The Chase

by Alejo Carpentier

  On the fourth day, he awoke in the middle of the afternoon with a muddy taste in his mouth. A slow sweat, the drops seeming to swell out of every pore, rolled out of the shadows under his eyes, down the back of his neck, off his forehead, making him feel yellow, emaciated, filthy through and through. Fortunately, he had no mirror to confirm his suspicion, for that would only have made things worse. He sat up on the mattress as if to disburden his temples of an avalanche of gravel. To make things worse, his penis came alive, painfully, enervated by the throbbing in his chest and stomach. He touched himself and then walked over and sat down on the trunk, astonished that his body retained so much energy despite his hunger pangs. Beyond the barricaded door, beyond the dining room, the old lady’s niece was speaking confusedly with the seamstress from downstairs. The woman must have gotten better. She’d gone through the same thing before and cured herself with her concoctions and herbs. But this time the illness had gone on for a longer time. So he had to think about eating. He would have to invest his newly won lucidity of the past few days—his joy at not eating—into the will to eat. Since he could no longer count on the old lady for food, he had to think about other possibilities. There had to be edible things in a house, in a room, things people do not usually cook. As a boy, he’d often thought about the flavor a grass soup might have, a leaf stew, a crabgrass salad. Herbivorous animals eat plants that man, too, could probably eat. Besides, who hasn’t known the pleasure of chewing on a tender stalk of grass? He looked around: wood, clay, soot. In the besieged cities of ancient times, people actually ate bits of softened leather. They gnawed saddle covers, they boiled bridles, belts, the soft thongs of sandals. And in a flooded mine the men had discovered after a few days that the support beams still had soft bark on them . . . He crawled—so his silhouette wouldn’t show against the outside walls of the terrace—to where he could see the patio behind the saddler’s shop. Someone had taken away the half-cured hides that had been drying for all that time on the carriage. He was astonished at how absurd it was of him to want to contemplate those unreachable skins, as if their remote odor of the flaying or salting room could provide him some relief. Wood, clay, soot. “When the peasants were forcibly gathered in cities by the wicked Captain General of Spain,” the old lady had told him, “they swelled up from drinking so much water.” He turned on the faucet and, catching the water in his hands, began to drink it avidly in order to fill his stomach. But the water, warmed by the sun that heated the pipes, reached his stomach with the heavy, hollowing coldness of wet soot. He was doubled over by a violent spasm, and falling forward on his fists, he vomited up what he’d drunk until he was seized with a retching that collapsed his stomach and forced him to arch his back like a poisoned dog foaming at the mouth. Exhausted, he threw himself down at the foot of the wall, his body shaken by whiplash convulsions. He was so overwhelmed by the idea of eating that this idea, the only one he could conceive of, became a command of an almost abstract kind. He was no longer thinking, as he had on the first day of his fast, about his favorite dishes, nor did the image, mixed with nostalgia for childhood, appear in his mind of the grand family kitchen smelling of freshly fried fish—with the unctuous greens of peas, rice dyed with saffron, the crackling stiffness of pastries yielding to teeth—that put unreachable flavors in his mouth, ravaged by so much anxious saliva. These foods lost their difference, because he could only think about food, any food, all food, as if he had returned to the hunger of a newborn abandoned at the foot of a church steeple howling its misery, seeking its mother in the stone . . . He heard voices. From the spiral staircase, the seamstress downstairs was calling up to the old lady’s niece to come try on a dress. He waited impatiently until her high-heeled shoes echoed, ever more faintly, on the wooden stairs, until their voices stopped next to the sewing machine, which had been brought out to the patio to take advantage of the coolness. Taking down the planks and braces, he opened the door that had isolated him from the rest of the house for four days. The old lady, asleep, moaned softly with labored breath, under her Palm Sunday fronds. Next to her, on a chair, there was a bowl of oatmeal. There was only a dessert spoon, so he sank his shaking hand into the mass crisscrossed by melted sugar. And then it was his tongue, anxious, hasty, astonished to be eating stolen food, that cleaned the plate, to the sound of his hog-like grunts in the depths of the china; his tongue quickly moved to the chair’s rush seat to lick up what had spilled. His body then raised itself to its knees, and it was his hand again in the box with the Quaker on it, scraping his nails in the raw oatmeal. Later, the door remained closed. Night began to fall. A dredge down in the bay slowly passed opposite the Belvedere: it seemed to float above the sun that stained the walls of the Concert Hall orange. Under the pergolas, a pack of aroused dogs chased a spotted griffon bitch that barked at the onslaught of the males. High up in the modern building, music was playing: the same music he’d heard so often. First nervous, then sad, slow, monotonous. The person lying on the floor, his stomach simultaneously pained and gorged, sleepy, racked by rumbling bowels, drifting from felicity to nausea, sometimes confused those muffled notes with the muffled noise of the visiting-card printing shop. Behind the door, the old lady began to call out to her niece in a cranky voice, which showed she was feeling better. “You cain’ eat so much, aunty,” shouted the dark woman, who was returning with her new dress, when she saw that there was barely any oatmeal left in the box with the Quaker on it. “You shuddin’ eat so much.” And since the Soldier was waiting for her in front of the house, she went off, her heels clicking rapidly down the spiral staircase.

