The Viceroy of Ouidah (5 page)

She tried to picture the house they would live in when they went back to the City. She spoke of dancing in Bahia, in a tall blue room lined with mirrors and pillars of gold — which was quite untrue, for she had never strayed further than Ouidah.

At other times they would call on the Germans. In 1890 a Hamburg trading company called Goedelt bought the concession of the old British Fort. The newcomers drank beer from stoneware tankards and, in the evening, their mess-room clouded over with pipe-smoke. A cuckoo clock, painted with red roses, hung on the wall and there were pictures of the Rhinemaidens and one of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Cesário was the favourite of Herr Raabe the director, who thought of training him as a book-keeper. Whenever Eugenia went over to fetch him, she brought a chicken or some fruit and would stand on one foot, shyly, in the doorway, rubbing her calf with the other foot and staring at the wall.

The Germans thought she was waiting for the cuckoo. When the bird popped out of its hutch, they would say in English, ‘That's enough now, old lady. Thank you. Time to go home!' and when the door shut, in German, ‘My god, how that woman stares!'

But she had only been staring at the Kaiser.

 

 

 

 

ONE EVENING SHE and Cesário were crossing the Sogbadji Quarter in the stillness that precedes a storm. White flags hung motionless over a fetish. Some old men were crouching in the shadows, whitewashed all over, with their heads hung low. Unusual numbers of turkey-buzzards were converging on the town.

From one house they heard a low moan; from another mourners carried a corpse wrapped in a reed mat with the feet poking out. They saw a man dragging himself into the bushes. There were patches of vomit and yellow excrement all down the street.

The cholera had come ashore with the crew of a ship.

They hurried home. She bolted the door and would admit no one: she knew that much about contagion.

At dusk on the third day, Cesário felt dizzy and had to lie down. Within an hour he had fouled his bed. Sweat streamed from his skin leaving it cold, inelastic and clammy. His eyes sank in their sockets and gaped, expressionless, at the rafters. He did not lose consciousness and locked his shrivelled fingers tightly round hers.

The crisis came at that moment in an African dawn when everything is golden. Doves were cooing in the garden. A shaft of sunlight fell through the window and framed the woman in blue who kneeled by the boy's bed. Cramps racked his body and his ribcage writhed like a concertina.

She bent over and kissed him, slowly sliding her tongue into his dry mouth, praying for the disease to leave him and come to her.

He gasped, ‘Do leave me alone,' and soon he left her.

She went on living.

She went to a Brazilian trader and bought a length of azure cloth, the colour the Angels wore in Heaven. She washed the body, which had already taken on a greenish tinge. She wrapped it and laid it in a coffin of iroko wood. She fluffed his hair round like a halo. She put a gold coin in his hand and her gardener nailed down the lid.

They buried him in the family cemetery, under Dom Francisco's window, with a cross of palm-fronds set over his head. None of her relations took any notice, being too distracted by their own deaths.

Three days later, Raabe's assistant saw her walking on the beach, her chin pressed against her throat, muttering and watching the sand squeeze between her toes.

Then she laughed and held her hands wide and waved a black scarf at the birdless sea.

He asked what she was doing and she said, ‘He's gone to Bahia.'

 

 

 

 

THE NEXT FEW years washed over her without disturbing her solitude.

She failed to notice the outburst of human sacrifice that marked the accession of the new King, Behanzin the ‘Shark'. She ignored the French bombardment of Ouidah which killed a hundred and thirty people and dismembered a sacred baobab. Nor did she celebrate when Estevão da Silva hauled an improvised tricolour up the flagpole and started the family on their career as brown Frenchmen.

The events of her life were the palm-nut harvest and the festivals of the Brazilian Church. For three weeks before Saints Cosmas and Damian in September, she and her maid, Roxa, would sew frilly dresses for the twin sisters of the town, who were almost worshipped as divinities. In January, they would help paint the mummers' costumes for the Bumba-Meu-Boi. And every 3rd of June, on John the Baptist's Day, they sat outside the chapel of the Portuguese Fort grilling ears of new corn for the congregants.

Because these occasions repeated themselves year after year, she lost all sense of growing old.

