The Viceroy of Ouidah (6 page)

She spent most days crouching in the speckled shade of an acacia, smoking a stone pipe.

The house had a grass roof and walls of packed mud and scantlings and stood in open country in a clump of umbu trees. The shutters were painted a cool blue, but the coolness was an illusion.

A barricade of bromelias fenced in the yard. Nearby, there was a cattle-tank with duckweed and, beyond that, the thornscrub, rising and falling in grey-green sweeps, punctuated here and there by black candelabra cacti.

The three rooms were bare, whitewashed, flyblown. Folded hammocks hung like hams from the rafters: the saddles, hats and halters hung in the porch. There was a statuette of Onuphrius to guard the door and one of St Blaise to keep off ants. The woman kept a white cloth on the altar table long after she had stopped praying for anything in particular.

Within weeks of her husband's death, she took up with an Indian half-breed called Manuelzinho, who came to the house one day and asked for water. He had a hare-lip and teeth like bits of rusty metal. The tie-strings of his jerkin stretched taut across his chest, and people thought they were going to snap. He killed snakes for a living and sold the flaky white flesh at market.

His horse had one ear clean off, and when they asked, ‘What happened to that horse's ear?' he'd say gloomily, ‘It got eaten by bugs.'

The boy's first memories were of watching the pair, creaking night and day in a sisal hammock: he never knew a time he was not a stranger.

Yet whenever the man satisfied her, the woman's voice became less rasping and her mouth would ease into a smile. She took trouble with meals, combed her son's hair for lice, and told the old stories of Dom Sebastião and the Princess Magalona.

Remembering happier times, she told him the riddles she had learned as a child: the avocado which had the ‘heart of a bull'; or the ‘girls in a castle clothed in yellow', who were a bunch of bananas. And then there was his particular favourite:
— a little round white church, without a window and without a door: yet inside it had two treasures, one of silver, one of gold — to which the answer was ‘Egg'.

But Manuelzinho was a born wanderer. After a week of captivity he was ready to move on. He would pace round the yard glaring at the sun as though it were setting late. Or he would flay the dust with a whip, or sit throwing knives at a log.

Then as the woman watched him dwindle to an ash-coloured speck, her fingers would claw the table top and the splinters got in under her nails.

 

 

 

 

MANY YEARS LATER, chained hand and foot in the King of Dahomey's prison, Francisco Manoel would remember the year of the drought.

That summer — he was seven at the time — the clouds banked up as usual and burst. For five days rain drenched the earth, seedlings sprouted and there were clouds of yellow butterflies everywhere. Then the clouds went away. The sun quivered in a blue metal sky. The mud cracked.

One sunset, mother and son watched the formations of duck flying south. She hugged him and said, ‘The ducks are flying to the river.'

Hot winds blew, hiding the horizon in dust and blowing pellets of goat dung across the yard. When the tank dried up, the cattle stood around the patch of green slime, groaning, with their muzzles full of spines.

In a cabin behind the house lived an old Cariri Indian called Felix, who looked after the widow's few animals in return for food and a roof. One evening, he collapsed in the kitchen and, in a hoarse and hopeless voice, said, ‘All of them are dying.' He had cut lengths of cactus, stripped them of spines, and set them out for fodder: but the cattle had gone on dying.

Blood flowed from their flanks from the little pink lumps that were ticks. They slashed themselves trying to reach a single unwithered leaf and, when they did die, the hides were so tough that carrion birds could not break through to the guts.

Fires tore through the country with a resinous crackling, leaving velvety stumps where once there had been trees. The flames caught Felix as he was hacking out a firebreak, and they found him, charred and sheeny, with a grimace of white teeth and green mucus running out of his nose. The woman dug a grave, but a dog unearthed the body and chewed it apart.

Rats ran down the boy's hammock strings and bit him as he slept. Rattlesnakes came into the yard, attracted by anything that still had life. When a column of driver-ants swept through the house, the woman had only the energy to save a saucepan of manioc flour and some strips of wind-dried beef.

Finally, when she had lost hope, Manuelzinho rode out of the thornscrub, where he had lived on the halfroasted bodies of rodents. He dug deeper down the wellshaft and came back with a dribble of foul ferruginous liquid. But within a week all three water jars were empty.

The boy's mouth cracked and ulcerated. His eyelids blazed. His legs went stiff. They gave him mashed palmroots to eat but they swelled in his stomach and the cramps forced him to lie down. All the moisture seemed to have drained from his body. There was no question of being able to cry — even as his mother entered her death agony.

They woke that morning to find her left leg hanging limply over the lip of her hammock. Manuelzinho lifted the cloth that covered her face from the flies. Unspeaking, and with the terrible tenderness of people pushed to the limit, she pleaded for the son whom she had starved herself to save.

Her oases were not of this world: she died in the night without a groan.

The boy watched Manuelzinho bury her. They started south for the river. They passed knots of migrants too tired to go on. Black birds sat waiting on the branches.

The horse died on the second day, but men are tougher than horses.

They reached the river at the ferry station of Santa Maria da Boavista, where Manuelzinho left the orphan with the priest and rode away.

The boy remembered nothing of the journey, yet for years he would keep back a lump of meat and sleep with it under his pillow.

 

 

 

 

SANTA MARIA DA Boavista lay on the north bank of the Sāo Francisco River as it sweeps in a great arc through the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco.

It had a single street of pantiled houses strung out along a rocky ridge. Below, the muddy waters sluiced by, carrying rafts of vegetation from a greener country upstream. A white church crowned the highest point: above the scrolls of its pediment, a plain blue cross melted the sufferings of the Crucifixion into a cloudless sky.

The boy's guardian, Father Menezes Brito, was a fat conceited Portuguese, who had been exiled here for some misdemeanour: his one amusement was to baptize Indian babies with his spittle. He fed Francisco Manoel and let him sleep in a shed. Hoping to claim him for the Church, he taught him to ring a carillon of bells, the rudiments of Latin, some simple mathematics and the art of writing letters in italic script.

He told him of Bahia and its three hundred churches, of the city of Lisbon and the Holy House of Rome. He made him play the role of St Sebastian at Corpus Christi processions. He called him ‘my green-eyed angel' yet made him grovel and confess the blackness of his soul. Sometimes he led him into a bedroom reeking of incense and dead flowers, where he kissed him.

The village boys called the newcomer ‘Chico Diabo' and were always plotting to hurt him: he had only to glare in their faces and they shrank back.

His one friend was the black boy, Pepeu, whom he held in thrall. Together they plucked finches alive, made certain experiments with the flesh of a watermelon, and shouted obscenities at the girls washing tripes in the river.

Once, they tried crucifying a cat, but it got away.

On market days, they went down to the slaughterhouse where old hags would be fighting with pariah dogs over offal. The butchers wore red caps and breeches of blue nankeen that were always purple, and they would splash about in the blood, puffing at cigars and poleaxing any animal still left standing.

The cows stared unamazed at their murderers.

‘Like the Saints,' said Francisco Manoel.

He knew, far better than the priest, the meaning of Christ's martyrdom, and the liturgy of thorns and blood and nails. He knew God made men to rack them in the wilderness, yet his own sufferings had hardened him to the sufferings of others. By the age of thirteen, he wore an agate-handled knife in his belt, took pains to clip his moustache, and showed not a trace of squeamishness when he went to watch a flogging at the pillory.

Every October, as the cashews ripened in the last of the rains, the cowhands from the outlying ranches would round up their herds and begin the long trek south to the markets of Bahia. Files of cattle converged on the town. They were cumbersome animals, with swinging dewlaps and hides the colour of cornmeal; and the men would ride around in clouds of dust yelling, ‘É . . . Hou . . . Hé . . . Hé . . . O . . . O . . . O . . . O . . .!'

