The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  At first its rhetoric disheartened me. I refused to employ formulas of invocation like: “Our Father, heir of Kronos, Lord of lords!” or “Kinsman of Zeus and son of Laertes, many-counseled Odysseus.” Nothing could be more contrary to the type of text I needed. I read and re-read certain passages, impatient to set to work. I went back several times to the episode of Polyphemus, but finally found it too full of action and incident. I went out of doors and walked around in the rain, to Rosario’s horror. I hardly answered Your woman when she talked to me, and it upset her to see me so nervous. But she finally stopped questioning me, accepting the fact that a man can have “bad days” and is under no obligation to give the reasons for his scowling brow. To keep out of my way, she went off in a corner, behind me, and started picking the ticks off Gavilán’s ears with a pointed bamboo stick.

  But in no time I was in a good mood again. The solution to the problem was simple. All I had to do was prune Homer’s text down to the needed simplicity. I suddenly discovered the magic, primeval tone, at once clear and solemn, in the episode of the invocation of the dead: “About it I poured the drink-offerings to the congregation of the dead, a honey-and-milk draught first, sweet wine next, with water last of all: and I made a heave-offering of our glistening barley; invoking the tenuous dead, in general, for my intention of a heifer-not-in-calf, the best to be found in my manors, when I got back to Ithaca; which should be slain to them and burnt there on a pyre fed high with treasure: while for Teiresias apart I vowed an all-black ram, the choicest male of our flocks. . . . I took the two sheep and beheaded them across my pit in such a manner that the livid blood drained into it. Then from out of Erebus they flocked to me, the dead spirits of those who had died.”

  As the text took on the needed consistency, I conceived the musical structure of the speech. The passage from word to music would come as the voice of the coryphaeus almost imperceptibly softened into verse when he spoke of the tender girls and the warriors fallen under the brazen spears. The melismatic element would be introduced above the first voice by the lamentation of Elpenor, grieving because he lay unwept and unburied. The poem speaks of his thin wail, which I would vocalize as a prelude to his plea: “Consume my body in fire, with these arms and armor which remain mine, and heap over the ashes a mound at the edge of the sea where the surf breaks white, for a token telling of an unhappy man, and when the rites are completed fix above my mound the oar that in life I pulled among my fellows.”

  The appearance of Anticleia would bring the contralto note to the vocal edifice, which grew clearer and clearer in my mind, entering as a kind of fauxbourdon in the descant of Ulysses and Elpenor. An open chord of the orchestra, with the sonority of an organ pedal, would herald the presence of Teiresias. But at this point f stopped. The need to write music had become so imperious that I began to work on my outline, seeing the musical signs, so long neglected, come forth at the call of my pencil.

  When I had finished the first page of this first draft, I paused in wonder over these rough staves, so unevenly drawn, with lines more converging than parallel, on which I had set down the notes of a homophonic introduction which, in its very configuration, had something of spell, invocation, of music different from any I had written before. In nothing did it resemble the artful writing of that misbegotten Prelude to “Prometheus Unbound” so in the fashion of the day, in which, like so many others, I had tried to revive the health and spontaneity of a craftsman’s art—the work begun on Wednesday to be sung at the Sunday service—borrowing its formulas, its contrapuntal devices, its rhetoric, but without recovering its spirit. The dissonances, the misplaced notes, the harshness of the instruments deliberately set in their most difficult and extreme registers would not give permanence to a copybook art that came only from the head, using only the lifeless legacy—the patterns and formulas of “development”—which all too often forgot, and deliberately so, the inspired richness of the slow movements, the sublime inspiration of the arias, substituting sleight-of-hand tricks with the confusion, the haste, the headlong rush of the allegros.

  For years a kind of locomotor ataxia had afflicted the composers of concerti grossi, in which two movements in eighths and sixteenths—as though there were no such things as half and whole notes—wrenched out of place by a heavy offbeat, which violated all laws of musical breathing, boomed to right and left of a ricercare whose paucity of ideas was hidden under the sourest counterpoint that could be imagined. Like so many others, I, too, had been impressed by the slogans of “return to order,” the calls for purity, geometry, asepsis, smothering within myself all melody that sought to raise its head. Now, far from concert halls, manifestoes, the unspeakable boredom of art polemics, I was inventing music with an ease that astounded me as ideas, descending from my brain, crowded my hand, falling over one another to reach my pencil. I knew that I should be suspicious of anything brought forth without suffering. But there would be plenty of time to scratch out, weigh, correct. To the relentless sound of the rain, I wrote with feverish impatience, as though driven by an inner daemon, condensing my script in a kind of shorthand that only I could decipher. When I finally went to bed, the first draft of the Threnody had filled the entire Notebook . . . Property of . . .

  XXXI/ I had just suffered a disagreeable shock. The Adelantado, from whom I had requested another notebook, asked me if I ate them. I explained to him why I needed more paper. “This is the last one I’m giving you,” he replied tartly, explaining that the notebooks were for minutes, records, and not to be wasted on music. As a sop to my disappointment, he offered me his son Marcos’s guitar.

