The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Everything smelled of water, everything had the sound of water, the hand encountered water everywhere. Every day when I had gone out to look for something on which to write, I had slipped into holes screened by treacherous grass, and had come back covered with mud. Everything that flourished in the dampness thrived and rejoiced. The caladium leaves were never so green and lush, the mushrooms so abundant; the moss was never so high, the frogs were never in such fine voice or the inhabitants of rotten wood so numerous. The outcroppings of the plateaus were streaked in black. Each crack, each fold, each fault in the rock was the bed of a torrent. It was as though these plateaus were carrying out the gigantic task of channeling the waters to the lands below, of providing each area with its quota of rain. It was impossible to pick up a board from the ground without setting the wood lice scurrying. The birds had disappeared from the landscape, and one day Gavilán discovered a boa in the flooded part of the garden.

  Men and women accepted all this as one of nature’s inevitable crises, keeping to their huts, knitting, twisting rope, unspeakably bored. But suffering the rains was one of the rules of the game, the same as bringing forth their young with travail, and having to cut off the left hand with a machete wielded by the right if the fangs of a poisonous serpent had buried themselves in it. This was a part of life, and many things in life are not pleasant. These were the days for the accumulation of humus, the rotting and decay of the fallen leaves, in keeping with the law decreeing that all generation shall take place in the neighborhood of excretion, that the organs of generation shall be intertwined with those of urination, and that all that is born shall come into the world enveloped in mucus, serum, and blood—just as out of manure comes the purity of the asparagus and the green of mint.

  One night we believed the rains were over. There came a kind of truce during which the roofs were silent and the valley took a deep breath. In the distance the flowing of the rivers could be heard, and a thick, white, chill mist filled all the space between things. Rosario and I sought each other’s warmth in a long embrace. When we recovered consciousness of the world about us, it was raining again.

  “It is in the time of the waters that women conceive,” Your woman whispered in my ear. I laid my hand on her belly in a propitiatory gesture. For the first time I felt the longing to caress a child born of me, to hold it in my arms, and watch its knees bend over my arm, and see it suck its fingers. . . .

  In the midst of these thoughts, with my pencil poised over a dialogue of trumpet and English horn, I was startled by an outcry that brought me to the door of our hut. Something had happened in the Indian village, for they were all milling and shouting around the Headman’s house. Rosario, wrapped in her shawl, rushed out in the rain. An atrocious thing had occurred: an eight-year-old girl had just come up from the river dripping blood from her loins to her knees. When they could make out what she was saying through her horrified sobs, they learned that Nicasio, the leper, had tried to rape her, tearing her genitals with his hands. Fray Pedro was stanching the hemorrhage with rags while the men, armed with clubs, were searching the neighborhood.

  “I said we ought to get rid of that Lazarus,” the Adelantado was reminding the friar, and his words held a latent reproach of long standing. The Capuchin did not answer. With his long experience of forest medications, he was stuffing the wound with cobwebs and rubbing the pubis with mercury ointment. The disgust and indignation I felt at the outrage was unspeakable; it was as though I, a man, all men, were equally guilty of this revolting attempt because of the mere fact that possession, even willing, puts the male in the attitude of aggression.

  My fists were still clenched in fury when Marcos slipped a shotgun under my arm; it was one of those long double-barreled guns, bearing the stamp of the gunmakers of Demerara, which perpetuate in those remote spots the techniques of the earliest firearms. Putting his finger to his lips to avoid attracting Fray Pedro’s attention, the boy made signs to me to follow him. We wrapped the gun in cloths and set out toward the river. The muddy, rushing waters were dragging along the body of a deer, its white belly so swollen that it looked like a manatee. We reached the place where the attack had occurred, the grass all trampled down and stained with blood. There were deep footprints in the mud, which Marcos, bent low, followed. We walked for a long time. Night was coming on when we reached the foot of the Cliff of the Petroglyphs, and we had not yet caught up with the leper. We were about to turn back when the half-breed pointed to a recent track through the dripping underbrush. We went on a little farther, when suddenly the tracker stopped: there was Nicasio kneeling in the middle of a clearing looking at us with his horrible eyes.

