The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  I sensed the revival of these struggles of adolescence as I walked along with Mouche, past the brick wall of the Church of St. Nicholas. She was talking a blue streak as though to quiet her conscience, insisting that she had had no part in the scandalous newspaper accounts, that she had been the victim of an abuse of trust on the part of the reporter, etc.—not having lost, naturally, her inveterate ability to lie with wide-open eyes, looking one straight in the face. She did not reproach me for what I had done to her when she had come down with malaria, magnanimously attributing it to my zeal to acquire the authentic musical instruments. As she had been in the grip of a high fever that first time I had embraced Rosario in the Greeks’ cabin, I was left wondering whether she had really seen us.

  I endured her company that night for the sake of having someone to talk to, not to be alone in my dimly lighted room, walking from wall to wall amidst the reek of margarine. And as I was determined to frustrate her attempts at seduction, I let myself be led to the Venusberg, where my credit was still good. In that way I would not have to confess that I was completely broke, and I would take care not to drink too much. But in spite of everything, the liquor maliciously managed to undermine my firm intentions, and before long I found myself in the studio for astrological consultations, whose paintings were now finished. Mouche filled up my glass several times, and then excused herself to get into something more comfortable, and when she had done so she called me a fool for depriving myself of a pleasure that would have no consequences. She said that what I did now would not compromise me in any way, and she used her body to such advantage that I gave in with a lack of protest caused in large measure by several weeks of unwonted abstinence.

  After a few minutes I experienced the depression and disillusion of those who return to a flesh that no longer holds any surprises, after a separation that might have been final, when there is no link to the being this flesh envelops. I was sad, angry with myself, more alone than before, beside a body I once more regarded with contempt. Any streetwalker I had picked up in a bar, to whom I had paid a fee, would have been better than this.

  Through the open door I saw the paintings in the consultation room. “This trip was written on the wall,” Mouche had said the evening before we left, giving a prophetic sense to the presence of Sagittarius, the Ship Argo, and Berenice’s Hair in the motifs of the decorations, personifying herself in the third of these figures. Now, the prophetic implications of all that—if it had any—took on noonday clarity in my mind: Berenice’s Hair was Rosario, with her virgin hair, which had never been cut, while Ruth became the Hydra that completed the mural, poised threateningly behind the piano, which could be interpreted as the instrument of my profession.

  Mouche sensed that my silence, my indifference, were not favorable to her. To change the direction of my thoughts, she picked up a publication lying on the night-table. It was a little religious journal to which a black nun, who shared her plane seat for several hours, had persuaded her to subscribe. Mouche explained to me laughingly that, as she was going through a bad time, she had taken the subscription on the off-chance that Jehovah might be the true God. Opening up the modest missionary bulletin, printed on cheap paper, she put it in my hands. “I think it mentions that Capuchin we knew; there is a picture of him.”

  In an ornate black frame there really was a photograph of Fray Pedro de Henestrosa taken many years before, for his face was still young in spite of the fact that his beard was already graying. I learned, with growing emotion, that the friar had undertaken a mission to the lands of the savage Indians he had once pointed out to me from the top of the Cliff of the Petroglyphs. From a gold-hunter—the article went on—who had recently reached Puerto Anunciación, it had been learned that the body of Fray Pedro de Henestrosa had been found horribly mutilated in a canoe sent downstream to the white man’s lands by his killers as a grim warning. I put on my clothes without answering Mouche’s questions and rushed out of her house, knowing that I would never go back.

  All night until dawn I walked past empty warehouses, banks, dark funeral parlors, sleeping hospitals. Unable to rest, at daybreak I took a ferry, crossed the river, and went on walking past the warehouses and customs buildings in Hoboken. I thought how the Indians had undoubtedly stripped Fray Pedro after shooting him with arrows, and then had cut through his gaunt ribs with a stone knife and torn out his heart in keeping with an ancient ritual. Perhaps they castrated him; perhaps they skinned and quartered him and cut him to pieces like a steer. I could imagine the most cruel possibilities, the bloodiest surgery, the worst mutilations carried out on his old body. But his terrible death did not arouse in me the horror of the death of other men who did not know why they were dying, calling for their mothers, trying to hold back with their hands the further mutilation of a face already devoid of nose or cheek. Fray Pedro de Henestrosa had found the supreme reward a man can confer on himself: that of going to meet his death, defying it, and falling in a combat which, for the vanquished, is the arrowed victory of St. Sebastian, the rout and final defeat of death.

  (December 8)

  XXXVII/ I had a painful surprise when the boy who was acting as my guide pointed the house out to me, saying it was the new inn. Behind those thick walls, beneath that roof covered with grass swaying in the wind, we had sat up one night with Rosario’s dead father. There, in the vast kitchen, I had drawn near Your woman for the first time with a dim sense of her future importance to me.

