And then the water again, below whose surface bubbled icy springs in which I buried my face and washed my hands with coarse sand like marble filings. Later on, the Indians would come to bathe naked, their only garment their hands covering their penises. And at noon it would be Fray Pedro, not even covering the whitened hairs of his genitals, bony and gaunt as a St. John preaching in the wilderness.
Today I had made the great decision not to return there. I would try to learn the simple crafts followed here in Santa Mónica de los Venados, beginning by watching the building of the church. I would liberate myself from the fate of Sisyphus, which was laid upon me by the world I came from. I would flee the empty callings, the spinning of a squirrel in a cage, the measured time, the trades of darkness. Mondays to me would no longer be Ash Mondays, nor would I need to remember that Monday is Monday, and the stone I had borne would be for whoever wanted to bow beneath its useless weight. I preferred to wield saw and ax rather than go on prostituting music in the announcer’s trade.
I told all this to Rosario, who accepted my plan with joyous docility, as she would always accept the will of the man whom she had received as her man. Your woman had not grasped the fact that, for me, this decision was much more serious than it seemed, for it meant renouncing everything back there. For her, born on the outskirts of the jungle, who had sisters living with miners, it was natural that a man should prefer the open spaces to the congestion of the cities. Besides, I do not think that in accustoming herself to me she had been forced to make as many intellectual adjustments as I had. To her I did not seem very different from other men she had known. Whereas I, to love her—and I realized that I loved her deeply now—had been compelled to establish a new scale of values to make it possible for a man of my formation to establish bonds with a woman who was all woman and nothing but woman.
I was, therefore, clearly aware of what I was doing. And when I told myself again that I was staying, that my lights from then on would be those of the sun and the hearthfire, that each morning I would plunge my body into this cascade, and that a whole and complete woman, without complications, would always be within reach of my desire, a vast happiness came over me.
Lying on a rock while Rosario, her breasts bared, washed her hair in the stream, I took out Yannes’s old copy of the Odyssey, and as I opened it, I came upon a paragraph that made me smile: the one that speaks of the men whom Ulysses sent to the land of the lotus-eaters and from whose minds, when they had tasted of the fruit they were given, all memory of home faded. “I had to seek them and drag them back on board,” relates the hero, “and chain them beneath the thwarts, deep in the well.”
In the marvelous tale I had always been irked by the cruelty of Ulysses, tearing his companions from the happiness they had found without offering them other recompense than serving him. I found in this myth a reflection of the irritation always aroused in society by the acts of those who find in love, in the enjoyment of a physical privilege, in an unexpected gift, a way of avoiding the shabbiness, the restrictions, the spying the majority must suffer.
I turned on my side on the warm stone, and this brought into view a group of Indians seated around Marcos, the son of the Adelantado, and weaving baskets. And it seemed to me now that my old theory about the origins of music was absurd. I saw how unfounded were the speculations of those who feel that they can grasp the beginnings of certain of man’s arts or institutions without knowing prehistoric man, our contemporary, in his daily life, in his healing and religious practices. My idea of relating the magic objective of the primitive plastic arts—the representation of the animal that gives power over its living counterpart—to the first manifestations of musical rhythm, the attempt to imitate the gallop, the trot, the tread of animals, was highly ingenious. But I was present, a few days ago, at the birth of music. I could see beyond the dirge with which Aeschylus revived the Persian Emperor; beyond the rune with which the sons of Autolycus stanched the dark blood that flowed from Ulysses’ wounds; beyond the song designed to protect the Pharaoh Unas against serpents’ stings in his journey to the other world. What I had seen confirmed, to be sure, the thesis of those who argue that music had a magic origin. But they had arrived at this conclusion through books, through studies in psychology, building dangerous hypotheses on the survival, in the classical tragedy, of practices deriving from a sorcery already remote. But I had seen the word travel the road of song without reaching it; I had seen how the repetition of a single syllable gave rise to a certain rhythm; I had seen how the alternation of the real voice and the feigned voice forced the witch-doctor to employ two pitches, how a musical theme could originate in an extramusical practice. I thought of all the nonsense uttered by those who take the position that prehistoric man discovered music in his desire to imitate the beauty of bird-warblings—as though the song of a bird had any musical-aesthetic value for those who hear it constantly amidst a concert of snorts, screeches, splashing, running, things falling, waters rushing, which for the hunter is a kind of sonorous code, the understanding of which is a part of his craft.
