The Chase

by Alejo Carpentier

  And these things hast thou hid in

  thine heart: I know that this is with thee

  Job 10:13

  The old lady had withdrawn to her narrow iron bed decorated with Palm Sunday fronds and turned her face to the wall with the humble, resigned gesture of a suffering animal. And after the long night, during which the man who had taken refuge there kept watch over her without being able to call the doctor—much less the Doctor who had died so long before, the one she called out for in the darkness when her tearful breathing became words—his real incarnation began. Until then, all he had to do from dawn until dusk was to stay in the second room listening for the warning sounds on the spiral staircase, where the footfalls slowly grew louder, making the thick wood echo. He read the newspapers the old lady borrowed from the dressmaker downstairs; he bought the overripe fruit the vendor sold off cheaply. He could even satisfy his desire for coffee or have liquor sent up. But he had to spend what little money he had carefully—because he could not change the bill folded up inside his belt buckle until he found out about the Arrangement. But now, after the young doctor the niece called had scribbled a hasty prescription—too many stairs for too little pay—they brought almost no food to the sick woman. Food—real food—crunches between your teeth, holds your spoon upright, has to be cut into pieces, pieces you have to chew, that have the consistency and texture a growing, almost intolerable hunger puts into the hungry man’s mind, now transformed into a mouth. The niece would appear at any time she pleased with a bottle of milk or a small pot of broth wrapped in newspaper. Which is why he had to take refuge in the Belvedere, locking from the outside the door that led to the terrace. Many of the people who had come up to visit the old lady had tried to open that door to get rid of the smell of sickness in that rectangle of sunbaked tiles. “Not even she knows where she’s put the key,” the same masculine voice said every time, shaking the door, which he had braced from behind with stakes and boards wedged against the floor. And so two days already went by without his eating a thing, hidden within those four tepid walls from which the paint was peeling, walking from the Westminster clock, which had neither pendulum nor hands, to the trunk with moldy hasps whose lid still boasted the label where, on a certain day, he had written in thick letters using the tip of a shaving brush dipped in India ink: BY EXPRESS. Fearful always that someone would hear the frame of the rickety old bed creak, his pistol within easy reach, he spent his time stretched out on the floor of that broken-down Belvedere in that decayed seignorial house, whose marble, gray and as worn down as a tombstone, retained a remote coolness amid all the feverish brick, enclosed by the low stone walls—too low to create any shade—that delineated the terrace. At least the nights now were not as terrible as the first ones he spent there: those slow, unending nights he whiled away facedown under the open window, keeping himself from falling asleep, waking himself up whenever his eves closed, because sleep and death were one in his fear. His open eyes registered the reality of a star, of a complete revolution of the lighthouse lamp, and were suddenly disturbed because an insect had begun to buzz behind the door. A wire on the bed frame broke and snapped in his ear because he’d fidgeted too much; the crickets that devoted themselves to singing inside the trunk, the land breeze that swirled up the soot that had fallen in the corners of the terrace—everything that sounded quiet, or strange, or surprising during those nights served as a repeated expiation for his torture. Nevertheless, just before dawn, when the lighthouse lamp seemed to tire of winking in circles, something like a Pardon descended from on high. He relaxed his guard himself and lowered his eyelids as the sea became pale in the first light, yielding himself to a possibility that never lost its terror but which seemed strangely alien, even desirable to him, as long as he did not awaken once the fear of physical suffering had passed. Because physical pain was unacceptable to him. So unacceptable that, because he could not tolerate pain—not just the stab of a real pain but the merest suggestion of pain—he found himself in this abominable present, waiting for the results of the Arrangement. From those first nights he’d retained the habit of dropping off to sleep at dawn, since during the day he had to stay inside the Belvedere to avoid being seen from the high terrace—a rendezvous for laundresses, a playground for children (the children were to be feared most)—of the modern building that flanked the colonial house which had