The Kingdom of This World Read online

  The Kingdom

  Of This World

  ALEJO CARPENTIER

  Translated by Harriet de Onís

  Copyright © 1957 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in Spanish under the title El Reino de Este Mundo by E.D.I.A.P.S.A., México, DJ., 1949

  This edition first published in 1989 by Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Published in Canada by Harper Collins Canada Ltd.

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 57-5661

  The English version of lines from Racine's Phèdre is quoted, by permission of the Princeton University Press, from The Best Plays of Racine. Translated by Lacy Lockert, copyright © 1936, by Princeton University Press.

  Part One

  I THE WAX HEADS

  II THE AMPUTATION

  III WHAT THE HAND FOUND

  IV THE RECKONING

  V DE PROFUNDIS

  VI THE METAMORPHOSES

  VII HUMAN GUISE

  VIII THE GREAT FLIGHT

  Part Two

  I THE DAUGHTER OF MINOS AND PASIPHAЁ

  II THE SOLEMN PACT

  III THE CALL OF THE CONCH SHELLS

  IV DAGON INSIDE THE ARK

  V SANTIAGO DE CUBA

  VI THE SHIP OF DOGS

  VII SAINT CALAMITY

  Part Three

  I THE PORTENTS

  II SANS SOUCI

  III THE SACRIFICE OF THE BULLS

  IV THE IMMURED

  V CHRONICLE OF AUGUST 15

  VI ULTIMA RATIO REGUM

  VII STRAIT IS THE GATE

  Part Four

  I THE NIGHT OF THE STATUES

  II THE ROYAL PALACE

  III THE SURVEYORS

  IV AGNUS DEI

  Part

  One

  THE DEVIL

  Permission to enter I seek . . .

  PROVIDENCE

  Who are you?

  THE DEVIL

  The King of the West.

  PROVIDENCE

  I know you, accursed one.

  Come in.

  (He enters)

  THE DEVIL

  Oh, blessed court.

  Eternal Providence!

  Where are you sending Columbus

  To renew my evil deeds?

  Know you not that long since

  I ride there?

  —Lope de Vega

  The Wax Heads

  Of the twenty stallions brought to Cap Français by the ship’s captain, who had a kind of partnership with a breeder in Normandy, Ti Noël had unhesitatingly picked that stud with the four white feet and rounded crupper which promised good service for mares whose colts were coming smaller each year. M. Lenormand de Mézy, who knew the slave’s gift for judging horse flesh, had paid the price in ringing louis d’or without questioning his choice. Ti Noël had fashioned a headstall of rope, and had felt with satisfaction the breadth of the heavy dappled beast, sensing against his thighs the lather of sweat that gave an acid reek to the percheron’s thick coat. Following his master, who was riding a lighter-limbed sorrel, he crossed the sailors’ quarter with its shops smelling of brine, its sailcloth stiffened by the dampness, its hardtack that it took a fist-blow to break, coming out on the main street iridescent at that hour of the morning with the bright checked bandannas of the Negresses on their way home from market. From the carriage of the Governor, with its heavy gilded trim, a fulsome greeting floated to M. Lenormand de Mézy. Then squire and slave tied their horses before the shop of the barber who subscribed to the Leyden Gazette for the enlightenment of his educated customers.

  While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël could gaze his fill at the four wax heads that adorned the counter by the door. The curls of the wigs, opening into a pool of ringlets on the red baize, framed expressionless faces. Those heads seemed as real—although their fixed stare was so dead—as the talking head an itinerant mountebank had brought to the Cap years before to promote the sale of an elixir for curing toothache and rheumatism. By an amusing coincidence, in the window of the tripe-shop next door there were calves’ heads, skinned and each with a sprig of parsley across the tongue, which possessed the same waxy quality. They seemed asleep among the pickled oxtails, calf’s-foot jelly, and pots of tripe à la mode de Caen. Only a wooden wall separated the two counters, and it amused Ti Noël to think that alongside the pale calves’ heads, heads of white men were served on the same tablecloth. Just as fowl for a banquet are adorned with their feathers, so some experienced, macabre cook might have trimmed the heads with their best wigs. All that was lacking was a border of lettuce leaves or radishes cut in the shape of lilies. Moreover, the jars of gum arable, the bottles of lavender water, the boxes of rice powder, close neighbors to the kettles of tripe and the platters of kidneys, completed, with this coincidence of flasks and cruets, that picture of an abominable feast.

