Tourists as Primitives? Inverting the Tourist Gaze in The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier

Abstract

One of the most puzzling aspects of Alejo Carpentier’s historical novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) is its depiction of the French general Charles LeClerc’s young wife Paulina Bonaparte, who accompanies him from France to Haiti. In this novel, which is above all else a chronicle of the Haitian Revolution, it is difficult to determine Carpentier’s reasons for including the episode of Paulina, whose licentious behavior commands much of the reader’s attention but does little to advance the main plot of the novel. Has Carpentier included her as an illustration of the white colonists’ decadence? Is she meant to symbolize the laziness of the French colonial officials (whose lackadaisical behavior set the stage for the rebellions that would ultimately overthrow their rule?) Carpentier describes Paulina as a coquette about whom “hundreds of men dream each night in their cabins, castles and bunkers.”¹

At the beginning her French attendants gave her massages, but one day she decided that a man’s hand would be deeper and more vigorous, and she enlisted the services of Soliman, a former bathhouse attendant. In addition to caring for her body, he covered her in almond creams, shaved her and clipped her toenails. When he bathed her, Paulina took a devious pleasure in brushing against his legs in the water of the pool. She knew that he was eternally tormented by desire, and he was always throwing her sidelong glances with the false docility of a dog scathed by the whip. She often enjoyed beating him with a green branch, not hurting him but laughing at his expressions of contrived pain.²