The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  When I found out that he was Greek—which explained his complete omission of articles when he talked—I was on the point of asking him, as a joke, if he was one of the Seven against Thebes. But just then Mouche strolled over, her air indifferent, as though she had no idea why our hands were all cut up. I made some veiled reproaches that did not begin to express my irritation. She seated herself across the table, paying no attention to what I had said, and began to look over the Greek—who was now so respectful that he moved his bench away, not to be too close to her—with an attention that seemed to me a deliberate challenge at such a time. To the apologies of the Diamond-Hunter, who called himself a “damn-fool brute,” she answered that the incident was of no importance. I looked at Rosario. She was watching me out of the tail of her eye with a kind of ironic gravity that I was at a loss to interpret. I tried to begin some kind of conversation that would get us away from what had happened, but I could think of nothing to say.

  Mouche, meanwhile, had moved closer to the Greek with such a tense, provocative smile that my temples began to throb with rage. We had just got out of a mess that might have had serious consequences, and here she was, trying her wiles on the miner who half an hour earlier had taken her for a prostitute. This attitude was so literary, so much a part of the spirit that glorified sailors’ taverns and foggy waterfronts, that she suddenly struck me as being an utter fool in her inability to throw off the clichés of her generation when confronted with any real situation. She had to pick out a hippocampe rather than an article of colonial handicraft because of Rimbaud; she had to scoff at a romantically staged opera which truly caught the fragrance of the garden of Lammermoor; and she could not see that the prostitute of the novels of Evasion had been transformed here into a mixture of a carnival wench and a St. Mary of Egypt without odor of sanctity.

  I looked at her with what must have been such a strange air that Rosario, fearful that I was going to start up the fight again because I was jealous, stepped into the breach to placate me with a phrase that was a cross between proverb and epigram: “When a man fights it should be to defend his home.” I do not know what Rosario meant by my “home”; but she was right if she was trying to say what I thought I understood: that Mouche was not my “home.” On the contrary, she was that loud and willful woman the Bible speaks of whose feet abide not in her house.

  The phrase threw a bridge across the table between Rosario and myself, and at that moment I felt the bond of a sympathy that perhaps would have suffered to see me defeated again. Moreover, with every hour the girl was taking on stature in my eyes as I noticed how she established links with her surroundings. Mouche, on the contrary, was proving utterly alien, revealing a total lack of adjustment between herself and everything around her. An aura of exoticism was thickening around her, creating a distance between her and the others, between her acts, her behavior, and the norms of conduct here. Little by little she was turning into something foreign, incongruous, eccentric, which attracted attention in the same way the turbans of the ambassadors of the Sublime Porte aroused wonder at the Christian courts.

  Rosario, in contrast, was like a St. Cecilia or St. Lucy back in her rightful setting in a restored old stained-glass window. With the passing of morning into afternoon and afternoon into evening, she grew more authentic, more real, more clearly outlined against a background that affirmed its constants as we approached the river. Relationships became established between her flesh and the ground we were treading, relationships proclaimed by sun-darkened skins, by the similarity of the visible hair, by a unity of forms giving the common stamp of works from the same potter’s wheel to the waists, shoulders, thighs that were praised there. I felt myself more and more drawn to Rosario, who grew more beautiful by the hour—in contrast to Mouche, who was receding into the distance she had created—and everything she said or expressed seemed right to me. And yet, as I looked at her as a woman, I felt myself clumsy, awkward, realizing my own strangeness in the face of an innate dignity that seemed invulnerable to the easy approach.

