The Viceroy of Ouidah Page 7

  Francisco Manoel would use the same girl for a night or two, then send her home with a present for her family.

  His profits — and reputation for straight dealing — exasperated the veterans of the Trade. One year, a Captain Pedro Vicente begged him for a shipload of slaves without money or goods to pay. He swore to return but squandered the proceeds in Bahia and did not come back. Some time later, on hearing that the same man was in Lagos with an unseaworthy ship and a mutinous crew, Da Silva sent his cutter with a message: ‘Come over to Ouidah and I will refit you. Nobody cheats me twice.’

  Nor was he less straightforward in his dealings with the King.

  The two men never met: a taboo forbade Dahomean monarchs setting eyes on the sea. But if the King wanted twelve gilt chairs, they were sent. If he wanted twenty plumed hats, these were found. And he even got his greyhounds, which came specially from England — though, on their way up to Abomey, the dog was bitten by a rabid bitch.

  Every month or so an invitation came for Francisco Manoel to visit the capital. He would read each letter through and politely decline: on the first one, the King’s Portuguese scribe had written a warning in the margin:

  ‘I, Antonio Maciel, have been sixteen years a prisoner of this cruel king without seeing another of my countrymen ...’

  THE KING WENT to war in January and the chain-gangs started reaching Ouidah towards the end of March.

  The captives were numb with fright and exhaustion. They had seen their homes burned and their chiefs slaughtered. Iron collars chafed their necks. Their backs were striped purple with welts; and when they saw the white man’s ships, they knew they were going to be eaten.

  The Dahomeans’ mindless cruelty offended Da Silva’s sense of economy. Time and again, he complained to the Yovogan that the guards were ruining valuable property, but the old man sighed and said, ‘It is their custom.’

  On arriving at the Fort, the slaves were housed in a long shed, roofed with dried grasses and fenced in with a palisade of sharpened stakes. Each was manacled to an iron chain that ran in bights down the length of the structure. The thatch came lower than a man’s waist and, when the buyers peered in out of the sunlight, all they could see were eyes in the darkness.

  Every morning, after the Angelus, they were fed from a cauldron of millet gruel and driven to the lagoon where they washed and danced for exercise.

  Taparica cured the sick and calmed their fears: in a dozen dialects he would burble of their country-to-be where everyone danced and cigars grew on trees. He taught his master to distinguish the various tribes by their cicatrices. He could tell any man’s age by the state of his gums; and if in doubt, would lick his checks to test the resilience of his stubble.

  The loading was done in the cool of the evening, when the sea was down — the same scene repeated year after year: the ship, the waves, the black canoes, the black men shorn of their breechclouts, and the slave-brands heating in driftwood fires.

  Francisco Manoel preferred to do the branding himself, taking care to dip the red-hot iron in palm-oil to stop it sticking to the flesh.

  The chains were struck off at the water’s edge, so that, in the event of capsize, one man would not drag the others down. Only occasionally, in a final bid for freedom, would one fling himself to the breakers; if, later, his shark-torn carcass was washed ashore, Taparica would bury it in the dunes, sighing, ‘Ignorantes!’

  FIVE YEARS WENT by, of heat and mist and rain. The British stopped recognizing Ouidah as a slave port; and when a frigate of the West Africa Squadron boarded the brig Borboleta, becalmed off Ouidah with five hundred slaves aboard, Da Silva watched the fight through his telescope and said, ‘At least something has happened.’

  Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving-girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded over her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are those women?’ and Da Silva would glare down on the table and say, ‘Our future murderers.’

  The sight of white men disintegrating in the tropics disgusted him. How he hated their hollow laughter! And as their warted contours dissolved behind clouds of cigar smoke, he would make an excuse to slip away and be alone.

  On Thursdays he put on his regimentals and went to dine with the Yovogan in an open courtyard frescoed with ochre chameleons.

