The Chase

by Alejo Carpentier

  times of the Tribunal . . .)

  . . . the times of the Tribunal, well, it was two or three years ago that exasperation unleashed terror in broad daylight. The Tribunal passed sentence and loosed the vengeful, implacable Furies against the weak and the informers. But after the necessary, the just, the heroic, after the times of the Tribunal, came the time of looting. Exempt from reprisals, the malcontents gave themselves over to taking chances, which they did in armed groups that trafficked in violence, proposing plans and extorting rewards. They would unleash the Furies in broad daylight, this time to the advantage of this or that politico. Even the police fled when they appeared. They were feared, and their powerful protectors knew how to make holes in prison walls. They still asserted that this was just and necessary; but whenever the man ejected from the Belvedere, the man now under sentence, returned from a job, he had to drink himself insensible in order to go on believing that what he’d done had actually been just and necessary. A price had been placed on the shedding of blood, even though that price was quoted in the language of revolution. And when he remembered how the expression “undercover man” was used in those days, the man seated on the curb clenched the hand that would have voted for the death sentence. How miserable his shoulders felt, as they sank in the shadow of the poplars, how fearful he was of seeing the eyes of the executioners light up in the night . . . (Their weapons are loaded and waiting somewhere, like those that rested in that bed, behind the screen, their triggers, butts, muzzles all ready, loaded even before the sentence was pronounced. “Defend yourself,” I said. But I spoke without wanting to be heard. I spoke to myself; so I could say to myself that I had spoken. I’ve come to wonder now if I spoke or if the echo of what was spoken by the others echoed in me. And that walk, avoiding his eyes, toward the thickest trunk, which was then shedding its bark—I remember—just like this one that leaves a smell like bitter almonds on my fingernails. On one of its branches a frog sang, just as one did on that afternoon—when I felt authorized to sit at the right hand of the Lord . . .) He was disgusted, sick to his stomach over all he’d lived since then; longing to drag himself to the foot of a confessional in order to shout that nothing had been necessary, to vomit all his guilt so that exceptional punishments would be meted out to him, the most terrible the Church had ever instituted. He took satisfaction in the idea that such punishment could exist for anyone who could pour out abominations like his. He threw himself facedown on the roots of the poplar—so hard that his teeth, after clamping on something, brought the taste of his blood to his mouth—when he saw two men slowly walking down the hill toward the shadows that protected him. “A drunk,” said the older man bending over slightly. “Maybe he died from a heart attack,” opined the one who didn’t want to look. “They’ll pick him up tomorrow.” They walked off toward the avenue. For them as well, death was something easy. A stiff corpse becomes a thing to be taken or brought; something bothersome because it weighs a lot and is hard to carry, something that—as a matter of form—just can’t be left in the street like that. It looks like a person, and because of its shape it evokes a certain period of time that should end below the roots and not above them. “They’ll pick him up tomorrow,” repeated the older man, already far away, as if to excuse himself from having to notify the authorities. The fugitive got up, shaking off the red ants that were running up his sleeves. Their bites spurred him to start walking. He stopped quite soon to make sure that those footsteps echoing on the opposite sidewalk were his own. The breeze changed from south to north and again carried with it the bellow of the loudspeakers, with their women’s choruses, among which stood out, because of its high pitch, the voice of a female pharmacy student he knew: Return quickly to the vestibule to finish with the second matter, just as you have done with the first. And a man answered: Have no fear, we shall know how to end the affair. But soon: by whatever road you choose! howled some Electra insistently. The voice was right. It was necessary to hurry and get there as soon as possible, by any road. Nor had that part about “we shall know how to end the affair” spoken by the other voice been an evil omen . . . Before him the avenue, where various Presidents, with thick bronze frock coats, standing on granite pedestals, were sculpted in heroic size above the ice-cream vendors, who were ringing their viaticum bells, descended to the sea covered over by clouds palpitating with distant flashes of lightning. Here he’d have to stay close to the houses because the palm trees, whose tops were higher than the highest streetlight, cast no shadow. The fugitive reached the obscure street with the sad café whose green wood columns were a squalid imitation of the Tuscan order, and in long strides he reached the corner where the House of the Arrangement, its walls gone, had been reduced to pillars standing on a marble floor covered with rocks, beams, and chunks of stucco chipped off the ceilings. The gates and the lions that bit iron rings had been taken away. A wheelbarrow path leading upward crossed the grand salon to end at a pantry where several shovels jutted out of a pile of shapeless stones. Next to the wrought-iron railing with its Andalusian tracery, the statue of the goddess Pomona from the garden had been laid on its back, with base and pedestal in the grass spattered with plaster from the moldings. A dog was sleeping under the sign painted in thick brushstrokes on a broken barrel:

