The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  But what surprised Ti Noël most was the discovery that this marvelous world, the like of which the French governors of the Cap had never known, was a world of Negroes. Because those handsome, firm-buttocked ladies circling in a dance around a fountain of Tritons were Negresses; those two white-hosed ministers descending the main stairway with leather dispatch cases under their arms were Negroes; Negro was the chef, with an ermine tail on his cap, who was receiving a deer borne on the shoulders of several villagers led by the master huntsman; those hussars curvetting about the riding ring were Negroes; that high steward, with a silver chain around his neck, watching, in the company of the royal falconer, the rehearsals of Negro actors in an outdoor theater, was a Negro; those footmen in white wigs, whose golden buttons were being inspected by a butler in green livery, were Negroes; and, finally, Negro, good and Negro, was that Immaculate Conception standing above the high altar of the chapel, smiling sweetly upon the Negro musicians who were practicing a Salve. Ti Noël realized that he was at Sans Souci, the favorite residence of King Henri Christophe, former cook of the rue des Espagnols, master of the Auberge de la Couronne, who now struck off money bearing his initials above the proud motto God, my cause and my sword.

  A heavy blow landed across the old man’s back. Before he could utter a protest, a guard was herding him, with kicks in the behind, toward one of the barracks. When he found himself locked in a cell, Ti Noël began to shout that he was personally acquainted with Henri Christophe, and he even believed he had heard that he had married Marie-Louise Coidavid, the niece of a free lace-maker who had often come to the plantation of Lenormand de Mézy. But nobody paid any attention to him. In the afternoon he was led with other prisoners to the foot of Le Bonnet de l’Évêque, where great piles of building materials lay. He was handed a brick.

  “Take that up, and come back for another one.”

  “I’m too old .”

  A cudgel cracked on Ti Noël’s skull. Without further objections he began to climb the steep mountain, joining a long procession of children, pregnant girls, women, and old men, each of whom carried a brick. The old man looked back toward Milot. In the afternoon light the palace looked rosier than before. Before a bust of Pauline Bonaparte which had once adorned her house at the Cap, the little Princesses, Athenaïs and Améthyste, dressed in guipure-trimmed satin, were playing battledore and shuttlecock. A little farther off, the Queen’s chaplain—the one light face in the whole picture—was reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives to the Crown Prince under the satisfied gaze of Henri Christophe, who was strolling, followed by his ministers, through the Queen’s gardens. In passing, his Majesty’s hand reached out carelessly to pick a white rose that had just opened amid the boxwood clipped in the shape of a crown and phœnix at the foot of the marble allegories.

  The Sacrifice of the Bulls

  Above the summit of Le Bonnet de l’Évêque, dentelated with scaffolding, rose that second mountain—a mountain on a mountain—which was the Citadel La Ferrière. A lush growth of red fungi was mounting the flanks of the main tower with the terse smoothness of brocade, having already covered the foundations and buttresses, and was spreading polyp profiles over the ocher walls. That mass of fired brick, towering above the clouds in proportions whose perspective challenged visual habits, was honeycombed with tunnels, passageways, secret corridors, and chimneys all heavy with shadows. Light, as of an aquarium, a glaucous green tinted by ferns already meeting in space, fell above a vaporous mist from the high loopholes and air vents. The stairways to hell connected three main batteries with the powder magazine, the artillerymen’s chapel, the kitchens, cisterns, forges, foundry, dungeons. Every day in the middle of the parade square several bulls had their throats cut so that their blood could be added to the mortar to make the fortress impregnable. On the side facing the sea and overlooking the dizzying panorama of the Plaine, the workers were already stuccoing the rooms of the Royal Palace, the women’s quarters, the dining- and billiard-rooms. To wagon axles mortised into the walls were attached the suspension bridges over which brick and stone were carried to the topmost terraces, stretching between inner and outer abysses that filled the stomachs of the builders with vertigo. Often a Negro disappeared into space, carrying with him a hod of mortar. Another immediately took his place, and nobody gave further thought to the one who had fallen. Hundreds of men worked in the bowels of that vast edifice, always under the vigilance of whip and gun, accomplishing feats previously seen only in the imagined architecture of Piranesi. Hoisted by ropes up the face of the mountain, the first cannon were arriving and being mounted on cedar gun-carriages in shadowy vaulted rooms whose loopholes overlooked all the passes and approaches of the country. There stood the Scipio, the Hannibal, the Hamilcar, satin smooth, of a bronze that was almost gold in hue, together with those that had been cast after ‘89, with the still unproved motto of Liberté, Egalité. There stood a Spanish cannon whose barrel bore the melancholy inscription Fiel pero desdichado; and several of larger bore and more ornate barrel, stamped with the seal of the Sun King insolently proclaiming his Ultima Ratio Regum.

