The Haitian Trilogy: Plays: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth (8 page)

Eating your own stomach, where the sickness is;

Your smell of blood offends the nostrils of God.

CHRISTOPHE

Perhaps the smell of sweat under my arms

Offend that God, too, quivering His white crooked nostrils.

Well, tell Him after death that it is honest

As the seven words of blood broken on His flesh; tell Him

The nigger smell, that even kings must wear,

Is bread and wine to life.

I am proud, I have worked and grown

This country to its stature: tell Him that.

BRELLE

With hammer and hatred breaking

What Toussaint built, exploding

Where he created. How many dead

Children has your love considered?

Will you never learn the lesson

You taught your best friend in the grammar death?

You broke his breath like a stalk; and now you walk,

A subtle monster lost in rooms of himself;

Your hate walks out of screens

With fifty murders smiling in its hand.

You have become worse than your Dessalines;

You have grown mad with satisfaction and despair.

How long, King, will you continue to wear

A cloak of blood around an ex-slave shoulder?

CHRISTOPHE

Slave, eh? You have never forgotten that.

Will that never dissolve?

I have not a conscience but a memory.

Brelle, you have gone too far.

BRELLE
(
Feeling his success.
)

Not far enough.

We must all suffer, even you, eh, King?

The anatomy of pity, the pearl of pain, is common suffering.

A unity of wounds transcends the agony.

Think how the world is suffering and you will smile;

Think how so many kings were killed and you will feel lucky.

You think a slave is shame …

When I was in a seminary in Provence,

Meditating martyrdom among the poplars,

I thought and toyed of a bright martyrdom,

Selling my faith for death, to blacks …

CHRISTOPHE

I have told you myself

Not to refer contemptuously to my people.

BRELLE

They are my people too, King,

And they are black;

Spiritual power has never made me despotic,

As temporal power has made you insane, neurotic;

What kind of perverse kindness is it that denies

Them white bread but will not let a friend call them blacks?

CHRISTOPHE

You say it again,

Priest. I am tired of your complexion;

I have had too much to do with this.

Besides, you talk to no slave …

BRELLE

And you to God’s elect,

An archbishop.

CHRISTOPHE

Because of my rule, and Dessalines’s dying.

BRELLE

What black ignorance in king and country …

CHRISTOPHE

Provoking me …

But why?

What comfort is your death,

Perhaps you think … Oh, I see

Rebellion, a trick with you and Pétion?

BRELLE

You are so lost.

Good night.

(
BRELLE
is going. He passes contemptuously by
CHRISTOPHE
.
The stabbing is quiet and terrible, with a minimum amount of struggle.
)

CHRISTOPHE

What fools! Assembling on the shelves of their lives

Clay gods, and in a dusty room,

Half-broken faiths that falsify,

Building their need for comfort into religions!

The one final thing is death, and how you die. I die crowned!

And you, white man,

This death beats dying; I have built

These châteaux of my past that no time eats.

A slave, I survive.

Vastey … Vastey …

VASTEY
(
Who has been near.
)

Yes, Henri.

CHRISTOPHE

We are safe now.

VASTEY

I know.

CHRISTOPHE

We have strangled memory and regret,

But this must be the last.

I nearly could not kill him, but when he said …

What drums are those?

They are coming nearer.

Oh, Vastey, my dreams …

Ruin, ruin, O King, ruin and blood!

Someone has blown out the candle of the sun.

Ruin and blood.

Stain my eyes, my linen, I walked alone in a wood

Of skeletons and thorns where the leaves dripped blood.

Get this mess cleaned.

Do you hear drums?

VASTEY

Forget. Try to sleep;

We are safe, you talk like old Sylla.

What do you hear? The wind, that lost ghost

Under the willows, with a thread for a voice; only

The wind; I hear it, too.

Do you think it is Pétion?

CHRISTOPHE

Ah, who is Pétion?…

I want to sleep.

VASTEY

Yes.

You know they really sound like drums …

What’s the matter?

CHRISTOPHE

My legs, my legs …

I always get these pains …

A cramp I cannot stab away.

Help me to the throne: it will pass.

(
Fade-out.
)

Scene 3

The scene is the same as before. It is dim.
CHRISTOPHE
,
wearing only his general’s cloak, torn open to show his bare chest, is sprawled on the throne, muttering to himself.
VASTEY
,
near the throne, is watching a
WITCH DOCTOR
fuss over skull and incense in an elaborate, unconvincing ritual.

VASTEY

How are our legs now?

CHRISTOPHE

I cannot move them …

VASTEY

Henri, we must leave the citadel,

Pétion is already a day near;

Even here, La Ferrière, is not safe.

You must …

CHRISTOPHE

I know, I know.

(
He indicates the
WITCH DOCTOR
.)

What is he doing?

Tell him to stop praying to wooded mercies and get

Me erect; tell him it is useless.

Christ and Damballa, or any god …

VASTEY

Wooden gods, they are not much good;

If I stocked all the superstitions end to end,

Or let now a crooked prayer climb, no god

Would excuse guilt.

CHRISTOPHE

Tell him to try again the rub, that mixture,

The old herbs, the antique magic,

That breed abortions; the weeds and smoking herbs cropped,

Hemlock-harmful, lethe-lulling,

Flowers of forgetting, raped from their cradles

In smoke, mists, and weathers …

VASTEY

He says it is wrong to rub you again so soon.

CHRISTOPHE

Ah … tell him to go.

