The Viceroy of Ouidah

by Bruce Chatwin

  Six months later, together with a copy of the title deeds to No. 1 Beco do Corto, Barra, came a crudely painted canvas, still reeking of turpentine, with a pink villa in a garden going down to the sea.

  Dona Luciana clapped her hands as they unwrapped it, and asked what were the squiggles in the sky.

  ‘Birds,’ he said.

  The first half of Paraízo’s letter listed the furniture and the names of the household slaves: he had kept back the bad news for the end.

  Because of an oversight by the Baron of Paraíba, Dom Francisco’s citizenship had been allowed to lapse. The Governor of Bahia had turned down his petition for a passport. Slaving was now a criminal offence: they would arrest him the minute he landed.

  And yet, Paraízo continued, perhaps there was no cause for alarm: a contribution to charity would surely solve the problem. Another year passed. But when the Jornal da Bahia reported the opening of the sailors’ hospital, Dom Francisco read the text of the Baron’s address — and not a mention of his name among the donors.

  In letter after letter, Dona Luciana appealed to the Governor, to the Baron and even to the Emperor himself: if all failed they would travel to Rome and lay their case before the Apostle Nunciate.

  In her imagination she saw the great golden church, the choirs, the angels and the sunlight slanting sideways on the altar. The smell of incense already tingled in her nostrils. Then a figure in shining white would get up from his throne, and raise his hand in benediction, and say, ‘Rise, Francisco! Reborn in the body of our Saviour!’

  THEY WENT ON waiting for news and there was none.

  Umbelina and Leocadia were too frightened to go out. Their half-brothers would jeer them, push them against the wall, and pretend that they were wanted by the King. Their father feared for their safety. Firmly, he ordered Dona Luciana to take them to the house in Bahia, where she would lobby for his pardon and he would, one day, join them.

  The Da Silvas were overjoyed to see the back of her: her departure was a scene of jubilation. But when she saw the ship slewing in the swells, and the tears in his eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and said, ‘No. I cannot go.’

  The setting sun had coloured the waves a milky golden green. The canoes looked like giant black centipedes as the crews heaved them down the scarp of the beach. Gently, Dom Francisco disentangled the moaning girls and led them to the water’s edge. He gave the Captain a note for the Baron of Paraíba, commending them to his care. Flecks of foam blew on to Dona Luciana’s black taffeta dress. And they stood, arm in arm, on the sand, watching the brown arms waving from a wavecrest and falling into the trough beyond.

  That night she accepted an old man’s love.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, she felt faint and had a twinge of pain in her stomach. Not till she started to swell would she believe what her instincts told her: she had always believed herself to be barren.

  The pregnancy was difficult — and dangerous for a woman in her forties. Yet after a painful struggle, on January 21st 1854, she gave birth to a daughter. The baby was sickly: they had her baptized in the bedroom in case she failed to live.

  But Eugenia da Silva clung to life and greedily took the teat of her wetnurse, though, at the same time, her mother had daydreams of falling into a slimy pit.

  Eventually, the pardon came — a sheet of paper signed by the Emperor himself, acknowledging Lieutenant da Silva’s ‘many years of zeal and useful service at the Fort of São Jõao Baptista da Ajuda’. In the first rush of excitement, they did not take in the contents of Paraízo′s letter, with its catalogue of debts to the Banco Coutinho, the failure of the cigar factory, the disease that had killed his cattle, the landslide, and the decision of the Bahia Society of Commerce to declare him bankrupt.

  He said, ′They have robbed me,′ and let fall the sheet of paper.

  HE WROTE, FOR the last time, to the Baron of Paraíba:Please, my dear friend, be patient with me. I would give you all I possess in Bahia. But what would people say? Everyone would turn against me if they knew I had nothing. They would say I could no longer count on you, my most trusted friend and protector over all these years. I ask you, I implore you, not to sell my furniture or my slaves, but put the house out to rent, so that my life may not be criticized. And I beg of you take care of my daughters . . .′

  The Baron did not reply to this letter. His bank foreclosed the mortgage. The bailiffs carted off the furniture, and the house and slaves were sold, unadvertised, at public auction. There was one bidder, Senhor Ricardo Paraizo, the agent’s brother, who opened the place as an academy for young ladies.

  But Umbelina and Leocadia did not attend classes at that school, or at any other school. They did not live in the Coutinho household, even as servants. Instead, they were sent to a famous personality called Mãe Andresinha, who taught them a trade on the cobbles of the Pelourinho.

  ‘Whores?’ their father howled at the captain, who told him that news. ‘Whores? My darling daughters? Whores?’ And he set his fists on the table and watched his whitening knuckles, and he choked with sobs.

  ON THE NIGHT of February 15th 1855, disguised as masked carnival dancers, he and Dona Luciana tried to smuggle themselves and their baby aboard a Brazilian ship. The night was cloudy, but the moon came out as they crossed the lagoon, and the sentries brought them back, as prisoners, to Simbodji.

  Dom Francisco was stripped of his wealth and privileges though he was allowed to live on in rooms bare of all but the bed. He was the King’s blood-brother: it was a crime to touch a hair on his head, yet even his own sons spoke of him in the past tense.

  On the hot days, he would lie in the shade of a mango and let little Eugenia clamber over his belly and tug at his beard. His eyes were weak. His hands weighed heavily under a network of grey veins.

  He would shred the petals of a rose or bury his face in a hibiscus flower. If his old gardener passed by, he would open his mouth to bark an order, but no words came. Or he would listen to the howling of the surf, and bang his head against the wall. At night, he saw rows of bloodshot eyes glaring at him out of the darkness.

  Some nights he lay under the tree till dawn and, by morning, the snails had left silvery threads over his legs. On tatters of paper, he scribbled incoherent prophecies, which Isidoro had his houseboys collect in case they contained information about the Brazilian fortune:In 1860 the thorns will bear fruit but there will be few heads on bodies. — In 1870 there will be no heads to fill the hats. — In 1880 the slaves will sell their masters and buy wings. — In 1890 the Emperor will send a ship for his friend, but the sea will run red and the sky will turn to mud. And there will be a rain of stars and the ship will sink. — In 1900 the Holy House of Rome will crumble and bodies will choke the streets of Bahia and Jerusalem.

  And Dona Luciana was sick and could do nothing to help him.

  SHE HAD A bitter taste in her mouth and headaches so terrible that the sutures of her skull seemed to crack. She said, ‘It’s nothing. It must be the clouds. If only the clouds would go away.’ She tried to smile, but the strain of forcing a smile made the pain much worse.

  Then the skin flaked off her arms and legs, and left humid patches covered with a mouldering blush. Then her toes went numb, and her fingers, and the patches of skin turned black.

  She could hardly breathe. Giddily, and with her pupils distended, she would gasp to Eugenia’s wetnurse, ‘Wash my arms! Look! Look! The spots are eating my arms!’ Or in bursts of euphoria, she would cling to the bedposts, and bare her gums and chant Alleluias! at the top of her voice.

  One morning, he saw threads of dark green mucus trailing from her mouth. Dimly, he remembered Taparica’s dying words and murmured, ‘Poison!’

  She said, ‘I’m so tired,’ as she passed into a coma.

  HE CLUNG TO the body, but the grave-diggers tore him away and he flapped his arms and cawed like a wounded bird.

  He never saw the smile of triumph spread over Jijibou’s shining face. He had run off into the canebrakes and w
ent missing for days. Search-parties failed to find him. Then a man coming home from his yam-patch saw something blue in the undergrowth. Brushing the branches aside, he made out a matt-haired figure on all fours, with a big bird perching on its shoulder.

  Zé Piranha bit Isidoro’s hand when they came for his master. But they overpowered the old man and chained him to a tree beside the Chinese pavilion at Zomai. Only later, when the rage went out of him, did they let him wander freely round the town.

  He would hobble round Simbodji crying, ‘My daughters! What have they done with my darling daughters?’ But the women hid little Eugenia so she should not see her father.

  One woman gave her a wooden doll and, at sunset, she would lay it down, wrap it in a scarf, stroke the tippet of white fur stuck to its chin, and whisper, ‘Sleep, Papa! Sleep!’

