The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  Copyright © 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1984 by Andrea Esteban Carpentier

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Spanish under the title Los Pasos Perdidos by E.D.I.A.P.S.A., México, D.F., 1953

  This edition first published in 1989 by Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Collins Publishers, Toronto

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 56-8906

  Printed in the United States of America

  Quotations from the Odyssey are given in the translation by T. E. Shaw by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright © 1932 by Bruce Rogers

  Contents

  Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Note

  Even though the site of the first chapters of this book does not call for any specific location; even though the Latin American capital and the provincial cities that appear later on are mere prototypes to which I have not given a local habitation because the elements which make them up are common to many countries, I feel called upon to make it clear, to satisfy the reader’s natural curiosity, that beyond the place called Puerto Anunciación, the landscape reproduces the very precise vision of little-known and rarely, if ever, photographed places.

  The river in question, which, earlier in the book, might be any great river of America, specifically becomes the Orinoco in its upper reaches. The location of the Greeks’ mine might be not far from its confluence with the Vichada. The passage with the triple incision in the form of a V marking the entrance to the secret channel really exists, with the sign, at the entrance of the Guacharaca Channel, some two hours’ sail up the Vichada. It leads, through vaulted roofs of vegetation, to a village of Guahibo Indians whose wharf lies in a hidden cove.

  The storm took place at a spot that might be Raudal del Muerto. The Capital of the Forms is Mount Autana, with its air of a Gothic cathedral. From this point on, the landscape becomes that of the Great Savanna, a vision of which is to be found in different portions of Chapters iii and iv. Santa Mónica de los Venados is what Santa Elena del Uariren might have been in the early days of its founding, when the easiest way to get to the young city was a seven-day trip from Brazil up a turbulent river. Since then many such settlements have sprung up—still without geographic location—in distant regions of the American jungle. Not long ago two famous French explorers discovered one of them, of which nobody had heard, which bears a striking resemblance to Santa Mónica de los Venados, one of whose inhabitants’ experience was that of Marcos.

  The chapter of the Conquistadors’ Mass took place in a Piaroa village close to Mount Autana. The Indians described in episode XXIII are Shirishanas from the Alto Caura. An explorer made a recording—the record forms part of the archives of Venezuelan folklore—of the dirge of the shaman.

  The Adelantado, Montsalvatje, Marcos, Fray Pedro, are personages every traveler encounters in the great theater of the jungle. They all represent a reality, as does the myth of El Dorado, which is nourished by the deposits of gold and precious stones. As for Yannes, the Greek miner who traveled with the Odyssey as his sole possession, I should like to say that I have not even changed his name. I might add that, along with the Odyssey, he admired above everything else in the world the Anabasis of Xenophon.

  A.C.

  The Lost Steps

  Chapter One

  And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

  —DEUTERONOMY XXVIII, 23

  I/ Four years and seven months had passed since I had seen the white-pillared house, with the austere pediment that gave it the severity of a courthouse; now, among the furniture and decorations, whose positions never varied, I had the distressing sensation that time had turned back. The claret curtain beside the wrought-iron lantern; the empty birdcage next to the rose trellis. In the background, the elms that I had helped to plant during the first enthusiastic days when we had all lent our hands to the common enterprise; alongside the scaly treetrunk, the stone bench that echoed woodenly under my heeltaps. To the rear, the river walk, with dwarf magnolias and ornate New Orleans-style iron fencing. Now, as on the first night, I walked under the portico, listening to my steps’ hollow ring, and took the shortcut through the garden to where the groups of branded slaves, the women with the skirts of their riding habits over their arms, and the ragged, wounded, clumsily-bandaged soldiers were awaiting their cues in the shadows stinking of varnish, of felt, and of the same old frock coats with new sweat added to old.

  I stepped out of the light just in time, for the hunter’s shot sounded and a bird fell to the stage from the second drop. My wife’s crinoline swooped past my head—I was standing exactly where she made her entrance, crowding the already narrow passageway. So as to be less in the way, I went to her dressing-room, and there time and the present flowed together, everything bearing witness to the fact that four years and seven months do not go by without taking their toll. The laces of her costume for the climax had grown dingy; the black taffeta of the dance scene had lost the stiffness that had made it rustle like a whorl of dry leaves at every curtsy. Even the room’s walls looked bedraggled, with repeated traces of fingermarks in the same places, and revealed their long association with make-up, withered flowers, and disguise.

  As I sat on the couch that had turned from sea-green to mold-green, I realized with a shock how hard it must have become for Ruth to bear this prison of lumber and contrivance, with its air-swung bridges, its string cobwebs, its artificial trees. In the opening days of the run of this Civil War drama, when we had all been trying to help the young author working with a company just out of the experimental theater, we had foreseen at most a run of twenty nights. We were now giving the fifteen-hundredth performance, and the actors—whose contracts included an indefinitely renewable clause—had had no chance for escape since the play had come under professional management, turning the generous, youthful enterprise into a big-business venture. For Ruth this play had become a Devil’s Island instead of an escape mechanism, a gateway to the multitudinous world of the Drama. Her brief fugues in the wig of Portia, the draperies of one of the Iphigenias, brought her little relief, for under each costume the eyes of the spectators sought the familiar crinoline, and in the voice pretending to be that of Antigone they heard the contralto tones of Arabella, who was on stage at that moment, learning correct Latin pronunciation from Booth by repeating the phrase “Sic semper tyrannis” in a scene that the critics had called astoundingly intelligent.

