an order, and here, within my head, a hand crossed out, corrected, circumscribed, selected. I no longer needed to wait for the benumbing effects of intoxication to wear off to put my thoughts in order. Now all I had to do was wait for the dawn, which would bring the light I needed to make the first sketches of the Threnody, the title stamped on my imagination during sleep.

  Before I had become engulfed in the senseless activities that made me forget my composing—at bottom, my laziness, my inability to resist any temptation of pleasure, were nothing but insecurity as to my powers of creation—I had given much thought to certain unexplored possibilities of linking words and music. In order to get a better focus on the problem, I had first reviewed the long and beautiful history of the recitative in both its liturgical and its profane aspects.

  But the study of the recitative, of the manners of reciting singing, of singing speaking, of seeking the melody in the inflections of the language, of weaving the word into the accompaniment or, on the contrary, of freeing it from the support of harmony—all this, which has so preoccupied modern composers since Mussorgsky and Debussy, culminating in the exasperated, convulsive achievements of the Viennese school, was not what I was looking for. I was striving for a musical expression that should come from the unadorned word, from the word prior to the music—not the word become music by the exaggeration and stylization of its inflections, after the impressionist manner—which should go from speaking to singing almost insensibly, the poem becoming music, finding its own music in the scansion and prosody, which is probably what takes place in the marvel of the Dies irae, dies illa of plain chant, whose music seems born of Latin’s natural accentuation.

  I had conceived of a kind of cantata in which a personage taking the role of the coryphaeus should step forward and, without a sound from the orchestra, after a gesture to attract the attention of the audience, should begin to say a very simple poem, made up of usual words, nouns like man, woman, house, water, cloud, tree, and others that because of their inherent eloquence require no adjective. A kind of word-genesis. And, little by little, the repetition of the words themselves, their accents, would give a peculiar intonation to certain successions of words which would be repeated at fixed intervals like a verbal refrain. And a melody would begin to assert itself, a melody which, as I conceived it, would have the simplicity of line, the design concentrated in a few notes, of an Ambrosian hymn—Aeterne rerum conditor—which I considered music in the state nearest the word. When the words had been transformed into melody, certain instruments would make their discreet entrance, like sonorous punctuation, framing and setting off the normal periods of the recited words, displaying in their participation the vibratile material of which each of them was made: the presence of wood, copper, string, tympanum, like the annunciation of possible combinations.

  At the same time, I had been greatly impressed, in those far-off days, by the revelation of a Compostelan trope—Congaudeant catholici—in which a second voice is heard above the cantus firmus, whose role was to adorn, to give it the melismas, the lights and shadows that would not have been fitting in the liturgical theme—whose purity was thus safeguarded—like a garland upon a bare column, detracting nothing from its dignity, but giving it an ornamental note, flexible and undulant. I saw the successive entrances of the voices of the chorus above the initial chant of the coryphaeus—masculine element, feminine element—as in the Compostelan trope. This, naturally, created a succession of new accents out of whose constants a general rhythm emerged, a rhythm to which the orchestra, with its sonorous devices, gave variety and color. In the process of development, the melismatic element shifted to the instrumental group, seeking planes of harmonic variation and the balance of the pure tones, while against it the chorus, finally in unison, could give itself over to a kind of polyphonic invention within the heightened enrichment of the contrapuntal movement.

  Thus I hoped to arrive at a combination of polyphonic and harmonic writing, concerted, mortised, in keeping with the most valid laws of music, within the framework of a vocal, symphonic ode, gradually rising in intensity of expression. The general concept, at any rate, was sensible enough. The simplicity of the recitative would prepare the listener to perceive the simultaneous planes which, if they had been suddenly presented, he would have found abstruse and confused. It would allow him to follow a logical process of development, the cell-word in all its musical implications. Naturally, one had to be on guard against a possible anarchy of styles engendered by this attempt to reinvent music—which, from the instrumental point of view, offered dangerous risks. I planned to protect myself by speculating with the pure timbres, and I reminded myself of certain extraordinary dialogues of flute and contrabass, of oboe and trombone, which I had discovered in works of Alberic Magnard. As for the harmony, I hoped to find an element of unity in the skillful use of the ecclesiastical modes, whose untouched resources were beginning to be utilized by some of the most intelligent of contemporary musicians.

