The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  Dagon inside the Ark

  After hiding for two days at the bottom of a dry well that was none the less gloomy for being shallow, M. Lenormand de Mézy, pale with hunger and fear, slowly raised his head above the wellcurb. All was silent. The horde had set out for the Cap, leaving behind fires that had a name when one searched the base of the pillars of smoke that curved upward to the sky. A small powder magazine had just been blown up near Le Carrefour des Peres. The master approached the house, passing the swollen corpse of the bookkeeper. A horrible stench came from the burned kennels. There the Negroes had settled a long-pending score, smearing the doors with tar to make sure none of the dogs got through alive. M. Lenormand de Mézy directed his steps toward the bedroom. Mlle Floridor lay on the rug, legs sprawled wide, a sickle buried in her entrails. Her dead hand was still clenched around one of the bedposts in a gesture cruelly reminiscent of that of a sleeping girl in a licentious engraving entitled The Dream which adorned the wall. With groaning sobs, M. Lenormand de Mézy dropped beside her. Then he snatched up a rosary, and said all the prayers he knew, including one he had learned as a child to cure chilblains. Thus he spent several days, terrified, afraid to set foot outside the house given over, standing wide open, to its own ruin, until one day a messenger on horseback pulled up his mount so short in the back patio that it went head first against a window, striking sparks from the stones. His news, bellowed out, aroused M. Lenormand de Mézy from his stupor. The horde had been defeated. The head of the Jamaican, Bouckman. green and open-mouthed, was already crawling with worms on the very spot where Macandal’s flesh had become stinking ashes. Total extermination of the Negroes was the order, but some armed groups were still sacking outlying dwellings. Without taking time to bury his wife, M. Lenormand de Mézy jumped up behind the messenger, who set out at a gallop on the road to the Cap. A burst of gunfire came from the distance. The messenger dug his heels into the horse’s sides.

  The master arrived in time to keep Ti Noël and a dozen other slaves bearing his brand from having their heads chopped off in the courtyard of the barracks. There the Negroes, tied back to back two by two, were being executed with, machetes to save powder. These were the only slaves he had left, and the lot of them would bring at least six thousand five hundred Spanish pesos on the Havana market. M. Lenormand de Mézy urged that they be given the severest corporal punishment, but begged that the execution be put off until he had had a chance to talk with the Governor. Trembling with nervousness, insomnia, and too much coffee, M. Blancheland paced his office, adorned with a picture of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the Dauphin. It was hard to make sense of his disordered monologue, in which vituperations of the philosophers alternated with quotations of prophetic warnings he had sent to Paris, to which he had not even received an answer. Anarchy was conquering the world. The colony faced ruin. The Negroes had violated nearly all the well-born girls of the Plaine. After ripping away so much lace, after rolling among so many linen sheets and cutting the throats of so many overseers, they could no longer be held down. M. Blancheland was in favor of the complete, absolute extermination of the slaves, as well as of the free Negroes and mulattoes. Anyone with African blood in his veins, quadroon, octoroon, sacatra, griffe—whatever the degree—should be put to death. It was foolish to be taken in by the cries of admiration the slaves uttered when the candles of the Nativity were lighted at Christmas-time. Father Labat had known what he was talking about after his first visit to the island: the Negroes were like the Philistines, adoring Dagon inside the Ark. The Governor then pronounced a word to which M. Lenormand de Mézy had not given the least thought up to that moment: Voodoo. Now he recalled how, years earlier, that ruddy, pleasure-loving lawyer of the Cap, Moreau de Saint-Méry, had collected considerable information on the savage practices of the witch doctors in the hills, bringing out the fact that some of the Negroes were snake-worshippers. Now that he remembered this, it filled him with uneasiness, making him realize that, in certain cases, a drum might be more than just a goatskin stretched across a hollow log. The slaves evidently had a secret religion that upheld and united them in their revolts. Possibly they had been carrying on the rites of this religion under his very nose for years and years, talking with one another on the festival drums without his suspecting a thing. But could a civilized person have been expected to concern himself with the savage beliefs of people who worshipped a snake?