  It would have taken the genius of a tragedienne such as the world has never seen for Ruth to rid herself of the parasite that was sucking her blood, that occupant of her very body, grappled to her flesh like an incurable disease. There were times when she longed to tear up her contract. But in the profession one paid for such rebellious acts with long periods of “leisure,’ , and Ruth, who had begun to say her lines when she was thirty, now found herself crowding thirty-five and repeating the same words, the same gestures, every night of the week, every Sunday, Saturday, and holiday afternoon, not to mention summer tours. The success of the play was slowly effacing its interpreters, who, in their unvarying costumes, were aging before the eyes of the audiences. The day after one of them had died one night of an infarct shortly after the curtain descended, the others in the company had appeared at the cemetery in a display of mourning which gave them—probably without their even being aware of it—something of the air of a daguerreotype. Growing more embittered, increasingly unsure of really
triumphing in a career that she instinctively loved in spite of everything, my wife had been caught in the automatism of her enforced work just as I had been caught in that of my job. Earlier she had at least tried, in a search for inspiration, to protect her temperament by a continuous review of the great roles she hoped to interpret some day: Nora, Judith, Medea, Tessa. But this illusion had succumbed to the melancholy of the monologue declaimed before the mirror.

  Unable to work out any normal arrangement for meshing our lives—an actress’s hours are not those of an office worker—we had finally wound up sleeping apart. Late on Sunday morning I used to get into her bed for a while, fulfilling what I regarded as a husband’s duty, though without ever knowing whether I was really interpreting Ruth’s desires. Probably she, too, felt obliged to maintain this weekly practice to honor the obligation she had assumed by signing our marriage license. As for me, I was motivated by the thought that I should not neglect an urge I was in a position to satisfy, thus silencing for a week certain twinges of conscience. The fact was that our embrace, though somewhat flat, retightened each time the links loosened by our unparallel lives. The warmth of our bodies restored, like a brief return to the home of our early days, a kind of intimacy. We watered the geranium that had been neglected since the previous Sunday; we moved a picture; we cast up household accounts. But the bells of a near-by carillon soon reminded us that the prison shades were closing in. When I left my wife on the stage for her matinee, I had the feeling that I was returning her to a prison in which she was serving a life sentence. The shot rang out; the stuffed bird fell out of the second drop; the Living-Together of the Seventh Day had come to its end.

  Today, however, there had been a change in the Sunday rule as a result of the pill I had swallowed toward daybreak to get to sleep quickly—I could no longer drop off the way I used to by just covering my eyes with the sleep shade Mouche had recommended. When I woke up, I noticed that my wife had left, and the confusion of underwear hanging out of open dresser drawers, theatrical make-up tubes tossed into the corner of the room, compacts and bottles thrown everywhere, told me of an unexpected trip.

  Now, followed by applause, Ruth was coming off stage and hurriedly unhooking her basque. She shut the door behind her with a kick of her heel which, through repetition, had dented the wood. The crinoline, which she pulled off over her head, billowed from wall to wall on the carpet. As she emerged from the lace, her pale body attracted me like something new and pleasant, and I was about to caress her when her nakedness disappeared under velvet slipping over her head and smelling like the contents of a ragbag my mother kept in the back of her mahogany wardrobe when I was a boy.

  I felt a flash of rage at the stupid profession of make-believe which was always coming between our bodies like the angel’s sword in the legends of the saints, rage at the drama that had divided our house, driving me to the other one whose walls were decorated with astral figures, and where my desire always found a warm welcome. And to think that it had been to help this career in its difficult early days, to increase the happiness of the one I then loved so much, that I had deflected my destiny, seeking material security in the job that had made me as much of a prisoner as she was. Now, with her back turned, Ruth was talking toward me into the mirror while smearing her mobile face with grease paint. She was explaining that after this performance the company was leaving immediately on a tour to the other coast and that for this reason she had brought her luggage to the theater.

  She asked me absent-mindedly about the preview of the film the night before. I was going to tell her about its success and remind her that the end of this work meant the beginning of my vacation, when there was a rap on the door. Ruth got up, and I saw before me once more the woman who had stopped being my wife to become the leading lady: she tucked an artificial rose into her waist and, with a gesture of excuse, walked toward the stage, on which the Italianate curtain had just opened, stirring a breeze that smelled of dust and old wood. She turned toward me again as though saying good-by and entered the dwarf magnolia path.

