Thus, gradually, delightedly, the reader realizes that he is moving not forward but backward in time. When the doctor shakes his head to indicate that there is no hope, the dying man feels better at once. Once the house is reassembled, in the room where the marquess lies the tall candles grow longer and longer until a nun puts them out with a light. Walls have sloughed their paper like snakes shed their old skins capitals lie fallen against their natural propensities, yet the vines recognize their affinity with the acanthus of fallen columns and twine round them. Outside the house, before the old man acts, a rich, baroque, typically encrusted description establishes the simultaneity of decay and renewal. But here the sorcerer's trick constitutes the reality of the text and so resembles the trompes l'oeil that begin The Lost Steps ( Los pasos perdidos) and Reasons of State ( El recurso del método). The character derives from Carpentier's interest in Afro-Cuban culture, music, and magic, evident in his first novel, ¡Ecue-yambo-Ó! (1933), and in his next, The Kingdom of This World ( El reino de este mundo 1949). Nor does the story propose (as Carpentier's later work does) that the man's magic is real in his world though not in ours: unelaborated, the sorcerer's world is not contrasted to our rationalist one. Although the story includes other Afro-Cubans, he is not among them. Once he has reset time's direction and lit the lamps, the Afro-Cuban sorcerer and his magical reality vanish into the text. With the workmen gone for the day, the old man twirls his stick over "a graveyard of paving stones" the house magically puts itself back together, and the man enters the house, where the Marqués de Capellanías lies dead. A mumbling old black man roves the ruins of a dilapidated colonial mansion being demolished by workmen. Unlike Carpentier's later work, where the "marvelous" accrues from the juxtaposition of different realities, this story depends on a magician and an explicitly literary trick. What is important, then, is not the source but rather the journey, the stories people spin out in idleness as they wait for death, a destination reached by the "hours growing on the right-hand side of the clock."
First published in 1944, the same year as Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones and collected in War of Time (1970), "Journey Back to the Source" starts from an idea so simple and so universal that a six-year-old has uttered it, "What if we could live our lives backwards?" The story answers that, living forward or living backward, we end in the same place: clay returns to clay.
The Cuban novelist who invented the phrase "lo real maravilloso americano," Alejo Carpentier considered "Journey Back to the Source" ("Viaje a la semilla") to be the story from which his maturity as a writer began. JOURNEY BACK TO THE SOURCE (Viaje a la semilla)
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