VASTEY
(
Touching the
WITCH DOCTOR
.)

Allez.

CHRISTOPHE

Ask him to leave the skull and incense …

But go, with his gods and their wooden smiles …

(
The
WITCH DOCTOR
goes.
)

Well, Brelle is dead …

VASTEY

I stumbled on his sprawled pride in the corridor,

He has his martyrdom.

No one to bury him. We are alone now.

Pétion powerful, Sylla silent.

Dessalines dead, Christophe … cramped …

This cramp, where is it?

CHRISTOPHE
(
Irritated
)

How many times must I say?

I don’t know; all over.

VASTEY

My own paralysis

Creeps somewhere between my will

And my regret. There are broken statues

On my tongue, dead stale civilizations

Breeding in my brain. You, if you could walk,

You could see the citadel, the soldiers have left it.

There is dust settling on the armoury,

Shafted beams with dust rising like history in the chapel,

Cracked windows and the vocabulary of ruin

Littered on lawns; the gardens and menagerie, the oleander

Groves, dead or rotten.

CHRISTOPHE

But regret,

Why do you regret?

VASTEY

For two days, with your paralysis,

I have lived in my huge linen rooms, eating my fears

Like the worm gnawing on the corner

Of the shroud of silence;

Drinking remorse in a spoonful of soup.

Dust on the mirrors, and floors cracking …

When I think of the past.

God!

CHRISTOPHE

You cannot stop gabbling?

If I had legs, and an army …

VASTEY

And Pétion is coming waving a new constitution.

Ragged herds follow. Oh, if he knew, or they,

How they were marching tall into the grave, murders, fevers,

And what responsibility the crown tightens.

Oh God, Henri!

CHRISTOPHE

Do not call gods, Vastey.

The gods are monstered children; they build

To break, or history

Burning biographies like rubbish, while time

Carries their smoke like memory past the nostrils.

Those who die hoping are grey children;

So death, selling his wares,

Fooled the archbishop.

VASTEY

But, as you said of Sylla,

He is safe now. Dead with dignity.

CHRISTOPHE

He was white.

VASTEY

In death, Henri, the bone is anonymous;

Complexions only grin above the skeleton;

Under the grass the dust is an anthology of creeds and skins.

Who can tell what that skull was?

Was it for that we quarreled?

CHRISTOPHE

Yes, fool; for that Haiti bled,

And spilled the valuable aristocratic blood

To build these citadels for this complexion

Signed by the sun.

Yes, for that we killed, because some were black,

And some were spat on.

For that I overturned the horn of plenty,

And harvest grey hairs and calumny;

It is I who, history, gave them this voice to shout anarchy

Against the King. I made this King they hate,

Shaped out of slaves …

What have I done, what have I done, Vastey, to deserve all this?

VASTEY

Dessalines, Brelle,

The violent love of self that kills the self.

Cathedrals and cruelties;

The apocalypse horsemen riding down starving ranks;

Thanks, thanks, thanks,

Forced to the King from bleeding lips;

Cannon and cruelty poured from the sides of ships.

Oh, Henri, we are guilty; admit, admit, it’s time.

CHRISTOPHE

How dare you assume

Such a familiar tone?

The only unguent I can rub on these bones

Is I have done what I would do again.

VASTEY

Is it not possible that you are sinking

In a quicksand of safety, thinking

Corruptions safe as the sand closes? It is not your house

You must put in order but yourself.

CHRISTOPHE

You take advantage while I am weak;

If I could flog these limbs to action—

(
The drums beat faintly, and the action, dim as it is, petrifies them both.
CHRISTOPHE
withdraws, slowly, a pistol from hiding, then settles it more accessibly.
)

Pétion is powerful. They are coming,

They are coming, Vastey.

If I could move …

VASTEY

You cannot tell how near they are,

And it is thickening,

And the châteaux are tall and dark. I must hide. I must hide.

The light …

Now it is dark.

This is the room where Brelle, with music playing …

Hither a new king, and another archbishop,

Monotonies of history …

We are finished, Majesty,

We were a tragedy of success.

CHRISTOPHE

It was not a great life, Vastey,

But the dying compensates it:

No slave, but a king

Whose exhalation is signed with meteors,

Whose spilled blood canonizes its anarchy.

Think of Brelle’s eyes with nothing in the pupils,

His hands contorted on a crooked crucifix,

Redemption, not riot, on his dusty lips;

And consider how confessions, penultimate pieties,

Are comical or forced. I cannot regret,

I acted evenly.

And I was often happy.

VASTEY

Happy, Henri?

Then no contritions?

(
CHRISTOPHE
picks up the pistol absently as the drums mount in tension.
)

CHRISTOPHE

Happiness is sensual, my equerry;

The fine meal, and the ready wife, the smile

Between the waltzes and cadenzas, the leap of lechery

In the wild ropes and rivers of the thighs.

Grief with despair, ruin, the crack of time,

Wreckage of several lives around our ankles, these lives

Are hopes the sea rejects; time’s tidal griefs

Rock with the moon’s knock, waves wreck our wraths,

Hopes drown, and kings fade on the memory.

These are the hard truths we cannot eat,

The black anarchy of the night, with dawn

Bleeding from its edges like a wound; the straw you hold,

Whether it is religion, fame, or hope, the kiss, the dying action,

Made by a huge mimer in an empty hall—

All these are the rich agony of living.

We wait, with accident our mercy, and truth is pain;