The Chase

by Alejo Carpentier

  The house was still warm from a very recent presence that lingered in the disorder of the bed, which was surrounded by the yellow butts of hand-rolled cigarettes. “Wait,” she said, going to change the sheet and plump up the pillows. (The canaries, asleep in their cage: smells of feathers, birdseed, and bread crumbs. The sleepy dog, trained not to bark, pokes his nose in. The moisture stain on the wall that looked like a blurry map. The beams above stained dark red, copying the imitation mahogany in small-town parlors. The pail left in the patio so she could wash her hair with rainwater tomorrow. And the presence of the pink soap, the kind with disinfectant in it.) And it was the perfume that he always rediscovered with delight, because his sense of smell automatically linked it with her waiting nakedness. “Conditioned reflex,” he said to himself, noting, as always, that from the moment he knocked at the door his thoughts, sensations, and acts followed each other in a fixed order, the same order as last time, the same as next time. “Today” repeated itself in desire without date—it could be the “today” of yesterday or of tomorrow—one that was reborn with identical words in the presence of the decorative plates in the dining room or after saying that the cat with a bell on his collar sleeping in its basket was beautiful. Their conversation always began the same way: He hadn’t visited lately because he was very busy with his studies; she hadn’t been going out and wasn’t in love with anyone else. He had seen a lamp that he promised to bring her on his next visit. (It could also have been a box of nougat candy or an embroidered cushion . . .) She would laugh, not believing him. She would sit on his lap for a few minutes, and then their conversation would die as she got up to turn on the night-table lamp, after covering the statue of the Virgin of Charity with a cloth. But this time things were different: “You almost didn’t find me here. A few days ago they threatened me; they were going to run me out of the neighborhood, they were going to send me to the women’s prison. Me, who never makes any trouble.” He stroked her with anxious hands, caressing the warmth in the crook of her knee. “I’m staying the night,” he whispered in her ear, eager for her to lock up the house. But he found her strangely inert, upset, obsessed with her idea. “I’m not going to any women’s prison; I don’t want to leave this neighborhood; people around here know I never make trouble.” She attached an angry importance to what had happened. Impatiently trying to draw her out of her monologue, he minimized the importance of the event by disdainfully shrugging his shoulders whenever she mentioned those who had threatened her. “It’s an Inquisition, an Inquisition—that’s what they’re up to.” She talked in circles, returning to the women’s prison, having to leave the neighborhood, the Inquisition, as if she were incapable of thinking about anything else. With each repetition the threat grew, turning into something like the stations along some infernal route. Now she was talking about herself as if she were the only endangered person in the world, the victim of persecution, martyr to an obscure cause, and in that magnification of suffering there was something like an urge to feel sorry for herself because of all the humiliation she’d suffered. “Now they want to know who you’re making a life with.” The singularity of that expression suddenly reminded him of the roofs and doorways of his rockbound hometown. Up there, where the dragon trees creaked in the wind, where the membranous leaves, the evil orchids, the plants with knife-sharp leaves and thorns wove themselves together in moist tangles that held the dew from dawn until dawn—there, at night, among the battlement-like cliffs, the wolf-dog bitches, the descendants of bitches who had run away from slave-hunting dogs centuries back, would thrust out their muzzles. And those muzzles, howling above their anxious flesh, in the clamor of heat, would call so loud that the dogs below would raise their heads and whine without daring to step beyond the boundaries of their own back yards. Exasperated by the wait, the females would come down to the edge of town and turn the smell of their desire to the breeze so that the dogs would come to break them, penetrate them—drag them, bitten, stone-bruised—until they fled at dawn to the high caves, where they would give birth. “They come to make a life,” the village boys would say when they heard the barking of the thirsty bitches panting on the nearby paths, just beyond the first lights, their teats dragging in the dust: “They come to make a life.” “And now,” she was saying, “they want to know who you’re making a life with.” Impatiently, he kissed her without finding that softness, that instinctive molding of her flesh to the hardness of the man. “Now,” she went on, “they want to know where the guy who left here went; if he went to the café over in the market to drink his wine with egg yolks.” He squeezed her waist, looking toward the newly made bed. “It’s an Inquisition,” she repeated, emphatically, insisting on the word, which she must have associated with interrogation, jails, chains, and the torture of the innocent, as she confused the Holy Office with some pagan persecution. Perhaps she’d seen the term among the lists of prayers that the rosary and ex-voto sellers displayed in the embrasures of convents or uninhabited houses. There, hung on bars that set them in a jail-like frame, were the Virgins of Sorrows, pierced with daggers; Saint Agatha without breasts; Saint Lucy offering her eyes in a chalice; Saint Rosa of Lima threatened by the Dog with sulphurous breath; and the Anima Sola, with wrists tied together, burned by the flames of her jealousy in an infernal porridge. In these lithographs and garish prints, there were stories of flagellations and strappados, drawing and quarterings, and people eaten alive by beasts, along with Saint Lawrence’s grill and Saint Andrew’s cross. The woman repeated the word “Inquisition” so often that it must have had a dreadful and mysterious value, which gave greater prestige to the suffering caused by those who had come to threaten her—doubtless the police in search of information about someone who had visited her often. Having thought of herself without a place where she could house her dog, her calico cat, her canaries; having imagined herself on the road to the women’s prison, being pointed out on the street that traced what remained of the port, among keels in dry dock, ocean rust, and fortresses made of coal, she must have felt herself to be cleaner, brighter, more at one with her alter ego, who closed the house up to all requests every year during Holy Week, visited the Stations of the Cross, giving large sums to charity and lighting candles at all the altars. “An Inquisition,” she repeated, as she absentmindedly ran her fingers through his hair. “Buy something to drink,” he said, tired of her whining, giving her the bank note that was heating his fingers. “And have some biscuits delivered for breakfast,” he added, seeing her return with her raincoat on over her slip. “It’s no good,” she said, handing back the money. “It’s no good. The bank notes that have the General with the sleepy eyes on them are no good . . .” “No good?” repeated the man, helpless, examining that paper whose numbers had suddenly lost all power. “No good?” . . . He shrank back into the armchair, as if hoping for mercy, feeling for the few coins weighing down his pockets. That’s why the impatient spectator had tossed that money between the bars of the ticket booth with that gesture of largess which, as it turned out, had been a subterfuge. “That’s all I have,” he said, with his entire voice keyed to hope. “It’ll have to be some other time,” she murmured, lightly gesturing toward the door, “but tonight I’m really tired.” Clutching someone who was returning him to solitude and frustration, he kissed the nape, the arms, and the shoulders of an inert being who now was offering him as much as he might want of her mouth to lead him more docilely to the door. “Don’t get wet now,” she added. The rain was getting heavier. Angrily running, the man reached the eaves of the market, where the turkeys poked their ragged heads out of their filthy cages. The smell of the farmyard, of chickens, along with whiffs of gardens and plowing, took him back in a flash to the map of the Gran Canada River, whose bed, bristling with rushes, was the road that had so often allowed him to play the game of Invisible Man. From the back of the house, skirting puddles and quagmires—really invisible—it was possible to go across the entire area; it was possible to learn about deserted kitchens at dusk, a
long with the first bats flying over pots set to boil; eavesdropping on forbidden dialogues taking place in the shadow of fences; it was possible to hear the creak of the rocking chairs in the sacristy, along with the murmurs of the old ladies gathered to say the rosary, while the Palm Climber would light candles to saints who had nothing to do with the Church, putting lottery tickets underneath the blade of a knife whose handle was a carved rooster’s head with a coral crest. Beyond the blacksmith’s shed, where the songs that were sung were always filled with rhymed obscenities, there stood a tree trunk, the secret mailbox of a childhood romance: wood where the red ants walked under the envelopes, carrying a larva or a straw. Into that hollow had passed the poems copied out in pencil, the written declarations of love, the lock of hair, and the long candy cane, striped like a barber pole, which he’d bought, averting his eyes from someone who could guess the truth and mock his sincerity. But suddenly the girl had started to grow at such a rate that she seemed to stretch between their dates, ever more hollow-eyed and lankier, turning into a giant among the small children. One day, she refused to hide with him anymore in the hollow near the riverbed, where they would make little flutes out of the