The Viceroy of Ouidah Read online

  Jerónimo told him stories of mudbrick palaces lined with skulls; of tribes who exchanged gold dust for tobacco; a Holy Snake that was also a rainbow, and kings with testicles the size of avocados.

  The name ‘Dahomey’ took root in his imagination.

  AND IT WAS time for him to move from Tapuitapera.

  The Colonel was sick and bad-tempered, and Joaquim bored by his company. He would deliberately pitch the conversation above his head, only to stop himself and say, ‘Now why am I telling you that?’

  His mother, Dona Epiphania, hated to see her son mix with inferiors and took her meals alone. She was a big woman with blotchy skin, black wings on her upper lip, and teeth corroded to thin brown wafers. She kept a silver-handled whip in her embroidery basket and, while a slave girl circulated the air with a leafy branch, would sit on a reed mat and plan vengeance on her husband’s mistresses.

  She called Francisco Manoel ‘The Catamite’.

  When he first came to the house, Joaquim’s sisters blew him kisses and signalled love-messages in the language of the fan. But soon, their mother encouraged them to pick on his weak points. They mimicked his accent. They mocked his efforts at conversation and would screech with laughter when he used a knife and fork. They said, ‘We do have chairs, you know,’ if he squatted on his hams. Often, as he entered the room, they would cry, ‘Hurry! Hurry! It’s the Brute!’ and dash for the door in a rustle of taffeta.

  One evening, Joaquim told him his father had had a stroke and that Dona Epiphania insisted he leave the house.

  Their eyes met.

  Francisco Manoel flushed with anger, but saw it was useless to argue and bowed his head.

  HE WENT TO Bahia.

  He drifted round the City of All the Saints in a suicide’s jacket of black velveteen bought off a tailor’s dummy. Flapping laundry brushed across his face. Urchins kissed him on the lips as their fingers felt for his pockets. His feet slipped on rinds of rotting fruit, and puffy white clouds went sailing past the bell-towers.

  He would stroll down the cobbles of the Pelourinho to watch the street-boys practise shadow-wrestling. The ‘Beautiful Dog of the North’ was a dyed blue poodle that played cards; and after dark there was always an excuse to let off fireworks.

  His principal amusement was to follow funeral processions. One day it would be a black catafalque encrusted with golden skulls. The next, a sky-blue casket for a stillborn child, or a grey corpse wrapped in a shroud of banana leaves.

  He lodged in a tenement in the Lower City and got a job with a man who sold the equipment of slavery — whips, flails, yokes, neck-chains, brandingirons and metal masks: the shop reminded him of tackshops in the backlands.

  His green eyes made him famous in the quarter. Whenever he flashed them along a crowded alley, someone was sure to stop. With partners of either sex, he performed the mechanics of love in planked rooms. They left him with the sensation of having brushed with death: none came back a second time.

  The lineaments of his face fell into their final form.

  His right eyebrow, hitched higher than the left, gave him the air of a man amazed to find himself in a madhouse. A moustache curled round the sides of his mouth, which was moist and sensuous. For years he had pinched back his lips, partly to look manly, partly to stop them cracking in the heat: now he let them hang loose, as if to show that everything was permitted. The fits of anger had left him, not so the remorse. He wanted to go to Africa, but would not take a conscious decision.

  Whenever a ship from Guinea anchored off the Fort of Sāo Marcello, he would stroll round the slave quays and watch the blacks being rowed ashore. Dealers from every province elbowed forward, shouting themselves hoarse as they identified the consignors’ brands. They calculated the numbers of the dead; then made the survivors run, stamp, lift weights and bellow to show the soundness of their lungs.

  The defectives were sold off cheap to gipsies.

  Francisco Manoel made friends with one of these gipsy slave-copers, who taught him some tricks of the trade: how to hide bloody dysentery with an oakum plug, or a skin disease by smearing it with castor oil.

  But when he talked to old Africa hands, every one of them shuddered at the mention of Dahomey.

  ONE DECEMBER AFTERNOON, for lack of anything better to do, he helped some hired ruffians hang a straw-filled effigy of the British Consul: it was four years since Parliament passed the Abolition Act, but only in recent months had the Royal Navy started seizing Brazilian slave ships.

