[In the following interview, Carpentier discusses his latest three novels, Concierto barroco, El recurso del método, and a work in progress.]

The leaves on the chestnut trees are just beginning to turn yellow along the Avenue Foch and the Rue de la Faisanderie leading to the Cuban Embassy. A chilly wind announces the coming of autumn. I have not seen Alejo Carpentier for four years. My daughter Elena is with me, coloring book in hand, and is practicing her Spanish on the embassy's French receptionist.

Over the last decade, Carpentier has been working on three novels more or less simultaneously. He assures me that he is still in the habit of getting up at five or five-thirty in the morning to take advantage of the early hours for his writing. He doesn't believe in the Muse or inspiration, but in the progress of daily work. Obviously, he says, there are good and bad days, when you re-read the next morning and exclaim with disgust, "This is just terrible!" But no matter how bad it is, you always find something you can use. Concierto barroco, El recurso del método, and another novel as yet untitled are his three new books.

Carpentier considers Concierto barroco a novella, a sort of Summa Theologica of his style since it also contains all the mechanisms of "Baroquism." Some chapters are worked in different colors: the first begins with a silver frame, symbolic of the chief source of income in the Mexico of the Viceroys. All the early scenes are enveloped in this baroque atmosphere, in the style of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. A Mexican miner, grandson of Spaniards born "somewhere between Colmenar de Oreja and Villamanrique del Tajo," acquires wealth and decides to travel to Europe to enjoy himself. His Indian servant, Francisquillo, comes along: after all, what is a powerful man of the New World without an exotic servant? In the second chapter, shades of gold and sulphur take over when master and servant arrive in Havana in the midst of a yellow fever epidemic. The travelers flee the epidemic to Villa de Regla (a town across the bay from Havana), where there existed at that time a kind of concentration camp for Jesuits. The Indian servant dies of fever in Regla and is replaced by Filomenc, a young black, grandson of the black Salvador who cut off the head of Captain Gilberto Girón in the struggle against the French pirates, described in Espejo de paciencia by Silvestre de Balboa, the first work of Cuban literature. The third chapter begins in the dull Madrid of Philip V's reign, filthy, decadent, mutilated, with sordid brothel settings. It ends with the felicitous entrance of the two into Barcelona, an episode based on the forty-first chapter of the second part of the Quijote.

The fourth chapter, really the manifestation of Carpentier's esthetics, takes place during carnival time, an image of spectacles, mimes, and costumes which appears in the author's other novels. This is a Venetian carnival that takes place in a kind of non-Venice, free from all the themes and gratuitous associations usually given to this over-used Italian setting; here, the reader will look in vain for Harlequins chasing Columbines. The Mexican protagonist, dressed as Montezuma, gets involved in a drinking bout with a redheaded monk, a German, and a non-Venetian Italian he meets in a tavern. In chapter five the four revelers, accompanied by Filomeno, arrive at the Mercy Hospital, a semi-convent sheltering seventy female orphans, each of whom plays an instrument. The girls don't have ordinary names, they are addressed by the name of the instrument each of them plays: Pierina del Violino, Cattarina del Corneto, Bettina della Viola, Bianca Maria Organista, etc. Three of the visitors reveal themselves to be the composers Antonio Vivaldi, George Friedrich Händel, and Domenico Scarlatti, who met in Venice in the year 1709. The musicians played a funambulist concerto grosso, joined by the Negro servant with his improvised orchestra of pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils. Towards dawn the guests eat and disperse to rest.