  Now one Don Melisio came forward to meet us, and his “lady,” a dwarf Negress, took three suitcases from the boys following me and piled them on her head as though the papers and books with which they were stuffed weighed nothing. The rooms were just as before except that the ingenuous adornment of the old pictures was gone. The same plants were still growing in the patio; in the kitchen stood that round tub which gave our voices the resonance of a cathedral nave. The big front room, however, had been turned into a combined dining-room and general store. There were great coils of rope in the corners, and shelves containing cans of black powder, balms and oils, and medicines in bottles of shapes no longer seen, as though intended for ailments of another age.

  Don Melisio explained to me that he had bought the house from Rosario’s mother, and that she had gone, with all her unmarried daughters, to live with a sister on the other side of the Andes, some ten or twelve days distant. Again I was struck by the naturalness with which these people accepted the size of the world, setting out to sail or ride for long weeks with their hammocks in a roll on their shoulder, without all the worries of the cultivated man confronted by distances that the precarious methods of transportation made immense. Besides, setting up their tent elsewhere, going from the estuary to the headwaters of a river, moving to the other side of a savanna that it took days to cross, formed part of the innate concept of freedom of beings to whom the earth was not an affair of fences, boundary stones, or limits. The earth, here, belonged to the person who took it; a river bank was cleared with machete and fire, a shelter was raised on four posts, and this was a ranch, which bore the name of the one who titled himself the owner, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and tossing a few branches to the wind, like the old conquistadors. It did not make him any richer; but in Puerto Anunciación the one who did not possess the secret of a gold vein felt himself a landowner.

  The aroma of sarrapia and vanilla that filled the house put me in a good humor. And this presence once more of fire on the hearth where a tapir haunch sputtered its grease that smelled of unfamiliar acorns. This return to the fire, to the living blaze, the flame that danced, the spark that shot out and found, in the hot wisdom of the embers, a glowing old age beneath the wrinkled gray of the ashes. I asked the dwarf Negress, Doña Casilda, for a bottle and glasses, and my table was open to anyone who remembered that I had been here six months before; in a little while I had guests. Here, bringing news from upstream and downstream, sat the Tuna-Fisher, the hunter of manatees, the carpenter who could take the measurements for a coffi
n at one glance, and a slow-moving lad, with an Indian profile, by the name of Simon, who got tired of being a shoemaker in Santiago de los Aguinaldos, and now sailed the less-traveled rivers with a canoe full of merchandise for barter.

  The answer to my first question confirmed the death of Fray Pedro. His body, pierced by arrows and with the thorax split open, had been found by one of the Yannes brothers. As a warning to all who might think of profaning their dominions, the Indians had put his mutilated corpse in a canoe, which the waters carried downstream to where the Greek found it, covered with buzzards, aground in a channel. “He’s the second to die that way,” observed the carpenter, adding that among these bearded friars there were those who were real men.

  It was my bad luck to learn that the Adelantado had been in Puerto Anunciación not more than two weeks before. Once more the tales were repeated of what he owned or was seeking in the jungle. Simon informed me that at the headwaters of unexplored rivers he came upon people who were settled and had built houses and planted the fields, and were not looking for gold. Another told of someone who had founded three cities, and called them St. Inés, St. Clara, and St. Cecilia for the patron saints of his three oldest daughters. By the time Doña Casilda brought us our third bottle of hazelnut brandy, Simon had offered to take me in his canoe to where I found the Curator’s instruments.

  I told him that I was looking for another collection of drums and flutes, not wishing to give the real reason for my trip. From there I would go with the Indian rowers who took us the other time, and who knew the way. The lad had never been that far and had only caught a glimpse on rare occasions of the first outcroppings of the Great Plateaus. But he promised to guide me past the Greeks’ old mine. After rowing upstream three hours, we would have to find that palisade, that wall of treetrunks, which hid the entrance to the channel. I would look for the carved sign that marked the branch-arched passage. Farther ahead, always bearing east by the compass, we would come to the other river, where the storm had caught us one memorable afternoon of my life. When we got to where I had found the instruments, I would think up some way of getting rid of my traveling companion and staying on with the villagers. . . .

  Now that I was sure of leaving the next day, I went to bed with a delightful feeling of relief. Those spiders spinning their webs between the roof beams would not bring me bad luck any more. When everything seemed lost back there—and how far back there everything seemed now—the legal bond was cut, and a successful, falsely romantic concerto for the movies opened the gate of my labyrinth. Here I was at last on the threshold of my chosen land, with everything I needed to work for a long time. As a measure of precaution against myself, in observance of a vague superstition that consisted in admitting the worst in order to conjure and ward it off, I had accepted the possibility that some day I might get tired of what I was seeking here; some work of mine might make me want to go back there for the time needed to publish it. But then, even though I knew I was pretending to admit what I did not admit, I was gripped by a real fear, fear of all I had just seen and suffered, which weighed on my life. Fear of the fetters, fear of the circles of hell. I did not want to write bad music, knowing that it was bad. I was fleeing from the useless professions, from the people who talked so they would not have to think, from the hollow days, from the meaningless gesture, and from the Apocalypse gathering over it all.

