The Kingdom of This World Read online

  The next day when they called him, he was not there. The master organized a hunt merely for the benefit of the Negro hordes, without putting much effort into it. A one-armed slave was a trifling thing. Besides, it was common knowledge that every Mandingue was a potential fugitive. Mandingue was a synonym for intractable, rebellious, a devil. For that reason slaves from that kingdom brought a very poor price on^’ the market. They all dreamed of taking to the hills. Anyway, with so many plantations on all sides, the crippled one would not get very far. When he was brought back, he would be tortured in front of the others to teach them a lesson. A one-armed man was nothing but a one-armed man. It would have been foolish to run the risk of losing a couple of good mastiffs whom Macandal might have tried to silence with his machete.

  The Reckoning

  Ti Noël was deeply distressed by Macandal’s disappearance. If Macandal had suggested that he run away with him, Ti Noël would joyfully have accepted the mission of serving the Mandingue. Now he felt that Macandal had thought him too poor a thing to give him a share in his plans. During the long nights when this idea tormented him, he would get out of the manger where he slept and, weeping, throw his arms around the neck of the Norman stallion, burying his face in the warm, clean-smelling mane. The disappearance of Macandal was also the disappearance of all that world evoked by his tales. With him had gone Kankan Muza, Adonhueso, the royal kings, and the Rainbow of Whidah. Life had lost its savor, and Ti Noël found himself bored by the Sunday dances and by always living with his animals, whose ears and perineums he kept scrupulously free of ticks. Thus the entire rainy season went by.

  Close by the stables, one day when the rivers had returned to their beds, Ti Noël came upon the old woman of the mountain. She brought him a message from Macandal. In response, just at the break of dawn, the lad made his way into a narrow-mouthed cave covered with stalactites that pointed toward a deeper opening where bats hung by their feet. The floor was covered with a thick layer of guano that held petrified objects and fossil fishbones. Ti Noël noticed that several clay jugs standing in the center gave off a heavy, bitter smell in the damp gloom. Lizard skins were piled on fern leaves. A large flat stone and several smooth round stones had been used recently for grinding. On a log stripped of its bark by machete slashes lay an account book stolen from the plantation’s bookkeeper, its pages showing heavy signs drawn in charcoal. Ti Noël was reminded of the herbalists’ shops in the Cap, with their big brass mortars, their prescription books on stands, their jars of nux vomica and asafetida, their bunches of althea root for aching gums. All that was lacking was a few scorpions in alcohol, attar of roses, and a tank of leeches.

  Macandal was thin. His muscles now moved at bone level, molding his thorax in bold relief. But his face, on which the candlelight brought out olive reflections, revealed a calm happiness. Around his head he wore a scarlet bandanna adorned with strings of beads. What amazed Ti Noël was the revelation of the long, patient labor the Mandingue had carried out since the night of his escape. It seemed that he had visited the plantations of the Plaine one by one, establishing direct contact with all who worked on them. He knew, for example, that in the indigo works of Dondon he could count on Olain, the gardener, Romaine, the cook of the slave-quarters, and one-eyed Jean-Pierrot; as for the Lenormand de Mézy plantation, he had sent messages to the three Pongué brothers, the bowlegged Fulah, the new Congolese, and to Marinette, the mulatto who had slept in the master’s bed until she had been sent back to the washtub on the arrival of a certain Mlle de la Martinière, who had been married to him by proxy in a convent at Le Havre before embarking for the colony. He had also got in touch with two Angolese from beyond Le Bonnet de l’Évêque, whose buttocks were zebra-striped with scars from the red-hot irons applied as punishment for stealing brandy. In letters legible only to himself, Macandal had entered in his register the name of the Bocor of Milot, and even of drovers who were useful for crossing the mountains and making contact with the people of Artibonite.

  Ti Noël learned that day what the one-armed man wanted of him. The very next Sunday the master, returning from Mass, was informed that the two best milch-cows on the plantation—the white-tailed ones brought from Rouen—were dying amid their droppings, their muzzles dripping bile. Ti Noël explained to him that animals brought in from foreign parts often could not distinguish between good grass and certain plants that poisoned their blood.