  The crowds worked themselves into a fury and, when a platoon of militia dispersed them, they set on a Scottish sailor and dumped him in the harbour. Perhaps Francisco Manoel’s strongest memory of Bahia was of leaning over a balustrade and watching the red head bobbing amid a lattice of masts and spars.

  A fortnight later, he was drinking a glass of sweet lime outside the slave auction on the Rua dos Matozinhos when one of the lot numbers, a Benguela houseboy, ran off in the middle of the bidding. Joaquim Coutinho was among the buyers and, as the sales clerks chased the fugitive, he spotted his old friend and tapped him on the shoulder.

  They renewed their friendship: in fact, whenever Joaquim came to town, the two would spend an evening together and a night with the whores.

  On one of these visits, he said that the Colonel had died, leaving the family affairs in a terrible state, and forcing Dona Epiphania to sell her diamonds. Hoping to repair the fortune, he had joined a syndicate of army officers, whose aim was to corner the market in dried beef and invest the profit in faster slave ships.

  The most valuable slaves came from Ouidah — and Ouidah, by terms of the Prince Regent’s treaty with England, was the one port north of the Equator where it was legal to trade: the only problem was the King of Dahomey, who was mad.

  Francisco Manoel made it clear he had only the haziest idea where Dahomey was.

  ‘You should go there,’ said Joaquim. ‘You’d soon find out.’

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Francisco Manoel found himself in a room at the Capitania, where the city’s founding fathers peered from the dark panelling and Joaquim’s partners were seated round a table.

  A man in gold epaulettes and a red sash got to his feet, twirled a terrestrial globe, pointed to the Fort of St John the Baptist at Ouidah, and raised the candidate to the rank of lieutenant. The commission carried no salary, but came with two free uniforms, a passage to Africa and permission to trade in slaves. None of the officers knew what had happened to the Governor of the Fort, or to its garrison. At the end of the interview, everyone rose to their feet to congratulate the man they knew would be a corpse.

  On his last night ashore, with the slaving brig Pistola stowed and ready for sea, he went to a farewell Mass at the Hospice of Boa Viagem.

  The church was lit by a double row of crystal chandeliers and the walls were covered with panels of blueand-white tiles. The tiles were painted with galleons — galleons dashed on rocks, toppled by waves, lashed by leviathans or battered in gunfights — yet always saved by the Blessed Virgin who hovered in an aureole above the masthead.

  The captain and sailors sat in the front pews.

  All were men with blood on their hands; yet all gazed longingly at the milk-white body of Our Dying Lord, identifying His Agony with their agony and calling on Him to pacify the sea.

  The priest said a short prayer to the Patron of Slavers, St José the Redeemed, and a longer one for the souls of the Black Brethren who would be ransomed for the Christian fold. Nasal responses rose to the roof, where the Prophet Elijah, in spirals of smoke and flame, continued his chariot journey towards the Almighty.

  Candles blazed on the altar, and the light flickered on the golden wings of angels.

  From his seat at the back, Francisco Manoel saw the priest exhibit the ciborium and the crew file meekly towards him: Corpus Domini Nostrum Jesum Christum ... Corpus Domini Nostrum ...’

  Without a second tor reflection, he joined them — making a treaty with the hand in lace cuffs and letting
the wafer wetten on the tip of his tongue.

  Outside, the storm had blown over. Stars shrank and expanded in the blue void. Lightning flashed over the island of Itaparica, silhouetting the ship’s yardarms out in the fairway.

  The Mass ended, and the sailors stood outside the church holding up the ship’s mizzen topgallant by its tack and clews. The choir sang an anthem and the priest’s golden chasuble detached itself from the angels and was seen moving slowly down the aisle.

  The procession passed through the green doors.

  Boys in purple cassocks carried a silver cross, a stoup and a palm-frond aspergillum.

  Drops of Holy Water pattered onto the canvas.

  ‘Bless, O Lord, this ship Pistola and all who sail in her. Bear her as you bore the Ark of Noah over the floodwaters. Give them your hand as you gave it to the Apostle Peter when he walked upon the waters of the sea ...’

