The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  Macandal had not foreseen this matter of forced labor. Nor had Bouckman, the Jamaican. The ascendancy of the mulattoes was something new that had not occurred to José Antonio Aponte, beheaded by the Marquis of Someruelos, whose record of rebellion Ti Noël had learned of during his slave days in Cuba. Not even Henri Christophe would have suspected that the land of Santo Domingo would bring forth this spurious aristocracy, this caste of quadroons, which was now taking over the old plantations, with their privileges and rank. The old man raised his beclouded eyes to the Citadel La Ferrière. But his gaze could no longer travel so far. The word of Henri Christophe had become stone and no longer dwelt among us. All of his fabulous person that remained was in Rome, a finger floating in a rock-crystal bottle filled with brandy. And in keeping with that example, Queen Marie-Louise, after taking her daughters to the baths of Carlsbad, had ordered in her will that her right foot be preserved in alcohol and given to the Capuchins of Pisa to be kept in a chapel built by her pious munificence. Try as he would, Ti Noël could think of no way to help his subjects bowed once again beneath the whiplash. The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt. Ti Noël was afraid that he, too, would be ordered to the furrow in spite of his age, and as a result the thought of Macandal took hold in his memory. Inasmuch as human guise brought with it so many calamities, it would be better to lay it aside for a time, and observe events on the Plaine in some less conspicuous form. Once he had come to this decision, Ti Noël was astonished at how easy it is to turn into an animal when one has the necessary powers. In proof of this he climbed a tree, willed himself to become a bird, and instantly was a bird. He watched the Surveyors from the top of a branch, digging his beak into the violated flesh of a medlar. The next day he willed himself to be a stallion, and he was a stallion, but he had to run off as fast as he could from a mulatto who tried to lasso him and geld him with a kitchen knife. He turned himself into a wasp, but he soon tired of the monotonous geometry of wax constructions. He made the mistake of becoming an ant, only to find himself carrying heavy loads over interminable paths under the vigilance of big-headed ants who reminded him unpleasantly of Lenormand de Mézy’s overseers, Henri Christophe’s guards, and the mulattoes of today. At times a horse’s hooves destroyed a column of workers, killing hundreds of them. When this happened, the big-headed ants straightened out the file again, retraced the path, and all went on as before, in the same busy coming and going. As Ti Noël was there in disguise, and did not for a moment consider himself one of the species, he took refuge by himself under his table, which that night was his shelter against a steady drizzle that filled the fields with the hay-like odor of wet rushes.

  Agnus Dei

  It was going to be a hot, overcast day. The dew had no more than dried from the cobwebs when a great noise descended from the sky upon the lands of Ti Noël. Running and stumbling as they dropped came the geese from the old barnyards of Sans Souci, the geese that had escaped the sack because the Negroes did not like their meat, and that had lived as they pleased, all this time, among the canebrakes of the hills. The old man received them with great rejoicing, happy over their visit, for there were not many who knew, as he did, the intelligence and cheerfulness of geese, for he had taken notice of their model habits when M. Lenormand de Mézy had attempted years before, without much success, to acclimate them. As they were not made for a hot climate, the females laid only five eggs every two years. But this clutch gave rise to a series of rites whose ceremonies were handed down from generation to generation. On the bank of a shallow stream the nuptials took place in the presence of the entire clan of geese and ganders. A young male took his mate for life, covering her amid a chorus of jubilant honkings accompanied by a ritual dance consisting of turns, stampings, and arabesques of the neck. Then the whole clan set about building the nest. During the incubation period the bride was watched over by the males, on the alert all night even though their round eyes were tucked under a wing. When some danger threatened the clumsy, canary-downed goslings, the oldest gander directed charges of breast and beak, heedless of whether the adversary was mastiff, horseman, or carriages. Geese were orderly beings, with principles and systems, whose existence denied all superiority of individual over individual of the same species. The principle of authority represented by the Oldest Gander was a measure whose object was to maintain order within the clan, after the manner of the king or head of the old African assemblies. Ti Noël employed his magic powers to transform himself into a goose and live with the fowl that had made his domain their abode. But, when he attempted to take his place in the clan, he encountered sawtoothed beaks and outstretched necks that kept him at a distance. He was made to keep to the edge of the pasture, and the indifferent females were surrounded by a wall of white feathers. In view of this Ti Noël tried to be circumspect, and not draw too much attention to himself, to approve the decisions of the others. His reward was contempt and a shrugging of wings. In vain did he reveal to the females where certain succulent watercress was to be found. Their gray tails twitched with displeasure and their yellow eyes regarded him with haughty suspicion, repeated by the eyes on the other side of the head. The clan now seemed a community of aristocrats, tightly closed against anyone of a different caste. The Great Gander of Sans Souci would have refused to have anything to do with the Great Gander of Dondon. Had they met face to face, hostilities would have ensued. Thus Ti Noël quickly gathered that even if he persisted in his efforts for years, he would never be admitted in any capacity to the rites and duties of the clan. It had been made crystal clear to him that being a goose did not imply that all geese were equal. No known goose had sung or danced the day of Ti Noël’s wedding. None of those alive had seen him hatched out. He presented himself, without proper family background, before geese who could trace their ancestry back four generations. In a word, he was an upstart, an intruder.

  Ti Noël vaguely understood that his rejection by the geese was a punishment for his cowardice. Macandal had disguised himself as an animal for years to serve men, not to abjure the world of men. It was then that the old man, resuming his human form, had a supremely lucid moment. He lived, for the space of a heartbeat, the finest moments of his life; he glimpsed once more the heroes who had revealed to him the power and the fullness of his remote African forebears, making him believe in the possible germinations the future held. He felt countless centuries old. A cosmic weariness, as of a planet weighted with stones, fell upon his shoulders shrunk by so many blows, sweats, revolts. Ti Noël had squandered his birthright, and, despite the abject poverty to which he had sunk, he was leaving the same inheritance he had received: a body of flesh to which things had happened. Now he understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World.

  Ti Noël climbed upon his table, scuffing the marquetry with his calloused feet. Toward the Cap the sky was dark with the smoke of fires as on the night when all the conch shells of the hills and coast had sung together. The old man hurled his declaration of war against the new masters, ordering his subjects to march in battle array against the insolent works of the mulattoes in power. At that moment a great green wind, blowing from the ocean, swept the Plaine du
Nord, spreading through the Dondon valley with a loud roar. And while the slaughtered bulls bellowed on the summit of Le Bonnet de L’Évêque, the armchair, the screen, the volumes of the Encyclopédie, the music box, the doll, and the moonfish rose in the air, as the last ruins of the plantation came tumbling down. The trees bowed low, tops southward, roots wrenched from the earth. And all night long the sea, turned to rain, left trails of salt on the flanks of the mountains. From that moment Ti Noël was never seen again, nor his green coat with the salmon lace cuffs, except perhaps by that wet vulture who turns every death to his own benefit and who sat with outspread wings, drying himself in the sun, a cross of feathers which finally folded itself up and flew off into the thick shade of Bois Caïman.