The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  Next morning, when he came to leave, the Da Silva boys shouted ‘Vivas!’ The girls garlanded him with frangipani; and, presenting him with a box of his best Havanas, Dom Francisco asked him to put in a good word with his brother-in-law, Dom Pedro of Brazil.

  ‘I shall tell him everything,’ the Prince said.

  It came as a terrible shock when Blaise Brue got a message from his company in Marseille to drop his association with the infamous slaver.

  ‘I am sorry, mon vieux,’ — and that was all he had to say.

  IN DESPAIR DOM Francisco turned to the British, hoping that if he helped them, they would help him in return.

  When a Bristol barque went ashore four miles down the coast at Jacquin, he cleared the beach of looters and helped the crew salvage the cargo. He rescued a Methodist mission stranded at Lagos, and looked after Mrs McCalvert when her husband blew his brains out. He even entertained the Englishmen who came with Lord Palmerston’s draft treaty for abolishing the Slave Trade.

  The first ‘Englishman’ to visit the King was a Freetown ‘trouser black’, the Reverend Tommy Crowder, who was forced to witness the annual sacrifices and came back scared out of his wits. He did, however, just manage to stammer out the greetings of the Great White Queen.

  The King’s reply, which the clergyman transcribed into a kind of English, asked after the Queen’s health and that of ‘His Daughters and His Sons and His Mother and His Grandmother’. It agreed that selling slaves was ‘BAD’; that Brazilians were ‘BAD PIPPLE ONLY WANT SLAVE FOR MONEY’; and that ‘Him Queen’ should send a man with a ‘Big Head to hear King Palaver and write Book Palaver and same way King of Dahomey send messenger to Queen bye and bye’.

  The man with a ‘Big Head’, Captain William Munro, arrived six months later in the uniform of the 1st Life Guards. He had ginger hair, candid blue eyes, a tuft of ginger whiskers on the bridge of his nose, and his conversation was full of the stock phrases of Abolitionist literature. He had brought the King a present of a pair of peacocks, and a spinning-wheel from his mother in the Highlands.

  Over dinner he tried to convince Dom Francisco that the soil of Dahomey was ideal for growing cotton.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ his host replied. ‘It will come. It will all come. You will bring them railways and make them very happy. You may even stop them killing each other. But that will take a long time, and I am much too old and tired to try. All I can do, my dear young friend, is offer you the hospitality of my simple house.’

  He was laid up with rheumatism the day the mission left for Abomey; but calling the Captain to his bedside, he gripped his hand and whispered, ‘Do, please, commend me to the King.’

  Afterwards, no one knew if the interpreter was to blame, or Munro’s naivety, or the King’s desire to please. But the Foreign Office got the impression that the King was a ‘just and humane man’, who longed to be rid of the ‘detestable Da Silva’ and take up the peaceful arts of agriculture.

  In his turn, the King had the pleasing vision of an annual subsidy of three thousand pounds from his White Sister, which would allow him to make war and take as many heads as he liked without the troublesome business of selling captives.

  His letter to Queen Victoria promised to expel all the slavers from Ouidah; and since the Queen’s heart was a ‘BIG CALABASH overflowing with palm-wine for the thirsty man’, he needed a big tent and a golden carriage — now.

  Three more English missions came, each worse-tempered than the last, and a Vice-Consulate was set up at Ouidah in the old British Fort.

  The King promised one thing, then another, but never put his cross to the treaty. No tent came from England, nor did the golden carriage. Instead Consul Crosby took the King a suit of chain mail, some gutta-percha masks of Punch and Judy, a contraption called Dr Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator, and a copy of the Illustrated London News covering the Great Exhibition.

  The meanness of these presents shocked the King into asking Dom Francisco what three thousand pounds would pay for:

  ‘Your household expenses for one week.’

  The Vice-Consul was a sour-faced man, who held himself excessively erect and had cheeks that looked as if they were pumped full of grease. He earned Dom Francisco’s undying hatred when he pointed at Taparica and said, ‘I see, sir, that you keep a performing monkey.’

  His orders from Lord Palmerston were to insist that Dahomey refrain from attacking the city of Abeokuta, where there were Anglican missionaries. The King, however, had promised his ancestors to leave Abeokuta a pile of ashes — and he promised the English nothing.

  At his last audience, Crosby made the mistake of lecturing on the evils of war, at which the King produced a framed engraving of the Battle of Waterloo and said, ‘Whose war, Mr Consul? Whose war?’

  The Consul’s reply was to present the King with a native hoe together with some comment about ‘doing a useful job of work’. The King then flew into a rage, threw a necklet of bat wings in the envoy’s face and bellowed, ‘Take that for the old woman!’

  Consul Crosby broke off negotiations and closed the Consulate.

  The King went to war.

  Two missionaries stationed at Abeokuta, Messrs Bickersteth and Smith, gave the Egbas lessons in arms drill and provided ammunition. On March 3rd 1851, five thousand Dahomeans were killed below the Sacred Rock. It was the worst defeat in their history.

  The West Africa Squadron then blockaded the port of Ouidah and the King’s ministers blamed Dom Francisco for letting the Englishmen into the country.

  BUT WORSE TROUBLES were to come from the ‘Brazilians’.

  The first ‘Brazilians’ in Ouidah were a shipload of ex-slaves, who had bought their freedom and chartered an English merchantman to take them back to Africa. They landed near Lagos, hoping to go upcountry to their old homes in Oyo. But the fetid swamps were far from the paradise of their grandmothers’ tales. Villagers stoned them and let loose their dogs. They panicked at the thought of being sold again. They were homesick for Brazil but, with one-way passports, had nowhere else to go.

  Dom Francisco heard of their plight and sent his cutter to offer them asylum.

  He met them on the beach, the men in stove-pipe hats, the women in white-lace crinolines with their hair ironed flat. He gave them parcels of land and soon their cheerful farms dotted the countryside all the way to Savi.

  The ‘Brazilians’ turned Ouidah into a Little Brazil. They went on picnics. They gave dinners. They planted pots of love-lies-bleeding and the marvel of Peru. They decorated their rooms with pictures of St George and the Dragon and, at Carnaval, would pelt each other with waxed oranges full of scented water.

  The whole town changed colour. Instead of dull pinks and ochres, the houses took on the hues of a Brazilian garden; and as the women leaned over their half-doors, they seemed to be wearing them as an extension of their dress.

  On the hot days they would lounge on their balconies, fanning themselves or scratching their backs with ivory back-scratchers. Sometimes, a chain of captives came clanking by with dogs at their heels — and the ‘Brazilians’ would fling flowers into the street, shout ‘Boa Viagem!’ and sigh for the great houses of Bahia and Pernambuco.

  Every Saturday, Dom Francisco gave a dinner for the leaders of the colony. All of them agreed that Simbodji was gloomy, old-fashioned and vulgar.

  THE NEWCOMERS WERE very fussy about their health and, for the first time, Ouidah had a doctor.

  He was Dr Marcos Brandão Ferraez, a harassed young mulatto, gone grey at thirty, who could be seen hurrying on his rounds with a green carpet-bag. Back in Brazil he had eloped with a Sertanista from a small town in Ceará: they decided to go to Africa when her brothers threatened to kill him.

  The couple were childless and lived in two neat rooms above their pharmacy, where they put a plaster bust of Hippocrates and rows of blue pottery drug jars inscribed with Latin names; and they had a macaw called Zé Piranha.

  Dona Luciana kept a spotless kitchen. No one knew be
tter how to make guava marmalade or stuff a crab. She sang as she pounded her spices and, when she sang, her upper lip lifted in an enchanting way. But they were all sad songs. She had sung them as a girl, when she ached to get out of the backlands — to which she was aching to return.

  After a while, she seemed to shrivel away in the heat. Her hair hung in rat-tails and her face came up in a rash. She was terrified of going out, mistook scorpions for snakes and would sit, miserably fingering her crucifix, till her husband came back.

  One midday, as Dom Francisco was walking home with Taparica, he stopped dead in his tracks. Clearly and slowly, through the pharmacy window, came the words of a song that untied knots in his memory. It was a song his mother sang, about the gipsy woman who walked from fair to fair; and when Dona Luciana came to the final stanza, he joined in the last two lines.

