Concierto barroco

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Ballad 0/ Another Time

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A Sudden Chunk 0/ the Abyss: . .An Introduction to the Works 0/ the Marquis de Sade

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ALEJO CARPENTIER, along with Jorges Luis Borges,

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a major force in twentieth-century Latin American writ-

ing. Here in English for the first time is Concierto Barraco) the novella Carpentier called "a verbal fiesta." A wealthy, eighteenth-century Mexican and his Cuban servant travel to Spain and Venice, where the musical geniuses of three centuries come together. The . story of Montezuma becomes an opera as the New World. impacts the Old, providing through its mythic material an unexpected leap into a transformed reality Carpentier's work is set in a period when ((old

certainties are being shattered by change and the citadels 0/ the mind have been shaken ajar . . .)J

RALPH ELLISON

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COUNCIL OAK BOOKS 1428 South St. Louis Tulsa, Oklahoma 74120 800/247-8850 or 918/587-6454 in Oklahoma

©1974 by Alejo Carpentier. Translation © 1988 by Asa Zatz.

All rights reserved under international and Pan ',q

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

MONTEZUMA (MOCTEZUMA) WAS FIRST portrayed on

the stage in 1695 in the "pseudo-opera" or masque The Indian Queen by Henry Purcell. In the world of that time, however, so tremendously impressed by the discovery and conquest of America (there is a rich literature in these fields that runs from Montaigne though Voltaire and Marmontel. . .), it was no longer important to treat the New World with strict regard for his'torical verisimilitude, at least as far as the theater was concerned. Thus, Montezuma is portrayed as a young Inca and general in the Peruvian army in Purcell's masque, which is based on a tragedy by Sir Robert Howard and

Dryden ... The credit must go to Antonio Vivaldi, then, for having made Montezuma the hero of the first serious opera inspired by the history of the conquest of Mexico. He composed it in 1733, two years before Rameau wrote Les Indes galantes a ('heroic ballet," which took place in an America as fantastic as Purcell's. Vivaldi's Montezuma) drawn from the Historia de la Conquista de Mexico (1685) by Antonio de Solis, marks the grand entrance of America as the scene of the dramatic action on the operatic stage. In 1755, King Frederick II of Prussia wrote a threeJ

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act tragedy entitled Montezuma at the behest of Karl Heinrich Graun, his favorite composer. Curiously enough, in this work, the Emperor of Mexico is glorified to the detriment of Cortes, who is presented -

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the text by Frederick II, Montezuma is depicted as the victim of his own generosity and trustfulness.) From that time on, the Montezumas proliferated in such a manner that we can say he was the historical figure who inspired the greatest number of operas by composers in .~\

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the second part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth . The theme (libretto by Cigna -Santi) was used by De Majo in 1765; in 1722, by Galuppi and Paisiello (with the same. libretto); in 1775, by Antonio Sacchini, a bust of whom decorates the fa~ade of the Opera de Paris; in 1780, by Insanguine; in 1781, by the great Niccolo Antonio Zingarelli (still using Cigna -Santi's libretto) . . . And, without considering the works of such minor composers as Mysliweczek, the parade of Montezumas continues splendidly with the magnificent Fernand Cortez ou la Conquete du Mexique by Spontini (1809),

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which was still to be heard two years ago at the Phoenix Theater in Venice. Several romantic Montezumas must also be added to this list: those by Luigi Ricci (1830), Pirola (1833),

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Giacomo Treves (1845), and Francesco Malipiero, whose name is the same as that of the contemporary

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I wish to thank the eminent musicologist and ardent Vivaldian Roland de Cande, who put me on the trail of Father Antonio's Motezuma. The enchanting milieu of the Ospedale della Pieta with its Cattarina del cornetto, Perina dell violino, Luceta della viola, etc. is described by many travelers of the period, particularly the engaging President de Brosses, libertine par excellence and friend of Vivaldi, in his spicy Lettres /amilieres sur I'Ita lie.

I should also mention that the building I describe is not the one now to be seen, which was built in 1745, but the previous one located at the same site on the Riva degli Schiavoni. It is interesting to note, however, that the present church of the Pieta, true to its musical

destiny, retains the special appearance of a concert hall with elaborate balconies like those of a theater and its grand ceremonial box in the center reserved for distinguished listeners and influential music lovers ..

ALEJO CARPENTIER

Havana and Paris, 1976

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FOREWORD

ALEJO F. CARPENTIER y VALMONT was born on 26

December 1904 in Havana, Cuba, to Georges Julien Carpentier, a French architect, and Lina Valmont, a language instructor of Russian ancestry. The couple had emigrated to Cuba from France just two years before. In 1912 they returned with their young son to Europe, traveling to Russia, Austria, and Belgium before settling briefly again in Fra-nee. The refinement and biculturalism into which Carpentier was born determined the course of his life and literary career. His first language was French, which predisposed him to assimilate easily

the avant-garde movements in Europe and accounted for the fact that his Spanish pronunciation was forever marked by a distinct Gallic r. Commenting on the crosscultural influence on Carpentier's writing, the eminent Hispanist Emir Rodriguez Monegal wrote, ('His approach to Spanish as a literary instrument was, initially, similar to that of a Conrad or a N abokov in English: he used words as if having first exhausted every available dictionary." 1 Carpentier's peripatetic beginnings foreshadowed a lifetime of extensive travel to such diverse" locales as Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Spain, Morocco, England, Belgium, Holland, the French Caribbean, East-

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ern Europe, China, the United States, and France, the country from which he initially redefined Latin American reality in his writings and in which he died while serving as Cuba's cultural envoy~ Most ofhislife abroad

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was spent in France, where he briefly fell under the spell of· surrealism, and in Venezuela, where he lived and worked for fourteen years and whose geography inspired the setting for his novel Los pasos perdidos (1953; Eng. The Lost Steps) 1956). Curiously, Carpentier's works have superseded him, traveling greater dis· '.',',

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tances than their creator by appearing in more than twenty-three'languages worldwide. In Paris, and earlier at home, Carpentier studied

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music and architecture, subjects he pursued more formally later on and which had a profound effect on 'his literary production, providing elements that are obvious even to the most casual reader of his works. Both his parents played musical instruments (his father had studied cello with Casals) and were responsible for instilling in their son a love for music, matched only by his

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interest in architecture, where again his father's influence could be seen. A timid, lonely, and asthmatic child, Carpentier occupied himself primarily with music and reading .

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he was enamored with the works of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola and at fifteen he wrote his first short stories, imitating Anatole France. After attending secondary school at the Lycee Jeanson de Sailly in Paris, Carpentier returned with his family to Cuba, where in.1921 he

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began to study architecture at the UniversityofH~v~n~. His education was curtailed shortly thereafter, however,

when his father abandoned the family. Forced to earn a living and help his mother, Alejo launched a career as a journalist and became a columnist for a number of

Cuban newspapers, most notably Social and Carteles) at the latter of which he rose to the position of editor-inchief in 1924. Three years later he helped found the vanguardist Revista de Avance) which was devoted to "nationalism, radicalism, and, above all, to new ideas in the arts"; he served as coeditor until 193o. In collabora tion with Amadeo Roldan, Carpentier organized a series of concerts in which the music of such artists as Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Malipiero was played in Cuba for the first tUlle. While simultaneously working as a

music and theater critic, Carpentier became a founding member of the Grupo Minorista) actively involved in social and cultural reform in Cuba between 1923 and 1928. As a result, he was thought to be politically subversive and, after signing a manifesto against the thendictator Gerardo Machado, was imprisoned. During his forty-day incarceration, he began writing his first novel, j

Ecue- Yamba-6.') a work which combines social realism

and Afro-Cuban folklore, as evinced by its exotic title, a lacumi phrase meaning «Praised Be Our Lord!" The French surrealist poet Robert Desnos, who was visiting Cuba at the time, helped Carpentier escape to France

by providing him with false identification papers. In 1931 Carpentier published in Paris a collection of nine

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cantos entitled Poemes des Antilles (Poems of the Antilles). Carpentier did not return to Cuba until the outbreak

of World War II in 1939. His eleven-year hiatus in Paris led to his firsthand discovery of the avant-garde, and he became active in the cultural and literary circles of such " figures as Aragon, Breton, Tzara, Picasso, Eluard, de Chirico, and Villa-Lqbos. It was also during this time that he met Miguel Angel Asturias (1967 Nobel Prize winner, Guatemala) and Arturo Uslar Pietri, both of ;.' ,',

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whom helped Carpentier launch in 1930 the short-lived though literary journal Iman) of which only a single important ' issue was published. Among its contributors were Henri Michaux, Franz Kafka (posthumously), and John Dos Passos. This and other such 'ventures helped define Carpentier's role as a writer and the mission of the Latin American intellectual: «to integrate the different national cultures into a truly continental unity; to recapture the fabulous past and update it; to preserve whatever was still meaningful and valuable in the collapsing cultures of the West."2 The nihilistic tendencies of the day, coupled with his reading of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (translated into , Spanish in 1932), led to Carpentier's conviction that the future of man lay in the New World. Consequently, he took part in a search for his country's roots, its primitive element, and a reevaluation of its Negro culture.

After rewriting i Ecue- Yamba-6.t, which he had begun a few years before, Carpentier published the '1\fro-

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Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Pedro Salinas. In 193 7 Carpentier, along with the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, served as a member of the Cuban delegation to the Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals held in Madrid and Valencia. Also attending were such luminaries as Andre Malraux, Antonio Buero Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Jorge Guillen, Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda (1971 Nobel Prizewinner, Chile), and Langston Hughes.

During the early to late thirties, Carpentier's primary source of income in Paris was his work as a radio technician and producer. He returned to Cuba in 1939, where he continued in broadcasting as director of the radio station of the Ministry of Education from 1939 to 1945. In 1944, while vacationing in Mexico, Carpentier

was commissioned to write La must"ca en Cuba (Music in Cuba, 1946), a landmark investigation into the history, traditions, and peculiarities of that country's musical heritage. The work has not only provided invaluable information for musicologists, historians, and area specialists but also encouraged Carpentier to take a new approach to writing in which he would draw heavily from historical and documental elements in creating fiction. From 1945 to 1959 Carpentier lived in Venezuela in

self-proclaimed exile, during which time he wrote over four thousand newspaper articles, taught at the Univer-

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sidad Central in Caracas, worked for an advertising agency, and composed fiction. With the triumph of the revolution in Cuba in 1959, Carpentier decided once again to return to his native country, wher~ he received a hero's welcome. He

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renewed his involvement in the cultural activities of the state by organizing the Festival del Libro Cubano, and he was appointed assistant director of the Direcci6n de Cultura (1960), vice-president of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (1961), and executive director of the Editorial Nacional (1961-67). In 1967 Carpentier became cultural attache to the Cuban embassy in Paris, a posi. tion he retained until his death in 1980.

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tion, viewed much like the Mediterranean with its own heroes and epics. Important for its portrayal of the primitive world of the Cuban Negro his religious,

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jEcue-Yamba-O.' (1933), Carpentier's first novel, focuses on the Caribbean as the eta,dIe of a new civiliza .

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reaction. Even Carpentier was critical of the novel. EI reino.de este mundo (1949; Eng. The Kingdom a/This World) 1957), based on a trip Carpentier made to Haiti in 1947 with French actor Louis Jouvet, deals with a slave revolt against French colonialism and stresses the cyclical nature of history and the endless struggle against tyranny. Through such struggle, one of the characters learns, salvation is achieved not in the biblical kingdom of heaven but, rather, in the kingdom of this world. Here, for the first time, Carpentier defines pre-

cisely his concept of "10 real maravilloso" (lit. the mar· velous real), or ('magic realism," where, simply put, mythical and magical elements of Latin America are combined convincingly to portray real events as fantastic and fantastic events as real. With EI reino de este

mundo) Carpentier initiates what he called his

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Los pasos perdidos (1953; Eng. The Lost Steps, 1956), is related in chronologically reverse order and in diary form and represents the frustrated attempt of the narrator.protagonist to denounce civilization and liberate himself from its influences by moving back through history and geography in order to recapture the lost innocence and sitnplicity of the primeval world. The work was inspired by the author's own experiences and travels in the Venezuelan hinterland. Commenting on the novel's mythical and philpsophical implications,

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that its hero is obsessed by those resonant questions which the Sphinx always puts to the Hero when old, certainties are being shattered by change and the citadels of the mind have been shaken ajar to chaos: What is the meaning of human society? How must one live and act to achieve the creative life? What, really, when he's stripped of the garments, the conceits and prejudices of his class and culture, is man?"3 I': . ,.

