SOURCE: "El Acoso: Alejo Carpentier's War on Time," in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 78, No. 1, September, 1963, pp. 440-48.

[In the following essay, Weber discusses one of Carpentier's recurrent themes, "the representation, domination, or denial of time," as seen in his El acoso.]

The protagonist of Alejo Carpentier's short novel El acoso is an informer fleeing from men who would avenge the deaths he has caused. The pursuit and punishment of an informer, not a new plot, is usually developed with rapid pacing and suspense. But Carpentier modifies this traditional story of the chase by breaking it into a mosaic of fragmentary incidents and remembrances arranged without chronological sequence. Adopting certain techniques of the stream-of-consciousness writers, he reduces external action to a minimum and uses interior monologues and confused shreds of memory to show the inner life of his characters. Yet his work is not primarily a psychological study: the combination of two apparently disparate approaches to the novel (one a story line based on a closely-knit, causal-temporal progression and the other a narrative structure determined in part by the flux and shift of consciousness) creates a static and almost allegorical depiction of Betrayal in its various modes and incarnations. This duality of presentation is also evident in the subject matter: definite historical happenings, tied to actual sites in the city of Havana, are the factual ingredients in a drama that seems to be just one possible version of a constant theme. Uniting the particular and the abstract, intertwining the external chain of events (shattered and rearranged according to noncausal principles) with pictures of internal chaos, Carpentier presents both the vision of a traitorous, degenerate world in which man plays out certain prescribed roles and the artistic or literary organization of this drama of the fall. Underlying these elements and binding them together is one of Carpentier's repeated themes—the representation, domination, or denial of time.

El acoso was first published separately and later included with three shorter works in a volume entitled La guerra del tiempo. The other tales are fantastic, either because of the narrative situation itself or because of the peculiar temporal distortions to which the author submits it. In "El Camino de Santiago," a single man's self splits into two different roles played at successive periods in his life (Juan el Romero, Juan el Indiano), and they confront each other at the beginning and at the end of the story in identical, duplicated scenes, told from opposite points of view; in "Viaje a la semilla," the normal passage from birth to death is simply reversed, as in a film run backwards; in "Semejante a la noche," diverse avatars of the departing warrior are telescoped into a single person and scene. In all three stories, the unreality of the plot constitutes a negation of time as the medium of essential change: temporal succession reveals only varying combinations of changeless parts. In El acoso, perfectly real and even ordinary events appear in such a way as to suggest that both for the author and his hapless protagonist, time and causality are purely phenomenal, without meaning in view of a fixed dramatic scheme. A single episode, or even a simple physical gesture, may splinter into distinct images inserted at widely spaced sections of the narrative; past happenings are juggled and shuffled so that the reader must infer the action on the basis of dispersed clues and signals. The principal characters, the Acosado and the taquillero, see the course of their own lives not as a psychological unfolding but as a kind of timeless, mythical drama of primal innocence destroyed by the fall into sin.

The novel has three main parts, subdivided into eighteen unnumbered sections. But the progression of the narrative seems at first disordered and chaotic. Part I (first section) begins with a description of the thoughts of an unnamed ticket-taker during a concert intermission; next appears a torrential interior monologue in the mind of we know not whom ("… ese latido que se me abre a codazos; ese vientre en borbollones; se corazón que se me supende …"). Only when the third section reintroduces the ticket-taker does the reader realize that the anguished inner voice was that of another person, one whose external shape will not become visible until Part II. Meanwhile, through the taquillero's memories, we piece together the story of a youth from a provincial village who has come to Havana to study music. For weeks he has been preparing himself for the evening's performance of Beethoven's Eroica, but no sooner does the orchestra begin than, giving in to a sexual impulse, he leaves the concert hall and hurries to the house of the prostitute Estrella. When she refuses him, he returns to the concert in time to catch the last nine minutes of the symphony.

