First published in Great Britain in 1992
by Andre Deutsch Limited
105-106 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LJ
Translation copyright © 1990 by Andrea Estoban Carpentier.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Mercury House.
Originally published in Cuba by
Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana,
under the title El Arpa y la Sombra,
© Alejo Carpentier, 1979.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Carpentier, Alejo
The harp and the shadow.
I. Title
863 [F]
ISBN 0-233-98747-9 pbk
For Lilia
This translation is for
Claire and Ellen
Verle and Virginia
Anne
In the sounding of the harp
there are three elements;
the hand, the string, and art.
In man; the body, the soul, and the shadow.
The Golden Legend
CONTENTS
Translators’ Preface
Discovering Alejo Carpentier
I • The Harp
II• The Hand
III • The Shadow
TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE
DISCOVERING
ALEJO CARPENTIER
In a Latin American village, Indian dancers put on painted wooden masks with fair skin, blue eyes, and blond beards. They dress in the elaborate Renaissance fashions worn by Spanish conquistadors expecting to meet the Grand Khan of the Indies. So begins, in the eternal present of the festival, a new discovery, a ritual reenactment of the conquest of the Americas. It is an incongruous but not unusual scene, for in Latin America the conquest remains a part of daily life, and signs of it are everywhere: In Mexico, Christian churches rise on the foundations of Aztec temples; in Central America, Mayan people praise the hero Tecún Umán, defeater of the villainous Pedro de Alvarado, and remain largely unconquered; in South America, Inca gold, melted and recast in the form of saints, adorns the most glorious cathedral altars.
In North America, by contrast, the conquest is an abstraction, obscured by Hallmark images of Mayflower landings and blunderbuss-and-buckle-bedecked forefathers dining thankfully with feathered, moccasined savages who have stepped from the pages of Lamartine and Cooper. We have forgotten our origins, rejected and expunged our native heritage; our imagination only takes hold centuries later, with the pioneer movement west.
“Latin American culture, the culture in which we write, in which we create today, is permeated by the event of the conquest and by the world preceding the conquest, which is not true of North America,” Carlos Fuentes once remarked. “In Mexico and the Andean countries and Central America, the Indian world is alive, one way or another. Even if it’s only alive in a corrupt religious ceremony, it is there. One can see it, one can visit it. Our language is permeated with Indian words, so it is not something of the past. The past is present in Latin America; the past is past in the United States.”
It is not surprising then that for us Christopher Columbus is little more than a name, a list of ships, and a date recited by schoolchildren. Of the man himself we know almost nothing. Yet his discovery of our lands determined to a large degree the course of our history. “It is in fact the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity,” Tzvetan Todorov writes in The Conquest of America. And he adds, “We are all the direct descendants of Columbus.” (Likewise, all American translators—that abject lot!—are descendants of our mother La Malinche, Cortés’s informer, the famous whore and traitor.)
Because the discovery and conquest are experienced almost as contemporary events by Latin Americans, they have been the most astute interpreters of those events. Among modern novelists, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Fuentes have produced notable works on the theme, and Gabriel García Márquez has been strongly influenced by the fabulous chronicles of the Spanish explorers; recently, the Brazilian João Ubaldo Ribeiro traced consequences of the conquest down to the present in his sweeping novel An Invincible Memory, while in Argentina Abel Posse has published an extraordinary new novel based on the Columbus story, The Dogs of Paradise. But The Harp and the Shadow remains the prototype (no doubt this is why Eduardo Galeano, in The Memory of Fire, his interpretive history of the Americas, quotes from it at the beginning of his account).
The encounter of the Old and New Worlds, the give and take of colliding cultures and traditions, has been a recurring theme in Carpentier’s work. In The Lost Steps, for example, a Spanish American musicologist returns from Europe to make a visit to one of the sources of native American culture, traveling up the Orinoco River to dwell with an Indian tribe. In Explosion in a Cathedral, the spirit of the French Revolution arrives in the New World in the company of one of its more gruesome symbols, the guillotine, where it is reshaped by a tangle of indigenous secret societies, voodoo, and other local traditions. And in another historical novel, The Kingdom of This World, the nineteenth-century Haitian ruler Henri Christophe finds himself torn between French and Afro-Caribbean cultures.