  “Aim at his face,” Marcos said. I raised the gun, lining up the sights with the gaping hole in the middle of the wretch’s face. From his throat came an unintelligible word that sounded like: “. . . fession . . . fession.” I lowered the gun. The criminal was asking to be allowed to make confession. I turned toward Marcos. “Shoot,” he urged. “It’s better for the priest not to get mixed up in this.”

  I took aim again. But there were two eyes there, two almost extinct lidless eyes, that went on looking. The pressure of my finger would put them out. Put out two eyes. A man’s two eyes. He was a horrible thing, a thing capable of the vilest outrage, who had destroyed young flesh, perhaps contaminating it with his own curse. He ought to be eliminated, done away with, left to the birds of the air. But something in me resisted, as though from the moment my finger tightened on the trigger, something would be changed forever. There are acts that throw up walls, markers, limits in a man’s existence. And I was afraid of the time that would begin for me the second I turned Executioner. Marcos, with an angry gesture, snatched the gun from my hands.

  “They can blast a city to pieces from the sky, and can’t do this. Weren’t you in the war?” The gun had a bullet in the right barrel and a cartridge in the left. The two reports followed one another almost without interval, and the report echoed from rock to rock, from valley to valley. The waves of the echoes still vibrated in the air when I forced myself to look. Nicasio was kneeling in the same place, but his distorted face had lost all human likeness. It was a bloody mass that was disintegrating, slipping down his chest like melting wax. Finally the blood stopped flowing and the body collapsed on the wet grass. The rain suddenly started up again, and it was dark. Now it was Marcos who carried the gun.

  XXXIII/ It was like a prolonged rumble of thunder which came from the north of the valley and passed overhead. I started up from my hammock so violently that I almost turned it over. The men of the Neolithic were fleeing in terror from an airplane that circled and returned.

  The Adelantado stepped to the door of the Government House, followed by Marcos. Both stood staring in amazement, while Fray Pedro called out to the Indian women, howling with fright in their huts, that this was a “white man’s thing” and would not hurt them. The plane was some five hundred feet off the ground, under a heavy ceiling of clouds on the point of bursting into rain again. But it was not a distance of five hundred feet that separated the flying machine from the Headman of the Indians, who glared at it defiantly, bow in hand; it was one hundred and fifty thousand years. For the first time the sound of the combustion motor was heard in those lands; for the first time the air was churned by a propeller, and this spinning parallel roundness where the birds had their feet introduced them there to nothing less than the invention of the wheel.

  The plane, however, showed a kind of hesitation in its flight. I noticed that the pilot was watching us as though looking for something or waiting for a signal. So I ran into the center of the square, waving Rosario’s shawl. My rejoicing was so contagious that the Indians approached without fear, leaping arid shouting, and Fray Pedro had to push them back with his staff to clear the field. The plane turned downriver, descending a little, and then came circling toward us, lower and lower. It touched the ground, taxied dangerously toward the curtain of trees, and with a skillful turn braked to a sto
p.

  Two men leaped out of the cockpit, two men who called me by my name. And my amazement grew as I learned that several planes had been looking for me for more than a week. Somebody—they didn’t know the name—had said back there that I was lost in the jungle, possibly a prisoner of head-hunting Indians. I had become the hero of a novel, which included the hypothesis that I had been tortured. It was another Fawcett case, and the accounts, published in the newspapers, were a modern version of the story of Dr. Livingstone. An important newspaper had offered a large reward for my rescue. The pilots charted their route on information from the Curator, who pointed out the general area of the musical instruments I had set out to look for. They had been on the point of giving up the search when, that morning, they had had to change their course to avoid a thunderstorm. As they flew over the Great Plateaus, they had been surprised to see a settlement where they had expected only an uninhabited region, and when they saw me waving the shawl, they had thought that I must be the person they were looking for.

