I finally asked her if it was true that she was pregnant. At that moment Themis became a mother: she clasped her arms about her with a desolate gesture, bending over the life that was coming to being in her womb as though to protect it from my contaminating presence, and began to cry quietly, almost like a child, without looking at me, so hurt that her deep sobs emerged as gentle moans. Then, calmer, she fixed her eyes on the wall as though seeing something in the distance, rose to her feet with a great effort, and went to her room, closing the door after her.
Wearied by the scene, feeling the need for air, I went down the stairs and into the street.
(Later)
XXXV/ As I had acquired the habit of walking in time to my breathing, I was amazed to see how the people around me came, went, passed one another on the wide sidewalk, in a rhythm that had nothing to do with their organic wills. If they walked at one pace rather than another, it was because their walking was linked to the idea of getting to the corner in time to see the green light go on to tell them they could cross the avenue. At times the crowd that welled up from the mouth of the subway with the regularity of a pulsation seemed to upset the prevailing rhythm of the street; but in a little while the regular tempo between semaphore and semaphore was restored. As I now found myself unable to adjust to these laws of collective motion, I decided to walk very slowly, close to the store windows, since beside the shops there was a kind of protected zone for old folks, invalids, and those who were not in a hurry.
It was then I discovered in the narrow spaces to be found between two show windows, or two houses not tightly joined together, beings who stood quietly, as though bemused, with the air of erect mummies. A kind of niche sheltered a woman far gone with child, whose face had a waxy look; in a red brick recess a Negro, huddled in a frayed overcoat, tried out a new ocarina; in an excavated hole a dog shivered between the legs of a drunk who had fallen asleep on his feet.
I reached a church and was attracted to its incensed shadows by the notes of an organ gradual. The Latin of the liturgy echoed through the arched vault of the ambulatory. I looked at the faces turned toward the officiant, on whom the yellowness of the candles was reflected: not one of those whose devotion had brought them to this evening service understood a word the priest was saying. The beauty of the language was alien to them. Now that Latin had been dropped from the schools on the grounds that it was useless, what I saw here was the presentation, the staging, of a growing misunderstanding. Between the altar and the faithful from year to year a moat was widening, filled with dead words.
The Gregorian chant was heard: “Justus ut palma florebit:—Sicut cedrus Libani multiplicabitur:—plantatus in domo Domini—in atriis domus Dei nostri.” To the unintelligibility of the text there was now added that of a music which had ceased to be music for most people; a song listened to but not heard, like the dead language that accompanied it. And as I now observed how strange, how foreign to these men and women congregated here was a thing said and sung to them in a language they did not understand, I realized that the lack of awareness which they brought to this mystery was typical of nearly all their acts. When they married here they exchanged rings, they threw handfuls of rice, without any realization of the age-old symbolism of what they were doing. These people prided themselves on preserving traditions whose origins had been forgotten, the expression, for the most part, of a collective reflex, like collecting objects whose use is unknown, covered with inscriptions that fell silent forty centuries ago.
In the world I would now return to, on the contrary, not one gesture was made without cognizance of its meaning: the food set out upon the grave, the purification of the house, the masked dance, the herb bath, the pledge of alliance, the dance of defiance, the veiled mirror, the propitiatory drum, the devils’ dance of Corpus Christi, were practices whose effects were weighed in all their implications.
I raised my eyes to the frieze of that public library set in the middle of a square like an ancient temple; between its triglyphs was carved the bucrane that some hard-working architect designed without remembering, in all probability, that this ornament out of the night of the ages was nothing but the emblem of a trophy of the chase, still slippery with coagulated blood, which the head of the family hung at the entrance of his dwelling.
