The Harp and the Shadow

by Alejo Carpentier

  Five, six, seven “kings” of this island came to render tributes (or at least that was my interpretation, although the cursed Biscayans in Juan de la Cosa’s circle said that they just wanted to get a look at my face . . .): kings like those we’d seen already; kings who, instead of dressing in imperial purple robes, wore a tiny codpiece for every celebration. And this procession of naked “majesties” forced me to speculate that we were still quite a distance from the fabulous Cipango of the Italian chronicles. Because there they had palaces with golden roofs and courts gleaming with gold and precious stones, and the Christian ambassadors were received by Lords wearing golden armor, surrounded by ministers and counselors dressed in gilded tunics, and were served banquets on golden tablecloths while peacocks danced the paduana accompanied by melodious instruments, and tame lions—like the one that became as a lapdog to Saint Jerome—sat respectfully, graciously around the table, and monkeys did tricks, and musical birds trilled at their master’s command, and at the same time—a marvel described by Marco Polo and Oderic of Pordenone—the cups of wine flew to the table like doves, from the hands of the chief server at the banquet table, without a drop of the beverage being spilled—and they were golden cups, of course. Golden, because everything was made of gold in that marvelous country I sought, with the sinking sensation that with each day’s run I was farther away from it. Perhaps, if we had sailed farther south from Cuba; or perhaps, if we had gone north from Isabella . . . And now those shit-assed Indians did nothing but confuse me: the ones from Hispaniola, perhaps to get me off the track of their gold mines, kept telling me to keep going—it’s up ahead, farther but not too far, “you’re getting warmer, warmer, warmer,” as if we were playing find-the-button, you’re nearly there—urging me to keep on sailing; the Indians we had captured, on the other hand, probably because they were afraid I would take them even farther from their little island homes, told me that if I followed that advice I would wind up in a country populated by cannibals with a single eye in the head of a dog—monsters that sustained themselves on nothing but the flesh and blood of humans. And with all this I still hadn’t found the immense treasure I was seeking. For while Hispaniola seemed to hold more gold than Cuba, to judge from the jewelry of the caciques and from the little nuggets they gave us, and so must have been the location of the vein of gold, the Mother Lode, the mine, the huge mine—which had been mentioned time and again by the Venetians—I could find no trace of it anywhere. And this mine, this huge and wonderful mine, became an obsession with me . . . Now, with death hovering over me, as I await the confessor who is so slow to arrive, I reexamine the yellowed pages, with their faint, lingering smell of saltpeter, of the rough draft of the Account of My First Voyage, and I am horrified, filled with shame and sorrow, to see how many times the word GOLD appears there. Especially since, to prepare for my death, I have assumed the robes of a minor order of Franciscans, who are poor because they choose poverty, they wish to be poor, to be wed, as was Saint Francis of Assisi, to Our Lady of the Poor . . . It’s as if witchcraft, an infernal vapor, had tarnished this manuscript so that it seems more a search for the Land of the Golden Calf than for the Promised Land, to ransom the millions of souls sunk in the vile shadows of idolatry. It made me angry at myself to see, for example, that on the twenty-fourth of December, when I should have been meditating, as a Franciscan, on the divine event of the Nativity, I wrote the word GOLD five times in ten lines that could have been taken from the grimory of an alchemist. Two days later, on the Feast of Saint Stephen, instead of thinking of the blessed death—by rocks and stones more precious than any gold—of the first martyr of the religion whose cross was displayed on our sails, I wrote the word GOLD a dozen times in an account in which I mentioned the Lord God only once—and that time only as part of a secular expression. And it is in just such thoughtless expressions as those that I used the name of the All-Powerful fourteen times in a general account in which GOLD is mentioned more than two hundred. And “Our Lord” is even used—I recognize this now with horror—almost as a polite formula accompanying the words Your Highnesses in talk intended to flatter, or it is used as a sort of propitiatory incantation- “Thanks be to God,” “Through the grace of God”—when, with a false piety that stinks of brimstone, of the cloven-hoofed devil, I keep myself from saying Our Lord should have showed me where the GOLD was. Not only that, but on just one occasion—the twelfth of December—was the name of Jesus Christ finally inscribed in my text. Except for that one day, that exceptional occasion when I remembered I was a Christian, I invoked God and Our Lord in a way that revealed how much more profoundly my mind had been shaped by the Old Testament than by the Gospels, how much closer I felt to the God of Wrath with his furies and favors than to the parable of the Good Samaritan, on this voyage where, to tell the truth, neither Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John was with us. We had left the Holy