  Evidently there was no connection in his mind between composing and writing. The only music he was acquainted with was that of harpists, mandolin-players, the pluckers of stringed instruments, all minstrels of the Middle Ages like those who came to these shores in the first caravels, who had no need of scores, who did not even know that such a thing as staved paper existed. I went to Fray Pedro to complain. But he was in complete agreement with the Adelantado, adding that the latter had evidently forgotten that very soon baptismal, burial, and marriage registers would be needed. Then, all of a sudden, he looked me sternly in the eye, asking if I intended to go on living in my present state of sin the rest of my life.

  I was so unprepared for this that I stammered out something that had nothing to do with what he was saying. Whereupon Fray Pedro launched into a tirade against those who, passing themselves off as cultivated, superior persons, made his evangelical tasks more difficult by setting the Indians a bad example. He maintained that it was my duty to marry Rosario, for sanctified and legal unions should be the basis of the order to be established in Santa Mónica de los Venados. Suddenly I recovered my self-assurance, and permitted myself a touch of irony, assuring him that things went very well here without benefit of clergy. All the veins in the friar’s face seemed to swell up; he shouted, as though invoking divine wrath upon me, that he would tolerate no reflections on the importance of his ministry, justifying his presence there with the words of Christ about the sheep that were not of his fold and had to be brought in to hear his voice.

  Surprised by the wrath of Fray Pedro, who pounded the ground with his staff as he talked, I shrugged my shoulders and looked the other way, refraining from saying what was in my mind: This is what the church is good for. The shackles hidden beneath the Samaritan’s robe have been revealed. Two bodies cannot take their pleasure together without black-nailed fingers wanting to make the sign of the cross over them. The hammocks in which we lie must be sprinkled with holy water some Sunday when we agree to become the protagonists of an edifying scene. This nuptial chromo struck me as so ridiculous that I burst into a guffaw and left the church, which had been temporarily patched up with malanga leaves, on which the rain kept up its persistent drumming.

  I went back to our cabin, where I had to confess to myself that my scoffing, defiant laughter was nothing but the cheap reaction of my attempt, in keeping with the best literary f
ormulas, to hide the fact that I was already married. And this would have been of little importance had it not been for the fact that I was truly, deeply, in love with Rosario. At this remove from my country and its courts, the charge of bigamy would carry little weight. I could easily go through with the farce the friar demanded, and everybody would be happy. But the days of deception were over. Just because I had recovered my manhood, I would be a party to no more lies. As I prized above everything in the world the loyalty Rosario put into anything connected with me, the thought of deceiving her revolted me, especially in a matter to which a woman instinctively attaches so much importance, who must be assured of a home to shelter the living home of an always possible pregnancy. I could not bear to think of the farce of Rosario’s carrying, tucked away somewhere in her clothes, her “lines,” entered in the Adelantado’s notebook, declaring us “man and wife before God.” The conscience of my conscience made a baseness of this sort impossible.

  For this very reason I was worried about the friar’s tactics, unswerving in their aim. Pedro de Henestrosa would work on Your woman’s feelings until he brought things to a head. I would be forced into a situation in which I would have either to confess the truth or lie. If I were to tell the truth, my position would become difficult as regards the missionary, and the whole placid, simple harmony of my life with Rosario would be upset. If I decided to lie, I would destroy with one act the rectitude of behavior that I had determined should govern my new life.

  To flee this dilemma, this being torn by doubt, I tried to concentrate on my score, finally achieving it. I was at the extremely difficult moment when the shade of Anticleia appears, at which the voice of Ulysses begins a simple descant beneath the melismatic lament of Elpenor, introducing the first lyric episode of the cantata, which the orchestra would take up after the entrance of Teiresias, supporting the first instrumental development, beneath a polyphony established on the vocal level. . . . At the end of the day, in spite of the fact that I had kept my writing as small as I possibly could, I found that I had filled up one third of the second notebook.

  It was evident that I must quickly find a solution to the paper problem. There had to be some product there in the jungle, which was so rich in natural fibers, jutes, leaves, bark, on which one could write. But there was no let-up in the rain. There was not a dry thing in the Valley of the Plateaus. I crowded my writing a little more, utilizing every millimeter of paper; but this pinching, miserly preoccupation frustrated the generous proportions of my inspiration, limiting its flow, keeping my mind on the petty when I should have been thinking along lines of greatness. I felt shackled, diminished, foolish, and I finally gave up my task a little before evening, seething with irritation. It had never occurred to me that the imagination could founder on anything so stupid as lack of paper.

  And when I was at the peak of my indignation, Rosario asked me to whom I was writing letters, inasmuch as there was no post office there. This mistake, the vision of a letter meant to travel, but which could not, suddenly made me aware of the vanity of everything I had been doing since the day before. A score that is not played is utterly valueless. A work of art is meant for others—above all, music, which by its very nature can reach vast audiences. I had chosen the moment of my escape from the places where a work of mine could be heard to begin really to compose. It was foolish, absurd, laughable. And yet, even though I swore to myself that this was the end of the Threnody, that it would not go beyond the first third of the second notebook, I knew that the next day, with the dawn, a power beyond my control would make me take up the pencil and work out the entrance of Teiresias, which my ear could already hear, with its mighty organ sonority: three oboes, three clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, one trombone. What would it matter if the Threnody were never played? I had to write it, and I would write it, come what may, if only to prove to myself that I was not empty, completely empty, as I had tried to make the Curator believe, one day.

