The Governor opened the hammock for a last look at his Majesty’s countenance. With a knife he cut off one of the little fingers, handing it to the Queen, who slipped it into her bosom, feeling it slide toward her stomach with the chill writhing of a worm. Then he gave an order, and the pages laid the body on the pile of mortar into which it slowly began to sink, as though pulled down by slimy hands. The corpse had curved a little as it was carried, still warm, up the mountainside. For that reason, the abdomen and thighs were the first to disappear. Arms and boots floated for a time, as though undecided, on the heaving gray surface of the mixture. Then all that remained was the face, held up by the frame of the bicorne clamped down from ear to ear. Lest the mortar should set before completely engulfing the head, the Governor laid his hand on the King’s brow to push it down more quickly, with the gesture of one who takes a sick person’s temperature. The mortar finally closed over the eyes of Henri Christophe, who now continued his slow descent into the entrails of a moisture that was growing less plastic. Then the corpse came to rest, one with the stone that imprisoned it.
Having chosen his own death, Henri Christophe would never know the corruption of his flesh, flesh fused with the very stuff of the fortress, inscribed in its architecture, integrated with its body bristling with flying buttresses. Le Bonnet de L’Évêque, the whole mountain, had become the mausoleum of the first King of Haiti.
Part
Four
I had fear of these visions
But since seeing these others,
My fear is grown greater.
—Calderón
The Night of the Statues
With a tinkling of bracelets and charms, Mlle Athenaïs was accompanying on the newly acquired pianoforte her sister Améthyste, whose slightly acid voice was embellishing with languid portamenti an aria from Rossini’s Tancredi. Wearing a white morning robe, a kerchief knotted about her head in Haitian fashion. Queen Marie-Louise sat embroidering an altar cloth intended for the Capuchins of Pisa and scolding a cat that was playing with her skeins of thread. After the tragic days of the execution of the Dauphin Victor, after their departure from Port-au-Prince with the help of English merchants who had been purveyors to the royal family, the Princesses, in Europe for the first time, were enjoying a summer that seemed like summer. Rome lived with doors open wide beneath a sun that made all the marbles shine, dispelled the stench of the monks, and evoked the calls of the orgeat-vendors. The city’s thousand bells tinkled with unaccustomed laziness beneath a cloud-free sky that recalled the sky of the Plaine in January. At last, sweaty, happy, warm again, Athenaïs and Améthyste spent their days barefoot on the stone floors, their skirts unfastened, tossing dice on the gameboard as they played at royal goose, making lemonade, and pulling off the shelves the latest novels, whose covers, after the new fashion, were adorned with woodcuts of cemeteries at midnight, Scottish lakes, sylphs encircling a young huntsman, maidens hiding a love letter in the hollow of an old oak.
Soliman, too, found that Roman summer to his liking. His appearance in the streets of the low quarters—damp with dripping wash, dirty with cabbage leaves, garbage, and coffee grounds—produced a veritable commotion. The shock brought open the eyes of the blindest lazzaroni, the better to see the Negro, while mandolin and hand-organ fell mute. Some of the beggars thrust forward stumps of arms, all their gamut of wounds and mutilations, on the chance that this might be some ambassador from across the sea. The children followed him wherever he went, organizing serenades of harmonicas and jews’-harps. He was offered glasses of wine in the taverns. As he passed, tradesmen came out of their shops to offer him a tomato or a handful of nuts. Not for a long time had the profile of a real Negro been silhouetted against a wall of Flaminio Ponzio or a door of Antonio Labacco. And he was asked to tell his life story, which he did with gusto, embellishing it with the greatest lies, passing himself off as a nephew of Henri Christophe who had miraculously escaped the slaughter of the Cap the night when the death squad had had to finish off one of the King’s natural sons with bayonets because several volleys had failed to bring him down. His gaping audience had no clear idea of where all these things had taken place. Some thought it was Madagascar, others Persia or the land of the Berbers. There was always someone eager to wipe his face with a handkerchief, when he began to sweat, to see if the color came off. One afternoon, as a joke, they took him to one of the narrow, foul-smelling theaters where opere buffe were sung. After the finale of a plot that had to do with Italians in Algiers, he was pushed onto the stage. His unexpected appearance was such a hit with the spectators that the manager of the company invited him to repeat the performance whenever he liked. Now, to make things even better, he was having a love affair with one of the maids at the Borghese Palace, a sturdy Piedmontese girl who had no taste for sugar-candy lovers. On the really hot days Soliman was in the habit of taking long