The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  In the first rush of her disappointment, she did not take in the tall, freckle-faced lieutenant with his red moustache and blue eyes the colour of the market-women’s beads — and then she understood the pounding of her heart.

  That evening he came to Simbodji with a request for hammockeers: he was going to Abomey with a message to deliver to the King.

  At dinner he wore the blue and gold mess uniform of the Queen’s 2nd West India Regiment, which was stationed at Cape Coast Castle. She spoke a little English and he said, ‘We’ll soon put a stop to that pidgin.’

  Slowly, so she should understand every word, he told her of the Queen of England and the City of London. She tried to imagine snow — soft and white like the down of the silk-cotton tree, but cold, how cold she could not guess.

  She played the Swiss musical boxes that had once belonged to her father. They watched the steel combs and the bristling brass cylinders that turned erratically because the combs were corroded with rust. He tried to sing Schubert’s ‘Trout’, but the tempo was far too erratic and they ended up laughing.

  Then she found the key to the box that played waltzes. Not knowing the steps, she let her feet drift and the weight of her body fall on his hand in the small of her back.

  He played billiards with her half-brother Antonio and allowed him to win. She heard them murmuring in English and, when she looked in their direction, saw the avid blue eyes through clouds of Havana smoke.

  Next morning he came with presents: two scarves of Madras silk, a marcasite necklace and a gilt toilet mirror — all intended for the ladies of the King.

  At sunset they walked to the garden at Zomai where Dom Francisco had built a Chinese pavilion. The trunks of the mango trees had been whitewashed and the breeze stirred a glissando of coco fronds.

  The pavilion had upturned eaves and round windows that were no longer round. The old gardener had swept it clean as if for a picnic. He slipped away as they came in and she thought, ‘So my brother arranged all this.’

  Her forelip tingled from the bristles of his moustache. His hands were gentle at first but she could feel them hardening. Her dress ripped as she tore herself away.

  He dropped her in surprise. She did not scream. She ran from the garden into the red street, where some Fon drummer boys were practising. They jeered and thumbed her and struck up a thumping rhythm as she passed.

  She shut herself in her room and lay face downward on the brass bed covered with country cloths. Only when her pillow was wet through did she realize the extent of her loneliness.

  Not that she had been ignorant of what to expect. Virgins were broken at Simbodji with the ease of bursting seed pods. From childhood she had known the coarse laughter of women as they sniffed the bloodstained rag. Her half-brothers had tried to force her. Her half-sisters pursed their lips if approached by anyone darker than themselves — yet they were always willing to whore to white sailors.

  An unlearned code of honour had stopped her sinking to their level.

  But when he came back in the morning, mumbling apologies, she fell, a lovely automaton, into his arms.

  She said, ‘Take me with you!’

  ‘I will,’ he said, and instantly regretted it.

  THE PORTERS WERE ready to carry the expedition upcountry.

  The lieutenant and the professor lay on the blue-and-white striped hammocks. The porters lifted their weight as if it were nothing, and they set off with a clatter of gongs and retching of ivory trumpets. The last she saw of them was a khaki sleeve waving as they went out of sight.

  For three weeks her mood varied from euphoria to despair. Then, late one night, a boy ran over from Mr Townsend’s house: the younger white had come back sick, very sick; and the professor had been kept by the King.

  The colour of his face had gone beyond the white of the bed-curtains. His eyes were yellow and his mouth was grey, foaming at the edges, babbling names that meant nothing to her. Mr Townsend diagnosed an attack of malaria that would, perhaps, be fatal. He had run out of quinine, but had the sense not to despise the remedy she fetched from the herbalist. He rammed it down the throat of the patient, who recovered.

  As the fever left him, he would shout hysterically, ‘Get me out of here! Do something!’ and when Mr Townsend told him of a Dutch brig at anchor, he said, ‘Get me aboard!’

  None of the King’s subjects was allowed to leave Dahomey without permission, so she had to go down to the beach under guard. His manner was correct but his voice was cold: from England he would send the passage money, and the bride-price.