The whole of Part II deals with the six previous days in the life of the novel's main character, the Acosado. Present action is interwoven with disordered recollections of past incidents in such a way that the reader must himself deduce the linking of causes and effects: by keeping careful track of fleeting allusions, of details charged with significance for the protagonist, by relating minute coincidences and mentally establishing a system of cross-references, one can recompose the biography of this other provincial student who had come to the capital to study architecture. The order of events is as follows: on arriving in Havana, he stays a short while with his aged former nurse; he joins the Communist Party, but after witnessing the violent police repression of a student demonstration, he goes over to the "bando de los impacientes." Although his terrorist acts begin idealistically enough ("Todo habia sido justo, heroico, sublime en el comienzo"), the kangaroo trial of a student friend ("época del Tribunal") and his first political murder precipitate him into what he recognizes as a "burocracia del horror," a crime syndicate that cynically makes use of the idealistic fervor of its members. Finally, no better than a paid assassin, he accepts a salary to direct the elimination of the political foe of a certain Alto Personaje. Arrested the morning after the killing, he informs under threat of torture, and when he is released from prison, he finds himself hunted by his former associates. The present action of six days relates his hiding-out in his old nurse's house, his departure from that refuge, and his attempt to get help from the Alto Personaje. Spotted on the street by two of his pursuers, he has slipped into the concert hall just at the beginning of the Eroica.

The first section of Part III continues the Acosado's turbulent interior monologue as he listens to the concert; the second and final section returns to the taquillero and then concludes with the indirect reporting of the Hunted Man's execution.

In a narrative lacking normal time sequence, made up out of the subjectivity of the characters and jumbled bits of action described or merely alluded to, some unifying elements must serve as guide posts to the reader in his reconstruction of events. The order imposed upon this novel does not derive from causal plotting but from the disposition of motifs and the patterns of theme and structure. In the composition of any fiction we can distinguish between dynamic motifs that generate action and static motifs that effect no change of situation but contribute to the setting or mood. These last may or may not be directly related to the central action. In El acoso the numerous static motifs at first appear extraneous to the story, but gradually their true import emerges to reveal a system of chance connections and exchanges between Acosado and taquillero; they form a bundle of Ariadne threads that guide the reader through the narrative's cross-cutting paths. The delayed disclosure of the pertinence of these motifs weakens the sense of time, for a vision of the entire action must be suspended until all the elements can be coordinated; nonsequential articulation is an effective weapon in Carpentier's "guerra del tiempo."

Certain occurrences (which, however, do not come in chronological order) tie together the parallel lives of the informer and the ticket-taker: the yellow-papered cigarette butt, thrown out of Estrella's window by the taxi driver, burns the hand of the Hunted Man crouching against the wall of her house; a few hours later (though the passage is situated in the narrative some seventy-seven pages earlier), the ticket-taker finds Estrella's bed surrounded by "colillas de papel de maíz." The storm that the ticket-taker watches from the concert-hall lobby surprises the Hunted One with the Becario at the ocean shore. The screech of ambulance brakes that heralds the entrance of the hurried ticket buyer in Part I ("En aquel instante una ambulancia que llegaba a todo rodar pasó frente al edificio, ladeándose en un frenazo brutal") sounds again at the end of Part II when the fugitive darts in front of the speeding vehicle: "Una ambulancia, brutalmente frenada, había quedado entre su cuerpo y los gestos que estaban en suspenso a la altura del bolsillo del corazón." Other commonly perceived things and events indicate the physical proximity in which the two men have been living for the past two weeks: the old mansion next to the modern apartment house, the wake for the old woman. Alternately shared objects and experiences (the new bill, Estrella, and the Beethoven symphony) weld these two lives into a single action, a mechanism with rotating parts (or, to use the image of the Acosado in describing the third movement of the Eroica, "con algo de esos juguetes de niños muy chicos, que por el movimiento de varitas paralelas, ponen dos muñecos, a descargar martillos, alternativamente, sobre un mazo"). The new bill, a dynamic motif, appears now in the hands of one, now affects the life of the other, and these exchanges are vital to the plot's complication. The meshing of the visits paid by both to Estrella is a descriptive, static device, because the prostitute, as her name implies, is a fixed point of convergence, the motionless, timeless center in the lives of her clients and the pivot between Acosado and taquillero. Beethoven's Eroica not only determines the fictional time the narrative but also creates the strongest bond between the former architecture student and the music student. For days the man hiding on the roof-terrace hears the music played by his neighbor on the phonograph, at times almost unaware of its persistence, but finally convinced of its significance in his drama ("Estaba eso en la casa al lado, porque Dios quiso que as fuera …"). The symphony that accompanied him in his refuge and that now marks the temporal limits of his last anguish is one of the many signs of a divine plan.