pink pine nut seeds, flutes they would pass back and forth to see who could get the better sound. He shrank from the girl who abandoned his world and crouched down so no one in the fields could see her as they walked along the edge of the stagnant water. Her hips filled out, her blouses became tight, and she would no longer allow anyone to sniff her armpits and find out by sticking in their noses that they smelled of sweat, just so they could call her a pig. One afternoon, the wagon that went to the train station brought back a rebuilt piano on whose keyboard the Widow of eternal mourning taught her to play the “Alexandra” waltz by ear. The teas and recitals began then, as well as the women’s promenades along the main street, walking with arms around each other’s waist, exchanging confidences. It was then that he, in despair, started wanting to learn some showy instrument so he could join the county band, at whose concerts the cornet of clarinet soloists were applauded, their names emblazoned on music stands for greater notoriety . . . This evocation of lost purity brought his irritation against the person who had just thrown him out of her house to its peak. A man might want to believe that a woman like that could be a friend, but she was what they all were: first name, whore; last name, garbage. The book was hurting his arm now—the edge of its binding as sharp as a reproach—amid the stench of the wet turkeys, the guinea hens poking their vulturous heads through the holes in the chicken wire. A green plantain, smashed by a heel, was like a flash in the night. Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il souvvenire di un grand’Uomo. Despair gave way to shame. He would never get anywhere, never free himself from that maids’ room, from pressing his handkerchiefs on the mirror to dry, from worn socks tied up at the big toe with a piece of string, as long as the image of a prostitute was all it took to distract him from the True and the Sublime. He opened the book, whose pages turned blue in the flash of a neon sign: After that prodigious Scherzo, with its whirlwinds and its weapons, comes the Finale, a song of jubilation and freedom, with its celebrations and dances, its exultant marches and its laughter, and the rich volutes of its variations. And behold, amidst it all, Death reappears . . . There was still time to hear some of it. He stopped a taxi and reached the hall just when the first chords of the Finale were ringing out behind the red curtain. The doorman, with no one to take care of, was drowsing over the money drawer in the ticket booth, perched on a high stool. “Is there much to go?” he asked, surprised to see the ticket seller return. “About nine minutes,” the ticket seller answered, adding, just to show off, “If it’s properly directed, the work should not exceed forty-six minutes.” Looking up, he once again saw the old palace appear in the rain, decayed and darkened, with its Belvedere, where the people attending the wake had been forced to take refuge again in the room with the candles. He remembered the old lady who lived there: he had seen her through the skylight in his room, standing up on a bed, amusing himself watching how she watered her plants with a child’s watering can—two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, because it was his birthday, when, with the small money order he’d received from his father, he had bought himself the Eroica on well-worn but still fine-sounding records. The vision of the old lady, wearing a white toque, bent over her old pots of rosemary and mint, had touched his heart. Just like the black women in his rocky hometown, when they left their begonias for prayer at the hour of long shadows, while at the same time the hills echoed with the howls of the bitches clamoring to “make life” with the panting, fearful guard dogs down below. Suddenly it occurred to him that it must have been the old lady who had died. But, no, those old black women lived to be a hundred. Some had even gone around still wearing the ankle chains they’d worn aboard slave ships. When he got paid, he’d visit her—even if he didn’t know her—and bring her some old-fashioned candy, the kind sold by the guitar-playing confectioner whose doily-covered trays were filled with sugar icing, saints’ bones, powder cakes, meringues, and egg-yolk sweets, covered with green, red, and opalescent sprinkles and filled with mint, grenadine, and absinthe syrups. He had to be sure she was alive, that very night, as a rite of purification. Two weeks before, he had bought the Eroica to prepare himself for hearing the live performance, in a gesture that to him seemed worthy of Bach, who had gone on foot to Lubeck in order to hear Buxtehude. But when the great night came, he abandoned the Sublime Concept for the heat of a whore. He needed to know the old woman in the night was alive. He needed to know it so badly that he would run to the house with the Belvedere as soon as the Finale was over, to make sure she was not the person for whom the wake was being held.