  It was a grey and windless day but the crashing breakers wafted a current of air that set her muslin dress flapping between her legs. She waved a scarf as the canoe shoved off. He did not wave back but stared out to sea, fixedly, at the waiting ship.

  She waited six months, a year, two years. She learned the art of lace-making from a slavewoman freed from Bahia. Together they made headcloths, petticoats and napkins: she was anxious to possess every accomplishment.

  She taught herself to read. She pretended to read, but though she could distinguish one page from another, though she could even memorize the letters on a page, she was never able to unravel the sense from the lines.

  Hoping to master more English, she went each Thursday to the service of hymn-singing in the Methodist Chapel. The Reverend Bernabo was a Sierra Leone mulatto, who had Dundreary whiskers and had been educated in England. He taught her the scales on a tinny upright piano and soon, to the toc-toc of the metronome, she was playing ‘Abide with Me!’ or ‘Mine Eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord!’

  The missionary’s daughters adored her. They would all wear white together and, when they sang, a wide-eyed crowd was sure to gather at the gate. She was bitterly upset to learn they hired themselves to pay for their father’s drink.

  She went on long walks alone.

  On thundery afternoons, when perpendicular clouds towered high in the sky, she would wander through the palm-groves to the lagoon and watch the black-and-white kingfishers flutter over the dark water.

  Sometimes she walked inland to the campsites of the Peuls. These were a light-skinned people who slept under the stars and kept their beauty into old age. The harmattan brought them down from the savannah to the coast. Their lyre-horned cattle moved through the grass with a crackling sound. She welcomed their coming: the dry season also brought Europeans to the shore.

  Her eyes would question Mr Townsend but pride prevented her from asking for news. He tried to avoid her: the callousness of his countryman embarrassed him. Only when his company recalled him did he find the courage to tell her of the professor’s letter: the lieutenant had resigned his commission, married and settled in Somerset.

  ‘Oh!’ she said.

  He had expected an outburst of grief and held out a hand to comfort her. But she stared at him as if he were mad and ran off, singing and dancing barefoot in the sand, to where some krumen were landing empty palm-oil puncheons from a ship.

  THE YEARS HARDENED the contours of her face into angular planes. A pinched look came into the corners of her eyes. Her skin stretched tight over her nose and cheekbones, and fell in loose folds down her throat. At thirty she was an old maid, but after that her appearance hardly changed: the Slave Coast takes its victims young or pickles them to great antiquity.

  One by one, her acquaintance narrowed to her maid, her Mahi slave-boy, her father and the red-haired stranger. Unable to make the distinction between the real and the supernatural, she made none between the living, the absent and the dead.

  For all she cared, her relatives were the masks of a nightmare. And in their turn, the Da Silvas looked on the white childless woman with superstitious awe.

  They suspected her of the Evil Eye. They took care to burn their loose hair and nail clippings. The women said she prowled round Simbodji at night, scooping up earth impregnated with their spittle.

  Since no one would sleep under the same roof, they left her in possession of Jo
aquim da Silva’s old villa at the far end of the compound. She bought a bolt of black cloth and draped it round her room. She took to wearing black herself, a stiff dress reaching to her calves and a lace bonnet tied under her chin.

  For years she had lavished affection on her father’s macaw, a ba-tempered bird called Zé Piranha, which pecked at strangers and its own feathers till it died of inanition. She then transferred her love to a scabby bitch with mastitis that lay all day in the shade of a banana, but at sunset would sit by the steps and howl.

  Simbodji decayed. The roofs collapsed and the walls crumbled. Livid weeds smothered the piles of rubble, which were left to lizards, scorpions and snakes. Deprived of their revenues from the Slave Trade, the Da Silvas sank into tropical torpor.

  In 1882 a tornado hit Dom Francisco’s house, whirled its pantiles in the air and scattered them over the town.

  In 1884 a girl was grilling cashew nuts when one burst from her brazier and set a roof on fire. Thirteen houses burned to the ground.

  In 1887 Cândido da Silva, one of Dom Francisco’s youngest sons, was elected Head of the Family on the strength of his talent for repairing the fortune. He even got the King of Dahomey to put his cross to a document that turned Ouidah over to the Portuguese as a protectorate.

  The colonizers came with a military band from the island of São Tome, and staked out the site for a barracks. The King sent Cândido a flattering message inviting him up to Abomey. And he left, in his Portuguese Colonel’s uniform, with his wives, children, umbrella-bearers, musicians and an Amazon guard of honour.

  He did not come back.

  The Portuguese major, who went to ask for his comrade-in-arms, was shown into a mud house with a pair of executioners’ knives flanking the doorway. The honorary colonel sat trussed to a European chair, still in his epaulettes, with an iron chain round his neck and a wooden gag shoved down his throat. At his feet was a silver bowl, buzzing with flies.

  ‘Into that bowl’, the officer was told, ‘go the heads of all who trouble the Kingdom.’

  Nine days later, a detachment of Amazons burst into Simbodji in uniforms sewn with the crocodile insignia of their brigade.

  They fired their muskets in the air and danced the decapitation dance, warning the Da Silvas that if they dared sell one grain of Dahomean soil, the house would be broken, razed, obliterated; and they would be sent to work the Royal Plantations, or to tell the King’s ancestors how things stood in this perfidious world.

  For months Simbodji was wrapped in the silence of the tomb.

  SENHORINHA EUGENIA TOOK advantage of the catastrophe to carry off some of Dom Francisco’s relics, as if, by collecting his possessions, she could restore him to life.

  She took his silver-mounted cigar case; his pink opaline chamber pot; his ivory-handled slave-brand with the initials F.S.; his rosary of carnauba nuts; some scraps of paper covered with his handwriting; a lithograph of the Emperor Dom Pedro II; a picture of a Brazilian house, and a particularly bloodthirsty canvas of Judith hacking off the head of Holophernes.

  Her fellow-raider on these expeditions was Cândido da Silva’s ten-year-old son, Cesário. He had got left behind when his parents went up to Abomey, and was now an orphan.

  With his green eyes and wad of blond hair, Cesário was a throwback to an earlier strain in the family. And as young birds will expel an albino from their nest, the other boys made his life a misery and pelted him with filth and rotten fruit.

  The climate disagreed with him. The sun peeled his skin leaving pink patches. There was a permanent scab on the bridge of his nose, and his mosquito bites would come up in welts and go septic.

  He came to her one morning with chiggers in his left foot.

  She laid him down, sharpened a knife blade, cut through the leathery sole, and scoured out the sack of eggs. He didn’t even whimper. She kissed him on the forehead and took him to live with her.

  She had never looked after a child and each day brought something new. She recovered her lilting walk and dazzling smile. The colour returned to her face. She threw off her black, put hoops of gold in her ears, and strode through the market in a dress of bright flowers.

  She dressed Cesário in long whites, made him wear a panama of palm fibre and, in this uniform, sent him to the French Fathers to learn how to read. He would come home with stories of railways and knights-in-armour and all kinds of useful information: the Ancestors were, in fact, Gauls; the cows of Haute-Savoie gave six times more milk than cows in Africa.

  He particularly liked the story of Moses and Pharaoh and kept asking whether Pharaoh was the same as the King of Dahomey: he was unimpressed when told he was not.

  On rainy days she would take out a colour print distributed by the Church Missionary Society in Abeokuta, and she would point to the greybeard beckoning the traveller up the ‘Straight and Narrow Path’ and say, ‘Look! It’s a picture of your grandfather!’

  Or they would spread out a panorama of Bahia and he would read off the names: ‘Casa Santa da Misericórdia ... Monastery of São Bento ... Convent of Santa Teresa ...’ while her eyes ranged over the domes, towers and pediments which reminded her of the New Jerusalem floating down from Heaven.

  She tried to picture the house they would live in when they went back to the City. She spoke of dancing in Bahia, in a tall blue room lined with mirrors and pillars of gold — which was quite untrue, for she had never strayed further than Ouidah.