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that man is "a soldier in the war of time," collects three short stories "E1 Camino de Santiago" ("The Highroad of Saint James"), "Viaje a la semilla" ("Journey Back to the Source"), and "Semejante ala noche" ("Like

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1962) and set during the Napoleonic era, is Carpentier's longest and perhaps most important novel. It provides a complex view of the ambiguities of history, particularly during a revolutionary period, denouncing the claims of reason and the attendant horrors that are often justified

by it. EI recurso del metodo (1974; Eng. Reasons 0/ State, 1976), whose title recalls Descartes's Discours de la

methode (1637), offers a satire of the Latin American dictator, adding to a lengthy list of similar works from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845; Eng.

Life in the Argentine Republic in the Daysp/ the Tyrants) 1868) to El senor presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias (1946; Eng. El Senor Presidente, 1963), and including such later treatments of the theme as Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo elSupremo (1974; Eng. I theSupreme 1986) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel El olono del patriarca (1975; Eng. The Autumn 0/ the Patriarch) 1977). The original English version of El recurso del metodo was rendered by Frances Partridge (b. 1900), J

noted author and translator of French as well as Spanish and the only· surviving member of the Bloomsbury group. Carpentier was himself a translator of some merit, as evidenced by his French version of a cubist, surrealistic, sixty-page poem by Pablo Picasso written shortly before the artist's death. Published as L'enterremen! du comte dJOrgaz (The Burial of Count Orgaz; Paris, Gallimard, 1978), in a bilingual edition which •

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included two other texts, Carpentier's translation and introduction were done at Picasso's request and received the latter's approval. 4 Carpentier's vast literary production, hinted at by the works discussed above, also includes the following: "El milagro de Anaquille" (The Miracle of Anaquille, 1927), ballet-scenario; Tientos y dtferencias (Considerations and Differences, 1964), Ese musico que lleva dentro (That Musician I Carry inside Me, 1980), and La nueva

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novela latinoamericana en visperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos (The New Latin American Novel on the ,

Eve of a New Century and Other Essays, 1981), essays; El derecho de asilo (Right of Sanctuary, 1972), short story; Concierto barroco (1974; Eng. Concierto Barroco) 1988), novella; La consagracion de la primavera (The Consecration of Spring, 1978), and El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow, 1978), novels; Cronicas (Chronicles, 1971) and Letra y solla (Lyrics and Harmony, 1975), chronicles; Carpentier: Afirmaci6n literaria americanista (Carpentier: Literary Americanist . Affirmation, 1978), lectures-dialogue; and Raz6n de ser (Reason for Being, 1980), lectures. 5 Kessel Schwartz's analysis of the overall production of· Carpentier is among the most succinct: "Carpentier used geographical, political, and historical imagery to explore mythic, cyclical, and dialectical interpretations of history and its interrelationship with the individual . Frequently writing in an epic mode, he presented magi-

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Carpentier is the best--known Cuban novelist abroad and was arguably, with the exception of Jorge Luis Borges, the most influential Latin American writer of prose fiction of his generation. 7" As Carlos Fuentes points out, Carpentier was one of the first professional writers in Latin America and was among the first novelists in 1he region "to make a conscious and concerted attempt to encompass the Latin-American experience as a whole, without undue concern for the superficial differences created by regional or national boundaries. "In word and deed, Carpentier is something of a prototype of the Latin-American intellectual: homegrown but culturally crossbred, an appropriate formula in a society that . . . is the product of racial symbiosis and spiritual miscegenation."8 Donald L. Shaw's assessment of the contribution of the so-called Boom writers in Latin America whose work emerged in the 19508, capturing the imagination and attention of the world and among whom Carpentier was an acknowledged leader identifies "a new vision of Spanish American reality past and present, a deep awareness of the potential tragedy of the human condition, a greater readiness to explore human sexuality and to incorporate humor into the novel, and the ., . '

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Solitude ' a work which was to mark the Colombian's meteoric rise as a novelist and for which, in large part, he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize and began writing the novel anew. 10 In One Hundred Years) as subsequently published, one can discover a kind of intertextual homage to Carpentier, for Garcia Marquez has incorporated into the novel one of Carpentier's own

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characters, Esteban from Explosion in a Cathedral. It is perhaps dually significant to note that Carpentier was born on 26 December, the feast day of San Esteban (Saint Stephen). Carpentier's work has brought him numerous accolades at home and abroad, culminating with his being accorded the 1977 Premio Miguel de Cervantes, presented to him in Spain by King Juan Carlos and representing the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary distinction. In 1956 Carpentier was honored by the

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French, receiving the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger for The Lost Steps. In 1975 he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the University of Havana and was elected Honorary Fellow of the University of Kansas. That same year, he garnered Mexico's prestigious Premio Alfonso Reyes and France's Prix Mondial Cino del Duca. In addition to these honors, Carpentier is said to have been a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. According to the dust-jacket blurb of a Mexican edition of one of his works, Reasons 0/State was adapted for the screen in a Mexican-Cuban-French coproduction under the direction of the renowned Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin. Similarly, in the early sixties United Art· ists jointly held the rights to The Lost Steps for film adaptation, a project which was to involve the estate of the late Tyron~ Power and the screenplay for which was to be written by Irwin Shaw. I! Apparently, though, no such movie was ever produced.

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Despite Carpentier's international acclaim and reputation as a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, poet, musicologist, and diplomat, the New York Times) in the necrology section of its Saturday, 26 April 1980 edition, devoted a scant nine lines to the announcement of his death and a retrospective of his life achievements, a slight further exacerbated by the unfortunate typos scattered throughout the notice. Such neglect CQuld, perhaps, partially be explained by the cultural myopia

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of many U.S. publishers, critics, and journalists toward much of Latin America and her writers, especially those of an extreme leftist or communist persuasion a . situation which only recently has begun to be rectified. Fortunately, there have been a number of major publishers (Harper & Row, Knopf, Grove, Dutton, and Avon among them) and some smaller presses (e.g., Pergamon, Persea, and Godine) in the u.s. 'which have earnestly and consistently sought to extend some of Latin America's literary wealth to English readers. Included among their ranks now is Council Oak Books (established 1984), which is adding to its already diverse list of titles a collection of international literature in translation, beginning with Jose Luis Gonzalez's novel Ballad 0/ Another Time' (19'87; Balada de otro tiempo) 1978) and followed here by the first English translation of Concierto barroco) one of Alejo Carpentier's and Latin America's most fascinating works. First published in November 1974 in a beautifully illustrated edition by Siglo Veintiuno Editores of Mexico City, Concierto barroco was the first of three works Carpentier~had promised his readers after having gone nearly eleven years without writing a novel; the book served as a kind of homage to the author on the advent of his seventieth birthday. Shorter than his novella Manhunt (El acoso), Concierto barroco defies its often facile classification as a ('novel" in terms of both length and

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eminent musicologist who studied and taught music theory throughout much of his life and who, in 1946, wrote the seminal work on music in Cuba. This is particularly important to note in any consideration of Concierto ba rro co,' for unlike other writings ,by Carpentier in which musical elements and influences are adeptly incorporated, here the work stands for much more: the entire novella is a direct tribute to music, a celebration of Carpentier's life passion. 12 The genesis of Concierto barroco reveals something even more intriguing: Carpentier's remarkable discovery of Alvise (referred to variously as Albize and Albisi) Giusti's lib~etto to Vivaldi's first opera, Motezuma (Montezuma), which premiered in 1733. Further investigation led to Carpentier's documentation of a meeting between Vivaldi, Handel, and Scarlatti which took place in Venice during the Christmas carnival in 1709. Carpentier first learned of the possible existence of the libretto, which was believed to be irrevocably lost, from Francesco Malipiero while working with him- in Paris around 1937. Finally, in the early seventies, Carpentier found the manuscript after following the trail left behind by Roland de Cande, a musicologist and Vivaldi specialist. Motezuma is the first treatment of an American theme in opera by an important composer, appear.. ing two years before the lncan setting of Les Indes galantes by Jean Philippe Rameau, as explained in Carpentier's note included in the 1976 French edition of Concierto barroco (Concert baroque) Gallimard) and

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provided here as well in English as an appendage to the present text. The story displays a rich amalgamation of elements seen in other works by Carpentier, including references to historical events, allusions to classic literature, the phantasmagoric representation of time, involuted plot development, and the interweaving of reality and fantasy all related in characteristic grandiloquent prose. Here, as Klaus Muller-Bergh points out, one finds a kind of summa theologica of Carpentier's style, with its

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nisms of 'Baroquism.' "13 Structural evidence of this is seen, in fact, in t~e chromatic presentation of some of the novella's episodes. Chapter 1, for example, develops within a "silver" frame (the story's opening line begins: "Of silver the slender knives, the delicate forks; of silver the salvers with silver trees chased in the silver of the hollows . . ."), neatly evoking the wealth and vitality of Mexico (the New World) with her silver mines in con . trast to the poverty and squalor of Madrid and Venice (the Old World). Although the plotline develops around the travels of a wealthy Mexican to Spain and Italy, his impressions and diversions along the way, the meeting with Vivaldi, Scarlatti, and Handel, the performance of

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European one, saving the latter from complete "impoverishment. " This effort to convey Latin Amer-

ica's cultural importance and to establish her identity, a thread which runs throughout Carpentier's work and parallels the author's lifelong search for a personal cultural identity as well, remains as elusive as his search for Latin American reality itself. The ambiguities of this reality are clearly and allegorically reflected in the temporal displacements and ambiguities found in Concierto

barroco. Although Carpentier established a legacy in relentlessly attempting to synthesize history and the self in his writings, the ineffable nature of Latin America, which belies any image of an integrated continental reality, instilled in him an undeniable sense of solitude. Garcia Marquez, in accepting the 1982 Nabel Prize in Literature, beautifully echoed this dilemma felt by Latin Americans and her writers by describing their reality as "one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless, daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude." 14 DAVID DRAPER CLARK

World Literature Today University of Oklahoma

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1. The Borzoi Anthology 0/ Latin American Literature 2: The Twentieth Century from Borges and Paz to Guimaraes . Rosa and Donoso} Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Thoma~ Colchie,. eds., New York, Knopf, 1977, p. 517. 2. Ibid" p. 518. 3. Quoted in An Anthology 0/ Spanish American Literature) 2d ed., John E. Englekirk, Irving A. Leonard, John T. Reid, John A. Crow, eds., New York, Meredith Corporation, 1968, p. 739. 4. According to Klaus Muller-Bergh in "Talking to Carpentier," in Review 76 (Fall 1976), Andree Conrad, tr., New York, p. 24. 5. For a more complete bibliography of works by and about Carpentier, see Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Klaus .

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Muller-Bergh, AleJ'o Carpentier: Bibliographical GuldelGuia Bibliograjica} Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983 . 6. Kessel Schwartz in the Encyclopedia 0/ World Literature .. in the 20th Century 1: A to D) rev. ed., Leonard S. Klein, ed., New York, Ungar, 1981, pp. 415-16. 7. An eloquent comparative study of the two authors and, a discussion of their critical analysis of Latin American historical thought is found in Enrique Pupo-Walker's article "Borges, Carpentier y lit critica de 1a historia," in Insula) 427 (1982), pp. 11, 13 . 8. Luis Harss, Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers) New York, Harper & Row, 1966, p. 38. 9. Donald L. Shaw, Ale,'o Carpentier, Boston, Twayne, 1985, p. vii (unnumbered). 10. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, '~ejo Carpentier," in Narrativa y critica de nuestra America) Joaquin Roy, ed.,

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665-67. 13. Muller-Bergh, p. 20. 14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 Nobel lecture (delivered in Stockholm in December 1982), in the New York Times) Marina Castaneda, tr., 6 February 1983, section 4, p. 17.

