The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  I looked out through the blinds again. Beyond the Governors’ Palace, with its Grecian columns supporting a baroque cornice, I recognized the Second Empire facade of the theater where, for lack of more popular entertainment we had forgathered, under great crystal chandeliers, with the draped marbles of the Muses flanked by busts of Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Rossini, and Hérold. A curving stairway with rococo urns on the balustrade had led us to fhe red velvet salon, with golden dentils edging the balconies, where, under the lively chatter, the orchestra could be heard tuning up. Everybody seemed to know everybody else. The laughter ran along the boxes, from whose warm shadows emerged bare arms, hands putting into motion such survivals from the past century as mother-of-pearl opera glasses, lorgnettes, and feather fans. There was a kind of soft, powdered abundance to the flesh emerging from the décolletages, the uplifted bosoms, the shoulders that evoked the memory of cameos and lace corset-covers.

  I had hoped to be amused by the extravaganzas of opera presented in the grand manner of bravura, coloratura, fioritura. But the curtain had already gone up on the garden of Lammermoor Castle, and the outmoded scenography with its false perspectives, its claptrap, its trick devices had failed to arouse my irony. On the contrary, I felt myself yielding to an indefinable charm, a fabric of vague, remote memories and partly remembered longings. This great velvet rotunda, the generous décolletages, the lace handkerchief warmed in the bosom, the thick hair, the sometimes overpowering perfume; this stage where the singers, against a prodigious vegetation of hanging backdrops, profiled their arias with their hands clasped to their hearts; this complex of traditions, manners, attitudes, which could no longer be revived in a great modern city, was the magic world of the theater as my pale, ardent great-grandmother might have known it, she of the sensual yet veiled eyes, gowned in white satin in the portrait by Madrazo which filled my childhood dreams before my father fell on hard times and had to sell it.

  One afternoon when I had been alone in the house I had discovered in the bottom of a trunk an ivory-bound book with a silver clasp in which the lady of the portrait had kept her diary. On one page, under rose petals that time had turned the color of tobacco, I found the ecstatic description of a Gemma di Vergy sung in a theater in Havana that must have been the counterpart of the one I was seeing tonight. Negro coachmen in high boots and cockaded silk hat no longer waited at the door; the lanterns of corvettes did not rock in the harbor; nor would the performance conclude with a musical interlude. But there in the audience were the same faces flushed with pleasure at the romantic performance; the same lack of attention to everything but the stars’ arias; as soon as the music became unfamiliar, it served only as a background for a vast machinery of meaningful looks, vigilant glances, whispers behind fans, smothered laughs, gossip, flirtations, feigned disdain, whose rules I did not know, but which I watched with the envy of a child looking at a masked ball to which he has not been invited.

  At intermission time Mouche flatly stated that she could not take any more of it, for according to her, it might have been “Lucia as seen by Mme Bovary in Rouen.’ 7 Although there was something to what she said, I felt suddenly irritated by her habitual self-sufficiency, which made her adopt an attitude of hostility the moment she came into contact with anything that did not bear the stamp of approval of certain artistic circles she had frequented in Europe. She felt contempt for the opera not because something about it really grated on her very limited musical sensibility, but because it was one of the taboos of her generation. My subtle allusion to the Parma Opera in the days of Stendhal failing of its purpose to get her to go back to her seat, I left the theater in a huff. I felt the urge to start a quarrel with her to get the upper hand of a type of reaction that could spoil the best pleasures of this trip for me. I wanted to spike beforehand certain criticisms I could see coming, recalling the conversations, loaded with intellectual prejudices, that went on in her house.

  But we were soon confronted with a far darker night than that of the theater, a night that awed us with the quality of its silence, the solemnity of its star-studded presence. Any transient noise momentarily shattered it. Then it would coalesce again, filling halls and doorways, dense in the seemingly uninhabited open-windowed houses, weighing down the deserted streets with their heavy stone arcades. A sound rooted us where we stood, amazed, and we had to walk forward and stop several times to make sure of the wonder: the echo of our footsteps could be heard from the opposite sidewalk. In a square before a nondescript church, all shadows and stucco, there was a fountain of Tritons where a woolly dog stood on its hind legs drinking with a delightful lapping sound. The pointed hands of the clocks were in no hurry, and they marked time with a measure of their own in old belfries and municipal facades. Downhill, in the direction of the sea, the hubbub of the modern quarter of the city could be sensed; but for all the flashing of neon signs, the insignia of night haunts, it was clear that the real city, its soul and body, revealed itself in the habits and stones of this section.