  At other times they would call on the Germans. In 1890 a Hamburg trading company called Goedelt bought the concession of the old British Fort. The newcomers drank beer from stoneware tankards and, in the evening, their mess-room clouded over with pipe-smoke. A cuckoo clock, painted with red roses, hung on the wall and there were pictures of the Rhinemaidens and one of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  Cesário was the favourite of Herr Raabe the director, who thought of training him as a book-keeper. Whenever Eugenia went over to fetch him, she brought a chicken or some fruit and would stand on one foot, shyly, in the doorway, rubbing her calf with the other foot and staring at the wall.

  The Germans thought she was waiting for the cuckoo. When the bird popped out of its hutch, they would say in English, ‘That’s enough now, old lady. Thank you. Time to go home!’ and when the door shut, in German, ‘My god, how that woman stares!’

  But she had only been staring at the Kaiser.

  ONE EVENING SHE and Cesário were crossing the Sogbadji Quarter in the stillness that precedes a storm. White flags hung motionless over a fetish. Some old men were crouching in the shadows, whitewashed all over, with their heads hung low. Unusual numbers of turkey-buzzards were converging on the town.

  From one house they heard a low moan; from another mourners carried a corpse wrapped in a reed mat with the feet poking out. They saw a man dragging himself into the bushes. There were patches of vomit and yellow excrement all down the street.

  The cholera had come ashore with the crew of a ship.

  They hurried home. She bolted the door and would admit no one: she knew that much about contagion.

  At dusk on the third day, Cesário felt dizzy and had to lie down. Within an hour he had fouled his bed. Sweat streamed from his skin leaving it cold, inelastic and clammy. His eyes sank in their sockets and gaped, expressionless, at the rafters. He did not lose consciousness and locked his shrivelled fingers tightly round hers.

  The crisis came at that moment in an African dawn when everything is golden. Doves were cooing in the garden. A shaft of sunlight fell through the window and framed the woman in blue who kneeled by the boy’s bed. Cramps racked his body and his ribcage writhed like a concertina.

  She bent over and kissed him, slowly sliding her tongue into his dry mouth, praying for the disease to leave him and come to her.

  He gasped, ‘Do leave me alone,’ and soon he left her.

  She went on living.

  She went to a Brazilian trader and bought a length of azure cloth, the colour the Angels wore in Heaven. She wash
ed the body, which had already taken on a greenish tinge. She wrapped it and laid it in a coffin of iroko wood. She fluffed his hair round like a halo. She put a gold coin in his hand and her gardener nailed down the lid.

  They buried him in the family cemetery, under Dom Francisco’s window, with a cross of palm-fronds set over his head. None of her relations took any notice, being too distracted by their own deaths.

  Three days later, Raabe’s assistant saw her walking on the beach, her chin pressed against her throat, muttering and watching the sand squeeze between her toes.

  Then she laughed and held her hands wide and waved a black scarf at the birdless sea.

  He asked what she was doing and she said, ‘He’s gone to Bahia.’

  THE NEXT FEW years washed over her without disturbing her solitude.

  She failed to notice the outburst of human sacrifice that marked the accession of the new King, Behanzin the ‘Shark’. She ignored the French bombardment of Ouidah which killed a hundred and thirty people and dismembered a sacred baobab. Nor did she celebrate when Estevão da Silva hauled an improvised tricolour up the flagpole and started the family on their career as brown Frenchmen.

  The events of her life were the palm-nut harvest and the festivals of the Brazilian Church. For three weeks before Saints Cosmas and Damian in September, she and her maid, Roxa, would sew frilly dresses for the twin sisters of the town, who were almost worshipped as divinities. In January, they would help paint the mummers’ costumes for the Bumba-Meu-Boi. And every 3rd of June, on John the Baptist’s Day, they sat outside the chapel of the Portuguese Fort grilling ears of new corn for the congregants.

  Because these occasions repeated themselves year after year, she lost all sense of growing old.

  Mãe Roxa died in the smallpox epidemic of 1905 after refusing an inoculation. Her place was taken by an eighteen-year-old ‘Brazilian’ girl, whose real name was Cristella Chaves, but Eugenia would make no concession to the change, called her Roxa and expected her to know all about the last fifty years.