The Viceroy of Ouidah Page 5

  HE HAD MADE up his mind to run away when a rider came into town with news that his mother’s old companion was dying at a ranch some leagues into the bush.

  Outside the shack a sorrel stallion chomped at the hitching post. He pushed back the cowhide that served as a door and saw a shrunken figure laid out on a pallet. A crust of pustules covered his face and his eyes were closed.

  Feebly, Manuelzinho gestured to his saddle, his quirt, an ocelot waistcoat, a waterproof made of boa skin and a leather hat sewn with metal medallions.

  ‘Take them,’ he said.

  The boy rode off with some passing horsemen. He did not say goodbye to the priest. Nor did he ever go back.

  FOR THE NEXT seven years, he drifted through the backlands of the North-East, taking odd jobs as butcher’s apprentice, muleteer, drover and gold panner. Sometimes he knew a flash of happiness, but only if it was time to be departing.

  Duststorms burnished his skin. His clothes reeked of sour milk and horses. When drought tore at his throat, he soothed it with an infusion brewed from the tail of a rattlesnake.

  Faces he forgot, but he remembered the sensations: the taste of the armadillo meat roasted in clay; the shock of aguardiente on the tongue; the pleasures of hot blood spurting over his hands, or of pissing down the leg of his horse.

  He lived in Indian villages. He rode with gipsies who sold dud slaves and scapulars of St Anthony. For a season he washed gravel, working shoulder to shoulder with negroes, at a diamond-camp. It astounded him to find their fetor so exciting: he would compare their uncreased foreheads with the battle raging inside his own.

  He knew he was brave. One night, a face loomed red in the firelight: he was amazed by the ease with which his knife slid into the man’s belly. Another time, bivouacked on the Raso da Catarina, he shared his meat with a bush-wanderer whose clothes were a patchwork of green silk and whose fingers were stiff with gold rings. The man walked eighteen leagues a day, barefoot through the cacti:

  ‘I trust no one,’ he said. ‘Why should I trust a horse?’

  Not for months did Francisco Manoel realize that this was the bandit Cobra Verde who robbed only rich women and only for their finery.

  And he too believed he would go on wandering for ever: yet, on Santa Luzia’s Day of 1807 — a grey, stifling day that held out the promise of rain — the aimless journeys ended.

  HE HAD BEEN riding through the village of Uauá when the potter’s daughter rushed from her house with an apronful of green oranges. A week later he brought her trinkets: within a month they had married.

  He found work on a ranch nearby. His employers were a family of absentee landlords called Coutinho, who had ranched in the Sertāo for two centuries, but now lived on their sugar plantation by the sea.

  He learned the equations of grass and water; the flight of birds around a stricken cow, or the presence of an underground spring. For leagues around he could distinguish all the neighbours’ brands: it was a point of honour to return a lost animal no matter how far it had strayed.

  Not far away, along the river-bed, there were cotton fields worked by poor sharecroppers. Knowing him to be cool and resourceful, they came to him when they were cheated and he would force the landowners to admit their miscalculations and pay up. But when the sharecroppers came again, with gratitude and humble presents, a bitter taste rose up his throat, and he brushed them aside.

  The Coutinhos paid no wages, but each round-up entitled the cowhands to one calf in four.

  For two years he sold his animals, preferring coins in his pocket to wealth on the hoof. But for the third season he ordered a branding iron from the blacksmith and set about ‘humanizing’ his property.

  He coralled young bulls, tied their legs and lashed them to a wooden post. He sliced off their testicles and sawed the tips of their horns. They slavered and moaned as the iron sizzled into their flanks: it gave him pleasure to rub the hot tallow into his own initials.

  And he enjoyed his simple house with its gourds and melons straggling over the porch and its ochre walls that sucked up the sunlight. After a hard day he would unhook his guitar and strum the old songs of the Bandeirantes.

  His wife dressed always in pink. She could sew, plant vegetables, cook, and squeeze the poisonous juice from manioc. Yet her movements were stiff and mechanical. Making love meant no more to her than sweeping the floor. A dazzling set of teeth froze the words in her throat. She would make her eyes glitter if she wanted something, or cloud them over if ever she was afraid. More often, she sat, staring into the distance, stroking an orange cat.

