The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  By 1914 the Chapel of the Fort had fallen into decay. She had long coveted the image of the Baptist’s head and, to preserve it from looters, she took it away for safekeeping. The head had glass eyes and snaky black curls and was the work of an African sculptor in Bahia who had carved the aorta, the oesophagus and third neck vertebra with meticulous attention to detail. He had screwed it to a Minton meat-dish stencilled with mauve carnations: painted blood trickled into the scoop intended to catch juices from the roast beef of Old England.

  Her next idea was to convert Dom Francisco’s bedroom into a shrine.

  She and Roxa made rosaries. They made reliquaries. They made wreaths of artificial flowers from sea-shells and they improvised a Holy Ghost from a Pirevitte teapot in the form of a chicken. They hung up the panorama of Bahia, the picture of Judith and some religious colour prints: Santa Marta with a pair of bleeding hearts; Santa Luzia smiling at her own two eyes lying in the palm of her hand.

  The head of the Baptist they set on the altar table.

  Then, with the work all but finished, she hit on the idea of buying a statue of St Francis to stand at the foot of her father’s bed.

  The palm-nut buyer, Monsieur Poidevineau, advanced some money on her share of the crop and sent off to Marseille to a company that specialized in sacred sculpture.

  The Poverello arrived at the railway station in a stout box. The Brazil-town band beat out a samba and Mama Wéwé — as she was now called — stood smiling on the platform as the train drew in. For the first time in twenty-five years she was not wearing black.

  The Fathers of Our Lady of Africa heard of this touching example of faith and offered their help. But she would allow no one in the shrine until she was ready for the consecration.

  One morning Fathers Truitard, Boët and Zérringer walked down to Simbodji in spotless white soutanes and sandals. She unbolted the door and ushered them in with a gesture of triumph.

  They saw the head of Holophernes, the head of the Baptist, the slave chains, a toilet mirror and the nails and bloodstained feathers. Father Zérringer, who was an amateur zoologist, looked over the reliquaries and identified a vulture’s claw, a python vertebra, a fragment of baboon skull and the eardrum of a lion.

  ‘Ce sont les gri-gris du marché,’ he whispered.

  Knowing him to be less liable to sectarian anger, Father Truitard’s colleagues deputed him to tell her the truth. He was an embarrassed man, with a pitted face and kind brown eyes, who had spent years communing with waves and petrels on the island of Ushant. He knew some Portuguese.

  Mother Church, he explained, could not allow the worship of idolatrous objects on Holy Ground. The Faith was there. The heart was willing and the Flesh was willing. But she did need some lessons in scripture. Nor was the choice of St Francis a wise one to stand over the grave of a slaver.

  ‘But he sent them to PARADISE!’ she screamed, and pointed to the panorama of Bahia.

  ‘But St Francis, my sister, was a poor wanderer, who loved all men and the birds and the animals . . . ’

  She was not listening. A hoarse cry tore from her lips. Her arms lashed out and flapped helplessly. She hurled herself out into the blazing sun and fell down in a heap.

  Two days later, Mère Agathe of the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres barged past Roxa and forced her way into Eugenia’s room. She withdrew after five minutes, her face scratched to ribbons and her habit a massacre of carmine.

  MAMA WÉWÉ SAT another sixty years in the curdled odour of rotting brocade, her eyes glued to her father’s portable oratory of the Last Supper.

  This was a glass-fronted vitrine, the size of a small doll’s house and made by the nuns of the Soledade in Bahia:

  The miniature room had sky-blue walls, mirrors and gilded pilasters. On the floor there was a marquetry sunburst and, under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, a clock. Wooden figures of Christ and the Apostles were sitting down to a meal of plaster-of-Paris chicken. The eyes of Our Lord were the colour of turquoise and his head bristled with real red hair. In her imagination she would contract her body and stand watching in the doorway — though she would step aside for the shifty mulatto who left in the middle of the dinner.

  The years slipped by and nobody repaired the house. The thatch rotted, the shutters splintered and, when ants undermined the floor, her rocking chair would no longer rock. Weeds sprang up in the rainy season, bleached for lack of light. Patches of mould spread over the walls: a delta of red streams fanned out from the wasps’ nests in the rafters and cut across the termite trails.