Some motifs are connected with the Acosado alone and serve as directives for fitting together the story-line (frequently what appears first as a fragment of memory is later included as dramatic scene enacted in the present): the pistol; the explosive Antología de oradores: de Demóstenes a Castelar; the prayer book with the Cross of Calatrava on its cover; the Alto Personaje and the Casa de la Gestión; the attempted assassination in the graveyard; the fugitive's vomiting of the warm water drunk in desperation after three days of enforced fast; the learning of the Apostles' Creed; his torture. Other motifs, however, not only show the careful workings of the plot but are to the Hunted Man himself evidence of an unavoidable tragedy of sin and atonement. Thus, in the first interior monologue, he is horrified by an acne-scarred neck: "No mirar ese cuello: tiene marcas de acné; había de estar ahí, precisamente—único en toda la platea—, para poner tan cerca lo que no debe mirarse, lo que puede ser un Signo"; the explanation of this delirious obsession comes on pp. 242-243 when the Acosado recalls his first act of political terrorism. The dog that barked at him in the ruins of the Casa de la Gestión is yet another fixture in the divine plan of expiation, as are the Beethoven symphony, the overheard dialogue of a Sophoclean tragedy, and the words engraved in bronze on the façade of the University of Havana: Hoc erat in votis. This phrase, although taking on different connotations in different contexts, announces, in the first internal monologue, the protagonist's awareness of the ineluctability of his tragedy: it is the summary and prophetic declaration of a total and minutely detailed program of ensnarement. The terrible march of events is due neither to chance nor to the voluntary acts of the informer:

[Era] Dios, que no perdonaba, que no quería mis plegarias, que me volvía las espaldas cuando en mi boca sonaban las palabras aprendidas en el libro de la Cruz de Calatrava; Dios que me arrojó a la calle y puso a ladrar un perro entre los escombros; Dios que puso aquí, tan cerca de mi rostro, el cuello con las horribles marcas; el cuello que no debe mirarse. Y ahora se encarna en los instrumentos que me obligó a escuchar, esta noche, conducido por los truenos de su ira … Sé ahora que nunca ofensor alguno pudo ser más observado, mejor puesto en el fiel de la Divina Mira, que quien cayó en el encierro, en la suprema trampa—traído por la inexorable Voluntad a donde un lenguaje sin palabras acaba de revelarle el sentido expiatorio de los últimos tiempos. Repartidos están lospapeles en este Teatro, y el desenlace está ya establecido en el después—lhoc erat in votis!—como está la ceniza en la leña por prender.

In this allegorical scheme of transgression and punishment, the old trunk containing the souvenirs of his student life, reminders of an uncorrupted youth ("mis cosas puras": books, architectural drawings, photographs of famous buildings, a Communist Party card, "la última barrera que hubiera podido preservarlo de lo abominable"), is to the Hunted One a symbol of man's innocence before original sin: "una figuración, sólo descifrable para él, del Paraíso antes de la Culpa."

Listening to the Eroica in the concert hall, the fugitive, only recently converted to a belief in God, sees the necessity of the episodes in his assigned role. Although this happens in Part I, the reader is not yet aware of the portentousness of the events recalled. The author scatters references to them throughout the text, sometimes in a very unobtrusive way, so that the realization of their importance, both in the makeup of the plot and in the emotional life of the protagonist, is acquired only gradually. Motifs that seem unrelated to the story—chance occurrences and apparently insignificant acts and objects—are eventually revealed as indispensable to its development. The reader retrospectively fits details into a meaningful unit and recognizes, along with the Hunted One, a rigorously preordained plan. This halting, piecemeal disclosure of an unchanging, inextricable web of facts divests a conventional dramatic plot of its normal pattern of suspense: tension arises not out of an evolving complication of the action but through the placement—counterpoint, shifts, juxtapositions—of anecdotal and descriptive fragments. By replacing the expected consecutive order with a discrete arrangement, the author destroys temporal progression and turns the narrative into a stable complex whose parts are simultaneously apprehended.

