We know no freedom is that big, but in the universe of what seems true, or accurate, it is not at all hard to believe in extensive perception. This was Carpentier’s take on the freedom that came with and through world exploration and straight-up conquest, all inevitably destined to submission through miscegenation one way or another. Missionaries, sailors, conquistadors, naturalists, and villainous roustabouts, each type giving the close listener access to something close to thematic infinity in every direction given prelude by fanciful tales. But in this case, the Carpentier Case, much more unifies, since this writer’s knowledge, interests, and imagination were apparently liberated by masterful creation itself, juices brought through characters always contrapuntal in their relationships to one another. This foamed into the great getting-up morning of the New World. A varied bush where colonized women learned what all princesses knew the world over: they possessed lush boxes as magnetic as any opened by Pandora, come one, come all.
NOTES OF THE GHOSTS
Walt Whitman, along with Herman Melville, is a father of free form in American and world literature, developed along with what Rousseau, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the European gang threw into the boxing ring of art; both the wandering poet and the novelist seem to foreshadow the ambition at the crux of Carpentier’s fiction. The sloppily made huts, some rather neat caves, the indignant whirlpools, and his magnificent cathedrals of intellect, his branches and crevices of feeling, and all that is there, living, dead, or ghostly, appears in the introduction to the 1855 edition of Leaves Of Grass, Whitman coming right out of the box and leaving the stadium with the stains of new paint on his breeches: “Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and books of the earth and all reasoning.”
Carpentier’s Cuban-born art was prefigured in his youth by an obsession and scholarly leap into Afro-Cuban music, which he was one of the first to study seriously. A sincere grasp of music actually pulls him away from most writers who are tone-deaf enough to write either telephone lists of names and numbers or advertising copy. But the Cuban work came to loom over its time because Carpentier’s inner strength increased until it was aged wisdom, a condition known everywhere but perhaps most significant in the aesthetic context, and always aided by a sense of human recognition that escapes all of those snares, the intricate heaps of holes made by academics and meant for the capturing of imagination, its wind and breath, itself an Edenic force like the line in geometry that has no beginning and no end. Carpentier knew we have access to the part of the line that we pretend, together, has a start and a finish. Nothing not only comes from nothing, as the Greek said, but life emerges from and continues into oblivion, moving from mist to mist, impenetrably.
The relationship between time and space always follows the rules of quicksilver on a board beneath feet that is also a floor through which we see moments disappear—now you see it; now you don’t.
Bessie Jones speculated to a college audience that the only meaning clearly said by life was this: Being born meant that one was going to die. A perfect grasp of existentialism by a Georgia Sea Island singer at an age carved into later space by wisdom. Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Joyce were open to such a scope of communication between the learned and the not-too-literate, since the poetic was always available to take the giant steps necessitated by democracy and its central thoughts, with recognition of the grand mystery of personal importance or group significance seeming to rise from nowhere and going somewhere on engines of vitality.
That is the roller coaster of international mulatto life, an inevitable that all human closeness brands as invincible. Alejo Carpentier believed and lived and danced and sang by it, if not to it. Happiness, sadness, or any variations on either are secondary to the vitality, the affirmation, of the breath itself, and to the wind that blows along or reveals the prints and footprints of the past.
I was forlornly born in a bucket of butcher knives
I been shot in the ass with two ice-cold Colt .45s
So you got to be mighty goddam ignorant to mess with me
When asked, I say, Whatever will be, already happened.
Ice freezes red, you hear me?
ONE
… it is not my design to teach the method that everyone must follow in order to use his reason properly, but only to show the way in which I have tried to use my own.
—DESCARTES, DISCOURSE ON METHOD
1
… BUT I’VE ONLY JUST GONE TO BED. AND THE alarm has gone off already. Half past six. It’s impossible. Quarter past seven, perhaps. More likely. Quarter past eight. This alarm clock would be a marvel of Swiss watchmaking, but its hands are so slim that one can hardly see them. Quarter past nine. That’s not right, either. My spectacles. Quarter past ten. That’s it. Besides, daylight is already shining through the yellow curtains with morning brilliance. And it’s always the same when I come back to this house: I open my eyes with the feeling of being there, because this same hammock accompanies me everywhere—house, hotel, English castle, our palace—because I’ve never been able to sleep in a rigid bed with a mattress and bolster. I have to curl up inside a rocking hammock, to be cradled in its corded network. Another swing and a yawn, and with another swing I get my legs out and hunt about with my feet for my slippers, which I have lost in the pattern of the Persian carpet. (There, always thoughtful for my moments of waking, the Mayorala Elmira, my housekeeper, would already have put on my shoes for me; she must be asleep in her camp bed—she has her fads too—with her breasts uncovered and petticoats over her thighs, in the darkness of the other hemisphere.)