  The portentous news was God. God, who had been revealed to him by the light of the old lady’s cigar the night before she fell ill. Suddenly, her taking the coal from the brazier and raising it to her face—a gesture he’d seen repeated in the kitchens of his childhood—became magnified in his mind and took on overwhelming implications. Her hand, as it raised the light, carried a fire that came from very far away, a fire that existed before the matter it would consume and change—matter that was merely the possibility of fire until a hand set it on fire. But if that present fire was an end in itself, a prior action was necessary to attain it. And that action required another, and others before it, which could only derive from an Initial Will. There had to be an origin, a point of departure, a capitular of fire which, through countless eras, had illuminated men’s faces. And that First Fire could not have set itself ablaze independently . . . He thought he could see in everything a similar succession, an ineluctable process whereby one thing received energy from other things; nevertheless, that sequence of acts could not be infinite. The strings had to end up, perforce, in the hand of a Prime Mover, the initial cause of everything, stock-still in eternity and endowed with Supreme Efficacy. His father’s atheism seemed absurd to him now, in the presence of an image that explained so many things; he was wondering to himself why others before him hadn’t thought to prove the existence of God by means of that illuminating insight he’d had looking at a glowing coal. It had to be Sunday, because the day before he’d heard the children in the modern building singing, “Died on Sunday and that is the end of Solomon Grundy.” As the church bells called people to Mass, he opened the black-and-gold book with the Cross of Calatrava on it, which dispensed unending illuminations to someone who had grown up far away from the catechism, in a Masonic–Darwinian tailor shop. Every page revealed a beauty in the liturgy he’d never known, giving him the exalting impression that he was penetrating a secret, being initiated, sharing the secrets of a fellowship. He had never thought about these things, though he’d seen them many times. The mere altar cloths, for example, could represent the Shroud wherein His Body was wrapped; the alb, the girdle, and the stole told three episodes of the most transcendant Trial witnessed by men. From the purple vestments, which evoked in his mind the columns of Pilate’s house, he would pass to Calvary, where he would stop, absorbed, at the edge of the Chalice; and after contemplating—after understanding—the Chalice
, he would marvel at the discovery of that ever-open sepulcher, always open insofar as the most precious substance was concerned, mystical transposition of the greatest drama: darkness that worked the metal to unthinkable depths; shadow wrapped in the blaze of gems and gold; reverse alchemy that out of the splendor created a long night of waiting for a humanity under sentence. Even water, whose liturgical sense he hadn’t understood, spoke now from the flank of the Redeemer. He had, from time to time, been in a church, brought there by his devout aunt when his father was in the capital buying fabric for those of his customers who still requested drill and alpaca. He, too, knelt, sat, and stood before the altar with its baroque moldings without ever suspecting that when the celebrant put on the robes of his office he represented nothing less than the Son of God in His Passion. He had observed the service—amused by everything that was not part of the Mass, staring at the beams in the cupola, where there was always a sleeping bat to be seen—without thinking that right before his eyes the Mystery that concerned him most directly was being performed in an action reduced to its symbolic essence. And now that he had been enlightened, he found in the simple movements that accompanied the Doxology, the Gospel, the Offertory, that prodigious sublimation of the elemental which, in architecture, had transformed the hunting trophy into a bucranium, had transformed the ring of twine that binds the sheaf of branches of the primitive saddle into an astragal of pure Pythagorean proportions. To have carried within himself such powers of understanding, to have been able to perceive those truths and to have turned away from them all in order to hear speeches that ended up justifying both the heroic and the abject! Oh! I believe! I believe He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified and buried, that He descended into Hell and that on the third day He rose again from the dead. I believe He ascended into Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. I believe that from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead . . . And there is something like the trumpet of the Last Judgment in the music being played again in the modern building, where someone, delighted by the cheap, harsh-sounding gramophone he’s just bought, keeps playing the same music over and over again, sometimes even replaying the same passage. What he plays is like a series of different pieces recorded one after the other, which always follow each other in the same order. First it’s something very confused that sounds like bugle calls—a military march that never quite turns into a military march. Then comes the sad, slow, monotonous part. After that, there is a very happy dance. But another military march interrupts it, a military march which never really quite turns completely into a military march: something like the bugle calls in that ridiculous documentary about the French aristocrats who heard Mass before the hunt and had their hounds blessed while the huntsmen in livery played instruments that looked like huge copper volutes. And that part always ended with music in little jumps—which resembled those toys very small children play with, the ones in which two parallel sticks are moved up and down so that two dolls take turns pounding a peg with mallets. The next section was made up of broken waltzes that turned into something majestic and grand, with trumpets and a brass section, just like the one that played in Sancti-Spiritus near the tailor shop on concert nights. And then that happy final uproar, with the hunting horns again . . . The old lady’s niece was descending the spiral staircase. It was necessary to open the door to see if the old lady was