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f silver the slender knives, the delicate forks; of silver the salvers with silver trees chased in

the silver of the hollows for collecting the gravy of roasts; of silver the triple-tiered fruit trays of three round dishes crowned by silver pomegranates; of

silver the wine flagons hammered by craftsmen in silver; of silver the fish platters, a porgy of silver lying plumply on a seaweed lattice; of silver the saltcellars, of silver the nutcrackers, of silver the goblets, of silver the teaspoons

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engraved with initials . . . All these were being' borne gradually, without haste carefully, so that silver

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should not bump against silver toward the glum, waiting penumbras of wooden cases, of slatted crates, of chests with stout locks, overseen by the master in his dressing gown, who made the silver ring from time to time when he urinated with stately stream, copious and percussive, well aimed into a silver chamber pot, the bottom decorated with a roguish silver eye soon blinded

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goes.)) Some silver, too, among what was to go the lesser service, a set of small cups, and of course, the chamber.pot with the silver eye but principally, silk . shirts, silk knee breeches, silk stockings, silks of China, porcelain of Japan the breakfast service which, one could never know, might well he shared in most delectable company and embroidered shawls from Manila borne over the broadest seas of the West. Francisquillo, his face wrapped round, tied up like a bundle of clothes,

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that all boxes, chests, crates, and valises were in order, to partake of a flagon of wine with him. Afterwards, when all articles had been laid away and furniture was in its slipcovers, the master, pacing slowly,

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mantels. Here, a painting of the niece who had taken vows, in white habit, with long rosary, bejeweled and!, adorned with flowers the gleam in her eye too sultry, perhaps on the day of her marriage to the Lord. Opposite, in a square black frame, a portrait of the master drawn with such calligraphic perfection that· it seemed as though the artist had executed it in a single tracing entwining upon itself and bordered with scrollwork that unrolled to enroll again without having lifted quill from canvas But the most grandiose painting of all hung in the salon reserved for dances, receptions, and formal hot-chocolate and maize-cream parties the work of a European artist, who might . have once passed through Coyoacan, that depicted the most transcendent event of the country's history. Montezuma was portrayed as part Roman and part Aztec a Caesar with quetzal-feather headdress seated on a throne, its style a hybrid of Vatican and Tarascan Indian - beneath a canopy 'held aloft between two halberds, a vague-looking Cuauhtemoc with the face of a young Telemachus, eyes slightly almond-shaped, standing beside him. Before him, Hernan Cortes, a velvet hat on his head, sword in his belt arrogant boot bestriding the first step of the imperial throne was frozen in a dramatic tableau of the Conquest. Behind, Friar Bartolome de Olmedo in the habit of the Mercederian Order, brandishing a crucifix with a gesture betokening scant friendliness, and Dona Marina, 1 with sandals and Yucatecan huipil, arms outstretched in dumb show of a

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beauty of women rendered even lovelier

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ochtitlan what the Spaniard had just said. Painted in dark oils and heavily varnished, in an Italian ate style long out of fashion where now the sky of domes and their falling TItans opened against real luminous skies, and artists were using sunny palettes showing doorways in the background with curtains lifted by the heads of curious Indians, eager to slip through into the great theater of events, who seemed copied out of an account of travels in the kingdoms of Tartary . . . Farther on, hanging in a small antechamber that led to a barber's chair, was a painting of three figures by Rosalba pittora) a famed female artist of Venice whose work in pastel grays, pinks, blues, and turquoise tones proclaimed the

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ties no longer inaccessible now that he could soon become acquainted with such courtesans there being no lack of the wherewithal for the purpose so highly praised in the writings of certain illustrious travelers,

and before very long, he would be playing that licentious "astrolabe game" indulged in by many of the city, according to what he had been told ~ a pastime that consisted of floating through the narrow canals hidden in a boat with curtains left open a crack to enable catching by surprise an «imprudence" on the part of lovely ladies who, aware of being observed yet feigning

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decolletage, sometimes speedily, but not so speedily as to interfere with a clear view, exposed a breast and its rosy nipple . . . The master, returning to the grand salon, draining the while another goblet of wine as he walked, stopped to read Horace's distich that he had had carved over the lintel of one of the doors with sly innuendo directed at his old shopkeeper friends to say nothing of the notary, the inspector of weights and measures, and the priest, translator of Lactantius whom, for want of persons of higher merit and position, he received to join him at cards and the uncorking of newly arrived wines from Europe:

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tion, the nocturnal visitor bared her tits to the air and crossed her legs with most arrant boldness, the master's hand straying between the lace-tiered petticoats, seeking the warmth of the segrete case of which Dante sang. The manservant, to enter into the spirit, picked up his

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you, a floor scrubber, a grinder of corn, whom I screwed the night my pure, good wife passed away after receiving holy unction and the papal blessing .. . ! And since Francisquillo, after tapping the deepest-hidden barrel in the cellar, would have provided her with the necessary for curbing her tongue and warming her disposi-

aching for I love that woman so," until the master, fed up with those old standbys, plumped the nocturnal visitor into his lap and called for something different, something that Francisquillo was being taught at the school where the lessons were costing such good money~ And in the vastness of the red lava-stone house, under cupolas decorated with little pink angels, among the boxes those to stay and those to go filled with washbasins and ewers of silver, silver spurs, sets of silver buttons, and silver reliquaries, the servant's voice rose, I

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singing with a broad tropical-coast accent an Italian couplet very appropriate for a day like this that the maestro had taught him on the eve of departure:

Ah) dolente partz'ta, Ah) dolente partita.' All at once, the great knocker of the main door sounded, and the song was suspen~ed as the master muted the instrument, hand on the strings. "Go and see ... but let no one in. I've had a bellyful of good-byes for the last three days . . ." A distant creaking of hinges could be heard, somebody begging pardon on behalf of his companions, "thank you's" that could be guessed at, then a distinctly audible Hdon't wake him" followed by a chorus of ((good nights." And the servant returned with a long, rolled-up sheet of Holland paper that bore in a round, readily legible hand a list of last-minute petitions and commissionsthe sorts of things that pop into the minds of others the moment one is about to set foot in the stirrup presented to the traveler by his friends and frequenters . . . The inspector of weights and measures would like oil of bergamot, a mandolin inlaid with mother-af-pearl, fqr his daughter and a small in the Cremona style keg of Zara maraschino. Inigo, the master silversmith, wanted two Bolognese-style lanterns used on carriagehorse headbands to serve as models for a new

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artifact, without doubt, that might find favor with those here at home. For the priest, a copy of the Bibliotheca Orientalis by the Chaldean, Assemino, the Vatican librarian, not to mention "just a few" Roman coins if not too expensive ... hmph! for his numismatic collection and, if possible, a walking stick of Polish amber with gilt knob (not, perforce, gold) of the kind that comes in a long case lined in crimson velvet. The notary was after something more unusual: a deck· of playing cards of a type unknown here, called minchiate} an invention, it was said, of the painter Michelangelo for teaching arithmetic to children and which, instead of the classical suits of diamonds, clubs, hearts, and spades, bore figures representing stars, the sun and moon, a pope, the devil, death, a hanged man, a lunatic (the wild card), and the trumpets of the last judgment which determine what shall be trump. ("For fortunetelling and sorcery," interjected the wench, lending an ear to the reading of the list as she removed her bracelets and stripped down her stockings.) But the most engaging petition of all came from the judge emeritus who requested samples of Italian marble for his bric-a-brac

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possible examples of onion marble, indigo, breccia (that resembles mosaic), and Siena yellow, but not to forget mottled Pentelic, Numidian red (used commonly in antiquity), and also, perhaps, a chunk of lumachella with nacreous tracings in the veins, and if not too much of an imposition, a small slab of serpentine green,

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than to be chasing after rare books, heavenly stones, and exotic unguents. Your music teacher is the only one I'll lift a finger for, Francisquillo~ His were modest requests, only for things easy to carry: sonatas, 'concertos, symphonies, oratorios little bulk and much harmony ... And now, ba~k to your song, boy ... "

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Since setting sail from Veracruz, the vessel had been beset by all the contrary winds that on allegorical maps puff out the cheeks of perverse genies, the enemies of. seafaring people. A safe landing was finally made with sails torn, hull damaged, and quatterdeck battered , only"to find Havana plunged in mourning because of a terrible epidemic of malignant fever. All in that place - as Lucretius would have said '(was turmoil and confusion and the afflicted buried their fellows as best they could." (De Rerum Natura) Book VI, indicated the erudite traveler on quoting the words from memory.)

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though a master sans servant could be a master at alihis grand entrances now frustrated (for want of retainer with Mexican vihuela)} as was his dream of the figure he would cut wherever he appeared, wealthy, rolling in wealth, with money to burn, he a grandson of those who had set out from Spain ('their bottoms showing through their breeches," as the saying goes to seek , their fortune in the lands of America. But here at the inn the starting place of the mule trains which made the journey every morning to Jaruco - his attention was drawn to a freed Negro, skilled in the arts of currying and trimming, who, during his rests from tending the beasts, strummed on a rude guitar or, when so disposed, sang irreverent ditties concerning horny priests and ladies of easy virtue, accompanying . himself on a drum or sometimes beating out the rhythm of the choruses with a pair of ship's thole pins which, when struck together, made a sound of hammer against

metal like that heard in the silversmiths' workshops in Mexico. The traveler, to distract himself in his impatience to continue his voyage, sat listening to the groom every afternoon in the mule yard. And it crossed his mind that, since it was the fashion in those days for wealthy gentlemen to be attended by black pages apparently, such Moors were already to be seen in the capital cities of France, Italy, Bohemia, and even of

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distant Denmark where the queens, as is well known, have their husbands murdered by poisons which, like music with infernal powers, must enter through the ear - it would not ill become him to take this groom into his service, instructing him, of course, in certain comportments with which he seemed unfamiliar. He ques .. tioned the innkeeper as to whether the individual was honest, a good Christian, a person of seemly habits, and was told that none better could be found in all the town and, what is more, that he knew how to read, could compose an uncomplicated letter, and even understood • • mUSlC wrItten on paper. Accordingly, he engaged Filomeno for such was the groom's name in conversation and learned that he was the great-grandson of one Salvador, a black who a century before had been the hero of a deed so celebrated'that a poet of the country, Silvestre de Balboa, sang of him in a long, well .. rhymed ode entitled Paragon

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One day as the young man related in the waters off Manzanillo, where an endless curtain of trees along the beach screens unpleasant surprises that may issue from the sea, there dropped anchor a brigantine under the command of Gilberto Giron, a French freebooter of the stamp that holds faith in neither the VIrgin nor the saints, captain of a band of Lutherans, adventurers of every stripe, among the many ever disposed to take part in an enterprise of boarding, smuggling, or pillage, who prowled the waters of the Caribbean and Florida com-

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mitting outrages. Black-hearted Giron knew that the good Friar Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano would be on the haciendas of Yara, a few leagues from the coast) visiting his diocese as bishop of this island that was formerly named Fernandina "because when first it was sighted by Grand Admiral Don Cristobal, a King Ferdinand ruled in Spain who, according to a saying of the people of olden times, amounted to as much as the queen, possibly because it was the king's duty to mount the queen, and in the intimacy of the marriage bed, who is to know who mounts whom, since whether the male mounts or the male is mounted, is a matter that ... "2 "Get on with your story in a straight line, boy," interrupted the traveler, "and don't be veering off on tangents and curves; to arrive at the clear truth calls for many proofs and reproofs." "I shall· so do," the youth replied. And raising his arms to work his hands as puppets, the thumbs and little fingers moving like tiny arms, he carried on his narration with a flair rivaling that of any of those nimblewitted mountebanks who pull characters out from behind their backs and set them on the platform of their shoulders. ("Just the way certain strolling players in the markets of Mexico relate the grand story of Montezuma and Hernan Cortes," the traveler said to himself.) The Huguenot, then, apprised that the holy pastor of Fernandina was to pass the night in Yara, set out with his henchmen to search for the good friar with the evil intention of taking him prisoner and holding him for

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high ransom. He entered the town at daybreak and,

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finding the inhabitants asleep) seized the worthy prelate without respect or consideration and demanded a price for his freedom enormous for those poor folk of two hundred ducats in money, a hundred arrobas of meat and bacon, and a thousand hides, not -to mention other items of lesser value to satisfy the vices and beastliness of such buccaneers. The unfortunate townspeople managed to pay the outrageous ransom, and the bishop returned to his parish, where he was received with great joyousness and festivity '(which will be spoken of more fully later," the youth indicated, as he frowned and deepened his voice before passing to the second, considerably more dramatic, part of the tale . . . Enraged upon learning of what happened, doughty Gregorio Ramos, a captain and a Christian "valiant as the champion Roland," resolved that the Frenchman should not come away unpunished or' enjoy his easy booty. With dispatch, he enlisted a party of hairy-chested, resolute fellows and set out at their head for Manzanillo with the aim of engaging the pirate Gir6n in battle. There were men in the band with good blades, linstocks, partisans, and blunderbusses, while the rest their profession not being that of arms bore whatever weapon each could muster for joining the fray: this one, an iron dibble with sharpened tip; his neighbor, nothing but a rusty pike; another, ~n ox goad or wooden digging stick, clutching a manatee hide as a buckler. There were, as well, several nabor~ or freed, Indians disposed to fight

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\ Among our crew) now of great fame) A man of zeal most notorious, A black man} one Salvador by name) On the fields ofYara a worker laborious) Son of Goloman) patriarch wise and without blame)" Bearing machete and spear soon victorious) On hearing Gir6n~ insults inJourious) Fell on him like a lion most furious.

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. . . side stepped) and with unerring lunge) into that evil heart hz's spear did plunge.

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The prolonged struggle waxed fierce. The Negro was being stripped naked by the wild slashes of the Lutheran's sword, against which, however, his Norman coat of mail afforded him good protection. But after blocking and parrying, mocking and harrying him, brave Salvador, resorting to feints practiced in the culling of fighting bulls:

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with their native devices and cunning. But also among .them, most importantly most importantly! was one) a man) he (and he doffed his storyteller's straw hat , with tangled fringe), impelled by heroic zeal, whom the poet Silvestre de Balboa was to sing of especially in this verse:

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Oh) criollo Salvador! Oh) honorable black.' To praise this soldier's worth,

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May there never be a lack Of tongue or pen on Earth!

