Eighty years have passed since Alejo Carpentier’s initiatory trip to Haiti, and seventy since the publication of The Lost Steps, one of his great novels and of Spanish language in the twentieth century.
The story of its protagonist, immersed in the search for the origins of musical instruments and essences that testify to the human journey at the time of creation, combines myth, art, memory and time in a superb narrative.
Drama of intense existential significance, the author himself confessed: “My character (…) travels through the Orinoco to the roots of life, but when he wants to find it again he can’t, because he has lost the door to his authentic existence.”
In a distant interview with him by the then young Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa—2010 Nobel Prize in Literature—, published on March 1, 1965 in the weekly Marcha, of Montevideo, regarding that novel—“it seems to me one of the most ambitious books in Latin American literature, because it expresses within a unity two antagonistic dimensions of a world: one objective and the other mythical,” warns the interviewer—the author revealed: “The meaning of The Lost Steps is that: a going back, through the Orinoco artery to the most remote past, and a demonstration that all stages of life subsist on the American continent.”
Carpentier between the kingdom and the steps
Such a confession is essential to understand the passion of the novelist, for whom the world of the Caribbean and its surroundings, specifically the connections as intricate as they are fertile that lead to its historical and imaginative reserves, are keys that more than distinguish the narrative world of Alejo Carpentier ( Lausanne, Switzerland, December 26, 1904 – Paris, France, April 24, 1980), made up of titles such as the one already mentioned, plus The Kingdom of This World (1949), The Harassment (1956), Time War (1958) , The Age of Enlightenment (1962), Baroque Concert (1974), The Resource of Method (1974), The Rite of Spring (1978) and The Harp and the Shadow (1979).
One of the most vehement scholars of Carpentier’s work, the Cuban essayist Roberto González Echevarría, when addressing the subject in a book of his dedicated entirely to such an imprint, El peregrino en su patria, remembers that it was in the Caribbean where they were generated, for for the first time in the so-called New World, events such as “colonialism, slavery, the mixture and struggle of races and, consequently, the movements of revolution and independence”, all of them closely linked to such a portentous creation, as a kind of guide to look at the map where he established his expressive, historical and thematic domains.
According to Carpentier himself in the preamble to his novel The Kingdom of This World, it was a trip to Haiti that allowed him to discover the areas, as astonishing as they were inaccessible, where King Henri Christophe managed to forge, at the end of the 18th century, the renown of his legend. In such a famous prologue, the vision of “the ruins, so poetic, of Sans Souci; the mass, impressively intact despite lightning and earthquakes of the Citadel La Ferriére”, accompanied by the not fortuitous reason “of having found magical warnings on the red roads of the Central Plateau, of having heard the drums of the Petro and the Rada”, They were an immediate invitation.
Emerging in the shadow of the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue is unique, due to the triumph of the slaves. Such an event, in The Kingdom of This World, occupies two moments, more or less approximate, as the beginning and the end. First there is 1750, the maroon revolt led by Mackandal, and then 1830, the final days of the presidency of Jean Pierre Boyer, who had reunified the northern possessions that had been a kingdom, with the south that had become a republic. Between one and the other, the rebellion against the French colonists, which leads to the amazing reign of Henri Christophe, and the one that puts an end to this, proclaiming the government of the republican mulattoes.
Carpentier between the kingdom and the steps
With a style that expands with vigor, everything narrated in The kingdom of this world becomes for the reader everything experienced. In that order, the sensory opulence provided by Carpentier’s prose is fabulous. In the third chapter of the third part of that novel, titled “The Sacrifice of the Bulls”, around the raising of the walls of the Citadel La Ferriére, in the most rugged of those elevations in northern Haiti, a significant example stands out: The blood of the sacrificed beasts, a component that the masons will use in their mixtures, is revealed as a magical ritual for the visions of the capricious sovereign Henri Christophe.
Doubly essential, as a discovery of the environment where the fabulousness of history coincides with the everydayness of the gaze, was the trip that Alejo Carpentier made to Haiti in 1943 in the company of his wife Lilia Esteban, and there the contact with a medium in which magical rites, affirmed in the domination of natural enclaves, favored a substantial network. The journey by car through the most rugged roads that led to the heights of the Citadel La Ferriére, will become the nucleus of a narrative world built over almost thirty years, from 1949 to 1978, in which it is part also deeply The lost steps.
Regarding all that, it is worth remembering what Graziella Pogolotti noted about the great writer: “A searcher for communicating vessels between music, visual arts, theater and literature, Carpentier did not stop at the work of his contemporaries. He did not limit himself to the recognition of his essential affinities. “Insatiable curiosity, that virtue proclaimed in one of his chronicles of his return, led him to follow in the footsteps of successive generations that took other paths.” This being the case, the extraordinary curiosity that the novelist was always provides proof of this condition, established in the depths of all his work, desires and horizons.
Now, when eighty years have passed since the trip to Haiti that was the seed of the adventure of the marvelous real, the starting point for his initial book, and seventy since the publication of The Lost Steps, a novel established in that lineage that extends to our own days, with other books and authors who prolong it in various ways where rupture and tradition come together, his work reminds us, as he himself indicates at the end of it, that “the only race that is prevented from detaching itself from dates is the race of those who make art.” In that direction, owner and lord of a prodigious literature, Carpentier is on his journey between the kingdom and the steps.
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