  It was not only the broken bottles that were raised here to form a wall of glass that spoke a warning to the hands; it was the thousand books I had read and of which she knew nothing; it was her beliefs, habits, superstitions, ideas of which I knew nothing and which, nevertheless, formed the basis for vital beliefs as valid as my own. My formation, her prejudices, all that she had been taught, all that she valued, at that moment seemed to me irreconcilable factors. I kept telling myself that none of all this had any bearing on the ever-possible coupling of the body of a man and a woman, and yet I knew that an entire culture, with its deformations and taboos, separated me from that forehead behind which there was probably not the haziest notion of the fact that the earth was round or of the position of the different countries on the map. This came to me as I recalled her beliefs about the one-legged deity of the woods. And as I saw the little gold cross she wore about her neck, I thought to myself that the only common ground of understanding we might have shared, our faith in Christ, had been abandoned by my paternal forebears long before, ever since they, Huguenots expelled from Savoy by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had gone over to the Encyclopédie in the person of one of my great-grandfathers, a friend of Baron Holbach. They had preserved the family Bibles without any longer believing in their content, but because of a certain poetic quality they possessed. . . .

  Another shift of miners invaded the tavern. The scarlet women emerged from the back rooms, tucking away the earnings of their first round. To put an end to the ambiguous situation that was making those of us at the table uneasy, I suggested that we take a walk down to the river. The Diamond-Hunter seemed embarrassed by the insinuating attentions of Mouche, who, without listening to him, made him relate his adventures in the jungle in such halting French that he was never able to conclude a phrase. He seemed relieved at my suggestion, bought some bottles of cold beer, and led us down a straight street that was swallowed up in the night far from the glare of the fires.

  We soon reached the bank of the river, which ran in the darkness with the vast, steady, deep sound of a mass of waters dividing the land. It was not the noisy chatter of the slender streams, nor the splash of falls, nor the cool purling of brooks I had so often heard by night on other banks. It was the steady drive, the genesial rhythm of a descent beginning hundreds and hundreds of miles upstream in union with other rivers that had come from still farther away with all the volume of their cataracts and springs. In the darkness it seemed as though the water, which was always pushing water, had no other bank, and that from now on the sound of it would drown everything to the ends of the earth.

  Walking along in silence, we came to a cove—more like a backwater—which was a graveyard of old beached ships with rudders adrift and decks noisy with frogs. Among them was an ancient sailer of noble cut, with a figurehead in carved wood representing Amphitrite, her bare breasts emerging from sails folded back like wings. We stopped near the hull, almost under the figure that seemed to be flying over our heads. Lulled by the cool of the night and the monotonous sound of the moving waters, we sat down with our backs against the gravel bank. Rosario let down her hair and began to comb it slowly, with a gesture so intimate, so indicative of the hour of sleep, that I did not venture to speak to her. Mouche, on the other hand, kept up her silly chatter, asking the Greek questions, receiving his answers with shrill laughter, without seeming aware of the fact that the elements of the setting in which we found ourselves made up one of those unforgettable stage designs rarely encountered. The figurehead, the flames, the river, the abandoned boats, the constellations—nothing that met the eye seemed to touch her. I think this was the moment when her presence began to weigh on me like a load that grew heavier each day.

  (Wednesday, the 13th)

  XI/ Silence is an important word in my vocabulary. Working with music, I have used it more than men in other professions. I know how one can speculate with silence, measure it, set it apart. But then, sitti
ng on that rock, I was living silence: a silence that came from so far off, compounded of so many silences, that a word dropped into it would have taken on the clangor of creation. Had I said anything, had I talked to myself, as I often do, I would have frightened myself.

  The sailors down below were cutting grass for the stud bulls that were traveling with us. Their voices did not reach me. Without thought of them I looked out over the vast savanna, whose boundaries dissolved in a faint circular darkening of the sky. From my vantage point of rock and grass, I took in, almost in its totality, a circumference that formed a perfect, a complete part of the planet on which I lived. I no longer had to raise my eyes to find a cloud: those motionless cirri, that seemed as though they had always been there, were within reach of the hand that shaded my eyelids. Here and there in the distance a thick, solitary tree stood out, always flanked by a cactus like a tall candelabrum of green stone, on which unmoving, heavy hawks rested like heraldic birds. Nothing makes a noise, nothing collides with nothing, nothing moves or vibrates. When a fly in its flight crashed into a spider web, its buzz of horror took on a sound of thunder. Then the air grew calm again from horizon to horizon, without a sound.