  FREE RUBBLE

  Only a wall of the back room remained; a wheelbarrow lay on its side in the spot where the Spanish desk had stood—it had amused him so much that other time because of its inlaid pictures of straw dummies being tossed in blankets during carnival and of Madrid riffraff vaulting over bulls. It was difficult to reconstruct the office’s furnishings mentally: the table was decorated with a dry inkwell, bronze eagles, and blotters set in embossed leather. But as he sat there in that corner, protected from street light, the moment of the fissure became very real to him. Until that moment, the terrible work of the squad had required fearlessness, forgetting himself, and sacred fury. They had shown him how to counterfeit license plates, to carry dynamite, to saw off shotgun barrels, to make shells with two parts birdshot to one part buckshot; he’d learned about codes and cryptography by using the word “triangle”—it had no repeated letters—and rearranging the letters in seemingly disordered strings that corresponded to a secret order; he learned how to decipher the secret language of newspaper articles. They had sunk their picks into the clay that stank of sewers and the rot of coffins; in that tunnel they dug beneath the cemetery of the solemn poor in order to reach the Chancellor’s dome and blow up all those they hated. “Good and dead, the dog,” they would say bitterly in those days, as they watched hasty funerals pass among the tombs, the fearful mourners nervously glancing toward the cypress trunks. “Good and dead, the dog,” he would repeat, looking at the black-framed obituary page in the newspaper, whose Requiescat in pace seemed too forgiving to him . . . And then one day it was his turn to shoot someone; it took place on the wide avenue of the Bronze Presidents. Ordering his driver to take the port road so he could enjoy the morning breeze, the victim tapped out a song on the green car door. A ruby glittered on his ring finger. The pursuers pulled up at just the right speed, raising their weapons from the car floor smoothly, without getting in one another’s way. “Take off the safety,” the man on his right advised him, aware that he was new to this work. The back of the victim’s neck was soon so close that they could have counted his acne scars. Then he became a profile, a horrified face, two begging eyes, a howl, and shots. With a clatter of metal, the bullet-ridden car slammed against one of the galley prows that flanked the monument to the heroic Martyrs, while the pursuers turned onto a cross street. “Good and dead, the dog.” But that night he’d still had to drink until he was in a stupor and fell in a daze into Estrella’s bed in order to forget that acne-scarred neck which had been there, just beyond his weapon—almost within reach of his hand. Soon after, when he found out that someone had benefited from that death, he’d been plagued by doubts, which were soon silenced by those around him who skillfully used the Words that justifi
ed everything. “The revolution,” they said, “is not over yet.” And step by step, dragged along by his increasingly active hands, he passed into the bureaucracy of horror. First there was fury, as he swore to avenge those who had fallen, thinking HOC ERAT IN VOTIS as he contemplated the corpses of the condemned; but soon it became a profession of easy money and protection in high places. And one morning, sitting in front of the desk with its Goya-inspired marquetry, he had accepted a fee for masterminding the preparation of a certain Anthology of Orators and sending it through the mail. When he was arrested the next day, near the market café where he always went after leaving Estrella’s house, he realized that the police were acting out of mere suspicion, that they had no hard evidence, since the postal receipt was safely hidden and the preparer had fled the city when he found out that the book had in fact exploded in the hands of the man to whom it had been sent. And, as for the Exalted Personage, he was the person most interested in keeping things quiet . . . He remembered going over the drawbridge to the fortress; the black dungeons from whose walls rusty chains still hung; the walk along corridors and past cells where the lights were never turned off in order to keep the men stretched out on the canvas and metal cots from coming together on the floor like beasts. And after two days of being forgotten, without food—without alcohol, after having drunk so much for months—there had been the light in his face, hands wielding billy clubs, voices talking about drilling his teeth right down to the roots, and other voices talking about beating his testicles. The idea of an assault on his sex was intolerable to him, beyond all right, beyond all power. He had killed, but he hadn’t castrated. And now they were going to mutilate him, cut him off from himself, dry him out, depriving him of the axis where his body had its coat of arms, his most intimate pride, the infallibility of whose autonomous power he had boasted of. Within a few minutes, he would be set on the road to old age, deprived of future pleasures, of possessing innumerable women, dead for other flesh. His reality fell to pieces, ripped open, under the lights burning above his face like those in an operating room, with the sound of voices coming ever nearer—horrifyingly amplified by the resonance of that chamber with its low parapet—talking about hurting the thing he was so proud of, talking about emasculating him, ruining him, castrating him. The hands that approached his grimace, the sweat on his limbs, intensified his fear of a pain that would have hurt him less in another part of his body. Now everything would collapse; a death before dying, which he’d have to bear for interminable days without embraces, bearing the weight of his own cadaver. The first bite of the pincers drew such a long and desolate animal howl out of him that the others, calling him a coward, silenced him with a punch. And when he again felt the metal against his shrunken skin, he called out for his mother with a hoarse wail that turned into a death rattle and sob in the deepest part of his throat. And, with his eves fixed on the lights that filled his pupils with their incandescent circles, clutching his sex as if he were recovering it, holding it close and reintegrating it into his flesh, he began to talk. He told them whatever they wanted to hear; he explained the recent attacks, and depicted himself as an apprentice, an extra, in order to lessen his own guilt; he listed the names of those who at that moment were sleeping on the couches in a certain villa in the suburbs or drinking and dealing cards at a long table in the dining room with their pistols hung over the backs of their chairs. Filled to overflowing with so much information, so many revelations, the questioners believed him when he said he knew nothing about the preparation and mailing of the book that had caused two deaths, attributing the work to the collective activity of his team. And when the naked man, hanging on to his sex, declared that he knew no more, they returned him to his cell with a cigarette as reward. Once again he was locked up, with the footsteps in the corridor and the terrible fear that it would start all over again. At dawn, he sent a message to the warden, asking that notice of his imprisonment be sent to the Man from the National Palace. Half an hour later he was set free by an order that came from the personal secretary . . . He crossed the drawbridge and slowly walked down the hill from the fortress, excited after that passage through hell at the awakening streets. It was like the beginning of a convalescence; a return to the world of men. He wasn’t even hungry, had not the slightest desire to walk up to the big mahogany bars where the early-morning drinkers were pouring out the first drops of liquor, before tasting it, as an offering to the souls of the dead. In the softly clouded light, the poplars chirped with all their feathers: The spire on the Sacred Heart Church, a blurred opalescent whiteness, raised its marble Virgin above the countrified dome of San Nicolás, where at that time elderly black women with graying hair and many rosaries were attending Mass, fulfilling vows made to the Nazarene by wearing violet sackcloth fastened with a yellow badge. And the cupolas of flesh-colored mosaics, the gilt crosses, and the coppery belfries of the Carmen, the San Francisco, and Las Mercedes were glittering in the morning air, in the awakening of the terraces edged with balusters where the washerwomen hung out their clothes. Behind them, the view of the sea was so overpowering that the fishing boats seemed to be sailing above the roofs. The freed man went to his room, enjoying the coolness of the portals, the smell of the fruit on the scales, the smoke of the coffee ovens—discovering, much as someone who comes home from the hospital discovers, the unctuous quality of butter, the crunch of whole-wheat bread, the gentle splendor of honey. He slept until noon, when he was awakened by newsboys hawking a special edition. The papers showed bodies lying on a sidewalk he knew only too well, puddles of blood among turned-over furniture, men dying on operating tables, and some windows—in the kitchen and the pantry—through which a few had leaped into a gully. That same afternoon, as he made his way to the house of the Exalted Personage—the house that now only had walls of air—he found protection just in time behind a column and saved himself from a barrage of bullets fired from a black car whose license plates were covered by a tangle of streamers. After all, it was carnival time.

