Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  Thurso, who had requested half an hour with the Governor after dinner, was ready enough to confirm this; he did so, in fact, with discourteous emphasis.

  Paris’s presence was increasingly an irritant to him these days. Nevertheless, it was in a spirit of resentment rather than relief that he watched his surgeon’s retreat, the broad-shouldered, awkward form, the tendency to step a little short as if about to alter pace or make some bounding advance which in fact was never made. The man had been no earthly use from the start, merely a source of trouble and vexation…

  He was conducted into a small chamber on an upper floor, which the Governor used as an office.

  Here he was offered brandy, while the Governor himself, now in pale blue robe and round black skull-cap, sipped at a glass of pale fluid. “Camomile tea, sir,” he said with customary languidness. “An excellent specific for the digestion. I take a glass of it lukewarm every evening, before retiring for the night.

  Lukewarm, not too hot—in case you ever feel tempted to try it.”

  A small fire was burning in the grate, though the evening was not cold. He had one lit, he explained, in all the apartments he used. “To combat the infernal damp that is constantly emanating from the stone,” he said. “Well, sir, how may I be of service to you? I understand from Saunders that you saw the slaves but expressed some reservations.”

  “Reservations.” The word came gravelled with effort, as if only outrage could have forced it from the reluctant larynx. “Sir, I cannot buy the slaves at the prices you are asking. There is no profit for my owner at those prices.”

  “Come now, Captain.” The Governor spoke with the same nonchalance, but his gaze had sharpened.

  “You know well that there is still profit in it for you.

  If we were dealing privately together, no doubt I could offer you a lower price. But you must remember the heavy expenses the Company is under in the maintenance of this fort. There is a small army here of clerks, factors, artificers, who all have to have their wages.

  There is a chaplain. There are the permanent officers of the Company. There is a garrison of a hundred troops, at the Company’s charge for victuals.

  Allow me also to remind you that you enjoy all the advantages of warehousing here, without a penny of cost. The Company acts as a depot for the goods, they are collected here and wait for you, saving you the trouble and danger of foraging in the unhealthy swamps behind.

  Moreover, the Company takes care of relations with local chiefs and all intermediaries in the trade, and lays out money to keep them well disposed. But I don’t really need to remind you of this, do I, Captain? You are an old hand.”

  “Yes, sir, I am. Of course I know the Company has expenses. But so they did in the days of your predecessor, and he kept the surcharge to five bars a head. I know these up-country prices -I would be surprised if you were paying more than twenty bars. Your predecessor -“

  “My predecessor died here.” The Governor’s face was still set in its usual expression of cold composure, but his voice had risen. “He lies out there in the graveyard on the hill, with his name cut rough in the stone by a drunken mason. He lasted eighteen months before drink and the climate finished him. It is not my way to explain myself, Captain Thurso, but tonight is perhaps something of an occasion—it is a year to the day since I came out here.” The Governor paused for some moments, with head raised. “That knocking still,” he said. “They are working through the night.”

  “They will have light enough for it,” Thurso said stolidly. “It is a full moon tonight.”

  The Governor compressed his lips. There was so little colour in them that only the moulding at the corners indicated the contours of the mouth. Again, in what was clearly a habitual gesture, he dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. “A year to the day,” he said. “And apart from some loss of colour and occasional qualms and fluxes, I am as well as ever I was. Sir, I spent everything I had to purchase this post as a Director of the Company. The competition for such positions nowadays is fierce, as I dare say you know. I spent many months soliciting interest on my behalf in London. I had to go to the Jews for the balance of the money, and agree to pay the interest they asked. I have to recover what I have laid out and make my profit while there is time, sir. This climate eats Europeans. War with France could come any day now, with French privateers lying off these coasts, disrupting our trade. You take my meaning? It is a question of time, Captain.”

  “Well, sir,” Thurso said, “it is a question of time for all of us, one way or another. If I am obliged to wait for more favourable prices, some of the slaves already purchased will die on my hands.”

  He had no hope now of getting any reduction in the prices; he knew obduracy when he met it, and he had met it now in this slack-wristed, invalidish fellow. But long experience had taught Thurso that an argument is rarely lost completely, if it is persisted in; and certain concessions he was still hoping for.

  “What is to stop us trading independently?”’ he said.

  The Governor smiled at this, not very pleasantly.

  “There is no independent trade here, my friend,” he said. “Not as far as our writ runs—and it runs far. You have heard no doubt what happened to the Indian Maid? Very sad business. They were attempting to trade privately upriver and were cut off by the natives and two killed and their longboat a total loss. We could do nothing to help them.”

  “I have heard what happened to the Dutchman with the Corymantee negroes aboard.” Thurso fixed his eyes on the other but could detect no slightest change in the expression of his face.

  ‘The natives are very loyal here,” the Governor said, with a return to his more nonchalant manner. “They see the Company as their father.”

