The Viceroy of Ouidah Read Online Free PDF Page B

crouching in the shadows, whitewashed all over, with their heads hung low. Unusual numbers of turkey-buzzards were converging on the town.
    From one house they heard a low moan; from another mourners carried a corpse wrapped in a reed mat with the feet poking out. They saw a man dragging himself into the bushes. There were patches of vomit and yellow excrement all down the street.
    The cholera had come ashore with the crew of a ship.
    They hurried home. She bolted the door and would admit no one: she knew that much about contagion.
    At dusk on the third day, Cesário felt dizzy and had to lie down. Within an hour he had fouled his bed. Sweat streamed from his skin leaving it cold, inelastic and clammy. His eyes sank in their sockets and gaped, expressionless, at the rafters. He did not lose consciousness and locked his shrivelled fingers tightly round hers.
    The crisis came at that moment in an African dawn when everything is golden. Doves were cooing in the garden. A shaft of sunlight fell through the window and framed the woman in blue who kneeled by the boy’s bed. Cramps racked his body and his ribcage writhed like a concertina.
    She bent over and kissed him, slowly sliding her tongue into his dry mouth, praying for the disease to leave him and come to her.
    He gasped, ‘Do leave me alone,’ and soon he left her.
    She went on living.
    She went to a Brazilian trader and bought a length of azure cloth, the colour the Angels wore in Heaven. She washed the body, which had already taken on a greenish tinge. She wrapped it and laid it in a coffin of iroko wood. She fluffed his hair round like a halo. She put a gold coin in his hand and her gardener nailed down the lid.
    They buried him in the family cemetery, under Dom Francisco’s window, with a cross of palm-fronds set over his head. None of her relations took any notice, being too distracted by their own deaths.
    Three days later, Raabe’s assistant saw her walking on the beach, her chin pressed against her throat, muttering and watching the sand squeeze between her toes.
    Then she laughed and held her hands wide and waved a black scarf at the birdless sea.
    He asked what she was doing and she said, ‘He’s gone to Bahia.’
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    THE NEXT FEW years washed over her without disturbing her solitude.
    She failed to notice the outburst of human sacrifice that marked the accession of the new King, Behanzin the ‘Shark’. She ignored the French bombardment of Ouidah which killed a hundred and thirty people and dismembered a sacred baobab. Nor did she celebrate when Estevão da Silva hauled an improvised tricolour up the flagpole and started the family on their career as brown Frenchmen.
    The events of her life were the palm-nut harvest and the festivals of the Brazilian Church. For three weeks before Saints Cosmas and Damian in September, she and her maid, Roxa, would sew frilly dresses for the twin sisters of the town, who were almost worshipped as divinities. In January, they would help paint the mummers’ costumes for the Bumba-Meu-Boi. And every 3rd of June, on John the Baptist’s Day, they sat outside the chapel of the Portuguese Fort grilling ears of new corn for the congregants.
    Because these occasions repeated themselves year after year, she lost all sense of growing old.
    Mãe Roxa died in the smallpox epidemic of 1905 after refusing an inoculation. Her place was taken by an eighteen-year-old ‘Brazilian’ girl, whose real name was Cristella Chaves, but Eugenia would make no concession to the change, called her Roxa and expected her to know all about the last fifty years.
    By 1914 the Chapel of the Fort had fallen into decay. She had long coveted the image of the Baptist’s head and, to preserve it from looters, she took it away for safekeeping. The head had glass eyes and snaky black curls and was the work of an African sculptor in Bahia who had carved the aorta, the oesophagus and third