The Viceroy of Ouidah (2 page)

Meanwhile the photographer was getting desperate.

He was a young man called Cyriaque Cabochichi, with a shaved gourd-like head, skin so black it glinted blue and the most serious approach to his profession. On the back of his sleeveless orange jumpsuit were a purple lamb and letters reading ‘Foto Studio Agnew Pascal'.

He stood behind his tripod, half-hidden under the black cloth, signalling with both arms to Modeste and Pierre to push the ladies from either end and squeeze them within the frame of his plate camera.

The boys got wildly excited. They shoved at the ladies' backsides. They slapped them. They pinched them. But the ladies took no notice: their attention was drawn to the Python Temple where a European tourist was photographing the
féticheur.
The old man stood on one leg, a blue cloth round his midriff, pulling a face of absolute contempt, with the python's head nuzzling his left nipple and its tail coiled round his umbilical hernia.

The sun throbbed and slid downwards, casting bloodred shadows and gilding the jagged edges of the papaya leaves.

‘The light's going,' moaned Cyriaque Cabochichi, and brought the ladies to their senses.

Nothing was going to deprive them of their photograph. With a show of unity unimaginable a minute before, they turned sideways into a conga and the length of the line shrank.

Papa Agostinho set a picture of Dom Francisco on his knees. His chief wife, Yaya Felicidade, tried to control a wayward breast. Gustave tilted his bowler, Procopio twiddled his moustache. Modeste held up the green satin banner of the Société Brésilienne du Carnaval, and the ladies spread their mouths to the camera: flashes of white and gold burst through their lips.

Overhead the first fruit bats were flying towards the south-east. There was a vague smell of guavas and stale urine. Cyriaque Cabochichi lifted his lens cap and replaced it.

 

 

 

 

FROM THE PLACE de l'Immaculée Conception the family set off for the Portuguese Fort.

Two boys beat a tam-tam. Smaller boys waved maracas, banged gongs, whirled bicycle tyres, and cartwheeled in the dust. Pierre carried a wreath of pink vinyl roses to place on the shrine of the Virgin.

At the end of the Rue du Monsignor Steinmetz, the procession made a detour round the carcass of a bombax. The Minister of the Interior had declared the tree ‘a sorcerers' restaurant' and ordered it to be chopped down after a subaltern of the Gendarmerie caught an old man in the act of nailing a charm to its trunk: the charm had contained a bat claw, some crushed spiders and a newspaper clipping of the President.

The Da Silvas came into the Place du Marché Zobé. Mountainous mammas were sailing home in the opposite direction. Long-fingered Mandingo traders were folding lengths of indigo into tin trunks. The medicine man wrapped the excrement of a rainbow into a rag, and the state lottery salesman was making his final call to the ‘
fidèles amis de la chance
'.

It was the hour when the fetish priests slaughtered a fowl over Aizan, the Market God, an omphalos of cut stone standing alone in an empty space.

It was also the hour for the intellectuals of Ouidah to gather at the Librairie Moderne and discuss the latest books, even though its stock had been reduced to back numbers of the
La Femme soviétique
; the
Thoughts
of Kim Il-Sung; a Socialist novel called Le
Baobab
; Racine's
Bajazet
; a complete Engels and some pots of macaw-coloured brilliantine.

And it was supper-time. A hundred smoky lamps had lit up the booths where optimistic matrons were ladling millet beer from calabashes, frying fritters in palm-oil, wrapping maize blancmange in banana leaves or grilling joints of agouti, a big rat with yellow teeth.

Their hands reached out for their customers' money — pink, moist and affectionate as dog tongues. Babies were tucked into their cottons. All were asleep: not a single baby cried.

One of the women plucked a wing-feather from a live fowl and twizzled it in her ear.

‘It's to take away the human grease,' a small boy informed the European tourist: and the tourist, who was collecting this kind of information, patted the boy's head and gave him a franc.

‘I like the Whites,' the boy purred, ‘because the Whites repair me.'

Mama Benz went in the Mercedes: she was far too heavy to walk. As the chauffeur drew abreast of the mammas, she stopped for a snack of agouti in sauce, handing out a white enamel bowl to the woman, who handed it back.

