Read Online The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin - Free Book Online

voices repeated his ‘Boa Noite!’ in unison.
    The chapel was dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Conceiçao, and on the altar was the portable oratory of the Last Supper that would end its days at Ouidah. The nuns, who made it, had used as their model the dining room of the Big House. For some reason Francisco Manoel wanted to own it more than any other object he had seen.
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    LYING AWAKE ONE night, he heard a sound of drumbeats in the hills.
    He dressed and followed the sound to a forest clearing where some slaves were calling their gods across the Atlantic. The dancers wore white metal masks and white dresses that glowed orange in the firelight. They whirled round and round until Exu the Messenger tapped them between their shoulder-blades. Then, one by one, they shuddered, growled, crumpled at the knees and fell to the ground in trance.
    Their priest, a Yoruba freeman called Jerónimo, was a votary of Yemanja the Sea Goddess and he slept beside her mermaid image in a chamber bursting with corals and basins of salt water.
    Nothing gave Francisco Manoel greater pleasure than to sit with this androgynous bachelor and hear him sing the songs of the Kingdom of Ketou in a voice that suggested, not the gulf between continents, but planets.
    Jerónimo showed him the loko tree, sacred to Saint Francis of Assisi, whose writhing roots were said to stretch under the ocean to Itu-Aiyé, to Africa, the home of the Gods. Sometimes, a slave on the plantation would hear his ancestors calling through the rubbery leaves. At night he would creep among the branches and, in the morning, they would find the body, hanging.
    Jerónimo told him stories of mudbrick palaces lined with skulls; of tribes who exchanged gold dust for tobacco; a Holy Snake that was also a rainbow, and kings with testicles the size of avocados.
    The name ‘Dahomey’ took root in his imagination.
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    AND IT WAS time for him to move from Tapuitapera.
    The Colonel was sick and bad-tempered, and Joaquim bored by his company. He would deliberately pitch the conversation above his head, only to stop himself and say, ‘Now why am I telling you that?’
    His mother, Dona Epiphania, hated to see her son mix with inferiors and took her meals alone. She was a big woman with blotchy skin, black wings on her upper lip, and teeth corroded to thin brown wafers. She kept a silver-handled whip in her embroidery basket and, while a slave girl circulated the air with a leafy branch, would sit on a reed mat and plan vengeance on her husband’s mistresses.
    She called Francisco Manoel ‘The Catamite’.
    When he first came to the house, Joaquim’s sisters blew him kisses and signalled love-messages in the language of the fan. But soon, their mother encouraged them to pick on his weak points. They mimicked his accent. They mocked his efforts at conversation and would screech with laughter when he used a knife and fork. They said, ‘We do have chairs, you know,’ if he squatted on his hams. Often, as he entered the room, they would cry, ‘Hurry! Hurry! It’s the Brute!’ and dash for the door in a rustle of taffeta.
    One evening, Joaquim told him his father had had a stroke and that Dona Epiphania insisted he leave the house.
    Their eyes met.
    Francisco Manoel flushed with anger, but saw it was useless to argue and bowed his head.
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    HE WENT TO Bahia.
    He drifted round the City of All the Saints in a suicide’s jacket of black velveteen bought off a tailor’s dummy. Flapping laundry brushed across his face. Urchins kissed him on the lips as their fingers felt for his pockets. His feet slipped on rinds of rotting fruit, and puffy white clouds went sailing past the bell-towers.
    He would stroll down the cobbles of the Pelourinho to watch the street-boys practise shadow-wrestling. The ‘Beautiful Dog of the North’ was a dyed blue poodle that played cards; and