But it is in Columbus’s voyages that we find the quintessential encounter of the self with the Other, an other that is completely unknown and unknowable, unfathomable and uninterpretable. In this postlapsarian confrontation, language itself has no referents—the other becomes a mirror to the sel£ harshly exposing the flaws that lie at the foundation of our American culture. In Columbus’s fall, we sinned all.
Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman proposes in The Invention of America that America was not discovered but invented. The invention begins with Columbus. Discovering unknown peoples, Columbus shapes them by turns into Edenic innocents, sickly Moors, and villainous cannibals—even the name he gives them, “Indians,” is based on a fundamental misconception (or preconception). New World fruits, birds, trees, people—Columbus lacks the words to understand or to convey most of what he has discovered; in this sense he has failed to discover anything. “I say that the blue mountains I can see in the distance are like those of Sicily, though they are nothing like those of Sicily I say the grass is as tall as that of Andalusia in April and May, though there is nothing here that is anything like Andalusia. I say nightingales are singing when I hear twittering little gray birds with long black beaks that are more like sparrows. I allude to the fields of Castile, here where not a single thing recalls the fields of Castile. I have seen no spice trees, and I suggest that there may be spices here. . . .”
Instead of an unspoiled tropical paradise, Columbus sees, finally, nothing but a monstrous mine of gold, which exists only in his imagination. In desperation, unable to produce gold from this mine, he transfers its wholly imaginary value to the human resources he has found, balancing his mental ledgers by means of the institution of slavery and firmly planting greed, deceit, and oppression in the fertile ground of our hemisphere. So begins our modern history, which, in 1992, will celebrate its first half millennium.
T
hey turned their backs on the confessional altar with its eighty-seven candles, which had flickered more than once that morning, the glass holders vibrating as the swelling voices of the pontifical choir sang out a triumphant Te Deum; they softly closed the monumental doors of the basilica behind them as they emerged from its brilliant light into the chapel of the Holy Sacrament, which was suffused with twilight shadows; and then they lowered the sedan chair, transferring it from their shoulders to their hands and holding it suspended a few inches from the floor. The flabelli planted the shafts of the massive feathered fans in their racks, and the red-robed porters began their slow
walk, bending their knees to pass through the low-linteled doorways, carrying His Holiness through the innumerable rooms that still separated him from his private chambers. On both sides of the long, long passage that led past rooms and galleries, they passed muted oils, retables darkened by time, faded tapestries; there a person looking with an outsider’s curiosity would have seen mythological allegories, triumphs of the Faith, beatific faces lifted in prayer, or incidents from the lives of the saints. Rather fatigued, his Papal Holiness was barely conscious of the dignitaries of his retinue exiting the procession by rank and category, disappearing through their various doors according to the strict protocol of the ceremony. The first to vanish were the pairs of cardinals, de cappa magna, their trains carefully carried by clergymen; after them, the bishops, removing their resplendent miters; next, the canons, the chaplains, the apostolic prothonotaries, the heads of congregations, the prelates of the private bedchamber, the military officers, the monsignor majordomo and the monsignor camerlengo: so that when the procession had nearly reached the rooms whose windows faced the Court of Saint Damasus, the pomp of gold and violet and garnet, of moiré, silk, and lace, gave way to the less showy uniforms of domestics, doorkeepers, and bussolanti. At last the sedan chair was lowered to the floor near His Holiness’s modest worktable; then, after the chair had been freed of its august cargo, the porters raised it back up and retired with repeated reverences. Once he was seated in an armchair that gave him a reassuring feeling of stability, the pope requested an orgeat drink from Sor Crescencia, who was responsible for his refreshments, and then dismissed her with a gesture that included his valets as well; he listened to the shutting of the door—the final door—that separated him from the glittering, pulsing world of the princes of the church, the palatine prelates, dignitaries, and patriarchs whose staffs and capes became confused—in swirling clouds of incense raised by the zealous censer-bearers—with the cloaks and swords of the uniformed Cameristas, Royal Guards, and Swiss Guards, who were magnificent in their silver armor, ancient halberds, helmets allo condottiero, and orange-and-blue-striped uniforms: colors permanently assigned them by the brush of Michelangelo, whose work and memory are inextricably linked with the sumptuous existence of the basilica.