  FOUR

  HE LANDED AT Ouidah between two and three of a murky May afternoon smelling of mangrove and dead fish. A band of foam stretched as far as the eye could reach. Inland, there were tall grey trees which, at a distance of three miles, anyone might mistake for waterspouts. He was the only passenger in the canoe: the crew knew better than to set foot in the Kingdom of Dahomey.

  At the start of the voyage he had gazed at the new element with the innocent awe of the landsman. He saw boobies. He saw fleets of medusas, ribbons of sea-wrack, the prismatic colours on the backs of bonitos and albacores and the pale fire of phosphorescence streaming into the night.

  Then, as the ship sailed into the horse-latitudes, the sails hung slack, shark fins swirled on an oily sea, everyone lost their tempers, and the mate smashed a sailor’s teeth in with a marlinspike.

  A shower of red rain spattered the deck the day they sighted the African coast, and a locust got caught in the rigging. On his last night aboard, Francisco Manoel woke up covered in his own vomit: the ship had narrowly missed the tornado that covered the shore with dead fish.

  He brushed aside the krumen who helped him from the canoe. He refused to ‘dash’ the outstretched hand of the fetish-man. He refused to let the porters carry him across the lagoon, and with black ooze coating his thighs he strode up the track to the Captains’ Tree.

  Waiting in the shade of this decrepit ficus were some underlings of the Yovogan, the Dahomean Minister for the Slave Trade. Decanters of claret, madeira, rum and distilled palm-wine were laid out on a card table missing most of its baize.

  He drank their toasts and soldiers fired their muskets in the air. A royal eunuch with silver horns on his temples tilted his head, asked what presents he had brought from Brazil, and gasped when the answer was ‘None!’

  A palaver followed, and everyone seemed quite friendly, but when he reached the Fort he found the place in ruins.

  The flagstaff was broken, the Royal Arms defaced. Walls were roofless and smoke-blackened. The shutters were wrenched off their hinges and the cannon had come adrift of their emplacements and were sinking through the swish walls.

  Turkey buzzards flapped off as he stepped into the yard. A pig was teasing the rind off a jackfruit. A dog pissed against a tree and started howling.

  Through the door of the chapel came a gangling poxpitted figure in a drum major’s shako and the remains of a Turkish rug. He blinked at the newcomer; then, curling his lips back over a set of loose yellow teeth, whooped, ‘Mother of Jesus Christ and All the Saints be praised!’ and bounded over to paw the apparition and make sure it was real.

  Taparica the Tambour was the only survivor of the garrison.

  A Yoruba freeman who had joined the 1st Regiment of Black Militia, he told his sad story in the lilting cadences of plantation Portuguese: of how the Governor died of fever, the lieutenant in a skirmish by the shore; and how the King had let his soldiers loot the Fort.

  They stole the bells, cut the eyes from the Prince Regent’s portrait, unstoppered the rum barrels, buggered a cadet, and marched the men off to Abomey where, for all he knew, their heads were on the palace wall.

  Thinking he knew the secret of buried treasure, the Dahomeans put ants on the Tambour’s chest, pepper under his eyelids and burned his tongue with the tip of a red hot machete. They were about to do their worst when someone explored the powder magazine with a lighted firebrand. Seven bodies were taken from the wreckage, and they left him thereafter in peace.

  In the last of the light he walked his rescuer round the garden where there were mounds of red earth, each set with a rough wood cross. Then they barricaded the gate with palm-trunks.

  Francisco Manoel slung his hammock and lay under a muslin net listening to a symphony of frogs and mosquitoes. And he congratulated himself: for the first time in forty-seven days, he rocked to his own rhythm, not that of the ship.

  AT SEVEN IN the morning the Yovogan’s messenger came with an order for the Brazilian to present himself at once.

  Taparica shook his head.

  ‘King him need gun,’ he said. ‘Yovogan him come you.’

  The Kingdom, it so happened, was passing through one of its periodic bouts of turmoil. The people had had enough of the King’s blasphemous ways. He had failed to ‘water’, with blood, the graves of his ancestors. He was a coward and a drunk. Food was scarce, the army was out of ammunition while, from the east, the Alafin of Oyo was threatening to invade.