asleep, and reach the broth which, as usual, vas cooling next to the bed. But now, as he took the bowl to bring it to his mouth, his hands froze in the air. In the black woman’s surprisingly unwrinkled face, her two eyes were opening, staring at him with glassy fixity—with distant and inexpressive intensity—at him, as he put the bowl down between two medicine bottles without daring to sip its oils slathered over turbid lentils and the bony feet of some fowl—the kind hanging from a hook in the poultry market. The twisted nails of an old rooster were attached to three toes covered with gray scales—there was something human in the wrinkles of their skin—and rested on a slice of barely peeled pumpkin. He vacillated for a moment, then defied the fixed stare focused too late on what could not be restrained, and sank his mouth into that Sunday soup, snorting and gnawing, before approaching the carton with the Quaker on it. Then, his lips still powdered with raw oatmeal, he sought forgiveness and made the gesture of tucking the old lady in, pulling the blanket up to her neck. When he touched her cheek, a shock of fear paralyzed him, arresting his entire being: that cheek was stiff and hard, and the clenched fist she’d rested on her temple went right back to her temple with all the obstinacy of rigor mortis as he tried to find some pulse in the cold veins of her wrist. A footfall echoed on the spiral staircase. The clicking heel belonged to the niece, who, followed by some other people, was coming up the stairs. She began to scream just as he, after hastily locking the door behind him, reached the Belvedere. The horror of what happened stupefied him; he squatted on the floor, his back against the trunk, all his attention concentrated in his ears: that lame woman was the seamstress; the velvety, asthmatic stride belonged to the janitor; the clatter of shoe taps on each step was the Soldier—who went downstairs again to get the things necessary for a wake and a burial. The patios filled with the sound of questions called from window to window. And soon, in a confused fuss, the men from the Funeral Parlor came with their ice and candles. With the arrival of family members from far-off neighborhoods—Jesús del Monte, Calvario, Santa María del Rosario—who only remembered one another when they found out their numbers had been reduced, the wake began. Occasionally one of them would pound on the locked door, trying to get to the terrace, and the terror of those first days was now reborn within him. The door itself was firmly braced, so they quickly gave up trying to open it. But now the resistance of the wood was reaching its limit. When they took away the coffin tomorrow, the janitor—who was angry because the key had been lost—would call the locksmith. From his secular arm hung the master key. And when the master key turned in the moldy lock and they saw that the blue door did not move on its hinges because it had been blocked from inside, he would have to give himself up. Not to those men, who could do nothing to him and wouldn’t even call the police when they learned he belonged to the world of Those to Be Feared. He would have to turn himself over to freedom—to the street, the crowds, the eyes—which was like being called to appear before a judge. Once again he would be questioning every face, afraid to eat two courses sitting at the same table, intolerably obsessed with discovering the coldness of a hospital in the whiteness of every sheet. It would mean having to get out of bed before finishing a good night’s sleep, walking in the shadows, fearful of the echo of his own steps; flesh that withdraws and flees the heat of another’s flesh because a piece of ripe fruit falls onto the patio—because the wind closes the venetian blinds in the corridor. When no one had wanted anything to do with him; when he was turned away with horror from people’s houses, he had remembered the old lady. She could not forget that a long time before she had carried him at her breast, calling him by such tender names that he was moved when he had been told about it. The old lady, seeing him so emaciated, his shirt torn and dirty under the navy-blue suit he’d put on the better to blend in with the shadows, began to shout that she wanted no scandals in her house and that people who start out bad usually end up worse. She had rented him the Belvedere for a pittance when he’d arrived from Sancti-Spiritus; she had given him advice like a second mother. And he had walked out—of course—when he saw he wouldn’t be allowed to bring low-life women into a proper religious household . . . But he seemed so miserable at that moment, sitting astride a stool, weeping into his dirty-nailed hands, that he became again for her the same child who once almost seemed about to suffocate from whooping cough in her arms. It was his veins, swollen and green in his temples, and his neck, the spasmodic shaking of his shoulders, his vinegary breath, the muted moan that came from within him after his sobs. Moved, the old lady brought him up to the Belvedere, deserted all this time, so he could wait there, hidden�
��next to the trunk where all that was left of his University life was stored—until the Arrangement was made. Oh! Mother of God, Mother Most Pure, Mother Most Chaste, Powerful Virgin, Merciful Virgin, pray for us; Mystic Rose, Tower of David, Star of the Morning, Health of Sinners, Queen of Martyrs, pray for us . . . She who calmed my hunger first with the milk of her breasts; she who made me know the sin of gluttony with the smooth carnality of her nipples; she who put on my tongue the savor of a flesh I have sought out so many times in young torsos of her same race; she who nourished me with the purest sap of her body, giving me the warmth of her lap, the sanctuary of her hands that dandled me with caresses; she who took me in when all others threw me out, she lies there in her black box, enclosed within the roughest planks, diminutive, her face seemingly shrunken over the ice that drips into a dented tub, because I, who never even should have thought it—who never should have admitted it would be possible of me—have devoured her bedridden food, wolfed down her cereals, gnawed her chicken bones, sucked down her Sunday broth like a greedy hog. Lord, have mercy on us! Christ, have mercy on us! . . . And in the modern building, that music, so sad, so monotonous and sad, seems like a response for the dead.