The Viceroy of Ouidah (10 page)

The fear of illness obsessed him. But since his servant was an adept in the mysterious medicine of excrements, 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.'

An albino dwarf jumped up, saluted crazily, screeched white man's talk and gurgled as if he were being garrotted.

The executioner ran his fingers up and down his knife-blade.

But the prisoner knew better than to show fear and, as if by suction, drew the monarch's mouth into a cracked tobacco-stained smile.

By the end of the audience he was the King's friend.

 

 

 

 

NOT THAT HE was set free, merely that swarms of people clustered round his house — to see him, to feel him, to beg for medical treatment and give him food. Ministers came to call, princes came. A man came with a tumour the size of a loaf, and a woman kept coming with fruit and said, ‘I am your mother.'

He found the Portuguese prisoners and noted down their names: ‘Luis Lisboa ... Antonio Pires ... Roque Dias de Jordão ... ' but when he tried to get them released, the King said, ‘You are my friend. Don't speak about my enemies.'

The King said he loved him ‘too much' and made him stand at his side to watch every ceremony of importance. So, Francisco Manoel saw the Horse Sacrifice and the Platform Sacrifice, at which the victims were trussed in baskets and toppled to the executioners. He saw the spirits of Dead Kings moving with the slow disjointed gait of skeletons. He saw the Dead Queen Mothers, who were much more colourful and lively; the King's ‘Birds' who twittered and wore white, and the Lady Pipe Smokers who looked rather ill.

Often, the King would dance himself, rolling his scapulars and weaving his steps around the skulls of his favourite victims. Or he would amuse himself by teaching little boys to chop heads, and when they made a mess of it shout, ‘Not that way, you fool! Think of chopping wood!'

Then he would nudge his friend in the ribs and bellow, ‘Ha! Whiteman! I drink from your head also.'

The courtiers cackled at his buffooneries, and Francisco Manoel wondered where the farce would end.

 

 

 

 

YET HE WAS not alone; for there was a young man who kept trailing him wherever he went.

His forehead was high and wide, his eyebrows were glistening arches and his teeth shone. He wore an iron ring on his upper arm. A pink tunic, slit at the sides, revealed the slabs of his back and chest, and a hunter's knife hung loosely from his belt.

His one defect was a cast in the right eye, which was veiled and bloodshot.

He seemed to be signalling a message, but when Francisco Manoel returned the smile, the face collapsed in idiotic blankness.

A guard said he was Kankpé, the King's mad half-brother.

A friendlier guard whispered that Kankpé was only shamming madness; that he was the rightful king, and only waiting for an omen to raise the rebellion.

 

 

 

 

IN APRIL, THE month when purple arums reared their hoods in the yamfields, there were fresh rumours spreading through the city.

The diviners who foresaw the future in egg-yolks and the surface of water were predicting catastrophe or change. At Sado, a woman gave birth to a boy who was half a leopard. The war against the Egbas had produced a total of five captives — and the King's behaviour had surpassed even Dahomean limits of tolerance.

He had tied up his two chief ministers, the Mingan and Meu, and spat rum in their faces. He had castrated a soldier whose hips were too wide. His sons had defiled a royal tomb, and he had opened the belly of one of his wives to prove her foetus was a boy.

One morning levee, an old man pushed through the crowd and raised a finger at the throne. His cheeks were hollow. His chest was smeared with white paste and white rags hung limply from his hips.