  De Profundis

  The poison crawled across the Plaine du Nord, invading pastures and stables. Nobody knew how it found its way into the grass and alfalfa, got mixed in with the bales of hay, climbed into the mangers. The fact was that cows, oxen, steers, horses, and sheep were dying by the hundreds, filling the whole countryside with an ever-present stench of carrion. Great fires were kindled at nightfall, giving off a heavy, oily smoke before dying out among heaps of blackened skulls, charred ribs, hooves reddened by the flames. The most experienced herbalists of the Cap sought in vain for the leaf, the gum, the sap that might be carrying the plague. The beasts went on falling, their bellies distended, encircled by swarms of buzzing bottleflies. The rooftrees were alive with great black bald birds awaiting the moment to drop and rip the hides, tense to bursting, with their beaks, releasing new putrefaction.

  Soon, to the general horror, it became known that the poison had got into the houses. One evening, after his afternoon repast, the master of Coq-Chante plantation had suddenly dropped dead without any previous complaint, dragging down in his fall the clock he was winding. Before the news could reach the neighboring plantations, other owners had been struck down by the poison, which lurked, as though waiting to spring, in glasses on night tables, soup tureens, medicine bottles, in bread, wine, fruit, and salt. The sinister hammering of coffins could be heard at all hours. At every turn in the road a funeral procession was encountered. All that was heard in the churches of the Cap was the Office for the Dead, and the last rites always arrived too late, ushered in by distant bells tolling new deaths. The priests had had to shorten the service in order to be able to care for all the bereaved families. Throughout the Plaine the identical prayers for the dead echoed lugubriously, converted into a hymn of terror. For terror was gaunting the faces and choking the throats. In the shadow of the silver crucifixes that moved up and down the roads, green poison, yellow poison, or poison that had no color went creeping along, coming down the kitchen chimneys, slipping through the cracks of locked doors, like some irrepressible creeper seeking the shade to turn bodies to shades. From Miserere to De Profundis the voices of the subchanters went on, hour after hour, in a sinister antiphony.

  Exasperated with fear, drunk with wine because they no longer dared taste the water of the wells, the colonists whipped and tortured their slaves, trying to find an explanation. But the poison went on decimating families and wiping out grownups and children. Nor could prayers, doctors, vows to saints, or the worthless incantations of a Breton sailor, a necromancer and healer, check the secret advance of death. With involuntary haste to occupy the last grave left in the cemetery, Mme Lenormand de Mézy died on Whitsunday a little while after tasting a particularly tempting orange that an over-obliging limb had put within her reach. A state of siege had been declared on the Plaine. Anyone walking through the fields or near the houses after sunset was shot down without warning. The garrison of the Cap had paraded the roads, ridiculously threatening an intangible enemy with dire death. But the poison continued to mount mouth-high by the most unexpected routes. One day the eight members of the Du Périgny family found it in a keg of cider that they had brought with their own hands from the hold of a ship that had just docked. Putrefaction had claimed the entire region for its own.

  One afternoon when they threatened to let him have a load of buckshot in the ass, the bowlegged Fulah finally talked. Macandal, the one-armed, now a houngan of the Rada rite, invested with superhuman powers as the result of his possession by the major gods on several occasions, was the Lord of Poison. Endowed with supreme auth
ority by the Rulers of the Other Shore, he had proclaimed the crusade of extermination, chosen as he was to wipe out the whites and create a great empire of free Negroes in Santo Domingo. Thousands of slaves obeyed him blindly. Nobody could halt the march of the poison.

  This revelation set off a whirlwind of whiplashes on the plantation. And when the buckshot, fired in pure rage, had blasted the bowels of the black informer, a messenger was sent off to the Cap. That very afternoon all available men were mobilized to track down Macandal. The Plaine—stinking with green flesh, charred hooves, the domain of the worms—echoed with barks and blasphemies.

  The Metamorphoses

  For several weeks die soldiers of the Cap garrison and the search parties made up of planters, bookkeepers, and overseers beat the neighborhood, tree by tree, gulch by gulch, canebrake by canebrake, without finding any trace of Macandal. Moreover, the poison, now that its source was known, had halted its attack, returning to the jars the armless man probably had buried somewhere, bubbling in the dark night of the earth, which had become night of the earth for so many of the living. The dogs and men returned from the hills at nightfall, sweating fatigue and frustration from every pore. Now that death had resumed its normal rhythm, its tempo accelerated only by certain raw winds of January or fevers brought on by the rains, the planters gave themselves over to drinking and card-playing, demoralized by their forced association with the soldiery. Between indecent songs and sharpers’ tricks and fondling the Negresses’ breasts as they brought in clean glasses, they recounted the feats of grandfathers who had taken part in the sack of Cartagena or had lined their pockets with the treasures of the Spanish Crown when Piet Hein, Peg-Leg, had brought off the fabulous attempt freebooters had dreamed of for two hundred years. Over tables stained with wine, between tosses of dice, they proposed toasts to L’Esnambuc, to Bertrand d’Ogeron, Du Rausset, and those men with hairy chests who had founded the colony on their own initiative making their will law, without ever being intimidated by edicts issued in Paris or the gentle reprimands of the Code Noir. Asleep under the stools, the dogs enjoyed the freedom from their spiked collars.

  With lazing around in siestas and guzzling in the shade of the trees, the search for Macandal had slowed down. Several months had elapsed without word of him. Some thought he had taken refuge in the interior, among the cloudy heights of the Great Highlands, there where the Negroes danced fandangos to the rhythm of castanets. Others stated that the houngan had got away on a schooner, and was operating in the region of Jacmel, where many men who had died tilled the land as long as they were kept from tasting salt. Nevertheless, the slaves displayed a defiant good humor. Never had those whose task it was to set the rhythm for the corn-grinding or the cane-cutting thumped their drums more briskly. At night in their quarters and cabins the Negroes communicated to one another, with great rejoicing, the strangest news: a green lizard had warmed its back on the roof of the tobacco barn; someone had seen a night moth flying at noon; a big dog, with bristling hair, had dashed through the house, carrying off a haunch of venison; a gannet—so far from the sea!—had shaken the lice from its wings over the arbor of the back patio.

  They all knew that the green lizard, the night moth, the strange dog, the incredible gannet, were nothing but disguises. As he had the power to take the shape of hoofed animal, bird, fish, or insect, Macandal continually visited the plantations of the Plaine to watch over his faithful and find out if they still had faith in his return. In one metamorphosis or another, the one-armed was everywhere, having recovered his corporeal integrity in animal guise. With wings one day, spurs another, galloping or crawling, he had made himself master of the courses of the underground streams, the caverns of the seacoast, and the tree-tops, and now ruled the whole island. His powers were boundless. He could as easily cover a mare as rest in the cool of a cistern, swing on the swaying branches of a huisache, or slip through a keyhole. The dogs did not bark at him; he changed his shadow at will. It was because of him that a Negress gave birth to a child with a wild boar’s face. At night he appeared on the roads in the skin of a black goat with fire-tipped horns. One day he would give the sign for the great uprising, and the Lords of Back There, headed by Damballah, the Master of the Roads, and Ogoun, Master of the Swords, would bring the thunder and lightning and unleash the cyclone that would round out the work of men’s hands. In that great hour—said Ti Noël—the blood of the whites would run into the brooks, and the Loas, drunk with joy, would bury their faces in it and drink until their lungs were full.

  The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs.

  Human Guise

  After reinstating Marinette, the laundress, in his bedchamber for a while, M. Lenormand de Mézy, with the parish priest of Limonade acting as go-between, had married again, a rich widow, lame and devout. As a result, when the first northers of that December began to blow, the house servants, directed by the new mistress’s cane, began to arrange Provençal saints around a papier-mâché grotto, still smelling of warm glue, which would be illuminated under the porch eaves during the Christmas holidays. Toussaint, the cabinetmaker, had carved the Three Wise Men in wood, but they were too big for the Nativity, and in the end were not set up, mainly because of the terrible whites of Balthasar’s eyes, which had been painted with special care, and gave the impression of emerging from a night of ebony with the terrible reproach of a drowned man. Ti Noël and the other slaves of the household staff watched the progress of the Nativity, bearing in mind that the days of gifts and midnight Masses were approaching, and that what with visitors and festivities the masters’ discipline became somewhat relaxed, leaving it not too hard to come by a roast pig’s ear in the kitchen, take a swig of wine from the spigot of the cask, or slip by night into the quarters of the newly purchased Angola women whom the master was going to mate, with Christian ceremony, after the holidays. But Ti Noël knew that this time he would not be around when the candles were lighted and the gold of the grotto reflected their gleam. He would be far away that night, at the festival organized at the Dufrené plantation, to celebrate with a glass of Spanish brandy per person the birth of the first male in the house of the master.

  Roulé, roulé, Congoa roulé!

  Roulé, roulé, Congoa roulé!

  A fort ti fille ya dansé congo ya-ya-ró!

  For more than two hours the drums had been booming under the light of the torches, the women’s shoulders kept moving rhythmically in a gesture as though washing clothes, when a momentary tremor shook the voices of the singers. Behind the Mother Drum rose the human figure of Macandal. The Mandingue Macandal. The man Macandal. The One-Armed. The Restored. The Transformed. None spoke to him, but his glance met that of all. And the glasses of brandy began to move from hand to hand toward his single hand, which had known a long thirst. Ti Noël saw him for the first time since his metamorphoses. Something of his sojourns in mysterious places seemed to cling to him, something of his successive attires of scales, bristles, fur. His chin had taken on a feline sharpness, and his eyes seemed to slant a little toward his temples, like those of certain birds whose appearance he had assumed. The women passed before him, and passed again, their bodies swaying to the rhythm of the dance. But the air was so fraught with questions that suddenly, without previous agreement, all the voices joined in a yenvaló solemnly howled above the drumbeats. After the wait of four years, the chant became the recital of boundless suffering:

  Yenvaló moin Papal

  Moin pas mangé q’m bambo

  Yenvaló, Papa, yenvaló moin!

  Ou vlai moin lavé chaudier,

  Yenvaló moin?

  “Will I have to go on washing the vats? Will I have to go on eating bamboos?” As though wrenched from their
vitals, the questions trod one on the other, taking on, in chorus, the rending despair of peoples carried into captivity to build pyramids, towers, or endless walls. “Oh, father, my father, how long is the road! Oh, father, my father, how long the suffering!” With so much lamentation, Ti Noël had forgotten that the whites, too, have ears. For that reason, in the patio of the Dufrené big house at that very moment balls were being rammed into all the muskets, blunderbusses, and pistols that had been lifted down from their places on the wall. And, to provide for all contingencies, a supply of knives, rapiers, and clubs was left in the keeping of the women, who were already saying prayers and making rogations for the capture of the Mandingue.

  The Great Flight

  One Monday in January, shortly before daybreak, the slaves of the plantations of the Plaine du Nord began to enter the city of the Cap. Shepherded by their masters and overseers on horseback, escorted by heavily armed guards, the slaves began to darken the city square while the military drums sounded a solemn beat. Several soldiers were piling faggots of wood at the foot of a quebracho post; others were adding fuel to a brazier. In the atrium of the principal church, alongside the Governor, the judges, and the Crown officials, the ecclesiastic hierarchy sat in tall red armchairs in the shade of a funeral canopy stretched upon rods and braces. Bright parasols moved in the balconies, like the gay nodding of flowers in a windowbox. As though talking from loge to loge in a huge theater, the women, fans in their mittened hands, chattered loudly, their voices delightfully excited. Those whose windows gave upon the square had prepared refreshments of lemonade and orgeat for their guests. Below, more tightly packed and sweaty every minute, the Negroes awaited the performance that had been prepared for them, a gala function for Negroes on whose splendor no expense had been spared. For this time the lesson was to be driven home with fire, not blood, and certain illuminations, lighted to be remembered, were very costly.