The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  “It is possible,” I answered, knowing that there was no sign there.

  “Possible is not a legal term,” he remarked sententiously, and at that moment I fell against the side of the boat, which had just struck a network of lianas. Simon got to his feet and with the pole felt for bottom to push the canoe off. At that moment, in the second the pole took to sink into the water, I realized why we had not found the sign, were not going to find it: the pole, which was some three yards long, did not touch bottom, and my companion had to cut us loose with his machete. When we started off again and he looked at me, my expression was one of such distress that he came over to me, thinking I had been hurt. What had happened was that I had remembered that when we came here with the Adelantado, the oars touched bottom all the time. This meant that the river was still high, and that the sign we were looking for was under water.

  I told Simon what I had just realized. Laughing, he told me that that was exactly what he had thought, but that “out of respect” he had not wanted to say anything. Besides, he had thought that I was taking the rise of the river into account. Now I asked him, haltingly, fearful of his answer, if he thought that the waters would soon recede enough so that we could find the sign. “Not before April or May,” he answered, bringing me face to face with a reality that admitted of no appeal. So until April or May the narrow door of the jungle would be closed to me.

  I realized now that after having successfully passed the trial of the nocturnal terrors, of the tempest, I had to submit to the acid test: the temptation to return. It was Ruth, at the other end of the world, who had sent the Messengers that had dropped from the sky one morning, with their eyes of yellow glass and their earphones around their necks, to tell me that the things I needed to express myself were only three hours’ flying time away. And I had taken off into the clouds, to the stupefaction of the Neolithic men, to find myself a few reams of paper, without suspecting that I was being kidnapped by a woman mysteriously aware of the fact that only the most drastic means would give her one last chance to bring me back to her terrain.

  During these last days I had felt the presence of Rosario close at hand. There were times at night when it seemed that I heard her quiet breathing. Now, with the sign covered and the entrance closed, this presence seemed to withdraw. Winnowing the bitter truth from words my companion listened to without understanding, I told myself that the discovery of new routes embarked upon without realization, without awareness of the wonder of it while it is being lived, is so unique, so defies recapture, that man, puffed up with his vanity, thinks he can repeat the feat whenever he wishes, master of a privilege denied to others. One day I had made the unforgivable mistake of turning back, thinking that a miracle could be repeated, and on my return I found the setting changed, the landmarks wiped out, and the faces of the guides new. . . .

  The sound of the oars filled me with anxiety. Night was sifting through the jungle; the swarms of buzzing insects were growing thicker around the roots of the trees. Simon, no longer listening to me, had moved to the center of the stream to return as quickly as possible to the Greeks’ abandoned mine.

  (December 30)

  XXXIX/ I was working with Shelley’s text, cutting certain passages, to give it a more authentic cantata quality. I had left out part of Prometheus’ long lament at the magnificent beginning, and I was now trying to fit in the scene of the Voices—where some of the verses are irregular—and the dialogue between the Titan and the Earth. This task, it goes without saying, was merely an attempt to curb my impatience, to relieve the obsession, the one idea that had kept me paralyzed there in Puerto Anunciación for the past three weeks. I had been told that there was a guide on the point of returning to Rio Negro who knew the passage I was looking for, or, at any rate, other waterways that would take me to my final destination.

  “He’ll be back. . . . He’ll be back,” Doña Casilda told me in response to my questions about the guide as she served me my early morning coffee. I also had the hope that the Adelantado, in need of medicines or seed, might suddenly show up, and for that reason I stayed on in the town, turning a deaf ear to Simon’s tempting suggestion that we try the northern channels. The days rolled by with a slow monotony that would make me happy in Santa Mónica de los Venados, but which here, unable to concentrate my thoughts, I soon found unbearably tedious. Besides, what I was interested in now was the Threnody, and I had left the first draft with Rosario. I could have started it all over again, but what I had done there so satisfied me in its spontaneity of accent that I did not want to begin again cold, with a heightened critical sense, drawing on my memory, and nagged by impatience to continue my journey.

  Every afternoon I walked down to the rapids and lay on the rocks shaken by the rushing of the waters. I found a kind of surcease from my irritation when I was alone amid that thunderous roar, isolated from the world by the sculpture of that foam which boiled and still preserved its form—a form that swelled and diminished in keeping with the varying force of the current, without losing a design, a volume, and a consistency that transformed its perennial, dizzying mutation into something alive and fresh, as caress-able as the back of a dog, with the roundness of an apple to the lips resting on it. The island of Saint Prisca became one with its inverted reflection, and the sky drowned in the depths of the river.