siestas in the grass of the Forum, where flocks of sheep were always pastured. The ruins threw a pleasant shade over the abundant grass, and if one dug in the dirt a little it was not unusual to find a marble ear, a stone ornament, or an oxidized coin. The spot was sometimes chosen by a streetwalker to ply her trade with a seminary student. But its most assiduous visitors were persons of a thoughtful turn of mind, priests carrying green umbrellas. Englishmen with delicate hands who went into raptures at the sight of a broken column, copying down some half-effaced inscription. Toward evening the Negro would go into the Borghese Palace by the service entrance and give himself over to uncorking bottles of red wine in the company of the girl from the Piedmont. Complete disorder reigned in the mansion, for the owners were away. The lamps at the door were dark with fly-specks, the servants’ liveries were filthy, the coachmen were drunk all the time, the carriage was unpolished, and the cobwebs in the library were so thick that for years nobody had wanted to enter it for fear that disgusting insects would crawl down the neck or even into the bosom. If it had not been that a young abbot, a nephew of the Prince, lived in one of the upper apartments, the servants would have moved upstairs to sleep in the beds formerly occupied by cardinals.
Late one night, when Soliman and his light-of-love were alone in the kitchen, the Negro, completely drunk, decided to explore beyond the servants’ quarters. Following a long corridor, the two of them came out into an immense patio filled with marbles shimmering in the moonlight. Two rows of superimposed columns framed the patio, casting the outline of their capitals halfway up the wall. Raising and lowering the street lantern she carried, the Piedmontese girl revealed to Soliman the array of statues that filled one of the lateral galleries. They were all of naked women, although all wore veils that an imaginary breeze coyly swept across such spots as decency demanded. There were many animals, too, for one of the ladies held a swan in her arms, another was clasping the neck of a bull, others were running with hounds or fleeing from horned men with goat-legs who were probably related to the devil. It was a white, cold, motionless world, but its shadows took on life and grew under the light of the lantern, as though those beings with unseeing eyes, who looked without looking, were moving about their midnight visitors. With that gift of the drunk for seeing horrible things out of the tail of the eye, Soliman thought that one of the statues had lowered its arms a little. Uneasily he pulled the Piedmontese girl toward a stairway leading to the upper rooms. Now paintings seemed to step from the wall: a smiling youth who raised a curtain, a boy, crowned with grape leaves, who held a mute panpipe to his lips or laid a finger to his mouth for silence. After crossing a gallery adorned with mirrors painted with flowers, the chambermaid, with a provocative gesture, opened a small walnut door and lowered the lantern.
Against the farther wall of that small chamber a single statue stood. It was a naked woman lying on a bed and holding out an apple. Trying to collect his disordered thoughts, Soliman made his stumbling way toward the statue. Surprise had sobered him a little. He knew that face, and the body, too; that whole body aroused a memory. He touched the marble with eager hands,
his sense of smell and sight in his fingers. He felt the breasts. He ran a curved palm over the belly, letting his little finger rest in the depression of the navel. He caressed the tender hollow of the back, as though to turn the body over. His fingers sought the rounded hips, the delicate thighs, the terseness of the breast. That voyage of his fingers refreshed his memory, bringing back distant images. He had known this contact before. With this same circular movement he had one day relieved the pain of a twisted ankle. The substance was different, but the forms were the same. Now those nights of fear on the Île de la Tortue came back to him, when a French general had lain dying behind a closed door. He recalled her whose head he had stroked to put her to sleep. And, suddenly, moved by a memory not to be gainsaid, Soliman began to go through the motions of a masseur, following the structure of the muscles, the outline of the tendons, rubbing the back from the middle outward, stroking the breast muscles, tapping with his forefinger here and there. But suddenly the chill of the marble rising to his wrists as with pincers of death stiffened him into a cry. The wine in his head began to whirl. This statue, yellow in the light of the lantern, was the corpse of Pauline Bonaparte, a corpse newly stiffened, recently stripped of breath and sight, which perhaps there was still time to bring back to life. With a terrible cry, as though his breast were riven, the Negro began to shout, shout as loud as he could, in the vast silence of the Borghese Palace. And his look became so primitive, his heels stamped so strongly on the floor, turning the chapel beneath into a drumhead, that the horrified Piedmontese fled down the stairs, leaving Soliman alone with the Venus of Canova.