Mãe Roxa died in the smallpox epidemic of 1905 after refusing an inoculation. Her place was taken by an eighteen-year-old ‘Brazilian' girl, whose real name was Cristella Chaves, but Eugenia would make no concession to the change, called her Roxa and expected her to know all about the last fifty years.

By 1914 the Chapel of the Fort had fallen into decay. She had long coveted the image of the Baptist's head and, to preserve it from looters, she took it away for safekeeping. The head had glass eyes and snaky black curls and was the work of an African sculptor in Bahia who had carved the aorta, the oesophagus and third neck vertebra with meticulous attention to detail. He had screwed it to a Minton meat-dish stencilled with mauve carnations: painted blood trickled into the scoop intended to catch juices from the roast beef of Old England.

Her next idea was to convert Dom Francisco's bedroom into a shrine.

She and Roxa made rosaries. They made reliquaries. They made wreaths of artificial flowers from sea-shells and they improvised a Holy Ghost from a Pirevitte teapot in the form of a chicken. They hung up the panorama of Bahia, the picture of Judith and some religious colour prints: Santa Marta with a pair of bleeding hearts; Santa Luzia smiling at her own two eyes lying in the palm of her hand.

The head of the Baptist they set on the altar table.

Then, with the work all but finished, she hit on the idea of buying a statue of St Francis to stand at the foot of her father's bed.

The palm-nut buyer, Monsieur Poidevineau, advanced some money on her share of the crop and sent off to Marseille to a company that specialized in sacred sculpture.

The Poverello arrived at the railway station in a stout box. The Brazil-town band beat out a samba and Mama Wéwé — as she was now called — stood smiling on the platform as the train drew in. For the first time in twenty-five years she was not wearing black.

The Fathers of Our Lady of Africa heard of this touching example of faith and offered their help. But she would allow no one in the shrine until she was ready for the consecration.

One morning Fathers Truitard, Boët and Zérringer walked down to Simbodji in spotless white soutanes and sandals. She unbolted the door and ushered them in with a gesture of triumph.

They saw the head of Holophernes, the head of the Baptist, the slave chains, a toilet mirror and the nails and bloodstained feathers. Father Zérringer, who was an amateur zoologist, looked over the reliquaries and identified a vulture's claw, a python vertebra, a fragment of baboon skull and the eardrum of a lion.

‘
Ce sont les gri
-
gris du marché
,' he whispered.

Knowing him to be less liable to sectarian anger, Father Truitard's colleagues deputed him to tell her the truth. He was an embarrassed man, with a pitted face and kind brown eyes, who had spent years communing with waves and petrels on the island of Ushant. He knew some Portuguese.

Mother Church, he explained, could not allow the worship of idolatrous objects on Holy Ground. The Faith was there. The heart was willing and the Flesh was willing. But she did need some lessons in scripture. Nor was the choice of St Francis a wise one to stand over the grave of a slaver.

‘But he sent them to PARADISE!' she screamed, and pointed to the panorama of Bahia.

‘But St Francis, my sister, was a poor wanderer, who loved all men and the birds and the animals . . . '

She was not listening. A hoarse cry tore from her lips. Her arms lashed out and flapped helplessly. She hurled herself out into the blazing sun and fell down in a heap.

Two days later, Mère Agathe of the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres barged past Roxa and forced her way into Eugenia's room. She withdrew after five minutes, her face scratched to ribbons and her habit a massacre of carmine.

 

 

 

 

MAMA WÉWÉ SAT another sixty years in the curdled odour of rotting brocade, her eyes glued to her father's portable oratory of the Last Supper.

This was a glass-fronted vitrine, the size of a small doll's house and made by the nuns of the Soledade in Bahia:

The miniature room had sky-blue walls, mirrors and gilded pilasters. On the floor there was a marquetry sunburst and, under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, a clock. Wooden figures of Christ and the Apostles were sitting down to a meal of plaster-of-Paris chicken. The eyes of Our Lord were the colour of turquoise and his head bristled with real red hair. In her imagination she would contract her body and stand watching in the doorway — though she would step aside for the shifty mulatto who left in the middle of the dinner.