On my return I found the city covered with ruins that were more ruins than those considered as such. Everywhere I saw sickly columns and dying buildings, with the last of the classic tablatures employed in this century, and the final acanthus of the Renaissance, which had withered in the styles the new architecture had turned its back on, without substituting new ones or a grand manner.. A beautiful detail of Palladio, a bold thrust of Borromini, had lost all meaning on facades that were a patchwork of earlier cultures which the invading cement would soon efface. From these cement mazes emerged, exhausted, men and women who had sold another day of their time to the enterprises that fed them. They had lived another day without living, and would now restore their strength to live another day tomorrow which would not be lived either, unless they fled—as I used to do, at this same hour—to the din of the dance hall or the benumbment of drink, only to find themselves the next sunrise more desolate, wearier, sadder than before.
My steps had led me to the Venusberg where Mouche and I so often came to drink, with its electric sign in Gothic letters. I followed those in search of amusement and went down to the basement, on whose walls were painted scenes of desert wastes, which seemed airless, strewn with skeletons, fallen arches, bicycles without riders, crutches that supported what seemed stone phalluses, and, in the foreground, as though overwhelmed with despair, a number of half-flayed old men who seemed to ignore the presence of a bloodless Gorgon, her ribs pierced above a belly devoured by green ants. Farther off, a metronome, an hourglass, and a snail rested on the cornice of a Greek temple whose columns were the legs of a woman wearing black stockings with a red garter as astragal. The orchestra platform was mounted on a construction of wood, stucco, pieces of metal, indented with small lighted grottoes holding wax heads, hippocampi, anatomical plates, and a mobile consisting of two wax breasts mounted on a revolving disk, whose nipples were brushed, in their interminable whirl, by the middle finger of a marble hand.
In a slightly larger grotto there were greatly enlarged photographs of Louis of Bavaria, the coachman Hornig, and the actor Joseph Kainz as Romeo, against a background of the rococo Wagnerian castles of the King whose madness had made him fashionable among certain circles—now old hat, though Mouche had remained faithful to them until very recently, as a protest against everything she dubbed “the bourgeois spirit.” The ceiling imitated the roof of a cavern irregularly blotched with mold and damp.
Now that I had recognized the setting, I gave my attention to the people around me. The dance floor was a jigsaw puzzle of bodies fitted into one another, with myriad legs and arms, blending in the darkness like the ingredients of some amorphous mass, of heaving lava, swaying to blues reduced to their basic rhythmic patterns. The lights went out, and the darkness, which encouraged certain futile embraces, certain contacts frustrated by thin barriers of silk or wool, lent a new sadness to this collective movement which had something of a subterranean ritual, of a dance to stamp down earth not there to be stamped. . . .
Once more I found myself in the street, dreaming monuments for these people which should be great rutting bulls covering their cows in masterly manner upon plinths ennobled with turds in the middle of the public squares. I paused before a picture gallery where dead idols were on exhibit, devoid of all meaning for lack of worshippers, in whose enigmatic or terrible faces many contemporary painters were seeking the secret of a lost eloquence with that same desire for instinctive energies which made many of the composers of my generation strive for the elemental power of primitive rhythms in the abuse of percussion instruments. For more than twenty years a weary culture had been seeking rejuvenation and new powers in the cult of the irrational. But now I found ridiculous the att
empt to use masks of Bandiagara, African ibeyes, fetishes studded with nails, without knowing their meaning, as battering-rams against the redoubts of the Discourse of Method. They were looking for barbarism in things that had never been barbarous when fulfilling their ritual function in the setting for which they were designed. By labeling such things “barbarous” the labelers were putting themselves in the thinking, the Cartesian, position, the very opposite of the aim they were pursuing. They were trying to bring new life to Western music by imitating rhythms that had never had a musical function for their primitive creators.
These reflections led me to the conclusion that the jungle, with its resolute inhabitants, with its chance encounters, its accidental meetings, its not yet elapsed time, had taught me far more of the essence of my art, of the profound meaning of certain texts, of the ignored grandeur of certain trends, than the reading of so many books that lay dead forever on the shelves of my library. The Adelantado had taught me that the greatest challenge a man can meet is that of forging his destiny. Because here, amidst the multitude that surrounded me and rushed madly and submissively, I saw many faces and few destinies. And this was because, behind these faces, every deep desire, every act of revolt, every impulse was hobbled by fear. Fear of rebuke, of time, of the news, of the collectivity that multiplied its forms of slavery. There was fear of one’s own body, of the sanctions and pointing fingers of publicity; there was fear of the womb that opens to the seed, fear of the fruits and of the water; fear of the calendar, fear of the law, fear of slogans, fear of mistakes, fear of the sealed envelope, fear of what might happen.