  I had been there more than an hour without moving, knowing how futile it was to move when one was always at the center of that which was contemplated. Far, far off, a deer appeared among the rushes by a spring. It paused, its head nobly poised, so motionless against the flat surface that it had something of the air of a monument, a totemic symbol. It was like the mythical ancestor of men not yet born; like the founder of a clan that would convert its antlers, fastened to a pole, into coat of arms, hymn, standard. Catching my scent on the breeze, it moved off with measured step unhurriedly, leaving me alone with the world.

  I turned toward the river. So vast was its stream that the torrents, the whirlpools, the falls that perturbed its relentless descent were fused in the unity of a pulse that had throbbed, from dry season through rainy season, with the same rests and beats since before man was invented. We were embarking that morning, at dawn, and I had spent long hours looking at the banks, without taking my eyes for too long from the narration of Fray Servando de Castillejos, who had brought his sandals here three centuries ago. His quaint prose was still valid. Where the author mentioned a rock with the profile of an alligator high on the right bank, there it was, high on the right bank. Where the chronicler spoke with amazement of seeing gigantic trees, I had seen gigantic trees, descendants of his trees, sprung up in the same spot, housing the same birds, blasted by the same lightning.

  Within the range of my vision, the river entered through a kind of cut, a rent in the western horizon; it broadened out where I was sitting until the opposite bank became a greened blur of trees, and it emerged as it entered, splitting the dawn horizon to empty on the other slope, where the proliferation of its innumerable islands began, a hundred leagues from the ocean. Granary, source of waters, pathway, it had no regard for human activity, set no value on individual haste. Rail and road had been left behind. One traveled with the stream or against it. In either case one had to adjust to immutable rhythms. Here man’s travels were governed by the Code of the Rains. I noticed that I, to whom the measuring of time was a mania, shackled to the metronome by vocation and to the clock by profession, had stopped thinking of the hour, gauging the height of the sun by hunger or sleep. The discovery that I had not wound my watch made me laugh out loud, alone there on that timeless savanna. A covey of quail rose around me; the captain of the Manatí called me aboard with shouts that sounded like chanteys, arousing caws on every side.

  I stretched out again on the bales of hay under the broad canvas awning, with the bulls on one side of me and the Negress cooks on the other. The sweating Negresses, singing as they pounded garlic in a mortar, the rutting bulls, and the acrid smell of alfalfa blended into an odor that left me as though intoxicated. Nothing about that smell could be called agreeable. And yet it invigorated me as though in truth it fulfilled a hidden need of my organism. I was like the peasant who returns to his ancestral fields after years in the city and breaks into tears as he sniffs the manure-laden breeze. It reminded me—I just remembered—of the back yard of my childhood: there, too, were a sweating Negress pounding garlic and singing, and cattle grazing near by.

  And above all—above all!—there was that willow basket, the vessel of my voyages with María del Carmen, which smelled like the alfalfa in which I was burying my face with almost painful emotion.

  Mouche, whose hammock was swung to catch the breeze, was talking to the Greek miner, and knew nothing of that spot, which was like an attic and a cubby-hole. Rosario, on the contrary, often climbed up to that pile of bales, undisturbed by an occasional shower filtering through the canvas and cooling the new-cut hay. She would stretch out some distance from me, smiling as she buried her teeth in a fruit. I admired the courage of this woman who, without hesitation or fear, was making a trip that the directors of the Museum for which I worked considered a hazardous undertaking. This unflinching temper of women seemed common there. In the stern a mulatto whose body was that of a young girl was bathing, pouring buckets of water over her flowered nightdress. She was on her way to meet her lover, a gold-prospector, at the headwaters of an almost unexplored tributary of the river. Another, dressed in mourning, was going to try her luck as a prostitute—with the hope of rising from prostitute to kept woman—in a village near the jungle, where famine is not uncommon during the flood months.