  Greatly depressed by the Governor’s pessimism, M. Lenormand de Mézy wandered aimlessly through the city streets until nightfall. He feasted his eyes on Bouckman’s head, spitting insults at it until he got tired of repeating the same obscenities. He spent a while at the house of the fat Louison woman, whose girls, in tight-fitting white muslin, fanned their bare breasts in a patio full of potted caladiums. But everywhere the atmosphere was disagreeable. So he set out for the rue des Espagnols to have a drink at the Auberge de la Couronne. When he saw the closed doors, he recalled that the cook, Henri Christophe, had given up the business for the uniform of the colonial artillery shortly before. Since the tin crown had been taken down, which for so long had been the sign of the inn, a gentleman could not eat decently in the Cap. His spirits raised a little by a glass of rum he drank over a counter, M. Lenormand de Mézy made arrangements with the owner of a coal-hooker which had been laid up for repairs for months, and which would be setting out for Santiago de Cuba as soon as it was caulked.

  Santiago de Cuba

  The hooker had rounded the cape of the Cap. Behind, the city lay under constant menace from the Negroes, who knew they could count on arms offered by the Spaniards and on the fervor with which certain humanitarian Jacobins were beginning to defend their cause. While Ti Noël and his companions lay sweating in the hold on bags of coal, the first-class passengers, gathered in the poop, took deep breaths of the mild breezes blowing off the Strait of the Winds. There was a singer from the new company at the Cap whose hotel had been burned down the night of the uprising, and whose only dress was the costume of Dido the Forsaken; an Alsatian musician who had managed to save his clavichord, which the salt air had put out of tune, who occasionally broke off a measure of one of Johann Friedrich Edelmann’s sonatas to watch a flying fish leap over a bank of yellow clams. A monarchist marquis, two republican officers, a lace-maker, and an Italian priest carrying the monstrance of his church completed the passenger list.

  The night of their arrival in Santiago, M. Lenormand de Mézy made straight for the Tivoli, the palm-thatched theater recently erected by the first French refugees, for the Cuban inns with their flyswatters and hired donkeys at the entrance disgusted him. After so much anxiety, so much fear, such changes, he found the atmosphere of that café chantant comforting. The best tables were occupied by old friends of his, landowners who, like himself, had fled from the machetes whetted with molasses. But the strange thing was that with their fortunes gone, ruined, half their families unaccounted for, and their daughters convalescing from the Negro rapings—which was no small thing—the old colonists, far from bemoaning their situation, seemed to have taken a new lease on life. While others more foresighted than they had got their money out of Santo Domingo and had gone to New Orleans, or were starting new coffee plantations in Cuba, those who had salvaged nothing reveled in their improvidence, in living from day to day, in freedom from obligations, seeking, for the moment, to suck from everything what pleasure they could find. The widower discovered the advantages of being single; the respectable wife gave herself over to adultery with the enthusiasm of an inventor; the soldiers rejoiced in the absence of reveilles; young Protestant ladies came to know the flattery of the boards, appearing before the public in make-up and beauty spots. All the bourgeois norms had come tumbling down. What mattered now was to play the trumpet, give a brilliant performance in a minuet trio, or even strike a triangle on the right beat for the greater glory of the Tivoli orchestra. Sometime notaries now copied music; former tax-collectors painted twenty Solomonic columns on twelve-foot curtains. At rehearsal-t
ime, when all Santiago was taking a siesta behind wooden shutters and nail-studded doors alongside monstrous dusty images from the preceding Corpus Christi Day, it was not unusual to hear some matron, once famed for her piety, singing with languid intonations:

  Sous ses his l’amour veut qu’on jouisse

  D’un bonheur qui jamais ne finisse! . . .

  (Love, by its laws, desires us to enjoy

  A happiness that never ends.)

  A great pastoral ball—a fashion now outmoded in Paris—was being planned, and for its costuming all the trunks salvaged from Negro rapine were being pooled. The palm-frond dressing-rooms were scenes of pleasant encounters while some baritone husband, carried away by his role, was immobilized on the stage by the bravura aria of Monsigny’s Le Déserteur. For the first time Santiago de Cuba heard the music of passepieds and contredanses. The last powdered wigs of the century, worn by the daughters of the colonists, swayed in time to the music of swift minuets that were forerunners of the waltz. An air of license, of fantasy, of disorder swept the city. The young Cubans began to copy the fashions of the émigrés, leaving to the members of the city council the always outdated Spanish attire. Unbeknownst to their confessors, Cuban ladies took lessons in French etiquette and practiced the art of turning out their feet to show off the elegance of their slippers. At night, when M. Lenormand de Mézy attended the performance with a goodly number of drinks under his belt, he got to his feet with the rest, after the last number, to sing, in keeping with a custom established by the refugees themselves, the Hymn of St. Louis and the Marseillaise.

