(Thursday, the 14th)
XII/ We resumed our voyage with the full moon, for the owner had to pick up a Capuchin friar at the port of Santiago de los Aguinaldos on the opposite bank of the river, and wanted to shoot a particularly rough rapids in the morning, leaving the afternoon free to do some trading. This being accomplished with masterly handling of the rudder and poling over some of the rocks, I found myself at midday in an incredible city in ruins. The long, deserted streets were flanked by empty houses, the doors rotted away, leaving only the jamb or the crossbar, the mossy roofs fallen through in the very middle, following the collapse of the rooftree gutted by termites and blackened by empty wasp combs. The pillars of a porch held up the remains of a cornice split by the roots of a fig tree. There were stairways without beginning or end, as though suspended in space, and latticed balconies that hung from window frames open to the sky. White campanula vines hung an airy curtain over the vast expanse of rooms that still preserved their cracked tile floors, and there were the old golds of aromo bushes and the red of poinsettias. Cactuses with arms like candelabra swayed in the halls as though held in the hands of invisible servants. There were toadstools on the doorstep and thistles in the fireplaces.
Trees scaled the walls, burying their claws in the cracks in the mortar, and a burned church still displayed various buttresses, archivolts, and a monumental arch on the point of collapse, on its tympanum still to be discerned, in dim relief, the figures of a celestial concert, with angels playing the bassoon, the theorbo, the organ, and the maracas. This so amazed me that I was going back to the boat for pencil and paper to make sketches for the Curator of this rare organographic example. But just then came the sound of drums and shrill flutes, and several devils appeared around a corner of the plaza, headed toward a miserable church of brick and plaster across from the one that had burned down. The faces of the dancers were covered with black cloth, like those of the penitentes of certain Christian brotherhoods; they advanced slowly, in little skips, behind a kind of leader or master of ceremonies who could have played the role of Beelzebub in a Passion Play, of the Dragon, or the King of Madmen, with his devil’s mask of three horns and pig’s snout.
A kind of fear came over me at the sight of those faceless men, as though they were wearing the veil of parricides; at those masks, out of the mystery of time, perpetuating man’s eternal love of the False Face, the disguise, the pretense of being an animal, a monster, or a malign spirit. The strange dancers reached the door of the church and pounded the knocker a number of times. They stood for a long time before the closed door, weeping and wailing. Then suddenly the double doors were noisily flung open, and there in a cloud of incense was St. James the Apostle, the son of Zebedee and Salome, riding a white horse borne on the shoulders of the faithful. At the sight of his crown of gold, the devils fell back in panic, as though seized by a fit, stumbling against one another, falling, rolling to the ground. Behind the image a hymn began, the ancient sonority of sackbut and hornpipe helped out by a clarinet and a trombone:
Primus ex apostolis
Martir Jerosolimis
Jacobus egregio
Sacer est martirio.
The bell rang its full swell, several boys sitting athwart the bell gable pushing it with their feet. The procession wound slowly around the church, led by the nasal falsetto of the priest, while the devils, feigning the tortures of exorcisement, shrank back in a groaning group from the aspersions of hyssop. When all was over, the figure of St. James the Apostle, he of the Campus stellae, shaded by a canopy of moth-eaten velvet, disappeared into the temple, whose doors closed with a bang on a flickering wave of lights and candles. Whereupon the devils, who were left outside, began to run, laughing and leaping, turned from devils to clowns, disappearing among the ruins of the city, shouting lewdly through the windows, asking whether women still gave birth there.
The faithful dispersed. I stayed on alone in the middle of the gloomy plaza, whose flagstones had been pushed up and cracked by the roots of the trees. Rosario, who had gone to light a candle for her father’s recovery, soon appeared in the company of a bearded Capuchin who was to embark with us, and introduced him to me as Fray Pedro de Henestrosa. With few words, in a slow, sententious tone, the friar explained to me that it was the singular custom here to bring out the figure of St. James on the feast of Corpus Christi, because shortly after the founding of the town the image of the patron saint had arrived on the afternoon of that day, and the tradition had been observed ever since. We were soon joined by two Negro guitar-players, with their instruments swung across their shoulders, who complained that this year the celebration had been nothing but hymns and processions, and they were never coming back.
I learned then that this had formerly been a city of replete coffers, rich in furnishings, in cupboards filled with cambric sheets. But the repeated lootings of a long civil war had ruined its mansions and estates, covering its hatchments with ivy. Those who could emigrated, selling their manor houses for whatever they would bring. Then came the scourge of plagues arising from rice fields which, no longer cultivated, had gone back to swamp. This time death finally handed the mansions over to the grass and the termites, paving the way for the destruction of arches, roofs, and thresholds. Today it was nothing but an abode of shades in the shade of what had once been the rich city of Santiago de los Aguinaldos.
