The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  Thus she spent her time between siestas and waking, feeling herself part Virginia, part Atala, in spite of the fact that at times, when Leclerc was off in the south, she consoled herself with the youthful ardor of some handsome officer. But one afternoon the French coiffeur who was dressing her hair with the aid of four Negro assistants collapsed, vomiting up nauseous, half-clotted blood. A terrible killjoy in silver-spotted basque had come to disturb Pauline Bonaparte’s tropical dream with its buzzing.

  Saint Calamity

  The next morning, at the insistence of Leclerc, who had just come through villages decimated by the plague, Pauline fled to La Tortue, accompanied by the Negro Soliman and maids loaded with bundles. She whiled away the first days bathing in a sandy cove and leafing through the memoirs of the surgeon Alexander Olivier Esquemeling, with its first-hand store of information on the habits and rascalities of the corsairs and buccaneers of America, who had left the ruins of an ugly fortress as a souvenir of their turbulent life on the island. She laughed when her bedroom mirror revealed to her that her skin, tanned by the sun, had become that of a splendid mulatto. But this interlude was of brief duration. One afternoon Leclerc landed on La Tortue, his body shaken by ominous chills. His eyes were yellow. The military doctor who accompanied him administered strong doses of rhubarb.

  Pauline was terrified. To her mind came blurred memories of an epidemic of cholera in Ajaccio: black coffins carried out of the houses on the shoulders of men in black; widows in black veils who ululated at the foot of the fig trees; daughters garbed in black who attempted to throw themselves into their parents’ graves and had to be dragged from the cemetery. She suddenly had one of those attacks of claustrophobia which she had so often suffered as a child. La Tortue, with its parched earth, its reddish cliffs, its wastes of cactus and locusts, its ever-present sea, seemed now her native island. Flight was impossible. Behind the door wheezed a man who had been so inconsiderate as to bring in death hidden under his galloons. Convinced that the doctors could do nothing, Pauline gave ear to the advice of Soliman, who prescribed fumigation with incense, indigo, and lemon peel and prayers of extraordinary effectiveness such as those to the Great Judge, St. George, and St. Calamity. She had the doors of the house scoured with aromatic plants and tobacco strippings. She knelt at the foot of a crucifix of dark wood with ostentatious and somewhat peasant devotion, shouting with the Negro at the end of each prayer: Malo, Presto, Pasto, Effacio, AMEN. Moreover, those conjures, and driving nails to form a cross in the trunk of a lemon tree, stirred up in her the lees of old Corsican blood, which was more akin to the living cosmogony of the Negro than to the lies of the Directory, in whose disbelief she had grown up. Now she repented of having so often made a mock of holy things to follow the fashion of the day. Leclerc’s agony, heightening her fear, drove her still farther toward the world of the powers called up by the spells of Soliman, now become the real master of the island. The only possible defender against the plague from the other shore, the only doctor among the useless prescripters. To prevent the evil miasmas from crossing the water, the Negro set afloat little boats made of halves of coconuts, all bedecked with ribbons from Pauline’s sewing box, which were in the nature of tributes to Aguasou, Lord of the Sea. One morning Pauline discovered a model of a man-of-war in Leclerc’s luggage. She went running with it to the beach so Soliman might add this work of art to his offerings. Every means of defense had to be employed against the sickness: vows, penitence, hair shirts, fasts, invocations to whoever would lend an ear, even though at times it was the hairy ear of the Lying Enemy of her childhood. Suddenly, Pauline began to walk about the house in a strange manner, avoiding stepping on the cracks of tiles, which—as everyone knew—were laid in squares at the impious instigation of the Masons, who wanted people to tread on the cross all day long. It was no longer scented perfumes, cool mint water that Soliman poured over her breasts, but salves of brandy, crushed seeds, oily juices, and the blood of birds. One morning the horrified French maids came upon the Negro circling in a strange dance around Pauline, who was kneeling on the floor with her hair hanging loose. Soliman, wearing only a belt from which a white handkerchief hung as a cache-sexe, his neck adorned with blue and red beads, was hopping about like a bird and brandishing a rusty machete. Both were uttering deep groans which, as though wrenched from inside, sounded like the baying of dogs when the moon is full. A decapitated rooster was still fluttering amid scattered grains of corn. When the Negro saw that one of the maids was watching the scene, he angrily kicked the door shut. That afternoon several saints’ images were found hanging from the rafters head down. Soliman, who now never left Pauline’s side, slept in her room on a red rug.

