The Lost Steps

by Alejo Carpentier

  At another time I would have lingered in the rustic church, but the darkness of the butterflies which enveloped us was beginning to have the enervating effect on me of an eclipse that had lasted longer than could be endured. This and the fatigue of the night led me back to the inn, where Mouche, thinking it was still night, slept on, her arms clasped around a pillow. When I awoke several hours later, she was not in the room, and the sun had reappeared after the great brown exodus. Happy at having avoided a possible quarrel, I set out for Rosario’s house with the vehement hope that she might be up.

  Everything there had resumed its normal rhythm. The women, dressed in mourning, went placidly about their duties, following the old custom of going on with life after the normal accident of death. In the patio, full of sleeping dogs, the Adelantado was arranging with Fray Pedro an immediate trip to the jungle. At this point Mouche showed up, followed by the Greek. Her determination to return, so furiously voiced the night before, seemed forgotten. On the contrary, her expression was one of malicious, defiant satisfaction, which Rosario, who was sewing mourning clothes, noticed at the same time I did. Mouche felt called upon to explain that she had met Yannes at the wharf alongside the sailing canoe of a group of rubber-hunters getting ready to sail up the river, avoiding the rapids of Piedras Negras by a detour through a narrow channel navigable at this season. She had asked the miner to take her to see this granite barrier, which had halted all major navigation since the first discoverers had wept with rage in the face of its terrifying reality of boiling whirlpools, engulfing waves, treetrunks jammed in roaring crevasses.

  She was beginning to exploit the literary possibilities of the mighty spectacle, and was showing the exotic flowers, a species of wild lily, which she said she had picked alongside the thundering gorge, when the Adelantado, who never paid any attention to anything a woman said, cut short her speech—which he did not understand, anyway—with a brusque gesture. He was of the opinion that we ought to take advantage of the rubber-gatherers’ departure and thus cover with less effort a good part of the distance we had to row. Yannes assured us that we could reach his brothers’ diamond mine that same night. Contrary to all my expectations, Mouche, at the sound of the words “diamond mine”—probably dazzled by the vision of a cave glittering with gems—gave her enthusiastic approval. She threw her arms around Rosario, begging her to come with us on this easy stage of our trip. Tomorrow we could all rest at the diamond mine. She could wait for us there while we went on with our journey. What Mouche wanted, it seemed to me, was to find out, without risking more than a short trip, what difficulties were in store for us, and to make sure of company back to Puerto Anunciación in case she decided to give up the venture.

  Whatever the reason, I was delighted at the thought of Rosario coming with us. I looked at her and met her eyes looking up from the workbasket as though to read my wishes. When she saw my acquiescence, she immediately went to her sisters, whose outcry could be heard in the rooms and at the washtubs protesting that the plan was crazy. Paying no attention to them, she was soon back with her bundle of clothing and a coarse shawl. While Mouche walked ahead of us to the inn, Rosario whispered to me that the flowers my friend had shown us did not grow among the rocks of Piedras Negras, but on a tree-covered island, the site of an abandoned mission, which she pointed out with her hand. I was about to ask for further explanations, but from that moment on she took care not to be alone with me until we were settled in the rubber-gatherers’ boat.

  After we had poled through the channel, the boat advanced upstream, hugging the bank to avoid the powerful impact of the current. The three-cornered sail, bellying from the mast like that of an ancient galley, reflected the western sun. The landscape in this antechamber of the jungle was at once solemn and somber. On the left bank rose black slate hills streaked with moisture, depressingly sad. Along their slopes lay blocks of granite in the shape of lizards, tapirs, petrified animals. A three-pronged mound emerged from the stillness of a swamp like a barbarous cenotaph, terminating in an oval formation that resembled a gigantic frog about to spring. At intervals basalt rubble-heaps were visible, rectangular monoliths fallen among sparse, scattered shrubs which seemed the ruins of archaic temples, menhir, cromlech, the remains of a forgotten necropolis where all was silence and repose. It was as though some strange civilization of people different from those we know had flourished there, leaving, as they were swallowed up in the night of ages, the vestiges of an architecture designed for unknown purposes.

