The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  At a given moment all the fans snapped shut. There was a great silence behind the military drums. Macandal, his waist girded by striped pants, bound with ropes and knots, his skin gleaming with recent wounds, was moving toward the center of the square. The masters’ eyes questioned the faces of the slaves. But the Negroes showed spiteful indifference. What did the whites know of Negro matters? In his cycle of metamorphoses, Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects, making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings, or long antennae. He had been fly, centipede, moth, ant, tarantula, ladybug, even a glow-worm with phosphorescent green lights. When the moment came, the bonds of the Mandingue, no longer possessing a body to bind, would trace the shape of a man in the air for a second before they slipped down the post. And Macandal, transformed into a buzzing mosquito, would light on the very tricorne of the commander of the troops to laugh at the dismay of the whites. This was what their masters did not know; for that reason they had squandered so much money putting on this useless show, which would prove how completely helpless they were against a man chrismed by the great Loas.

  Macandal was now lashed to the post. The executioner had picked up an ember with the tongs. With a gesture rehearsed the evening before in front of a mirror, the Governor unsheathed his dress sword and gave the order for the sentence to be carried out. The fire began to rise toward the Mandingue, licking his legs. At that moment Macandal moved the stump of his arm, which they had been unable to tie up, in a threatening gesture which was none the less terrible for being partial, howling unknown spells and violently thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square:

  “Macandal saved!’’

  Pandemonium followed. The guards fell with rifle butts on the howling blacks, who now seemed to overflow the streets, climbing toward the windows. And the noise and screaming and uproar were such that very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry. When the slaves were restored to order, the fire was burning normally like any fire of good wood, and the breeze blowing from the sea was lifting the smoke toward the windows where more than one lady who had fainted had recovered consciousness. There was no longer anything more to see.

  That afternoon the slaves returned to their plantations laughing all the way. Macandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World. Once more the whites had been outwitted by the Mighty Powers of the Other Shore. And while M. Lenormand de Mézy in his nightcap commented with his devout wife on the Negroes’ lack of feelings at the torture of one of their own—drawing therefrom a number of philosophical considerations on the inequality of the human races which he planned to develop in a speech larded with Latin quotations—Ti Noël got one of the kitchen wenches with twins, taking her three times in a manger of the stables.

  Part

  Two

  “. . . je lui dis qu’elle serait reine là-bas; qu’elle trait en palanquin; qu’une esclave serait attentive au moindre de ses mouvements pour exécuter sa volonté; qu’elle se promènerait sous les orangers en fleur; que les serpents ne devraient lui faire aucune peur, attendu qu’il n’y en avait pas dans les Antilles; que les sauvages n’étaient plus à craindre; que ce n’était pas là que la broche était mise pour rôtir les gens; enfin j’achevais mon discours en lui disant qu’elle serait bien jolie mise en créole.”

  —Madame d’Abrantés

  (“...I told her that she would be queen out there; that she would go about in a palanquin; that a slave would watch her smallest gesture in order to carry out her wishes; that she would stroll under orange-trees in bloom; that she need not fear snakes, for there are no snakes in the Antilles; that the savages are not to be feared; that people are not roasted on spits out there; at the end I rounded out my speech by telling her that she would be very pretty dressed as a Creole.”)

  The Daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë

  Not long after the death of M. Lenormand de Mézy’s second wife, Ti Noël had to go to the Cap to pick up some harness that had been ordered from Paris for state occasions. During those years the city had made remarkable progress.Nearly all the houses were of two stories, with wide-eaved balconies and high ogival doors trimmed with polished bolts or hinges with clover-shaped heads. There were more tailors, hatters, feather-workers, hairdressers; there was a shop that sold violas and transverse flutes, as well as the music of contredanses and sonatas. The bookseller displayed the latest number of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, printed on thin paper with a border of vignettes and spaced leads. And, as a further luxury, a theater for drama and opera had been opened in the rue Vandreuil. This prosperity was particularly good for the rue des Espagnols, where the most prosperous visitors took lodgings at the Auberge de la Couronne, which Henri Christophe, the master chef, had just bought from Mlle Monjean, its former mistress. The Negro’s dishes were famous for the perfection of their seasoning when he was trying to please a guest newly arrived from Paris, or, in his olla podrida, for the abundance of ingredients when he was catering to the appetite of some hungry Spaniard who had come from the other side of the island in clothes so outmoded that they seemed those of the old buccaneers. Moreover, Henri Christophe, in his high white cap in the smoky kitchen, had a magic touch with turtle vol-au-vent or wood pigeons. And when he put his hand to the mixing bowl, the fragrance of his puff paste carried as far as the rue des Trois Visages.