  She froze.

  He peered in.

  She took one look under the brim of his hat, saw the eyes and afterwards swore she had seen the Devil.

  ON THE OTHER hand he was always welcome for a glass of sweet lime at the house of Jacinto das Chagas, a half-Yoruba mulatto who had been a clerk on a sugar estate and had a lovely daughter called Venossa.

  Jacinto’s calm smile, his gentlemanly bearing, his temperance and clean cotton suits made a lasting impression on the Dahomeans. Years of deference had taught him how best to worm his way into another’s confidence, or play on another’s guilt. Whenever he spoke of the Slave Trade, he would splay his long bony fingers over his heart and sigh, ‘My brothers! My poor black brothers!’

  Because of his reliability, and his head for figures, Dom Francisco took him on as his assistant. He trusted him with commercial secrets he would never have shared with his sons. And he even trusted him on confidential errands to the King.

  At first the King was infuriated by the idea of black men in shoes, but when Jacinto told him of the ‘Brazilians’ ’ marriages in the chapel, he too said he needed a Christian bride: the whole colony was disgusted by Jacinto’s decision to sacrifice his own daughter.

  One drizzly morning, veiled so no one should see her crying, and driving her fingernails through a purse of blue satin, Venossa das Chagas said, ‘I will,’ between sobs; and she walked down the aisle on the arm of Dom Francisco, who stood proxy for his blood-brother in a black morning coat.

  An Amazon guard of honour escorted her to Abomey where, forty-nine years later, a French army officer found her, bent double before a crucifix in an attitude of prayer.

  It was she who ruined the Da Silvas.

  A MONTH AFTER the marriage, her father picked a quarrel with his employer, made friends with the French, and set up as a palm-oil exporter on his own. The King gave him land and slaves. He built a house with white columns and filled it with furniture from Paris. Soon, under the cover of the oil business, he started selling slaves to dealers from the United States.

  Dom Francisco heard his monopoly was broken, and thought he was going mad. He burst in on the Das Chagas family at luncheon and sneered:

  ‘Where are your black brothers now?’

  ‘Those were Mahis,’ Jacinto replied, ‘not my people.’ In message after message, Dom Francisco tried to get his rival expelled but Jacinto had taught the King the true value of gold. And he had hinted that half the Da Silvas’ fortune was already in Brazil — a capital crime in a country where every scrap of property was royal.

  Without warning the King’s tax-collectors swarmed into Simbodji and removed all the silver and gold. A month later, a steam-frigate of the West Africa Squadron boarded the last Baltimore clipper: it was obvious that Jacinto had tipped the British off.

  The women of Simbodji said, ‘The Big Tree is falling,’ for quite suddenly the master was old.

  AND TAPARICA WAS dying.

  His head drooped. His skin shrivelled and red crescents showed up under his eyeballs. Some days he peered like a lost child, not knowing where he was. When the end came, Dom Francisco would not let him die on a mat, laid him down on the Goanese bed and held his scaly hand through three suffocating nights.

  The voice croaked through the curtains:

  ‘You not know this people. You not learn them never.’

  Taparica tried to explain the various kinds of poison and their antidotes. But the seabird part of him had flown, back to his island in the Bay of Bahia, where he had once licked the armpit of the woman who had taught him the mysterious medicine of excrements.

  Dom Francisco buried him at dawn in a grave among the flowerbeds. A clammy mist enveloped his private sorrow, and he stared at the mud-stained shroud.

  From over the wall of the seraglio, he could hear the women wailing, but the wails sounded more like a song of triumph.

  A WORRIED DR Brandão Ferraez appeared one morning before breakfast to report a case of yellow fever in a ‘Brazilian’ house where a girl had entertained a Cuban sailor.

  Within a week groans and muffled prayers sounded in every street. The disease struck down hundreds of blacks and mulattos but left the whites alone. The ‘Brazilians’ hung purple cloths from their balconies and, if they strayed out of doors, tied sponges soaked in vinegar under their noses. Isidoro and his half-brother Antonio lit bonfires to stop the contagion, but the sparks set fire to a roof and burned down several houses.