  Under the leadership of a dog that always barked in the same high-pitched key, all the dogs of the neighborhood intoned a kind of chant, made up of howls, which I listened to with closest attention as I walked back from the rocks, for I had noticed, on repeated afternoons, that its duration was always the same, and that it invariably ended as it began, on two barks—never one—of the mysterious dog-shaman of the pack. The dances of the monkey and of certain birds having been discovered, it occurred to me that systematic recordings of the noises of animals that live with man might reveal a certain obscure musical sense in them, not too far removed from the chant of the medicine-man which had so impressed me one afternoon in the Jungle of the South. For five days the dogs of Puerto Anunciación had been howling the same way, entering in a set order, and ending on an unmistakable signal. Then they returned to their homes, went to sleep under the stools, listened to what was said to them, and licked the bowls, without begging for more until the paroxysmal days of being in heat would return, when man must resign himself to waiting patiently until the animals of the Alliance had concluded their rites of reproduction.

  I was thinking all this as I came to the outer street of the town, when suddenly two powerful hands were clapped over my eyes, and a knee in the middle of my spine bent me backward so brutally that I let out a screech of pain. The joke seemed so stupid that I tried to wrench myself loose and let fly with my fists. But a roar of laughter that I recognized quickly turned my anger to joy. Yannes threw his arms about me, enveloping me in the sweat of his shirt. I grabbed him by the arm as though afraid he might run away and took him back to my lodging, where the dwarf Doña Casilda served us a bottle of hazelnutted brandy.

  At first I feigned a flattering interest in what he had been doing, the quicker to establish a climate of friendship and thus arrive, on the basis of affection, at the only thing that interested me. Beyond doubt Yannes knew the secret entrance; he had been with us the other time we went there; besides, with his long experience of the jungle, he would be able to open the Door without need of looking for the triple V. Probably, too, the water had gone down somewhat in those last weeks. But I observed that there had been a change in the Greek’s expression; his eyes, once so penetrating and steady, now seemed restless, suspicious, never coming to rest anywhere. He had a nervous, impatient air, and it was hard to carry on a coherent conversation with him. When he was telling something, his words rushed out in a torrent, or he hesitated, but without pausing to turn over an idea, as he had before.

  Suddenly, with a conspiratorial air, he asked me to take him to my room. Once there, he turned the key in the door, tried the windows, and showed me, by the light
of the lamp, a quinine tube from which the tablets had been removed and which now contained small crystals that looked like smoked glass. He explained, almost in a whisper, that these quartzes were something like the advance guard of diamonds; not far from them one always finds the object of his search. He had buried his pick in a certain place and found a fabulous deposit. “Diamonds of fourteen carats,” he confided to me in a hoarse voice. “And there are probably bigger ones there.”

  He was dreaming of the recently discovered hundred-carat gem that had turned the head of all the seekers of El Dorado still roaming the continent, who had not given up hope of finding the treasures sought by the dreamer Felipe de Utre. Yannes was upset by his discovery; he was on his way to the capital to file a claim to the mine, haunted by the fear that during his absence someone might stumble on his remote find. It seemed that there had been cases of the miraculous coincidence of two hunters on the same little acre of the vast map. But none of this interested me. I raised my voice to get his attention and told him the one thing I wanted.

  “All right, on the way back,” he answered, “on the way back.”

  I implored him to put off his trip so that we could leave that very night, before daybreak. But the Greek answered that the Manatí had just arrived, and was sailing the next day at noon. Besides, it was impossible to reason with him. He was thinking of nothing but his diamonds, and when he stopped talking about them it was because he was afraid that Don Melisio or the dwarf might overhear. In helpless rage, I resigned myself to this new delay. I would wait until he came back—which would be soon, spurred as he was by greed. And to make sure that he would not fail to come for me, I offered to advance him money to begin his diggings. He gave me a smothering embrace, calling me brother, and dragged me off to the tavern where I had met the Adelantado. He ordered another bottle of brandy, and to make sure of my interest in his discovery he pretended to give me confidential information about the place where he found the quartz, forerunner of his strike. And in this way I learned something I should never have suspected: he discovered the mine on his way back from Santa Mónica de los Venados, after having come upon the hidden city and spending two days there.

  “Stupid people,” he said, “imbeciles! They have gold close by and don’t mine it. I wanted to work it; they said shoot me with gun.”

