Verger was an autodidact. Born in Paris in 1902 of prosperous Belgian parents, he had begun working in his family printing business and knew the painful process of transforming himself from a dandy into a scholar. Drawn, in the words of the anthropologist John Ryle, to “the allure of otherness embodied in non-European peoples”, Verger escaped first through photography (from the 1930s he was the front-line photographer of Life magazine in Algeria, Cuba and Mauritania); and then through the meticulous documentation of the slave trade and religious practice in north-eastern Brazil and West Africa. Initiated into the voodoo priesthood in Dahomey, he was a “babalao” or father of secrets.
He was cynical, and what he liked about African and Brazilian religions was that morally they were cynical too. Their witchcraft was based on malice, which he saw as corresponding to his deeply morose view of human nature while at the same time giving rein to a sensous delight in the world.
Bruce had hoped that Verger would energise his quest for de Souza, but their brief meeting was not a success. He wrote to Elizabeth, “I met the famous Afro-Brazilian scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge but little practical use. Tight with information. A fantastical old queen, having a tiff with his Yoruba boyfriend.” Verger, who once called scholars “colourless parrots”, may have felt the same towards Bruce. He thought The Viceroy of Ouidah “OK – but why did he have to change the names?”
Bruce’s failure to charm Verger into revealing his secrets depressed him. “After the meal, which Bruce had only picked at, he slumped onto his usual chair looking ill and exhausted. His face was ashen and there were dark rings around his worried eyes. ‘Wish I hadn’t started this,’ he mumbled. He had been trying to interview some of the Brazilian families of West Africa – the de Souzas, the Mendozas and de Silvas – to obtain more memoirs of their slave-trading ancestors.” Price was not surprised. “Their reserved and suspicious manner would deter the most hardened investigator.”
One day, when Bruce was out, Price heard a chant of “thief, thief” in the street and looked out to see “a mob of about a hundred” harassing a young girl who was being dragged along by two men. Apparently, she had stolen a loaf of bread. “Her bodice had been ripped and from the look of her small exposed breasts she was no more than 13 years old.”
Price watched her disappear into the police barracks opposite. He thought no more about the incident until the next morning when he found Bruce up and about, correcting his notes.
“What was that noise?” Bruce asked. “That screaming? I couldn’t sleep at all.” Price had heard nothing.
Bruce’s bedroom window faced the police barracks. That evening Bruce stormed into Price’s sitting room.
“It’s started again.”
“What’s started again?”
“That screaming. Can’t concentrate with that noise, it’s so distracting.”
Leaving Bruce in the house, Price went across to the barracks, where he knew the lieutenant on duty. He asked what was going on. The policeman grinned. “A thief . . . The boys are having some fun.”
He had a writer staying, Price told the policeman. The screaming was a distraction.
“I was hoping that the mention of the close proximity of a writer might have some effect on him. The lieutenant was unimpressed.
“‘Try and stop them,’ he said and shuffled some papers on his desk. ‘You want her?’ he asked without looking up. ‘Want a bit of fun?’
“A short piercing scream came down the corridor.
“‘Fun? Doesn’t sound like she’s enjoying it much.’
“‘She’s young, a learner. You want her?’ I nodded and he tossed me a key.”
By the time Price arrived the girl was alone, half-naked on the floor and seemingly asleep. “She was a pitiful sight.” Angrily, he kicked the boarded window and the boards fell away. “She was as light as a feather. I lifted her and placed her outside the window. Her wrap fell off completely and I noticed blood on her thin legs.” Price in a whisper urged her to leave. After first falling to her knees she crawled away.
When he returned, Bruce went white. “You’re mad.”
“I agree. But she got away and now you can write.”
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” said Bruce.
Before returning to Benin, Bruce shook Price’s hand and promised to send him a signed copy of In Patagonia. “This is something I would have treasured, but it never arrived.” Price’s last words were: “Just take care. The current regime think that every white man is a mercenary intent on killing the president.” Bruce laughed. “I’ll be fine.”
On 14 January, by the light of a guttering lamp, Bruce wrote a rambling letter to Elizabeth from Porto Novo, Benin’s capital. He had rented a room in Sebastian de Souza’s family house, “in a street lined with Portuguese houses built by creole nabobs who returned from Bahia in the 1850s. It is infernally sticky and I have to confess the whole of this part of the trip is something of a trial.”
Cha Cha’s story still eluded him. Verger had impressed on him the absence of records. Bruce had taken this as a cue to switch genres from a biography to fiction. “I’ve been reading some Balzac and think the only way to treat de S is to write a straight Balzacian account of the family, beginning with a description of the place and then switching back to him and writing through to the present. Quite a mouthful.”
He had changed his mind about Elizabeth joining him. “Frankly I don’t now see any point in your coming out because it isn’t a joyride and the only way is to get it over as soon as I can.” He concluded: “Going with Sebastian de Souza to a football match in Togo and will write from there again with more news.”
Hours after finishing this letter his research was cut short in a dramatic fashion.
On Sunday 16 January 1977, Kasmin dined with Maschler and updated him on the progress of the “Dahomey book”. The publisher saw “a big future for B”. Kasmin had just finished writing these words in his diary when the telephone rang. There had been a coup in Benin.
Not until the 21st did Kasmin hear from Bruce. “Woken at 7.30 this morning by Bruce calling from Abidjan. He escaped from Cotonou yesterday and related his experiences during the mysterious coup of last Sunday. Was arrested, roughed up and locked up with hundreds of other Europeans and some blacks. Some shootings, much brutality and chaos . . . His story of hiding in a de Souza closet and then at the Gendarmerie, a mercenary type being brought in with gun and dressed in camouflaged combat suit who transpired to be the French Ambassador, found while out on a partridge shoot; and the Amazon who kicked him for being slow at undressing on command. Poor B. was worried whether he was wearing underpants or not.”
Kasmin was not the only person Bruce telephoned from Abidjan. A week after the coup, the Sunday Times interviewed an anonymous “refugee” who claimed while in detention to have been assaulted and deprived of food and water. The report, written by James Fox, his former colleague on the magazine, described “a French scholar who wishes to remain anonymous in the hope of continuing work in Benin”. It added this detail: “The mercenaries even had time to hold ‘a drinks party’ in a thatched chalet in the grounds of the Hotel de la Croix du Sud . . .” Then what the “refugee” called a “witch-hunt” for foreigners took place. Stripped to their underpants, the informant and 600 others were told variously that they would be held incommunicado for five days, tried by a military tribunal, or “shot at five a.m. the next morning”.
The coup had begun late, at 7.30 a.m. and had lasted five hours. People who heard the initial explosions mistook the noise. “I heard boom boom and told my mother there’s going to be a lot of rain,” says Latif de Silva. The members of the coup comprised a hundred or so Africans, Belgians and French, sponsored by exiled Beninois wishing to overthrow Kérékou’s Marxist state. From a training camp in Morocco they flew to Gabon, picking up arms in France-Ville. The pilot radioed ahead to Cotonou: his DC8 was bringing personnel for a festival.
But someone had betrayed them. In Cotonou, the
army were waiting. And Bruce, on his way to the football match in Togo, was caught in the crossfire.
The story grew in the retelling. The first version bears little resemblance to the last, published in Granta as a “story” – a word, wrote Bruce, “intended to alert the reader to the fact that however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work”. In the gap between the two versions is found the clue to Bruce’s storytelling process. The inflations, distortions, confabulations are all there.
His initial account of the coup is written in his diary. It starts in Porto Novo, just after he has finished his letter to Elizabeth. “Sunday morning began with me under the mosquito net in the bedroom in Sebastian de Souza’s yard.” Sebastian appears, dressed in brown, elegant for the football match in Togo. The two of them walk to the autogare in Porto Novo and squash into the back of a crowded Peugeot 405. On the coast road to Cotonou, they notice people waving from cars. The driver, thinking a wheel might be coming off, stops the car.
“C’est là guerre a Cotonou,” he is told.
“I knew it,” Sebastian says. “I knew it would happen.” He has been longing for Kérékou’s “yapping police state” to collapse. The others in the car are delighted too. They about-turn and drive back to Porto Novo, rejoining Sebastian’s anxious wife. They sit down on her leatherette chairs and listen to Kérékou broadcasting on the radio. Mercenaries have landed at Cotonou airport in a DC8. “L’heure est grave.” All citizens are urged to block the roads and go with guns to secure the airport. The speech would play several times that day to the background of spliced applause bought in from the BBC.
Possibly, this is the moment when, as he told Kasmin, Bruce hides in Sebastian de Souza’s closet. “Trembling voices” he writes. Sebastian is taken off to the Douanes. Bruce waits a short time before “gingerly” stepping outside.
In the street, a waving crowd shouts: “Mercenaires, mercenaires.” He is wearing khaki shorts with patch pockets (“the badge of a mercenary”). He finds a gendarme who bundles him into a van – “For your own protection”. He is taken to the gendarmerie and later marched at gunpoint to the Centre de Recherches where he finds the French Counsellor and a doctor friend in hunting rig. Both men had been seized from the bush with a booty of dead birds and their ancient twelve-bore shotguns. Bruce seems to find the details more ridiculous than dire. “Looked absolutely mercenary, dressed for la chasse, dressed to kill.”
Later, they are joined by three Swiss birdwatchers captured with precision binoculars and a long-lens camera, the size and shape of a mortar.
By afternoon, the talk is of mercenaries retreating towards the marshes of Ouidah. Bruce and his companions are ordered into a police vehicle and driven to Cotonou. At the Camp Ghézo, they join a cheerful crowd of between 300 and 400 blacks and whites, all down to their underpants. They are herded into a shed, made to strip. “Separated from all my possessions including pack. Thought I didn’t have on underpants. Sent into a corner and sat down. After 5 minutes asked to redress and I clung to my bag desperately.”
There is no mention in his notes of the brutal “Amazon” he told Kasmin about on the telephone. Nor does Kasmin recollect seeing on their journey any female soldiers.
After being stripped – he is wearing “pink and white boxer shorts from Brooks Brothers” – Bruce is ordered back aboard the truck and taken to the Sûreté Nationale and made to sit in a waiting room. Questioned at last by an amiable policeman, who complains of his ruined weekend, he is led before the commandant, a man with thin red eyes and white woolly hair. When Bruce tells him he is a tourist, the commandant says: “Leur cas est plus compliqué.”
These are the words Bruce writes next: “Foreign prints: ‘Kicked by Amazon’”. It is not clear what they describe. In his journal, nothing much happens at this point. At 9 p.m. he is placed in a room with a wobbly fan where he passes the night. But in his Granta article, published seven years later, there appears at this point a fearsome woman in the mould of Ghézo’s warriors: “I stood like a schoolboy, in the corner, until a female sergeant took me away for fingerprinting. She was a very large sergeant. My head was throbbing: and when I tried to manoeuvre my little finger onto the inkpad, she bent it back double; I yelled ‘Ayee!’, and her boot slammed down on my sandalled foot.” (One cannot but be reminded of how, a few days earlier, he had trodden on a woman’s toes in Ouidah.)
Then to what do the words “Foreign prints: ‘Kicked by Amazon’” refer? Was Bruce assaulted? Or was he projecting himself into a scene from a print which a moment before he has seen hanging on the commandant’s wall: a print that illustrated, say, the pages of his Skertchley or Burton? As Kasmin says of Bruce on their Benin trip: “His model was Burton.” If so, it is a paradigm of how his imagination worked: to escape an uncomfortable situation by seizing on a piece of art and, as in a Borges story, incorporating himself into it.
Kasmin is not alone in observing how Bruce was able to go on adding to his stories. “He’s got so many role models and heroes and he’s endlessly confusing and conflating them. He got a naughty, giggly pleasure out of it.” As Piggott noted too, he was “genuinely incapable” of distinguishing fact from fantasy.
A year later the story has metamorphosed further. Bruce told James Lees-Mime on a walk from Badminton to Holwell of certain “hair-raising experiences” which had occurred on this journey. Lees-Milne put their conversation into his diary. “In one little country – I forget which – he was arrested for some misdemeanour, passport not visa-ed, and beaten up. He was hit in the face, stripped of all his clothes – what a pretty sight to be sure – and humiliated in public. ‘How awful!’ I said. ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘I must confess to having rather enjoyed it.’ ‘Then you are a masochist, I surmise.’ ‘Just a bit,’ he answered.”
Few friends were told about the “gang-rape”, nor did Bruce ever write it down. This story may owe less to Skertchley or Burton than to Rimbaud (who was gang-raped in the Paris commune) or T. E. Lawrence (who alleged a similar assault by Turkish soldiers). According to Elizabeth, the incident took place “a few days after he left Benin”. Bruce’s journal merely reports how the coup peters out. Detained overnight, he is hauled up before an apologetic police tribunal in the early afternoon on the following day. “Actually made them laugh and got out.” He moves into the Hotel de Plage, where The Comedians had been filmed, and three days later flies to Abidjan in the Côte D’Ivoire.
In Bruce’s version to Elizabeth, he was raped here. “He was waiting to go to Brazil. He got a room in some cheap hotel and couldn’t lock the door and soldiers came in to demand money and raped him. That’s what he told me. He could barely say it. ‘I didn’t do anything. There were several of them’.”
If true, terrible. Yet a suspicion persists that the true rape victim was not Bruce but a thin-legged, 13-year-old girl in Ibadan, whose screams he had heard from his bedroom.
XXV
Brazil
I want to forget. I want to sleep with Negroes and Negresses and Indians and Indian women, animals and plants.
—BC notebooks
FROM ABIDJAN, BRUCE FLEW TO MONROVIA TO CATCH THE KLM flight to Rio. As day dawned he engaged a young Englishman seated in the row behind in lengthy conversation about how narrowly he had escaped death. He betrayed no sign that he might have been assaulted by soldiers. He seemed to Nigel Acheson “very comfortable, not at all frightened”. His chief concern was that in the chaos of his departure from Benin, his bags had been directed to Egypt. “Will walk off the plane with nothing but the clothes I stand in,” he wrote in his notebook.
Acheson was returning to Rio to a teaching position at the Cultura Inglesa and became Bruce’s host and guide during his two months in Brazil. He had intriguing South American connections: his family had worked in Iqique during Chile’s nitrate boom. Their story of sudden decline and humiliating suburban decay predictably captivated Bruce. The grandfather who was put on a boat with £100 in his pocket; the gr
andmother who continued to wear her Worth dresses until they were threadbare; the sad end in Cheltenham, polishing the brass plates on the steps at night to keep up the pretence they still had servants. Bruce encouraged Acheson to write down the story. Overawed by his display of erudition and “utterly charmed” by him, Acheson offered Bruce a mattress in his spartan apartment at 194 Rua Assis Brasil.
Bruce loved Brazil’s atmosphere of public sensuality. With nothing much to do until his luggage reappeared, he frequented Copacabana. His Brazilian notebook immediately registers his excitement. It shows him susceptible to “the cat-like figures” on the beach, bronze bodies anointed with oil, mulattos with “corkscrew curls tumbling in cascades”. After meeting a Mr Willis from Minneapolis playing in the sea, Bruce wrote: “I prey to the most unreasoning desire.” He was powerless to resist. He had enjoyed adventures on previous travels, but in a sporadic way, and usually with black women whose “African rumps” he found “infinitely alluring”. (“A tight black bottom I could never resist,” he told Gregor von Rezzori.) In Brazil he became an avid sexual tourist and a hemisphere away from his wife and family, he talked in an intimate way to his younger host.
One night he described a homosexual encounter which had taken place with a boy at Marlborough after a rugby match. “He surprised himself,” says Acheson. “He said he had never spoken so openly.” Bruce said he had no time for gay politics, or the gay community, and he abhorred the word “gay”. “I’d much rather be called a bugger,” and he roared with laughter.
In common with his Viceroy, whose “solitary wanderings” set him apart and who longed to “unburden his load”, Bruce’s confessions suggest a liberating mortification, like the tears that save de Souza from his violent impulses. In Brazil, with Acheson as the foil, he launched into a world of homosexual promiscuity that flowered four months later into his first grand passion.
Bruce Chatwin Page 45