  The old man was so old he could remember the piles of skulls put up to celebrate the Dahomean conquest of Ouidah in 1741 — and, to amuse his guest, would croak a refrain about using the dead king’s head as a mortar:Doli dohò mè sè

  Boli sà boli sè

  He liked his white friend so much that he took him to his bed-chamber to show off his blunderbuss and the nine rosaries of human molars, the souvenirs of his bloodthirsty youth. But he was equally fond of his European presents — the porcelain teapot of the Brandenburgers or the cruet-stand presented by the Royal Africa Company — since they reminded him of the days when ships of every nation crowded the roadstead.

  The Yovogan trembled at the mention of the King’s name. But one day, he unwrapped a framed engraving of the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, the parting gift of Citizen-Governor Deniau before he left for France.

  The idea of chopping off a king’s head in public struck the old man with the force of a revelation. Deniau had explained that a tyrant forfeits the right to live, and, though he never understood the logic of that argument, it was an awesome precedent.

  AND DA SILVA was always dreaming of Bahia. Whenever a ship sailed, he would watch the yardarms vanish into the night, then light a pipe on the verandah and sink into a reverie of the future: he would have a Big House, a view of the sea, grandchildren and the sound of water tinkling through a garden. But then the mirage would fade. The sound of drumbeats pressed against his temples and he had a presentiment that he would never get out of Africa.

  He confided his fears to no one. To convince himself they were unreal, he would sit, red-eyed into the night, writing letters to Joaquim Coutinho, tearing up sheet after sheet in an effort to express himself:

  These people must be the biggest thieves in the world. I would live on any other continent but this one. I would live in the lands of ice and snow, anywhere to be away from their gibberish . . .

  Or:

  I cannot begin to describe this cretinous existence of mine. Nor how lonely it is to be without family or friends. Perhaps next year I shall come back and marry ...

  He pleaded for news, any scrap of news, to keep his memories of Brazil from fading: but Joaquim’s replies were invariably cold and commercial:By our brig Legitimo Africano I have this day received your consignment of 230 items (144 M 86 f), also 41,500 cola nuts (female). I regret to report losses of one third owing to an outbreak of the bloody flux. I would like your opinion as to why the females do so much better than the males. In the meantime the above items will be sold for the highest possible price and your share returned in flintlocks, tobacco and iron bars . . .

  But why, his partner wrote back, had they not made him Governor of the Fort? How he longed for one word that they were aware of his existence! ‘My conduct, I can assure you, is irreproachable.’

  The officers had not forgotten him. But since they were profiting, privately, from his activities, public recognition was out of the question.

  At an official level, the Fort at Ouidah had ceased to exist.

  GRADUALLY AFRICA SWAMPED him and drew him under. Perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps in despair of fighting the climate, he slipped into the habits of the natives.

  He wore long pantaloons instead of the breeches that gave him prickly heat in the groin. He wore amulets against the Evil Eye. Taparica taught him to shuffle his feet at the phallus of Papa Legba and, together, they went to the diviners.

  The fear of illness obsessed him. But since his servant was an adept in the mysterious medicine of excrement
s, and since he trusted him in everything, he had no choice but to swallow his own piss for a liver attack; piss and yams for malaria; and when he had a sore throat, he would say a prayer to St Sebastian and flavour his coffee with fowl droppings.

  Some evenings they went to the Python Temple to watch the novices sink their teeth into the necks of living goats. The spectators screamed with laughter as boys somersaulted on one another’s backs and mimicked the motions of sodomy. When the lightning danced, the votaries of the Thundergod would axe their shoulder blades, then writhe and rear their buttocks to the sky.

  He never knew what drew him to the mysteries. The blood? The god? The smell of sweat or the wet glinting bodies? But he was powerless to break his addiction and, realizing that Africa was his destiny, he took an African bride.

  HER NAME WAS Jijibou.

  She was sixteen.

  Dehoué, her father, was a chief of the krumen, whose one ambition was to possess a white son-in-law. He had come four times to the Fort to propose yet another of his daughters. When turned down a fourth time, he had threatened to go on strike: the Yovogan said it was most insulting to refuse an offer of wives.

  One December evening, Dehoué came again, this time with musicians and a figure muffled in white cloth. The town was silent but for the howl of breakers on the bar. Swifts were slicing the green air. The girl brushed past the spectators and tore off her veil.

  She had owl eyes, a pouting mouth and shell-pink fingernails that fluttered at her finger-tips. Gold hoops shone in her ears. Her neck was a perfect cylinder. Her legs gleamed like metal rods and her torso, clad only in an indigo loincloth, was hard yet flexible as a hinge.

  Her shoulders shuddered at the first roll of drums. Then she spun round. She pirouetted. She strutted. Her arms pumped the air, her feet kicked the dust. Sweat poured from her breasts and a musky perfume gusted into the Brazilian’s face: not once did she let her gaze fall away from him.

  The drummers stopped.

  She stood before him, on tiptoe, swaying her hips and languidly laying out her tongue. Her arms beckoned. She bent at the knees. Then she arched her spine and bent over backwards till the back of her head brushed the ground.

  Francisco Manoel caught her father’s eye and nodded.

  TAPARICA RATTLED HIS teeth with horror, said, ‘You not know this people,’ and moped about in a sulk. But Da Silva put his reaction down to jealousy and went ahead with plans for the wedding.

  That midnight he left her panting behind the bed-curtains and chucked the red rag to the crowd of her relatives who had drunk far more rum than he had bargained for.

  In the morning, Taparica prayed the blood came from his master’s scratched and bleeding face, but his hopes fell on hearing the guffaws of the bride’s mother as she inspected the night’s work.

  As for Francisco Manoel, he welcomed the change. The south-west angle of the Fort now echoed with the thumping of mortars and the ivory merriment of ripe women. He liked Jijibou’s peppery messes. He liked twisting his tongue round the dissonant syllables of Fon. And when he loved her, she would rub her calloused heels, one after the other, down the depression of his spine.

  She tightened her lips if ever he tried to kiss them. Yet her nostrils would quiver with pleasure at the sight of a new present. She would swan about begging approval for a new bandanna of Cantonese silk: what the eye saw, the fingers grabbed and played with, childishly.

  One Thursday he gave her a Dutch looking-glass and she stared at herself, tossing her head this way and that way till Saturday, till she let it slide to the floor and shiver to bits.

  Her stomach swelled and she gave birth to a boy the colour of pink coral. They called him Isidoro and the midwives buried his umbilical cord under the roots of a baobab.

  But the delivery of a male heir was the signal for her relatives to move in. Not a day passed without some new cousin requiring to be fed. Jijibou stole the key to the liquor store and gave it to her brothers. He asked her to restrain them, but she said, ‘Stealing from a white man isn’t stealing.’ And when he complained to the Yovogan, the old man looked dreamily over the chameleons and said, ‘It is their custom.’

  Late one night, they heard howls coming from the Yovogan’s compound. He had died of delirium and the body had swelled up and gone green. Taparica knew which particular cactus had provided the poison, said it had ‘not taste’ and begged his master board the Brazilian brig at anchor in the roads.

  But Francisco Manoel was unwilling to abandon his property.

  THERE WERE BAD days ahead: the King had fresh troubles and was blaming them on the foreigners.

  He replaced the Yovogan with a Commander of the Atchi Brigade, a man all mouth and no neck to speak of, who, at their first meeting, kept the Brazilian waiting five hours hatless in the sun. When asked to settle the King’s debt, the man folded his arms and said, ‘Dahomeans never sell slaves to white men.’

  Within a month only a few cripples could be seen hobbling round the barracoon. People shut the doors in Da Silva’s face. Boys darted across his path shouting, ‘Road closed to whites!’ The officials made him pay a toll to go down to the beach and a far bigger toll to come back. One morning, a headless black cock appeared on the altar of the chapel.

