The kingdom of this world alejo carpentier pdf

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Examine how your chosen text explores what it means to be of Haitian descent in the New World. What is the significance of Haitian and Haitian Dyasporic traditions as they are portrayed here? How does this work reiterate or complicate claims about Haiti? How does it address or reinforce discriminatory practices, particularly as it relates to the intersections between race, class, gender, nationality, or sexuality?

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BOOKS: PDFs BELOW

Allende, Isabel. Island Beneath the Sea (ISBN: 9780061988257). SECONDARY

Carpentier, Alejo. Kingdom of This World (ISBN: 9780374537388). SECONDARY SOURCE

Danticat, Edwidge. Butterfly’s Way (ISBN: ISBN: 9781569472187). SECONDARY SOURCE

---, ed. Everything Inside (ISBN: 9780525521273). PRIMARY SOURCE

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 and 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. 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 authority 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.

At a given moment all the fans snapped shut. There was a great silence behind the military drums. Macandal, his waist girded by striped pants, bound with ropes and knots, his skin gleaming with recent wounds, was moving toward the center of the square. The masters’ eyes questioned the faces of the slaves. But the Negroes showed spiteful indifference. What did the whites know of Negro matters? In his cycle of metamorphoses, Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects, making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings, or long

antennae. He had been fly, centipede, moth, ant, tarantula, ladybug, even a glow-worm with phosphorescent green lights. When the moment came, the bonds of the Mandingue, no longer possessing a body to bind, would trace the shape of a man in the air for a second before they slipped down the post. And Macandal, transformed into a buzzing mosquito, would light on the very tricorne of the commander of the troops to laugh at the dismay of the whites. This was what their masters did not know; for that reason they had squandered so much money putting on this useless show, which would prove how completely helpless they were against a man chrismed by the great Loas.

Macandal was now lashed to the post. The executioner had picked up an ember with the tongs. With a gesture rehearsed the evening before in front of a mirror, the Governor unsheathed his dress sword and gave the order for the sentence to be carried out. The fire began to rise toward the Mandingue, licking his legs. At that moment Macandal moved the stump of his arm, which they had been unable to tie up, in a threatening gesture which was none the less terrible for being partial, howling unknown spells and violently thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square:

“Macandal saved!’’ Pandemonium followed. The guards fell with rifle butts on the

howling blacks, who now seemed to overflow the streets, climbing toward the windows. And the noise and screaming and uproar were such that very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry. When the slaves were restored to order, the fire was burning normally like any fire of good wood, and the breeze blowing from the sea was lifting the smoke toward the windows where more than one lady who had fainted had recovered consciousness. There was no longer anything more to see.

That afternoon the slaves returned to their plantations laughing all the way. Macandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World. Once more the whites had been outwitted by the

Mighty Powers of the Other Shore. And while M. Lenormand de Mézy in his nightcap commented with his devout wife on the Negroes’ lack of feelings at the torture of one of their own—drawing therefrom a number of philosophical considerations on the inequality of the human races which he planned to develop in a speech larded with Latin quotations—Ti Noël got one of the kitchen wenches with twins, taking her three times in a manger of the stables.

Part Two

“. . . je lui dis qu’elle serait reine là-bas; qu’elle trait en palanquin; qu’une esclave serait attentive au moindre de ses mouvements pour exécuter sa volonté; qu’elle se promènerait sous les orangers en fleur; que les serpents ne devraient lui faire aucune peur, attendu qu’il n’y en avait pas dans les Antilles; que les sauvages n’étaient plus à craindre; que ce n’était pas là que la broche était mise pour rôtir les gens; enfin j’achevais mon discours en lui disant qu’elle serait bien jolie mise en créole.”

—Madame d’Abrantés (“...I told her that she would be queen out there; that she would go about in a palanquin; that a slave would watch her smallest gesture in order to carry out her wishes; that she would stroll under orange-trees in bloom; that she need not fear snakes, for there are no snakes in the Antilles; that the savages are not to be feared; that people are not roasted on spits out there; at the end I rounded out my speech by telling her that she would be very pretty dressed as a Creole.”)

The Daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë

Not long after the death of M. Lenormand de Mézy’s second wife, Ti Noël had to go to the Cap to pick up some harness that had been ordered from Paris for state occasions. During those years the city had made remarkable progress.Nearly all the houses were of two stories, with wide-eaved balconies and high ogival doors trimmed with polished bolts or hinges with clover-shaped heads. There were more tailors, hatters, feather-workers, hairdressers; there was a shop that sold violas and transverse flutes, as well as the music of contredanses and sonatas. The bookseller displayed the latest number of the Gazette de Saint-Domingue, printed on thin paper with a border of vignettes and spaced leads. And, as a further luxury, a theater for drama and opera had been opened in the rue Vandreuil. This prosperity was particularly good for the rue des Espagnols, where the most prosperous visitors took lodgings at the Auberge de la Couronne, which Henri Christophe, the master chef, had just bought from Mlle Monjean, its former mistress. The Negro’s dishes were famous for the perfection of their seasoning when he was trying to please a guest newly arrived from Paris, or, in his olla podrida, for the abundance of ingredients when he was catering to the appetite of some hungry Spaniard who had come from the other side of the island in clothes so outmoded that they seemed those of the old buccaneers. Moreover, Henri Christophe, in his high white cap in the smoky kitchen, had a magic touch with turtle vol-au-vent or wood pigeons. And when he put his hand to the mixing bowl, the fragrance of his puff paste carried as far as the rue des Trois Visages.

Bereaved once more, M. Lenormand de Mézy, without the least respect for the memory of the dear departed, became an assiduous visitor to the Cap theater, where actresses from Paris sang Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s arias or loftily declaimed tragic alexandrines, pausing between hemistichs to wipe the sweat from their brows. An

anonymous libel in verse, excoriating the inconstancy of certain widowers, revealed to the world that a rich planter of the Plaine was finding nightly solace in the lush Flemish beauty of Mlle Floridor, a graceless interpreter of the role of confidante, whose name always appeared at the end of the cast, but who was uniquely gifted in the phallic arts. At her persuasion the master had departed for Paris unexpectedly when the season ended, leaving the management of the plantation in the hands of a relative. But something strange had happened to him. After a few months, a growing longing for sun, for space, for abundance, for command, for Negresses tumbled alongside a canefield, made it plain to him that this “return to France,” to which he had looked forward for so many years, was no longer the key to happiness for him. After all his cursing of the colony, after all his diatribes against its climate and his contempt for the boorishness of the upstart colonists, he returned to the plantation, bringing with him the actress, whom the Paris managers had refused to hire because of her lack of dramatic ability. And so, on Sundays, two splendid carriages with liveried postilions en route to church once more adorned the Plaine. In Mlle Floridor’s conveyance—the lady insisted on using her stage name—ten mulatto girls squirmed about on the back seat, twittering incessantly while their blue petticoats fluttered in the wind.

Twenty years had gone by in all this. Ti Noël had fathered twelve children by one of the cooks. The plantation was more flourishing than ever, with its roads bordered with ipecac and its vines already yielding a tart wine. Nevertheless, with advancing age M. Lenormand de Mézy had become cranky and drank heavily. He suffered from a perpetual erotomania that kept him panting after adolescent slave girls, the smell of whose skin drove him out of his mind. He multiplied the corporal punishments meted out to the men, especially those guilty of fornication outside the marriage bed. Meanwhile the actress, faded and gnawed by malaria, avenged her artistic failure on the Negresses who bathed her and combed her hair, ordering them whipped on the slightest pretext. There were nights when she took to the bottle. It was not unusual on such occasions for her to order all the slaves to turn out, and under the full

moon, between belches of malmsey, to declaim before her captive audience the great roles she had never been allowed to interpret. Wrapped in her confidante’s veils, the timid player of bit parts attacked with quavering voice the familiar bravura passages:

Mes crimes désormais ont comblé la mesure Je respire à la fois l’inceste et l’imposture Mes homicides mains, promptes à me venger, Dans le sang innocent brûlent de se plonger,

(My sins are heaped Already to overflowing. I am seeped At once in incest and hypocrisy. My murderous hands, hot for avenging me, Are fain to plunge themselves in guiltless

blood.) Agape with amazement, at a loss to know what it was all about,

but gathering from certain words that in Creole, too, referred to misdemeanors whose punishment ranged from a thrashing to having one’s head chopped off, the Negroes came to the conclusion that the lady must have committed many crimes in days gone by, and that she was probably in the colony to get away from the police of Paris, like so many of the prostitutes in the Cap, who had unsettled accounts with the metropolis. The word “crime” was similar in the island patois; everybody knew what judges were called in French; and, as for hell and red devils, they had been vividly described by the second wife of M. Lenormand de Mézy, a grim censor of all sins of the flesh. Nothing that this woman, wearing a white robe that was transparent in the torchlight, was confessing was of an edifying nature:

Minos, juge aux enfers tous les pâles humains. Ah, combien frémira son ombre épouvantée, Lorsqu’il verra sa fille à ses yeux présentée, Contrainte d’avouer tant de forfaits divers,

Et des crimes peut-être inconnus aux enfers! (Minos, below, judges the souls of men. Ah, how his shade aghast will shudder when He sees his child is come before his eyes, forced to avow so many infamies Diverse, and even deeds unknown to hell!) In the face of such immorality, the slaves of the Lenormand de

Mézy plantation continued unshaken in their reverence for Macandal. Ti Noël passed on the tales of the Mandingue to his children, teaching them simple little songs he had made up in Macandal’s honor while currying and brushing the horses. Besides, it was a good thing to keep green the memory of the One-Armed, for though far away on important duties, he would return to this land when he was least expected.