  Rosario opened the door, and the light of day surprised me in my pleasant reflections. I could not get over my amazement: the Threnody had been inside me all the time, but its seed had been resown and had begun to grow in the night of the Paleolithic, on the banks of the river inhabited by monsters, when I heard the medicine man howling over a black, snake-poisoned corpse two paces from a sty where the captives wallowed in their own excrement and urine. That night I was taught a profound lesson by men whom I did not consider men; by those very beings who gave me a sense of my own superiority, and who, in turn, held themselves superior to the two slavering old men who gnawed bones left by the dogs. At the memory of an authentic threnody, the idea of the Threnody revived in me, with its statement of the cell-word, its verbal exorcism turning into music when confronted with the need for more than one intonation, more than one note, to achieve its form—a form which, in this case, was that demanded by its magic function, and which, with its alternation of two voices, two ways of growling, was in itself the embryo of the sonata.

  I, the musician, who had witnessed the scene, was adding the rest. Obscurely I sensed its potentialities and what it still lacked. I grasped its content of existent and not yet existent music. . . . I rushed out through the rain to the house of the Adelantado to ask him for one of his notebooks, one of those with a label on the cover reading: Notebook . . . Property of . . . which he grudgingly gave me, and I began to sketch musical ideas on staves that I myself drew, using the edge of a machete as a ruler.

  XXX/ At first, faithful to an old plan of my youth, I thought of working on the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley, the first act of which, like the third of Faust, Part II, contains a marvelous cantata theme. The liberation of the chained prisoner, which I mentally associated with my flight from there, conveyed a sense of resurrection, an emergence from darkness, most appropriate to the original conception of the threnody, which was a magic song intended to bring a dead person back to life. Certain verses I recalled would have fitted in admirably with my desire to work on a text made up of simple
and direct words: “Ah me! alas, pain, pain, pain ever, for ever!”—”No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.” And then those choruses of mountains, springs, storms, elements by which I was surrounded and which I felt. That voice of the Earth, at once Mother, clay, and womb, like the Mothers of Gods who still reign in the jungle. And those hounds of hell who break into the drama and howl with the accent of maenads rather than furies. “Ha! I scent life!” “Let me but look into his eyes!”

  But no. It was absurd to excite my imagination with this when I did not have Shelley’s poem there, and never would. There were only three books there: Rosario’s Genevieve of Brabant, Fray Pedro’s Liber Usualis and such texts as his ministry called for, and the Odyssey of Yannes. Leafing through Genevieve of Brabant, I found to my surprise that the plot, if divested of its execrable style, was not much worse than that of excellent operas, and had points of resemblance to Pelléas. As for the religious works, they would not fit in with my idea of the Threne, giving a vehicular, Biblical style to the cantata. So I was left with the Spanish version of the Odyssey.

  It had never entered my mind to compose the music for a poem written in this language, which of itself would constitute an obstacle to the performance of a choral work in any important artistic center. I suddenly found myself annoyed by this subconscious confession that I wanted to “hear myself performed.” My resignation would never be effective as long as I had such notions. I was the poet of the desert island of Rainer María Rilke, and as such I should create out of a deep compulsion. Besides, what was my real tongue? I knew German from my father. With Ruth I talked English, the language of my boyhood education; French, as a rule, with Mouche; the Spanish of my Abridged Grammar—Estos, Fabio—with Rosario. But this, too, was the language of the Lives of the Saints, bound in purple velvet, from which my mother used to read to me. St. Rose of Lima, Rosario—I took this conjunction for a favorable sign. Without hesitation I returned to Yannes’s Odyssey.