become a tenement. The modern building had a wide, windowless wall covered by meaningless figures in red, green, and black that reminded him of the disks and signs at a rail crossing—although there, at the University, some studious types, disdained by his group, might have asserted that these heroic-sized hieroglyphics corresponded to a new concept of decoration. At nightfall, after the old lady had said her rosary with the seamstress from downstairs, saying good night with exaggerated yawns so everyone would know she was going to bed, he would slip toward the door, remove the stakes, and, crossing into the second room, take whatever the old Nvoman could offer him in the way of stew or nice, thick pot roast, and the morning newspaper, where he would look avidly for some news related to his own destiny. Often all that would be left of the most interesting page would be the mere outline of shoulder pads or sleeves cut out of the paper for patterns to be used by the students of the Academy of Style—which is what the seamstress called the room with the mannequins and red velvet pincushions bristling with pins where she gave lessons on how to sew simple blouses and skirts. But the fragments that remained and supplied information about those living on the outside still kept him absorbed, rereading apparently insignificant news items—those, for instance, that told about people about to take trips—until the time when the old lady was asleep, the movie marquees were dark, the streets empty, and the persistent cry of a child proved how deeply those around his cradle were sleeping. Then, above the spotlights that left him in shadows, he could walk the length of the terrace, looking at the patios with their areca palms and colorless flowers, where, under the archway of an old coach house, there would suddenly appear in the flash of a struck match a woman fanning her bosom or an old asthmatic man enveloped in the smoke from some burned medicinal paper. Beyond was the back of the saddlery, where the dusty remains of a phaeton with lanterns, on whose oilcloth surface were some half-tanned hides, set out there to dry like trophies from a slaughterhouse. Further on arose the inky stench of a small shop that printed business cards. A bit closer, the stink of the kitchens of the poor, their pots abandoned for today in greasy water, and, on the other side, the lazy bustle of a rich family’s kitchen, where two maids were dropping dry knives on the table in time to songs they hummed interminably, songs they barely knew but which they continuously started over and would never finish. Hiding behind the body of the Belvedere from the always frightening terrace of the modern building, he would peek out into the street for a moment, contemplating a world of houses where the Californian, the Gothic or Moorish, dwarf Parthenons, Greek temples with lights and venetian blinds mixed with Renaissance villas whose planks were held up by sick columns among malanga vines and bougainvillea. These were colonnaded streets, avenues, galleries, roads of columns, as bright as day; so numerous were the columns that no city had such a stock, with a disorder of orders that mismatched Doric at the axes of a façade with the volutes and acanthus leaves of solemn Corinthians, pompously erected half a block down, between the clotheslines of a laundry whose broken-nosed caryatids supported wooden architraves. There were capitals covered with pustules burst by the sun, shafts whose fluting was swollen with the abscesses left by the oil paint that covered them. Below there abounded utterly vulgar motifs—rosettes on railings, the dentils that should have been up on the cornices were within easy reach of an outstretched hand—while the cornices themselves supported the socles or pedestals that properly belonged at the foot of the wall; between the telephone wires, like afterthoughts, lay Roman vases and cinerary urns which had acquired a felt-like texture and looked like birds’ nests. There were metopes in the balconies and friezes that ran from an o
give to an embrasure. One frieze ran completely around all four sides of the building, as if it had been sold by the yard: the theme of the Sphinx interrogating Oedipus. As they walked from portal to portal, passersby could witness the death agony of the last classical orders used in modern times. And in places where the portal had been demolished in a fit of modernization, the columns hugged the wall, embedding themselves in it, useless because they had no structure to support, finally dissolving into the cement that had hardened on top of them. Nothing of all that had anything to do with what little the man who had been given shelter had learned at the University—that University which for him had been stored away in the trunk with the moldy hasps.

