The Viceroy of Ouidah Read Online Free PDF

with the initials F.S.; his rosary of carnauba nuts; some scraps of paper covered with his handwriting; a lithograph of the Emperor Dom Pedro II; a picture of a Brazilian house, and a particularly bloodthirsty canvas of Judith hacking off the head of Holophernes.
    Her fellow-raider on these expeditions was Cândido da Silva’s ten-year-old son, Cesário. He had got left behind when his parents went up to Abomey, and was now an orphan.
    With his green eyes and wad of blond hair, Cesário was a throwback to an earlier strain in the family. And as young birds will expel an albino from their nest, the other boys made his life a misery and pelted him with filth and rotten fruit.
    The climate disagreed with him. The sun peeled his skin leaving pink patches. There was a permanent scab on the bridge of his nose, and his mosquito bites would come up in welts and go septic.
    He came to her one morning with chiggers in his left foot.
    She laid him down, sharpened a knife blade, cut through the leathery sole, and scoured out the sack of eggs. He didn’t even whimper. She kissed him on the forehead and took him to live with her.
    She had never looked after a child and each day brought something new. She recovered her lilting walk and dazzling smile. The colour returned to her face. She threw off her black, put hoops of gold in her ears, and strode through the market in a dress of bright flowers.
    She dressed Cesário in long whites, made him wear a panama of palm fibre and, in this uniform, sent him to the French Fathers to learn how to read. He would come home with stories of railways and knights-in-armour and all kinds of useful information: the Ancestors were, in fact, Gauls; the cows of Haute-Savoie gave six times more milk than cows in Africa.
    He particularly liked the story of Moses and Pharaoh and kept asking whether Pharaoh was the same as the King of Dahomey: he was unimpressed when told he was not.
    On rainy days she would take out a colour print distributed by the Church Missionary Society in Abeokuta, and she would point to the greybeard beckoning the traveller up the ‘Straight and Narrow Path’ and say, ‘Look! It’s a picture of your grandfather!’
    Or they would spread out a panorama of Bahia and he would read off the names: ‘Casa Santa da Misericórdia ... Monastery of São Bento ... Convent of Santa Teresa ...’ while her eyes ranged over the domes, towers and pediments which reminded her of the New Jerusalem floating down from Heaven.
    She tried to picture the house they would live in when they went back to the City. She spoke of dancing in Bahia, in a tall blue room lined with mirrors and pillars of gold — which was quite untrue, for she had never strayed further than Ouidah.
    At other times they would call on the Germans. In 1890 a Hamburg trading company called Goedelt bought the concession of the old British Fort. The newcomers drank beer from stoneware tankards and, in the evening, their mess-room clouded over with pipe-smoke. A cuckoo clock, painted with red roses, hung on the wall and there were pictures of the Rhinemaidens and one of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II.
    Cesário was the favourite of Herr Raabe the director, who thought of training him as a book-keeper. Whenever Eugenia went over to fetch him, she brought a chicken or some fruit and would stand on one foot, shyly, in the doorway, rubbing her calf with the other foot and staring at the wall.
    The Germans thought she was waiting for the cuckoo. When the bird popped out of its hutch, they would say in English, ‘That’s enough now, old lady. Thank you. Time to go home!’ and when the door shut, in German, ‘My god, how that woman stares!’
    But she had only been staring at the Kaiser.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    ONE EVENING SHE and Cesário were crossing the Sogbadji Quarter in the stillness that precedes a storm. White flags hung motionless over a fetish. Some old men were