  Bereaved once more, M. Lenormand de Mézy, without the least respect for the memory of the dear departed, became an assiduous visitor to the Cap theater, where actresses from Paris sang Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s arias or loftily declaimed tragic alexandrines, pausing between hemistichs to wipe the sweat from their brows. An anonymous libel in verse, excoriating the inconstancy of certain widowers, revealed to the world that a rich planter of the Plaine was finding nightly solace in the lush Flemish beauty of Mlle Floridor, a graceless interpreter of the role of confidante, whose name always appeared at the end of the cast, but who was uniquely gifted in the phallic arts. At her persuasion the master had departed for Paris unexpectedly when the season ended, leaving the management of the plantation in the hands of a relative. But something strange had happened to him. After a few months, a growing longing for sun, for space, for abundance, for command, for Negresses tumbled alongside a canefield, made it plain to him that this “return to France,” to which he had looked forward for so many years, was no longer the key to happiness for him. After all his cursing of the colony, after all his diatribes against its climate and his contempt for the boorishness of the upstart colonists, he returned to the plantation, bringing with him the actress, whom the Paris managers had refused to hire because of her lack of dramatic ability. And so, on Sundays, two splendid carriages with liveried postilions en route to church once more adorned the Plaine. In Mlle Floridor’s conveyance—the lady insisted on using her stage name—ten mulatto girls squirmed about on the back seat, twittering incessantly while their blue petticoats fluttered in the wind.

  Twenty years had gone by in all this. Ti Noël had fathered twelve children by one of the cooks. The plantation was more flourishing than ever, with its roads bordered with ipecac and its vines already yielding a tart wine. Nevertheless, with advancing age M. Lenormand de Mézy had become cranky and drank heavily. He suffered from a perpetual erotomania that kept him panting after adolescent slave girls, the smell of whose skin drove him out of his mind. He multiplied the corporal punishments meted out to the men, especially those guilty of fornication outside the marriage bed. Meanwhile the actress, faded and gnawed by malaria, avenged her artistic failure on the Negresses who bathed her and combed her hair, ordering them whipped on the slightest pretext. There were nights when she took to the bottle. It was not unusual on such occasions for her to order all the slaves to
turn out, and under the full moon, between belches of malmsey, to declaim before her captive audience the great roles she had never been allowed to interpret. Wrapped in her confidante’s veils, the timid player of bit parts attacked with quavering voice the familiar bravura passages:

  Mes crimes désormais ont comblé la mesure

  Je respire à la fois l’inceste et l’imposture

  Mes homicides mains, promptes à me venger,

  Dans le sang innocent brûlent de se plonger,

  (My sins are heaped

  Already to overflowing. I am seeped

  At once in incest and hypocrisy.

  My murderous hands, hot for avenging me,

  Are fain to plunge themselves in guiltless

  blood.)

  Agape with amazement, at a loss to know what it was all about, but gathering from certain words that in Creole, too, referred to misdemeanors whose punishment ranged from a thrashing to having one’s head chopped off, the Negroes came to the conclusion that the lady must have committed many crimes in days gone by, and that she was probably in the colony to get away from the police of Paris, like so many of the prostitutes in the Cap, who had unsettled accounts with the metropolis. The word “crime” was similar in the island patois; everybody knew what judges were called in French; and, as for hell and red devils, they had been vividly described by the second wife of M. Lenormand de Mézy, a grim censor of all sins of the flesh. Nothing that this woman, wearing a white robe that was transparent in the torchlight, was confessing was of an edifying nature:

  Minos, juge aux enfers tous les pâles humains.