In addition to the intricate fretwork of concrete particulars, Carpentier unifies the novel through a series of variations on the topic of betrayal and on the related theme of a world crumbling into moral and esthetic decay. The Acosado's traitorous acts are many: he abandons his studies, he defects from the Communist Party ("recordó que de eso tambiín habia renegado"), he refuses, out of cowardice, to stand up for a companion tried and sentenced by a kangaroo court, he becomes a criminal terrorist (thereby distorting his revolutionary ideals), and, finally, he steals his old nurse's meager food. The ticket-taker, whose function in the novel is to echo, as if in a minor key, the theme of the fall from original innocence, regards his surrender to sexual temptation as a betrayal of his high ideals ("la imagen de una prostituta bastara para apartarlo de lo Verdadero y lo Sublime"); his lost purity is personified by the old negro woman in the mansion ("Necesitaba saberla viva, en la noche, por rito de purificación"). All the other characters betray or deceive, some intentionally, some unwittingly: Estrella, the Becario, the taxi-driver, the police inspector. The very roles of delator and of expiatory victim are transferred indifferently from one man to another: the acne-marked dignitary who was once "el emplazado" ("el emplazado parecía feliz en el frescor mañanero") bequeaths the title to his murderer, the informer ("Una ambulancia llegaba a todo rodar … el emplazado se arrojó delante de ella"). Thinking of his condemned friend, the Acosado remembers a corporeal image of guilt ("una miserable espalda se redondeaba en la sombra de los álamos") that the narrator applies to him a few pages later ("Miserable era ahora su espalda que se redondeaba en la sombra de los álamos"). A kind of chiasmus, whose terms must be held in mind by the reader, ties together the two men in the anonymity of the victim's role. Even the landscape across which the characters move is disintegrating: the former architecture student sees the decline of his epoch in the debasement of style and form: "Se asistía, de portal en portal, a la agonía de los últimos órdenes clásicos usados en la época."

The use of multiple, coexisting embodiments of a single theme reinforces the novel's static quality, for that which occurs only in time, the fall into corruption, is pictured as an invariable component in a repetitive design.

By interchanging the characteŕs' roles Carpentier denies them individualized behavior; by excluding proper names he shows them to be mere actors in the play. All have abstract or generic titles ("el Acosado," "el taquillero," "el Becario," "el Alto Personaje"), with the single exception of Estrella, less a name than a sign for her function—the fixed point around which the others revolve. Not only does the narrator withdraw from his fictional creatures but they too disassociate themselves from their deeds: decisive acts appears as autonomous happenings not as the results of a conscious will. Both the Acosado and Estrella consider their treacheries in a curiously depersonified way: Acosado: "Había unafisura, ciertamente; un trínsito infernal. Pero, al considerar las peripecias de lo sucedido en aquel tránsito …"; Estrella: "Al medir el abominable alcance de lo dicho para quitarse de encima a los de la inquisición …"; "Un indicio, dado para desviar una amenaza sin mayor gravedad … había hecho de ella una puta." The Hunted Man thinks of his original sin not as a deliberate act but as a mechanical response. He did not kill, he only made a certain gesture: "Jamás repetiría el gesto que le hiciera mirar tan fijamente un cuello marcado de acné." The memory of his first murder is derationalized into a rapid succession of photographic images and interruptive sounds that impose themselves in a passive sensory apparatus: "la nuca, a poco, se le colocó tan cerca que hubieran podido contarse las marcas dejadas en ella por el acné. Luego fue un perfil, una cara empavorecida, dos ojos suplicantes, un aullido y una descarga." His own death is reported with laconic indirectness: "Entonces, dos espectadores que habían permanecido en sus asientos de penúltima fila se levantaron lentamente, atravesaron la platea desierta … y se asomaron por sobre el barandal de un palco ya en sombras, disparando a la alfombra." The event toward which the entire story moves, the Hunted One's execution, becomes a secondary action, inserted as a modifying adverbial phrase—and the human target itself goes unmentioned.

