The Viceroy of Ouidah (14 page)

Every Saturday, Dom Francisco gave a dinner for the leaders of the colony. All of them agreed that Simbodji was gloomy, old-fashioned and vulgar.

 

 

 

 

THE NEWCOMERS WERE very fussy about their health and, for the first time, Ouidah had a doctor.

He was Dr Marcos Brandão Ferraez, a harassed young mulatto, gone grey at thirty, who could be seen hurrying on his rounds with a green carpet-bag. Back in Brazil he had eloped with a Sertanista from a small town in Ceará: they decided to go to Africa when her brothers threatened to kill him.

The couple were childless and lived in two neat rooms above their pharmacy, where they put a plaster bust of Hippocrates and rows of blue pottery drug jars inscribed with Latin names; and they had a macaw called Zé Piranha.

Dona Luciana kept a spotless kitchen. No one knew better how to make guava marmalade or stuff a crab. She sang as she pounded her spices and, when she sang, her upper lip lifted in an enchanting way. But they were all sad songs. She had sung them as a girl, when she ached to get out of the backlands — to which she was aching to return.

After a while, she seemed to shrivel away in the heat. Her hair hung in rat-tails and her face came up in a rash. She was terrified of going out, mistook scorpions for snakes and would sit, miserably fingering her crucifix, till her husband came back.

One midday, as Dom Francisco was walking home with Taparica, he stopped dead in his tracks. Clearly and slowly, through the pharmacy window, came the words of a song that untied knots in his memory. It was a song his mother sang, about the gipsy woman who walked from fair to fair; and when Dona Luciana came to the final stanza, he joined in the last two lines.

She froze.

He peered in.

She took one look under the brim of his hat, saw the eyes and afterwards swore she had seen the Devil.

 

 

 

 

ON THE OTHER hand he was always welcome for a glass of sweet lime at the house of Jacinto das Chagas, a half-Yoruba mulatto who had been a clerk on a sugar estate and had a lovely daughter called Venossa.

Jacinto's calm smile, his gentlemanly bearing, his temperance and clean cotton suits made a lasting impression on the Dahomeans. Years of deference had taught him how best to worm his way into another's confidence, or play on another's guilt. Whenever he spoke of the Slave Trade, he would splay his long bony fingers over his heart and sigh, ‘My brothers! My poor black brothers!'

Because of his reliability, and his head for figures, Dom Francisco took him on as his assistant. He trusted him with commercial secrets he would never have shared with his sons. And he even trusted him on confidential errands to the King.

At first the King was infuriated by the idea of black men in shoes, but when Jacinto told him of the ‘Brazilians' ' marriages in the chapel, he too said he needed a Christian bride: the whole colony was disgusted by Jacinto's decision to sacrifice his own daughter.

One drizzly morning, veiled so no one should see her crying, and driving her fingernails through a purse of blue satin, Venossa das Chagas said, ‘I will,' between sobs; and she walked down the aisle on the arm of Dom Francisco, who stood proxy for his blood-brother in a black morning coat.

An Amazon guard of honour escorted her to Abomey where, forty-nine years later, a French army officer found her, bent double before a crucifix in an attitude of prayer.

It was she who ruined the Da Silvas.

 

 

 

 

A MONTH AFTER the marriage, her father picked a quarrel with his employer, made friends with the French, and set up as a palm-oil exporter on his own. The King gave him land and slaves. He built a house with white columns and filled it with furniture from Paris. Soon, under the cover of the oil business, he started selling slaves to dealers from the United States.

Dom Francisco heard his monopoly was broken, and thought he was going mad. He burst in on the Das Chagas family at luncheon and sneered:

‘Where are your black brothers now?'

‘Those were Mahis,' Jacinto replied, ‘not my people.' In message after message, Dom Francisco tried to get his rival expelled but Jacinto had taught the King the true value of gold. And he had hinted that half the Da Silvas' fortune was already in Brazil — a capital crime in a country where every scrap of property was royal.