  When Ti Noël laid his brick down at the foot of a wall it was almost midnight. Nevertheless, construction was going on by the light of bonfires and torches. Along the way men were sleeping on great blocks of stone, on cannon, beside mules whose knees were calloused from falling as they toiled upward. Worn out with fatigue, the old man dropped into a ditch under the suspension bridge. A whiplash awakened him at dawn. Above, the bulls who were to have their throats cut at daybreak were bellowing. New scaffoldings had come into being with the passing of the cold clouds, and the entire mountain came alive with neighing, shouts, bugle calls, whip cracks, the squeaking of dew-swollen ropes. Ti Noël began the descent to Milot in search of another brick. On the way down he could see coming up the flanks of the mountain, by every path and byway, thick columns of women, children, and old men, each with a brick to be left at the foot of the fortress, which was rising like an ant-hill, thanks to those grains of fired clay borne to it unceasingly, from season to season, from year’s end to year’s end. Ti Noël soon learned that this had been going on for more than twelve years, and that the entire population of the North had been drafted for this incredible task. Every protest had been silenced in blood. Walking, walking, up and down, down and up, the Negro began to think that the chamber-music orchestras of Sans Souci, the splendor of the uniforms, and the statues of naked white women soaking up the sun on their scrolled pedestals among the sculptured boxwood hedging the flowerbeds were all the product of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of M. Lenormand de Mézy. Even worse, for there was a limitless affront in being beaten by a Negro as black as oneself, as thick-lipped and wooly-headed, as flat-nosed; as low-born; perhaps branded, too. It was as though, in the same family, the children were to beat the parents, the grandson the grandmother, the daughters-in-law the mother who cooked for them. Besides, in other days, the colonists—except when they had lost their heads—had been careful not to kill their slaves, for dead slaves were money out of their pockets. Whereas here the death of a slave was no drain on the public funds. As long as there were black women to bear their children—and there always had been and always would be— there would never be a dearth of workers to carry bricks to the summit of Le Bonnet de l’Évêque.

  King Henri Christophe often went up to the Citadel, escorted by a squad of officers on horseback, to observe how the work was progressing. Heavy-set, powerful, with a barrel-shaped chest, flat-nosed, his chin half-hidden in the embroidered collar of his uniform, the monarch examined the batteries, forges, and workshops, his spurs clinking as he mounted the interminable stairways. From his Napoleonic bicorne stared the bird’s-eye of a two-colored cockade. At times, with a mere wave of his crop, he ordered the death of some sluggard surprised in flagrant idleness, or the execution of workers hoisting a block of granite too slowly up a steep incline. His visits always ended by his having an armchair brought out to
the upper terrace that overlooked the sea from beside an abyss that made even those most accustomed to the sight close their eyes. Then, with nothing that could cast a shadow or care upon him, high above all, standing on his own shadow, he measured the scope of his power. In the event of any attempt by France to retake the island, he, Henri Christophe, God, my cause and my sword, could hold out here, above the clouds for as long as was necessary, with his whole court, his army, his chaplains, his musicians, his African pages, his jesters. Fifteen thousand men could live with him within those Cyclopean walls and lack for nothing. Once the drawbridge of the Single Gate had been pulled up, the Citadel La Ferrière would be the country, with its independence, its monarch, its treasury, and all its pomp. Because down below, the sufferings involved in its building forgotten, the Negroes of the Plaine would raise their eyes to the fortress, replete with corn, with gunpowder, iron, and gold, thinking that there, higher than the birds there, where life below was the remote sound of bells and the crowing of roosters, a king of their own race was waiting, close to heaven, which is the same everywhere, for the thud of the bronze hoofs of Ogoun’s ten thousand horses. Not for nothing had those towers arisen, on the mighty bellowing of bulls, bleeding, their testicles toward the sun, at the hands of builders well aware of the deep significance of the sacrifice even though they had told the ignorant that this represented an advance in the technique of military engineering.