  Ah, combien frémira son ombre épouvantée,

  Lorsqu’il verra sa fille à ses yeux présentée,

  Contrainte d’avouer tant de forfaits divers,

  Et des crimes peut-être inconnus aux enfers!

  (Minos, below, judges the souls of men.

  Ah, how his shade aghast will shudder when

  He sees his child is come before his eyes,

  forced to avow so many infamies

  Diverse, and even deeds unknown to hell!)

  In the face of such immorality, the slaves of the Lenormand de Mézy plantation continued unshaken in their reverence for Macandal. Ti Noël passed on the tales of the Mandingue to his children, teaching them simple little songs he had made up in Macandal’s honor while currying and brushing the horses. Besides, it was a good thing to keep green the memory of the One-Armed, for though far away on important duties, he would return to this land when he was least expected.

  The Solemn Pact

  The claps of thunder were echoing like avalanches over the rocky ridges of Morne Rouge and dying slowly away in the depths of the ravines when the delegates from the various plantations of the Plaine du Nord. covered with mud to the waist, shivering under their soaking shirts, reached the heart of Bois Caïman. To make matters worse, the August rain, which fell warm or cold as the wind shifted, had been coming down with increasing fury ever since the slave curfew had sounded. His pants clinging to his groin, Ti Noël tried to protect his head with a burlap sack folded in the shape of a hood. In spite of the darkness, there was no possibility that a. spy might have sneaked into the gathering. The word had been passed around at the last minute by men who could be trusted. Although the voices were kept low, the buzz of the conversations filled the forest, mingled with the pervading presence of the rain falling on the trembling leaves.

  Suddenly a mighty voice arose in the midst of the congress of shadows, a voice whose ability to pass without intermediate stages from a deep to a shrill register gave a strange emphasis to its words. There was much of invocation and much of spell in that speech filled with angry inflections and shouts. It was Bouckman the Jamaican, who was talking. Although the thunder drowned out whole phrases, Ti Noël managed to grasp that something had happened in France, and that some very powerful gentlemen had declared that the Negroes should be given their freedom, but that the rich landowners of the Cap, who were all monarchist sons of bitches, had refused to obey them. At this point Bouckman let the rain fall on the trees for a few seconds, as though waiting for the lightning that jagged across the sea. Then, when the thunder had died away, he stated that a pact had been sealed between the initiated on this side of the water and the great Loas of Africa to begin the war when the auspices were favorable. And out of the applause that rose about him came this final admonition:

  “The white men’s God orders the crime. Our gods demand vengeance from us. They will guide our arms and give us help. Destroy the image of the white man’s God who thirsts for our tears; let us listen to the cry of freedom within ourselves.”

  The delegates had forgotten the rain running down them from chin to belly, stiffening the leather of their belts. A howl went up out of the storm. Beside Bouckman a bony, long-limbed Negress was brandishing a ritual machete.

  Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, O!

  Damballah m’ap tiré canon,

  Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, O!

  Damballah m’ap tiré canon!

  Ogoun of the Irons, Ogoun the Warrior, Ogoun of the Forges, Ogoun Marshal, Ogoun of the Lances, Ogoun-Chango, Ogoun-Kankanikan, Ogoun-Batala, Ogoun-Panama, Ogoun-Bakoulé were now invoked by the priestess of the Rada amid the shouting of the shadows:

  Ogoun Badagri

  Général Sanglant,

  Saizi z’orage

  Ou scell’orage

  Ou fait Kataoun z’éclai!