Without warning the King's tax-collectors swarmed into Simbodji and removed all the silver and gold. A month later, a steam-frigate of the West Africa Squadron boarded the last Baltimore clipper: it was obvious that Jacinto had tipped the British off.

The women of Simbodji said, ‘The Big Tree is falling,' for quite suddenly the master was old.

 

 

 

 

AND TAPARICA WAS dying.

His head drooped. His skin shrivelled and red crescents showed up under his eyeballs. Some days he peered like a lost child, not knowing where he was. When the end came, Dom Francisco would not let him die on a mat, laid him down on the Goanese bed and held his scaly hand through three suffocating nights.

The voice croaked through the curtains:

‘You not know this people. You not learn them never.'

Taparica tried to explain the various kinds of poison and their antidotes. But the seabird part of him had flown, back to his island in the Bay of Bahia, where he had once licked the armpit of the woman who had taught him the mysterious medicine of excrements.

Dom Francisco buried him at dawn in a grave among the flowerbeds. A clammy mist enveloped his private sorrow, and he stared at the mud-stained shroud.

From over the wall of the seraglio, he could hear the women wailing, but the wails sounded more like a song of triumph.

 

 

 

 

A WORRIED DR Brandão Ferraez appeared one morning before breakfast to report a case of yellow fever in a ‘Brazilian' house where a girl had entertained a Cuban sailor.

Within a week groans and muffled prayers sounded in every street. The disease struck down hundreds of blacks and mulattos but left the whites alone. The ‘Brazilians' hung purple cloths from their balconies and, if they strayed out of doors, tied sponges soaked in vinegar under their noses. Isidoro and his half-brother Antonio lit bonfires to stop the contagion, but the sparks set fire to a roof and burned down several houses.

Ten Da Silvas died of the disease; and the doctor was the last of its victims.

He came home from calling on a case, his cheeks concave and his eyes congested and yellow. He said, ‘Don't touch me! Don't come near me!' and lay down on his bed.

By noon he was writhing on the floor with streams of black vomit, black as coffee grounds, spilling from his lips. Towards evening there was a storm. The clouds were the colour of mud. The palms bent and hissed. For another hour he lay quietly. Then he screamed as if an arrow had pierced his throat, and he died.

In the crowd watching the body as it came feet first through the pharmacy door was a hysterical woman who had lost all her children. The second she saw Dona Luciana, she shrieked out, ‘Witch!'

The mob smashed the drug jars and the bust of Hippocrates lay headless in the street.

Dom Francisco heard the pandemonium and guessed the cause. Half an hour later, he and the houseboy carried in a bundle of rags and clotted blood, which they set on the Goanese bed.

For ten days Dona Luciana wavered between life and death, though she ate greedily what food was put before her. When she was well enough to recognize her rescuer, she shut her mouth so tightly they had to feed her by force.

Whenever he came into the room, she would cringe like a nocturnal mammal brought into the sunlight. It took weeks for her to get used to his presence. Then, suddenly, overnight, the man who had been the Devil was transfigured into her Guardian Angel.

He took care not to touch her, not even to touch her sleeve or her hand. Yet, joining two miseries in one, they took comfort from each other's company and could not bear to be apart.

He let her live on at Simbodji. She slept in the bed, while he slept next door on one of the jacaranda couches. He had the door of the seraglio walled up, and they stayed indoors and saw no one.

They lived as a man and a wife who have sworn themselves to chastity. She made an altar table and put vases of white flowers on either side of the oratory of the Last Supper. She kept a candle burning, and she promised to save his soul.

She would read from the New Testament the stories of Christ's forgiveness for sinners, with the sunbeams falling over her widow's weeds and her chignon of flaxen hair. Her neck was very white: around it, on a velvet ribbon, hung a locket of her husband's curls.

Dom Francisco listened, while Zé Piranha perched on his shoulder and poked his mandible into his ear: when the macaw's feathers came out, he would stroke his poll and say softly, ‘Poor bird! He wants to go back home.'

In the rainy season, his attacks of rheumatism got worse and for weeks he would be too stiff to move. She applied hot compresses to his spine: she knew any number of remedies, but had lost her medicines in the pharmacy fire.