  A blind geometry had taken a hand in the scattering of these perpendicular or horizontal stones, which descended in series toward the river, rectangular series, series like congealed pourings of metal, combinations of both joined by flagged paths set at intervals with broken obelisks. In the middle of the stream islands were like piles of haphazard stones, handfuls of unimaginable pebbles tossed here and there by some fantastic leveler of mountains. And each of these islands revived in me the impact of a fixed idea that had its origin in a strange remark of Rosario’s. I inquired somewhat vaguely about the island where the abandoned mission stood.

  “It is St. Prisca,” Fray Pedro said, blushing a little. “It should be called St. Priapus,” chortled the Adelantado to the rubber-gatherers’ loud guffaws. From this I learned that for years the tumble-down walls of the old Franciscan mission had been the refuge of those couples who found no place to take their pleasure in the town. It had been the scene of so many fornications that—according to the helmsman—one whiff of the smell of dampness, moss, wild lilies that hung over it was enough to inflame the most austere man, even a Capuchin friar.

  I went up to the prow alongside Rosario, who seemed to be reading the story of Genevieve of Brabant. Mouche, who was stretched out on a sack of tonka beans on the deck, and who had not heard the talk, was completely unaware of the fact that something very serious had occurred as far as our life together was concerned. I was not even angry, nor did I feel any desire—at that moment, at least—to punish her for what had happened. On the contrary, in that twilight filled with the music of frogs in the bulrushes, humming with the buzz of the insects that relieved the daytime detail, I felt buoyant, relieved, released by the knowledge of her infamy, like a man laying down a burden borne too long.

  On the bank the flowers of a magnolia stood out against the foliage. I wondered where my wife’s path was leading her day by day. But her figure was not entirely clear in my memory, it was blurred, faded. The rocking motion of the ship reminded me of the basket that had carried me on fabulous voyages in my childhood. Rosario’s arm, close to mine, emanated a warmth that my arm welcomed with a strange and pleasurable prickling.

  (Saturday night)

  XVI/ In the way he builds his house man reveals his lineage. The house of the Greeks was built of the same materials the Indians use for their cabins, and this fiber, this palm frond, this mud and wattle, have established their own norms, based on their coefficient of resistance, as has happened in every type of architecture the world has known. But a slighter pitch to the eaves and an increase in the width of the crossbeams have sufficed to give the gable end the dignity of a façade and to create the architrave. Treetrunks wider at the base than at the top were selected for pilasters in an instinctive desire to imitate the Doric column. The rocky landscape contributed, too, to this unexpected Hellenic atmosphere. As for Yannes’s three brothers, whom I now met, they were replicas, at different ages, of the profile to be found on the bas-reliefs of triumphal arches.

  I was told that in a near-by hut, where the goats are penned up for the night, Doctor Montsalvatje, about whom the Adelantado had already told me, was putting in order and completing his collection of rare plants. He came to greet us, gesticulating, talking in a throaty voice, this scientist-adventurer, collector of curare, peyotl, and all the herbal poisons and narcotics of still unknown properties he was studying and experimenting with. Without showing more than a perfunctory interest in who we were, the herbalist overwhelmed us with Lat
in terminologies designed for fungi never before seen, crushing an example of one of them between his fingers while explaining why he believed the name he had hit upon was suitable. All of a sudden he realized that we were not botanists, and he poked fun at himself, “The Lord of Poisons,” and asked news of the world from which we came.

  I tried to satisfy his curiosity, but it was apparent from the indifference of those listening that my information interested nobody. What Doctor Montsalvatje really wanted to know was things having to do with the river. He asked Fray Pedro for a quinine tablet. He planned to go down to Puerto Anunciación with his collections of plants on Monday and to return as quickly as possible, for he had discovered a hitherto unknown mushroom whose mere smell induced visual hallucinations and a cactus whose proximity caused certain metals to rust. The Greeks touched their temples, indicating that the doctor had a screw loose. The Adelantado was tickled by the strange sonority he gave to certain native words. The rubber-gatherers, on the contrary, were convinced that he was a great doctor, and talked of how he had relieved an abscess with the point of a nicked knife. Rosario was already acquainted with him, and his verbal incontinence seemed to her natural in a person who rarely had an opportunity to talk. Mouche, who had nicknamed him “Lord Macbeth,” and who talked to him in French, finally got bored with his botanical lore and asked Yannes to hang her hammock inside the house.