  The dog woke up and, looking toward the shadows above, began to bark, not furiously but monotonously, one bark after another, interrupted by pauses in which he spun around searching for the unreachable fleas in his skinny tail. The man on the run got up heavily and walked down the wheelbarrow path, entering through the collapsed ceiling into the salon, where, dirty and faded, the syrinxes and tambourines of a Pompeian allegory were still visible. On the threshold without a door, the dog waited for him, barking reluctantly. “I’m not worth the trouble of a bite,” thought the man, crossing the garden bristling with stakes. After sinking ankle-deep into some mud encrusted with plaster, he reached the street. The idea of retracing his route across the city, along the tree- and column-lined streets, in order to reach Estrella’s far-off house was unthinkable. His fatigue went beyond fatigue. It was a dense stupor in which all his limbs moved as if they were being dragged along by an outside force. He had resigned himself to giving up the fight, to stopping once and for all and just waiting for the worst; and yet he went on walking with no particular goal, from sidewalk to sidewalk, lost on the street he knew best. He could have dropped at the foot of that tree, if it hadn’t been for those obstinate, muffled barks that followed next to his ankles. He remembered some vacant lots among whose weeds he could hide and sleep. But they were too far away for his fatigue. The only money he had was the counterfeit bill Estrella had given back to him, which would be rejected everywhere and provoke dangerous arguments. His own apartment was being watched by the others. In cheap hotels, it was necessary to pay in advance; his appearance was too lamentable for him to walk into the big hotels with the notion of running out without paying the bill the next day. Why didn’t men today have that ancient option of “claiming sanctuary” spoken of in a book on the Gothic? Oh, Jesus! If at least your Houses were open on this unending night so I could fall down on their paving stones in the peace of the naves, and groan and free myself of all that I have hidden in my heart! . . . Oh, if I could only lie facedown o
n the cold floor, with this stony weight I’m dragging—my cheek against the cold stone, my hands open over the cold stone; my fever gone, and my thirst, and this heat that burns my temples—all relieved by the coldness of the stone! . . .