Sometimes, in the lane leading to the river, a tired cow would lie down and the other cows would spill sideways, break fences and trample the villagers' bean patches. Women rushed from their houses and shook their fists, but the riders took no notice: the cattle-men never seemed to notice gardens.

Francisco Manoel liked helping them winch the animals aboard the wherries. Then, after dark, he would listen to their stories of bandits and pumas. But if he asked to go along, someone was sure to say, ‘The boy's too young,' and he went back to the hard bed and disapproving crucifix.

 

 

 

 

HE HAD MADE up his mind to run away when a rider came into town with news that his mother's old companion was dying at a ranch some leagues into the bush.

Outside the shack a sorrel stallion chomped at the hitching post. He pushed back the cowhide that served as a door and saw a shrunken figure laid out on a pallet. A crust of pustules covered his face and his eyes were closed.

Feebly, Manuelzinho gestured to his saddle, his quirt, an ocelot waistcoat, a waterproof made of boa skin and a leather hat sewn with metal medallions.

‘Take them,' he said.

The boy rode off with some passing horsemen. He did not say goodbye to the priest. Nor did he ever go back.

 

 

 

 

FOR THE NEXT seven years, he drifted through the backlands of the North-East, taking odd jobs as butcher's apprentice, muleteer, drover and gold panner. Sometimes he knew a flash of happiness, but only if it was time to be departing.

Duststorms burnished his skin. His clothes reeked of sour milk and horses. When drought tore at his throat, he soothed it with an infusion brewed from the tail of a rattlesnake.

Faces he forgot, but he remembered the sensations: the taste of the armadillo meat roasted in clay; the shock of aguardiente on the tongue; the pleasures of hot blood spurting over his hands, or of pissing down the leg of his horse.

He lived in Indian villages. He rode with gipsies who sold dud slaves and scapulars of St Anthony. For a season he washed gravel, working shoulder to shoulder with negroes, at a diamond-camp. It astounded him to find their fetor so exciting: he would compare their uncreased foreheads with the battle raging inside his own.

He knew he was brave. One night, a face loomed red in the firelight: he was amazed by the ease with which his knife slid into the man's belly. Another time, bivouacked on the Raso da Catarina, he shared his meat with a bush-wanderer whose clothes were a patchwork of green silk and whose fingers were stiff with gold rings. The man walked eighteen leagues a day, barefoot through the cacti:

‘I trust no one,' he said. ‘Why should I trust a horse?'

Not for months did Francisco Manoel realize that this was the bandit Cobra Verde who robbed only rich women and only for their finery.

And he too believed he would go on wandering for ever: yet, on Santa Luzia's Day of 1807 — a grey, stifling day that held out the promise of rain — the aimless journeys ended.

 

 

 

 

HE HAD BEEN riding through the village of Uauá when the potter's daughter rushed from her house with an apronful of green oranges. A week later he brought her trinkets: within a month they had married.

He found work on a ranch nearby. His employers were a family of absentee landlords called Coutinho, who had ranched in the Sertāo for two centuries, but now lived on their sugar plantation by the sea.

He learned the equations of grass and water; the flight of birds around a stricken cow, or the presence of an underground spring. For leagues around he could distinguish all the neighbours' brands: it was a point of honour to return a lost animal no matter how far it had strayed.

Not far away, along the river-bed, there were cotton fields worked by poor sharecroppers. Knowing him to be cool and resourceful, they came to him when they were cheated and he would force the landowners to admit their miscalculations and pay up. But when the sharecroppers came again, with gratitude and humble presents, a bitter taste rose up his throat, and he brushed them aside.

The Coutinhos paid no wages, but each round-up entitled the cowhands to one calf in four.

For two years he sold his animals, preferring coins in his pocket to wealth on the hoof. But for the third season he ordered a branding iron from the blacksmith and set about ‘humanizing' his property.

He coralled young bulls, tied their legs and lashed them to a wooden post. He sliced off their testicles and sawed the tips of their horns. They slavered and moaned as the iron sizzled into their flanks: it gave him pleasure to rub the hot tallow into his own initials.