I listened with interest to the missionary’s account, thinking of the cities ruined by the Wars of the Barons, smitten by the plague, when the guitar-players, whom Rosario had asked to entertain us with some music, began to pluck their instruments. Suddenly their song carried me much farther than the scenes I had been evoking. Those two black jongleurs were singing ballads telling of Charlemagne, of Roland, the Bishop Turpin, the treachery of Ganelon, and the sword that cut down the Moors at Roncesvalles. By the time we reached the dock, they were recalling the tale of certain Infantes of Lara, which was unknown to me, but whose archaic flavor was moving in that setting of crumbling, lichened walls like those of ancient, deserted castles.
We cast off as the twilight was lengthening the shadows of the ruins. Leaning on the rail, Mouche remarked that the sight of that ghost city could compare in mystery, in supernatural suggestion, with the best that the greatest of modern painters could have conceived. Here the themes of fantastic art were three-dimensional; they could be felt, lived. They were not imaginary constructions or cheap poetic claptrap: one walked through real labyrinths, one ascended stairs that broke off at the landing, continued by a railing without balustrades that disappeared in the night of a tree. Mouche’s observations were not stupid; but as far as she was concerned, I had reached the saturation point at which a man who has tired of a woman is bored even when she says intelligent things.
With its cargo of bellowing bulls, coops of chickens, pigs running about the deck under the hammock of the Capuchin and getting tangled up in his rosary of seeds, the song of the Negress cooks, the laughter of the Greek diamond-hunter, the prostitute in her mourning nightgown bathing in the prow, the guitar-players making music for the sailors to dance, this ship of ours made me think of Bosch’s Ship of Fools. But a ship of madmen now taking off from a shore that defied ubication; for though the roots of what I had seen were grounded in styles, reasons, myths I could identify, the final result, the tree that had sprung up on this soil, was as disconcerting and new as the huge trees that began to hide the banks, and which, in groups at the entrance to the channels, stood out against the setting sun—with something of the rotundity of low hills about their foliage and something of dogs’ muzzles about their tops—like councils of gigantic baboons. I recognized the elements of this scenography, to be sure. But in the humidity of this world, the ruins were more ruins, the vines pried loose the stones in a different way, the insects had other tricks, and the devils were more devils when Negro dancers groaned beneath their horns.
An angel and maracas were not in themselves new. But an angel playing the maracas carved on th
e tympanum of a burned church was something I had never seen anywhere else. I was asking myself whether perhaps the role of these lands in the history of man might not be to make possible for the first time certain symbioses of cultures, when I was interrupted in my reflections by something that aroused an echo in me of something both very near and very remote. Standing beside me, Fray Pedro de Henestrosa, in honor of Corpus Christi Day, was chanting in a low tone a Gregorian hymn printed in neumes on the yellow, wormholed pages of a Liber Usualis of long ago:
Sumite psalmum, et date tympanum:
Psalterium jocundum cum citara.
Buccinate in Neomenia tuba
In insigni dei solemnitatis vestrae.
(Friday, June 15)
XIII/ When we reached Puerto Anunciación, the humid city that for hundreds of years has been carrying on a stalemate war with the jungle, I realized that we had passed from the Lands of the Horse to the Lands of the Dog. There, behind the outlying roofs, the vanguard of the still-distant jungle had posted its sentinels, magnificent trees having the air of obelisks rather than trees, still scattered, apart from one another, towering above the vast expanse of mangroves, whose creeping feracity could wipe out a trail in one night. There was no place for the horse in a pathless world. And beyond the green expanse that cut off the south, trail and track disappeared under such a weight of branches as to make the passing of a rider impossible. The Dog, on the other hand, whose eyes are at the height of a man’s knees, sees everything lurking under the treacherous fronds, in the hollow of the fallen trees, among the rotting leaves; the Dog, with tense muzzle, twitching nose, registering danger in rising hackles, has observed over the ages the terms of his first alliance with Man. For it was a pact that joined Dog and Man here, a mutual complementing of powers which made their relation a brotherhood.
The Dog brought to the bargain those senses which had atrophied in his hunting companion—the eyes of his nose, his moving on four feet, his useful disguise of an animal among the other animals—in exchange for the spirit of enterprise, the arms, the oar, the walking upright that the other contributed. The Dog was the only being that shared with Man the benefits of fire, assuming, by this approach to Prometheus, the right to take Man’s side in any war against Animals. For this reason, that city was the city of the Bark. In hallways, behind the window grilles, under the tables, the dogs stretched, sniffed, scratched, watched. They sat in the prows of the boats, ran about the roofs, watched the roasting meat, were present at all meetings and collective acts, went to church. Bearing witness to this was an old colonial ordinance, which nobody was interested in enforcing, ordering the beadle appointed for that purpose to drive the dogs out of the temple “every Saturday and on the eve of all feasts.” On nights when the moon was full the dogs gave themselves over to its adoration with a vast chorus of howls which was no longer interpreted as presaging some calamity, but whose sleep-banishing effects were accepted with that resigned tolerance with which one accepts the tiresome rites of relatives who practice a different religion.