  She would wake in the night and scream, ‘Father! Father!’ Twice a week she went to see the potter and came back red to the elbows in clay.

  The strain of living with her told on his nerves. The sight of her vacant smile made him pale with anger and tempted him to sink his fingers in her throat. He took to sleeping rough, hoping to recover his equilibrium under the stars.

  HE WOKE ONE sunrise on a patch of stony ground and, squinting sideways, was surprised to see, so far from water, a green frog crouching under the arm of a cactus. Its back was the colour of new grass, its belly mauve, and when it crawled, patches of orange and turquoise flashed from under its legs.

  He poked the frog with a stick. It stiffened with fright. He watched its eyes suffuse from silver to purple. He took a stone and pounded it to a blood-streaked slime and, for a whole week, regretted what he had done.

  His wife was expecting a child.

  The women of the village came with advice, with bunches of rue to keep off witches, and a crucifix to place under the mattress. But the prospect of witnessing the birth disgusted him. He made an excuse to go on a journey and, afterwards, could never believe that the child, who curled her fingers round his, was his own daughter.

  He was alone in the house one afternoon sewing a patch on a leather horse-frontal. Rain smacked on the rooftiles and cut winding channels in the earth. From time to time he looked up and watched the black clouds streaming past the window frame. Suddenly, the cat was sitting on the sill.

  He went on sewing but the cat stared in his direction. When it miaowed, he felt as if a scalpel were scouring the inside of his skull. It bounded over and started sharpening its claws against his breeches. He shivered as its head nuzzled his calf. One hand reached under its forelegs, the other for a knife.

  The blood was warm and sticky on his hands. He wiped the dark drops coagulating on the floor. He put the cat over his saddle and rode off to get rid of it. Then he stood for hours, hopelessly alone, in the cloudbursts.

  The woman looked for the cat but soon forgot about it.

  One evening she tucked the baby into her cradle and, balancing a waterjar on her head, went off to refill it at the tank. He watched them go, two undulating forms, receding down an alley of agaves into an orange sunset. He sat savouring the silence, and then began to twang at his guitar. The baby cried. He stopped playing and the baby stopped. But when he touched the strings again, the cries redoubled.

  He held the guitar above the cradle, waited for the crash of splintering wood, then checked himself and broke it across his knee.

  He had gone before the woman came back.

  HE WENT BACK to his solitary wanderings. Believing any set of four walls to be a tomb or a trap, he preferred to float over the most barren of open spaces.

  He passed through valleys of white dust where men in white went digging for tubers. Jerked beef was his food, dried fruits and wild honey: water he pressed from the roots of the umbu.

  Sometimes there was water and no grass, but sharp sedges only and the horses falling from hunger. The journeys were endless, over empty horizons: the sound of hoofs on chips of silica, the crack of dead branches, the crack of rainless thunder, the shriek of a vulture — whatever broke the silence was sadder than silence.

  And when he did go to the towns, the noises oppressed him: the dances, the music, the lively talk and laughter — he would crouch on his haunches and swig at a bottle
.

  And in the evenings he would stroll past houses and peer into the lamplit rooms, where fathers played with children, men played cards and women smiled as they braided their hair. He craved their simple pleasures of touch and trust; but if a woman saw the green eyes glinting in the darkness, she closed her shutters and bars of light slid through the jalousies and striped his face.

  ONE LENT HE passed the sacred mountain, Monte Santo, where the Capuchin Father, Apollonio of Todi, found mysterious letters carved in rock.

  Pilgrims in sky-blue rags came here from all parts of the Sertão to climb the white quartz via sacra to the chapel on the summit where, every Good Friday, the Virgin shed tears of blood.

  He heard their litanies. He heard their cries as they flailed themselves with nettle-spurge. He watched them crawl the four miles on their kneecaps and the path becoming redder as they neared their goal.

  He longed to perform some similar act of mortification, or simply to unburden his load. He would gaze for hours at wayside crosses. He never passed a village without dismounting to watch a congregation at prayer — yet he could never join them.