The boy said, ‘Mama Benz is a carnivore, heh?'

More little boys, teeth glittering in the half-light, kept up a deafening chorus:
‘Ago! Yovo! Ago! Yovo!
' — which means, ‘Go away, Whitey!'

Meanwhile the Da Silvas turned right up the Rue Lenine, past the Hotel Windsor, past the Hotel Anti-Windsor and came up to the Bar Ennemi du Soir, where Uncle Procopio slipped in for a drink.

Nailed to the wall was a rattan mat with three giraffes moving through a Chinese landscape, beside which someone had scrawled in blue chalk:

Two Lagos taxis were parked outside, the Confidence Car and Baby Confidence. Earlier in the afternoon the groans of love were heard from behind the splintering shutters of the bedrooms. But now the drivers were drinking beer with the bar girls and, over the radio, the Head of State was barking the first of his evening monologues.

The smallest bar girl gasped and bared her armpit in astonishment as Uncle Procopio bowed, clicked his heels and said, ‘Mamzelle, I need a green chartreuse.' She fixed her eyes on his incredible moustache, poured from the bottle as if by instinct, and held her gaze till he had downed the glass and gone.

All the young Marxists came out and ogled the Mercedes as it passed.

The Da Silvas finally reached the Fort and laid the wreath.

They inspected the Independence Memorial — the last Portuguese Resident's burned-out Citroën set up on a concrete plinth.

They looked out over the south bastion at the grey lagoon, at the mangroves and the line of surf beyond.

The flourish of Arab calligraphy was a canoeman punting home.

Soft lights were seen moving along the track to the beach, up which Dom Francisco had come, down which the word ‘Voodoo' made its way to the Americas.

Then they went back to Simbodji.

 

 

 

 

THE ANCESTRAL HOME of the Da Silvas was a mud-walled compound to the west of the taxi park, where, for a week before the Mass, the noises of rasping, thumping, grinding and sizzling had drowned the infernal chatter of weaver birds as Dom Francisco's descendants cooked the dishes he loved to eat.

Girls came back from market with pitchers of pigs' blood. Boys rode bicycles with strings of offal slung from their shoulders. Fishermen brought baskets of oysters and blue-clawed crabs. Old men brought leaves from the forest. Old women crystallized eggs in honey.

The six-year-old Grégoire da Silva pointed to a column of ants marching into an unplugged refrigerator and said, ‘The refrigerator exists.'

Modeste and Pierre spent the week sloshing apricot limewash over the walls of Dom Francisco's private quarters — two long low buildings set at right-angles around the main courtyard.

Both boys stripped to the waist but wore dunces' caps of newspaper to stop the paint from caking in their hair.

They picked out the crosses over the lintels and took infinite care to mix the colour of the doors and shutters, a colour that was neither black nor purple nor brown but was the colour of themselves.

Then they set to work on the old gaming saloon.

They emptied the dead flies from a Japanese porcelain bowl. They mended a broken spittoon and nailed a hard-board sheet over the collapsed wicker seat of a sofa. They scrutinized the ruins of a billiard table, without being able to imagine how one played, and flicked an ostrich feather over the frames of the pictures — for the room was also a portrait gallery.

Around the blue-washed walls hung the heads of the Da Silvas, from the Founder to the present Chief.

Dom Francisco's knotted brow and scarlet skull-cap glowered from a canvas of treacly impasto, done twenty years after his death by a wandering Sicilian artist who got stuck in Ouidah in the 1870s and had obviously earned his living from ikons of Garibaldi.

A far more competent likeness was that of his son, Isidoro da Silva, the Second Chief, painted in Bahia to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in 1837. The young mulatto dandy was shown standing in a book-lined library, wearing a blue frock-coat, a velvet cravat, and with a flowered white satin waistcoat shining over his paunch. One hand clutched at his lapel, the other fingered the diamond knop of his cane.

The portraits of his brothers, Lino and Antonio, were also the work of the Sicilian dauber. There was a sepia photograph of Cândido, the Fifth Chief, in the uniform of an Honorary Colonel of the Portuguese Infantry. And lastly there was a framed page of the souvenir catalogue of the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where Estevāo da Silva and his son Agostinho-Ezekiel were exhibited as ‘
Fils et Petit-Fils du Négrier
'.