  If Thurso had doubts on this score, he gave no indication of it. After a long moment he said, “Well, it seems that I shall have to trade on your terms, sir, if I want to trade at all.”

  “I am glad you take that view, Captain. You will have your pick of the slaves, sir, I can promise you that.”

  And it was on this note of harmonious accord between them that Thurso obtained the spoils of the vanquished, which he had all this while, in his dogged and cunning fashion, been pursuing: on the understanding he would take the slaves presently in the dungeons, subject to their being passed as fit, the Governor agreed to let him have eight armed men and two canoes for a week’s absence on private business, the expenses of this to be charged to the Company.

  Meanwhile Delblanc had not yet made clear to the surgeon the nature of the advice he was seeking, though both men had made some inroads into the brandy by this time and had grown fairly confidential with each other. The painter occupied a single, square-built chamber, which seemed to have been intended originally as a guard-room. It was high on the ramparts, at the same level as the governor’s quarters, but facing east, away from the sea.

  The night was warm and Delblanc’s windows were open; he had stretched squares of fine bobbin-net across them to keep out insects. “I carry those nets around with me wherever I go,” the young man said. “I had rather do without a bed than without those.”

  Moonlight shone through these precious screens, silvering the mesh, as if to confirm Delblanc’s high estimate. Though earlier wreathed about in cloud, the moon had ridden clear now and hung in the sky, serene and radiant. Blanched pools lay below the casement windows and Delblanc’s shadow fell momentarily across them as he walked to and fro, holding his glass. An array of paints and brushes and jars lay on a low trestle table against one wall. In the centre of the room, masked by a square of pale cloth touched down one edge by moonlight, a canvas stood on an easel.

  ‘This moonlight is amazing strong,” Paris said. “Strong enough to read by, against the windows. I can hear the sea still, but it does not lie before us, does it?”’

  “No, the room looks east, along the coast.

  I am on the leeward side here—it grows confounded hot during the day. The best quarters are those that get the
sea breeze, like those of our esteemed Governor.” As he spoke Delblanc glanced with a harassed expression at the veiled canvas.

  “As you’d expect,” he added, running a hand through his thick, already somewhat disordered light brown hair.

  “That is he, isn’t it, under the sheet?”’

  Paris nodded at the easel.

  “Yes, that is he,” Delblanc said.

  However, he made no move to uncover the painting.

  “Have some more brandy,” he said.

  “I will.” Waiting for his glass, Paris was struck suddenly by the wonder of existence. He said, “It is quiet, but for the waves. I could not tell for a while what the difference was, but it is that—they have stopped their hammering.”

  “What? Ah, no, they will begin again. They need a store of coffins in reserve. You cannot keep corpses long in this climate. For most of the last week they have been at it, practically all the time I have been -” He broke off, as if struck by some notion. “I wonder if that is the reason,” he said.

  “You will understand when you see the portrait, I think. But I shall need another glass before bringing it to view. Anyway, it is an ill wind that blows no one good. The Reverend Kalabanda has been kept busy with funerals, for which he gets an emolument from the Company.” Delblanc’s expression of harassment gave way suddenly to a smile. “There’s a character for you. That unctuous way he talked about preaching to his free brethren. His free brethren have to listen to his sermons whether they want to or not. They are all in debt to the Company, which makes it a policy to give them drams and goods on credit. The Company could sell them tomorrow to recover the debts and they know it.”

  “Like Tucker,” Paris said.

  “Who is he?”’

  “Oh, he is a mulatto trader on the Sherbro River, where we have just been. He has a big trade connection there and is the principal man of the region. By advancing credit he puts people in fear of him and so gets everyone in his power.”

  “Well, it is common practice,”

  Delblanc said, “and not only in Africa. Though one sees it in a pure form here, not so much shrouded with hypocrisy. One sees the sacredness of money.”

  He passed a hand through his hair again. His eyes were light hazel in colour, very large in the iris and set rather shallow; with the clear, high forehead they gave to the whole face a sincerity almost disturbing in its nakedness and absence of concealment comand greatly at odds with the gentlemanly offhandedness of his manner. He was smiling slightly now but his expression was unhappy and rather bitter. “Money is sacred, as everyone knows,” he said. “So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty. Still, the negroes are not much worse off than the whites, from what Saunders tells me. He is one of the factors here.”

  “Yes, we met this afternoon. He took us to see the slaves. He did not look in good health to me.”

  “He will die if he does not get away from here. He would leave if he could, while he still has some chance of recovering his health, but he cannot—the Company has got him as fast as if he were in chains. Seventy-five pounds a year sounds well enough in Leadenhall Street. But when he got out here he found that it was paid in crackra.”

  “What is that?”’

  “It is a kind of false currency that can only be used in the Company stores—at Company prices. It is all Saunders can do to buy cankey, palm oil and a little fish to keep himself alive. For other necessaries he has to go into debt. And the others are all in the same case.