I thought of all the other fallacious theories, and I began to muse on the clouds of dust my observations would stir up in certain musical circles in which ideas all come from books. It would be a good thing to record some of the songs of these Indians, which were very beautiful in their simplicity, with their strange scales, and which would destroy that other widely held belief that the Indians use only the pentatonic scale. But suddenly I grew exasperated at these ideas running through my head. I had made up my mind to stay here, and I had to lay aside, once and for all, these idle speculations.
To rid myself of them I put on the scant clothing I used here, and went to join the group that was completing the building of the church. It was a wide, round cabin, with a pointed roof like that of the huts of palm fronds over a framework of boughs, topped by a wooden cross. Fray Pedro was determined that the windows should have a Gothic air, with pointed arches, and the repetition of two curved lines in a mud and wattle wall was, in this remote spot, a forerunner of the Gregorian chant. We hung a hollow trunk from the bell-tower, and in lieu of bells I had suggested a kind of teponaxtle. The idea for that instrument came to me from the drum-rhythm-stick in the hut, and the study of its principle of resonance had given rise to a painful experience.
When, two days before, I had untied the withes that held the protecting mats in place, these, stiffened by the dampness, snapped back, spilling the funerary urn, the rattles, the Panpipes on the floor. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by creditor-objects, which it did no good to stand in the corner, like naughty children, to free myself of their accusing presence. I had come to these forests, shaken off my load, found myself a woman, thanks to the money I had taken for these instruments, which were not mine. By fleeing, I was shackling my creditor. And I knew I was shackling him, for the Curator without doubt would take the responsibility for my absconding, and at any sacrifice would pay back the money given me, pawning his possessions or perhaps borrowing the money from some loan shark. I should have been happy, blissfully happy, but for the presence at the head of my hammock of these museum pieces, mutely demanding index cards and showcase. I ought to have got these instruments out of here, broken them, buried the pieces at the foot of a rock. But I could not do it, for my conscience had returned to its deserted post and, after its long exile, had come back mistrustful and full of complaints.
Rosario blew into one of the reeds of the ritual jar, and a hoarse bellow echoed, like that of an animal fallen into the darkness of a pit. I pushed her aside so roughly that she moved away, her feelings hurt, not knowing what she had done. To soothe her, I told her the reasons for my irritation. She came up at once with the simple solution: I must send these instruments to Puerto Anunciación when the Adelantado made his regular trip in a few months to buy needed medicines and to replace some worn-out tool. There her sister would take charge of seeing that they got down the river to the post office. My conscience stopped gnaw
ing at me. The day those bundles were on their way I would have paid for the keys of my evasion.
XXVII/ I had climbed up the cliff of the petroglyphs with Fray Pedro, and now we were resting on a floor of shards, broken by black crags that caught the winds on all flanks, or had crumbled like ruins, rubble, among vegetation that seemed cut from gray felt. There was something remote, lunar, not meant for man, on this terrace that led to the clouds, furrowed by a brook of icy water that was not spring water, but mist water. I felt vaguely uneasy—an intruder, not to say a profaner—at the thought that my presence had torn the veil from the mystery of a mineral teratology whose arid grandeur, the work of millenniums of erosion, revealed a skeleton of mountains that seemed composed of sulphur stones, lava, chalcedony rubble, plutonic slag. There were gravel beds that made me think of Byzantine mosaics fallen from their walls in a landslide and shoveled and heaped up here like a winnowing of quartz, gold, and carnelian.