  Only once, in 1942, was there a break in the rhythm of her days.

  After a noisy vin d’honneur, the Resident’s wife, Madame Burlaton, mistook the accelerator for the brake of her Peugeot and distributed Aizan, the Market Fetish, in pieces all over the square. The féticheurs demanded a human sacrifice for the reconsecration. Her husband refused. There was a riot.

  A platoon of Senegalese spahis fired, killing a goat and wounding a woman in the leg. Roxa heard the shots and, four hours later, ran to the barracks with a message for their commanding officer: Mademoiselle da Silva would be delighted to receive him.

  Lieutenant André Parisot had heard of the mysterious white woman whom nobody had seen. He took some time to macassar his hair and put on his best whites.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘I shall play to celebrate your victory. Roxa, fetch me my piano!’

  Roxa carried in a white plank painted with thirty-five black keys, and the lieutenant chewed his lip as her uncut fingernails scratched the arpeggios and dust fell out of the wormholes.

  Dom Francisco’s wardrobe, held together by its paint surface alone, lasted until 1957, when it collapsed, revealing a wreckage of whalebone stays and shreds of black taffeta that fluttered upwards like flakes of carbonized paper.

  Spiders had turned the parrot cage into a grey tent. The pictures were peeling, and all Twelve Apostles eaten away to leprous stumps.

  Yet, from the head of Christ, like the periscopic eyes of certain fish, two blue glass beads stood out on stalks.

  HER OWN EYES were too tired to see the faces peering in at the window. But she had seen the same faces long ago, and they were all there, as she imagined.

  Unscrewing a silver phial, Father Olimpío da Silva gave extreme unction and the room resounded with his prayer. Modeste swung a censer and the clouds of blue smoke disturbed the wasps and set them buzzing.

  She was not sweating. Her face was still. No one would have thought that, under that papery skin, there were veins and arteries and a pumping heart.

  Then her lips opened with an audible pop. The Da Silvas heard a rustling sound. At first, they were uncertain if it were the rustle of her skin, the rustle of black bombazine, or the start of the death rattle.

  A word detached itself and floated around the room. A second word came clear. A string of words, faint as the wind in distant palms.

  ‘The papers,’ they whispered. ‘Ask her about the papers.’

  Papa Agostinho put his ear to her mouth. He got up and tiptoed to the window.

  ‘She speaking Portuguese. Who speaks Portuguese? Doesn’t anyone speak Portuguese?’

  THREE

  THE MAN WHO landed at Ouidah in 1812 was born, twenty-seven years earlier, near Jaicos in the Sertão, the dry scrubby cattle country of the Brazilian North-East.

  The Sertanistas are wild and poor. They have tight faces, sleek hair and sometimes the green eyes of a Dutch or Celtic ancestor. They hate negroes. They believe in miraculous cures, and their legends tell of a phantom king called Dom Sebastião, who will rid the earth of Antichrist.

  Like all people born in thorny places, they dream of green fields and a life of ease. Sometimes, with light hearts, they set out south for San Salvador da Bahia, but when they see the sea and the city, they panic and turn back to the badlands.

  Francisco Manoel’s father, a hired hand on a ranch, was killed while driving steers at a round-up. His leather hat caught in the fork of two branc
hes: the chinstrap slipped round his neck and throttled him. Friends following the tracks of his riderless horse found the body dangling with the feet just clear of the ground.

  His son was one year old.

  The mother was a very bad-tempered woman. Her hands were worked raw. Blue veins stood out on her temples and her thinning hair failed to hide the wens that had sprouted in several places on her scalp. Years of drought had set her mouth in an expression of rage — rage for her shrivelled breasts; for the bast sandals instead of shoes; for the feather bed she would never own, or the white metal crucifix that should have been made of gold.

  She spent most days crouching in the speckled shade of an acacia, smoking a stone pipe.

  The house had a grass roof and walls of packed mud and scantlings and stood in open country in a clump of umbu trees. The shutters were painted a cool blue, but the coolness was an illusion.

  A barricade of bromelias fenced in the yard. Nearby, there was a cattle-tank with duckweed and, beyond that, the thornscrub, rising and falling in grey-green sweeps, punctuated here and there by black candelabra cacti.

  The three rooms were bare, whitewashed, flyblown. Folded hammocks hung like hams from the rafters: the saddles, hats and halters hung in the porch. There was a statuette of Onuphrius to guard the door and one of St Blaise to keep off ants. The woman kept a white cloth on the altar table long after she had stopped praying for anything in particular.

  Within weeks of her husband’s death, she took up with an Indian half-breed called Manuelzinho, who came to the house one day and asked for water. He had a hare-lip and teeth like bits of rusty metal. The tie-strings of his jerkin stretched taut across his chest, and people thought they were going to snap. He killed snakes for a living and sold the flaky white flesh at market.

  His horse had one ear clean off, and when they asked, ‘What happened to that horse’s ear?’ he’d say gloomily, ‘It got eaten by bugs.’

  The boy’s first memories were of watching the pair, creaking night and day in a sisal hammock: he never knew a time he was not a stranger.

  Yet whenever the man satisfied her, the woman’s voice became less rasping and her mouth would ease into a smile. She took trouble with meals, combed her son’s hair for lice, and told the old stories of Dom Sebastião and the Princess Magalona.

  Remembering happier times, she told him the riddles she had learned as a child: the avocado which had the ‘heart of a bull’; or the ‘girls in a castle clothed in yellow’, who were a bunch of bananas. And then there was his particular favourite:Igrejinha bem rondinha

  Bem branquinha

  Não tem porta

  Não tem janela

  Dentro dela tem tesouros

  Um de prata, outro d’oro.

  — a little round white church, without a window and without a door: yet inside it had two treasures, one of silver, one of gold — to which the answer was ‘Egg’.

  But Manuelzinho was a born wanderer. After a week of captivity he was ready to move on. He would pace round the yard glaring at the sun as though it were setting late. Or he would flay the dust with a whip, or sit throwing knives at a log.

  Then as the woman watched him dwindle to an ash-coloured speck, her fingers would claw the table top and the splinters got in under her nails.

  MANY YEARS LATER, chained hand and foot in the King of Dahomey’s prison, Francisco Manoel would remember the year of the drought.

  That summer — he was seven at the time — the clouds banked up as usual and burst. For five days rain drenched the earth, seedlings sprouted and there were clouds of yellow butterflies everywhere. Then the clouds went away. The sun quivered in a blue metal sky. The mud cracked.

  One sunset, mother and son watched the formations of duck flying south. She hugged him and said, ‘The ducks are flying to the river.’

  Hot winds blew, hiding the horizon in dust and blowing pellets of goat dung across the yard. When the tank dried up, the cattle stood around the patch of green slime, groaning, with their muzzles full of spines.

  In a cabin behind the house lived an old Cariri Indian called Felix, who looked after the widow’s few animals in return for food and a roof. One evening, he collapsed in the kitchen and, in a hoarse and hopeless voice, said, ‘All of them are dying.’ He had cut lengths of cactus, stripped them of spines, and set them out for fodder: but the cattle had gone on dying.

  Blood flowed from their flanks from the little pink lumps that were ticks. They slashed themselves trying to reach a single unwithered leaf and, when they did die, the hides were so tough that carrion birds could not break through to the guts.

  Fires tore through the country with a resinous crackling, leaving velvety stumps where once there had been trees. The flames caught Felix as he was hacking out a firebreak, and they found him, charred and sheeny, with a grimace of white teeth and green mucus running out of his nose. The woman dug a grave, but a dog unearthed the body and chewed it apart.

  Rats ran down the boy’s hammock strings and bit him as he slept. Rattlesnakes came into the yard, attracted by anything that still had life. When a column of driver-ants swept through the house, the woman had only the energy to save a saucepan of manioc flour and some strips of wind-dried beef.

  Finally, when she had lost hope, Manuelzinho rode out of the thornscrub, where he had lived on the halfroasted bodies of rodents. He dug deeper down the wellshaft and came back with a dribble of foul ferruginous liquid. But within a week all three water jars were empty.