  At the end of the street we came upon an old house with a wide portico and moss-covered roof, whose windows stood open, showing a drawing-room adorned with old pictures in gold frames. Pressing our faces against the grille, we could make out, beside an impressive general in shako and epaulets, a delicate painting of three ladies taking the air in a landau and a portrait of Taglioni with little butterfly wings at her waist. The lights of a rock-crystal chandelier were burning, but there was not a sign of a human presence in the corridors leading to other lighted rooms. It was as though preparations had been made a century before for a dance to which nobody came. Suddenly, from a piano to which the tropics had given the tone of a spinet, came the flowery prelude of a waltz for four hands. A breeze rippled the curtains and the whole drawing-room seemed to fade out in a whirl of floating tulle and lace.

  The spell broken, Mouche announced that she was tired. Just as I was being carried away by the charm of the night, which brought out, as in a palimpsest, the meaning of certain faded memories, she cut short my enjoyment of a peace in which time had ceased to exist, and which might have led me to an unweary dawn. Overhead, above the roof, the stars were perhaps tracing the vertices of Hydra, Argo, Sagittarius, Berenice’s Hair, facsimiles of which adorned Mouche’s studio. But it would have been a waste of time to ask her, for, like myself, she was ignorant of the exact position of any of the constellations except the Big and Little Dippers. Now, as I thought how ridiculous this ignorance was on the part of a person who made her living from the planets, I couldn’t help laughing as I turned toward her. She opened her eyes without awakening, looked at me without seeing me, gave a deep sigh, and turned toward the wall.

  I was tempted to go back to bed, but then I thought it would be a good thing to take advantage of her sleep to set out on my search for native instruments—the idea obsessed me—as I had decided to do the evening before. I knew that she would call my determination naive, to say the least. So I dressed quickly and left without awakening her.

  The sun, drenching the streets, reverberating off the windows, spinning shimmering threads over the water of the pools, was so strange and new for me that to face it I had to buy myself a pair of dark glasses. Next I tried to orient myself toward the neighborhood of the old colonial house, in the vicinity of which I felt there would be secondhand stores and strange shops. I set out up a street with narrow sidewalks, stopping here and there to look at the shop signs, which brought to mind handicrafts of bygone days: the flowery letters of Tutilimundi, the Bota de Oro, the Rey Midas, the Arpa Melodiosa, and the swaying planisphere of a secondhand-book dealer. On one corner a man was fanning the flame of a brazier over which a haunch of veal was roasting, studded with garlic, its fat sputtering into acrid smoke as he basted it with marjoram, lemo.n, and pepper. Farther off, sangaree and pineapple juice were for sale, and fried fish redolent of oil.

  Suddenly the breath of bread just out of the oven poured through the gratings of a basement in whose half-light men, white f
rom their hair to their sabots, were singing. I stopped in delighted surprise. I had long forgotten this morning presence of flour back there where bread, kneaded God only knows how and where, brought in by night in closed trucks as though it were some shameful thing, had ceased to be the bread one breaks with one’s hands, the bread the father hands around after he has blessed it, the bread that should be received with a gesture of gratitude before breaking its crust into the broad bowl of leek soup or sprinkling it with oil and salt to recover a taste which, more than the taste of bread with oil and salt, is the old Mediterranean taste already on the tongue of Ulysses’ comrades.