To get here we had been traveling for two days by paths from which the reptiles had gradually disappeared, paths rich in orchids and flowering trees, through the Lands of Birds. From sunup to sundown we were escorted by brilliant macaws and pink parrots and solemn-visaged toucans, with their greenish-yellow breastplates, their clacking bills, and their “Go with God” at nightfall when wicked thoughts have more power over man. We saw the hummingbirds, more insect than bird, motionless in their phosphorescent vibration. From overhead came the busy drill of dark-striped woodpeckers, the noisy confusion of the whistlers and the warblers in the roof of the forest, apprehensive of everything, high above the chatter of parrots, and many other birds displaying every color of the palette, which, Fray Pedro told me, for lack of known name the conquistadors called “Indian sunflowers.” Just as other cultures were branded with the sign of the horse or the bull, the Indian with his bird profile placed his culture under the sign of the bird. The flying god, the bird god, the plumed serpent were the nucleus of his mythologies, and everything beautiful was adorned with feathers. The tiaras of the emperors of Tenochtitlan were made of feathers, as were the decorations of the flutes, the toys, the festive and ritual vestments I had seen here.
Struck by the discovery that I was now living in the Lands of the Bird, I remarked somewhat superficially that it would probably be difficult to find in the cosmogonies of these peoples myths that paralleled ours. Fray Pedro inquired if I had read a book called the Popol-Vuh, of which I did not know even the name.
“In that sacred book of the Quichés,’’ the friar told me, “with tragic intuition the myth of the robot is set down. I would even go so far as to say that it is the only cosmogony that has foreseen the threat of the machine and the tragedy of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” And in the language of the scholar, which must have been his before it became petrified in the forest, he told me how, in the first chapter of Creation, the objects and utensils invented by man, which he used with the help of fire, rose against him and killed him. The water jars, the stone griddles, the plates, the cooking-pots, the grinding stones, the houses themselves, in a horrifying apocalypse, to the accompaniment of the barking of maddened dogs, had turned on him and wiped out the generation of man.
He was still telling me of this when I raised my eyes and found myself at the foot of the gray wall with the rock carvings attributed to the demiurge who, in a tradition that had reached the ears of the primitive inhabitants of the jungle below, triumphed over the Flood and re-populated the world. We were standing on the Mount Ararat of this vast world. This was where the ark had come to rest when the waters began to withdraw and the rat had returned with an ear of corn between its paws. We were where the demiurge threw the stones over his shoulder, like Deucalion, to call into being a new race of men. But neither Deucalion, nor Noah, nor the Chaldean Unapishtim, nor the Chinese or Egyptian Noahs left their signature scrawled for the ages at the point of their arrival. Whereas here there were huge figures of insects, serpents, creatures of the air, beasts of the water and the land, designs of the moon, sun, and stars which someone had cut here with a Cyclopean chisel, employing a method we could not divine. Even today it would be impossible to rig up the gigantic scaffolding that would be needed to raise an army of stonecutters to a height at which they could attack the stone wall with their tools and leave it so clearly inscribed. . . .
Now Fray Pedro led me to the other end of the Signs and pointed out on that side of the mountain a kind of crater in whose depths horrendous plants proliferated. They were like fleshy grasses whose morbid shoots were round like tentacles or arms. The huge leaves, open like hands, resembled submarine flora in their texture of coral and seaweed, with bulbous flowers like feather lanterns, birds suspended from a vein, ears of corn of larvae, bloodshot pistils bursting from their sides without the grace of a stem. And all this, there below, intertwined, tangled, in a grappling, a coupling, monstrous and orgiastic, incests that represent the supreme confusion of forms.
“These are the plants which have fled from man since the beginning,” the friar told me, “the rebel plants, those which refused to serve him as food, which crossed rivers, scaled mountains, leaped the deserts for thousands and thousands of years, to hide here, in the last redoubts of Prehistory.”
In silent amazement I gazed on what in other places was fossil impression or slept in the petrification of coal, but here continued alive in a timeless spring antedating the days of man, whose season might not be that of the solar year. Perhaps their seeds germinated in hours; perhaps they took half a century. “This is the diabolical vegetation that surrounded the Garden of Eden before the Fall.”