  Once, at Jeremoabo, he stopped to speak to some women laying lilies on the altar. The guardian of the church was a young mulatto with skin-covered bones for legs, who propelled himself in a wood-wheeled cart, always looking over his shoulder as if someone, perhaps Death, were coming to collect him. He introduced the visitor to his companions: Santa Rosario in green lace; Sts Theatriel, Uriel and Barakiel; St Moses the Black with his foot on Pharaoh’s windpipe; or St Anthony of Padua, whose tortured image would appear to runaway slaves and tell them to go home.

  The cripple pushed himself up the aisle, unlocked the chest under the altar, and rolled back the shroud of mildewed velvet to uncover the cadaver of Christ.

  The body was smooth and white, the belly taut, and the palms held inarticulately outwards. Black hair, graceful as a girl’s, swirled about the shoulders. Red paint gushed from the lance wound and the knees were crimson scabs.

  ‘Dead!’ the cripple whimpered, and the tears welled up, out and round his cheeks, and pattered among the wreckage of his legs onto the boards of the cart.

  Francisco Manoel laid a hand on the hunched shoulder. His mouth crinkled and he too, suddenly, burst out crying.

  A cassock swished past.

  He bolted for the door.

  HE HAD NOT cried since before his mother’s death: the tears relieved his sorrow. The fear that he would turn into a killer left him. He began to drink in bars, to laugh and play cards, though still he would not trust himself with a woman.

  He was drawn towards the cities of the coast.

  He went as far south as Tucano, where the cacti grew stunted and the big trees began, and where his old employer, Colonel Octávio Coutinho, owned a factory for making jerked beef. There, as if to purge himself in blood, he worked with the butchers and the salters, and would hang the slabs of meat to dry on copper wires. The grease boilers covered the town in a pall of smoke. Healthy men died of fever and the survivors drank.

  From time to time caravans came up from the coast to buy beef for the slaves on the sugar estates. One January evening the Colonel’s heir came to fetch a load for the family plantation at Tapuitapera: he had been sent along with the muleteers to toughen him up.

  Joaquim Coutinho had dark wounded eyes that watered in the wind. His clothes were coated with a bloom of dust. His buttocks were in agony — he was unused to long journeys in the saddle — and the slave boys snickered as they watched him dismount.

  That night he and the backlander struck up a friendship that could only be explained by the attraction of opposites. Next day, when the panniers were loaded and the men were ready to leave, Joaquim said he would like to stay on.

  Francisco Manoel taught him to lasso steers, to braid rawhide whips, to break colts and ride down rheas and snare them with slingstones. Yet he, in turn, sat tonguetied to hear Joaquim prattle of his lineage and latifundias, and of the Tower at Tapuitapera that had stood two hundred years.

  One day, Joaquim said, ‘You should ride with me down to the coast.’

  He held back: secretly, he dreaded setting eyes on the sea.

  Then he said, ‘Yes.’

  TAPUITAPERA, SO NAMED after a rock on which the Tapuya Indians once sharpened their axe-blades, was a hump of red sandstone about seventy miles north of Bahia and three miles inland from a beach of white sand. On the summit was the shadow of something dark and solid half-seen through the shining trees.

  The sea was always blue and dotted with the sails of outriggers, and offshore breezes soughed through woods of mango and cashew trees.

  The Coutinhos’ plantation house had cross-lattice windows and walls of pink stucco. Green silk curtains rustled in its flower-stencilled apartments. On the verandah there were aviaries of song-finches; and in the dining room vases of blue-glazed porcelain, gilded pilasters and panels the colour of lapis lazuli.

  The scents of rose and lily drifted through the garden. Humming-birds sucked from scarlet honeysuckle. Morpho butterflies fluttered over the morning-glories and, after dark, in a Chinese loggia, black choirboys in snuff-velvet breeches and lace jabots would sing Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.

  And Francisco Manoel imagined he had stumbled on Paradise.

  THE COLONEL WELCOMED him as a good influence on his son, treated him as one of the family and put him in charge of his stables.