  This new meeting with flour, the discovery of a window displaying pictures of mulattoes dancing the marinera, made me forget what I had set out to look for in these strange streets. Here I stopped before the execution of the Emperor Maximilian; there I leafed through an old edition of Marmontel’s Les Incas, whose illustrations had a touch of the Masonic aesthetics of The Magic Flute. I listened to “Mambrú se va a la guerra” sung by children playing in a courtyard where the fragrance of boiled custard floated. And, attracted by the morning cool of an old cemetery, I wandered in the shade of its cypresses among tombs that lay forgotten among the grass and bluebells. Some of the graves displayed, behind glass dimmed by mold, daguerreotypes of the occupants who lay beneath the marble: a student with feverish eyes, a veteran of the Frontier Wars, a laurel-crowned poetess. I was looking at the monument to the victims of a river flood when the air, somewhere, was torn like a piece of waxed paper by the report of machine guns. Probably the students of a military academy at target practice. Silence followed, and the cooing of the doves puffing out their breasts as they circled the Roman urns was resumed.

  Esto, Fabio, ¡ay dolor!, que ves agora,

  campos de soledad, mustio collado,

  fueron un tiempo Itálica famosa.

  I repeated again and again these verses, fragments of which had been coming to my mind ever since I had arrived, and which finally emerged complete in my memory when the crackle of machine guns began again, louder this time. A boy ran past, followed by a barefoot, terrified woman carrying a basket of wet clothes in her arms, who seemed to be fleeing some great danger. Somewhere behind the walls a voice cried out: “It’s begun! It’s begun!” A little uneasy, I left the cemetery and started back toward the modern part of the city. I quickly noted that the streets were empty and that the stores had closed their doors and rolled down their iron shutters with a speed that boded no good. I was reaching for my passport, as though the letters stamped between its covers had some magic power, when an outcry pulled me up short, now really frightened, behind a pillar. A screaming mob, spurred by fear, was pouring out of one of the avenues, knocking down everything in its path to get out of the range of heavy gunfire.

  It was raining broken glass. Bullets were rebounding from the metal lampposts, making them vibrate like organ pipes hit by a rock. The snap of a high-tension wire cleared the street, whose asphalt caught fire in spots. Near me a peddler of oranges fell on his face, dropping his fruit, which rolled out, flying into the air at the impact of a low bullet. I ran to the nearest corner, taking refuge in an arcade from whose pillars hung lottery tickets left behind in their vendor’s flight. Only a bird market separated me from the rear of the hotel. I decided to run for it after a bullet just missed my shoulder and perforated the window of a drugstore. Leaping over crates, stepping on canaries and hummingbirds, knocking down cages of terrified parrots, I finally made it to one of the service doors that had been left open. A toucan, dragging a broken wing, came hopping after me, as though seeking my protection. Perched on the handlebar of an abandoned tricycle, a haughty macaw sat all alone in the middle of the deserted square, taking the sun.

  I went up to our room. Mouche was still asleep, her arms around a pillow, her nightgown around her hips, her feet tangled up in the sheet. My mind at rest about her, I went down to the hall to find out what was happening.

  The talk was of revolution. But this meant little to one who, like myself, was completely ignorant of the history of the country aside from its Discovery and Conquest and the voyages of several friars who had made mention of the musical instruments of its primitive inhabitants. So I began to ask questions of those who, judging from their excitement and from the amount they talked, seemed well-informed. But I very soon saw that each one gave his own version of events, referring by name to personages who meant absolutely nothing to me.

  Then I tried to find out the position, the objectives of the conflicting groups, without any better results. Just as I thought it was clear that it was a movement of Socialists against Conservatives, of Communists against Catholics, the cards were shuffled, positions were reversed, and the name-dropping began all over again, as though what was taking place was a matter of persons rather than parties. I repeatedly found myself plunged by my ignorance into what seemed episodes of Guelphs and Ghibellines because of the air of a family affair about the whole thing, a fight between brothers, a quarrel between people who had been friends the day before. When, following my customary line of reasoning, I tried to figure out what would seem a typical political conflict of our epoch, I found that I was dealing with something more akin to a religious war. Because of an incredible chronological discrepancy of ideals, the conflict between the conservatives and those who seemed to represent extremist tendencies gave me the impression of a kind of battle between people living in different centuries.

  “That’s very acute,” replied a lawyer wearing an outmoded frock coat, who seemed to accept what was going on with surprising calm. “You must remember that we are accustomed to living with Rousseau and the Inquisition, with the Immaculate Conception and Das Kapital. . . .”