Books in Spain, they hadn’t crossed the Ocean Sea, hadn’t arrived in the new world, where no one intended to baptize anyone or save any of the souls whose ignorance sadly condemned them to die without understanding the meaning of the Cross made by our carpenters from planed and joined wood, and planted all up and down the coast as the Spanish claimed it. The Gospels, as I said, were left at home, rather than being launched in an attack, an army of sacred verses, against the religions I found here—although I was careful not to talk about them—revealed by the primitive sculptures, human figures, which I left where they were without much thought because they were only large stones . . . And here, in these papers, I have spoken only—with a single exception—of the Lord of Abraham and Jacob, the one who spoke to Moses from the burning bush—the Lord before his Incarnation, and I have absolutely ignored the Holy Spirit, who appears in my account less often than Mohammed . . . Realizing that now, as the soft sound of rain drowns out the steps of the droves of beasts that carry oil and vinegar in my street, realizing that, I tremble with fear . . . I turn the pages of my journal, searching, searching, searching. But no, no, no. The Incarnation was not entirely forgotten in these pages because, after I named the first island I discovered—on the fifteenth of October—for Saint Mary of the Divine Conception, after I celebrated the feast day of Saint Mary of O—on the eighteenth of December—by shooting off our Lombardy guns, while we were on our way home, one day—the fourteenth of February—made me recognize the Divine Power of the Virgin, universally venerated by Christian sailors. I am overwhelmed by my memory of that night, when the wind swelled and the waves were terrifying, crashing one against the other, breaking over the ship and so hindering it that it could neither move forward nor escape them. In the clamor of the storm, Martín Alonso’s caravel was separated from us—which, I confess, yes, I should confess it, did not cause me any great grief at the time, since for quite some time now the overweeningly proud captain had been standing up against me, disobeying my orders with such disrespect for my authority that, a little earlier, while we were sailing along the coast of Hispaniola, he had gone off for several days, looking for gold, according to his story, with the help of several rogues from the rowdy and muttering mob that was set against me by Juan de la Cosa and that other malicious villain Vicente Yáñez . . . (Ah, the Spaniards, the Spaniards, the Spaniards . . . I have been thoroughly fucked by their propensity to split up, to splinter, to divide into groups, form factions, in perennial discord! . . .) So, that night we were surrounded by such a terrible tempest I thought the ships would be engulfed by the sea, and I attributed this disaster—and here I say it—to my lack of faith and confidence in Divine Providence. It was then—and only then!—that I had recourse to the divine intercession of the Virgin in whose belly, as Saint Augustine said, “God made a Son in the shape of a Man.” Then I cast my lot with those who pledged pilgrimages, promising Saint Mary of Guadalupe that I would bring her a Pascal candle made from five pounds of wax; and I promised another one to Saint Mary of Loreto, who is in the lighthouse at Ancona, near the Pope; to Saint Claire of Moguer I promised I would keep an all-night vigil and have
a Mass said. And we all, each and every one of us, made a vow that as soon as we reached land we would go in our undershirts, in procession, to pray in a church where Our Lady is worshipped . . . That done, I wrote a very brief account of our journey, intended for Their Highnesses, and threw it into the sea in a barrel, in case our ships were wrecked. And to my misery and disgust, in the middle of this terrifying storm, several scoundrels accosted me to say that if we were going to sink, it was because, with my pitiful knowledge of seafaring, I had not loaded the ships with ballast as heavily as I should have, not foreseeing that when we returned, the barrels that had been full on the voyage out with beef and pickles and flour and wine, long since eaten and drunk, would be empty And as this last was sadly true, I accepted the humiliation of admitting it as a punishment for my lack of faith—wickedly pleased, nonetheless, and I couldn’t help it, that the swine Martín Alonso had been lost during the terrible night, that he couldn’t testify against me if we were spared from the dreadful fury of the elements . . . (Martín Alonso, driven by the wind, landed on the coast of Galicia, where he wrote the king and queen a letter that was filled to the brim with infamies: but I was favored by Divine Providence, which let me live to approach the Court, though bent under the weight of his calumnies. May the soul of that miserable little bastard be consumed in the flames of hell! . . .) As for me—and it is another charge against my conscience that weighs upon me in the hour of my final accounting—I don’t remember, no, I don’t remember—but perhaps it was obscured by my failing memory—having kept the promise I made to Saint Mary of Guadalupe, since so many cares and concerns, so many surprises deflected my steps, distracting me, when I arrived . . . And I think now that the many afflictions I have suffered since that time stemmed from that unpardonable omission.