A few steps towards the light. Pull the cord on the right, and with a rattle of curtain rings above, the scenario of the window is revealed. But instead of a volcano—the snow-covered majestic, remote, ancient Home of the Gods—in front of me stands the Arc de Triomphe, and behind it the house of my great friend Limantour, who was Don Porfirio’s minister, and with whom I have such profitable talks about economics and our problems. A slight sound at the door. And in comes Sylvestre in his striped jacket, carrying aloft the silver tray—thick, beautiful silver from my mines: “À café de Monsieur. Bien fort comme il l’aime. À la façon de là-bas … Monsieur a bien dormi?”
The three brocade curtains have been pulled back, one after the other, showing a fine sunny day for the races, and Rude’s sculptures. The boy hero with his little balls exposed to view, being carried off to war by a tough, dishevelled chieftain, one of those—make no mistake—who utters yells of victory but will hurry from the van to the rear if things turn out badly. Now Le Journal. The Excelsior, with so many photos in its pages that it’s practically a cinema of real life. L’Action Française, with Pampille’s gastronomic recipes, which my daughter outlines in red pencil every day for the attention of our excellent cook, and Léon Daudet’s abusive editorial, whose inspired and apocalyptic insults—supreme expression of the liberty of the press—could promote duels, kidnapping, assassinations, and shooting daily in our countries. Le Petit Parisien: the rebellion in Ulster is still going on, with its concerto for machine guns and Irish harps; universal indignation has been aroused by the second round-up of dogs from Constantinople, condemned to eat one another on a desert island; more rioting in the Balkans, that eternal wasps’ nest and powder magazine, but very like our provinces in the Andes. I still remember—on my last journey—the ceremonious reception of the King of Bulgaria. He came on a visit here with President Fallières, exhibiting his plumed and braided majesty (for a moment he looked to me like Colonel Hoffmann) in a superb state coach, while the band of the Republican Guard, stationed at the foot of Napoleon’s monument, played “Plat-cha Divitza, Chuma Maritza,” with a profusion of trumpets, clarinets, and tubas, enhanced by a zarzuela-like combination of flute and triangle. “Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!” shouted the republican crowd, pining at
heart for thrones, crowns, sceptres, and maces, very inadequately replaced as a spectacle by presidents in frock coats with red ribbons across their waistcoats, who moved their top hats from head to knee in a gesture of salutation very like that of blind men asking for alms after trying to extract the singsong tune of “La jambe en bois” from the black depths of an ocarina. Twenty to eleven.