  Just then an agitated Mouche appeared. She had been awakened by the sirens of ambulances speeding past in mounting numbers, cutting through the bird market, where, meeting the seeming obstacle of the piled-up cages, the drivers slammed on their brakes, skidding into the last of the mockingbirds and troupials. At the disagreeable prospect of being shut up in the hotel, my girl became enraged at the events that had upset all her plans. In the bar the foreigners had organized irritable card and dice games washed down with drinks while they growled about half-breed states that always had a ruckus on tap.

  At this point we learned that several of the waiters had disappeared from the hotel. We saw them go by a little later under the arcades across the street, outfitted with Mausers and bandoleers. When we saw that they were still wearing their white service jackets, we joked about their military bearing. But as they reached the first corner the two who were marching ahead suddenly doubled over, hit in the belly by a spray from a machine gun. Mouche gave a cry of horror, clasping her hands over her own middle. We all backed away in silence to the end of the foyer, unable to take our eyes off that prostrate flesh on the reddened pavement, indifferent now to the bullets that were still finding their mark in it, stamping new designs of blood on the white drill. The jokes we had been making a few minutes before now seemed contemptible to me. If they died in these countries for reasons I could not understand, that did not make death any less death. In the rubble of ruins in which I felt no conqueror’s pride, I had more than once stepped on the bodies of men who had died in defense of convictions no worse than those upheld here.

  Just then several tanks—from our war surplus—rolled by, and when the chatter of their ammunition belts died away, it seemed that the street fighting had taken on new intensity. In the vicinity of Philip II’s fortress the reports at moments were fused in a solid din that made it impossible to distinguish single explosions, shaking the air with a steady burst that sounded nearer or retreated according to the wind, like the pounding of a heavy sea. At times, however, there came a sudden pause. It seemed that everything was over. The sound of a sick child’s crying, the crowing of a rooster, the slamming of a door, could then be heard. Then suddenly there came the chatter of a machine gun, and the uproar began all over again, a
lways underscored by the ear-splitting wail of the ambulances. A mortar had just gone into action near the old Cathedral, an occasional shell striking the bells with a sonorous hammer stroke.

  “Eh bien, c’est gai” remarked a woman standing near us in a deep, musical voice, with a husky accent, who introduced herself as a Canadian and a painter, the divorced wife of a Central American diplomat. I took advantage of Mouche’s having somebody to talk with to have a quick one to make me forget the presence of those corpses stiffening there on the sidewalk. After a cold lunch that held no promise of coming feasts, the afternoon hours slipped by with amazing speed, what with reading that left no memory, card games, conversations carried on with the mind elsewhere, all to cover up a general uneasiness.

  When night came, Mouche and I, shut up in our room, started drinking heavily to keep from thinking too much of what was going on around us. The necessary detachment finally achieved, we let our bodies take over, and discovered a sharp, new voluptuousness in making love while others about us were playing the game of death. There was something of the frenzy of the lovers in the dances of death in our effort to hold one another closer—to plumb impossible depths—while the bullets whistled past the blinds or buried themselves, snicking off the plaster, in the dome that crowned the building. We finally fell asleep on the pale carpet. And this was the first night for a long time that brought rest without eyeshade or drugs.

  (Friday, the 9th)

  VI/ The next day, as we could not go out, we tried to adjust ourselves to the reality of a beleaguered castle, a quarantined ship, which events had forced upon us. But instead of sloth, the magic situation that reigned in the streets manifested itself within our protecting walls in an urge to do something. Those having a skill tried to set up a workroom or office, as though to prove to the rest that the show must go on no matter what. On the orchestra platform of the dining-room a pianist executed the trills and mordents of a classic rondeau, trying to coax clavichord sonorities from the piano keys. The members of a ballet company did exercises at the barre, while the première danseuse practiced slow arabesques on the waxed floor, from which the tables had been moved against the wall. All over the building typewriters clicked. In the writing-room businessmen riffled the contents of their briefcases. Before the mirror in his room, the Austrian Kappellmeister, who had been invited to the city by the Philharmonic Society, conducted Brahms’s Requiem with impressive gestures, bringing a vast imaginary chorus in on its exact entrances. Not a single magazine or detective story or anything readable remained on the newspaper stand.