  I regretted more and more having brought Mouche on this trip. I would have liked to strike up an intimacy with the crew, eating their sailor’s fare, which they thought too coarse for refined palates, getting to know those strong-limbed resolute women better, and drawing out their stories. But most of all I would have wished to be free to know Rosario better, whose deeper being eluded the probing procedures I had used up to that hour in my dealings with women, whom I found pretty much alike. At every step I was afraid of offending her, annoying her, taking too many familiarities with her, or making her the object of attentions that might seem to her silly or unmanly. There were moments when it occurred to me that these interludes among the cattle pens, where nobody could see us, called for a determined move on my part; everything seemed to invite it, and yet I lacked the courage.

  Nevertheless, I noticed that the men on board treated the women with a kind of rough and ready fellowship that seemed to please them. But these people had their rules, their code of behavior, of which I was ignorant. Yesterday when Rosario saw a shirt I had bought myself in one of the best shops in the world she began to laugh, saying that such garments were for women, not men. When I was with her I was always afraid of seeming ridiculous, a fear that could not be conjured away by the thought that “they don’t know,” for here they were the ones who knew. Mouche was unaware of the fact that though I pretended to keep an eye on her, if I acted as though I cared whether she talked to the Greek or not, it was because I imagined that Rosario felt it my duty to watch over the woman who was my companion on the trip. There were times when it seemed to me that a glance, a gesture, a word, whose meaning eluded me, was an invitation. I climbed up on the bales and waited. But it was then that I waited in vain. The rutting bulls bellowed, the Negresses sang to excite and tantalize the sailors, the smell of alfalfa intoxicated me. Temples and sex throbbing, I closed my eyes and fell into the idiotic frustration of erotic dreams.

  At sundown we tied up to a makeshift pier of piles driven into the mud. As we came into a village where the talk was of wrangling and lassos, I realized that we had come to the Lands of the Horse. First of all, the smell of the circus ring, of sweaty withers, which the world has known so long, proclaimed the culture of the neigh. It was the dull thud of the hammer telling of the presence of the blacksmith, still busy with anvil and bellows, painted with a dark palette, in his leather apron, by the glow of the hearth. It was the hiss of the white-hot iron plunged into the pail of cold water, and the song that kept time to the drivi
ng of the horseshoe nails. And then the nervous prancing of the newly shod feet, fearful of slipping on the stones, and the bucking and rearing mastered by skilled reins for the benefit of the girl at the window with a ribbon in her hair. With the horse the saddler’s art had reappeared, with its aroma of leather, the smooth cordovan, the harness-makers at work amidst pegs adorned with cinches, stirrups, embossed saddle-trees, and Sunday bridles with silver-studded headstalls.

  A man seemed more a man in the Lands of the Horse. He became once more the master of age-old skills that had brought his hands into direct contact with iron and hide, which had taught him the arts of breaking and riding, developing physical prowess that he could display on holidays before women filled with admiration for the powerful knee, the mastering arm. The male sports were reborn of breaking the screaming stallion, throwing the bull by the tail—the animal of the sun—and laying its arrogance in the dust. A mysterious solidarity was established between the animal with well-hung testicles which covered its female deeper than any other and man, whose symbol of courage was what the sculptors of equestrian statues modeled and cast in bronze or carved in marble, that the spirited steed might go surety for the Hero astride him, lending propitious shade to the lovers who held their trysts in the city parks.

  Crowds of men were gathered in the houses where many horses drowsed in the shade of the sheds; but where a single horse waited in the night, half hidden in the underbrush, its owner removed his spurs more quietly to enter the house where a shadow awaited him. I observed with interest that after having been the most prized possession of the man of Europe, his machine of war, his vehicle, his messenger, the pedestal of his heroes, the ornament of his friezes and arches of triumph, the horse had written new chapters of his glorious history in America. It was only in the New World that he still carried on to the full and on so vast a scale his age-old activities. If the Lands of the Horse had been left blank on the maps, as happened with unknown lands in the middle ages, they would have whitened the fourth part of the hemisphere, bearing witness to the mighty presence of the horseshoe in a region where the Cross of Christ had entered by the horse, not dragged at its heels, but aloft, carried on high by men who were taken for centaurs.