Dom Francisco himself lay sleeping under his bed, in a chamber that overlooked a garden of red earth and plastic flowers where lizards sunned themselves on the flat white marble tombs. The room was the preserve of Yaya Adelina, a laundrywoman, who would allow no one to enter without permission.

The bed was a Goanese four-poster with ebony up-rights and a headboard set with ivory medallions. But the most arresting feature was a painted plaster statue of St Francis of Assisi, his brown cassock girdled with a rope of real knots, gazing at the mildewed sheets of his name-sake and lifting his hands in prayer.

A white marble plaque, set into the floor, read:

A wreath of arums bore the legend ‘Pour Notre Illustre Aïeul!' and on a shelf stood a gilt crucifix, a yellowing Ecce Homo and a silver elephant, which was the family emblem.

Yaya Adelina carried her veneration of the ancestor to such lengths that she kept a bottle of Gordon's Gin open on the bed-table in case he should wake up.

Every morning, in case he wanted to wash, she refilled the silver water-jug cast from Maria Theresa thalers that melted when a British shell fired a warehouse in the 1840s.

From time to time she would remove the white cloth covering a rusty iron object resembling an umbrella, clotted with blood and feathers, and stuck into the floor.

This was an
Asin
, the Dahomean Altar of the Dead.

 

 

 

 

TWO DAYS BEFORE the celebration there was a moment of alarm when Lieutenant-Colonel Zossoungbo Patrice of the Sûreté Nationale burst in on Papa Agostinho's siesta and banned the celebration.

The colonel was twenty-four, and had long curly eye-lashes and knife-edge creases to his green paratrooper fatigues. Two grenades, the shape of scent-bottles, were slung from his belt.

Papa Agostinho wrapped a towel round his tummy and rocked his rocking chair, while the young revolutionary paced up and down, waving a North Korean sub-machine gun to emphasize important points:

Family festivals, he shouted, were the barbarous and fetishistic survivals of the colonial period . . .

But the afternoon was hot and the colonel was tired.

His voice rose to a childish treble. He was terrified of not making the right impression and, when Papa Agostinho made a very modest cash offer, was so relieved and grateful that he allowed the Da Silvas to go ahead — on one condition (he had to make a condition): they must listen to the Presidential broadcast at eight o'clock.

Then, with a smile of radiant innocence, he doffed his cap as if it were a schoolboy cap, and edged out backwards.

His boot crushed a begonia as he went.

The colonel's visit explained the brown plastic radio blaring martial music as the guests came in to dinner.

There was a table covered with red-chequered oilcloth. Kerosene lamps spread streams of yellow light over the aerial roots of the banyan. Two mango trees, glimmering with fireflies, cut arcs of blacker velvet in the sky.

 

 

 

 

NEVER, NOT EVEN in the time of Dom Francisco, had Ouidah witnessed so unctuous a feast

Pigs' heads were anointed with gumbos and ginger. Black beans were frosted with cassava flour. Silver fish glittered in a sauce of malaguetta pepper. There was a ragout of guinea-fowl and seri-flowers, which were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. There were mounds of fried cockscombs, salads of carrot and papaya, and pastes of shrimp, cashew nuts and coco-flesh.

The names of Brazilian dishes were on everyone's lips:
xinxin de galinha, vatapà, sarapatel, muqueca, molocoto.
There were phallic sweetmeats of tamarind and tapioca, ambrosias, bolos, babas and piles of golden patisseries.

Yaya Adelina, her head shaved and her cottons whirling with the rings of Saturn, lumbered round the table, scooping up a sample of each dish into a calabash carved with totemic animals.

Uncle Procopio moved towards the
petits
-
pains au chocolat
murmuring, ‘
Byzance!
' He had all but thrust one through his moustachios when Adelina slapped his back:

‘Shame on you, sir! Eating before the Father eats!'

She set the calabash on a table outside Dom Francisco's bedroom window and covered it with a cloth of broderie anglaise.