  The death of Leclerc, cut down by yellow fever, brought Pauline to the verge of madness. Now the tropics seemed abominable, with the relentless buzzard waiting on the roof of the house in which someone was sweating out his agony. After she had her husband’s body, in dress uniform, laid in a cedar coffin, Pauline embarked with all haste aboard the Swiftsure, thin, hollow-eyed, her breast covered with scapulars. But before long, as the east wind brought Paris ever nearer the prow and the salt air tarnished the rings of the coffin, the young widow began to shed her cilices. And one afternoon as the white-capped sea made the deck boards creak, her mourning veils became entangled in the spurs of a young officer, the one in charge of looking after General Leclerc’s remains. In the hamper that contained her crumpled Creole disguises traveled an amulet to Papa Legba, wrought by Soliman, which was destined to open the paths to Rome for Pauline Bonaparte.

  The departure of Pauline marked the end of such common sense as still existed in the colony. Under the government of Rochambeau, the remaining landowners of the Plaine, all hope of recovering their former prosperity gone, gave themselves over without let or hindrance to a vast orgy. Nobody paid any attention to clocks, nor did dawn mark the end of night. The watchword was eat, drink, and be merry before catastrophe swallows up all pleasure. The Governor granted favors in exchange for women. The ladies of the Cap mocked the late Leclerc’s pronouncement that “white women who had prostituted themselves to Negroes were to be sent back to France, whatever their rank.” Many women became tribades, appearing at dances with mulatto girls whom they called their cocottes. The daughters of slaves were forced while still infants. This was the road leading straight to horror. On holidays Rochambeau began to throw Negroes to his dogs, and when the beasts hesitated to sink their teeth into a human body before the brilliant, finely clad spectators, the victim was pricked with a sword to make the tempting blood flow. On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs: “They’ll be puking niggers!”

  The day the ship Ti Noël had seen rode into the Cap, it tied up alongside another schooner coming from Martinique with a cargo of poisonous snakes which the general planned to turn loose on the Plaine so they would bite the peasants who lived in outlying cabins and who gave aid to the runaway slaves in the hills. But these snakes, creatures of Damballah, were to die without laying eggs, disappearing together with the last colonists of the ancien régime. Now the Great Loas smiled upon the Negroes’ arms. Victory went to those who had warrior gods to invoke. Ogoun Badagri guided the cold steel charges against the last redoubts of the Goddess Reason. And, as in all combats deserving of memory because someone had made the sun stand still or brought down walls with a trumpet blast, in those days there were men who covered the mouths of the enemy cannon with their bare breasts and men who had the power to deflect leaden bullets from their bodies. It was then that there appeared about the countryside Negro priests, untonsured and unordained, who were known as the Fathers of the Savanna. When it came to praying in Latin at the pallet of the dying, they were as learned as the French priests. But they made themselves better understood, for when they recited the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, they gave the words accents and inflections that made them like other hymns everyone knew. At last certain matter
s of life and death were being taken care of in the family.

  Part

  Three

  Everywhere one came upon royal crowns of gold, some of them so heavy that it was an effort to pick them up.

  —Karl Ritter

  (a witness of the sack of Sans Souci)

  The Portents

  A Negro, old, but still steady on his bunioned, calloused feet, stepped off the schooner that had just tied up at Quai Saint-Marc. Far off to the north, a mountain ridge outlined a familiar landscape in blue hardly darker than that of the sky. Without loss of time, Ti Noël, a stout lignum vitae staff in hand, set out from the city. It was a long time now since the day a Santiago plantation-owner had won him in a card game by calling M. Lenormand de Mézy’s bet. The latter had died soon after in the most abject poverty. Under his Cuban owner, Ti Noël’s existence had been much more bearable than under the French of the Plaine du Nord. Saving up his Christmas money year after year, he had finally managed to get together the price of his passage on a fishing smack, sleeping on deck. Although twice branded, Ti Noël was a free man. He had now set foot on a land where slavery had been abolished forever.

  His first day’s travel brought him to the banks of the Artibonite, where he spent the night under a tree. The next morning he set out again, following a road that ran between wild grape vines and bamboos. Men who were bathing horses called out words he did not understand very well, but which he answered in his own fashion, saying the first thing that came into his head. Besides, Ti Noël was never alone even when he was alone. He had long since acquired the art of talking with chairs, pots, a guitar, even a cow or his own shadow. These people were gay. But around a turn in the road, plants and trees seemed to have dried up, to have become skeletons of plants and trees in earth which was no longer red and glossy, but had taken on the look of dust in a cellar. There were no bright cemeteries with little tombs of white plaster like classic temples the size of dog-houses. Here the dead were buried by the side of the road on a grim, silent plain invaded-by cactus and brush. At times an abandoned roof on four poles told of the flight of its inhabitants from malignant miasmas. Everything that grew here had sharp edges, thorns, briers, evil saps. The few men Ti Noël encountered did not reply to his greeting, plodding by with their eyes to the ground like their dogs’ muzzles. Suddenly the Negro pulled up short, catching his breath. A hanged he-goat dangled from a thorn-covered tree. The ground was covered with signs: three stones forming a half-circle, a broken twig in the shape of a pointed arch like a doorway. Farther on, several black chickens swung head down along a greasy branch. Finally, where the signs ended, a particularly evil tree stood, its trunk bristling with black thorns, surrounded by offerings. Among its roots were thrust twisted, gnarled branches as crutches for Legba, the Lord of the Roads.