  Lazy, unable to put his mind to any business venture, M. Lenormand de Mézy began to divide his hours between the card table and prayer. He sold off his slaves one by one to gamble away the money at cardhouses, pay his account at the Tivoli, or take home with him Negresses whose beat was the waterfront and who wore tuberoses in their kinky hair. But, at the same time, seeing in the mirror how the marks of age deepened with every passing week, he began to fear the approaching summons of God. Once a Mason, he now began to distrust the triangle. And so, accompanied by Ti Noël, he took to spending long hours groaning and rasping out ejaculatories in the Santiago Cathedral. While this went on, the Negro drowsed under the portrait of some bishop or watched the rehearsal of a Christmas cantata directed by a dried-up, loud-voiced, swarthy old man called Don Esteban Salas. It was really impossible to understand why this choirmaster, whom everyone seemed to respect notwithstanding, was determined that the singers should enter the chorus one after the other, part of them singing what the others had sung before, and setting up a confusion of voices fit to exasperate anyone. But this was undoubtedly pleasing to the verger, a personage to whom Ti Noël attributed great ecclesiastical authority because he went armed and wore pants like other men. Despite these discordant symphonies, which Don Esteban Salas enriched with bassoons, horns, and boy sopranos, the Negro found in the Spanish churches a Voodoo warmth he had never encountered in the Sulpician churches of the Cap. The baroque golds, the human hair of the Christs, the mystery of the richly carved confessionals, the guardian dog of the Dominicans, the dragons crushed under saintly feet, the pig of St. Anthony, the dubious color of St. Benedict, the black Virgins, the St. Georges with the buskins and corselets of actors in French tragedies, the shepherds’ instruments played on Christmas Eve had an attraction, a power of seduction in presence, symbols, attributes, and signs similar to those of the altars of the houmforts consecrated to Damballah, the Snake god. Besides, St. James is Ogoun Faï, marshal of the storms, under whose spell Bouckman’s followers had risen. For that reason Ti Noël, by way of prayer, often chanted to him an old song he had learned from Macandal:

  Santiago, I am the son of war:

  Santiago,

  Can’t you see I am the son of war?

  The Ship of Dogs

  One morning the harbor of Santiago was filled with barking. Chained to each other, growling and slavering behind their muzzles, trying to bite their keepers and one another, hurling themselves at the people watching behind the grilled windows, hundreds of dogs were being driven with whips into the hold of a sailing ship. More dogs arrived, and still more, shepherded by plantation overseers, farmers, and hunters in high boots. Ti Noël, who had just bought a porgy for his master, approached the strange ship into which they were still driving dozens of mastiffs, which a French official was counting with rapid clicks of the beads of an abacus.

  “Where are they taking them?” Ti Noël shouted above the din to a mulatto sailor who was unfolding a net to stretch across a hatchway.

  “To eat niggers!’’ the other answered with a guffaw.

  This reply in Creole was a complete revelation to Ti Noël. He set out at a trot up the street toward the Cathedral, where he had become used to gathering with other French Negroes waiting for their masters to come out of Mass. The Dufrené family, having lost all hope of keeping their lands, had reached Santiago three days before, abandoning the plantation that had become famous by reason of Macandal’s capture. The Dufrené Negroes had brought great news from the Cap.

  From the minute she stepped on board, Pauline had felt a little like a queen on that frigate loaded with troops bound for the Antilles, its rigging creaking in time to the heaving of the broad, furrowed waves. From hearing her lover, the actor Lafont, declaim for her entertainment the most regal verses of Bajazet and Mithridate, she had become familiar with queenly roles. Never over-gifted with memory, Pauline vaguely recalled something like “the Hellespont whitening beneath our oars,” which fitted in nicely with the wake of foam which L’Océan, its sails set, its pennants fluttering, was leaving behind. But now each change of wind carried off several alexandrines. After having held up the departure of a whole army because of a childish whim to make the trip from Paris to Brest in a litter, she now had to put her mind to more important things. Sealed hampers carried kerchiefs brought from the island of Mauritius, shepherdesses’ basques, skirts of striped muslin that she planned to wear the first warm day, having been briefed in all such matters by the Duchess of Abrantès. After all, the trip was not turning out too much of a bore. At the first Mass said by the chaplain in the forecastle when they had emerged from the rough waters of the Bay of Biscay, all the officers had turned out in dress uniform, led by General Leclerc, her husband. There were handsome specimens among them, and Pauline who, despite her tender years, was a connoisseur of male flesh, felt delightfully flattered by the mounting desire hidden behind the bowings and scrapings and solicitude of which she was the object. She knew that when the lanterns rocked on the masts in the ever more brilliantly starred nights, hundreds of men were dreaming of her in staterooms, forecastle, and hold. For that reason she was so given to feigned meditations each morning, standing alongside the foresail, letting the wind ruffle her hair and play with her clothes, revealing the superb grace of her breasts.

  A few days after sailing through the Azores Channel and contemplating in the distance the white chapels of the Portuguese villages, Pauline noticed that the sea was taking on new life. It was garlanded with what seemed to be clusters of yellow grapes drifting eastward, needlefish like green glass, jellyfish that looked like blue bladders, dragging after them long red filaments, repulsive, toothed garfish, and squids that seemed entangled in the transparencies of bridal veils. The brilliant officers began to unfasten their coats, following the example set by Leclerc, revealing shirt bosoms under open uniforms. One particularly sweltering night Pauline left her stateroom in her nightgown, and stretched out on the quarterdeck, where she had been in the habit of taking long afternoon naps. The sea glowed green with strange phosphorescence. A slight coolness seemed to descend from the stars, which grew larger with every day’s run. At dawn the lookout discovered, with pleasant surprise, a naked woman asleep on a folded sail in the shadow of the mizzenmast jib. Thinking her one of the stewardesses, he was on the point of sliding down a rope to join her. But a gesture of the sleeper, indicating that she was awakening,
revealed to him that the body he was feasting his eyes on was that of Pauline Bonaparte. She rubbed her eyes, laughing like a child, her hair all blown about by the morning breeze, and, thinking herself protected by the canvas that hid the rest of the deck from her, poured several buckets of fresh water over her shoulders. From that night on she slept in the open, and her generous nonchalance became so well known that even wooden M. d’Esmenard, who was going out to organize the repression of the uprising, found himself dreaming with open eyes before the statue that was her body, evoking in her honor the Galatea of the Greeks.

  The sight of the Cap and the Plaine du Nord, with the background of mountains blurred by the mist rising from the canefields, delighted Pauline, who had read Paul and Virginia, and had heard L’Insulaire, a charming Creole contredanse of exotic rhythm published in Paris on the rue du Saumon. Feeling herself part bird of paradise, part lyrebird, in her billowing muslin skirts, she discovered the delicacy of tender ferns, the brown juiciness of the medlar, leaves whose size made it possible to fold them like fans. At night Leclerc talked with furrowed brow of slave risings, of difficulties with the monarchist planters, of menaces of every sort. Fearing even greater dangers he had arranged for the purchase of a house on the Île de la Tortue. But Pauline did not take him too seriously. She was still much moved by the reading of Un Nègre comme il y a peu des blancs, the lachrymose novel of Joseph Lavallée, and was enjoying to the full the luxury, the abundance that surrounded her, unlike anything she had known during a childhood in which dried figs, goat cheese, and rancid olives had been all too common. She lived not far from the principal church in a huge mansion of white stone surrounded by a shady garden. Under spreading tamarind trees she had ordered a swimming pool dug and lined with blue mosaic. There she bathed naked. At first she had herself massaged by her French maids; but one day it occurred to her that a man’s hand would be stronger and more stimulating, and she engaged the services of Soliman, former attendant of a bath-house, who, besides caring for her body, rubbed her with almond cream, depilated her, and polished her toenails. While he was bathing her, Pauline took a perverse pleasure in grazing his flanks with her body under the water, for she knew that he was continually tortured by desire, and that he was always watching her out of the tail of his eye with the false meekness of a dog well-lessoned by the lash. She used to whip him with a green switch without hurting him, for the fun of seeing the faces of feigned suffering he made. As a matter of fact, she was grateful to him for the loving care he lavished on her beauty. For this reason at times she permitted the Negro, in return for an errand quickly carried out or a devoutly made communion, to kneel before her and kiss her feet in a gesture that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre would have interpreted as a symbol of the noble gratitude of a simple soul brought into contact with the generous teachings of the Enlightenment.