The courtyard came ablaze with candles and lanterns. Awakened by the voice that had reverberated so powerfully from the second floor, the footmen and coachmen emerged from their rooms in shirtsleeves, pulling up their pants. There was a loud banging of the knocker at the side door, which was opened to let in the gendarmes of the night patrol, who filed in followed by several frightened neighbors. As the mirrors were lighted up, the Negro turned sharply about. Those lights, the people crowding into the patio among the white marble statues, the unmistakable bicornes, the uniforms with their light piping, the cold curve of an unsheathed sword brought back to him in a second’s shiver the night of Henri Christophe’s death. Swinging a chair through a window, Soliman leaped to the street. And the first matins found him shivering with fever—for he had fallen victim to the malaria of the Pontine Marshes—and calling on Papa Legba to carry him back to Santo Domingo. His hands still felt the excruciating touch of nightmare. It seemed to him that he had fallen into a trance upon the stones of a grave, as happened Back There to certain of the possessed, whom the peasants both feared and revered because they were on better terms than anyone else with the Masters of the Graveyards.
In vain did Queen Marie-Louise attempt to calm him with an infusion of bitter herbs which she had received from the Cap, via London, as a special token from President Boyer. Soliman was cold. An unseasonable fog was chilling the marbles of Rome. The summer was veiled by a mist that thickened by the hour. The Princesses sent for Dr. Antommarchi, who had been Napoleon’s doctor on St. Helena, and who was credited by some with exceptional professional gifts, particularly as a homeopath. But the pills he prescribed never left the box. Turning his back on all, moaning to the wall papered with yellow flowers on a green background, Soliman was seeking a god who had his abode in far-off Dahomey, at some dark crossroad, his red phallus on a crutch he carried for that purpose.
Papa Legba, l’ouvri barrié-a pou moin, agó yé,
Papa Legba, ouvri barrié-a pou moin, pou
moin passé.
The Royal Palace
Ti Noël had been among the ringleaders in the sack of the Palace of Sans Souci. As a result, the ruins of the old manor house of Lenormand de Mézy were bizarrely furnished. The building continued roofless for lack of two points of support on which to rest a beam or rooftree. But with his machete the old man had pried away fallen stones, bringing to light parts of the foundation, a windowsill, three steps, a piece of a wall that still displayed, clinging to the brick, the molding of the old Norman dining-room. The night the Plaine teemed with men, women, and children carrying on their heads pendulum clocks, chairs, draperies, saints’ canopies, girandoles, prayer stools, lamps, and washbasins, Ti Noël had made several trips to Sans Souci. In this way he had become the owner of a boule table that stood before the straw-strewn fireplace where he slept, hidden from sight behind a Coromandel screen covered with dim figures against a dull-gold background. An embalmed moonfish, the gift of the Royal Society of London to Prince Victor, lay on the tiles of a floor pushed up by grass and roots alongside a music box and a decanter whose thick green glass held bubbles the color of the rainbow. He had also carried off a doll dressed as a shepherdess, an armchair upholstered in tapestry, and three volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie on which he was in the habit of sitting to eat sugar cane.