  I grabbed Yannes by the shoulders, and shouted at him that I wanted news of Rosario, how she was, how she looked, what she was doing.

  “Wife of Marcos,” the Greek answered. “Adelantado happy because she with child. . . .”

  It was as though I had been hit over the head. My skin felt as though a thousand cold needles were coming through it. With an immense effort I reached for the bottle, and the touch of it seemed to burn me. I slowly filled my glass, poured the liquor into a throat that could no longer swallow, and broke into an agonizing cough. When I recovered my breath, I looked at myself in a mirror, black with fly specks, in the rear of the room, and what I saw was a body sitting at a table, looking hollow, empty. I was not sure that it would move and walk if I ordered it to. But the being that moaned within me, lacerated, flayed, its wounds filled with salt, finally dragged itself to my throat, and I began a stuttering protest.

  I don’t know what I said to Yannes. What I heard was the voice of another talking of prior rights to Your woman, explaining that the delay in returning was due to reasons beyond his control, trying to justify himself, appealing his case, as though he was on trial before a court determined to destroy him.

  Aroused from his diamonds by the broken, imploring timbre of a voice that was trying to turn back time and undo what had been done, the Greek looked at me in surprise that turned to pity. “She no Penelope. Young, strong, handsome woman needs husband. She no Penelope. Nature of woman here needs man . . .”

  The truth, the crushing truth—now I realized it—was that these people had never believed in me. I was there on loan. Rosario herself must have looked on me as a Visitor incapable of staying on indefinitely in the Valley where Time had Stopped. I recalled now the strange way she had looked at me when she saw me writing feverishly for days on end, there where writing fulfilled no useful purpose. New worlds had to be lived before they could be analyzed. Those who lived there did not do so out of any intellectual conviction; they simply thought this, and not the other, was the good life. They preferred this present to the present of the makers of the Apocalypse. The one who made too much of an effort to understand, the one who underwent the agonies of a conversion, the one whose idea was that of renunciation when he embraced the customs of those who forged their destinies in this primaeval slime in a hand-to-hand struggle with the mountains and the trees, was vulnerable because certain forces of the world he had left behind continued to operate in him.

  I had traveled through the ages; I had passed through the bodies and the times of the bodies, without realizing that I had come upon the hidden straitness of the widest door. But association with the miracle, the founding of cities, the liberty encountered among the Inventors of Callings on the soil of Enoch, were realities whose grandeur was perhaps not scaled to the puny dimensions of a contrapuntalist, always ready to employ his leisure in seeking a victory over death in an arrangement of neumes. I had tried to make straight a destiny that was crooked because of my own weakness, and a song had welled up in me—now cut short—which had led me back to the old road, in sackcloth and ashes, no longer able to be what I had been.

  Yannes offered me passage on the boat in which he was sailing the next day, the Manatí. I would sail toward the burden awaiting me. I raised my burning eyes to the flowery sign of Memories of the Future. Within two days the century would have rounded out another year, and this would be of no importance to those around me. There the year in which we live can be forgotten, and they lie who say man cannot escape his epoch. The Stone Age, like the Middle Ages, is still within our reach. The gloomy mansions of romanticism, with its doomed loves, are still open. But none of this was for me, because the only human race to which it is forbidden to sever the bonds of time is the race of those who create art, and who not only must move ahead of the immediate yesterday, represented by tangible witness, but must anticipate the song and the form of others who will follow them, creating new tangible witness with full awareness of what has been done up to the moment. Marcos and Rosario were ignorant of history. The Adelantado stood at the first chapter, and I could have remained at his side if my calling had been any except that of composing music—the calling of a scion of the race. It remained to be seen whether I would be deafened and my voice stilled by the hammer strokes of the Galley Master who waited for me somewhere. Today Sisyphus’ vacation came to an end.

  Somebody behind me said the river had fallen a great deal these last days. Many of the submerged stones had reappeared, and the rapids bristled with rocky spurs whose fresh-water algae died in the light. The trees along the bank looked taller now that their roots would soon feel the warmth of the sun again. On one scaly trunk, a trunk of ochre streaked with pale green, there would become visible, when the waters settled, the Sign carved on its bark with the point of a knife some three handspans above the level of the waters.

  Notes

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  All quotations from The Odyssey are from The Odyssey of Homer (tr. by T. E. Shaw). New York: Oxford University Press; 1932.