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Authors: Bruce Chatwin
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after dark there was always an excuse to let off fireworks.
His principal amusement was to follow funeral processions. One day it would be a black catafalque encrusted with golden skulls. The next, a sky-blue casket for a stillborn child, or a grey corpse wrapped in a shroud of banana leaves.
He lodged in a tenement in the Lower City and got a job with a man who sold the equipment of slavery â whips, flails, yokes, neck-chains, brandingirons and metal masks: the shop reminded him of tackshops in the backlands.
His green eyes made him famous in the quarter. Whenever he flashed them along a crowded alley, someone was sure to stop. With partners of either sex, he performed the mechanics of love in planked rooms. They left him with the sensation of having brushed with death: none came back a second time.
The lineaments of his face fell into their final form.
His right eyebrow, hitched higher than the left, gave him the air of a man amazed to find himself in a madhouse. A moustache curled round the sides of his mouth, which was moist and sensuous. For years he had pinched back his lips, partly to look manly, partly to stop them cracking in the heat: now he let them hang loose, as if to show that everything was permitted. The fits of anger had left him, not so the remorse. He wanted to go to Africa, but would not take a conscious decision.
Whenever a ship from Guinea anchored off the Fort of SÄo Marcello, he would stroll round the slave quays and watch the blacks being rowed ashore. Dealers from every province elbowed forward, shouting themselves hoarse as they identified the consignorsâ brands. They calculated the numbers of the dead; then made the survivors run, stamp, lift weights and bellow to show the soundness of their lungs.
The defectives were sold off cheap to gipsies.
Francisco Manoel made friends with one of these gipsy slave-copers, who taught him some tricks of the trade: how to hide bloody dysentery with an oakum plug, or a skin disease by smearing it with castor oil.
But when he talked to old Africa hands, every one of them shuddered at the mention of Dahomey.
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ONE DECEMBER AFTERNOON, for lack of anything better to do, he helped some hired ruffians hang a straw-filled effigy of the British Consul: it was four years since Parliament passed the Abolition Act, but only in recent months had the Royal Navy started seizing Brazilian slave ships.
The crowds worked themselves into a fury and, when a platoon of militia dispersed them, they set on a Scottish sailor and dumped him in the harbour. Perhaps Francisco Manoelâs strongest memory of Bahia was of leaning over a balustrade and watching the red head bobbing amid a lattice of masts and spars.
A fortnight later, he was drinking a glass of sweet lime outside the slave auction on the Rua dos Matozinhos when one of the lot numbers, a Benguela houseboy, ran off in the middle of the bidding. Joaquim Coutinho was among the buyers and, as the sales clerks chased the fugitive, he spotted his old friend and tapped him on the shoulder.
They renewed their friendship: in fact, whenever Joaquim came to town, the two would spend an evening together and a night with the whores.
On one of these visits, he said that the Colonel had died, leaving the family affairs in a terrible state, and forcing Dona Epiphania to sell her diamonds. Hoping to repair the fortune, he had joined a syndicate of army officers, whose aim was to corner the market in dried beef and invest the profit in faster slave ships.
The most valuable slaves came from Ouidah â and Ouidah, by terms of the Prince Regentâs treaty with England, was the one port north of the Equator where it was legal to trade: the only problem was the King of Dahomey, who was mad.
Francisco Manoel made it clear he had only the haziest idea where Dahomey was.
âYou should go there,â said Joaquim. âYouâd soon find out.â
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THREE WEEKS
His principal amusement was to follow funeral processions. One day it would be a black catafalque encrusted with golden skulls. The next, a sky-blue casket for a stillborn child, or a grey corpse wrapped in a shroud of banana leaves.
He lodged in a tenement in the Lower City and got a job with a man who sold the equipment of slavery â whips, flails, yokes, neck-chains, brandingirons and metal masks: the shop reminded him of tackshops in the backlands.
His green eyes made him famous in the quarter. Whenever he flashed them along a crowded alley, someone was sure to stop. With partners of either sex, he performed the mechanics of love in planked rooms. They left him with the sensation of having brushed with death: none came back a second time.
The lineaments of his face fell into their final form.
His right eyebrow, hitched higher than the left, gave him the air of a man amazed to find himself in a madhouse. A moustache curled round the sides of his mouth, which was moist and sensuous. For years he had pinched back his lips, partly to look manly, partly to stop them cracking in the heat: now he let them hang loose, as if to show that everything was permitted. The fits of anger had left him, not so the remorse. He wanted to go to Africa, but would not take a conscious decision.
Whenever a ship from Guinea anchored off the Fort of SÄo Marcello, he would stroll round the slave quays and watch the blacks being rowed ashore. Dealers from every province elbowed forward, shouting themselves hoarse as they identified the consignorsâ brands. They calculated the numbers of the dead; then made the survivors run, stamp, lift weights and bellow to show the soundness of their lungs.
The defectives were sold off cheap to gipsies.
Francisco Manoel made friends with one of these gipsy slave-copers, who taught him some tricks of the trade: how to hide bloody dysentery with an oakum plug, or a skin disease by smearing it with castor oil.
But when he talked to old Africa hands, every one of them shuddered at the mention of Dahomey.
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Â
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Â
ONE DECEMBER AFTERNOON, for lack of anything better to do, he helped some hired ruffians hang a straw-filled effigy of the British Consul: it was four years since Parliament passed the Abolition Act, but only in recent months had the Royal Navy started seizing Brazilian slave ships.
The crowds worked themselves into a fury and, when a platoon of militia dispersed them, they set on a Scottish sailor and dumped him in the harbour. Perhaps Francisco Manoelâs strongest memory of Bahia was of leaning over a balustrade and watching the red head bobbing amid a lattice of masts and spars.
A fortnight later, he was drinking a glass of sweet lime outside the slave auction on the Rua dos Matozinhos when one of the lot numbers, a Benguela houseboy, ran off in the middle of the bidding. Joaquim Coutinho was among the buyers and, as the sales clerks chased the fugitive, he spotted his old friend and tapped him on the shoulder.
They renewed their friendship: in fact, whenever Joaquim came to town, the two would spend an evening together and a night with the whores.
On one of these visits, he said that the Colonel had died, leaving the family affairs in a terrible state, and forcing Dona Epiphania to sell her diamonds. Hoping to repair the fortune, he had joined a syndicate of army officers, whose aim was to corner the market in dried beef and invest the profit in faster slave ships.
The most valuable slaves came from Ouidah â and Ouidah, by terms of the Prince Regentâs treaty with England, was the one port north of the Equator where it was legal to trade: the only problem was the King of Dahomey, who was mad.
Francisco Manoel made it clear he had only the haziest idea where Dahomey was.
âYou should go there,â said Joaquim. âYouâd soon find out.â
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THREE WEEKS
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