The Solemn Pact

The claps of thunder were echoing like avalanches over the rocky ridges of Morne Rouge and dying slowly away in the depths of the ravines when the delegates from the various plantations of the Plaine du Nord. covered with mud to the waist, shivering under their soaking shirts, reached the heart of Bois Caïman. To make matters worse, the August rain, which fell warm or cold as the wind shifted, had been coming down with increasing fury ever since the slave curfew had sounded. His pants clinging to his groin, Ti Noël tried to protect his head with a burlap sack folded in the shape of a hood. In spite of the darkness, there was no possibility that a. spy might have sneaked into the gathering. The word had been passed around at the last minute by men who could be trusted. Although the voices were kept low, the buzz of the conversations filled the forest, mingled with the pervading presence of the rain falling on the trembling leaves.

Suddenly a mighty voice arose in the midst of the congress of shadows, a voice whose ability to pass without intermediate stages from a deep to a shrill register gave a strange emphasis to its words. There was much of invocation and much of spell in that speech filled with angry inflections and shouts. It was Bouckman the Jamaican, who was talking. Although the thunder drowned out whole phrases, Ti Noël managed to grasp that something had happened in France, and that some very powerful gentlemen had declared that the Negroes should be given their freedom, but that the rich landowners of the Cap, who were all monarchist sons of bitches, had refused to obey them. At this point Bouckman let the rain fall on the trees for a few seconds, as though waiting for the lightning that jagged across the sea. Then, when the thunder had died away, he stated that a pact had been sealed between the initiated on this side of the water and the great Loas of Africa to begin the war when the auspices were

favorable. And out of the applause that rose about him came this final admonition:

“The white men’s God orders the crime. Our gods demand vengeance from us. They will guide our arms and give us help. Destroy the image of the white man’s God who thirsts for our tears; let us listen to the cry of freedom within ourselves.”

The delegates had forgotten the rain running down them from chin to belly, stiffening the leather of their belts. A howl went up out of the storm. Beside Bouckman a bony, long-limbed Negress was brandishing a ritual machete.

Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, O!

Damballah m’ap tiré canon, Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, Faï Ogoun, O!

Damballah m’ap tiré canon! Ogoun of the Irons, Ogoun the Warrior, Ogoun of the Forges,

Ogoun Marshal, Ogoun of the Lances, Ogoun-Chango, Ogoun- Kankanikan, Ogoun-Batala, Ogoun-Panama, Ogoun-Bakoulé were now invoked by the priestess of the Rada amid the shouting of the shadows:

Ogoun Badagri

Général Sanglant, Saizi z’orage

Ou scell’orage Ou fait Kataoun z’éclai!

The machete suddenly buried itself in the belly of a black pig,

which spewed forth guts and lungs in three squeals. Then, called by the name of their masters, for they had no other, the delegates came forward one by one to smear their lips with the foaming blood of the pig, caught in a big wooden bowl. Then they dropped face downward on the wet ground. Ti Noël, like the others, swore always to obey Bouckman. The Jamaican then clasped in his arms Jean- François, Biassou, and Jeannot, who would not return to their plantations that night. The general staff of the insurrection had been

named. The signal would be given eight days later. It was possible that aid would come from the Spanish colonists on the other side of the island, bitter enemies of the French. And in view of the fact that a proclamation had to be drawn up and nobody knew how to write, someone remembered the goose quill of the Abbé de la Haye, priest of Dondon, an admirer of Voltaire who had shown signs of unequivocal sympathy for the Negroes ever since he had read the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

As the rain had swollen the rivers, Ti Noël had to swim the slimy brook to be in the stable before the overseer woke up. The dawn bell found him sitting and singing, up to his waist in a pile of fresh esparto grass that smelled of the sun.