  BY EXPRESS. From: Sancti-Spiritus. The hand put down the worn-out shaving brush it had used to draw the words so elegantly in India ink. The man in hiding contemplates himself in that decisive moment of his life. He sees himself busily putting things into the old trunk, brought to the island so many years before by his immigrant grandfather. The relatives and friends who gather around him and who will soon—this very morning—accompany him to the train station no longer exist in the present. Their voices reach him from far away; from a yesterday he is leaving behind. He does not listen to their advice, the better to enjoy the undefinable delight of feeling he is in a future he has already glimpsed—the undefinable delight of detaching himself from the reality around him. At the end of the journey there will be the capital with the Fountain of the Indian Woman Havana, all made of white marble—just as it appeared in the magazine photo tacked to the wall. The caption recalled that, in years gone by, a poet, Heredia—who was not kept from becoming a member of the French Academy merely because he’d been born in a stupid backwater much like this one—had dreamed in the shadow of the statue. At the end of the journey he will see the University, the stadium, the theaters; he will not be held accountable to anyone; he will find freedom and perhaps, quite soon, a lover, since this last item, so difficult to locate in the provinces, is common currency in a place without iron-barred windows, shutters, and busybodies. The idea makes him take special care in folding his brand-new suit, cut for him by his father in the latest style, which he plans to wear for the first time, with matching tie and handkerchief, when he matriculates. Then he will stroll into a café and order a martini. At last he will know how that drink they serve with an olive tastes. Then he will go to the house that belongs to a woman named Estrella, about whom the Scholarship Student told him wonderful tales in a recent letter. And his father is telling him at precisely this instant not to associate with the Scholarship Student, since it seems he is leading a dissipated life and squanders his town-council stipend on good times—”which leave only ashes in your soul.” Their voices reach him from far off. They seem even farther away at the train station, among the peasants who shout to each other across the tracks after a trainload of cattle passes by in a thunderburst of mooing. At the last moment his father buys some honeycombs as a gift for the old lady who offered to give him lodging in her house—it seems she has a Belvedere on the terrace, a separate, comfortable room for the student. And now the express pulls in with its steam engine and there is a tumult of farewells . . . And he’d arrived here, very late at night, with the trunk he was now staring at: here at this Belvedere that the woman who was once his wet nurse, who had come to the capital years before with a rich family who owned the ancient mansion now turned into a tenement. From the first moment, he could see from the decidedly maternal tone of the black woman that she would keep his longed-for liberty on a short leash, carefully noting his comings and goings, chiding and annoying him, and, at the very least, keeping him from bringing women to the Belvedere. For that reason, he decided to move away as soon as he began his studies. And now, after having forgotten the old lady for months—was it she who started whining like that a minute ago, or was it the seamstress’s son whimpering?—after having deserted this room such a long time ago, he found here the ultimate refuge, the last one available, next to that provincial trunk, left behind when he moved because the things it contained had ceased to interest him.