But the pride of the old man’s heart was a dress coat that had belonged to Henri Christophe, of green silk, with cuffs of salmon-colored lace, which he wore all the time, his regal air heightened by a braided straw hat that he had folded and crushed into the shape of a bicorne, adding a red flower in lieu of a cockade. Of an afternoon he could be seen sitting among his weather-exposed furniture playing with the doll, which opened and closed its eyes, or winding his music box, which repeated from sunrise to sunset the same German Ländler. Ti Noël now talked continually. He talked, his arms opened wide, in the middle of the roads; he talked to the washerwomen kneeling beside the sandy brooks with their breasts bare; he talked to the children dancing in a circle. But most of all he talked when he sat behind his table, holding a guava twig in his hand as a scepter. To his mind came blurred recollections of things told by Macandal, the One-Armed, so many years back that he could not recall when. In those days he began to have the conviction that he had a mission to carry out, although no intimation, no sign, had revealed its nature to him. However, it was something great, something commensurate with the rights acquired by one whose days had been so long on the earth, forgotten by his children concerned only with their own children, on this and the other side of the sea. Moreover, it was clear that great things were about to take place. When the women saw him approaching, they waved bright cloths in sign of reverence, like the palms spread before Jesus one Sunday. When he passed a cabin, the old women invited him to sit down, bringing him a little raw rum in a gourd or a newly rolled cigar. At a festival of drums, Ti Noël had been possessed by the spirit of the King of Angola, and had pronounced a long speech filled with riddles and promises. Then herds had appeared on his lands. Those new animals that grazed among the ruins were undoubtedly gifts from his subjects. Seated in his armchair, his coat unbuttoned, his straw hat pulled down to his ears, slowly scratching his bare belly, Ti Noël issued orders to the wind. But they were the edicts of a peaceable government, inasmuch as no tyranny of whites or Negroes seemed to offer a threat to his liberty. The old man filled the gaps in the tumbledown walls with fine things, appointed any passer-by a minister, any hay-gatherer a general, distributing baronetcies, presenting wreaths, blessing the little girls, and awarding flowers for services rendered. It was thus the Order of the Bitter Broom had come into being, the Order of the Christmas Gift, the Order of the Pacific Ocean, and the Order of the Nightshade. But the most sought after was the Order of the Sunflower, which was the most decorative. As the half of a tiled floor which constituted his Audience Chamber was very good for dancing, his palace would fill up with countryfolk, who brought their reed pipes, their cháchás, and their drums. Lighted faggots were fitted into forked branches and Ti Noël, more majestic than ever in his green coat, presided over the feast, seated between a priest of the Savanna, who represented the native church that had sprung up, and an old veteran, one of those who had fought against Rochambeau at Vertières, who brought out for special occasions his campaign uniform of faded blue and red that had turned strawberry from the rain that leaked into his
house.
The Surveyors
But one morning the Surveyors appeared. One had to have seen the Surveyors at work to grasp the terror aroused by the presence of these beings who pursue the calling of insects. The Surveyors who had come down to the Plaine from distant Port-au-Prince beyond the cloudy hills were silent, light-skinned men wearing—it must be admitted—fairly normal attire, who stretched long cords along the ground, drove stakes, carried plummets, looked through telescopes, and bristled with measuring rods and squares. When Ti Noël saw these suspicious characters going and coming on his domain, he spoke severely to them. But the Surveyors paid no attention to him. They went here and there insolently, measuring everything and writing things in their gray books with thick carpenter’s pencils. The old man observed with rage that they spoke the language of the French, that language which he had forgotten since the days when M. Lenormand de Mézy had bet and lost him in a card game in Santiago de Cuba. Ti Noël ordered the sons-of-bitches off his land, shouting so furiously that one of the Surveyors grabbed him by the back of the neck, and to remove him from the field of vision of his telescope gave him a sound whack across the belly with his measuring stick. The old man withdrew to his chimney, peering out from behind the Coromandel screen to growl maledictions. But the next day, roaming the Plaine in search of something to eat, he noted that there were Surveyors everywhere, and that mounted mulattoes, wearing shirts open at the throat, silk sashes, and military boots, were directing vast operations of plowing and clearing carried out by hundreds of Negro prisoners. Astride their donkeys, carrying the hens and pigs, hundreds of peasants were le ving their cabins amid the weeping and lamentation of the women, to seek refuge in the hills. Ti Noël learned from a fugitive that farm work had been made obligatory, and that the whip was now in the hands of Republican mulattoes, the new masters of the Plaine du Nord.
The Kingdom of This World Page 8