  The Immured

  When the work on the Citadel was drawing to a close and there was more need of artisans than of carriers of bricks, discipline was relaxed a little. Even though mortars and culverins were still being transported to the lofty cliffs, many women were permitted to return to their cob-webbed cooking-pots. Among those who were allowed to leave because of their scant usefulness, Ti Noël managed to slip away one morning without turning his head back toward the fortress now clear of scaffolding on the flank of the Princesses’ Battery. The logs now being rolled up the slopes with crowbars were to be used as flooring for the living quarters. But none of this any longer interested Ti Noël, whose one thought was to set himself up on the former lands of Lenormand de Mézy, to which he was now returning like the eel to the mud in which it was spawned. Back on the manor, feeling himself in a way the owner of that land whose contours were meaningful only to him, he began to clear away some of the ruins with the help of his machete. Two acacia trees, as they fell, revealed a piece of wall. From under the leaves of a wild squash the blue tiles of the dining room emerged. Covering the cracked hearth of the old kitchen with palm fronds, the Negro fixed himself a bedroom that he had to enter on hands and knees, filling it with armfuls of dry grass to rest his body, bruised by the blows it had received along the trails of Le Bonnet de L’Évêque.

  There he found refuge from the winds of winter and the rains that followed, and watched summer come in. His belly was swollen from eating too much green fruit, too many watery mangoes, for he kept away from the roads as much as he could to avoid Henri Christophe’s men, who might be looking for workers to build some new palace, perhaps that one of which there was talk on the banks of the Artibonite, and which had as many windows as there were days in the year. But as the months went by without new developments, Ti Noël, his belly full of starvation, set out for the Cap, keeping to the seashore by the almost effaced trail he had so often traveled in other days, following his master, when he came back to the plantation riding a horse whose teeth did not yet meet, one of those whose trot had the sound of rubbed Cordovan leather and whose neck still showed the wrinkles of colthood. The city is good. In the city a forked stick can always find things to slip into a knapsack. In a city there are always kindhearted prostitutes ready to give an old man alms; there are markets with music, trained animals, talking dolls, and cooks who find it amusing when, instead of talking of hunger, one points to the brandy bottle. Ti Noël felt that a great chill was settling in the marrow of his bones. And he sighed for those bottles of other days—those in the cellar of the big houses—square, of thick glass, filled with peel, herbs, berries, and watercress steeped in alcohol, which reflected subdued hues of the most delicate odor.

  But Ti Noël found the whole city in a death watch. It was as though all the windows and doors of the houses, all the jalousies, all the louvers, were turned toward the corner of the Archbishop’s Palace with an expectation so intense that it distorted the façades into human grimaces. The roofs stretched out their eaves, the corners peered sharply forward, the dampness painted only ears upon the walls. At the corner of the Palace, a square of new cement had just dried, blending with the mortar of the wall, but leaving a small opening. Out of this hole, black as a toothless mouth, burst from time to time howls so horrifying as to send a shudder through the entire population and make the children sob. When this happened, pregnant women held their bellies with their hands and some of the passers-by took to their heels without completing the sign of the cross. And the howls, the senseless screams, continued at the corner of the Archbishop’s Palace until the throat, choked in blood, lacerated itself in curses, dark threats, prophecies, and imprecations. Then they turned into weeping, a weeping that came from the depths of the breast, with the whimpering of a child in the voice of an old man, which was even more unbearable than what had preceded it. Finally the tears became a wheezing in three tempos, which gradually died away with a long asthmatic cadence until it was mere breathing. And this was repeated day and night at the corner of the Palace. Nobody slept in the Cap. Nobody dared to pass through the adjacent streets. Inside the houses, prayers were said in low voices in the innermost rooms. Nor would anyone have ventured even to comment on what was happening. For that Capuchin immured in the Archbishop’s Palace, buried alive in its oratory, was Corneille Breille, the Duke of Anse, confessor of Henri Christophe. He had been condemned to die there, at the foot of a newly plastered wall, for the crime of having wanted to go to France knowing all the secrets of the King, all the secrets of the Citadel whose red towers had already been struck by lightning several times. In vain Queen Marie-Louise pleaded for him, clasping her husband’s boots. Henri Christophe, who had just insulted St. Peter for having sent a new storm against his fortress, was not being frightened by ineffectual excommunication by a French Capuchin. And, to remove any lingering doubt, there was a new favorite at Sans Souci, a Spanish chaplain with a long tile hat, as given to running about bearing tales as to singing Mass in his fine bass voice, who was known to all as Father Juan de Dios. Tired of the chick-peas and dried beef across the mountains, the sly friar found the Haitian court to his liking, where the ladies plied him with glacéed fruits and wines of Portugal. It was rumored that certain words of his, spoken, as though offhand, before Henri Christophe one day when he was teaching his hounds to jump at the name of the King of France, were the cause of Corneille Breille’s terrible disgrace.

  After a week of incarceration, the Capuchin’s voice had become almost inaudible, fading away to a death-rattle rather sensed than heard. And then silence came at the corner of the Archbishop’s Palace. The over-prolonged silence of a city that had ceased to believe in silence and which only a newborn infant dared to break with its whimper of ignorance, rerouting life toward its customary sonority of street-cries, greetings, gossip, and songs sung while hanging clothes out in the sun. This was the moment when Ti Noël managed to stuff a few things in his sack and cadge enough money from a drunken sailor for five glasses of brandy, which he tossed off one after the other. Staggering in the moonlight, he set out for home, vaguely recalling a song that in other days he had sung on his way back from the city. A song that was all insults to a king. That was the important thing: to a king. And in this way, unburdening himself of every insult he could think up to Henri Christophe, his crown, and his progeny, Ti Noël found the way back so short that when he stretched himself out on his straw pallet, he even asked himself if he had really gone to the Cap.

  Chronicle of August 15

  Quasi palma exaltata sum in Cades, et quasi plantat
io rosae in Jericho. Quasi oliva speciosa in campis, et quasi platanus exaltata sum juxta aquam in plateis. Sicut cinnamonum et balsamum aromatizans oderum dedi: quasi myrrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris.

  Without understanding the Latin intoned by Juan de Dios González with baritone inflections of unfailing effect, Queen Marie-Louise found that morning a mysterious harmony among the smell of incense, the fragrance of the orange trees in the near-by patio, and certain words of the liturgy of the day which referred to perfumes whose names were inscribed on the porcelain jars of the apothecary’s shop of Sans Souci. Henri Christophe, on the other hand, was unable to follow the service with due attention, for his breast was oppressed by an anxiety he could not account for. Against the advice of all, he had ordered the Mass of the Assumption sung in the church of Limonade, whose delicately veined gray marble gave a delightful impression of coolness so that one perspired a little less under the tightly buttoned swallowtailed coat and the weight of decorations. Yet the King felt himself surrounded by a hostile atmosphere. The populace that had hailed him on his arrival was sullen with evil intentions, recalling all too well, there in that fertile land, the crops lost because the men were working on the Citadel. In some remote house—he suspected—there was probably an image of him stuck full of pins or hung head down with a knife plunged in the region of the heart. From far off there came from time to time the beat of drums which he felt sure were not imploring a long life for him. But the Offertory was beginning: