The Viceroy of Ouidah Page 9

  Dom Francisco greeted each fresh atrocity with a glassy smile. He felt no trace of pity for the mother who pleaded for her child, or for the old man staring in disbelief at the purple veil spread out over the smouldering ruins.

  For years he continued in this self-directed nightmare. But one day, before the sack of Sokologbo, he was hiding behind a rock when some small boys came skipping down the path, waving bird-scarers to shoo the doves off the millet fields. He would never forget their gasps as the Amazons pounced from the bushes and garrotted them one by one.

  All that morning, as the Dahomeans did their work, he buried his face in his hands, muttering, ‘No. Not the children!’ and never went to war again.

  BUT THE KING became a warrior more frightful than any of his ancestors.

  He broke Grito in 1818, Lozogohé in 1820 and Lemón in 1825. He killed Atobé of Mahi, Adafé of Napou and Achadé of Léfou-Léfou. He made the Atakpameans eat their fathers in a stew. He swore to defeat the Egbas in their stronghold at Abeokuta, and he told the Alafin of Oyo to ‘eat parrots’ eggs’.

  He was not cruel. He too sickened at the sight of blood and would avert his eyes from the executions. He longed to end the cycles of war and revenge — yet he could never resist the temptation to acquire more skulls.

  The skulls of his enemies assured him that he was alive in the world of real things. He drank from skulls, he spat into skulls. Skulls formed the feet of his throne, the sides of his bed and the path that led to the bed-chamber. He knew the name of every skull in his Skull-House and held imaginary conversations with each in turn: the lesser enemies were piled on copper trays, but the great ones were wrapped in silk and kept in whitewashed baskets.

  Not that he could have spared many victims had he wanted to. The war-commanders eyed him for the first sign of weakness, and a body of priests was always on hand to advise which captives should go to the Deadland, and which to the Americas.

  Dom Francisco would think up ways to save them from the knife: he found the best plan was to divert the nobles’ attention with some novelty imported from Europe.

  One year, when the palace architects were planning a skull-mosaic, he suggested using porcelain plates instead. At first, the King was overjoyed at the idea of ‘breaking’ such valuable property and dashed a whole pile to the ground. Then, as if he heard his ancestors growling, he frowned, his dead eye drained the light from the live one, and he barked out:

  ‘War is for taking heads, not selling them attached to bodies.’

  GRADUALLY THE TWO friends lost the art of communicating except through presents. But though Dom Francisco’s presents usually pleased the King, the King had nothing to offer but women - and such were his ideas of friendship that he posted spies inside the Fort at Ouidah to make sure each one was used.

  The mistress of the seraglio was still Jijibou.

  She had weathered the upheavals and grown into a big-jowled woman, shapely as a horse, with a satiny gloss to her skin. She spent her days in the shade of her hut, muffled in orange cloth, and was never seen to smile.

  Her father, the kruman, had died. He drowned the day his canoe capsized and, even if Jijibou suspected her husband of selling him to a slaver, she did not allow her suspicions to interfere with her household duties.

  She would inspect the girls to make sure they were virgins, calm their fears and lead them to the bedroom. She brought each new baby to its father, but their squalling only reminded him of his Brazilian child, and, as their tiny fingers clawed at his beard, he would grit his teeth and stop his ears and hurry off.

  To uphold the decencies of the Church, he insisted on Christian baptism and made Jijibou go through a fiction of being the real mother. He tried to read her thoughts as she stood by the font. But if she caught him glancing in her direction, her eyes would narrow and the facets of her mouth turn down.

  BY 1835 THE size of his family had outgrown the Fort. So, work began on the mansion he had been cheated of building in Brazil.

  Simbodji — which means ‘Big House’ in Fon — lay open to Atlantic breezes on a sloping site between the King’s Baobab and the Captains’ Tree.

  The house that emerged from its chrysalis of palm scaffolds was a replica of Tapuitapera except that, for want of stone foundations, it was unsafe to build a second storey. The pink walls were the same, the upturned eaves, the blue dining-room, and the cross-lattice windows that were painted green.

  The houseboys had never seen glass windows before, and when they saw the reflection of the setting sun, they thought they were ablaze and doused them with water.

  Dom Francisco imported jacaranda couches, an opaline toilet set, the Swiss musical boxes and the Goanese bed. A piano came from Germany. The billiard-table came through the surf on a raft of three canoes lashed together.

  His own rooms were tall and cool, and stripes of sunlight filtered through the shutters. The verandah gave on to a garden of night-scented flowers, and there was a path that led through the wall to the seraglio.

  Facing his bed, he hung up a panorama of Bahia, but the sight of it made him homesick and he replaced it with an engraving of the boy Emperor Dom Pedro II. His desk was stacked with old Brazilian newspapers. He tried to puzzle out the politics of the new Empire. The names meant nothing. He gave up and only read the advertisements.

  One night, in a flash of inspiration, he wrote to Joaquim Coutinho, asking if the nuns of the Soledade could make a replica of the oratory of the Last Supper.

  Joaquim, it so happened, was delighted at being spared the embarrassment of his partner’s return. He lost no time in sending a crate with a letter:

  My consort and I take pleasure in sending the original, with our blessings for the Christian community established at Ouidah ...

  A PORTRAIT OF Dom Francisco at the age of fifty would have shown a man strangely unaffected by the climate. A scar fanned out from his right temple. A deep furrow split his forehead into two. But his skin, though yellowish, was unwrinkled. His hair and beard were black and glossy, and he moved with the easy strides of youth.

  He took not the slightest trouble with his clothes. By day he wore a planter’s suit of grey calico, an old pair of boots and a bandless straw hat with holes in it. He would make his dinner guests wear freshly laundered whites, only to insult them by turning up in a dirty chintz housecoat and pantaloons that trailed over his Moorish slippers.

  Not that he had no other clothes. In his bedroom was a wardrobe painted with Chinese landscapes, stuffed full of the clothes he ordered from the tailors of London and Paris for the receptions he would never attend. Some nights, behind a bolted door, he put on evening dress and would extend a white-gloved hand to the cheval-glass that flaked and pitted far faster than his own face. Then, when the moths and silverfish began their work, he would tell Taparica to burn the lot and write out fresh orders to his agent.

  He wore no watch. He knew the time from the sun or the constellations; and even when the sky was overcast, he could peer into the darkness and say, ‘Three hours left till dawn.’

  Yet he kept a collection of watches in a leather box beneath the bed — gold fobs and half-hunters; watches with rock crystal dials, or painted with scenes of the Turkish harem. His favourites were the Swiss musical clocks; and when his women heard the tiny birds twittering under the mattress they thought they were the spirits singing.

  He would wind them up before retiring, taking care to set each one to a different hour: he was so much obsessed with the passage of time.

  There were other nights when he would take out his rings, putting on one after the other till his fingers were stiff with the wild light of emeralds.

  Afterwards he would stare moodily at his bare hands and call out, ‘Taparica! Soap and water!’ Then he would lie in his nightshirt, waiting for the creak of boards on the verandah: on the bad nights, the game of breaking virgins was his only hope of consolation.

  THE DA SILVA boys were allowed to play naked till the age of seven. After that, their fathe
r dressed them in whites, put them to sleep in a dormitory and sent them to the padre’s schoolroom to learn how to read.

  They were lively boys and they learned easily. They learned their catechism and the verses of Camoens, but most days they came back from their lessons with blank, bewildered faces.

  Twenty years of mission work in Angola had given Father de Lessa the appearance of a bird of prey and biblical convictions on the subject of Blacks. He had the habit of conducting scripture lessons in the form of rhetorical questions:

  ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin?’ he would shout. ‘Or the leopard his spots?’

  Was not black the colour of night? Of the Devil? Was not black skin the very mark of Cain?

  Dom Francisco guessed what was wrong and, one morning, sat outside the schoolroom and listened to the padre’s peroration. Then he poked his head through the window and said, ‘But blacks believe the Devil is white.’

  HIS ELDEST SON, Isidoro, was sent to Bahia to finish his studies with the Coutinho boys. The family now lived in a big white mansion on the cliffs overlooking the bay. But Isidoro’s wildness — and African toilet habits — so terrorized the ladies of the household that his guardian packed him off to a gloomy seminary in the hills.

  There, in classrooms reeking of incense, he learned to parse a Latin sentence wearing a white cassock emblazoned with a red cross. He would come back for the holidays sunk-eyed and flabby. His coughing fits reminded the Fathers of consumption and, finally, they sent him away for good.

  Back in Bahia, he soon recovered his spirits in the bars and brothels of the Pelourinho.

  ‘I have decided’, Joaquim Coutinho wrote to his partner, ‘to shut my eyes to your son’s indecencies, since the only means I have of controlling them would be to hand him over to the civil authorities, which, as a guardian, I am loath to do.’

  But when the young mulatto staggered into the house, drenched with blood and his clothes ripped to ribbons, he was thrown out and sent to lodge with a slave-broker in the Lower City.

  JOAQUIM COUTINHO USED Isidoro’s behaviour as an excuse to break up the partnership: by 1838 slave-trading was no longer an occupation for a Brazilian gentleman.

  It had been a criminal offence for ten years. But though it flourished without prosecution, though the Southern coffee-planters were crying out for slaves, the business had got into the hands of Portuguese nouveaux riches, whose business methods made them highly unpopular.

  Brazilian liberals hated slavery on moral grounds and the conservatives mistrusted it for practical ones: there were far too many Blacks in Brazil.

  In 1835 a slave revolt had all but overwhelmed the city of Bahia. The leaders, it turned out, were a cabal of Muslim fanatics who had infiltrated the Black Christian Brotherhoods and declared a Holy War. But in fashionable society the name of Toussaint-Louverture was on everyone’s lips, while at Court the Emperor’s ministers were known to favour German immigrants over Africans.

  APART FROM HIS ships, Joaquim Coutinho was the owner of ranches, a diamond mine, a bank, streets of town property, and he was thinking of building a railway. He had also set his heart on a title, lived in dread of compromising himself and was particularly sensitive to his nickname, ‘Old Meat’.

  On a visit to Rio he bribed the imperial chamberlains. Then he cut his old associates and sold his fleet. He built two churches in the Gothic style; he endowed a convent, put his name at the top of every subscription list — and, finally, he had his reward.

  One evening at Simbodji, as Dom Francisco leafed through the latest copy of the Jornal do Rio de Janeiro, he read that the well-known Bahia financier and philanthropist had been created Baron of Paraíba. A line engraving showed a spade-bearded man, coffined in a frock-coat, with gold chains round his paunch and the Order of St Boniface round his neck.

  ‘Not the boy I knew,’ he said.

  He decided to risk a letter of congratulation, though five months passed before the reply came — a curt note regretting that public and private pressures no longer allowed him to attend to the African trade.

  THE NEW BARON of Paraiba did at least have the grace — or the self-interest — to find an agent in Bahia for his ex-colleague.

  José de Paraizo was a Portuguese who had learned from the experience of exile the art of making himself indispensable. His first action was to rescue Isidoro da Silva from the gutter. He bought him a new set of clothes, and made him pose in them for his portrait. Then he sent him to Marseille as an apprentice to a shipping company.

  He also excelled in finding things to keep the King of Dahomey amused. In the same consignment as the portrait, he sent some lustre-ware kettle-drums, a Noah’s Ark and a barrel-organ that played the Psalms. Next, he bought up the costumes that were sold off by the Rio Opera to defray its costs; and for a season, the court functionaries of Abomey swanned about dressed as characters from Rossini’s Semiramide.

  Another time, perhaps as a joke, he sent the canvas of Judith and Holophernes, but Dom Francisco kept it back:

  ‘These people’, he wrote, ‘have so little humour. His Majesty might not be amused.’

  Nor was there any way of telling if the King was pleased with a present; for he would frown at each one and lift an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘What have you kept back this time?’