  I was amazed to learn that this city of Enoch, still without brass- and metal-workers, where I perhaps played the part of Jubal, was only three hours from the city as the crow flies. That is to say, the fifty-eight centuries separating the fourth chapter of Genesis from the current year back there, could be spanned in one hundred and eighty-minutes, returning to the epoch some identity with the present—as though this were not the present, too—flying over cities that today, at this very time, belonged to the Middle Ages, the Conquest, the Colony, or the Romantic era.

  Out of the plane they lifted a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, which they would have dropped by parachute if they had found me where it was impossible to land, and they handed out medicines, canned goods, knives, bandages, to Marcos and the Capuchin. The pilot unscrewed the cap of a big aluminum jug and made me take a drink. Since the night of the storm over the rapids I had not tasted a drop of liquor. Now, in this all-pervading dampness that surrounded us, the alcohol suddenly produced a lucid intoxication that filled me with forgotten desires. I not only wanted to drink more, and watched with jealous impatience while the Adelantado and his son sampled my liquor, but a thousand taste sensations flocked to my palate. There was the urgent longing for tea and wine, celery and sea-food, vinegar and ice. And that cigarette brought back the taste of the Virginia tobacco I smoked as a boy, when my father could not see me, on my way to the conservatory.

  Within me another stirred who was also I, and who did not quite fit his own image; he and I were uncomfortably superimposed on one another, like plates handled by an apprentice lithographer in which the yellows and the reds do not completely coincide, or like something seen through the glasses of a nearsighted person. That burning liquid running down my throat disconcerted and softened me. In that precious moment I became frightened of the mountains, the clouds thickening once more, the trees that the rain had made denser than before. It was as though curtains were closing in around me. Certain elements of the landscape became foreign to me; the planes became confused, the path had nothing more to say to me, and the noise of the cascades became deafening. In the midst of the infinite sound of waters, I heard the voice of the pilot as something distinct from the language he employed. It was something that was fated to happen, an event expressed in words, summons that could not be evaded, that would have caught up with me wherever I might have been. He told me to get ready to leave with them at once, for it was going to rain again, and he was only waiting for the mist to clear from the edge of the plateau to start the motor.

  I made a gesture of refusal. But at that very moment something echoed within me with a powerful and joyous sonority: the first chord of the orchestra in my Threnody. The tragedy of the lack of paper! And then the thought of the book, the need of a number of books. The desire would soon become irresistible to go to work on Prometheus Unbound—”Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!” Behind me the pilot was talking again. And what he was saying, which was always the same, aroused in me the memory of other verses of the poem: “I heard a sound of voices: not the voice which I gave forth.” The language of these men of the air, which was mine for so many years, displaced in my mind the matrix tongue, that of my mother, of Rosario. Then it was hard for me to think in Spanish, as I had managed to do again, confronted by the sonority of words that sowed confusion in my soul.

  Yet, I did not want to go. But I admitted to myself that what I lacked there could be summed up in two words: paper, ink. I had managed to dispense with everything I had been accustomed to in other days; I had discarded objects, tastes, clothing, pleasures, like unnecessary ballast, arriving at the supreme simplicity of the hammock, of cleansing my body with ashes, and the pleasure to be found in gnawing ears of corn roasted in the embers. But I could not do without paper and ink, without things expressed or to be expressed by these mediums. Three hours away there was paper and there was ink, and books made of paper and ink, and notebooks, and reams of paper, and bottles, flasks, jugs of ink. Three hours away . . .

  I looked at Rosario. There was a cold, detached expression on her face, which was neither anger, anxiety, nor grief. It was evident that she was aware of my struggle, for her eyes, which avoided mine, had a hard, proud expression, as if making it clear to everyone that nothing of what might happen affected her.