  The messenger shouted abuse and went away, only to return with word of an official visit.

  Puffs of musket smoke preceded the Yovogan, a frail octogenarian who rode to the Fort in a costume of pink satin, propped up by the grooms, sitting sidesaddle on a starved grey nag. A man led the beast by a grass halter. Another twirled a blue umbrella. A noisy entourage followed.

  It was raining. Boys splashed alongside carrying the old man’s cigar case, his stool, and the card table and decanters. Once inside the gate he signalled his wish to dismount, and the groom lifted him from the saddle, sat him down and removed his black tam-o’-shanter.

  The Yovogan clicked his fingers in salutation, then proposed his own King’s health in palm-wine and the Queen of Portugal’s in Holland’s Gin. He did not drink himself but poured the contents of both glasses down the gaping mouth of an acolyte.

  The interview began in broken Portuguese. The Yovogan’s face turned grey as he registered his disapproval at the lack of presents.

  What about the barquentine full of silk? What about the coach and horses? Or the trumpets? Or the silver hunting-gun?

  ‘There are no presents,’ said Francisco Manoel.

  ‘Not even the greyhounds?’

  ‘Not even greyhounds.’

  Nor would there be any presents, until the King released the prisoners, repaired the Fort and resumed the sale of slaves.

  Everyone was confused, then angry. A man shouted, ‘Death to Whites!’ and an Amazon whirled her cutlass round her forefinger and brought it close to the Brazilian’s face.

  But when the Yovogan raised his hand, the crowd melted away muttering.

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON, a hubbub of shouts and whiplashes awoke Francisco Manoel from his siesta. Peering over the north bastion, he saw a crowd of naked men piling up bundles of reeds, planks, baskets of oyster shells and buckets of swish: the Yovogan had sent a corvée of captives to make good the damage.

  In the weeks that followed Lieutenant da Silva worked in heat that would have driven most whites to their hammocks or their graves. Even on quivering afternoons, when the sun sucked out the colour of earth and leaves, he would strip to the waist, bark orders and shoulder the heaviest loads himself.

  The blacks were amazed to see a white man work.

  They thatched the roofs, whitewashed the walls and mucked out the cistern. Again the cannon gleamed with blacking and palm-oil. Again ships offshore saw the ‘five shields’ of the Braganzas floating from the flagpole, signalling that the Fort of St John the Baptist had slaves for sale.

  The first batch were criminals convicted of stealing the King’s palm-nuts and conde
mned to be fed on them till they burst: none seemed the least unhappy to be leaving Dahomey.

  More slavers came — the Mithridate, the Rinoceronte, the Fraternidade and the Bom Jesus — each carrying crates of muskets, rum, tobacco, silks and calico. The Alafin of Oyo did not invade. The King went to war against some defenceless millet planters in the Mahi Mountains and, within two years, Francisco Manoel had sent no less than forty-five slave cargoes to Bahia.

  Joaquim Coutinho had the sense to offer him a place in the syndicate.

  DA SILVA TOOK to the Trade as if he had known no other occupation. Having always thought of himself as a footloose wanderer, he now became a patriot and man of property. No word of congratulation came from his superiors in Bahia. Yet he believed it was his heaven-sent vocation to fuel with black muscle the mines and plantations of his country, and he believed they would reward him.

  He persisted in this illusion with the obstinacy of the convert. Often on sleepless nights he would lie and listen to the groan and clank of the barracoon, only to remember the sweet singing in the chapel at Tapuitapera and roll over with his conscience clean.

  He lived in the Governor’s suite of rooms; he restored the chapel and imported a Portuguese padre to say Mass before the start of each voyage.

  As major-domo of the Fort, Taparica dressed in a green frock-coat, sailor pants of white canvas and a black felt bicorn with a cockade of parrot plumes. Whenever they passed through the town, he would stride ahead of the hammockeers, clanging an iron bell and shouting, ‘Ago! Ago!’ to clear the path.

  He slept on a mat outside his master’s room. He cooked and tasted his food, controlled his drinking habits and emptied his slop-pail. He found girls for his bed, aphrodisiacs if the weather was exceptionally sticky, and warned him not to make lasting attachments.