  I longed to feel the breeze blow across my thighs once more; I was impatient to plunge into the cold streams from the Great Plateaus, and to turn myself over under the water, to see how the living crystal that would surround me would take on a pale green tint in the infant light. And above all I yearned to measure Rosario with my whole body, to feel her warmth glow against my trembling flesh; when my hands recalled her thighs, her shoulders, the softness beneath the short, coarse hairs, the surge of desire became almost painful in its urgency. I smiled, thinking that I had escaped from the Hydra, set sail in the Ship Argo, and that the one who displayed Berenice’s Hair was at the foot of the Marks of the Flood, now that the rains were over, gathering the herbs she macerated in jars of bubbling curatives, fortified by moon dew or the white of the morning hoarfrost. I was coming back to her stronger than I was before I loved her, for I had undergone new Trials; because I had seen farce and pretense everywhere. Besides, here the most important question of my sojourn in the Kingdom of this World would be decided—the one question, when all was said and done, that admitted of no dilemma: whether I was the master of my time, or whether it was ruled by others, trying to make me pull the right oar or the left oar of the galley. The answer depended on the determination I put into not living for them or serving them. In Santa Mónica de los Venados, while my eyes were open, my hours would belong to me. I was the master of my steps, and I would set them where I chose.

  (December 9)

  XXXVIII/ The sun was just rising above the trees when we tied up near the Greeks’ abandoned mine. Their house was deserted. Barely six months had elapsed since I had been here, and the jungle was once more lord of all. The hut where Rosario and I knew each other for the first time had been literally burst apart by the force of the plants that had grown into it, pushing up the roof, cracking the walls, turning to dead leaves, rot, what once had been the materials of which a home was made. Besides, as the last rise of the river had been very high, the ground was swamped. It had rained out of season, the waters had not receded to their normal level, and a strip of wet land fringed the river, covered with the slag of the jungle, above which myriads of yellow butterflies fluttered, flying wing to wing, so that if one hit at them with a stick it came away yellow. At the sight of them I understood the origin of the migrations I had witnessed in Puerto Anunciación, when the skies had been blotted out by seemingly endless wings. Suddenly the water began to bubble, and a school of fish surrounded our boat, leaping, colliding, turning the stream into a swish of lead-colored fins and tails which slapped the waters with a sound of applause.

  Above us a triangle of herons flew and, as though in response to a conductor’s baton, all the birds of the woodland broke into song. This omnipresence of the bird, which spread the sign of the wing over the terrors of the jungle, brought to my mind the transcendence and plurality of the Bird in the mythologies of this world. From the Bird-Spirit of the Eskimos, the first to caw beside the Pole at the stem end of the continent, to those heads which flew with the wings of their ears in the regions of Tierra del Fuego, all the coasts display birds of wood, birds painted on rock, birds drawn on the ground—of such a size that they must be viewed from the mountains—in an iridescent parade of monarchs of the air: the Thunder Bird, the Eagle of the Dews, the Sun Birds, the Condor Messengers, the Macaw Meteors launched across the wide Orinoco, the zenzontles and the quetzales, all presided over by the great trinity of plumed serpents: Quetzalcoatl, Gucumatz, and Culucán. . . .

  We sailed on down the river, and when the noon sun on the muddy, yellow waters became too overpowering, I pointed out to Simon the wall of trees to the left, which covered the entire bank. We pulled over and slowed down, watching for the sign marking the entrance to the connecting channel. With my eyes riveted on the trees, I watched for the three V’s one above another, at the height of a man’s breast if he were standing on the water. From time to time Simon inquired if we had reached the spot. We moved ahead. But I was watching so closely, my anxiety not to miss the sign was so great, that my eyes became weary of seeing the same tree. I began to wonder whether I had seen it without realizing it; I asked myself whether my attention might not have faltered for a minute; I ordered him to turn back, and all I found was a spot on the bark or a ray of sunlight. Simon, unruffled, followed my instructions without a murmur. The canoe rubbed against the tree roots, and at times we had to push off with the tip of a machete.

  This search for the sign on this endless succession of tree-trunks was beginning to make me dizzy. Yet I told myself that this could not be wrong, that I had not seen anything resembling the three superimposed
V’s. We sailed on for another half-hour, when suddenly a spur of black rock jutted out from the jungle. It was so irregular, of such strange design, that I was sure that if we had seen it before I would have remembered it. I made a sign to Simon to turn the boat around and backtrack. I had a feeling that he was looking at me ironically, and this annoyed me as much as my own impatience. I turned my back on him and went on observing the trees. If I had missed the sign, I would have to make sure of it this second time. There were two trunks, like the jambs of a narrow door. The lintel was of leaves, and the sign was halfway up the left trunk.

  When we had started out, the sun had been in our faces. Now, going back, we were rowing in a shadow that stretched farther and farther across the water. My anxiety was heightened by the thought that it might get dark before we found what we were looking for, might have to wait until the next day. This in itself would not be serious. But under the circumstances, it seemed a bad omen. Everything had gone so well of late that I could not accept the thought of such an absurd contingency. Simon kept looking at me with ironic meekness. Finally, just to say something, he pointed to some trees, asking if they might not be the entrance.