  All the serving girls at Simbodji were royal spies: whatever went on in the household the King was the first to know. So, when Dom Francisco bought for himself a silver swan that gobbled up fishes to the airs of Bellini, it vanished overnight, only to be sent back from Abomey with the neck off, the mechanism overwound and a warning never again to send anything broken.

  THE KING HAD no use for gold. Gold was the currency of his enemy, the King of Ashanti, whereas Dahomey used cowrie-shells that could neither be faked nor adulterated.

  But the Cubans and Yankees who came to buy slaves in Ouidah always preferred to pay in gold: ingots, doubloons, louis d’or, napoleons, sovereigns and sometimes the coins of the Great Moghul. Dom Francisco kept his hoard in money barrels buried under the bedroom floor: it alarmed him terribly when the King commanded one of them to be taken up to Abomey.

  The King peered at the coins, one after the other, and let them slide through his fingers. He learned the names of Louis Philippe, the Elector of Brandenburg, Tsar Paul and the young Queen Victoria. Then he rolled his eyes and threw the lot to the ground, snorting, ‘I wouldn’t let anyone walk off with my head,’ and never spoke of gold again.

  IN THE RAINY season of 1842 Father de Lessa went mad.

  He would come into the schoolroom naked and mortify himself with a leather flail. Or he could be seen stalking round the Python Temple, in a mud-spattered soutane, shrieking, ‘I will make this city desolate. I will smite the abominations.’

  One Sunday, as he was preparing the sacrament for Mass, he found a python curled up in his vestments and staved its head in with the butt of his processional cross. The fetish priests hauled him out of the chapel and, by the time Dom Francisco had rescued him, he was out of his mind.

  He kept seeing an animal called the Zoo.

  The Zoo had the head of a monkey, a dog’s body, leopard claws, and it would sprawl lecherously across his path and twitter like a bird.

  Dom Francisco decided to ship him back to Bahia. But the Zoo was also in the sea; for when they strapped him aboard the canoe, he was still screaming, ‘The Zoo! The Zoo!’

  ABOUT THIS TIME Isidoro came back from France with the airs of a dandy and a head full of schemes for starting a palm-oil factory: by the 1840s the middle classes of Europe had discovered the blessings of savon blanc de Provence.

  A Marseille trading company, Mm. Binet and Poncetton, sent a scout to report on the palm plantations of the Slave Coast: it was through Isidoro’s help that a thinlipped young man called Blaise Brue reoccupied the old French Fort of Saint-Louis-de-Grégoy.

  Blaise Brue played an excellent game of boston and was a welcome dinner guest at Simbodji. It was he who suggested turning Ouidah
into a French protectorate.

  As for Dom Francisco, he jumped at the chance of making clean money in the oil trade. He put his entire workforce at the Frenchman’s disposal, and they went into partnership. They unchoked old palmeries and they planted new ones. From distant villages women converged on the Fort with oil calabashes balanced on their heads. In the first season, four thousand barrels were rolled to the beach, and Dom Francisco was seen again to smile.

  He smiled as the palm nuts ripened the colour of embers and he smiled to watch the glutinous yellow liquid rise to the surface of the vats. Often, he would turn to his sons and say:

  ‘One day palm-oil will make us rich beyond the dreams of avarice.’

  But the young mulattos were stranded in a limbo. They hated their father. They hated any kind of work and, having no outlet for their energies, turned sour and moody, stole from the storerooms, or took to drink and discovered the pleasures of the knife.

  DOM FRANCISCO’S LOVE-AFFAIR with France reached a climax when Louis Philippe’s second son, the Prince de Joinville, landed off the frigate Belle-Poule to inspect the French factory.

  That night at dinner, he served a Château Margaux of 1811 and provided a silver tooth-pick holder in the form of a porcupine for each officer to take as a souvenir.

  The Prince made everyone laugh by telling scandalous stories about the English when he went to fetch the body of Napoleon off St Helena. He discussed the problem of cooling champagne in the tropics and the origin of the expression ‘Perfide Albion’. Then he drew a pencil sketch of his host — the basis of all future portraits — and retired to bed in the Goanese four-poster.