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impaled on the point of a lance . so that along the way, all might know of his wretched end before it was

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lowered to the blade of a poniard that entered up to the hilt in the gorge . . . and with that trophy, the band of tumultuous victors reached the celebrated city of Bayarno. The people clamored at the top of their lungs for freedom to be given the black, Salvador, in reward for his valor. The authorities granted the petition. And when the holy bishop returned, the town was bursting with exultation. And such was the happiness of the elders, the jubilation of the women, and the din, set up by the children that an audience 'composed of satyrs, fauns, centaurs, sylvans, naiads, and even hamadryads ('in skirts," disappointed at not having been invited to take part in the rejoicing, looked' on through the foliage of the guava trees and the sugarcane (Filomeno said, illustrating with allusive gestures his enumeration of apparel, horns, attributes)~ The reference to satyrs and centaurs peeping out of Cuba's wooded groves seemed to the traveler a product of fevered imagination on the poet Balboa's part, although he could not help but be surprised at coming upon a black man in RegIa able to pronounce so many ancient pagan names. The groom, however, vainglorious of his heritage proud to have

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questioned that in these islands supernatural beings,

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creatures of classical mythology, should have been seen, similar to the many of darker complexion that still

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inhabit the woods, fountains, and caves here as they had in the far-off, indeterminate kingdoms from whence came the forebears of illustrious Salvador, who was, in his way, a sort of Achilles, inasmuch as, ,for lack of a real Troy and keeping things in due proportion, one can be an Achilles in Bayamo or an Achilles in Coyoacan, commensurably with the magnitude of events. And now, in a'n outpouring of mimicry and onomatopoeia (of humming in falsetto and bass, hand clapping, and shoulder shaking, of thumping on boxes, tubs, wooden basins, and troughs, of running a stick over fence rails of the patio, of cries and heel stamping), Filomeno sought to recreate the din of the music at the memorable fiesta which lasted perhaps two days and produced on instruments recounted by two nights the poet Balboa in symphonious enumeration: flutes, pipes of Pan, "rebecs, one hundred" (a poetaster's maunderings in his groping for a rhyme thinks the traveler for nobody has ever heard of a symphony of a hundred rebecs, even at the court of King Philip, so great a music lover, it is said, that he never set out on a journey without taking along a portable organ that blind Antonio Cabez6n would play upon whenever they stopped), bugles, tambourines, tabors, timbrels, ket~ tledrums, and even tt'pt'naguas) drums fashioned by Indians from gourds since in that general concert

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there took part musicians of Castile and the Canaries, criollos and mestizos, nabories and Negroes.

"Whites and coloreds together in that revel?" won-

dered the traveler. '~n impossible harmony! Never could such folly have occurred, for the noble old melodies of the romance and the subtle modulations and variations of good maestros would have married ill with the barbarous racket raised by Negroes when they set to work with their rattles, maracas, and drums ... ! What an infernal cacophony it would have produced and what a great liar that Balboa must have been! " But at the same time, he thinks now more convinced than ever - that Golom6n's great-grandson would be the best possible candidate to assume the mantle of the departed Francisquillo and, one morning, having made the pro,posal to ~ilomeno that he enter his service, the visitor had him tryon a red jacket which fit admirably. He then set a white wig on his head that made him blacker than he was. Accommodation to the knee breeches and lightcolored stockings was quite easy. As for the slippers with buckles, his bunions did put up resistance but they would soon accustom . . . And after arranging all that was necessary to arrange and having settled accounts with the innkeeper, the master, wearing a Mexican charro hat, set out for the RegIa wharf in the early morning of that September day, the Negro walking behind him holding an umbrella of

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blue cloth with a silver fringe over his head. The breakfast service, large cups and small all of silver, the cham-

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grandson of Spaniards who hailed trom

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son spoke glowingly of the land they left behind, the master had pictured Madrid otherwise. To him, raised amidst the opulence of Mexican silver and red lava stone, the city appeared drab, gloomy, and mean.

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Except for the main square, all was narrow, dirty, and squalid when one considered how broad and richly ornamented the streets at home were, with their tiled fa~ades, balconies aloft on the wings of cherubs between cornucopias pouring forth fruits carved out of

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whose lettering entwined with vine leaves and ivy proclaimed the attractions of jewelry shops. The inns here were poor, with a smell of rancid oil that seeped into the rooms, and it was impossible in many of those hostelries

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less said the better. The sight of the meatballs they were served and the monotono'us hakes called up remembrance in the Mexican of the subtlety of red snapper and the pomp of turkey swathed in dark-hued sauces rich with the aroma of chocolate and the fires of a thousand spices; the quotidian cabbage, insipid beans, chick-peas, and broccoli moved the black to sing the

praises of the full-throated, tender avocado, of malanga tubers which, sprinkled with vinegar, parsley, and garlic, appeared on the tables of his country in the company of crabs, the tawny meat of whose claws was more substantial than the beefsteaks of this land. The days were spent, for the most part, in wandering from taverns well· stocked with fine wines to bookshops where the master bought richly bound tomes and trea-

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tises on theology of the sort that always dresses up a library, but the two were not having a really good time. One night they went whoring to a house where they were received by an obese, pug-nosed, cross-eyed, harelipped, pockmarked madam with a goiter that encircled her throat, whose broad bottom swaying at . a height of no more than a span and a half from the ground , looked as if it belonged to a dwarf giantess. An orchestra of blind ,musicians struck up a minuet in the Lagartera style to the cadence of which Filis, Cloris,

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and Lucinda entered. dressed. as shepherdesses, followed by lsidra and La Catalana, who were hastily polishing off asnack ot sliced onions on bread with olive oil, passing one another a wineskin of Valdapefias to

wash down the last mouthfuls. It was a night of heavy drinking, during the course of which the master related his adventures as a silver miner in Taxco, and Filomeno performed dances of his country to the rhythm of a song he sang that told of a snake with eyes like embers and fangs like needles. The house was ordered closed so that the strangers might give free rein to their revelry, and it was already well past noon when they returned to their inn, having lunched merrily with the whores.

But while Filomeno licked his chops over the memory of his first banquet of white flesh, the master, trailed

by a pack of beggars whenever he ventured forth (his charro hat embroidered in silver an already familiar beacon), grumbled incessantly over the wretchedness of this much-vaunted metropolis of small account, really, in comparison to what lay at the other shore of the ocean that obliged a gentleman of his standing and attributes to satisfy himself with whores in face of the unavailability of a lady of quality disposed to' open her alcove curtains to him'. The fairs here had neither the color nor spirit of those of Coyoacan; the shops were poor in wares and handicrafts, and the furniture displayed by some ~as stodgy and sad in design, if not to say out of style, its good-quality wood and tooled leather notwithstanding; also, the jousting was bad, due to the

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shut the boxes and wrapped himself in the coachman's

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horsemen's lack of mettle, and in the parade that preceded the tilting, the horses were unevenly gaited, nor did the riders know how to charge their mounts headon at the spectator stands and pull them up to a dead, four~ legged stop the moment a disastrous crash seemed unavoidable. As for the allegorical dramas offered by the strolling players, they were in obvious decadence, with devils having downturned horns, hoarse Pilates, and saints whose halos had been gnawed by mice. The days dragged by, and for all the money at his command, the master's boredom was becoming unbearable. And one morning the situation reached such a pass that he decided to cut short his stay in Madrid and set out, as soon as possible, for Italy where the carnival which attracted people from all over Europe would be starting at Christmastime. Filomeno, however, as though bewitched by the caperings of Filis and Lucinda, who frolicked with him in an oversize bed surrounded by mirrors at the dwarf giantess's house, did not take kindly to the idea of the trip. But the master made such a point of the wenches here being fit for the rubbish bin in comparison with those he would meet . around the pontifical· city that the black, convinced,

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cape he had just bought. As they made their way down to the sea

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each whiter than the last

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con and Minglanilla, the Mexican sought to divert his servant with tales of a mad hidalgo who had once

roamed those regions and who, on one occasion, mis· took some windmills (((like the one you see there ... ") for giants. Filomeno averred that those windmills did not look in the least like giants and that, as for real giants, there were some in Africa so big and so powerful

that they played with lightning bolts and earthquakes ... When they arrived in Cuenca, the master observed that the city, with its main street climbing the back of a hill, was a paltry thing "alongside Guanajuato, which also had such a street crowned by ~ church. Valencia was more to their liking, for there they found themselves once again enjoying a way of life untrammeled by the ·clock that brought back to them the dictum of their own lands of maize drinks and toothsome stews: «Do not put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow." And so, by roads from which sight of the sea was never lost, the travelers reached Barcelona, where their ears were gladdened by the sound of many pipes and

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way!" from coaches leaving the city. They saw boats off the beach, their awnings furled, covered with pennons and streamers' that fluttered in the wind, brushing and kissing the water. The playful sea, the joyous land, the crystalline atmosphere seemed instantly to engender and infuse pleasure in everyone.

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"They remind one of ants," said the master, observing the crowds on the docks from the deck of the ship on which they would set sail for Italy the next day. "If you let them, they'll be putting up buildings' high enough to reach the clouds." Beside him, Filomeno was praying in a low voice to a black Virgin, the patron saint of fishermen and travelers, to protect their voyage and bring them safely to port in Rome which, being an important city, must, as he imagined, be situated at the ocean's edge with a good bank of reefs to protect it from hurricanes such hurricanes as would tear loose the bells of Saint Peter's once each decade, or thereabouts, which was the case in Havana with the churches of San Francisco and the Holy Spirit .

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n the grayness of water and hazy skies despite that winter's mildness; under the grisaille of clouds, shaded with sepia, that painted themselves below upon the soft and ample swelling wavelets languid in their foamless rocking - that spread or merged in receding from bank to bank; amid the wash of palest watercolors that blurred the contours of churches and palaces with a moistness manifested in seaweed tones upon the stairway.s and jetties, in rainy reflections on the paving stones of the plazas, in misty stains along the walls lapped by silent waves; among evanescences, mutings, ocher lights, and mossy sadness in the shadows of the bridges across the quietness of canals; at the foot of cypresses like sketches barely suggesting trees; among opalescences, twilight tints, attenuated scarlets, pastel-blue smoke, the carin nival (the great carnival of Epiphany) exploded orange yellow and mandarin yellow; in canary yellow

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pole stripes, bicorne hats and plumes, iridescence of silks swirling within eddies of satins and ribbons, Turkish dress and fantastic costumes

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with such a blast of

cymbals and clappers, of drums, tambourines, and bugles, that all the pigeons of the city rose as a single flight darkening the sky for seconds as they took wing to distant parts. All at once, adding their symphony to that of the flags and pennants, lanterns and lamps came alight on warships, frigates, cargo boats, fishing smacks - their crews in costume while there appeared, like a floating pergola, the last bucentaur of the Most Serene Republic,3 patched together with odd-sized planks and barrel staves, disreputable-looking but still flamboyant and arrogant, withdrawn from its shelter on this festive day to set off sparklers, skyrockets, and a fireworks display that culminated in bursts of girandoles and Roman candles . . . .Everybody, then, changed face. White ceruse masks, all alike, froze the physiognomies of men of position from lustrous hat to tabard collar; dominoes of dark velvet hid the visages, alive only in the lips and teeth, of muffled ladies, slender of foot. As for the people sailors, vegetable vendors, bakers of buns, fishmongers, men of the sword and the inkwell,. the oars and the pole - there was a general transfiguration that concealed the skin, smooth or wrinkled, the grimace of the

beguiled, the impatience of the beguiler, and the leer of the feeler, beneath painted cardboard masks of Chinamen, death's-heads, Stag Kings, and others with

•

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rummy's noses, Berber's beards, billy-goat's whiskers, cuckold's horns. Respectable women, disguising their

voices) relieved themselves of all the salaciousness and dirty words held in for months, while nances, gotten up as mythological characters or in Spanish hoop skirts, fluted insinuations that did not always go unheeded. Everybody was talking, hawking, bawling, brawling, flattering, flirting, singing, soliciting in voices not their own, between puppet stage and players' boards, astrologer's booth' and medicine man's displays of herbs for love potions, elixirs to ease a stitch in the sid~ or to warm a graybeard's blood. Now, for forty days, shops would not be closing before midnight, to say nothing of the 'many whose doors would remain open all day and all night; the organ-grinders' monkeys would keep dancing, trained cockatoos keep swinging on their filigree trapezes, equilibrists keep walking over the square upon a wire, the fortune-tellers, necromancers, beggars, and harlots would keep plying their trades these last the only women with faces unconcealed, they being unmistakably, unimpeachably themselves at a time in this universal dissimulation of personality, age, demeanor, and shape, when one would appreciate having an inkling, should a bargain be struck, as to the likes of whom he might be taking with him to the neighboring hostelry. Under the city's illumination, the water was set aglow in the canals, great and small, which now seemed to be swaying the light of tremulous lanterns

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To find relief from the tumult and jostling of the milling crowd, from the vertigo of the colors, the master, dressed up as Montezuma, entered Victoria Arduino's Botteghe di Calle) followed by the black~ who had felt it unnecessary to disguise himself after seeing how much his own face resembled a mask among the white dominoes that made the masquer appear as though half his face belonged to a statue. Already there, seated at a table in the rear, was the Red Priest, wearing a habit cut of the finest cloth, his long, hooked nose sticking out beyond the natural curls of his coiffure which nevertheless

looked like a wig. "Since I was born with this mask, I see no need to buy another," he said, laughing. "Inca?" he then asked, fingering the Aztec emperor's glass beads. "Mexican," replied the master, launching into a lengthy tale which the priest, already deep in his cups, took to be about a king of giant beetles the narrator's

glossy, green, squamous breastplate did, in fact, resemble a beetle's

who had lived not so long ago, when

one considered it,· among temples, lakes, and teocallis) the ruler of an empire that was wrested from him by a

handful of bold Spaniards with the help of an Indian woman who was in love with the chief of the invaders.