This street had brought me back to the world of the Apocalypse where all seemed to await the opening of the Sixth Seal—the moment when the moon would become as blood, the stars of heaven fall even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, and the islands be moved from their places. Everything foretold this: the covers of the books in the windows, the titles, the inscriptions above the cornices, the phrases launched into space. It was as though the time of this labyrinth and of other similar labyrinths was already weighed, numbered, divided. And there came to my mind, as a relief, the memory of the inn at Puerto Anunciación where the jungle came to me in the person of the Adelantado. My mouth recovered the flavor of the hearty brandy that tasted of hazelnuts, with its lemon and its salt, and there emerged behind my forehead the letters with their shading and wreaths that spelled out the name of the place: Memories of the Future.
I was here tonight as a bird of passage, remembering the future, the vast land of possible Utopias, the possible Icarias. Because my trip had upset my ideas of past, present, future. This could not be the present, which would be yesterday before man had been able to live and contemplate it; this chill geometry without style, where everything grew weary and old a few hours after birth, could not be the present. Now I believed only in the present of the intact; in the future of that which was created face to face with the planets of Genesis. I no longer accepted the condition of Man-Wasp, of No-Man, nor did I admit that the rhythm of my existence could be set by the mallet of the Galley Master.
(October 20)
XXXVI/ When, three months before, the manuscript of my experiences in the jungle had been returned to me without any explanation, my knees shook with fear. The news of my divorce suit had sprung the trap on me. The newspaper could not forgive me for the money it had spent on my rescue, or for its having made me the object of a great publicity campaign, only to have the gentlemen of the cloth denounce me as a transgressor of the Law, an object of abomination. I had to sell my story for almost nothing to a third-rate magazine, and, fortunately, an international incident came along in time to relegate me to the back pages.
Then my battle with Ruth began, a Ruth dressed in black, wearing no make-up, who was determined to go on with her role of offended wife and mother-to-be before the public bar of justice. The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. But this, instead of simplifying matters, only made them worse, for her shrewd lawyer played up for all it was worth the fact that my wife had been prepared to give up her stage career the moment she thought herself pregnant. I became, therefore, the unworthy man of the Bible, the one who builds a house and does not dwell in it, who plants the vine and does not harvest its fruits. Moreover, that setting of the Civil War which had so tortured Ruth because of its treadmill automatism now suddenly became a shrine of art, the royal road to a career, which she had not hesitated to leave, sacrificing fame and glory to the sublime task of creating a new life—a life that the amorality of my behavior denied her. I had everything to lose in this mess which my wife was spinning out indefinitely, feeling that, with time on her side, she could make me return—my escape but a memory—to my previous existence. When all was said and done, she had taken the stellar role in this improvised drama, and Mouche had been crowded off the boards.
For three months, every afternoon, I turned the same corners, rode from floor to floor, opened doors, waited, talked to the secretary, signed whatever I was told to sign, and then found myself on the same sidewalks again, lighted up by the same electric signs. My lawyer now received me with visible ill humor, fed up with my impatience and warning me that I was going to have more and more trouble meeting the expenses of the divorce. And the fact of the matter was that I had moved from a first-class hotel to a student’s hotel, and from there to a rooming-house on Fourteenth Street, where the carpets smelled of margarine and rancid fat. Nor did my publicity agency forgive my delay in returning to work: Hugo, my former assistant, had been made head of the studios. I tried unsuccessfully to find work of some sort in this city where one thousand hunt for every job. I was going to leave here, divorce or no divorce. But to reach Puerto Anunciación I had to have money, money that grew in amount and importance with the passing of time. And all I found was insignificant orchestration commissions, which I worked on without interest, knowing that a week after I was paid, I would be penniless again.