The Call of the Conch Shells

M. Lenormand de Mézy had been in a vile humor ever since his last visit to the Cap. Governor Blancheland, a monarchist like himself, was completely out of patience with the vaporings of those Utopian imbeciles in Paris whose hearts bled for the black slaves. How easy it was to dream of the equality of men of all races between faro hands in the Café de la Régence or under the arcades of the Palais Royal. From views of the harbors of America decorated with compass cards and Tritons with wind-puffed cheeks; from pictures of indolent mulatto girls and naked washerwomen, of siestas under banana trees engraved by Abraham Brunias and exhibited in France along with verses of De Parny and the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” it was very easy to envisage Santo Domingo as the leafy paradise of Paul and Virginia, where the melons did not hang from the branches of the trees only because they would have killed the passers-by if they had fallen from such heights. In May, the Constituent Assembly, a mob of liberalists full of theories from the Encyclopédie, had voted to give the Negroes, sons of manumitted slaves, political rights. And now, faced with the specter of a civil war threatened by the plantation owners, these visionaries à la Stanislaus de Wimpffen answered: “Better the colonies should perish than a principle.”

It must have been about ten at night when M. Lenormand de Mézy, weary of chewing the bitter cud of his reflections, went out to the tobacco shed with the idea of forcing one of the girls who slipped in at this hour to steal some leaves for their fathers to chew. From far off came the sound of a conch-shell trumpet. What was strange was that the slow bellow was answered by others in the hills and forests. And others floated in from farther off by the sea, from the direction of the farms of Milot. It was as though all the shell trumpets of the coast, all the Indian lambis, all the purple conchs that served as

doorstops, all the shells that lay alone and petrified on the summits of the hills, had begun to sing in chorus. Suddenly, another conch raised its voice in the main quarters of the plantation. Others, higher- pitched, answered from the indigo works, from the tobacco shed, from the stable. M. Lenormand de Mézy, frightened, hid behind a clump of bougainvillaea.

All the doors of the quarters burst open at the same time, broken down from within. Armed with sticks, the slaves surrounded the houses of the overseers, seizing the tools. The bookkeeper, who had appeared, pistol in hand, was the first to fall, his throat slit from top to bottom by a mason’s trowel. After bathing their arms in the blood of the white man, the Negroes ran toward the big house, shouting death to the master, to the Governor, to God, and to all the Frenchmen in the world. But, driven by a longstanding thirst, most of them rushed to the cellar looking for liquor. Pick-blows demolished kegs of salt fish. Their staves sprung, casks began to gush wine, reddening the women’s skirts. Snatched up with shouts and shoves, the demijohns of brandy, the carboys of rum, were splintered against the walls. Laughing and scuffling, the Negroes went sliding through pickled tomatoes, capers, herring roe, and marjoram on the brick floor, a slime thinned by a stream of rancid oil flowing from a skin bag. A naked Negro, as a joke, jumped into a tub full of lard. Two old women were quarreling in Congolese over a clay pot. Hams and dried codfish tails were jerked from the ceiling. Sidestepping the mob, Ti Noël put his mouth to the bung of a barrel of Spanish wine and his Adam’s apple rose and fell for a long time. Then followed by his older sons, he went up to the first floor of the house. For a long time now he had dreamed of raping Mlle Floridor. On those nights of tragic declamations she had displayed beneath the tunic with its Greek-key border breasts undamaged by the irreversible outrage of the years.

Dagon inside the Ark

After hiding for two days at the bottom of a dry well that was none the less gloomy for being shallow, M. Lenormand de Mézy, pale with hunger and fear, slowly raised his head above the wellcurb. All was silent. The horde had set out for the Cap, leaving behind fires that had a name when one searched the base of the pillars of smoke that curved upward to the sky. A small powder magazine had just been blown up near Le Carrefour des Peres. The master approached the house, passing the swollen corpse of the bookkeeper. A horrible stench came from the burned kennels. There the Negroes had settled a long-pending score, smearing the doors with tar to make sure none of the dogs got through alive. M. Lenormand de Mézy directed his steps toward the bedroom. Mlle Floridor lay on the rug, legs sprawled wide, a sickle buried in her entrails. Her dead hand was still clenched around one of the bedposts in a gesture cruelly reminiscent of that of a sleeping girl in a licentious engraving entitled The Dream which adorned the wall. With groaning sobs, M. Lenormand de Mézy dropped beside her. Then he snatched up a rosary, and said all the prayers he knew, including one he had learned as a child to cure chilblains. Thus he spent several days, terrified, afraid to set foot outside the house given over, standing wide open, to its own ruin, until one day a messenger on horseback pulled up his mount so short in the back patio that it went head first against a window, striking sparks from the stones. His news, bellowed out, aroused M. Lenormand de Mézy from his stupor. The horde had been defeated. The head of the Jamaican, Bouckman. green and open-mouthed, was already crawling with worms on the very spot where Macandal’s flesh had become stinking ashes. Total extermination of the Negroes was the order, but some armed groups were still sacking outlying dwellings. Without taking time to bury his wife, M. Lenormand de Mézy jumped up behind the messenger, who

set out at a gallop on the road to the Cap. A burst of gunfire came from the distance. The messenger dug his heels into the horse’s sides.