"Good story. Good theme for an opera . . ." said the priest, thinking, all at once, of ingenious stage settings,

trapdoors, levitations, and machine with which effects of smoking mountains, apparitions of -monsters, and

earthquakes with collapsing buildings could be most

•

71

effectively created, since there were master stage technicians so skillful they could repr~duce any prodigy of

nature and even Inake a live elephant fly through the air, as had recently been witnessed in a great magic show. And while the other went on with his tale of sorcerers' spells, human sacrifices) and choirs on tragic nights, the fanciful Saxon, a friend of the friar's, appeared, dressed in his everyday clothes, followed by a young Neapolitan pupil of Gasparini, who removed his sweaty mask to . reveal a thin, shrewd c.ountenance that lit up in a smile of pleasure whenever he looked at Filomeno's black face: "Hey, there, Jugurtha. . ." 4 The Saxon, however, was in vile humor, flushed with anger and wine, as because a masquer covered with well, to be sure cowbells had pissed on his hose and dodged just in time to escape a slap that landed on the buttock of a nance who, taking this as an expression' of admiration, was

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disposed to .turn the other cheek. "Calm down," said the Red Priest. ('I've already heard that Agrippina had a bigger success tonight than ever." "A triumph," replied the Neapolitan, emptying a glass of brandy into his coffee. "The Grimani Theater was sold out." A great success, perhaps, considering the applause and acclamation at the curtain, but the Saxon could not accustom himself to such a public: "It's simply that nobody here takes anything seriously." Between the soprano's aria and the chorus of the castratt~ there was a constant coming and going of spectators eating oranges,

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taking snuff and sneezing, gulping refreshments, and uncorking bottles, when they weren't playing at cards,

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even during the most gripping moments of the tragedy. To say nothing of those fornicating in the mezzanine in the boxes crammed with soft cushions to the point where, that night, during Nero's poignant recitative, a woman's leg with the stocking rolled down to the ankle had appeared over the red velvet of the railing trailing a shoe that dropped in the middle of the orchestra, to the merriment of the audience, whose ,attention was at once distracted from the action on the stage. Paying no heed to the guffaws of the Neapolitan, George Frideric began to praise the people of his country who listened to music as though they were at mass, who were moved by the purity of an aria's structure and appreciated with thorough grasp the masterful development of a fugue . . . The time passed agreeably in joking, exchanging comments, speaking ill of this one and that, recounting the story of how a courtesan friend of the artist Rosalba ("I laid her last night," said Montezuma) had' gulled a wealthy French magistrate, giving him nothing for his money; meanwhile, there had crossed the table a num-

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ber of squat wine bottles encased in colored straw wrappings containing one of those pale reds that does

not enpurple the lips but filters through and down to mount with smoothest joyousness. "This is the very same wine being drunk by the king of Denmark who is having himself a bacchanalia at the

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"There can't be any kings in Denmark," said Mon. tezuma, who was growing seriously bleary-eyed. "There can't be any kings in Denmark because everything is rotten there, the kings die of poison that's poured into their ears, and the princes are driven crazy by all the ghosts that appear in the castles and end up playing with skulls, like Mexican kids on the Day of the Dead . . ." Since the conversation was beginning to wander and turn vacuous, and now weary of the hurly-burly of the square that obliged them to shout when they spoke, and dizzied by the swirl of white, green, black, and yellow masks, the nimble friar, the ruddy-faced Saxon, the

laughing Neapolitan then considered the possibility of separating themselves from the fiesta and repairing to some place where they might make music. And, forming a line the substantial German at the prow as breakwater and figurehead, Montezuma on his heels they set out to ply the swelling multitudes, stopping every so often only to pass around a bottle of chartreuse that hung from Filomeno's neck on a satin ribbon snatched off an infuriated fishwife along the way, who had insulted him with a richness of epithet such that ((coglione)) and ('son of the great whore" were the very

mildest in her repertoire.

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carnival, incognito, of course, under the name of the

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istrustful, the portress's face appearing at the wicket, then alight with joy when she recognized the Redhead. "Oh! Heavenly surprise!" The hinges of the small door creaked, and the five men entered the darkened Ospedale della Pieta, in whose long passageways the distant sounds of the carnival echoed at moments as though carried by an intermittent wind. ((Heavenly surprise!" repeated the nun, turning up the lights of the grand concert hall, which with its marble, moldings, and garlands, its many chairs, curtains, and gilt, its carpets, its paintings of biblical scenes appeared rather more like a theater without a stage or a church of scant altars, the ambience at once conventual and secu1ar' ostentatious and recondite. Towards the back,

where a cupola scooped into the shadows, the tapers and lamps elongated the reflections of the tall organ pipes, flanked by the shorter ones of the voix celestes. Montezuma and Filomeno were asking themselves what

could have possessed them to come to a place like this when they might have joined in the revelry where there

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would be women and wine, when two, five, ten, twenty pale figures began to emerge from the shadows at the right and the penumbra on the left, surrounding Antonio the Priest's habit with the charming whiteness

of their cambric chemises, negligees, nightgowns, and lace nightcaps. And more came, and yet more, still sleepy and languid on entering but at once blithe and chirping, swirling about the nocturnal visitors, examin .. ing Montezuma's necklaces and, more than anything

else, gazing at the Negro whose cheeks they pinched to discover if he wore a mask. And other~ came, and yet others, wearing perfume in their hair, flowers at their bosoms, and embroidered slippers, until the nave was

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filled with young faces · faces without masks, at last! - laughing, delighted at the surprise, and becoming even more excited when out of the larder there began to appear pitchers of sangaree and mead, Spanish wine, raspberry and mirabelle plum brandies. The Maestro for so they all called him took charge of the introductions: Pierina del via lin a . . . Cattarina del cornetto. . . Bettina della viola. . . Bianca Maria organista . . . Margherita del arpa doppia . . . Giuseppina del chitarrone . . . Claudia del/lautino . . . Lucieta della tromba. . . And gradually, since they were sixty-six and Maestro Antonio was in his cups mistaking some of the orphans for others, each name became reduced to that of the instrument she played. As if the

girls had no personalities of their own and were metamorphosed as sounds, he pointed his finger at them:

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Clavicembalo. . . Viola da brazzo . . . Clarino . . . Oboe · · · Basso di gamba ... Flauto ... Organo di legno . .. Regale. · . Violino alla /rancese . . . Tromba marina . . . Trombone . ..

The music stands were set up, the Saxon took his place magisterially at the keyboard of the organ, the Neapolitan tested the timbre of a harpsichord, the Maestro ascended the podium, seized a violin, raised the bow, and with two vigorous sweeps unleashed the most extraordinary concerto grosso the centuries could ever have heard but the centuries remember nothing, and more's the pity, for this was something as well worth· hearing as being seen. . . Having enkindled the frenetic allegro of the sixty-six young women, who knew their parts by heart, so often rehearsed by now, Antonio Vivaldi attacked the symphony with astonishing abandon in concertante form, as Domenico Scarlatti for it was he · rippled off vertiginous scales on the harpsichord, and George Frideric Handel launched into dazzling variations that violated all the rules of figured bass. "Hit it~ you bloody Saxon!" shouted Antonio. uI'll show you how it's done, you whoremaster priest!" the other shouted back, carried away by his prodigious improvisational power, whilst Antonio, never taking his eyes off Domenico's hands lavishing

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:-his students. And it would have seemed that the movement had reached its climax when George Frideric) activating the great organ, pulled out the foundation stops, the mixtures, and the plenum with such abandon in the clarion, trumpet, and bombardon stops that it began to sound like the calls of the Day of Judgment. "The Saxon is fouling us all up!" yelled Antonio, infuriating the fortissimo. "I can't even hear myself!" yelled Domenico, redoub . ling the volume of his chords. . But in the meantime, Filomeno had run off to the kitchen and returned with a battery of copper kettles of all sizes that he began to beat upon with spoons, skimmers, rolling pins, stirrers, feather-duster handles, and pokers with such prodigies of rhythm, syncopation, and complex patterns that he was given a thirty-twa-bar

chorus all to himself. ((Stupendous! Stupendous!" George Frideric cried out.

"Stupendous! Stupendous!" Domenico cried out, banging enthusiastically on the keyboard of the

harpsichord with his elbows. Measure 28. Measure 29. Measure 30. Measure 31. Measure 32. "Now!" howled Antonio Vivaldi, and everybody fell upon the da capo with fearsome force, drawing the very soul out of violins, oboes, trombones, regals, barrel organs, violas da gamba, and all that was

81

able to resound in the nave, whose crystal chandeliers vibrated above as though shaken by a celestial uproar. Final cadence. Antonio put down the bow. Domenico pulled the cover over the keyboard. The Saxon took from his pocket a lace handkerchief, very slight for such a broad brow, and dried his perspiration. The students of the Ospedale laughed aloud as they watched Montezuma pass around goblets of a drink he had concocted in a busy decantation with pitchers and

glasses, blending together a little of everything . . . Such was the prevailing mood when a painting, suddenly illuminated by a candelabrum that was moved close to it, caught Filo~eno)s attention. An Eve being tempted by the Serpent was depicted. But it was not the spi~dly and yellowish Eve too heavily enshrouded in tresses unnecessarily protective of a modesty' nonexistent in times still incognizant of carnal wickedness that stood out in the picture, but the Serpent,greenstriped, fleshly, taking three turns around the trunk of the Tree, whose enormous eyes brimming with evil seemed to be offering the apple to those looking at the painting rather than to its victim, still indecisive and it is under~tandable when one considers what her acquiescence cost us .about accepting the fruit that was to cause her to give birth with the pain of her entrails. Filomeno slowly approached the canvas as though

afraid the Serpent might leap from the frame and, beating on a tray that gave out a hoarse sound, looking

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the while upon those present as though officiating at a strange ritual ceremony, he began to sing: . - . .",

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LiJI mamma) li'l mamma) Come, come} come. Snake's gonna eat me, Come) come, come.

Looka he seyes, shine like a fire. Looka tha tooth) sharp lzke a pzn. •

Make-believe) my Negra, Come, come) come. A game from back home) come. Come, And swiping at the air with a huge carving knife as though killing the snake in the painting, he shouted:

The snake is

Ca-Ia-ba-son) Son-son. Ca-Ia-ba-son) Son-son.

