The Viceroy of Ouidah Read Online Free PDF Page A

contours of her face into angular planes. A pinched look came into the corners of her eyes. Her skin stretched tight over her nose and cheekbones, and fell in loose folds down her throat. At thirty she was an old maid, but after that her appearance hardly changed: the Slave Coast takes its victims young or pickles them to great antiquity.
    One by one, her acquaintance narrowed to her maid, her Mahi slave-boy, her father and the red-haired stranger. Unable to make the distinction between the real and the supernatural, she made none between the living, the absent and the dead.
    For all she cared, her relatives were the masks of a nightmare. And in their turn, the Da Silvas looked on the white childless woman with superstitious awe.
    They suspected her of the Evil Eye. They took care to burn their loose hair and nail clippings. The women said she prowled round Simbodji at night, scooping up earth impregnated with their spittle.
    Since no one would sleep under the same roof, they left her in possession of Joaquim da Silva’s old villa at the far end of the compound. She bought a bolt of black cloth and draped it round her room. She took to wearing black herself, a stiff dress reaching to her calves and a lace bonnet tied under her chin.
    For years she had lavished affection on her father’s macaw, a ba-tempered bird called Zé Piranha, which pecked at strangers and its own feathers till it died of inanition. She then transferred her love to a scabby bitch with mastitis that lay all day in the shade of a banana, but at sunset would sit by the steps and howl.
    Simbodji decayed. The roofs collapsed and the walls crumbled. Livid weeds smothered the piles of rubble, which were left to lizards, scorpions and snakes. Deprived of their revenues from the Slave Trade, the Da Silvas sank into tropical torpor.
    In 1882 a tornado hit Dom Francisco’s house, whirled its pantiles in the air and scattered them over the town.
    In 1884 a girl was grilling cashew nuts when one burst from her brazier and set a roof on fire. Thirteen houses burned to the ground.
    In 1887 Cândido da Silva, one of Dom Francisco’s youngest sons, was elected Head of the Family on the strength of his talent for repairing the fortune. He even got the King of Dahomey to put his cross to a document that turned Ouidah over to the Portuguese as a protectorate.
    The colonizers came with a military band from the island of São Tome, and staked out the site for a barracks. The King sent Cândido a flattering message inviting him up to Abomey. And he left, in his Portuguese Colonel’s uniform, with his wives, children, umbrella-bearers, musicians and an Amazon guard of honour.
    He did not come back.
    The Portuguese major, who went to ask for his comrade-in-arms, was shown into a mud house with a pair of executioners’ knives flanking the doorway. The honorary colonel sat trussed to a European chair, still in his epaulettes, with an iron chain round his neck and a wooden gag shoved down his throat. At his feet was a silver bowl, buzzing with flies.
    â€˜Into that bowl’, the officer was told, ‘go the heads of all who trouble the Kingdom.’
    Nine days later, a detachment of Amazons burst into Simbodji in uniforms sewn with the crocodile insignia of their brigade.
    They fired their muskets in the air and danced the decapitation dance, warning the Da Silvas that if they dared sell one grain of Dahomean soil, the house would be broken, razed, obliterated; and they would be sent to work the Royal Plantations, or to tell the King’s ancestors how things stood in this perfidious world.
    For months Simbodji was wrapped in the silence of the tomb.
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    SENHORINHA EUGENIA TOOK advantage of the catastrophe to carry off some of Dom Francisco’s relics, as if, by collecting his possessions, she could restore him to life.
    She took his silver-mounted cigar case; his pink opaline chamber pot; his ivory-handled slave-brand