Man, devoid of individuality and volition, is nothing but a congeries of automatic motions: "Un gesto resignado … apartó la cortina de damasco"; "La mano ha dejado la inservible brocha"; "Una mano crispada se hundió en la masa resquebrajada…. Y fue luego la lengua, ansiosa, presurosa, asustada de comer robando, la que limpié el plato con gruñidos de cerdo en las honduras de la loza, y saltó pronto al esparto de la silla, para lamer lo derramado. Levantóse luego el cuerpo sobre sus rodillas, y fue la mano, otra vez, en el envase del Cuáquero, escarbando con las uñas en la avena cruda'; "La boca se hundió en esa sopa de Domingos, resoplando y royendo antes de arrimarse al cartón del Cuáquero." A mindless body motivates or performs the cowardly act: "su carne más irreemplazable se había encogido atrozmente ante la amenaza del tormento"; "Y hay que levantar la mano y sentenciar…. La mía permanece inerte, colgante, buscando un pretexto para no alzarse en el lomo de un perro … mi codo al fin se mueuve, elevando dedos cobardes." As for the occasion of his informing, the man remembers not the human semblance of his interrogators but their disembodied hands, gestures, voices: "Y luego de dos días de olvido, sin alimento … había sido la luz en la cara, y las manos que empuñaban vergajos y las voces que hablaban de llegarla a las raíces de las muelas con una fresa de dentista, y las otras voces que hablaban de golpearlo en los testículos." The physical gesture is not only autonomous but at times its very import substantializes it, converting it into a material object: "Una ambulancia … había quedado entre su cuerpo y los gestos que estaban en suspenso a la altura del bolsillo del corazón." Or it becomes magnified into a divine revelation: "La portentosa novedad era Dios. Dios, que se le había revelado en el tabaco encendido por la vieja…. De súbito, aquel gesto de tomar la brasa del fogón y elevarla hacia el rostro … se la había magnificado en implicaciones abrumadoras."

Estrella is aware of this mysterious independence of the flesh: "Hablaba de su cuerpo en tercera persona, como si fuese, más abajo de sus clavículas, una presencia ajena y enérgica, dotada, por sí sola, de los poderes que le valían la solicitud y la largueza de los varones. Esa presencia actuaba, de pronto, como por sortilegio, alentando prolongadas asiduidades por gentes de ámbitos distintos." Her clients too are reduced to physical existence and appetite, "identificados en los mismos gestos y apetencias." Indeed, Carpentier habitually presents people in the guise of pure corporality: the characters see each other as moving flesh: "Después del sofocante anochecer los cuerpos estaban como relajados"; "Más allá de las carnes era el parque de columnas"; flesh that the pursued man thinks of as a protective wall ("rodeado de gente, protegido por los cuerpos, oculto entre los cuerpos; de cuerpo confundido con muchos cuerpos"), or flesh that he has envied ("Yo envidiaba aquella carne ceñida a sucontorno más viril"), or, in the case of his own, impersonally considered as bulk to be hidden ("cargado con el peso de un cuerpo acosado"). The man condemned by the revolutionary tribunal lives his last moments only in the automatic reactions of his body: "El cuerpo presente—presente ya ausente—sedesprende el reloj de la muñeca … le da cuerda, por hábito conservado por el pulgar y el índice de su mano derecha." In a sense the body, or more exactly the body's sexuality, is held responsible for the parallel falls into sin of Acosado and taquillero, the fear of castration in the former, simple sensuality in the latter ("había dejado la Sublime Concepción por el calor de una ramera"). It is their sexual life, their commerce with Estrella, that provides one of the most important ties between these duplicating lives.