83

((Kabala-sum-sum-sum," chorused Antonio VlValdi, out of ecclesiastical custom giving the refrain an unex-

pected inflection of Latin litany. (Kabala-sum-sumsum, chorused Domenico Scarlatti. ({Kabala sum-sumsum,)) chorused George Frideric Handel. ((Kabala-sumJ)

sum-sum,)) repeated the sixty-six "female voices of the

Ospedale, amidst clapping of hands and laughter. And following the black, who was now banging on the tray with a pestle, they all fell into line, hands on each other's waists, swaying their hips, forming the most disparate mummers' troupe inlaginable, a troupe now led by Montezuma, twirling a huge lantern on the end of a broomstick in rhythm with the chant, repeated a hundred times. Kabala-sum-sum-sum. And so, one behind anotherin a snake dance, they made several tours of the concert hall, continued to the chapel, took three turns around the ambulatory, and then continued along the corridors and hallways, up the stairways and down the stairways, passing through the galleries, until they were joined by the nuns on duty, the sister portress, the cooks, the ~cullery maids routed out of their beds" soon followed by the shop foreman, the market gardener, the flower gardener, the bell ringer, the boatman, and even the feebleminded girl kept in the attic who left off being feebleminded when it came to singing ,P. in that institution devoted to music and the instrumental arts where a grand concert of sacred music had been given two days before in honor of the king of Denmark . . . Ca-Ia-bason-s6n-son, sang Filomeno, accenting the beat more

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strongly each time. Kabala-sum-sum-sum, replied the Venetian, the Saxon, and the Neapolitan. Kabala-sumsum-sum) repeated the others, until exhausted from so much whirling, running up, running down, going in, going out, they returned to the concert hall and collapsed, all laughing, on the red carpet, around the goblets and bottles. After a pause for much vigorous fanning, they fell to dancing figures and steps in vogue to the music that Domenico began to pluck from the harpsichord, embellishing the familiar airs with most elegant mordents and trills. For lack of gentlemen, since Antonio did not dance and the others were reposing in the cushioned depths of their seats, oboe paired offwith tromba, clarino with regale, cornette with viola, flautino with chitarrone, while the violini piccoli alia francese joined in a quadrille with the trombones. '~ll the instruments scrambled together," said George Frideric. (It's like some sort of fantastic symphony. " But .Filomeno, now standing beside the harpsichord with a goblet over the sounding board, added a rhythmic background to the dancing by scraping a key across a kitchen grater. "Black devil!" exclaimed the Neapolitan. "When I want to carry a certain rhythm, he forces me to follow him. I'll wind up here playing cannibal music!" And with that, Domenico rose from the instrument, tossed a last tot down his gullet, took Margherita Double-Action

85

Harp by the waist, and disappeared with her into the Ospedale della Pieta's labyrinth of cells . . . But dawn began to paint itself on the great windows. The white figures were quieted down,. putting instruments away in their cases and cupboards, faces glum, as though ill-disposed now to return to their daily routines. The night of gaiety expired to the adieu of the bell ringer who, all at once sober, set about tolling matins. Like phantoms in a play, the white figures disappeared through the portal right and the portal left. The nun portress appeared with two hampers packed with puff pastries, cheeses, twists and croissants, quince preserves, glazed chestnuts, pink marzipan piglets, and peeping out above all these the necks of bottles of romagnese wine: (For your breakfast on the way.)) ((I'll take them in my boat," said the boatman. "I'm sleepy," said Montezuma. ((I'm hungry," said the Saxon. "But I would like to eat in a quiet spot where there's trees and birds other than those greedy pigeons of the square, plumper-breasted than Rosalba's models, who will gobble up our breakfast if we don't look sharp." "I'm sleepy," repeated the man in disguise.' "Let yourself drift away with the rhythm of the oars," said Prester Antonio. "What are you hiding there under your cloak?" the Saxon asked Filomeno. ,

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"Nothing. A little remembrance from Cattarina del cornetto," replied the Negro, fingering the object, its shape indeterminate, with the ecstasy of one touching the hand of a saint in a reliquary.

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arried by the breeze and wafted away, sounds ~ of the distant din of cornets and clackers reached them from the city, still dark with shadows under the grayish clouds of the slow dawn. The revelry continued between taverns and stalls whose lights were beginning to go out, the night-roving masquers unconcerned with refurbishing disguises that were losing their luster and their spell in the growing clarity. , After long, smooth oaring, the boat neared the cypresses of a cemetery. (You will be able to take your breakfast here in peace," said the boatman, drifting to a stop. Hampers, baskets, and bottles were passed onto the bank. The gravestones looked like tables with, their cloths off in a vast, empty cafe~ And the addition of the romagnese to the wine already imbibed restored the festive ring to their voices. The Mexican, roused from his torpor, was requested to retell the story of Montezuma which Antonio, deafened the night before by the hubbub of the masquers, had not heard clearly.

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"Splendid for an opera~" exclaimed theRedhead, listening more and mote closely to the storyteller who, carried away, dramatized his narration, gesticulating, changing his voice in improvised dialogues) and finally becoming possessed by the characters. "Splendid for an opera! Nothing is lacking. There is work for the stagehands. A brilliant role for the soprano that Indian woman in love with a Christian which we can give to one of the beautiful singers who . . ." "We are aware that you do not want for such . . .)) said George Frideric. '1\nd there is also the character of the vanquished emperor,» continued Antonio, "the grief-stricken sovereign, bewailing his lot in heartrending tones . . . I am reminded of The Persians) of Xerxes:

It is I) then) oh woe.' Dh) wretch} born To desolate my race And this land of mine.' "Leave Xerxes to me," said George Frideric, illhumoredly. "I'm the best prepared to handle themes of that nature." "You're right," said the Redhead, pointing to Montezuma. "This character is more unusual. I'll find a way to have him sung on the stage one of these days."

91

"A priest mixing into the operal" exclaimed the Saxon. "That's all this city needs to be buggered up for

good." "But if I manage it, I'll make sure not to be taking the Almiras and Agrippinas to bed with me, like some,do," said Antonio, looking down his sharp-pointed nose. ((1 thank you, insofar as that may refer to me . . ,» «The thing is, 1'm getting tired of those rancid plots. All the Orpheuses, all the Apollos, the Iphigenias, Didos, and Galateas! It's time to look for new material, different milieus, other countries, whatever . . . To bring Poland, Scotland, Armenia, Tartary to the theater. Other characters: Geneva, Cunegonde, Griselda, Tamerlane, or Scanderbeg the Albanian who gave the dam .. nable Turks such a bad time. There's a fresh wind blowing. The public will soon weary of lovelorn shepherds, constant nymphs, sententious rustics, Olympian panderers, laurel wreaths, moth-eaten peplums, and last season's royal robes." "Why not make up an opera aqout my great.grandfather Salvador Golom6n?" suggested Filomeno. ((That would be something new, for sure. With a beach and pa1m trees as scenery. " The Saxon and the Venetian burst into laughter with such concerted boisterousness that Montezuma came to his servant's defense. "That doesn't sound so farfetched to me. Salvador Golom6n fought for his faith against its enemies, the Huguenots, just as Scanderbeg fought for his. If a

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criollo of ours seems like a savage to you, the same could be said of one of those big Slavs out there," he cut in, pointing in the direction of the Adriatic, according to his reckoning by a mental compass shifted quite off its north by the red wine imbibed throughout the night. "But . . . who ever heard of an opera with a black hero?" said the Saxon. "Blacks are all right in masques and comic interludes." "Besides, an opera without love is no opera," added Antonio, "and love between a Negro and a Negress would be ludicrous; as for love between a black man and a white woman, that would be impossible · in the t heater, at any rate. " "Just a minute ... just a minute," said Filomeno, his tone mounting increasingly with the romagnese wine. "I've been told of a play that is having a big success in England which is about a Moor who is a great general and in love with the daughter of a Venetian senator. And a rival, jealous of his good fortune, even tells him that he's like a black buck mounting a· white ewe which, by the way, usually produces beautiful, spotted kids! " "Don't talk to me about theater in England," said Antonio. ((The British ambassador ... " '1\ good friend of mine," interjected the Saxon. ". . . the British ambassador has described to me several plays being put on in London, and they are horrifying. Things the like of which are not to be seen even in quacksalvers' shacks, magic lanterns, or those . broadsides peddled by the blind . . ."

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And in the rising dawn that blanched the cemetery, there followed an account of butchery, ghosts,· and murdered children: one whose two eyes were gouged out in plain view of the public by a duke of Cornwall who threw them on the floor and stomped them with his heels in the manner of a Spanish fandango dancer; a Roman general's daughter whose tongue was torn out

and both hands cut off after she had been raped, all of it ending in a banquet at which the offended father, left one-armed after a hatchet blow from his wife's lover, disguises himself as a cook and gives a queen of the Goths a pie to eat stuffed with the flesh of her two children, bled shortly before like pigs on the eve of a

village wedding . , . (How hideous!" exclaimed the Saxon. (~nd the worst of it was that he used the flesh of their faces noses, ears, and .necks in the pie, as recommended for pieces of fine game in treatises on the art of . ... " carvlng (~nd a queen of the Goths ate that?" asked Filomeno, with premeditation. "Like I am eating this pasty," said Antonio, biting IF

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the Negro observed, as the Venetian, savoring a slice of boar's head marinated in vinegar with marjoram and

paprika, took a few steps closer to a grave hard by which

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"I-GOR STRA-VIN-SKY," he said, separating the syllables. "That's he, all right," said the Saxon, following suit. "He wanted to lie in this cemetery." "Good musician," said Antonio, "but at times, very traditional in his approach. He draws on the same antiquated subjects: Apollo, Orpheus, Persephone ... when will it ever end?" "I know his Oedipus Rex) said the Saxon. (Some say that towards the end of the first act Gloria) gloria) gloria) Oedipus uxor.' it sounds like my music." "But . . . where did he get the outlandish idea of writing a profane cantata on a Latin text?" said Antonio. (They also played his Canticum sacrum at Saint Marks," said George Frideric. "It's full of medieval.. type embellishments that we stopped using long ago." "The thing is that these so-called 'modern' maestros are very concerned with what musicians of the past did - and sometimes they even try to rejuvenate their styles. We are more advanced as far as that gO,es. I don't give a damn what the operas or concerts of a hundred years ago were like. I write the way I have to write, and that's it." "Exactly my opinion," said the Saxon, (( ... but at the same time, it must be kept in mind . . ." "Stop talking shit," said Filomeno, upending a fresh bottle of wine just uncorked. J)

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And the four dipped their hands once again into the baskets from the Ospedale della Pieta, bottomless as the

cornucopias of myth. But by the time they reached the nuns' quince preserves and biscuits, the last clouds of morning had lifted, and the sun shone full upon the gravestones, creating a white radiance. beneath the deep-green cypresses. With· that, the Russian's name, inscribed so near, came into view once more as though magnified by this flood of light. The romagnese had made Montezuma drowsy again, while the Saxon, more aFcustomed to priming himself with beer than with heady red wines, turned argumentative and peevish. "Stravinsky once said," he suddenly reminisced with malice, ('that you had written the same concerto six hundred times." "Possibly," replied Antonio, "but I never composed a circus polka for Barnum's elephants." "But there are going to be elephants in your opera about Montezuma,') said George Frideric. "There are no elephants in Mexico!" said the disguised man, shocked out of his sopor by the monstrousness of such ignorance. "Nonetheless, some of those animals appear together with the panthers, pelicaris, and parrots in the Quirinal tapestries which tell us of the wonders of the Indies," George Frideric pointed out with the stubborness of those in an alcoholic haze who cling to an idee fixe. "That was good music we had last night," said Montezuma in an effort to shunt the others off a pointless argument .

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peace under their solemn gravestone slabs. Filomeno then desisted a bit discomfited by the reproofs from frightening with his flights of fancy the birds of the islet which, finding themselves once more ill possession of their domain, resumed their madrigals and motets in redbreast major. But George Frideric and Antonio, having eaten and drunk their fill and weary now of arguing, yawned in a duet of such perfect counterpoint that it made them shriek with laughter. "You sound like castrati in opera hau//e)}} said Montezuma.

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lengthening. The days at that time· of the year were growing shorter. "TIme to move on," said Montezuma, considering that twilight would be approaching and that a cemetery in the twilight is always quite melancholy and conducive to meditation of a cheerless sort regarding the fate of all men as indulged in on such occasions by a prince of Denmark given to playing with skulls, like Mexican youngsters on the Day of the Dead . . . To the rhythm of oars dipping into water so still that ripples barely formed on eit~er side of the boat, they floated slowly toward the main square. Curled up under the tasseled awning, the Saxon and the Venetian were· sleeping off the weariness of revelry with expressions on their faces of such conteritment that it was a pleasure to look at them. From time to time their lips formed unintelligible words in the way one tries to speak during a dream . . . As they went by the Vendramin -Calergi palace, Montezuma and Filomeno noted black-clad figures the men in formal dress, the women veiled like the professional mourners of old bearing a coffin of chill-glinting bronze toward a black gondola .

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"That's a German musician who died of apoplexy , yesterday," said the boatman, holding his oars at rest .. "Now they are shipping the remains to his country. It seems he wrote strange, colossal operas with dragons, flying horses, dwarves, TItans, and even Sirens put to sing at the bottom of a river. Think of it! Singing under water! Our Teatro della Fenice doesn't have equipment or machinery to stage anything like that." The black figures, wrapped in gauze and crepe, placed the coffin on the funerary bark which, propelled by the thrust of the gondoliers' poles in solemn cadence, began its voyage to the railway station where Turner's locomotive awaited, snorting amidst steam clouds, its Cyclope~n eye already glowing . . . "I'm sleepy," said Montezuma, suddenly overcome by irresistible weariness. "We're getting close," said the boatman. c1\nd your

inn has an entrance on the canal." HIt's over where the garbage barges dock," said Fi!omeno, the last round of red wine having put him into a rancorous mood over the· rebuke in the cemetery. '
"I'm sleepy," he continued to mumble. "Go to sleep, you, too. "

)

99

"No," said Filomeno. "I'm taking my trumpet to where I'll be able to make noise."

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Outside) the celebration continued.

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nd the mori of the Orologio Tower, assiduous in the performance of their already very ancient service of measuring time, again. struck the hour, although on this day they would be wielding their hammers midst autumn grayness, swathed in a misty rain that had been muffling the bronze notes since break of day.