The city would not let me go. Its streets wove a web around me like a net, a seine, that had been dropped over me. Week after week I came closer to those who wash their one shirt at night, whose shoes let in the snow, who smoke the butts of cigarette butts, and cook in the closet. I had not quite come to this, but the Sterno stove, the aluminum saucepan, and the package of oatmeal now formed part of the furnishings of my room, foretelling a state of affairs that filled me with horror. I spent whole days in bed, trying to forget the threat that hung over me by reading the wondrous pages of the Popol-Vuh, the Inca Garcilaso, and the travels of Fray Servando de Castillejos. At times I opened the volume of the Lives of the Saints bound in purple velvet with my mother’s initials stamped in gold, and looked up the section on St. Rose of Lima which had mysteriously fallen open the day of Ruth’s departure—a day on which so many routes were silently changed by the strange convergence of chance incidents. And each time I felt a greater bitterness as I came upon the tender verses that seem charged with painful allusions:
Ah me! My beloved,
Who detains him?
The hour is past, noon strikes.
But he comes not.
When the memory of Rosario gnawed at my flesh like an unbearable pain, I took interminable walks that always brought me to Central Park, where the smell of the trees, rusty with autumn, drowsing in the mists, afforded me a little relief. The touch of their bark, damp with rain, recalled the wet wood of our last hearthfire, with its acrid smoke bringing tears to the laughing eyes of Your woman, as she went to the window to catch her breath. I watched the Dance of the Firs to see if I could discern some favorable omen in the movement of their needles. My inability to think of anything but my return to what was waiting for me there made me look for auguries each morning in the first things I saw. A spider was bad luck, like the snake-skin displayed in a show window, but the dog that came over and let me pat it was a favorable sign. I read the daily-horoscope in the paper.
One night I dreamed that I was in a prison whose walls were as high as
the nave of a cathedral, between whose pillars swung the bodies that were to be stretched on the rack; there were thick arched roofs, repeated in the distance, with a slight upward deflection to each, as when an object is seen in two reflecting mirrors. At the end there were shadowy underground vaults where the muted gallop of a horse could be heard. The quality of a mezzotint about the whole thing made me think, when I opened my eyes, that some museum memory had made me a prisoner of the Invenzioni di Carceri of Piranesi. I could not get it out of my mind all day. Then, as night approached, I went into a bookstore to leaf through a volume on the interpretation of dreams. “Prison. Egypt: a strengthened situation. Occult sciences: prospect of the love of a person from whom one neither expects nor desires affection. Psychoanalysis: linked to circumstances, objects, and persons from whom one must free oneself.”
I caught a whiff of a perfume I knew, and a woman’s figure joined mine in a near-by mirror. Mouche was standing beside me, looking ironically at the book. And then her voice: “If you’re looking for advice, I’ll make you a special rate.”
The street was close at hand. Seven, eight, nine steps, and I would be outside. I did not want to talk to her. I did not want to listen to her. I did not want to argue. She was to blame for everything that was happening to me. But at the same time there came that familiar weakness in my legs and loins and a prickling that spread to the back of my knees. It was not clearly felt desire or excitation, but rather a kind of muscular acquiescence, a weakness of the will, which, in my youth, had dragged my body to the brothel while my spirit was struggling to prevent it. At such times I had undergone a kind of personality split, the recollection of which later caused me untold suffering. While my mind clung to the thought of God, the memory of my mother, the menace of disease, repeated the Lord’s Prayer, my feet moved slowly, unswervingly, toward the room with its bedspread trimmed with red ribbon, knowing that at the smell of certain cosmetics on the marble-topped dresser, my will would succumb to sex, leaving the soul defenseless in the darkness. Afterwards, my spirit was angry with my body, refusing to have anything to do with it until the night when the need for rest united us in a prayer, making ready for the repentance of the following days as I awaited the appearance of the ulcers and pus that were the punishment of the sin of lust.
The Lost Steps Page 25