  The boy’s mouth cracked and ulcerated. His eyelids blazed. His legs went stiff. They gave him mashed palmroots to eat but they swelled in his stomach and the cramps forced him to lie down. All the moisture seemed to have drained from his body. There was no question of being able to cry — even as his mother entered her death agony.

  They woke that morning to find her left leg hanging limply over the lip of her hammock. Manuelzinho lifted the cloth that covered her face from the flies. Unspeaking, and with the terrible tenderness of people pushed to the limit, she pleaded for the son whom she had starved herself to save.

  Her oases were not of this world: she died in the night without a groan.

  The boy watched Manuelzinho bury her. They started south for the river. They passed knots of migrants too tired to go on. Black birds sat waiting on the branches.

  The horse died on the second day, but men are tougher than horses.

  They reached the river at the ferry station of Santa Maria da Boavista, where Manuelzinho left the orphan with the priest and rode away.

  The boy remembered nothing of the journey, yet for years he would keep back a lump of meat and sleep with it under his pillow.

  SANTA MARIA DA Boavista lay on the north bank of the Sāo Francisco River as it sweeps in a great arc through the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco.

  It had a single street of pantiled houses strung out along a rocky ridge. Below, the muddy waters sluiced by, carrying rafts of vegetation from a greener country upstream. A white church crowned the highest point: above the scrolls of its pediment, a plain blue cross melted the sufferings of the Crucifixion into a cloudless sky.

  The boy’s guardian, Father Menezes Brito, was a fat conceited Portuguese, who had been exiled here for some misdemeanour: his one amusement was to baptize Indian babies with his spittle. He fed Francisco Manoel and let him sleep in a shed. Hoping to claim him for the Church, he taught him to ring a carillon of bells, the rudiments of Latin, some simple mathematics and the art of writing letters in italic script.

  He told him of Bahia and its three hundred churches, of the city of Lisbon and the Holy House of Rome. He made him play the role of St Sebastian at Corpus Christi processions. He called him ‘my green-eyed angel’ yet made him grovel and confess the blackness of his soul. Sometimes he led him into a bedroom reeking of incense and dead flowers, where he kissed him.

  The village boys called the newcomer ‘Chico Diabo’ and were always plotting to hurt him: he had only to glare in their faces and
they shrank back.

  His one friend was the black boy, Pepeu, whom he held in thrall. Together they plucked finches alive, made certain experiments with the flesh of a watermelon, and shouted obscenities at the girls washing tripes in the river.

  Once, they tried crucifying a cat, but it got away.

  On market days, they went down to the slaughterhouse where old hags would be fighting with pariah dogs over offal. The butchers wore red caps and breeches of blue nankeen that were always purple, and they would splash about in the blood, puffing at cigars and poleaxing any animal still left standing.

  The cows stared unamazed at their murderers.

  ‘Like the Saints,’ said Francisco Manoel.

  He knew, far better than the priest, the meaning of Christ’s martyrdom, and the liturgy of thorns and blood and nails. He knew God made men to rack them in the wilderness, yet his own sufferings had hardened him to the sufferings of others. By the age of thirteen, he wore an agate-handled knife in his belt, took pains to clip his moustache, and showed not a trace of squeamishness when he went to watch a flogging at the pillory.

  Every October, as the cashews ripened in the last of the rains, the cowhands from the outlying ranches would round up their herds and begin the long trek south to the markets of Bahia. Files of cattle converged on the town. They were cumbersome animals, with swinging dewlaps and hides the colour of cornmeal; and the men would ride around in clouds of dust yelling, ‘É . . . Hou . . . Hé . . . Hé . . . O . . . O . . . O . . . O . . .!’

  Sometimes, in the lane leading to the river, a tired cow would lie down and the other cows would spill sideways, break fences and trample the villagers’ bean patches. Women rushed from their houses and shook their fists, but the riders took no notice: the cattle-men never seemed to notice gardens.

  Francisco Manoel liked helping them winch the animals aboard the wherries. Then, after dark, he would listen to their stories of bandits and pumas. But if he asked to go along, someone was sure to say, ‘The boy’s too young,’ and he went back to the hard bed and disapproving crucifix.