  Fray Pedro took me aside and explained that the herbalist was not really crazy, but that his imagination ran away with him and that in his long solitudes in the jungle he had worked out a lineage of alchemists and heretics which made him the direct descendant of Raymond Lull—whom he stubbornly called Ramon Llull—basing this on the Learned Doctor’s obsession with the tree. But the uproar of the arrival and introductions died down as the miners came forward with their wooden trays of goat cheese, the radishes and tomatoes of their tiny garden, the cassava bread, salt, and brandy—perhaps subconsciously recalling the age-old ritual of salt, bread, and wine. And we sat around the campfire, in the ancestral rite of keeping the fire alive at night. Some of us were leaning on our elbows, others sat with chin in hand, the Capuchin enveloped in his habit, the women reclining on a blanket, Gavilán panting alongside Polyphemus, the one-eyed dog of the Greeks, and all watching the flames that spurted from the damp branches, flickering yellow, bursting into blue in a dry twig, while, underneath, the back logs turned to embers. The great upright, stones of the slaty incline where we found ourselves took on a strange air of stellae, milestones, monoliths, forming a stairway whose top steps were lost in the fog.

  It had been a hard day, yet nobody wanted to go to bed. We sat there as though hypnotized by the fire, a little drunk with its heat, each lost in himself, thinking without thinking, sharing an animal sensation of well-being, of peace. Soon over the stone-strewn horizon there appeared a chill light, and the moon rose behind a thick, liana-roped tree that began to sing with the voice of all its crickets. Overhead two cawing white birds passed, swooping earthward. The dying fire was mended and the talk began to flow.

  One of the Greeks complained that the mine seemed worked out. But Montsalvatje shrugged his shoulders, stating that farther ahead, toward the Great Plateaus, there were diamonds in all the riverbeds. In my imagination, heated by his words, the Herbalist, with his heavy-framed glasses, his sunburned bald head, his thick freckled hands, whose fleshy fingers looked a little like starfish, took on the air of a spirit of the earth, a gnome watching over the caves. He spoke of gold, and all immediately fell silent, because men like to talk of treasure. The Narrator—seated beside the fire, his traditional place—had studied in far-off libraries all there was to be known about the gold of this world. And gradually there emerged, eerie in the moonlight, the mirage of El Dorado.

  Fray Pedro smiled scornfully. The Adelantado listened, his face a sly mask, as he threw twigs on the fire. To the plant-collector a myth was always the reflection of a reality. Where men sought the city of Manoa up and down the extent of its vast, phantasmagorical province, there were diamonds in the mud of the banks and gold in the riverbeds. “Alluvial wash,” Yannes objected. “That just proves,” Montsalvatje went on, “that there is a main lode we know nothing about, a telluric alchemist’s laboratory, somewhere in this chain of mountains, with its cascades, which is the least explored area of the planet, on whose threshold we stand. There is what Sir Walter Raleigh called the ‘mother lode,’ which feeds the endless flow of gravel washed down by hundreds of rivers.”