  Just then Marcos came up with my old suitcase covered with mold. I made another gesture of refusal, but my hand reached out for the Notebook . . . Property of . . . The voice of the pilot, who must have been very eager for the offered reward, urged me to hurry. Then Marcos climbed into the plane with the musical instruments that should be in the Curator’s hands. I told him no, and then yes, thinking that the rhythm-stick, the rattles, and the funerary jar, once sent off in their fiber mat wrappings, would liberate me from the ghosts that still haunted my sleep in the cabin.

  I drank the rest of the contents of the aluminum flask. And suddenly I made my decision: I would go and buy the few things I needed to live a life as full as that of all the others here. All of them, with their hands, their occupation, fulfilled a destiny. The hunter hunted, the friar preached, the Adelantado governed. I, too, would have my calling—the legitimate one—aside from the skills needed in our common effort. In a few days I would be back for good, after sending the instruments to the Curator, and after communicating with Ruth, frankly explaining the situation to her and asking for a quick divorce. I realized that my adaptation to this life might have been a little too abrupt; my past demanded the observance of a last duty, the breaking of the legal tie that still bound me to the world back there. Ruth had not been a bad wife, but rather the victim of her unfortunate vocation. She would accept all responsibility when she realized that it was useless to oppose the divorce or to ask the impossible of a man who had learned the paths of evasion. Within three or four weeks I would be back in Santa Mónica de los Venados, with everything I needed for my work for several years.

  As for the work I produced, the Adelantado could take it to Puerto Anunciación on one of his trips there and send it off by the river mail. The directors and my musician friends to whom it would be sent could do as they saw fit with it, performing it or not. I felt freed of all vanity in this regard, though I now felt myself capable of expressing ideas, inventing forms, which would cure the music of my time of many errors. Although without feeling vain over what I then knew—without seeking the hollow vanity of applause—there was no reason for me to hide what I knew. Perhaps some young man, somewhere, was waiting for my message, to find within himself, through my voice, the road to freedom. What was done was not completely done until someone else had seen it. But it was enough for one person to see it to bring it to being and accomplish the true act of creation, like Adam, by giving it a name.

  The pilot laid his hand on my shoulder with an urgent gesture. Rosario seemed indifferent to everything. I explained to her in a few words what I had just decided to do. She did not answer, shrugging her shoulders with a gesture that had become contemptuous. I
held out to her, in proof, the notes of the Threnody. I told her that, after her, these were the most valuable things in the world to me. “You can take them with you,” she said in an angry voice, without looking at me.

  I kissed her, but she eluded me with a swift gesture, escaping from the arms that would embrace her, and moved away without turning her head, like an animal that does not want to be touched. I called to her, I spoke to her, but at that moment the motor of the plane began to turn over.

  The Indians burst into a joyous cry. From the cockpit the pilot made one last sign to me. And a metal door slammed shut behind me. The roar of the motors made it impossible for me to think. And then it was taxiing to the end of the square, the half-turn followed by a throbbing motionless-ness that seemed to drive the wheels into the miry ground. And then the treetops were beneath us; we cleared the top of the Cliff of the Petroglyphs, and we were circling over Santa Mónica de los Venados, whose square again was filled with its dwellers. I saw Fray Pedro whirling his staff in the air. I saw the Adelantado, arms akimbo, looking up beside Marcos, who was waving his palm-leaf hat. On the path that led to our house, Rosario walked alone without raising her eyes from the ground, and I trembled as I noticed that her black hair, which hung down both sides of her head—divided by a part whose slightly animal perfume came back to me with delectation—had something of the air of a widow’s veil.

  Far off, where Nicasio fell, a flock of vultures was gathering. A cloud was thickening below us, and, looking for better flying conditions, we flew upward into an opalescent mist that cut us off from everything. We were going to have to fly blind for some time, so I lay down on the floor of the plane and went to sleep, somewhat befuddled by liquor and altitude.