At Filomeno's call, the master emerged from his long sleep so long that it seemed to have lasted years. He was not the Montezuma of the night before, since he was now in a quilted nightshirt, nightcap, and bed socks, .and the costume he had worn last night was no longer on the armchair where he would have left it or where they would have placed it with its necklaces, feathers, and gilt-thonged sandals that had made him . such an alluring figure. "They took that outfit away to dress up Signor Massimiliano Miler in," the black told him as he removed clothing from the wardrobe. '~d you'd better hurry, i

because the last rehearsal with lights, machinery, and all the rest

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Oh! Yes! Of course! The biscuits dipped in malmsey refreshed his memory_ His servant shaved him hastily and, once more the gentleman, he descended the stairs, fastening cuff links in his lace cuffs. The strokes of the mori "my brothers," as Filomeno called the blackamoor figures could again be heard, but now the sound blended with that of the hammers of the Sant' Angelo stagehands behind the red curtains as they finished installing the grand scenic effects of the first act. The orchestra's strings and horns were already tuning up when the criollo and his servant took their seats in the penumbra of a box. And all at once, hammering and tuning ceased, deep silence settled in, and onto the podium strode Prester Antonio, dressed in black, violin in hand, he gaunter and his nose longer than usual, but his presence more imposing because of the nelVOUS tension in his scowl reserved for matters of high art, which manifested it~elf in a majestic economy of movement a sobriety carefully cultivated for throwing into sharper relief the controlled acrobatic attacks designed to show off his virtuosity in the concertante passages. Rapt, not even glancing at the few scattered persons who had filtered' into the theater, he slowly opened a manuscript, raised his bow just as he did on that night and in his dual role of conductor and matchless instrumentalist began the symphony more agitato and rhythmic, perhaps, than other symphonies of his in serener tempi, and the curtain opened on a blaze of color.

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The iridescence of streamers and pennants he had contemplated in Barcelona came to the criollo's mind as he looked on the gleaming jungle of sails and flags which, at the· prows of the vessels, enlivened the right side of the stage, while on the left, amaranth and purple pennons and banderoles decked the massive walls of a palace. And over an armlet of the lake of Mexico, the slender arch of a bridge (rather reminiscent, perhaps, of certain Venetian bridges) separated the landing place of the Spaniards from Montezuma's imperial residence. But below this magnificence there lay scattered over the floor the debris of what had evidently been a recent battle: spears, arrows, shields, military drums. The emperor of the Mexicans entered, lance in hand, and in obedience to Maestro Antonio's bow, cried out:

Son vt'ento eterni Dei! tutto in un giorno Lo splendor de}miei Jasti) e falta Gloria Del valor Messican cade svenata ... 5 Vain, the invocations in the face of an adverse destiny, the rituals, the plaints to heaven. All is grief this day, desolation, and crumbling grandeur: Un dardo vibrato nel mio sen ... 6 And enter the empress costumed as a

combination Semiramis and TItian subject, a brave and beautiful woman, seeking to lift the spirits of her vanquished husband placed in such an unfortunate predicament by a falso ibero.7

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"No way could she be left out of the play,>' whispers Filomeno to his master. ((She's Father Antonio's mistress, Anna Giro." "Learn to be more respectful," says the criollo sternly .to his servant. But at that moment, Teutile, a personage mentioned in the Historia de la Conquista de Mexico by Sire Antonio de Solis, chief chronicler of the Indies, enters, ducking his head under the Aztec pennons hung too low over the stage.

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And it turns out that Teutile wants to marry Ramiro, the conquistador Don Hernan Cortes's younger brother, a male role now being sung for us by Signora Angiola Zanuchi . . .

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here. If you don't think so, watch what's next."

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'~other one who goes to bed with His Highness, the Prince of Darmstadt)') insinuates the black.

"But . . . does everybody here go to bed with everybody?" asks the scandalized criollo. "Here, everybody sleeps with God knows who . . . But let me listen· to the music," says the black. '~ trumpet passage is coming up that I want very much to hear. " And the criono, disconcerted by the changes in sex,

begins to be lost in the maze of a plot that gets itself tangled and disentangled with never-ending intrigues. Montezuma asks Empress Mitrena for such is her name to immolate her daughter Teutile ("but Teutile was a Mexican general, dammit ... ") before the damsel could be sullied to satisfy the base appetites of the invader. But (and here the buts must perforce multi-

ply to infinity . . .) the princess would rather kill herself before Cortes's eyes. And crossing the bridge, which now looks surprisingly like the Rialto bridge, she cries out in her purity and dignity to the conquistador:

La /iglia d) un Monarca) in ostagio a Fernando? It Sangue ilustre d£ tanti Semzdei cost" ingrato avvilirsi?8

With that, Montezuma lets fly an arrow at Cortes, giving rise to such a commotion· on the stage that the . criollo loses the thread of the story and recovers

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his bewilderment only when the scenery is changed and we find ourselves suddenly shifted to the interior of a palace, its walls decorated with solar symbols, where the Emperor of Mexico now enters dressed as a Spaniard. "This is really peculiar!" observes the criollo on realizing that Signor Massimiliano Miler has taken off the disguise that he the person here in this box, a wealthy man, a silver merchant rolling in money was wearing last night, or the night before last, or the night before a .

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night way before last, or I don't know when, in order to

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seem like one of those Roman aristocrats who, trying to pass as living in austerity in the face of the extravagances of the Most Serene Republic, affected the fashions of Madrid and Aranjuez, as the rich from overseas have always done in a most natural manner. But in any case, this Montezuma gotten up as a Spaniard looks so incongruous, so outlandish, that the plot again becomes mangled, entangled, and disjointed to such a point that this new costuming of the hero, the vanquished Xerxes of this musical tragedy, causes the singer to become identified in the spectator's mind as another of the many, many persons with disguised personalities who were to be seen last night in the carnival, before last night, or I don't know when, until the red velvet curtain falls upon a lusty call to naval combat by Asprano, another "Mexican general" never mentioned by Bernal Diaz del Castillo or Antonio de Solis in their famous chronicles . . .

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The hours rung out by the mori of the Orologio Tower are heard again to the accompaniment

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percussion by the stagehands' hammers, but Prester Vivaldi does not leave the orchestra pit, where the musicians busy themselves peeling oranges and hoisting flasks of red wine while he, sitting on a stool, sets to work revising the score of the next act, annotating corrections at times with peevish pen. His con centra tion is so intense as he goes over the pages that no one dares interrupt him, and his skinny flanks remain rigid despite his gesticulations. "He reminds me of licenclado Goat," says the Mexican' recalling the well-known schoolmaster of a nove19 familiar throughout America. ((Maestro Horny Goat, I'd call him," says Filomeno, not unmindful of Anna Giro's rounded hips and blushing bosom .. , But at this moment 'the virtuoso's bow gives the cue in slow, sustained for the new overture to begin tempo, now and the scene opens on an immense reception hall, which looks just like the one· in the painting at the criollo's house in Coyoacan that portrays an episode of the Conquest closer to reality, in a way, than what has been seen here so far. Now, Teutile (must it be accepted, unremittingly, that he is female and not male?) laments the fate of her father, made captive by the Spaniards through treachery. But Asprano has men in readiness to rescue him:

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My warriors are eager to board their canoes and dugouts; eager to punish the Duce (sic) who was untrue to his word. Hernan Cortes and the empress enter, and the Mexican woman launches into a dramatic lament reminiscent in a way of Aeschylus's Queen Atossa, overlaid (in this opening we now hear) with a certain malinchista 10 defeatism. Mitrena-Malinche admits that life here is dark with idolatry, that the defeat of the Aztecs has been presaged by dire omens. And what is more: . :.... : .

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and, all at once, she has realized that the gods worshiped in her land were false gods and that the true religion has at last arrived through Cozumel to the thunder of cannon and lombards, with gunpowder, the horse, and the word of the gospel. A civilization of superior beings has been imposed through the tragic

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of scene such as could be produced only by the prodigious Venetian stage technicians and their marvelous

machine, and, in a swell of light, the great lake of Tezcoco volcanoes in the background, crisscrossed by Indian boats comes into view like an apparition, and upon its surface there ensues a tremendous naval battle with a savage melee between Spaniards and Mexicans, cries of hate, flights of arrows, din of clashing steel, falling helmets, . slashing of two-handed broadswords, men overboard, and horsemen who suddenly dash onto the stage, dispersing the horde; trumpets blare above, trumpets below, fifes and bugles screech, and the Aztec fleet bursts into flames, with Greek fire, pyrotechnical fumaroles, flashes, smoke, fireworks of the most advanced order, uproar, confusion, shrieks, and disaster. ('Bravo! Bravo!" excl~ims the Mexican. «(That's just what it was like! That's just what it was like!"

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Iphigenia, to placate the wrath of those who rule from the skies the destinies of mortals. "Well, as an idea borrowed from the classics, it might pass," opines the criollo, dubious, as he watches the red curtain close. . But immediately, the chorus of hammer blows can be heard again presaging a change of setting, the musicians return, and after a brief interlude that augurs no good - to judge from its heartrending harmonies the curtain opens again to reveal a splendid tower of massive construction against a panoramic background in a trompe l'oeil view of the great city of Tenochtitlan. Bodies are strewn about the floor, the reason for their presence not quite clear to the criollo. The action again becomes confusing, with Montezuma once more clad as Montezuma ("my costume, my very own costume ... "), Teutil~ a captive, people apparently determined to set her free, and a Mitrena who seeks to set fire to the building. 'l\nother fire?" asks Filomeno, delighted at the prospect of witnessing a repetition of the previous scene, an incredibly spectacular feat, indeed. But no. As if by magic, the tower is transformed into a . temple at the entrance to which there stands a grotesque, menacing statue, big-eared and ghastly, of a god that closely resembles the devils imagined by Hieronymus Bosch whose paintings were so admired by King Philip II and which are still preserved in the rotting-vaults of EI Escorial a god whom various

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priests, dressed in white, call "Uchilobos." ("Where could they have gotten that from?" the criollowonders.)

Teutile, hands bound, is brought in, and the bloody sacrifice is about to be consummated when Signor Massimiliano Miler, drawing upon his last reserves of voice, gravely taxed by Antonio Vivaldi's fevered inspiration, launches heroically and grimly into a lament worthy of the fallen monarch of The Persians:

Stars) you have vanquished me. An example be/ore the world am I 0/ your inconstancy. A kin& I was boastful 0/ possessing divine powers. Now) an obJ·ect 0/ scorn} a prisoner in chains) become a despicable trophy 0/ another~ glory I shall henceforth serve for naught but to be the subJoect 0/ future tales, As the criolla dries the tears wrung from him by such sublime plaints, the curtain closes, to open again situating us in the Great Square of Mexico City decorated with rostral columns as for a Roman victory celebration - beneath a sky quivering with all the streamers, banners, standards, pennons, and flags that had been seen thus far. Enter the Mexican captives, chained by the neck, bewailing their defeat; and when it appears that a new massacre is about to be witnessed, something unexpected' incredible, marvelous, and preposterous happens, something that flies in the face of all truth: Hernan Cortes pardons his enemies, and to seal the friendship ..

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between Aztecs and Spaniards, a celebration is held for the wedding of Teutile and Ramiro, amidst jubilation, vivas) and acclamation, while the vanquished emperor swears eternal fealty to the king of Spain, and the chorus -voices over strings and metals, conducted by Maestro Vivaldi with maximum energy at slow tempo sings of the happiness of peace regained, the triumph of the True Religion, and marital bliss. March, epithalamium, general dance, and da capo) another da capo~ and another da capo) until the velvet curtains close to the sound of the . ;,-

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"False, false, false! " he yells. And yelling, "False, false, . false, all false!" he runs toward the Red Priest, who has finished folding the score and is mopping his forehead with a large checkered handkerchief. "What's false?" the startled musician asks. "Everything. That finale is ridiculous. History . . ." "The opera is none of the business of historians." "But. . . there was never a Mexican empress, and no daughter of Montezuma ever married a Spaniard." "Just a minute, just a minute," says Antonio with sudden irritation. "The poet Alvise Giusti, the author of this musical drama, studied Solis's chronicle, which the chief librarian of Saint Mark's holds in high 'regard as well documented and accurate. And it speaks of the empress ... yes sir, as a worthy, determined, and courageous woman . " "I've never read any such thing."

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"Part five, chapter twenty-five. And in part four it also says that two or three daughters of Montezuma married Spaniards. So, one more, one less . . .» '1\nd what about that god Uchilibos?" "It's no fault of mine that you people have gods with names nobody can pronounce. The conquistadors themselves, in their efforts to imitate the Mexican language, called him Huchilobos or something like that. " (Now I get it! You mean Huitzilopochtli." '~nd do you believe it's possible to sing a word like that? Everything in Solis's chronicle is a tongue twister. Nothing but tongue twisters all the way through: Iztlapalapa, Goazocoalco, Xicalango, Tlaxcala, Magiscatzin, Qualpopoca, Xicotencatl . . . I learned them by heart to use as an articulation exercise. But ... to whom, dammit, did it ever occur to invent such a language? " '~nd what about that Teutile being turned into a female?" "He had a pronounceable name we could use for a woman . " '~nd what happened to Guatimozin, the real hero of all this?" ('He would have broken the unity of action . . . I can use him in another drama." "But .... Montezuma was stoned to death." '.