  Ten Da Silvas died of the disease; and the doctor was the last of its victims.

  He came home from calling on a case, his cheeks concave and his eyes congested and yellow. He said, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me!’ and lay down on his bed.

  By noon he was writhing on the floor with streams of black vomit, black as coffee grounds, spilling from his lips. Towards evening there was a storm. The clouds were the colour of mud. The palms bent and hissed. For another hour he lay quietly. Then he screamed as if an arrow had pierced his throat, and he died.

  In the crowd watching the body as it came feet first through the pharmacy door was a hysterical woman who had lost all her children. The second she saw Dona Luciana, she shrieked out, ‘Witch!’

  The mob smashed the drug jars and the bust of Hippocrates lay headless in the street.

  Dom Francisco heard the pandemonium and guessed the cause. Half an hour later, he and the houseboy carried in a bundle of rags and clotted blood, which they set on the Goanese bed.

  For ten days Dona Luciana wavered between life and death, though she ate greedily what food was put before her. When she was well enough to recognize her rescuer, she shut her mouth so tightly they had to feed her by force.

  Whenever he came into the room, she would cringe like a nocturnal mammal brought into the sunlight. It took weeks for her to get used to his presence. Then, suddenly, overnight, the man who had been the Devil was transfigured into her Guardian Angel.

  He took care not to touch her, not even to touch her sleeve or her hand. Yet, joining two miseries in one, they took comfort from each other’s company and could not bear to be apart.

  He let her live on at Simbodji. She slept in the bed, while he slept next door on one of the jacaranda couches. He had the door of the seraglio walled up, and they stayed indoors and saw no one.

  They lived as a man and a wife who have sworn themselves to chastity. She made an altar table and put vases of white flowers on either side of the oratory of the Last Supper. She kept a candle burning, and she promised to save his soul.

  She would read from the New Testament the stories of Christ’s forgiveness for sinners, with the sunbeams falling over her widow’s weeds and her chignon of flaxen hair. Her neck was very white: around it, on a velvet ribbon, hung a locket of her husband’s curls.

  Dom Francisco listened, while Zé Piranha perched on his shoulder and poked his mandible into his ear: when the macaw’s feathers came out, he would stroke his poll and say softly, ‘Poor bird! He wants to go back home.’

  In the rainy season, his attacks of rheumatism got worse and for weeks he would be too stiff to move. She applied hot compresses to his spine: she knew any numbe
r of remedies, but had lost her medicines in the pharmacy fire.

  The women of Simbodji hated their rival. Even in a rainstorm, Jijibou would bang and bang on the door, clamouring to be let in. She made such a row that Dom Francisco had to send for Isidoro who calmed his mother down and, for the first time, earned his father’s gratitude.

  Of all his children he cared only for two twin sisters by a mulatto woman who had died. Their names were Umbelina and Leocadia and they were growing up to be beauties. Dona Luciana said, ‘Let them come and live with us. Twins will bring us luck,’ and she gave them a mother’s love.

  She sewed them frilly white dresses and tied satin ribbons in their hair. She taught them to embroider their initials on handkerchiefs. Together they made a picture of the Virgin Mary, using Zé Piranha’s moulting wing-feathers for the robe, and his breast for the halo. Often, they took a picnic to the Chinese pavilion at Zomai. All four of them would sing the songs of the Bandeirantes. And how the girls screamed when their father told the story of the Goblin-with-hair-for-hands!

  On one of these picnics, Dona Luciana asked if he ever thought of going back to Brazil.

  ‘If God wills it,’ he said. ‘I would give anything to die in my country.’

  From that day onward she could think of nothing else. She was full of schemes for slipping past the King’s guards, who now watched over them night and day. But he, the man of action, seemed incapable of action. He would press his fists against his temples and say, ‘But how? How? How?’

  But she knew there had to be a way.

  He still owned property in Brazil — a cigar factory at Magarogipe, a ranch, a sawmill and a few town houses — which his agent had bought as an investment when the price of slaves was up. Not without misgivings, he wrote to José de Paraizo asking him to buy a house in Bahia for his retirement, begging him keep it a secret.