  U

  nder a brilliant April sun, the peerless city of Seville welcomed me like a conquering prince returned from the grandest victory, with joy and jubilation, with banners and bells, with compliments showering down and tributes from the balconies, with the music of organs and the trumpets of heralds, the bustle of a Corpus Christi procession, and the noise of flutes and bagpipes and oboes. And after the rejoicing and the fiestas and the banquets and the balls, I received my greatest reward: a letter from Their Highnesses inviting me to court, which was in Barcelona at this time of year, and—even more important to me—directing me to start immediately to organize a new voyage to the lands I had discovered. Caesar entering Rome in a triumphal chariot could not have felt more proud than I! Reading between the lines of the letter, I thought I saw the satisfaction and praise of one who considered my achievement, in some sense, as a token of victory placed at the feet of his Lady by a knight, a hero like those whose deeds are celebrated in romances . . . Impatient to see her again, it didn’t take any more than that for me to start of£ with my boxes of trophies, those parrots that were still alive—a bit runny-nosed and lackluster after their long trip, I had to admit—and, especially, my little band of Indians. Though I must say that those Indians, their eyes full of hate, were the only cloud—black cloud—casting a dark shadow on the vast horizon stretching toward the west that had just been opened up for me again, and much more safely this time. For of the ten captives we had taken, three were at death’s door, and the physics that cure us—clysters, sweet drinks, suppositories, and leeches—do not help these men, who are prostrated by a cold, in agony, the life departing from them in fevers and shakes. For these three, it was quite obviously too late for the apothecary; it was that morbid hour when one must fetch the carpenter. As for the others, they seemed to be heading in the same direction, although their faces still brightened a little when I brought them a good jug of wine—something I was careful to do both morning and night. And the problem isn’t that they drink constantly to get drunk—which helps them bear the inevitable pain they feel because of their exile from their country—rather it’s that feeding them creates a difficult problem. To start with, they consider milk from a goat or a cow to be the most disgusting beverage any man could taste, they are amazed that we swallow this animal fluid, good only for nursing the beasts that fill them with misgivings and even fear, because before we came they had never seen these beasts with horns and udders, which are not found on their islands. Dried beef and salt fish repel them. They find our fruits repugnant. They spit out cabbage and turnips, and even the most succulent stews, claiming they’re inedible. They like only garbanzo beans, because they taste a little, but only a little—according to Diegito, the only one we have managed to teach a few words of Spanish—like a food from their country, maize, a few sacks of which I have carried along, but which I’ve always scorned, not considering it fit for civilized people, though it might, perhaps, be good enough for pigs and asses. For all that, I think wine, although they have grown all too fond of it, can sustain them through their stubborn fast and give them strength for the new journey that was now planned. But that still left the question of the clothes for their presentation to the sovereigns. Out of respect for Their Majesties, they couldn’t appear in court almost naked, the way they did in their own nation. And if they dressed the way we did, they wouldn’t look that different from certain Andalusians with tan complexions—or from Christians mixed with Moors, of which we have a few in Spain. Luckily, at this critical moment, I was visited by a Jewish tailor I had met the year before near the Puerta de la Judería in Lisbon, where he had a shop, and who now, having gone from circumcised to Genoan—like so many others!—found himself in the city. He advised me to put them in red breeches sewed with little gold threads (“That’s it . . . Perfect!” I said), loose shirts that expose their chests, which are smooth and hairless, and, on their heads, headpieces like tiaras, also of gold thread (“That’s it . . . Perfect!” I repeated, “as good as gold”), filled with exquisite feathers—although not from the birds on their islands—that drape gracefully down the backs of their heads, over their black manes, which grew quite a bit during our voyage, and which I would now have to wash and curry like the coat of a horse, on the morning of the day of the presentation.