In the first draft of Concierto barroco, finished in August, 1972, the action of the last two chapters took place in a Venetian cemetery. The protagonists seek out a quiet place to have breakfast: the ancient graveyard of the Capuchins, where each tells the story of his life. Filomeno's tale is the most extraordinary: it encompasses a time-warp, uniting two events in history: the struggles of his ancestors against the pirate Gilberto Girón, and the more recent events at the same site, Guacanayabo Gulf and the Bay of Pigs. The Negro begins by reciting tales from the early resistance of the people of Bayamo, a town in Oriente Province, and ends with the April, 1961, anti-Castro invasion that landed in the uninhabited mangrove swamps of Playa Girón. After that, the characters discover the name of Igor Stravinsky inscribed on a gravestone, and an animated discussion of his work ensues. (It will be remembered that the Russian composer, who died in New York on April 6, 1971, is buried in the San Michele cemetery in Venice.) Into this dream-like, Poe-like environment, a black gondola intrudes, the first overt allusion to the Venetian setting. The reference is to Wagner's funeral in 1883, when his coffin was transferred, first by gondola and later by train, from Venice to Bayreuth. In the original text Carpentier compares the Wagnerian locomotive with Turner's famous painting of 1844. Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway: "Puffing in the fog, enveloped in its vapors, Turner's locomotive lay in wait, its Cyclopean eye already kindled." Among the first images of a train in nineteenth-century painting, its real theme is surely the effect of the beacon's swift light passing through the down-pour. The novel ends with a new "baroque concert": a Duke Ellington jazz concert which the servant is about to attend.

The published version of Concierto barroco is significantly different. There are superficial changes in the first chapter; in the second, Carpentier develops the Espejo de paciencia and exploits Balboa's interesting poem: the third remains intact except for some polishing of the style, for example in the symbolism of the ferryman Caronte, now more subtly achieved. The sixth chapter is rather extensively rewritten to make time changes less obvious and to shorten the Playa Girón episode to connect it to the last chapter, creating a new revolutionary allusion with a different motive.

As for the last pages, the recent discovery of Alvise Giusti's libretto to Vivaldi's first opera, Montezuma (premiered in 1733), forced Carpentier to alter the ending, adding some forty pages and changing the dénouement slightly. The libretto, thought irrevocably lost, reveals that the opera's plot hinged on a naval battle in Texcoco Lake and the burning of a teocali (an ancient temple). Carpentier, following the trail of Roland Candé, a musicologist and Vivaldi specialist, found the Giusti libretto, which enabled him to add a seventh chapter about the Montezuma text and a new, long episode describing the opera's dress rehearsal. In their eighth and last chapter, he changed the ending by switching the jazz concert with Duke Ellington at the piano for the trumpet virtuosity of Louis Armstrong, thereby achieving in the narrative a closer analogy between the instrumentation of the famous air in Händel's Messiah "The Trumpet Shall Sound," and Louis Armstrong's trumpet playing Negro spirituals such as "Go Down Moses" and "Jonah and the Whale."

Carpentier feels that discovering the libretto of Vivaldi's opera was crucial to finishing Concierto barroco. Montezuma is the first use of an American theme in opera, two years before the Inca setting of Jean Philippe Rameau's Les Indes Galantes. Carpentier was also affected by the historical fact that Vivaldi, Händel, and Scarlatti met in Venice on December 26, 1709: December 26 is Carpentier's birthday, it is St. Stephen's Day, and it always has been a day of good luck for him. (No wonder the protagonist of El siglo de las luces [Explosion in a Cathedral] is named Esteban!)

The second novel, El recurso del método, has an ironic title punning on Descartes' Discours de la Méthode: resources (recursos) are a feature of Latin American countries and have played a role in their political reality since well before the nineteenth century, as Carpentier points out: "Dr. Francia, transcending his own adventure, instituted among us a method of governing whose resources, multiplied to infinity, are still in effect in the political life of many Latin American nations. Hence the title 'recurso del método' given to this work, which is set in a country that is a summa geographica of the least Cartesian of all possible worlds." Thus without imitating any present or past book—Roa Bastos and Garcia Márquez have also written novels about dictatorship: Yo, El Supremo [I, The Supreme One] and El otoño del patriarca [The Autumn of the Patriarch]—Carpentier's book communicates with that introspective, analytical consciousness that is characteristic of the vanguard generation, and it fits into a Hispanic literary tradition that has its roots in "El matadero," Tirano Banderas, El Señor Presidente, and even El acoso.

El recurso del método is about the First Magistrate of the Nation (the title of most Latin American Presidents), mystical and flammarionesque dictator "overtaken by events," or as the author describes him "a reader, although not always well read, somewhat erudite, an occasional music lover, very given to the verbal baroque, implacable inside his country but excessively worried about what might be said about him outside of it." He is a sort of Latin American monster made up of the bits and pieces of real dictators: "Actually, a montage of elements which characterize many Latin American dictatorships of the past and present, faithfully incorporated into the robot-portrait in such a way that anybody reasonably well acquainted with our Latin American history could point out their source": Venezuela's Antonio Guzmán Blanco and Cipriano Castro; Mexico's Porfirio Diaz; Guatemala's Manuel Estrada Cabrera; Cuba's Gerardo Machado. Some contemporary historical figures are mentioned and allusions are made to "events which we continue to witness now." Thus Nehru appears in the novel's last chapter, which is entitled "1972." Carpentier notes: "Even though its actions extend over a period of fifteen years, and we know exactly what part of the history of this century those years are, the main character, by his omnipresence in the South American continent, breaks up his own chronology and exists simultaneously before and after the lifetime allotted him by the author." The technique of elaborating an American prototype with elements from different countries again reveals the universalist. American criterion typical of Carpentier's mature work. He intends for each reader to seek out the model for this or that passage in the novel, on his own and without the fetters of historical exactitude.

Carpentier insists that he is not a historian but a novelist, and that in confronting history he reserves the right to a behavior akin to Louis Aragon's "place à l'imagination." While a writer cannot falsify the date of the Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of Ayacucho, he ought, by presenting superfluous incidents, more interesting for their content than their form, to play with certain realities, using them as he pleases and according to his artistic vision. A good example of this technique is the second chapter of El recurso del método, where the First Magistrate attends—without understanding anything—a performance of Pélleas et Mélisande in 1914 in New York. The alert critic will observe that Debussy's opera did not have its première at the Metropolitan until 1921. But the main thing is the fact that the opera was heard at some point in New York, seven years' difference is not so important, and it certainly does not detract from the novel's credibility. Just as Carpentier tailors certain chronological elements to his imaginative needs, he does something similar in situating his characters in certain locales. At one time, various Latin American dictators lived in the Quartier de L'Etoile and one of Porfirio Diaz' ministers, Yves Limantour, had a house on the Rue Tilsit which, with the Rue de Presbourg, forms a circle around the Place d'Etoile. Thus Carpentier has the First Magistrate live out his days on the Rue Tilsit, in a house "from which Minister Limantour's mansion could be seen." And it is a historic fact that Porfirio Diaz' body rests almost directly across from Baudelaire's in the Montparnasse cemetery.

Carpentier plans to finish his third novel, as yet untitled, this year. He says the first part is divided into three sections and takes place in Paris and in Russia, at Baku on the Caspian Sea. Carpentier follows the life of his mother, a White Russian who eventually ended up teaching her native tongue in Cuba. We will find scenes, he says, from the decade following World War I, including the arguments spawned by Dadaism and Surrealism. Carpentier believes that in terms of the anguish of modern man as reflected in political and esthetic convulsions, the decade of the thirties was one of the most decisive in the twentieth century. It was then that for the first time the drama of the human condition was situated inside and not outside of man.

The second part of the novel develops during the Spanish Civil War, prelude to the most violent crisis in modern history. The memorable deeds of the Latin American volunteers in the international brigades, passed over in most accounts, form one of the most dramatic parts of the Civil War. In the brigades, people from the remotest places and backgrounds fought together: the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, nicknamed the "Coronelazo"; Evan Shipman, son of an American millionaire and friend of Robert Desnos; Pablo de la Torriente Brau, a Cuban who died under machine gun fire at the front; the Cuban trumpeter Cuevas who would play "La chambelona" to sound the charge for his comrades.

The third part of the novel takes place in Mexico during the cristero revolts. The fourth takes place in Cuba, ending with the Bay of Pigs. Carpentier tells the story through the impressions of fighters, wounded soldiers, and reports from Baragaño, a poet who died of a heart attack in 1962, whose artistic vision allowed him to narrate the historical events very differently from the other revolutionary activists. Into this novel of American events Carpentier incorporates bits and pieces of memories of living with the great ballet dancer Alicia Alonso in Venezuela and Cuba.

In early September, 1963, Carpentier met Igor Stravinsky in Brazil on the occasion of the International Festival of Music in Rio de Janeiro. The writer stayed at a hotel in the Copacabana not so much by taste—he would have preferred a more typical neighborhood—but because the hotel was near the Cuban Embassy. The Russian composer had come to conduct his Mass in memory of Pope John XXIII, which was performed at the Candelaria de Rio Church on September 8. One night Carpentier met Stravinsky by accident while out for a stroll on the Copacabana beach. They sat down on a bench on Avenida Atlántica, almost deserted at that hour, and talked about friends. Carpentier asked Stravinsky for permission to reproduce in his novel the first page of the manuscript of Le sacre du printemps.

Today, the novelist confesses that one of the mistakes of his book La música en Cuba was to believe too easily in nationalism. Now he realizes that it was a phase he had to go through, but that in the last analysis, it did not lead to anything concrete. That is, the idea held in those days that folklore would unite humanity in a single, immediate brotherhood, was too optimistic. Carpentier went into this problem in depth with arguments and examples in Tientos y diferencias. Years later, he attended a Czech ballet performed in Cuba and noted that part of the audience—some sixty Venezuelan peasants who were guests of the government—were bored to distraction. He decided that the reason Latin Americans so respect and appreciate first-rate folk guitarists and harpists is because they represent an institution, they are the custodians of a folk tradition that maintains its classic touches pure and unpolluted.

Carpentier does not think much of the thunder of the Boom in the Latin American New Novel. Actually he doesn't believe there has been a Boom as such, but rather the fortuitous coincidence, perhaps produced by the robust maturity, of a dozen or so writers, among whom are Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc. These writers, of different literary generations and different countries, have jumped to the fore by finding the formula to deprovincialize Hispanic American literature. One of the tasks confronting all Hispanic American artists continues to be the eternal problem of constantly watching over their craft while they discover new themes, new ideas, and to write in a simple, polished, and transparent style. This is one of the reasons Carpentier so admires Borges' prose.

As Cultural Adviser to the Cuban Embassy in Paris, the novelist continues to represent the revolutionary government at cultural events in Europe. At a symposium on Class Society and Racism (published as Klassengesellschaft und Rassismus), in Reda, Germany, he read a paper on "The Integration of the Afro-American Cultures in Latin America" and made some remarks that were taped and transcribed (unfortunately not very accurately). He continues to contribute to projects related to old friends. Shortly before his death, Pablo Picasso wrote a sixty-page poem entitled "The Burial of Count Orgaz," which was translated with an introduction by Carpentier. Picasso asked him to do it, and Michel Leiris, one of the last persons to visit Picasso frequently, brought him Carpentier's version, which Picasso approved. The poem is a surrealistic, cubistic, very contemporary vision. It has been published by Gallimard in a bilingual edition, and other single poems will be published separately, in Carpentier's translation.

Lilia, his wife, interrupts us to say it is lunch time. My daughter demands her tourist's rights to climb into a Bateau Mouche. We say goodbye, I turn and wave. Elena and I walk toward the Trocadero while that "old and lovely lady that is the Tour Eiffel" appears, outlined against the Paris sky.