Happiness due to an empty agenda tray, on the night table beside the hammock, instead of a whole timetable of interviews, official visits, presentation of credentials, or ostentatious entry of soldiers, suddenly bursting in on one without warning, to the rhythm of boots and spurs. But I’ve slept longer than usual and that’s because last night, yes, last night—and very late—I fucked a nun of Saint Vincent de Paul, dressed in indigo blue, with a starched, winged headdress, a scapular between her tits, and a whip made of Russian leather at her belt. The cell was perfect, with its cardboard missal made to look like calf, lying on the rough wooden table beside the plated candlestick and the too-grey skull—the truth is I never touched it—which was probably made of wax or perhaps rubber. The bed, however, in spite of its conventual and penitentiary appearance, was extremely comfortable, with its pillows of false serge (down-filled slips looking as if made of austere sackcloth) and that bedstead whose elastic springs collaborated so obligingly with the movements of the elbows and knees working away on them. The bed was as comfortable as the divan in the caliph’s room or the velvet seat of the Wagons-Lits-Cook sleeping compartment (Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée) eternally at a standstill, with two wheels and a little ladder leading up to it, in a passage that always smelled—I don’t know by means of what ingenious device—of the breath of locomotives. I didn’t have time to try all the possible combinations of cushions and mats in the Japanese house; nor the cabin on the Titanic, realistically reconstructed from documents, and seeming as if branded with the imminence of the drama. (Vas-y vite, mon chéri, avant que n’arrive l’ice-berg … Le voilà … Le voilà … Vite, mon chéri … C’est le naufrage … Nous coulons. Nous coulons … Vas-y …) The rustic attic of a Norman farm, smelling of apples, with bottles of cider within reach; and the Bridal Suite, where Gaby, dressed in white and crowned with orange blossom, was deflowered four or five times a night if she wasn’t on the day shift—“on duty,” it was called—because one or two friends of the house, in spite of their grey hairs and the Legion of Honour, still enjoyed from time to time the glory of Victor Hugo’s triumphant awakenings. As for the Palace of Mirrors, it had so often subjected my image to lengthenings and foreshortenings, distortions and grimaces, that all my physical proportions were imprinted on my memory, just as an album of family photographs catalogues the gestures, attitudes, and clothes of the best days of one’s life. I understood very well why King Edward VII had kept a private bath for himself there, and even an armchair—today a historic object, put in a place of honour—made by a skilful and discreet cabinetmaker, so that it allowed him to submit to delicate caresses which might be hindered by his capacious abdomen. Last night’s spree had been very good fun. However—because of the amount I’d drunk—I was left with a sort of fear lest my sacrilegious amusements with the little Sister of Saint Vincent de Paul (another time, Paulette had presented herself to me as an English schoolgirl, armed with tennis rackets and riding whips; yet another time, very much made up like a sailor’s whore, in black stockings, red garters, and high leather boots) might have brought me bad luck. (Besides, that skull, now I came to think about it, was pretty sinister, whether it was made of rubber or wax …) The Divine Shepherdess of Nueva Córdoba, Miraculous Protectress of my own country, might have known of my deviations from the mountain fastness where her ancient sanctuary stood, between crags and quarries. But I calmed myself by reflecting that they hadn’t gone so far in their zeal for authenticity as to provide a crucifix in the false convent of my guilty adventure. The truth was that Madame Yvonne, dressed in black with a string of pearls, exquisite manners and a way of speaking that passed from Port Royal to the argot of Bruant, according to circumstances and the condition of the client—much like my French, which was part Montesquieu, part Nini-peau-de-chien—understood each person’s whims perfectly, and yet always knew exactly where to stop. There was no portrait of Queen Victoria in the Room of the English Schoolboy, any more than there was an icon in the Room of the Great Boyar, nor a too-ostentatious Priapus in the Room of the Pompeian Fantasies. And when certain clients visited her she took care that “ces dames” should take up their position, as actors say: that they should concentrate on interpreting their parts—whether that of impatient girlfriend, satanic nun, provincial girl full of perverse curiosity, aristocrat concealing her identity, grand lady come down in the world, foreigner-passing-through-and-avid-for-new-sensations, etc., etc.; in short that they should behave like well-trained actresses, and they were forbidden to snatch coins off the corner of the table with their sexual labia, as other girls of a very different style did in the Salon of Performances down below—“au choix, Mesdames”—wearing nothing at all except a bolero made of Spanish sequins, a Tahitian necklace, or the hint of a Scottish kilt with a fox’s tail in the belt buckle.