The women of Simbodji hated their rival. Even in a rainstorm, Jijibou would bang and bang on the door, clamouring to be let in. She made such a row that Dom Francisco had to send for Isidoro who calmed his mother down and, for the first time, earned his father's gratitude.

Of all his children he cared only for two twin sisters by a mulatto woman who had died. Their names were Umbelina and Leocadia and they were growing up to be beauties. Dona Luciana said, ‘Let them come and live with us. Twins will bring us luck,' and she gave them a mother's love.

She sewed them frilly white dresses and tied satin ribbons in their hair. She taught them to embroider their initials on handkerchiefs. Together they made a picture of the Virgin Mary, using Zé Piranha's moulting wing-feathers for the robe, and his breast for the halo. Often, they took a picnic to the Chinese pavilion at Zomai. All four of them would sing the songs of the Bandeirantes. And how the girls screamed when their father told the story of the Goblin-with-hair-for-hands!

On one of these picnics, Dona Luciana asked if he ever thought of going back to Brazil.

‘If God wills it,' he said. ‘I would give anything to die in my country.'

From that day onward she could think of nothing else. She was full of schemes for slipping past the King's guards, who now watched over them night and day. But he, the man of action, seemed incapable of action. He would press his fists against his temples and say, ‘But how? How? How?'

But she knew there had to be a way.

He still owned property in Brazil — a cigar factory at Magarogipe, a ranch, a sawmill and a few town houses — which his agent had bought as an investment when the price of slaves was up. Not without misgivings, he wrote to José de Paraizo asking him to buy a house in Bahia for his retirement, begging him keep it a secret.

Six months later, together with a copy of the title deeds to No. 1 Beco do Corto, Barra, came a crudely painted canvas, still reeking of turpentine, with a pink villa in a garden going down to the sea.

Dona Luciana clapped her hands as they unwrapped it, and asked what were the squiggles in the sky.

‘Birds,' he said.

The first half of Paraízo's letter listed the furniture and the names of the household slaves: he had kept back the bad news for the end.

Because of an oversight by the Baron of Paraíba, Dom Francisco's citizenship had been allowed to lapse. The Governor of Bahia had turned down his petition for a passport. Slaving was now a criminal offence: they would arrest him the minute he landed.

And yet, Paraízo continued, perhaps there was no cause for alarm: a contribution to charity would surely solve the problem. Another year passed. But when the
Jornal da Bahia
reported the opening of the sailors' hospital, Dom Francisco read the text of the Baron's address — and not a mention of his name among the donors.

In letter after letter, Dona Luciana appealed to the Governor, to the Baron and even to the Emperor himself: if all failed they would travel to Rome and lay their case before the Apostle Nunciate.

In her imagination she saw the great golden church, the choirs, the angels and the sunlight slanting sideways on the altar. The smell of incense already tingled in her nostrils. Then a figure in shining white would get up from his throne, and raise his hand in benediction, and say, ‘Rise, Francisco! Reborn in the body of our Saviour!'

 

 

 

 

THEY WENT ON waiting for news and there was none.

Umbelina and Leocadia were too frightened to go out. Their half-brothers would jeer them, push them against the wall, and pretend that they were wanted by the King. Their father feared for their safety. Firmly, he ordered Dona Luciana to take them to the house in Bahia, where she would lobby for his pardon and he would, one day, join them.

The Da Silvas were overjoyed to see the back of her: her departure was a scene of jubilation. But when she saw the ship slewing in the swells, and the tears in his eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and said, ‘No. I cannot go.'

The setting sun had coloured the waves a milky golden green. The canoes looked like giant black centipedes as the crews heaved them down the scarp of the beach. Gently, Dom Francisco disentangled the moaning girls and led them to the water's edge. He gave the Captain a note for the Baron of Paraíba, commending them to his care. Flecks of foam blew on to Dona Luciana's black taffeta dress. And they stood, arm in arm, on the sand, watching the brown arms waving from a wavecrest and falling into the trough beyond.