It was hot. Because all the windows facing the Court of Saint Damasus—except his, of course—had been walled up to prevent indiscreet glances from prying into the pontiffs private domain, an absolute silence reigned there; the place was so free from the sounds of urban activity, the passage of carriages and the noises of workmen, that when the echo of some faraway bell drifted in, it sounded like distant music evoking an otherworldly Rome. The Vicar of the Lord could identify some bells by their sounds, borne to him on the breeze. This light one, reverberating in a narrow range, was from the baroque Church of Jesus; that nearer one, majestic and deliberate, was from Santa Maria Maggiore; another one, solemn and intense, was from Santa Maria sopra Minerva, which housed in its interior, within a forest of incarnate marble, the human vestiges of Katherine of Siena, the fiery, energetic nun who had been an impassioned defender of his predecessor, Urban VI; he himself had honored that irascible protagonist of the Western Schism five years before by publishing the combative Syllabus—he didn’t sign it, but everyone knew that the text derived from his sermons, homilies, encyclicals, and pastoral letters—in which he used clear, rigorous Latin prose to excoriate las pestes of the modern period, socialism and communism, clandestine societies (that is, the Freemasons), “biblical societies” (warning to the United States): all the liberal-clerical groups assailing the ear in those days. The Syllabus caused such an uproar that Napoleon III, who had never been accused of liberalism, tried to prevent its distribution in France, where the middle clergy were astonished by such intransigence, since they had already criticized the preparatory encyclical, Cuanta Cura, as excessively intolerant and extreme; oh, but its condemnation of religious liberalism was very mild compared to Pope Urban’s almost biblical opprobrium, which was supported so fiercely by the Sienese nun—he was reminded of her for the second time that day by the tolling of the bell of Santa Maria sopra Minerva! The Syllabus had slowly matured in his thoughts after he had journeyed to the Americas and observed the power of spreading philosophical and political ideas that were oblivious to the boundaries of seas and mountains. He had observed their power in Buenos Aires and all along the Andean cordillera during the trip—so long ago, so rich in useful lessons—that he had undertaken despite the sweet, sad protests of his saintly mother, Countess Antonia Catarina Solazzi, the exemplary spouse of his strict, proud, and righteous father, Count Girolamo Mastaï-Ferretti, so severe, so imposing; he remembered how as a frail and sickly boy he had listened to his father’s boasting about the coveted gonfalons of Sinigaglia . . . Now, in the peace following the pomp and splendor of the morning’s ceremonies, the distant chorus of Roman cowbells resonated with the crystalline syllables of Sinigaglia, bringing back memories of the times between the tolling of the church bells, when he danced hand in hand in the courtyard of the vast manorial house with his older sisters, who had such lovely names—Maria Virginia, Maria Isabella, Maria Tecla, Maria Olimpia, Catarina Juditta—and fresh, gay voices whose tones he could almost hear, reminding him of those other girls’ voices, joined in simple carols at the beginning of a rainy Christmas season in the distant, so distant and yet so vividly remembered, city of Santiago, Chile:
Tonight is Christmas Eve
Not a night to shut your eyes
For the Virgin is with child
And at midnight He will arrive
But, suddenly, the great voice of Santa Maria sopra Minerva wrenched him from these reflections, which were perhaps too frivolous for a day when he had resolved to make an important decision, despite his weariness after the long ceremony that had flooded Saint Peter’s Basilica with light. Between an ornamental pyx attributed to Benvenuto Cellini and an ancient rock-crystal thurible in the form of the Ictus of the Christian primitives lay the docket—the famous petition!