The years slipped by and nobody repaired the house. The thatch rotted, the shutters splintered and, when ants undermined the floor, her rocking chair would no longer rock. Weeds sprang up in the rainy season, bleached for lack of light. Patches of mould spread over the walls: a delta of red streams fanned out from the wasps' nests in the rafters and cut across the termite trails.

Only once, in 1942, was there a break in the rhythm of her days.

After a noisy
vin d'honneur
, the Resident's wife, Madame Burlaton, mistook the accelerator for the brake of her Peugeot and distributed Aizan, the Market Fetish, in pieces all over the square. The
féticheurs
demanded a human sacrifice for the reconsecration. Her husband refused. There was a riot.

A platoon of Senegalese spahis fired, killing a goat and wounding a woman in the leg. Roxa heard the shots and, four hours later, ran to the barracks with a message for their commanding officer: Mademoiselle da Silva would be delighted to receive him.

Lieutenant André Parisot had heard of the mysterious white woman whom nobody had seen. He took some time to macassar his hair and put on his best whites.

‘Lieutenant,' she said. ‘I shall play to celebrate your victory. Roxa, fetch me my piano!'

Roxa carried in a white plank painted with thirty-five black keys, and the lieutenant chewed his lip as her uncut fingernails scratched the arpeggios and dust fell out of the wormholes.

Dom Francisco's wardrobe, held together by its paint surface alone, lasted until 1957, when it collapsed, revealing a wreckage of whalebone stays and shreds of black taffeta that fluttered upwards like flakes of carbonized paper.

Spiders had turned the parrot cage into a grey tent. The pictures were peeling, and all Twelve Apostles eaten away to leprous stumps.

Yet, from the head of Christ, like the periscopic eyes of certain fish, two blue glass beads stood out on stalks.

 

 

 

 

HER OWN EYES were too tired to see the faces peering in at the window. But she had seen the same faces long ago, and they were all there, as she imagined.

Unscrewing a silver phial, Father Olimpío da Silva gave extreme unction and the room resounded with his prayer. Modeste swung a censer and the clouds of blue smoke disturbed the wasps and set them buzzing.

She was not sweating. Her face was still. No one would have thought that, under that papery skin, there were veins and arteries and a pumping heart.

Then her lips opened with an audible pop. The Da Silvas heard a rustling sound. At first, they were uncertain if it were the rustle of her skin, the rustle of black bombazine, or the start of the death rattle.

A word detached itself and floated around the room. A second word came clear. A string of words, faint as the wind in distant palms.

‘The papers,' they whispered. ‘Ask her about the papers.'

Papa Agostinho put his ear to her mouth. He got up and tiptoed to the window.

‘She speaking Portuguese. Who speaks Portuguese? Doesn't anyone speak Portuguese?'

THE MAN WHO landed at Ouidah in 1812 was born, twenty-seven years earlier, near Jaicos in the Sertão, the dry scrubby cattle country of the Brazilian North-East.

The Sertanistas are wild and poor. They have tight faces, sleek hair and sometimes the green eyes of a Dutch or Celtic ancestor. They hate negroes. They believe in miraculous cures, and their legends tell of a phantom king called Dom Sebastião, who will rid the earth of Antichrist.

Like all people born in thorny places, they dream of green fields and a life of ease. Sometimes, with light hearts, they set out south for San Salvador da Bahia, but when they see the sea and the city, they panic and turn back to the badlands.

Francisco Manoel's father, a hired hand on a ranch, was killed while driving steers at a round-up. His leather hat caught in the fork of two branches: the chinstrap slipped round his neck and throttled him. Friends following the tracks of his riderless horse found the body dangling with the feet just clear of the ground.

His son was one year old.

The mother was a very bad-tempered woman. Her hands were worked raw. Blue veins stood out on her temples and her thinning hair failed to hide the wens that had sprouted in several places on her scalp. Years of drought had set her mouth in an expression of rage — rage for her shrivelled breasts; for the bast sandals instead of shoes; for the feather bed she would never own, or the white metal crucifix that should have been made of gold.