  The morning was rampant with heads, for next to the tripe-shop the bookseller had hung on a wire with clothespins the latest prints received from Paris. At least four of them displayed the face of the King of France in a border of suns, swords, and laurel. But there were many other bewigged heads, probably those of high court dignitaries. The warriors could be identified by their air of setting out for battle; the judges, by their menacing frowns; the wits, by their smiles, above two crossed pens at the head of verses that meant nothing to Ti Noël, for the slaves were unable to read. There were also colored engravings of a lighter nature showing fireworks to celebrate the capture of a city, dance scenes in which doctors brandished big syringes, a game of blindman’s buff in a park, youthful libertines burying their hands in the bodices of serving-maids, or the never-failing stratagem of the lover lying on the sward and gazing upward in delight at the foreshortened intimacies of the lady swaying innocently in a swing. But Ti Noël’s attention was attracted at that moment by a copper engraving, the last of the series, which differed from the others in subject and treatment. It represented a kind of French admiral or ambassador being received by a Negro framed by feather fans and seated upon a throne adorned with figures of monkeys and lizards.

  “What kind of people are those?” he boldly inquired of the bookseller, who was lighting a long clay pipe in the doorway of his shop.

  “That is a king of your country.”

  This confirmation of what he had supposed was hardly necessary, for the young slave recalled those tales Macandal sing-songed in the sugar mill while the oldest horse on the Lenormand de Mézy plantation turned the cylinders. With deliberately languid tone, the better to secure certain effects, the Mandingue Negro would tell of things that had happened in the great kingdoms of Popo, of Arada, of the Nagos, or the Fulah. He spoke of the great migrations of tribes, of age-long wars, of epic battles in which the animals had been allies of men. He knew the story of Adonhueso, of the King of Angola, of King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal beginning, never ending, who took his pleasure mystically with a queen who was the Rainbow, patroness of the Waters and of all Bringing Forth, But, above all, it was with the tale of Kankan Muza that he achieved the gift of tongues, the fierce Muza, founder of the invincible empire of the Mandingues, whose horses went adorned with silver coins and embroidered housings, their neighs louder than the clang of iron, bearing the thunder of two drumheads that hung from their necks. Moreover, those kings rode with lances in hand at the head of their hordes, and they were made invulnerable by the science of the Preparers, and fell wounded only if in some way they had offended the gods of Lightning or of the Forge. They were kings, true kings, and not those sovereigns wigged in false hair who played at cup an
d ball and were gods only when they strutted the stage of their court theaters, effeminately pointing a leg in the measures of a rigadoon. These white monarchs lent more ear to the symphonies of violins and the whispers of gossip, the tittle-tattle of their mistresses and the warble of their stringed birds, than to the roar of cannon against the spur of the crescent moon. Although Ti Noël had little learning, he had been instructed in these truths by the deep wisdom of Macandal. In Africa the king was warrior, hunter, judge, and priest; his precious seed distended hundreds of bellies with a mighty strain of heroes. In France, in Spain, the king sent his generals to fight in his stead; he was incompetent to decide legal problems, he allowed himself to be scolded by any trumpery friar. And when it came to a question of virility, the best he could do was engender some puling prince who could not bring down a deer without the help of stalkers, and who, with unconscious irony, bore the name of as harmless and silly a fish as the dolphin. Whereas Back There there were princes as hard as anvils, and princes who were leopards, and princes who knew the language of the forest, and princes who ruled the four points of the compass, lords of the clouds, of the seed, of bronze, of fire.

  Ti Noël heard the voice of his master, who emerged from the barber’s with heavily powdered cheeks. His face now bore a startling resemblance to the four dull wax faces that stood in a row along the counter, smiling stupidly. On his way out M. Lenormand de Mézy bought a calf’s head in the tripe-shop, which he handed over to the slave. Astride the stallion panting for green pastures, Ti Noël clasped that white, chill skull under his arm, thinking how much it probably resembled the bald head of his master hidden beneath his wig. The Negresses returning from market had been replaced by ladies coming from ten o’clock Mass. Many a quadroon, the light-of-love of some rich official, was followed by a maid of her own equivocal hue, carrying her palm-leaf fan, her prayerbook, and her gold-tasseled parasol. On a corner a group of strolling players was dancing. Farther on a sailor was offering for sale to the ladies a Brazilian monkey in Spanish dress. In the taverns bottles of wine, cooled in barrels filled with salt and damp sand, were being uncorked. Father Corneille, the curate of Limonade, had just arrived at the Cathedral riding his donkey-colored mule.

  M. Lenormand de Mézy and his slave left the city by the road that skirted the seashore. A salvo rang out from the parapets of the fortress. La Courageuse, of His Majesty’s fleet, had been sighted, returning from the Île de la Tortue. Its gunwales returned the echoes of the blank shells. Old memories of his days as petty officer stirred in the master’s breast, and he began to whistle a fife march. Ti Noël, in a kind of mental counterpoint, silently hummed a chanty that was very popular among the harbor coopers, heaping ignominy on the King of England. This he was sure of, even though the words were not in Creole. Moreover, he had little esteem for the King of England, or the King of France, or of Spain, who ruled the other half of the Island, and whose wives, according to Macandal, tinted their cheeks with oxblood and buried foetuses in a convent whose cellars were filled with skeletons that had been rejected by the true heaven, which wanted nothing to do with those who died ignoring the true gods.

  The Amputation

  Ti Noël had seated himself on an upturned trough, letting the old horse circle the mill at a pace that habit had made mechanical. Macandal fed in sheaves of cane, pushing them head first between the iron rollers. With his bloodshot eyes, his powerful torso, his incredibly slender waist, the Mandingue exercised a strange fascination over Ti Noël. It was said that his deep, opaque voice made him irresistible to the Negro women. And his narrative arts, when, with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men spellbound, especially when he recalled his trip, years earlier, as a prisoner before he was sold to the slave-traders of Sierra Leone. As Ti Noël listened to him, he realized that Cap Français, with its belfries, its stone buildings, its Norman houses with their long-roofed balconies across the front, was a trumpery thing compared with the cities of Guinea. There, cupolas of red clay rose above great fortresses surrounded by battlements; the markets were famous beyond the limits of the deserts, as far as the nomad tribes. In those cities the workmen were skilled in working metals, forging swords that cut like razors and weighed no more than a wing in the hand of the user. Great rivers rising in the sky licked men’s feet, and there was no need to bring salt from the Land of Salt. Wheat, sesame, and millet were stored in great depots, and trade was carried on from kingdom to kingdom, even in olive oil and wines from Andalusia. Under palm-frond covers slept the giant drums, the mothers of drums, with legs painted red and human faces. The rains were under the control of the wise men, and at the feasts of circumcision, when the youths danced with bloodstained legs, sonorous stones were thumped to produce a music like that of tamed cataracts. In the holy city of Whidah, the Cobra was worshipped, the mystical representation of the eternal wheel, as were the gods who ruled the vegetable kingdom and appeared, wet and gleaming, among the canebrakes that muted the banks of the salt lakes.

  The horse, stumbling, dropped to its knees. There came a howl so piercing and so prolonged that it reached the neighboring plantations, frightening the pigeons. Macandal’s left hand had been caught with the cane by the sudden tug of the rollers, which had dragged in his arm up to the shoulder. An eye of blood began to widen in the pan catching the juice. Grabbing a knife, Ti Noël cut the traces that fastened the horse to the shaft of the mill. Slaves from the tannery rushed over, following the master, as did the meat-smokers and cacao-bean-dryers. Now Macandal was pulling at his crushed arm, turning the rollers backward. With his right hand he was trying to move an elbow, a wrist that no longer obeyed him. He had a stupefied look, as though he was not taking in what had happened to him. They began to tie a rope tourniquet under his armpit to stop the bleeding. The master called for the whetstone to sharpen the machete to be used in the amputation.

  What the Hand Found

  Incapacitated for heavier work, Macandal was put in charge of pasturing the cattle. Before daybreak he drove them out of the stables, heading them toward the mountain whose shady-slopes were thick with grass that held the dew until morning was high. As he watched the slow scattering of the herd grazing knee-deep in clover, he developed a keen interest in the existence of certain plants to which nobody else paid attention. Stretched out in the shade of a carob tree, resting on the elbow of his sound arm, he foraged with his only hand among the familiar grasses for those spumed growths to which he had given no thought before. To his surprise he discovered the secret life of strange species given to disguise, confusion, and camouflage, protectors of the little armored beings that avoid the pathways of the ants. His hand gathered anonymous seeds, sulphury capers, diminutive hot peppers; vines that wove nets among the stones; solitary bushes with furry leaves that sweated at night; sensitive plants that closed at the mere sound of the human voice; pods that burst at midday with the pop of a flea cracked under the nail; creepers that plaited themselves in slimy tangles far from the sun. One vine produced a rash, another made the head of anyone resting in its shade swell up. But now what interested Macandal most was the fungi. There were those which smelled of wood rot, of medicine bottles, of cellars, of sickness, pushing through the ground in the shape of ears, ox-tongues, wrinkled excrescences, covered with exudations, opening their striped parasols in damp recesses, the homes of toads that slept or watched with open eyelids. The Mandingue crumbled the flesh of a fungus between his fingers, and his nose caught the whiff of poison. He held out his hand to a cow; she sniffed and drew back her head with frightened eyes, snorting. Macandal picked more fungi of the same species, putting them in an untanned leather pouch hanging from his neck.

  On the pretext of bathing the horses, Ti Noël would absent himself for hours from the Lenormand de Mézy plantation and join the one-armed man. Then both would make their way to the edge of the valley, where the terrain became broken and the skirts of the mountains were perforated by deep caves. They stopped at the house of an
old woman who lived alone, though visitors came to her from far away. Several swords hung on the walls among red flags with heavy shafts, horseshoes, meteorites, and wire hooks that held rusty spoons hung to form a cross to keep off Baron Samedi, Baron Piquant, Baron La Croix, and other Lords of the Graveyards. Macandal showed Maman Loi the leaves, the plants, the fungi, the herbs he carried in his pouch. She examined them carefully, crushing and smelling some of them, throwing others away. At times the talk was of extraordinary animals that had had human offspring. And of men whom certain spells turned into animals. Women had been raped by huge felines, and at night, had substituted roars for words. Once Maman Loi fell strangely silent as she was reaching the climax of a tale. In response to some mysterious order she ran to the kitchen, sinking her arms in a pot full of boiling oil. Ti Noël observed that her face reflected an unruffled indifference, and—which was stranger—that when she took her arms from the oil they showed no sign of blister or burn, despite the horrible sputter of frying he had heard a moment before. As Macandal seemed to accept this with complete calm, Ti Noël did his best to hide his amazement. And the conversation went placidly on between the Mandingue and the witch, with long pauses while they gazed afar.

  One day they caught in heat a dog of the packs of Lenormand de Mézy. While Ti Noël, sitting astride the animal, held its head by the ears, Macandal rubbed its muzzle with a stone that the juice of a fungus had colored a light yellow. The dog’s muscles contracted, its body jerked in violent convulsions, and it rolled over on its back, legs stiff and teeth bared.

  That afternoon as they returned to the plantation, Macandal stood for a long time looking at the mills, the coffee- and cacao-drying sheds, the indigo works, the forges, the cisterns, and the meat-smoking platforms.

  “The time has come,” he said.