And the description of the body is usually purely sensory, frequently an optical impression: an ineradicable pictorial memory—the acne-scarred neck—afflicts the Acosado. Pictorial images are so insistent that physical qualities synecdochically replace their possessor. The characteristic of an object or person (which may be nominalized and subsequently modified by another adjective appropriate to the object) so predominate over the bearer that the latter disappears entirely behind an abstract construction: "Silencio ya en lo después. En lo que ya dejó de ser; pálpito y movimiento que ya saben del hierro arrojado a la rueda maestra, de la tierra que caerá sobre la todavía caliente inmovilidad de lo detenido." Independent of its owner, the change in a human attribute signifies the death of a man: "lo que se movía, dejó de moverse; la voz enmudeció en la bocanada de sangre que ya viste, como un esmalte compacto, el mentón sin rasurar." A further degree of abstraction is reached when the very substance of the cadaver is only circuitously alluded to: "Sobre el árbol del tronco más espeso se detienen las moscas, buscando los plomos que traspasaron." The body evaporates into a lingering warmth: "La casa estaba tibia aún de una presencia que demoraba en el desorden de la cama rodeada de colillas de papel de maíz."

Apposite to the dehumanized view of man is the sickly animation of the architectural setting. Buildings, pillars, decorative motifs and devices assume just enough life to suffer organic dissolution: "Había capiteles cubiertos de pústulas reventadas por el sol; fustes cuyas estrías se hinchaban de abscesos levantados por la pintura de aceite"; "Allí se afirmaba la condena impuesta por aquella ciudad a los órdenes que degeneraban en el calor y se cubrían de llagas, dando sus astrágalos para sostener muestras de tintorerías, barberías, refresquerías…."

The disorder of the narrative's progress is, I have noted, only apparent, for scenes and evocations are actually carefully woven together through a system of clue-like motifs and a strict temporal arrangement. This last, however, is not immediately evident and the reader must reconstruct it on the basis of various references. We discover two time levels. The events of Parts I and II occur during the present-time frame of the Sunday evening concert, a period of about one hour—the action begins shortly before the performance of the Eroica (the correct interpretation of which, according to the taquillero, takes forty-six minutes) and ends shortly afterwards; the action of Part II begins, one gathers, on the previous Tuesday when, because illness has confined the old woman to her bed, the Acosado must hide in the belvedere of the decrepit mansion, and takes us up to a moment before the start of the symphony; the repeated screech of the ambulance brakes indicates the confluence of the two time periods. The two-week span of the action of Part II (concerned exclusively with the Acosado) corresponds to the two weeks during which the ticket-taker has studiously listened to recordings of the Eroica: "Le había observado [a la vieja] hacía dos semanas—dos semanas exactas, puesto que era el día de su compleaños, cuando, con el pequeño giro recibido del padre, se habiía regalado a sí mismo la Sinfonia Heroica en discos de mucho uso."

In terms of real chronology, the events of Part II are prior to those of Parts I and III, but instead of appearing as a remembrance in the consciousness of a character, a flashback illuminating previous material, they occur as present action that unfolds dramatically before the reader. Although they are the temporal and causal antecedents of what happens in Parts I and III, the narrative structure makes them seem independent and exclusive so that they do not truly constitute the preparation for the dénouement. Between Parts I and II is an unexplained time-shift reminiscent of the film-run-in-reverse device used in "Viaje a la semilla." At the end of Part I the ticket-taker anxiously wonders if the wake in the old mansion is for the aged negro woman who symbolizes to him the lost purity of childhood: "Necesitaba saberla viva en la noche. Tanto lo necesitaba que correría a la casa del Mirador, en cuanto terminara el Final, para cerciorarse de que no era ella la persona de cuerpo presente." The first lines of Part II suddenly resuscitate this laid-out corpse: "La vieja se había recogido, encogida, en su estrecha cama de hierro … volviéndose hacia la pared."

The order of remembered events is determined by the emotional reactions of the protagonist. Part II reveals, albeit in a fragmentary way, the confession that led to the man-hunt; but this revelation lies submerged in the account of the fugitive's life in the old mansion, being postponed, in fact, until the end of the section and preceded by matters of more immediate concern to the character (his religious conversion, the memories of his revolutionary activities, etc.). For the Hunted One customarily considers his plight as the punishment for his original fall into sin—the betrayal of youthful ideals—rather than the necessary consequence of his cowardice in prison; his flight and suffering are part of a divinely decreed plan of atonement ("una perenne expiación por el tormento"; "fases de una expiación necesaria"). Because his crime is against God, not man, the recall of the "fisura," of the abominable gesture that makes him stare so fixedly at an acne-scarred neck, dissolves into a vision of penitent sinners: "Eran gemidos las palabras con que los atormentados, los culpables, los arrepentidos, se acercaban a la Santa Mesa, para recibir el Cuerpo del Crucificado y la Sangre del Sacrificio Incruento." The temporal rupture between Parts I and III on the one hand, and Part II on the other, is the literary reproduction of that psychological dissociation that divorces the denunciation of friends and comrades from its inevitable aftermath. For the reader, as well as for the Acosado, the pursuit is not directly linked to the informing.

This incision in the temporal continuity, this severing of determinants from results and the subsequent destruction of the normal causal relation between a crime and its punishment, transforms the episodes of a fast-moving suspenseful tale into the predictable stages of a ritual drama removed from time and the human world of motivation and will: "Sé ahora que nunca ofensor alguno pudo ser más observado, mejor puesto en el fiel de la Divina Mira, que quien cayó en la suprema trampa—traído por la inexorable voluntad." A man's deeds are nothing but the posturings of an actor playing an assigned role. "Repartidos están los papeles en este Teatro y el desenlace está establecido en el después." (At the close of his drama, the Acosado unsuspectingly comments on his own imminent disappearance from the stage: "Nadie se queda en un teatro cuando ha terminado el espectáculo. Nadie permanece ante un escenario vacío, en tinieblas, donde nada se muestra"). Human behavior does not evolve in time because the characters are cast as unvarying types.

The religious motifs woven into the story reinforce its representative quality, for they allude to what is timeless and archetypal. The action takes place during the first two weeks of Lent, the preparation for the great drama of betrayal and sacrifice ("el mayor de los dramas"). After his conversion, the fugitive reenacts the practice of the Christian catechumens in using this period to instruct himself for his initiation. Intrigued by the ceremonies of the mass that symbolically transpose the Mystery of salvation, he one day comes to understand how the liturgy of the Church, like architecture or any other art, gives form to man's experience: "Y ahora que se daba por enterado, hallaba en los simples movimientos que acompañaban el Gloria, el Evangelio, el Ofertorio, esa prodigiosa sublimación de lo elemental que, en la Arquitectura, había transformado el trofeo de caza en bucranio; la anilla de cuerdas que ciñe el haz de ramas del fuste primitivo, en astrégalo de puras proporciones pitagóricas." The liturgical references suggest not only the eternal but also the theatrical: religion becomes art.

The artist's conversion of the primary elements of his world (particularly of his perceptions of space and time) is schematically indicated in the novel by the pairing of the two characters, the student of architecture (the organization of spatial relations) and the student of music (the organization of temporal progression). The frame of their action is fiction, an image of time as memory. Music, Carpentier has written, is the achievement of human dominion over time, its submission to man's will. But the novel is also a manipulation of temporal sequence. The author successfully fuses these two modes in composing his narrative. Although he has destroyed normal chronology with the apparently illogical disposition of events, he carefully determines the duration of the action by the playing of the Eroica, thereby molding it to a musical order. The novel's abstractly executed plot is a literary parallel to the musical conformation of time.

The narrative display of esthetic transformation is evident not only in the ingenious temporal displacements but also in the story's strangely impersonal, hieratic quality; the passivity and powerlessness of the characters shows, as well as their human deficiency, their essential unreality, their literary nature. The author, precisely directing the paces of his actors according to a fixed program of betrayal and degradation, affirms human will in the very act of his novelistic contriving. Volition, so noticeably absent in the characters, is manifest in the shape and fact of the story itself. The informer's crime becomes a drama and, as artistic object, acquires value. The writer places his tragedy beyond the realm of incomprehensible motivations and unexpected changes, beyond the element in which these exist—beyond time. Harassed and obsessed by time man seeks to subject it to his desired measure in music, religion, and narrative.