  I was not in a mood to wait till the next intermission, when she would change from velvet to taffeta and spread new make-up over the old. I went back home, where the disorder of the hasty departure was still the presence of the absent one. The shape of her head was indented into the pillow; on the night-table stood a half-empty glass of water with a sediment of green drops, and a book open at the end of a chapter. My hand touched a spot still damp with spilled lotion. A sheet torn from the calendar pad, which I had not noticed before, told me of the unexpected trip: “Kisses, Ruth. PS. There’s a bottle of sherry in the desk.” I had a desolate sense of loneliness. This was the first time in eleven months that I had found myself, except when asleep, without something that had to be done right away, without having to dash for fear of being late somewhere. I was far from the excitement and confusion of the studios, in a silence unbroken by mechanical music or megaphone voices. Nothing was hurrying me and, for that very reason, I felt a vague threat hanging over me.

  In that room deserted by the person whose perfumes were still floating in the air, I found myself disconcerted at the possibility of talking to myself. I caught myself in a whispered dialogue. I went back to bed and, staring at the ceiling, summoned up my last years, seeing them pass, autumn to Easter, blizzard to sticky asphalt, without time to live them, knowing by the signs in a restaurant window that the wild ducks were back, that oysters were in season, or that it was chestnut time. Sometimes my awareness of the passing of the seasons came from the red paper bells that appeared in store windows or the truck-loads of pine trees whose smell transfigured the streets for a second or two. There were gaps of weeks in the chronicle of my existence, seasons that left with me no real memory, no unusual sensation, no enduring emotion; days when every gesture left me with the obsession that I had done the same thing before under identical circumstances—that I had been sitting in the same corner, that I had been telling the same story, looking at the schooner imprisoned in the glass of a paperweight.

  When my birthday was celebrated among the same faces, in the same places, with the same song sung in chorus, the thought invariably struck me that the only difference between my previous birthday and this one was the extra candle on the cake, which tasted exactly like the last one. Ascending and descending the hill of days, with the same stone on my back, I kept going through a momentum acquired in jerks and spasms, but which sooner or later would end on a date that might be on this year’s calendar. But to evade this, in the world that was my lot, was as impossible as trying to revive today certain epics of heroes or saints. We had fallen upon the era of the Wasp-Man, the No-Man, when souls were no longer sold to the Devil, but to the Bookkeeper or the Galley Master.

  Realizing that rebellion would be futile after an uprooting that had made me live two adolescences—one left across the sea and one that had ended here—I saw no way of finding any freedom except in the disorder of my nights when any excuse sufficed for abandoning myself to repeated excesses. By day my soul was sold to the Bookkeeper—I jeered at myself—but the Bookkeeper did not know that at night I fared forth on strange journeys through the mazes of a city invisible to him, a city within a city, with dwellings like the Venusberg and the House of the Constellations for erasing the memory of day when a vicious caprice aroused by drink took me to secret apartments where personal identity was left at the door.

  Because I was chained to my technique among clocks, chronographs, and metronomes in windowless, artificially lighted rooms lined with felt and soundproofed, my instinct, when at dark I found myself in the street, was to seek pleasures that would make me forget the passing of the hours. I drank and took my ease, turning my back on the clocks until drink and ease laid me low beside an alarm clock in a sleep that I tried to thicken by covering my eyes with a black mask that must have given me, while I slept, the look of a masked bandit in repose.

  The bizarre image put me into a good humor. I tossed off a big glass
of sherry, determined to silence the one who was thinking too much in my brain, and the effects of the previous evening’s drinking were revived by the wine. I stood at the window in Ruth’s room, where her perfumes were being dispelled by a penetrating smell of acetone. Summer had arrived behind the haze glimpsed as I woke up, ushered in by ships’ sirens calling to one another from river to river above the skyscrapers. Overhead, into the thinning mist, rose the peaks of the city: the patinaless spires of the Christian churches, the dome of the Greek Orthodox church, the large hospitals where White Eminences officiated beneath classical entablatures designed by those architects who, early in the century, sought to lose their way in an increase of verticality. Solid and silent, the funeral parlor with its multiple corridors seemed a reply in gray—with a synagogue and concert hall between—to the huge maternity hospital whose bare façade displayed a row of identical windows that I used to count on Sunday mornings from my wife’s bed when topics of conversation ran low. From the asphalt pavement rose a bluish haze of gasoline laced with acrid smells from garbage cans in courts where an occasional panting dog lay like a skinned rabbit, trying to find a cool spot on the hot floor. The carillon was hammering out an Ave María.

  I was seized by an unwonted curiosity to know which saint was being honored that day. “June 4, St. Francis of Carraciolo,” said the Vatican edition of the volume in which I once studied the Gregorian chants. He was completely unknown to me. I looked up the book of the Lives of the Saints, printed in Madrid, from which my mother used to read to me during pleasant minor ailments that kept me away from school. It said nothing about Francis Carraciolo. But I happened to open to a section with a series of devout titles: Rose receives visits from heaven; Rose wrestling with the Devil; The miracle of the Image that Sweats. And a border festooned with Latin words: Sanctae Rosae Limanae, Virginis. Patronae principalis totius Americae Latinae. And these impassioned verses of the saint, addressed to the Spouse: