The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

  Assumpta est Maria in caelum; gaudent Angeli, collaudantes benedicunt Dominum, alleluia!

  Suddenly, Juan de Dios González began to shrink back toward the royal chairs, clumsily stumbling against the three marble steps. The Queen’s rosary fell from her fingers. The King’s hand reached for the hilt of his sword. Before the altar, facing the worshippers, another priest had arisen, as though conjured out of the air, with part of his shoulders and arms still imperfectly fleshed out. And while his face was taking on contour and expression, from his lipless, toothless mouth, as black as a rat-hole, a thundering voice emerged which filled the nave with the vibrations of an organ with all stops pulled out, making the stained-glass windows tremble in their lead frames:

  Absolve Domine, animas omnium fidelium defunctorum ab omni vinculo delictorum. . . .

  The name of Corneille Breille stuck in the throat of Henri Christophe, leaving him dumb. Because it was the immured Archbishop, whose death and decay were known to all, who stood there before the high altar in his vestments intoning the Dies Irae. When, thundering like the roll of a kettledrum, there arose the words Coget omnes ante thronus, Juan de Dios González fell moaning at the feet of the Queen. Henri Christophe, his eyes starting from his head, bore it until the Rex tremendae majestatis. At that moment a thunderbolt that deafened only his ears struck the church tower, shivering all the bells at once. The precentors, the thuribles, the choristers’ stand, the pulpit had been cast down. The King lay on the floor paralyzed, his eyes riveted on the roof beams. Now, with a great bound, the specter had seated himself on one of these beams, in the very line of Henri Christophe’s vision, spreading wide arms and legs as though the better to display his bloodstained brocades. A rhythm was growing in the King’s ears which might have been that of his own veins or that of the drums being beaten in the hills. Carried out of the church in the arms of his officers, the King was mumbling curses, threatening all the inhabitants of Limonade with death if a rooster so much as crowed. While he was receiving first aid from Marie-Louise and the Princesses, the terrified countryfolk began stuffing hens and roosters into baskets and lowering them into the darkness of deep wells so they would forget their cackling and defiance. A rain of thwacks sent the startled donkeys down the hillside. The horses were muzzled lest their neighing give rise to wrong interpretations.

  And that afternoon the royal carriage drawn by six galloping horses drew up at the esplanade of honor of Sans Souci. With shirt open, the King was carried to his chambers. He dropped on the bed like a sack of chains. His eyes, more cornea than iris, revealed a fury that came from the depths of his soul at being unable to move arms or legs. The doctors began to rub his inert body with a mixture of brandy, gunpowder, and capsicum. Throughout the Palace the smell of medicines, infusions, salts, ointments pervaded the warm air of the salons overflowing with officials and courtiers. The Princesses Athenaïs and Améthyste were weeping on the bosom of their North American governess. The Queen, with little thought for etiquette, was squatting in a corner of the antechamber watching over the boiling of a root brew on a charcoal brazier whose flame, reflected on a Gobelin showing Venus beside Vulcan’s forge which adorned the wall, gave a strange realism to the colors of the tapestry. Her Majesty called for a fan to quicken the slow-burning fire. There was an evil atmosphere about that twilight of shadows closing in too quickly. It was impossible to know whether the drums were really throbbing in the hills. But at moments a rhythm coming from the distant heights mingled strangely with the Ave Maria the women were saying in the Throne Room, arousing unacknowledged resonances in more than one breast.

  Ultima Ratio Regum

  At sunset the following Sunday, Henri Christophe had the feeling that his knees and his arms, though still numb, might respond to a great enough effort of the will. Turning himself clumsily over in bed, he got his feet over the side, lying back as though paralyzed from the waist up. His valet, Soliman, helped him to stand. The King was then able to walk slowly to the window like a big mechanical toy. The Queen and the Princesses, notified by the servant, came quietly into the room, stopping beneath an equestrian statue of his Majesty. They knew that there was too much drinking going on in Haut-le-Cap. On the street-corners soup and smoked meat were being served from huge kettles by sweating cooks pounding the tables with skimmers and ladles. Between rows of laughing, shouting spectators, handkerchiefs fluttered in a dance. The King drew in deep breaths of the afternoon air, and the oppressions that had weighed down his breast began to lift. Night was creeping down from the slopes of the mountains, blurring the outlines of trees and mazes. All at once Henri Christophe noticed that the musicians of the royal chamber were crossing the entrance court, carrying their instruments. Each displayed his professional deformity. The harpist stooped, as though humpbacked under the weight of his harp; another, thin as a rail, seemed pregnant with the drum that hung around his neck; another clasped a helicon. And bringing up the rear was a dwarf, almost hidden beneath a pavilion chinois that jingled at every step. The King’s amazement that his musicians should be going off at such a time as though to give a concert at the foot of some solitary ceiba was interrupted by the ruffle of eight military drums. It was the hour of the changing of the guard. His Majesty took careful note of his grenadiers to make sure that during his illness the rigid discipline in which he had trained them had not been relaxed. But suddenly the monarch’s hand rose in angry surprise. The untuned drums were not playing the prescribed call, but a syncopated tone in three beats produced not by the drumsticks, but by hands against the leather.

  “They are playing the mandoucouman,” Henri Christophe screamed, throwing his bicorne to the floor.

  At that moment the guards broke ranks, crossing the esplanade in complete disorder. The officers were running with drawn swords. From the barracks windows clusters of men began to drop, coats open and pants drawn on over their boots. Shots were fired in the air. A color ensign slashed the flags of crowns and dolphins of the Prince’s regiment. In the midst of the confusion a squad of light horsemen galloped away from the Palace at full speed, followed by the mules of a transport wagon loaded with saddles and harness. It was a general rout of uniforms to the sound of military drums beaten by fists. A malarial soldier, surprised by the mutiny, came out of the infirmary wrapped in a sheet, fastening the chin-strap of his shako. As he passed beneath the window where Henri Christophe stood, he made an obscene gesture and then ran off as fast as he could go. Then came the hush of evening, broken by the distant cry of a peacock.

  The King turned his head. In the night of the room Queen Marie-Louise and the Princesses Athenaïs and Améthyste were crying. Now it was clear why the people had been drinking so much that day in Haut-le-Cap.

  Henri Christophe made his way through the Palace, supporting himself by banisters, curtains, and the backs of chairs. The absence of courtiers, flunkies, and guards made an oppressive emptiness of corridors and rooms. The walls seemed higher, the tiles broader. The Hall of Mirrors reflected only the figure of the King to the farthest reach of the most remote mirrors. And then, those buzzes, those slitherings, those crickets in the beamed ceilings which had never been heard before, and which now, with their intervals and rests, gave the silence a gamut of depth. The candles were slowly melting in the candelabra. A moth was circling the council room. After hurling itself against a gilded frame, an insect fell to the floor, first here, then there, with the unmistakable whirring of a flying beetle. The great reception room, with its two walls of windows, gave back the echo of Henri Christophe’s heels, heightening his sense of utter loneliness. He descended by a service door to the kitchens where the fire was guttering out under the spits bare of meat. On the floor beside the carving table several empty wine bottles stood. The ropes of garlic hanging from the chimney lintel, the strings of dion-dion mushrooms, the smoked hams had all been carried away. The Palace was deserted, abandoned to the moonless night. It was the spoils of anyone who wanted to take it, for even the hunting dogs were gone
. Henri Christophe returned to his floor. The white stairway rose sinisterly chill and lugubrious under the light of the candelabra. A bat that had come in through the skylight of the rotunda was flying in clumsy circles beneath the dull gold of the ceiling. The King leaned against the balustrade, seeking the solidity of the marble.

  From below, where they sat on the bottom step of the stairway of honor, five young Negroes turned their troubled faces toward him. At that moment Henri Christophe felt a surge of love for them. They were the Royal Bonbons, Délivrance, Valentin, La Couronne, John, and Bien-Aimé, Africans whom the King had bought from a slavetrader to give them their freedom and have them trained as pages. Henri Christophe had always held himself aloof from the African mystique of the early leaders of Haitian independence, endeavoring to give his court a thoroughly European air. But now that he found himself alone, betrayed by his dukes, barons, generals, and ministers, the only ones who had remained faithful to him were those five Africans, those five youths of Congo, Fulah, or Mandingue origin, waiting like faithful dogs, their buttocks against the chill marble of the stairway, his Ultima Ratio Regum, which could no longer be issued from the cannon’s mouth. Henri Christophe paused to look at them, made them an affectionate gesture, which they answered with a sorrowful bow, and then passed into the Throne Room.

  He stopped before the canopy adorned with his coat of arms. Two crowned lions upheld a shield displaying a crowned phoenix, with a device reading I rise from my ashes. A pennant bore the motto of the flags, God, my cause and my sword, Henri Christophe opened a heavy coffer hidden under the fringes of the velvet. He took out a handful of silver coins stamped with his initials. Then he threw on the floor, one after the other, several solid-gold crowns of different weight. One of them rolled to the door and went thudding down the stairway with a noise that reverberated through the Palace. The King mounted his throne, his eyes on the yellow guttering candles on a candelabrum. Mechanically he recited the opening words of all the pronouncements of his government: “Henri, by the Grace of God and the Constitutional Law of the State, King of Haiti, Ruler of the Islands of La Tortue and Gonave, and others adjacent, Destroyer of Tyranny, Regenerator and Benefactor of the Haitian Nation, Creator of its Moral, Political, and Military Institutions, First Crowned Monarch of the New World, Defender of the Faith, Founder of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Henry, to all those present and to come. Greetings. . . .” Suddenly there came to Henri Christophe’s mind the Citadel La Ferrière, his fortress up there above the clouds.

  But at that moment the night grew dense with drums. Calling to one another, answering from mountain to mountain, rising from the beaches, issuing from the caves, running beneath the trees, descending ravines and riverbeds, the drums boomed, the radas, the congos, the drums of Bouckman, the drums of the Grand Alliances, all the drums of Voodoo. A vast encompassing percussion was advancing on Sans Souci, tightening the circle. A horizon of thunder closing in. A storm whose eye at the moment was the throne without heralds or mace-bearers. The King returned to his chamber and his window. The burning of his plantations had begun, of his dairies, of his canefields. Now the fire outran the drums, leaping from house to house, from field to field. A flame shot up from the granary, scattering red-black embers into the hay barn. The north wind lifted the burning husks of the cornfields, bringing them nearer and nearer. Fiery ash was falling on the Palace terraces.

  Henri Christophe’s thoughts went back to the Citadel. Ultima Ratio Regum. But that stronghold, unique in the world, was too vast for one man, and the monarch had never thought the day might come when he would find himself alone. The bulls’ blood that those thick walls had drunk was an infallible charm against the arms of the white men. But this blood had never been directed against Negroes, whose shouts, coming closer now, were invoking Powers to which they made blood sacrifice. Henri Christophe, the reformer, had attempted to ignore Voodoo, molding with whiplash a caste of Catholic gentlemen. Now he realized that the real traitors to his cause that night were St. Peter with his keys, the Capuchins of St. Francis, the blackamoor St. Benedict along with the dark-faced Virgin in her blue cloak, and the Evangelists whose books he had ordered kissed each time the oath of loyalty was sworn. And, finally, all the martyrs, those to whom he had ordered the lighting of candles containing thirteen gold coins. After fulminating the white cupola of the chapel with a glance of wrath, the chapel filled with images that had turned their backs on him, symbols which had gone over to the enemy, the King called for a change of clothing and perfumes. He made the Princesses leave the room, and dressed himself in his richest ceremonial attire. He put on his broad two-toned sash, the emblem of his investiture, tying it above his sword hilt. The drums were now so close that they seemed to be throbbing there, behind the balustrades of the main entrance, at the foot of the great stone stairway. At that moment the fire lighted up the mirrors of the Palace, the crystal goblets, the crystal of the lamps, glasses, windows, the mother-of-pearl inlay of the console tables—the flames were everywhere, and it was impossible to tell which were flames and which reflections. All the mirrors of Sans Souci were simultaneously ablaze. The whole building disappeared under this chill fire, which reached out into the night, making each wall a cistern of twisted flames.

  The shot was almost inaudible because of the proximity of the drums. Henri Christophe’s hand released the pistol, to touch his gaping temple. His body stood erect for a moment, as though about to take a step, before it fell face forward amid all its decorations. The pages appeared on the threshold of the room. The King was dying, sprawled in his own blood.

  Strait Is the Gate

  The African pages came out by a back door that faced the mountain, running as fast as they could, carrying on their shoulders a machete-trimmed branch from which hung a hammock through whose broken mesh the monarch’s spurs emerged. Behind them, looking backward, stumbling in the darkness over the roots of the royal poinciana trees, came the Princesses Athenaïs and Améthyste, who had changed their shoes for the chambermaids’ sandals, and the Queen, who had discarded her slippers when the stones of the road wrenched off a heel. Soliman, the King’s valet, who had once been Pauline Bonaparte’s masseur, brought up the rear, with a gun slung from a bandolier and a machete in his hand. As they plunged deeper into the tree-dense night of the mountains, the fire below could be seen thicker, more compact with flames, although it was beginning to die down as it reached the edges of the Palace esplanade. In the direction of Milot, however, the haymows had caught fire. Distant neighs, which sounded like the screams of tortured children, could be heard, as whole sides of the stables collapsed in a burst of fiery-splinters, letting through a maddened horse with its mane singed and tail burned to the bone. Suddenly lights began to move in the Palace. It was a torch dance winding from kitchen to attics, entering by the open windows, ascending the stairways, running along the gutters, as though myriad glow-worms had taken possession of the upper floors. The looting had begun. The pages hurried on, knowing that this would entertain the rebels for a good time. Soliman put the safety on his rifle, slipping the butt of the gunstock under his arm.

  By daybreak the fugitives had reached the outskirts of the Citadel La Ferrière. Their progress was slowed down because of the steepness of the ascent and the numerous cannon lying across the path, cannon that had never been mounted on their carriages, and would now lie there until they scaled away in rust. The sea was growing light in the direction of the Île de la Tortue as the chains of the drawbridge creaked sinisterly against the stone. Slowly the nail-studded doors of the Single Gate opened. And the corpse of Henri Christophe entered his Escorial boots first, wrapped in the hammock on which it had been borne by the Negro pages. Heavier with each step, it began to mount the inner stairways bedewed by the chilly drops that fell from the vaulted ceilings. Reveille calls shattered the dawn, answering one another from every corner of the fortress. Completely covered with red fungi, still filled with night, the Citadel emerged—blood-colored above, rust-c
olored below—out of the gray clouds swollen by the fires of the Plaine.

  Now, in the middle of the Place d’Armes, the fugitives related their tragic misfortune to the Governor of the fortress. Soon the news had spread through air-vents, tunnels, and corridors to the sleeping-quarters and kitchens. From every side soldiers began to appear, pushed forward by new uniforms coming down the stairways, leaving their batteries, descending from the watch-towers, deserting their posts. A cry of jubilation went up in the patio of the main tower, where the prisoners, released by their jailers, rushed from their cells, running with defiant rejoicing toward the members of the royal family. Hemmed in closer and closer by this mob, the disheveled pages, the shoeless Queen, the Princesses timidly guarded from insolent hands by Soliman, fell back toward a pile of fresh-mixed mortar intended for yet unfinished works, in which several shovels left by the masons still stood. Seeing that the situation was threatening to get out of hand, the Governor ordered the courtyard cleared. His order aroused a vast derisive laugh. One of the prisoners, so ragged that his genitals hung out of his pants, pointed a finger at the Queen’s neck:

  “In the whites’ country, when a chief is killed they cut off his wife‘s head.”

  As the Governor realized that the example set almost thirty years earlier by the idealists of the French Revolution was still vividly recalled by his men, it seemed to him that all was lost. But at that very moment a rumor that the company of the guard had decamped, hurrying down the hillside, suddenly gave a new turn to events. Running, falling over one another, by stairways and tunnels, the men made pell-mell for the Great Gate of the Citadel. Leaping, sliding, slipping, they dashed for the pathways, looking for shortcuts that would take them to Sans Souci as fast as possible. Henri Christophe’s army was breaking up in a landslide. For the first time that huge edifice stood empty, taking on, with the vast silence of its rooms, the funereal solemnity of a royal tomb.