  I tell you, they are all a company of white negroes here and it is the same in the other trading forts I have been in. The only ones who do well out of it are the high officials of the Company.”

  He glanced again, involuntarily it seemed, at the veiled portrait on the easel. “If they live long enough, that is. Death is good for my business as well as Kalabanda’s. Or the threat of it, at least. There is nothing like the shadow of mortality for inclining a man to have his portrait painted. But what the sitter pays for, Mr Paris, is the promise of life. Just take a look at this, sir.”

  Delblanc finished what was left in his glass and moved towards the easel. After a final moment of hesitation he threw back the cover.

  “Good heavens!” Paris exclaimed. Whatever he had expected it had not been this. “What have you done to him?”’

  The likeness was remarkable: the artist had perfectly caught the high-bridged, disdainful nose, the languid eyelids; but the eyes were fixed, the bloodless mouth frozen in avarice and the whole face stark with ultimate composure. It was a mask of death that looked at him.

  “Now do you see what I mean?”’ Delblanc spoke as if making a point in an argument. “A man who lives in perpetual fear of dissolution, who is for ever dosing himself and taking his own pulse, and I have depicted him as a death’s head. It only happened in these last two days. The portrait was finished, or so I thought, he had done his sittings.

  I was intending only some finishing touches, heighten the flesh tones, ennoble the expression and so on, the usual embellishments, you know.

  Then, I don’t know how it happened, a touch here, a touch there, the line of the mouth, the set of the eyes, and this face emerged under my brush. And I can’t bring myself to change it—it is the truth of the man, and something more than that. But of course he won’t like it.”

  “No,” conceded Paris, “he won’t like it.”

  He felt a little lightheaded, after the wine at dinner and the brandy now, and the lapping light and shadow in the room, and this staring, moon-touched portrait of a stricken miser. “He won’t like it at all,” he said.

  “And if he doesn’t like it,” Delblanc pursued, with a sort of gloomy logic, “he won’t take it, and if he doesn’t take it, he won’t pay. But it’s not really that—I’m not short of money for the moment. No, but you see, he could make things devilish unpleasant for me, if he wanted, and he would want, I feel sure.”

  Delblanc gestured at the portrait. “You only need look at his face to see that. I could find myself in the dungeons on some trumped-up charge. We are a long way from home and justice is a relative concept at the best of times.

  Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence… It was Pascal said that, wasn’t it? I don’t feel like taking the risk.

  It is for that reason I thought of taking passage with you.”

  “As to that,” Paris said, “I think it would be best if you deal direct with Thurso himself. My recommendation would not dispose him in your favour, quite the contrary.”

  Delblanc nodded. ‘He did not appear very fond of you. My purse, such as it is, will best recommend me to the captain. He will take me, I have no doubt of it. It is not only to save my skin I want to get away.”

  He paused to replenish the surgeon’s glass and his own. “To be quite frank,” he said—and it was difficult to imagine his ever being much else—”I am fair sick of what I am doing and assisting in here. I have had to paint a good number of faces in order to get to this one. For eighteen months now I have been painting likenesses of company officials and agents and resident merchants up and down from James Fort to Elmina, not only English, but Dutch and French too. And now I have come upon their collective face. It is no accident that it has sprung out under my brush. Since I came to this coast I have seen things and heard of things, Paris, that I will take to the grave with me. The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities—which we supply. And so we spread d
eath everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough.

  Well, it is not enough for me. That face on the easel is the face of plunder and death, sir, it is the face of Europe in Africa. It is an unacceptable face to me, sir, and I cannot go on any longer painting it. I have come to the end of portraits, on this coast at least. A man can hold off the truth of things for purposes of making a living comt is legitimate, I suppose, though ignoble. But when the face is there, before your eyes… It cannot simply be expunged, d’you see, as if it had never existed, not when heart and mind have worked together to produce it.”

  ‘Heart and mind,” Paris repeated, struck by this simple and unaffected yoking of the two. Once again he was aware of some essential ingenuousness in the painter, a quality of innocence that had survived the wandering and makeshift life. He encountered the transfixed and horrendous stare of the face in the portrait. Moonlight lay along the pallid temples, revived a gleam of avarice in the dead left eye.

  “Yes,” the painter said, with the same eagerness.

  “To make a good likeness you must have heart and mind working together. But the heart comes first.”

  “The heart is a vital organ,” Paris said, in his serious and slightly pedantic way.

  “But it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.”

  “I take an opposite view,”

  Delblanc said excitedly. “No man will ever find virtue by the mind alone—to think so was the folly of the Greeks. This trade we are helping in our different ways—do you think it comes about through the dictates of the heart?”’

  “Nor truly of the mind either, but greed can take that colouring, as can other vices.”

  “Yes, sir, and so our natural instincts are perverted. Do you think for a moment that men would enslave one another if they lived in a state of nature?”’