The place known as an inn in Puerto Anunciación was an old barracks with cracked walls, its rooms opening on a muddy courtyard where big turtles were penned in case food should run short. Two canvas cots and a wooden bench constituted the furnishings of our room, with a piece of looking-glass held on the back of the door by three rusty nails. As the moon had just come up above the river, after a brief pause the howling antiphony of the dogs had broken out again—from the towering silvered trees of the Franciscan mission to the islands drawn in black—with unexpected responses from the other bank.
Mouche, who was in a wretched humor, refused to accept the fact that we had left electricity behind us and that we were in the age of the kerosene lamp and the candle, and that there was no drugstore at which she could replenish her stock of cosmetics. My friend was shrewd enough to hide the constant care she lavished on her face and her body, so those who did not know her would think her above such feminine vanities, unworthy of an intellectual, implying thereby that her youth and her natural beauty were attraction enough. Familiar with her tactics, it had amused me to watch her time and again from the bales of grass, observing with wicked irony how often she examined herself in her compact mirror, frowning with annoyance. What surprised me now was that the very substance of her body, the flesh of which it was made, seemed to have faded since the morning of that last day of navigation. Her skin, roughened by the hard water, had reddened, revealing areas of coarse pores around her nose and temples. Her hair had taken on the look of tow, greenish-blond in color, streaky, making evident how much its normal coppery hue owed to the careful use of tints.
Under her blouse, stained by strange oils that dripped from the sails, her breasts seemed less firm, and the polish peeled off nails broken by constantly having to grab for support on a deck stacked with buckets and barrels on that floating barn which was our boat. Her eyes, hazel and beautifully flecked with green and yellow, reflected a state of mind that was a mixture of boredom, fatigue, disgust, and an underlying rage at not being able to voice her fury over this voyage she had set out upon with such high literary rejoicing. Because the evening of our departure—I recalled it now—she had dragged out the familiar “desire for evasion,” ascribing to the great word “adventure” all the implications of invitation to the unknown, flight from the familiar, chance meetings, the vision of the Incredible Floridas of Rimbaud. Up to now, as far as she was concerned—for she remained indifferent to the emotions that afforded me daily delight, bringing back sensations that had been buried since childhood—the word “adventure” had meant being shut up in a hotel in the city, landscapes of monotonous and repetitious grandeur, seeing one thing after another without a thrill of any sort, the accumulated fatigue of nights without lamps to read by, and of sleep, when it finally came, interrupted by the rooster’s crow.
Now, hugging her knees, indifferent to what her tumbled skirt might reveal, she rocked herself gently on the cot, sipping brandy from a tin pitcher. She talked of the pyramids of Mexico and the Incan fortresses—which she knew only from photographs—of the stairways of Monte Albán, and the adobe villages of the Hopis, lamenting the fact that in this country the Indians had erected no such wonders. Then, employing the language of “those in the know,” categorical, interlarded with the technical jargon of which our generation is so enamored—and to which I give the name of “the economist tone”—she began to draw up an indictment of the way the people here live, their prejudices, their superstitions, the backwardness of their agriculture, the shortcomings of their mining, which, naturally, brought her to the surplus value and the exploitation of man by man.
Just to be contrary, I said that the thing that impressed me most on this trip was the discovery that there were still great areas of the earth where people were immune to the ills of the day, and that here, even though many people were contented with a thatched roof, a water jug, a clay griddle, a hammock, and a guitar, a certain animism lived on in them, an awareness of ancient traditions, a living memory of certain myths which indicated the presence of a culture more estimable and valid, perhaps, than that which we had left behind. It was of greater value for a people to preserve the memory of the Chanson de Roland than to have hot and cold running water. I was glad to know that there were still men unwilling to trade their souls for a gadget which by eliminating the washwoman did away with her song, thus wiping out ages of folklore at one fell swoop.
Pretending that she had not heard me, or that what I was saying was devoid of all interest, Mouche stated that there was nothing worth seeing or studying here; that this country lacked history or character; and, giving her opinion the quality of a verdict, she spoke of leaving the next day with the dawn, inasmuch as our boat, sailing with the current this time, could make the return trip in a little better than one day.
But now her wishes were a matter of complete indifference to me. And as this was something new in me, when I brusquely told her that I intended to fulfi
ll my obligations to the university, traveling to the place where I could find the instruments I had been sent in search of, she suddenly flew into a rage, calling me a bourgeois. This insult—well I knew—was a hang-over from the days in which many women of her background had proclaimed themselves revolutionaries for the sake of militating in ranks joined by a number of interesting intellectuals, and giving themselves up to sexual indulgences under cover of philosophical and social ideas after having done the same in the name of the aesthetic ideas of certain literary coteries. With her eye always on the main chance, over and above all her pleasures and petty passions, Mouche was my idea of the archetypal bourgeoise. Nevertheless, she applied “bourgeois” as the final insult to anyone who opposed to her criterion anything that smacked of duty or principles, who refused to go along with certain physical indulgences or was concerned with religious problems or a world of order. As my determination to do the right thing by the Curator and therefore by my conscience was a stumbling-block to her plans, such an objective became ipso facto bourgeois.
The Lost Steps Page 12