Now Sylvestre brings in the barber. While he shaves me he tells me news of the latest exploits of the apaches, who are now using motor cars and guns. Just as he is powdering my cheeks he shows me a recent photograph of his son, looking very martial—as I tell him—with cassowary plumes in his shako. I praise the organisation and discipline of a nation where a young man of modest origins can by his own virtue and industry rise to the same military rank as soldiers who, before they ever fire a gun, have to know by calculus and logarithms what will be the trajectory and distance of a shell. (My artillery, for the most part, decide on the sighting and angle of a gun by the empirical method—although marvellously effective in a few cases, one must admit—of: “Three hands up and two to the right, with a finger and a half of rectification, towards that house with the red roof … Fire!” And the best of it is that they hit the target.) From beneath the portrait of the cadet from Saint-Cyr the barber brings out a recent photo of a young woman swathed in transparent veils, who is so tremendously excited by the interest at 6.4 per cent on the new Russian loan that it seems she would be ready—very discreetly, of course—to acquire shares and so restore a fortune once supported by escutcheons covered in gules and ermine, which was now on the point of shipwreck; this young woman—and it was easy to see that her “know-how,” as they say, was not to be sneezed at—in short, this young woman … (I must first send for Peralta to have a look at me, palpate me, and say …)
Through the window panes summer announces its presence, as if new, just arrived, in the splendid foliage of the chestnut trees. Now the tailor comes and measures and re-measures me, covering me with segments of sports coats, jackets, frock coats, adjusting, tightening, joining together, drawing theoretical figures in white chalk on pieces of a dark woollen garment. I turn around, like a mannequin, stopping at angles where my figure appears in a favourable light. And according to the orientation thus imposed on my eyes, I look at the pictures or sculptures surrounding me, which seem to be reborn as I turn, since I’ve seen them so often that I hardly ever look at them now. Here, as always, is Jean-Paul Laurens’ Saint Radegunde, Merovingian and ecstatic, receiving the relic brought from Jerusalem, a piece of the Cross of Our Lord, offered to her in a beautiful marble casket by hooded emissaries. Over there, a spirited sculpture of some gladiators by Gérome, with the retiarius defeated, tangled in his own net, and twisting his body under the victorious foot of a he-man in a helmet and mask, who seems to be awaiting Caesar’s verdict, with his sword ready. (“Macte,” I always say when I look at this work, turning down my right thumb …) A quarter turn on my own axis, and I am looking at Elstir’s fine seascape, exposing its restless blues between a confusion of foam and clouds, with sailing boats in the foreground, not far from the pink marble of the Little Faun, winner of the Gold Medal in the latest Salon of French artists.
/> “A little more to the right,” says the tailor. And now it is the voluptuous nudity of the Sleeping Nymph by Gervex.
“Now the sleeve,” says the tailor. And here I am in front of Luc-Olivier Merson’s Wolf of Gubbio, in which the wild beast is tamed by Poverello’s ineffable preaching, has become holy and good, and is playing with some mischievous children who are pulling its ears. A quarter turn more and it’s Dumont’s Cardinals at Supper (and what expressions of enjoyment they all have, and how lifelike! You can even see the veins on the forehead of that one on the left!), next to which is The Little Chimney-Sweep by Chocarne-Moreau and Béraud’s Fashionable Reception, where the red background marvellously sets off the pale low-necked dresses of the women amongst black tailcoats, green palms, and glittering glass.
And now, almost facing the light, my eyes rest on the View of Nueva Córdoba, a work by one of our own painters, obviously influenced by some Toledan landscape by Ignacio Zuloaga—the same orange-yellows, the houses similarly terraced, with the Puente del Mapuche transformed into the Puente de Alcántara. And now I am facing the window, and the tailor is telling me about some of his clients whose names add to his professional prestige—just as happens in England when a biscuit or jam manufacturer labels his goods “By appointment to His Majesty.” Thus he informed me that Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was extravagant and grand in his ideas but always absent-minded and slow about paying, ordered twelve fancy waistcoats and other garments to the details of which I hardly listened, because the mere name of Gabriele D’Annunzio immediately called up to my mind that mysterious paved and aristocratic courtyard, hidden behind the façade of a wretched-looking house in the Rue Geoffroy L’Asnier, where, at the end of a passage smelling of leek soup, there appeared like some incredible opera set the pavilion with its classical façade, masks, and grilles, in which I had more than once had the honour to dine alone with the great poet. That luxurious yet secret hiding place had its own legends and mythology; it was said that when Gabriele was alone he was served by beautiful waitresses with fantastic names, and while his numerous creditors were kept at bay by a concierge hardened in such duties, inside that mansion filled with alabasters and ancient marbles, mediaeval parchments and chasubles, amongst steaming censers, the fresh voices of a choir of child acolytes, alternating antiphonally with plainsong, could be heard through curtains concealing the naked bodies of women, a lot of women—and some of them great, famous, and aristocratic—who were submitting to the mood of the Archangel of the Annunciation. (“I don’t know what they see in him,” Peralta used to say: “he’s ugly, bald and squat.” “Go and see,” I said, reflecting that, for the great man in question, it was probably a good deal more interesting than frequenting the de Chabanais brothel, however haunted that might be by the shade of Edward VII.)
Reasons of State Page 2