  The Colonel was a magnificent wreck.

  As a young man, frenzied at the thought of horizons unpopulated by his own cattle, he had extended his ranches into the green void of Maranhão, where horses sank to their withers and his ranch-hands died of anal gangrene. A parchment map of his empire still hung in his office. But his desk was stacked with copies of unpaid rent demands and, every month or so, word would come from some ranch upcountry that the tenant had annexed it.

  Fifty years of peppery food and pitching in the saddle had so inflamed his haemorrhoids that he could move from his hammock neither to dine, to sleep, to shit, to pray nor play cards with his chaplain. His one pleasure was to have his hair washed by a lovely mulatta, who would run her fingers through the stiff waves as if peeling the outer leaves off a cabbage.

  Francisco Manoel did his best to humour him. He put on freshly laundered whites for dinner. He took care to lose every other game of backgammon, and listened with attention to his stories of killing Indians.

  The two young friends fought gamecocks and trained a pack of hounds to hunt for capybaras in the forest. Returning, hot from the chase, they would wave up to Joaquim’s sisters, who lounged on feather hammocks or fed slips of custard-apple to their pet marmosets.

  On rainy days they explored the Tower, a gloomy granite colossus built in 1602 by Francisco Coutinho the First, whose leathery face stared out from the walls of the portrait gallery.

  Or they would leaf through volumes with vistas of European cities, or visit rooms where precious objects were strewn in disarray: Venetian glassware, silver from Potosi, crystal and cinnabar and black lacquer cabinets sloughing pearlshell.

  Francisco Manoel could not account for what he saw. He had never thought of owning more than his knives and a few silver horse-trimmings. Now, there was no limit to his thirst for possessions.

  IN MARCH THE time came round for the harvest. The hills and valleys flashed silver with the beards of sugar cane and, from the House, they could see lines of black backs and the glint of machetes. The blacks hacked at the wall of yellow stalks twice the height of themselves. The leaves slashed their skin and, by afternoon, the blood had mixed with the sweat and cane-juice and attracted swarms of flies.

  A thick smell of molasses hung over the mill. Vats bubbled. Pairs of yoked oxen turned the rollers of the cane press, and the slaves staggered towards it, bowed under the weight of the sheaves, with their neck-veins bulging.

  One afternoon, a man got his hand caught in the rollers and the overseer had to hack it off at the wrist. His screams silenc
ed the valley as his friends took him back to his cabin. The overseer shrugged and said, ‘Not another!’

  When the chapel bell clanked at six, the slaves downed tools and trudged uphill to say an evening prayer to the Virgin. They filed past the Colonel and raised their hats. Opaque, husky voices repeated his ‘Boa Noite!’ in unison.

  The chapel was dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Conceiçao, and on the altar was the portable oratory of the Last Supper that would end its days at Ouidah. The nuns, who made it, had used as their model the dining room of the Big House. For some reason Francisco Manoel wanted to own it more than any other object he had seen.

  LYING AWAKE ONE night, he heard a sound of drumbeats in the hills.

  He dressed and followed the sound to a forest clearing where some slaves were calling their gods across the Atlantic. The dancers wore white metal masks and white dresses that glowed orange in the firelight. They whirled round and round until Exu the Messenger tapped them between their shoulder-blades. Then, one by one, they shuddered, growled, crumpled at the knees and fell to the ground in trance.

  Their priest, a Yoruba freeman called Jerónimo, was a votary of Yemanja the Sea Goddess and he slept beside her mermaid image in a chamber bursting with corals and basins of salt water.

  Nothing gave Francisco Manoel greater pleasure than to sit with this androgynous bachelor and hear him sing the songs of the Kingdom of Ketou in a voice that suggested, not the gulf between continents, but planets.

  Jerónimo showed him the loko tree, sacred to Saint Francis of Assisi, whose writhing roots were said to stretch under the ocean to Itu-Aiyé, to Africa, the home of the Gods. Sometimes, a slave on the plantation would hear his ancestors calling through the rubbery leaves. At night he would creep among the branches and, in the morning, they would find the body, hanging.