  Somewhat calmed, I lay down in my hammock. My mind went back to the friar and his demand. Your woman was behind me, roasting ears of corn over a fire she had had trouble getting to burn because of the dampness. From where she sat, she could not see my face in the darkness or observe my expression as I spoke. I finally made up my mind to ask her, in a voice that did not come out very steady, if she thought it would be a good thing for us to get married. And when I thought that she was going to snatch at the opportunity to assign me a role in an edifying Sunday chromo for the use of the new converts, to my amazement she answered that marriage was the last thing she wanted.

  Like lightning, my surprise turned to jealous indignation. I got up and went toward her to find out her reasons. She disconcerted me with arguments employed by her sisters, and probably by her mother, which may account for the secret pride of these women, who feared nothing. According to her, marriage, the legal bond, deprived a woman of all her defenses against man. The arm she always had at her disposal against a bad husband was that she could leave him whenever she liked: he had no rights over her. A legal wife, in Rosario’s opinion, was one for whom the husband could send the police when she left the house where he was free to indulge his infidelity, his cruelty, or his drunkenness. To marry was to come under laws drawn up by men and not by women. But in a free union, Rosario sententiously observed, “the man knows that having a person who looks to his pleasure and comfort depends on the way he treats her.”

  I must confess that the shrewd peasant logic of this concept left me speechless. In her dealings with life, it was clear that Your woman moved in a world of ideas, customs, precepts that were not mine. And yet I felt humiliated, reduced to a level of annoying inferiority, because now it was I who wanted her to marry me; I was the one who wanted to play a part in the edifying picture, listening to Fray Pedro perform the marriage ceremony before the assembled Indians. But a signed and sealed paper existed, back there, which sapped my moral strength. Back there was the paper I needed so badly here, in abundance.

  As these thoughts were running through my mind, a terrorized scream from Rosario whirled me around. There, framed in the window, stood leprosy, the terrible leprosy of ancient times, which so many peoples have forgotten, the leprosy of Leviticus, which still existed in those forests. Beneath a pointed cap there was a residue, a mangled scrap of face, offscourings of flesh still clinging about a black hole open in the darkness of a throat, around two expressionless eyes like petrified tears on the point of dissolving in the disintegration of the being who moved them, and from whose trachea came a kind of hoarse whistle, as he pointed to the ears of corn, with an ashy hand. I did not know what to do about this living corpse, gesticulating, moving stumps of fingers, before whom Rosario knelt on the floor, mute with terror.

  “Go away, Nicasio,” said the voice of Marcos, approaching him without anger. “Go away, Nicasio, go away.” And he pushed him gently from the window with a forked stick. He came into the hut laughing, picked up a roasting ear, and threw it to the poor wretch, who put it into his bag and dragged himself off toward the mountains.

  I knew now that I had seen Nicasio, a gold-hunter in an advanced state of leprosy, whom the Adelantado had found when he got there, and who lived far away in a cave, waiting for death, which seemed to have forgotten him. He had been forbidden to come near the settlement. But it had been so long since he had done it that there was to be no punishment this time. Horrified at the thought that the leper might return, I invited Marcos to share our dinner. He dashed out through the rain to get his old four-stringed guitar—the same as those which enlivened the caravels—and with a rhythm that put Negro blood into the melody of the ballad, he began to sing:

  “Soy hijo del rey Mulato

  y de la reina Mulatina;

  la que conmigo casara

  mulata se volvería”

  XXXII/ When the Adelantado discovered that I was trying to write on leaves, bark, a deerskin mat in our hut, he took pity on me and gave me another notebook, warning me that this was posi
tively the last one. He planned to go to Puerto Anunciación for a few days when the rains ended, and would bring me all the notebooks I wanted. But there were still many days of the eight weeks of rains, and before he went the church had to be finished, and all the damage caused by the dampness repaired; also, the crops had to be sowed. So I went on working, knowing that after filling up sixty-four little pages, the first draft would have made little progress. Then I was almost afraid lest the wondrous mental excitement of the beginning should return. So, using the eraser freely—to keep the use of paper at a minimum—I spent my time correcting and paring down.

  I had not said anything more to Rosario about marriage; but, if the truth be told, her refusal that afternoon had flicked me on the raw. The days were interminable. It rained too much. The absence of the sun, whose wan disk was visible at noon behind the clouds, which for a few hours turned from gray to white, induced a state of depression there where everything needed the sun to harmonize its colors and cast its shadows on the ground. The rivers were roiled, dragging along trees, masses of rotting leaves, the slag of the forest, drowned animals. Uprooted and broken things piled up in jams, which were broken by the sudden thrust of a tree, wrenched up by its muddy roots, swept down by a cascade.