  Ti Noël fell to his knees and gave thanks to heaven for allowing him the joy of returning to the land of the Great Pacts. For he knew—and all the French Negroes of Santiago de Cuba knew—that Dessalines’s victory was the result of a vast coalition entered into by Loco, Petro, Ogoun Ferraille, Brise-Pimba, Caplaou-Pimba, Marinette Bois-Chèche, and all the deities of powder and fire, a coalition marked by a series of seizures of a violence so fearful that certain men had been thrown into the air or dashed against the ground by the spells. Then the blood, the gunpowder, the wheat flour, and the powdered coffee had been kneaded together to make the leaven that would turn men’s heads toward the ancestors, while the sacred drums throbbed and across a fire the swords of the initiate clashed. When the exaltation reached fever pitch, one who had become possessed leaped to the backs of two men who were neighing and all were joined in the pawing profile of a centaur descending at a gallop toward the sea which, beyond the night, far beyond many nights, lapped the shores of the world of Mighty Powers.

  Sans Souci

  After several days’ journeying, Ti Noël began to recognize certain places. The taste of the water told him he had often bathed, but lower down, in that brook which went winding toward the coast. He passed close to the cave where Macandal in days gone by had brewed his poisons. With mounting impatience he descended the narrow valley of Dondon to come out on the Plaine du Nord. Then, following the seashore, he made for the old plantation of Lenormand de Mézy.

  By the three ceibas that formed a triangle he knew that he had arrived. But nothing was left there, neither indigo works, nor drying sheds, nor barns, nor meat-curing platforms. All that remained of the house was a brick chimney once covered with ivy, which, lacking shade, had pined away in the sun; only a few flagstones buried in the mud told where the warehouses had stood; of the chapel, all that was left was the iron cock of the weathervane. Here and there stood fragments of wall which looked like the thick, broken letters of an alphabet. The pines, the grape-vines, the European trees had disappeared, as had the garden where, in olden days, the asparagus had raised its pale stalks, and artichokes had hidden their hearts in thick leaves amid the scent of mint and rosemary. The plantation had turned into a wasteland crossed by a road. Ti Noël sat down on one of the cornerstones of the old mansion, now a stone like any other stone for those who did not remember. He was talking to the ants when a sudden noise made him turn his head. Riding up at a swift trot came several horsemen in shining uniforms, with blue dolmans trimmed with frogs and loops, braid-embroidered collars, thickly fringed galloons, trousers of braid-trimmed chamois, plumed shakos, and hussar’s boots. Accustomed as he was to the simple Spanish colonial uniforms, Ti Noël suddenly discovered with amazement the pomp of Napoleonic fashion to which the men of his race had given a degree of splendor the Corsican’s generals had never dreamed of. The officers went by him in the direction of Milot as though enveloped in a cloud of gold dust. The old man, fascinated by the spectacle, followed the track of their horses in the dust of the road.

  When he emerged from a grove he had the impression that he had come out into a sumptuous pleasure garden. All the land around the village of Milot was tended like a garden, with geometrically aligned irrigation ditches and flowerbeds green with tender seedlings. Many people were working these fields under the vigilance of soldiers carrying whips who occasionally shied a stone at some laggard. “Prisoners,” thought Ti Noël to himself, as he observed that the custodians were Negroes, but that the workers were too, which ran counter to certain notions he had picked up in Santiago de Cuba on the nights when he had been able to attend some festive gathering of the French Negroes. But the old man stood still in his tracks, awed by the most unexpected, most overwhelming sight of his long existence. Against a background of mountains violet-striped by deep gorges, rose a rose-colored palace, a fortress with ogival windows, rendered almost ethereal by the high socle of its stone stairway. To one side stood long-roofed sheds that were probably workshops, barracks, stables. To the other stood a round building crowned by a cupola resting on white columns where surpliced priests went in and out. As he drew nearer, Ti Noël could make out terraces, statues, arcades, gardens, pergolas, artificial brooks, and boxwood mazes. At the foot of heavy columns, which supported a great sun of black wood, two bronze lions stood guard. Across the main esplanade white-uniformed officers busily came and went, young captains in bicornes, reflecting the glitter of the sun, sabers rattling on their thighs. Through an open window came the sound of a dance orchestra in full rehearsal. In the palace windows ladies were visible, wearing plumed headdresses, their full busts pushed up by the high waistlines of their fashionable gowns. In a patio two coachmen were polishing a huge gilded coach covered with suns in bas-relief. As he passed before the circular building from which the priests had emerged, Ti Noël saw that it was a church hung with curtains, banners, and canopies, which housed an image of the Immaculate Conception.