Leaning over the devil’s caldron, I felt the vertigo of space. I knew that if I let myself come under the spell of what I was looking upon here, this prenatal world, I would end up by hurling myself down, burying myself in this fearful density of leaves which would one day disappear from the planet without having been given a name, without having been re-created by the Word. They might be the creation of gods that came before our gods, gods on trial, clumsy in their works, unknown because they were never named, because they never took on shape in the mouth of man.
With a light blow on the shoulder with his staff, Fray Pedro aroused me from my half-hallucinated gazing. The shadows of the natural obelisks grew shorter as noon approached. We had to start back before evening overtook us on this height and the clouds closed in and we became lost in chill fogs. We passed before the signature of the demiurge once more, to the edge of the crevasse where we began our descent. Fray Pedro paused, took a deep breath, and gazed out upon a horizon of trees above which emerged a dentated slaty range of mountains which stood like a hard, hostile presence over the breath-taking beauty of the valley.
The friar pointed with his gnarled staff: “The only perverse and bloodthirsty Indians of these regions live over there.” No missionary had ever returned.
At this point I allowed myself some jocular remark about the futility of venturing into such thankless places. By way of reply two gray eyes, immeasurably sad, were fixed on me with an expression at once piercing and resigned so that I became disconcerted, wondering if I had in some way offended, though the reason escaped me. I can still see the Capuchin’s wrinkled face, his long unkempt beard, his ears bristling with hairs, his blue-veined temples like something that had ceased to belong to him and to be a part of his person. At that moment his being was concentrated in those old pupils, reddened by chronic conjunctivitis, which were gazing, as though made of clouded enamel, both inward and outward.
XXVIII/ Sitting behind a board resting on two trestles, almost naked because of the heat, beside his hand a student’s notebook on the cover of which was lettered: “Notebook. Property of . . . ,” the Adelantado was legislating in the presence of Fray Pedro, the Headman of the Indians, and Marcos, the Keeper of the Garden. Beside his master sat Gavilán, a bone between his hind legs for safekeeping. The purpose of the meeting was to make a number of decisions for the good of the community and to set them down in writing.
The Adelantado had discovered that during his absence does had been hunted and killed, and he moved that the killing of what he called the “female deer” and fawns should be absolutely prohibited except in case of famine, and that even then the raising of the ban would have to be treated as an emergency measure subject to the approval of those there present. The migration of certain herds, the thoughtless hunting, the depredations of wild beasts, which threatened the red deer of the region with extinction, were the cause for this measure.
After all had sworn to abide by it and observe it, the Law was inscribed in the Book of the Council, and the next item on the agenda was one of public works. The rainy season was approaching, and Marcos reported that the digging of the beds Fray Pedro had recently ordered had been done against his advice, for they were located in a position that would so channel the waters from a near-by slope that the granary would probably be flooded. The Adelantado frowned at the friar, waiting to hear his explanation. Fray Pedro answered that he had done this as preparation for the planting of onions, which needed well-drained and not too damp soil, which could only be achieved by laying out the beds with their narrow edges toward the slope. The danger, the Keeper of the Garden had pointed out, could be avoided by throwing up a dike of dirt, some three feet high, between the garden and the granary.
It was unanimously agreed that this work should be started the next day, with the help of all the inhabitants of Santa Mónica de los Venados, for the sky was heavily overcast and by midday the heat was almost unbearable, with dense humidity and swarms of flies, come to plague us from nobody knew where. However, Fray Pedro pointed out the fact that the church was not finished, and that this, too, was urgent. The Adelantado cuttingly answered that the safeguarding of the grain was more urgent than services in Latin, and concluded the business of the day with instructions about the cutting and hauling of logs for a fence and the need of posting sentinels to watch for the appearance of certain schools of fish which were coming up the river ahead of time.
The Lost Steps Page 20