  ‘Life here’, he wrote to his partner, ‘is not what it was a year ago, when a delicious life cost us nothing and we made good money. We are subject to the most humiliating searches and the Blacks are full of envy and hatred for the Whites. In addition, our friend the King of Dahomey has turned robber. He buys but does not pay. He owes me for the rifles of the Atalante, for the whole cargo of the Flor da Bahia, and hasn’t sent one captive to the coast in nine months. I cannot say what I should do. Perhaps I should move to Badagry and trade with the King of Oyo? My man Fernandinho will tell you all, for he has been one of the victims . . .’

  But Fernandinho did not get aboard with the letter. The customs men stripped him of all he possessed before they allowed him to board. And ten days later — the time it took to have the handwriting deciphered — a detachment of soldiers arrested Francisco Manoel and hauled him before the new Yovogan.

  The rain had fallen all day and, all over town, naked men were lathering each other in the purplish puddles. In the outer yard some boys were sorting cowries into grass-cloth bags. He heard a raucous cry. A weight pressed on his shoulders. The last thing he remembered was a foot rammed hard against his windpipe.

  He recovered consciousness lying in the mud with a red film covering his eyes: his head had hit the rim of a mortar as he fell. His right hand had swollen solid, where they had wrenched off the ring of his Brazilian marriage. Then they hobbled him with chains and put him in a stinking hut.

  The guards pinched him, pulled his hair and kicked him in the kidneys. Pus oozed from the head wound. He dribbled dysentery. The small boys laughed.

  He lost all sense of time and waited for death as one waits for a friend. Instead a messenger came with orders to take him to the capital.

  HIS MEMORIES OF the journey melted into a colourful blur.

  For seven days he tossed in his hammock, feverishly eyeing the runnels of sweat that poured from his bearer’s back. At one village there were heads on poles: at another, women pointed up a tree to where a crucified man croaked for water in a library of sleeping fruit bats. Crossing the Great Marsh, there were weedy meres where red birds perched on dead branches and blue dragon-flies darted over the nenuphars. A porter missed his footing on the causeway and the mud peeled from his thighs in thick grey flakes.

  It was night when they came into Abomey.

  THE PALACE OF Abomey had tall walls made of mud and blood but very few doors. It lay at a distance of twentythree thousand, five hundred and two bamboo poles from the beach. In its innermost compound lived the King, his eunuchs and three thousand armed women.

  The guards put their prisoner to lodge in a low thatched house. When his strength returned, they took him for walks about the city, but the drumbeats, the headless
victims, and stench of putrefaction made him dizzier and dizzier and he had to go back to his bed.

  Sometimes the King passed by on the far side of the wall, but all Da Silva saw was a white parasol frilled with jawbones. He asked, ‘When will I see the King?’ and the guard lowered his eyelids and drew his forefinger across his Adam’s apple.

  Then, one morning at cockcrow, three eunuchs came and told him to dress. Hardly daring to look right or left, he followed their swishing orange robes through courtyards crammed with hollering tribesmen: everywhere an architecture of white skulls outnumbered the heads of the living.

  They came into the presence of the King.

  The King lay lounging on a bolster of carmine velvet, thronged by naked women, who fanned him with ostrich feathers and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

  He was a tall sinewy man with dry red eyes, automatic gestures and the bonhomie of the seasoned slaughterer. The rising sun shone on his chest. His fingernails curled like cocks’ feathers. His loincloth was purple and his sandals were of twisted gold wire. At his feet were the heads of a boy and girl, sent half an hour earlier to tell the Dead Kings that their descendant had woken up. He glared at the Brazilian and spat.

  All the commoners lay on the ground and, when he lifted his baton, they rubbed their noses in the dirt and bellowed, ‘Dada! Breathe for me! Dada! Steal from me! Dada! Dada! Break me! Take me! My head is yours!’

  A troubadour crawled forward, pointed at Da Silva, and said in a hollow voice, ‘The bird who leaves her nest cannot carry away the eggs.’