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"Very unpleasant for the finale of an opera. Well, perhaps not for the English, who end their stage plays with murders, slaughter, funeral marches, and grave diggers. Here, people come to the theater to be amused." '1\.nd what happened to Dona Marina in this whole charade?" "That Malinche was a traitorous bitch, and the public doesn't like traitors. No singer of ours would have accepted such a part. To be a great figure deserving of music and applause, that Indian woman would have had to do as Judith did to Holophernes." "Your Mitrena, however, recognizes the superiority of the conquistadors." , "But at the end, she's the one· who calls for desperate resistance. Such characters are always popular." The criollo, although taken down a peg, continues to insist. "History tells us . . ." "Stop giving me that history crap. Poetic illusion is what counts in the theater ... The distinguished Monsieur Voltaire opened a tragedy in Paris not long ago which is about a romance between two historical characters, Orosman and Zaire, who, if they'd been living when the action takes place, he would have had to be more than eighty and she well over ninety . . ." "They could never have gotten it going even with tortoiseshell powder dissoved in brandy . . ." mutters Filomeno .

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and then, there's talk of afire in Jerusalem set by

Sultan Saladin, which is absolutely false, because th~

ones who really sacked the city and put the population to the sword were our own Crusaders. And take note that when it comes to the Holy Places, that's the real thing. Glorious and important history." ((Then, you don't consider the history of America 0

either glorious or important?" Prester Antonio puts his violin away in a case lined with purple satih. "In America everything is fantastical: tales of El Dorados and Potosls, fabulous cities, talking sponges, sheep with red fleece, Amazons with only one breast, big-eared Incas who eat Jesuits ... " Now the criollo becomes annoyed again. "If you are so fond of fantasies, why don't you set Orlando Furioso to music?" ((I already did. It was put on six years ago." "Don't tell me you had a scene on the stage of Orlando stripped naked, crossing all of France and Spain with his balls hanging out before he swam the Mediterranean Sea and went to the moon, just like that, - at· a11 ....;>" like nothlng "Stop talking such shit," says Filomeno, his attention

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how well they both sang which was true with perhaps more kisses than warranted. ','Tribades?" asks the Mexican) resorting to the most esoteric word that occurs to him on the spur of the moment for expressing his suspicions. "Who cares a rap about that?" exclaims the Prester, in a hurry all at once to respond to an impatient call from the beautiful Anna Giro, who has appeared at the , rear of the stage without benefit of lights and scenery now to enhance her charms. "I'm sorry you didn't like my opera . . . Next time, I'll try to find myself a more Roman theme . . ." Outside, the hammers of the mori have just struck six amidst now sleeping pigeons and droplets of mist risen

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hovered midway between idea and word. "Why," Filomeno asked him, "do you look to me like you were worn out by this representation we just saw?"

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win, despite my b~ing aware that it was an impossible outcome since nobody knows better than I, having been born there, how it all took place. I found myself perversely wishing Montezuma would punish the Spaniard for his arrogance and hoping that Teutile, like the biblical heroine, would ,cut off that Ramiro's head. And I realized all at once that I was on the Americans' side, brandishing the same weapons and willing the ruination of those to whom lowe my blood and my name. Had I been Quixote of the Retablo de Maese Pedro) I would have thrown myself with spear and shield upon my own people in coat of mail and morion." '1\nd of what good is the illusion of theater if not to' remove us from where we are and take us where we can't get to on our own?" Filomeno asks~ "Thanks to the theater, we can go back in time and live in periods forever gone something impossible for us in our present flesh." "It also serves us and this was written by an ancient philosopher to purge ourselves of anxieties hidden in the deepest, most secret places of the self. . On seeing the America contrived by that bad poet Giusti, I no longer felt myself a spectator and became one of the actors, I was jealous of Massimiliano Miler because he was wearing a Montezuma costume which, suddenly, I felt to be terribly a part of me, It seemed like the singer was playing a role intended for me, but which I had been incapable of taking on because of my not having the guts, my being an asshole. And all at once, I" felt e'

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unrelated, foreign, out of place, far removed from myself and what is really mine . . . It is sometimes

necessary to distance yourself from things, to put an ocean in between, in order to get a close look at them.))

At that moment, the mori of the Orologio Tower began to hammer, as they had been doing for centuries. ((This city sticks in my craw, with its canals and gondoliers. So far, I've laid Ancilla, Camilia, Zulietta,

Angeletta, Catina, Faustolla, Spina, and Agatina, to say nothing of a lot of others whose names I've forgotten enough is enough! I'm returning to my own, this very

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night. I need air ,of a different kind than this ... air that as it enfolds me molds me, gives me a shape." (~ccording to Prestet Antonio, everything over there is fable." ((You mustn't forget that great history feeds on fable. Our world seems like a fable to the people over here because they've lost their sense of the fabulous. They call everything fabulous that is remote, irrational, that belongs to yesterday." He broke off. ('They don't understand that the fabulous is in the future. The future is entirely fabulous . . .)' They were now on lively Calle de la Merceria, not as busy as on other occasions because of the rain, which had been falling so hard that it began to drip from their hat brims. The criollo then recalled the commissions

that friends and members of his social circle had . charged him with in Coyoacan on the eve of his departure. Of course, he never had any intention of trying to

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find the samples of marble, the Polish amber walking stick, or the Chaldean librarian's rare folio, nor of weighing down his baggage with kegs of maraschino or Roman coins. As for the mandolin inlaid with mother . of-pearl ... let the daughter of the inspector of weights and measures strum on her belly, it being well shaped and well tempered for the purpose. But that music shop over there must have the sonatas, concertos, and oratorios so modestly requested by poor Francisquillo's voice and guitar teacher. . . They went in. The clerk, to begin with, brought out some sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti for them. "Terrific guy," said Filomeno, harking back to that night. "I hear the great rascal is in Spain, where he got the Infanta Maria Barbara, a generous woman who wears her heart on her sleeve, to payoff his gambling debts, which will keep on mo~nting as long as there's a gaming table left anywhere with a deck of cards on it." ('Every man has his weaknesses. This one's has always been for the ladies," said Filomeno, pointing to concertos by Prester Antonio, Springy Summe" Autumn) and Winter, each preceded and explained by a lovely sonnet. "There's a fellow that will always live in the spring even when winter catches up with him," observed the criollo. , But now the clerk was extolling the merits of Messiah, a very well-known oratorio.

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"No less!" exclaimed Filomeno. "That Saxon doesn't work small." He opened the score. "Whew! This is

what you call writing for the trumpet! That'll be the day when I can play it!" And he read and reread with admiration the aria for basso written by George Frideric to two versicles from the Epistle to the Corinthians. c~nd underneath the notes, which only a top player could produce from the instrument, there are words that look like a spiritual or something:

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"I imagine so. . . When will you be returning to your country?" "I don't know. I'll go to Paris for the time being." "The women? The Eiffel Tower?" "No. There's women everywhere. And the Eiffel Tower hasn't been an attraction for a long time. Except maybe as a souvenir paperweight." ('So t hen ....~" "In Paris, I'll be known as Monsieur Philomene. Like that, with a Ph and a beautiful grave accent over the e. In Havana, they'll just call me 'the Negro, Filomeno.'" "That will change one day." "There would have to be a revolution first." "I don't trust revolutions." ((Because you have all that silver back there in Coyoacan. That means a pile of brass, and the people with the brass don't care for revolutions ... But the mes more and more all the time which are going to be masses and masses of us . . .)) Once again and how many times over the cen.turies? the mor£ of the Orologio Tower hammered out the hour. "Perhaps the last time I will be hearing this,)' said the criollo. "I've learned a lot through them on this trip." "Traveling is very. educational. )) "Basil, the great Cappadocian, a saint and doctor of the Church, pointed out in a rare treatise that Moses had picked up quite a bit of science during his years in Egypt and that Daniel turned out to be such a clever

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interpreter of dreams and how popular that is nowadays! because the Chaldean sorcerers had taught him so much." "You make the most of yours," said Filomeno. ((I'll

stick with my trumpet." '~nd well accompanied you'll be: the trumpet is staunch and spirited. A quick-tempered instrument that

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"Or until yesterday,)) said the black, but the word yesterday was drowned out by a long blast of the train whistle ...

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Filomeno turned toward the lights, and it appeared to him, all at once, that the city had aged drastically. Wrinkles were appearing on the faces of its tired,

cracked, crumbling walls stained with herpes and funguses antedating man, that had begun eating away at things as soon as they were created. The bell towers, Greek horses, Syrian pilasters, tile work, domes, and mosaics so often reproduced on the posters circulated around the world to attract the travelers-check people . had lost in the very multiplicity of those images the prestige of the Holy Places which demand of those contemplating them proof of having undergone travels fraught with obstacles and peril. It appeared that the water level had risen. The passage of motorboats aug-

mented the aggressiveness of wavelets, insignificant but persistent and unremitting, that broke over the piles,

props, and shoring which further elevated the homes beautified temporarily here and there by cosmetic masonry and the plastic surgery of modern architecture. Venice seemed to be sinking hour by hour into its choppy, turbid waters. A great sadness hung over the sick, undermined city that night. But Filomeno was not sad. He was never sad. Tonight's concert the eagerly awaited concert by him who made the trumpet ring like the voice of the God of Zachariah, the Lord of Isaiah, or as called for in the chorus of the most joyous psalm of the Scriptures would be taking place in half an hour. And since he still had much to master with respect to music in which the

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changers, in the great Platonic bazaar of ideas and consumer goods or the famous wager of Pascal and Co.) Underwriters, in the Word or the Torch. ~ For the time being, Filomeno was occupying himself with terrestrial music, since the music of the spheres concerned him not at all. He presented his ticket at the door of the theater, was shown to his place by an usherette with spectacula~ butto~ks the black looked at all things with single-minded focus on the immediate and palpable and the one-and-only Louis made his entrance to a thunder, a prodigious thunder, of applause and cheers. And raising the trumpet to his lips, he attacked, as only he knew how to, the melody of «Go

Down, Moses" before passing to "Jonah and the Whale," elevated by' the bell of his horn to the ceiling of the theater where pink pipers of an angelical chorus, perhaps from TIepolo's lucent brushes, flew, frozen in transit. And the Bible become rhythm dwelt in us again with "Ezekiel and the Wheel," before leading into a

'(Hallelujah, Hallelujah" which evoked for Filomeno all at once· the image of that one the George Frideric of that night' who reposed beneath a baroque statue by Roubiliac in the great Westminster Abbey club of marble sculptures, side by side with Purcell, who also knew so much about mystical and triumphal trumpets. And here the virtuoso was followed in improvised breaks by the instruments on the stage: saxophones, clarinets, bass, electric guitar, bongos, maracas (could they perhaps be those same tipinaguas mentioned by the poet

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1. Cortes's native mistress and interpreter, who played a key role in the realization of the Conquest. 2. A play on the words of the motto of the Catholic rulers of Spain (Tanto monta) monta tanto Isabel como Fernando) which expresses the equality of their authority. 3. State barge of Venice, used once a year by the doge in the ceremony of the marriage of the Adriatic.

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Quevedo. 10. Collaborationist. Dona Marina, Cortes's native mistress and interpreter) was called La Malinche. 11. For such long centuries the people were so stupid that they were unaware of their own treasures.

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4. An ancient kihg of Numidia. 5. I am vanquished, Eternal Gods! In a single day, the splendor of my might and the great glory of Mexican valor brought down in blood ... 6. A dart hurled into my breast ... 7. Perfidious Iberian. 8. The daughter of a monarch in thrall to Ferdinand? The illustrious blood of so many demigods thus ignobly demeaned? 9. El Buscon, a picaresque novel by Francisco de

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ALEJO CARPENTIER (1904-1980) is recognized 'as Cuba's greatest modern writer. Long a contender for the Nobel Prize, he is not well known as a writer in the United States, perhaps because he was a supporter of the Cuban revolution. Author of fourteen books, Carpentier developed the narrative of to real maravz1loso (magical realism) in which mythical and magical elements combine to portray real events as fantastic while fantastic events are portrayed as real. Carpentier's work impacted the development of twentieth-century Latin American literature, deeply influencing such writers as

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ASA ZATZ began his professional career as a translator

while living in Mexico. He translated The Children 0/ Sanchez (1956) and other works by anthropologist Oscar Lewis. His most recent translations include The Dead Girls and Two Crimes by Jorge Ibargiiengoitia, Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Peron Novel by Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Ballad 0/

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