  But today, when he lifted the lid, he rediscovered the abandoned University in the set of compasses his father had given him; in the ruler, drawing pens, and triangles; in the empty bottle of India ink that still smelled of camphor. There was Vignola’s Treatise, with the five orders, as well as the notebook where as an adolescent he had pasted photographs of the temple at Paestum and Brunelleschi’s dome, Wright’s Falling Water House, and a view of Uxmal. Insects had devoured his first pencil drawings; and of the capitals and bases he’d copied on tracing paper, there remained only a yellowish lace that disintegrated in his hands. Then came the books on the history of architecture, on solid geometry, and, at the bottom, on top of his diploma, his Party membership card. His fingers weighed that piece of cardboard, the last barrier that might have saved him from abomination. He was told not to waste his time in cell meetings, or in reading Marxist pamphlets, or in praising remote collective farms with photos of smiling tractor drivers and cows graced with phenomenal udders, when the best members of his generation were falling to the bullets of the repressive police. And, one morning, he found himself dragged along in a demonstration that shouted its way down the University stairs. A short distance later came the collision, the mob, the panic, with stones and roof tiles flying over their heads, women trampled, heads bloody, and bullets lodged in flesh. At the sight of the fallen, he concluded that it was true, these were times that demanded immediate action and not the caution and deliberation of a discipline that sought to temper exasperation. When he joined the impatient group, the terrible game began that a few days before had brought him back to the Belvedere, in search of some final protection, bearing the weight of a hunted body he had to hide somewhere. Now, breathing in the scent of termite-eaten papers, of the camphor of dried ink, he found in that trunk something like a symbol, one only he could decipher, of Paradise before the Fall. And when, for a few moments, he attained a lucidity he had never known, he understood how much he owed to the confinement that forced him to talk to himself for hours on end, searching through the detailed examination of those events for some relief from his present misery. To be sure, a road did exist, an infernal passageway. But when he considered the misadventures that had taken place in that passageway, when he confessed that almost everything in it had been abominable, when he swore that he would never repeat the gesture that had made him stare so fixedly at an acne-scarred neck—a neck that obsessed him more than the howling face he saw in the din of that terrible second—he thought he still might be able to live elsewhere and to forget the time when he’d lost the way. Groans: those were the words of the tormented, the guilty, and the repentant as they approached the Holy Table to receive the Body of Christ Crucified and the Blood of the Bloodless Sacrifice. Under the Cross of Calatrava that adorned the child’s small catechism that the old lady had given him, it was possible to hear that pathetic groaning, in prayers for confession, in litanies to the Virgin, in the prayers of the Blessed. With sobs, with supplications, the unworthy, the fallen addressed their divine intercessors, ashamed to speak directly to the One who had spent three days in hell. Besides, all the blame was not on his head. It was the fault of the times, of circumstance, of heroic illusions: the effect of the dazzling words with which on a certain afternoon they had welcomed him—a mere provincial boy, ashamed of his suit, badly cut in his father’s tailor shop—behind the walls of the building on whose majestically colonnaded facade were stamped in bronze relief, under an illustrious name, the tall Elzevir letters HOC ERAT IN VOTIS . . . Now he was looking toward the Concert Hall, whose capitals with squared volutes seemed to him a caricature of the ones he associated with the initiation he so despised today. There the sentence imposed by that city on the orders that degenerated in the heat and were covered with wounds was confirmed, their astragals transformed into supports for signs announcing a dry cleaner, a barber shop, a soft-drink stand, counters laden with meat
pies, ices, and tamarind drinks, where the sizzle of frying hissed in the shadow of the pillars. “I’ll write something about this,” he used to say, but he never wrote anything, because of that pressing need to accomplish noble tasks. He survived the epic drinking bouts of those months, the excesses to which they, who risked a lot and challenged a lot in order to find the light at the end of the tunnel, thought they were entitled. He did not know where he would be sent now, since the Exalted Personage was going to determine, for his own greater convenience, the most expeditious route. He would never finish the architecture course he had given up at the beginning of the first term. No matter: he would accept the hardest jobs, the worst pay, the sun on his back, oil in his face, the rickety cot, and the bowl, as phases of a necessary expiation. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.” All he remembered was the beginning of the Credo. He was going to get the little book with the Cross of Calatrava on it, which he’d left on the straw-filled mattress, when suddenly he noticed that his hunger had passed. He thought about fish, and he imagined them as repugnant things, with that glassy, flat eye which was barely an eye, a tack stuck into the stench of the scales; he thought about meat and found it repellent, unformed, with its dripping blood; he thought about different kinds of fruit and remembered them acid and cold; he thought about bread and it seemed disagreeable to him, the slime and crunch of the crumbs. He did not want to eat. He offered God the emptiness of his stomach as a first step toward purification. He felt light, rewarded, understood. And it seemed that a dazzling sharpness put him into contact with matter, things, the eternal realities that surrounded him. He understood the night, understood the stars, understood the sea which came to him in the reflection of the lighthouse lantern, which gently tortured him each time its rotation shone it into his eyes. But he did not understand in words or images. It was his entire body, his pores—understanding transformed into being—that understood. His person had integrated itself for an instant with the Truth. He threw himself facedown on the clay tiles that still radiated the day’s sweltering heat. All this clarity made him weep, there at the foot of the Belvedere in shadows.