  With rags falling off his body, he would skulk round the Legba Fetish. Only when no one was looking would he filch the offerings of cowrie-shells and buy himself a mouthful of food. He never ate Jijibou’s scraps for fear that they were poisoned.

  He talked to the waves on the beach. He even threw himself to the waves, but the waves threw him back; and they found him, bitten raw by sandflies and the crabs crawling over his body.

  Gasping for water one day, he saw the King come towards him, smiling and showing the gap between his two front teeth. The King was young again, and was wearing his pink hunting costume. He laid a cool hand on his old friend’s forehead and unstoppered his watergourd.

  Dom Francisco reached out both hands to receive it, only to wake and see the black pig snuffling round his toes.

  March 8th 1857 was a white-hot day with the wind kicking up dust-devils in the street. Dressed in their best black frock-coats, Isidoro da Silva and his brothers were giving a luncheon to thank Jacinto das Chagas for smoothing out their problems with the King.

  Dragging his left leg, Dom Francisco came through the Brazil Quarter, mobbed by a gang of boys chanting, ‘Bom Dia, Yovo! Yovo, Bom Dia!’ and making the sign of the knife.

  There were scabs on his kneecaps.

  He passed the plaster elephant over the front gate. He limped over to the gaming saloon, where some of his Swiss musical boxes lay undisturbed on a table. And he wound them up, one after the other, till the room was bursting with random sound.

  The door of the dining room opened and his sons stood before him. He peered at the faces filling the doorway. Some of them had napkins tucked into their collars. Jacinto excused himself and slipped away.

  The old man was crying. Tears sped down the creases of his cheeks, only to be sopped up in the mud that had caked in his beard. He opened his mouth to speak, but his lower lip hung slack, and the music whirled, round and round his skull, as he reeled from the room, out into the light and dust and hawks and dark and nothing.

  SIX

  THIS IS WHAT Mama Wéwé remembered as she lay dying:

  She remembered the rags, the scabbed legs and the swift, spiralling shadows on the ground. The women were wailing and there was an odour of burning. They burned the crops and the canebrakes. They set the chairs on the table, so there would be no place for the old man’s soul to sit — for once he sat down, he would sit there for ever.

  She never knew if she remembered — or if they told her later — of the King’s great grief: blood-brothers go together when they go to the Big House. Perhaps he knew that he would die within the year.

  Or the Amazons howling. ‘No. No. No. It was not the leopard that killed him. Not the buffalo that killed him. It was Night. Night that killed him!’

  But she could see clearly again the mourners carrying goats and chickens; the grave-digger shovelling spadefuls of soil through the bedroom window; and the rum barrel — it was Antonio’s idea to bury him in a rum barrel; and the shaved white head with wads of kapok stuffed up the nostrils.

  Once again, they were all around her, the cringing men and the set, fanatic faces of the women: it was not to be a Christian funeral.

  Again hands lifted her for one last look — at the head bobbing in the barrel and the boy and girl standing beside it, whimpering. They put her down when the sacrificer came with a knife.

  Then she was running, faster and faster down a wet red tunnel with no light at the end. A door opened. A cool draught blew in her face. A mulatto in a white suit brushed past her, turning his face to the wall.

  And she stepped into a tall blue room lined with mirrors and pillars of gold. A dinner-party was ending. A man rose from the head of the table. He had red hair and his eyes were the colour of the market-women’s beads. And he held out both his hands and said, ‘I have waited a long time.’

  LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ZOSSOUNGBO PATRICE heard the screams from his office in the Sûreté Nationale. His fatigues were drenched with sweat. He stopped composing his list of possible traitors. The President was coming to the end of his broadcast:Victory to the People!

  Glory to the People!

  Power to the People!

  Ready for the Revolution!

  Ready for Production!

  And the fight continues!

  Fixed to the wall were a pair of handcuffs and a broken guitar. There was also a stuffed civet cat, nailed, in mockery of the Crucifixion, with its hind legs and tail together and its forelegs stretched apart.

  Above the desk hung the scarified face of the President.

  The colonel got up and made a gesture which, if anyone had seen it, would have landed him in jail.

  Then he paced up and down, waving to an imaginary crowd, creaking the floorboards and crushing a cockroach under the heel of his combat boot.