The Kingdom of This World: A Novel by Alejo Carpentier

Author:Alejo Carpentier
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Magical Realism, Fiction, Literary, Historical, Classics, Cuban Literature
ISBN: 9780374530112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

The departure of Pauline marked the end of such common sense as still existed in the colony. Under the government of Rochambeau, the remaining landowners of the Plaine, all hope of recovering their former prosperity gone, gave themselves over without let or hindrance to a vast orgy. Nobody paid any attention to clocks, nor did dawn mark the end of night. The watchword was eat, drink, and be merry before catastrophe swallows up all pleasure. The Governor granted favors in exchange for women. The ladies of the Cap mocked the late Leclerc’s pronouncement that “white women who had prostituted themselves to Negroes were to be sent back to France, whatever their rank.” Many women became tribades, appearing at dances with mulatto girls whom they called their cocottes. The daughters of slaves were forced while still infants. This was the road leading straight to horror. On holidays Rochambeau began to throw Negroes to his dogs, and when the beasts hesitated to sink their teeth into a human body before the brilliant, finely clad spectators, the victim was pricked with a sword to make the tempting blood flow. On the assumption that this would keep the Negroes in their place, the Governor had sent to Cuba for hundreds of mastiffs: “They’ll be puking niggers!”

The day the ship Ti Noël had seen rode into the Cap, it tied up alongside another schooner coming from Martinique with a cargo of poisonous snakes which the general planned to turn loose on the Plaine so they would bite the peasants who lived in outlying cabins and who gave aid to the runaway slaves in the hills. But these snakes, creatures of Damballah, were to die without laying eggs, disappearing together with the last colonists of the ancien régime. Now the Great Loas smiled upon the Negroes’ arms. Victory went to those who had warrior gods to invoke. Ogoun Badagri guided the cold steel charges against the last redoubts of the Goddess Reason. And, as in all combats deserving of memory because someone had made the sun stand still or brought down walls with a trumpet blast, in those days there were men who covered the mouths of the enemy cannon with their bare breasts and men who had the power to deflect leaden bullets from their bodies. It was then that there appeared about the countryside Negro priests, untonsured and unordained, who were known as the Fathers of the Savanna. When it came to praying in Latin at the pallet of the dying, they were as learned as the French priests. But they made themselves better understood, for when they recited the Lord’s Prayer or the Hail Mary, they gave the words accents and inflections that made them like other hymns everyone knew. At last certain matters of life and death were being taken care of in the family.

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