  The machete suddenly buried itself in the belly of a black pig, which spewed forth guts and lungs in three squeals. Then, called by the name of their masters, for they had no other, the delegates came forward one by one to smear their lips with the foaming blood of the pig, caught in a big wooden bowl. Then they dropped face downward on the wet ground. Ti Noël, like the others, swore always to obey Bouckman. The Jamaican then clasped in his arms Jean-François, Biassou, and Jeannot, who would not return to their plantations that night. The general staff of the insurrection had been named. The signal would be given eight days later. It was possible that aid would come from the Spanish colonists on the other side of the island, bitter enemies of the French. And in view of the fact that a proclamation had to be drawn up and nobody knew how to write, someone remembered the goose quill of the Abbé de la Haye, priest of Dondon, an admirer of Voltaire who had shown signs of unequivocal sympathy for the Negroes ever since he had read the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

  As the rain had swollen the rivers, Ti Noël had to swim the slimy brook to be in the stable before the overseer woke up. The dawn bell found him sitting and singing, up to his waist in a pile of fresh esparto grass that smelled of the sun.

  The Call of the Conch Shells

  M. Lenormand de Mézy had been in a vile humor ever since his last visit to the Cap. Governor Blancheland, a monarchist like himself, was completely out of patience with the vaporings of those Utopian imbeciles in Paris whose hearts bled for the black slaves. How easy it was to dream of the equality of men of all races between faro hands in the Café de la Régence or under the arcades of the Palais Royal. From views of the harbors of America decorated with compass cards and Tritons with wind-puffed cheeks; from pictures of indolent mulatto girls and naked washerwomen, of siestas under banana trees engraved by Abraham Brunias and exhibited in France along with verses of De Parny and the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” it was very easy to envisage Santo Domingo as the leafy paradise of Paul and Virginia, where the melons did not hang from the branches of the trees only because they would have killed the passers-by if they had fallen from such heights. In May, the Constituent Assembly, a mob of liberalists full of theories from the Encyclopédie, had voted to give the Negroes, sons of manumitted slaves, political rights. And now, faced with the specter of a civil war threatened by the plantation owners, these visionaries à la Stanislaus de Wimpffen answered: “Better the colonies should perish than a principle.”

  It must have been
about ten at night when M. Lenormand de Mézy, weary of chewing the bitter cud of his reflections, went out to the tobacco shed with the idea of forcing one of the girls who slipped in at this hour to steal some leaves for their fathers to chew. From far off came the sound of a conch-shell trumpet. What was strange was that the slow bellow was answered by others in the hills and forests. And others floated in from farther off by the sea, from the direction of the farms of Milot. It was as though all the shell trumpets of the coast, all the Indian lambis, all the purple conchs that served as doorstops, all the shells that lay alone and petrified on the summits of the hills, had begun to sing in chorus. Suddenly, another conch raised its voice in the main quarters of the plantation. Others, higher-pitched, answered from the indigo works, from the tobacco shed, from the stable. M. Lenormand de Mézy, frightened, hid behind a clump of bougainvillaea.

  All the doors of the quarters burst open at the same time, broken down from within. Armed with sticks, the slaves surrounded the houses of the overseers, seizing the tools. The bookkeeper, who had appeared, pistol in hand, was the first to fall, his throat slit from top to bottom by a mason’s trowel. After bathing their arms in the blood of the white man, the Negroes ran toward the big house, shouting death to the master, to the Governor, to God, and to all the Frenchmen in the world. But, driven by a longstanding thirst, most of them rushed to the cellar looking for liquor. Pick-blows demolished kegs of salt fish. Their staves sprung, casks began to gush wine, reddening the women’s skirts. Snatched up with shouts and shoves, the demijohns of brandy, the carboys of rum, were splintered against the walls. Laughing and scuffling, the Negroes went sliding through pickled tomatoes, capers, herring roe, and marjoram on the brick floor, a slime thinned by a stream of rancid oil flowing from a skin bag. A naked Negro, as a joke, jumped into a tub full of lard. Two old women were quarreling in Congolese over a clay pot. Hams and dried codfish tails were jerked from the ceiling. Sidestepping the mob, Ti Noël put his mouth to the bung of a barrel of Spanish wine and his Adam’s apple rose and fell for a long time. Then followed by his older sons, he went up to the first floor of the house. For a long time now he had dreamed of raping Mlle Floridor. On those nights of tragic declamations she had displayed beneath the tunic with its Greek-key border breasts undamaged by the irreversible outrage of the years.