—that had been awaiting his decision for a year. No one had been so disrespectful as to prod him, but certainly the very venerable Cardinal of Bordeaux, the Metropolitan of the Diocese of the Antilles, his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Burgos, the Very Illustrious Archbishop of Mexico, as well as the six hundred and some bishops who had affixed their signatures to the document, must have waited for his resolution impatiently He opened the docket full of large papers covered with wax seals, tied in folios with ribbons of red satin, and he read for the twentieth time the Postulation for the Holy Congregation of Rites, which began with the well-turned phrase: Post hominum salutem, ab Incarnato Dei Verbo, Domino Nostro Jesu Cristo, feliciter instauratam, nullum profecto eventum extitit aut praeclarius, aut utilius incredibili ausu Januensis nautae Christophori Columbi, qui omnium primus inexplorata horrentiaque Oceani aequora pertransiens, ignotum Mundum detexit, et ita porro terrarum mariumque tractus Evangelicae fidei propagationi duplicavit. . . . The Primate of Bordeaux had put it well: Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World was the greatest event witnessed by man since the world had received the Christian faith; thanks to that unparalleled accomplishment, the extent of known lands and seas to which the word of the Gospels could be carried had been doubled. . . . And on a separate page attached to the respectful petition there was a brief message to the Holy Congregation of Rites, which awaited only the pope’s signature to set in motion the intricate process of the beatification of the Grand Admiral of Ferdinand and Isabella. His Holiness took the pen, but his hand hovered uncertainly over the page, rendered powerless once again by the implications of each word. This happened every time he resolved to trace the decisive rubric at the foot of the document. And all because one paragraph contained an underscored sentence that always made him hesitate: . . . pro introductione illius causae exceptionali ordine. Because the postulation required an exceptional procedure, the Supreme Pontiff hesitated one more time. Certainly the Vatican annals contained no precedents for the beati
fication—the first step toward canonization—of the Discoverer of America: the petition lacked certain biographical documentation necessary to the granting of an aureole, according to the canon. According to the wise and impartial Bollandists who were invited to offer opinions, this deficiency would certainly be utilized by the Devil’s Advocate, that subtle and intimidating Minister of the Republic of the Inferno . . . He, Pius IX, had been Archbishop of Spoleto, Bishop of Emilia, and a cardinal before being elected to the Throne of Saint Peter; in 1851, when he had occupied that throne for only five years, he had commissioned a French historian, Count Roselly de Lorgues, to write a Biography of Christopher Columbus, which the pope had read and pondered repeatedly, since it seemed invaluable for any decision about the canonization of the Discoverer of the New World. The Catholic historian was an ardent admirer of his subject, so he had emphasized the virtues that made the famous Genoan mariner such an important figure, worthy of a prominent place in the litany of saints and in the churches—hundreds, thousands of churches—where people would venerate his image, an image as yet rather imprecise, since there were no portraits of him—wasn’t that often the case with saints?—but soon to acquire corporeality and character, thanks to the pioneering efforts of an inspired painter who endowed him with all the power and expression that Bronzino, Cesar Borgia’s portrait painter, had given the famous mariner Andrea Doria in an exceptionally beautiful oil painting. Columbus’s canonization had obsessed Mastaï ever since his return from America, when he was a young canon, never dreaming that one day he would occupy the throne in Saint Peter’s Basilica. It was necessary to make a saint of Christopher Columbus for many reasons, reasons of faith as much as of politics—and ever since he had published the Syllabus, it had been apparent that he, Pius IX, did not disdain political action, political action inspired by the politics of God, as anyone who had studied Saint Augustine understood. To sign the decree before him would be a gesture that would stand as one of the momentous decisions of his papacy . . . Again he started to dip his pen in the ink, and yet again he held the pen suspended above the page. He wavered anew, this summer afternoon while the bells of Rome joined as one in the ringing of the angelus.
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