  And the day arrived. All Barcelona was celebrating. Like a trader who enters a castle with a magnificent exhibition, I entered the palace where she awaited me, followed by the fabulous company that would perform the Spectacle of the Marvels of the Indies—first spectacle of its kind ever presented in the great theater of the universe—a company that I left in the bedroom, in an order determined several days before when I directed the rehearsals and arranged the characters. Escorted by heralds and ushers, I entered Their Majesties’ throne room, slowly, solemnly, with the tread of a conqueror, without losing my poise or being dazzled by the splendor of the ceremony or the applause that greeted me—particularly pleasing was the sound of the applause of the many who were now repenting ever having been my enemy. My compass and beacon, on this walk down the crimson carpet that led straight to the royal platform, was the face of my sovereign, illuminated at this moment by the most ineffable smile. After I kissed the royal hands, she bade me take a seat- me, the renowned Genoan, the Genoan with hidden roots and an ancestry that I alone knew—between Castile and Aragon; the grand entrance door opened again and, walking two by two, carrying them on high, the porters brought in my trophies. On large silver trays—very large to make my display seem more impressive—the GOLD: chunks of gold, almost as large as a man’s hand; delicate gold masks; gold figurines, devoted, no doubt, to some idolatry that for now I was very careful to keep quiet; little beads of gold; nuggets of gold; tiny plates of gold—not as much gold, to tell the truth, as I had hoped: gold that suddenly seemed too little gold, much too little gold, next to the jewels, the coats of arms, the embroidery that whirled around me, the gold tapestries, gold maces held by bearers, the gold borders of the canopy—too little gold, when all was said and done. Just the first glint of gold, behind which, far off in the distance, one can glimpse more gold, and more gold, and more gold . . . But now the Indians were entering—summoned by the captain who
blew the lion-tamer’s whistle that was used to tell them to do this or that—and on their hands and arms and shoulders they carried all the parrots that were still alive, more than twenty—all tremendously agitated by the movement and voices of those present for this occasion; besides, before the procession of marvels from across the sea made its entrance, I had given them many crumbs soaked in red wine, which made them raise such a hubbub that I was afraid they would suddenly start talking, repeating the bad words they had certainly heard on board the ship and during their stay in Seville. And after the Indians knelt down in front of Their Majesties, howling and sobbing, palsied, frenzied (begging the sovereigns to free them from the captivity in which I had enchained them, to return them to their homelands, although I explained that they were thrilled, trembling with joy, at being prostrate before the Spanish throne . . .), some of my sailors came in, carrying the skins of snakes and lizards, larger than any found here, and branches, dried leaves, and withered vegetation, which we displayed as examples of valuable spices, although nobody was really looking at them, all eyes were fixed on the prostrate Indians—who were still sobbing and howling—and on the green parrots who had started to vomit cheap red wine all over the royalties’ red carpet. Seeing that the spectacle was starting to get out of control, I sent the Indians out with their birds, and the sailors with their plants, and I got to my feet, facing Their Majesties, and showing my profile to the brilliant assembly that filled the room—which, I have to admit, was suffocatingly warm, and full of the sour smell of sweat-soaked silk, satin, and velvet—and I began to speak. I spoke slowly at first, describing the drama of the voyage, our arrival in the Indies, our encounter with its inhabitants. To describe these new lands, I evoked the beauty of Spain’s most celebrated regions, the sweetness—I knew what I was doing—of the fields of Córdoba, although I certainly moderated my tone when I compared the mountains of Hispaniola with the summits of Teide. I told of seeing three sirens, on the ninth day of January, in a place where there were numerous tortoises—ugly sirens, to tell the truth, and with the faces of men, not the beautiful, musical temptresses I had seen, like Ulysses (what a whopper!) off the coasts of Malagueta. Since it’s easy to keep on talking once you get started, I gradually became inspired by my own words, enlarging my gestures, stepping back to allow my voice to resound, listening to myself as I would to somebody else, and the names of the most splendid lands, both real and fabled, began to roll off my tongue. Every gleaming, glistening, glittering, dizzying, dazzling, exciting, inviting image in the hallucinatory vision of a prophet came unbidden to my mouth as if impelled by a diabolical interior energy. Without my willing it, Hispaniola was transfigured by this inner music, so that it no longer resembled Castile and Andalusia, oh no! it grew, it swelled, until it achieved the fabulous heights of Tarsus, of Ophir or Ophar, and finally reached the borders, which I had found at last—yes, found!—of the fabulous kingdom of Cipango. And there, in that very place, was the incredibly rich mine mentioned by Marco Polo, and I had come to announce the fact to this kingdom and to all of Christendom. Colchis, Land of Gold, had been found, not in a pagan myth this time, but in its consummate reality. And gold was noble, and gold was good: Genoans, Venetians, anyone who has pearls, precious stones, anything of great value, they all are willing to travel to the ends of the world to trade, to exchange these things for gold, gold, the greatest good; gold, the greatest treasure; whoever has gold can have anything in the world and can even attain paradise . . . And with this voyage of mine, this amazing voyage of mine, the prophecy of Seneca has been fulfilled. Now . . .