  The mention of “Sergualterale,” as the Spaniards called him, led the Herbalist to cite the testimony of fabulous adventurers, who emerged from the shadows at the sound of their names to warm their mail and their cotton-wadded coats at the flames of our fire. Here came Federmann, Belalcázar, Espira, Orellana, followed by their chaplains, their drummers and fifers, the necromantic company of algebraists, herbalists, and keepers of the dead. Fair-haired Germans with curling beards, Spaniards from Extremadura, gaunt and goat-bearded, wrapped in the oriflamme of their standards, mounted on horses which, like those of Gonzalo Pizarro, become shod with solid gold the moment their hoofs touch the elusive confines of El Dorado. And, above all, Philip von Hutten, Urre, as the Spaniards called him, who, one never-to-be-forgotten afternoon, looked down in wonder on the great city of Manoa with its magic battlements, silent with amazement in the midst of his men. The news ran like wildfire, and for a century a grim struggle went on with the jungle, expeditions that ended in tragic failure, wandering in circles, eating saddle leather, drinking the blood of their horses, dying the daily death of St. Sebastian shot through by arrows. This was the story of the known attempts, for the chronicles fail to mention the names of those small groups who had burned their wings in the flame of the myth and left their skeletons in armor at the foot of some unscalable wall of rock.

  Standing in the shadows beyond the flames, the Adelantado held out to the light of the fire an ax that had attracted my attention that afternoon by reason of its strange shape. It was the work of a Castilian anvil, with an olive wood shaft that had turned black without separating from the metal. On the handle some rustic soldier had cut a date with knife-point, and the date was of the days of the conquistadors. While the weapon passed from hand to hand, and we eyed it, silent with a mysterious emotion, the Adelantado told us how he had come upon it in the heart of the jungle, in a heap of human bones, beside a welter of helmets, swords, arquebuses, gripped in the roots of a tree that had lifted a halberd to exactly the height at which the absent hands would have held it.

  The chill of the ax-blade brought the mystery to the tips of our fingers. And we let ourselves succumb to the world of wonder, eager for still greater portents. There arose beside the hearth, conjured up by Montsalvatje, the medicine men who healed wounds with the magic incantation of Bogota, the Amazon Queen, Cicañocohora, the amphibious men who slept at night in the bottoms of the lakes, and those whose sole nourishment was the scent of flowers. We accepted the Carbuncle Dogs that bear a glittering jewel between their eyes, the Hydra that Federmann’s men had seen, the bezoar stone, of miraculous properties, found in the entrails of deer, the Tatunachas, whose ears can cover as many as five persons, or those other savages with ostrich claws for feet—according to the unassailable account of a saintly abbot. For two centuries the blind pilgrims along the route to Santiago had sung the wonders of an American Harpy, to be seen in Constantinople, where it had died raging and roaring. . . .

  Fray Pedro de Henestrosa felt himself in duty bound to attribute such old wives’ tales to the work of the Devil—whereas their source was some friar’s solemn relation—and to the human weakness for spreading lies—whereas they were stories told by soldiers. But Montsalvatje assumed the role of Miracles’ Advocate, stating that the reality of the Kingdom of Manoa had been accepted by missionaries who set out in search of it during the age of Enlightenment. Seventy years earlier, in a scientific report, a noted geographer had claimed to have caught a glimpse, in the vicinity of the
Great Plateaus, of something resembling the fantastic city Urre had gazed upon one day. The Amazon women really existed: they were the women of the men slaughtered by the Caribs on their mysterious migration to the Kingdom of Corn. Out of the jungle of the Mayas there had emerged stairways, boat landings, monuments, temples decorated with unbelievable paintings representing the rites of the fish-priests, the shrimp-priests.

  Huge heads suddenly came to light under fallen trees, looking at their discoverers with closed eyes more terrifying, because of their inner contemplation of Death, than if the pupils had been visible. In other places there were long facing Avenues of the Gods, side by side, whose names would remain forever unknown, overthrown gods, dead gods, who for centuries and centuries had been the images of an immortality denied to man. On the shores of the Pacific gigantic designs had been discovered, so huge that people had walked over them without being aware of what they were treading upon, drawn on such a scale as though intended to be visible from another planet by peoples who had kept their records with knotted strings, and had punished with the maximum penalty any attempt to invent an alphabet. Every day new carvings turned up in the jungle; paintings of the feathered serpent were to be found on remote rock walls, and nobody had yet deciphered the thousands of petroglyphs that spoke a language of animal forms, astral symbols, and mysterious designs along the banks of the Great Rivers.