Then they went back to Simbodji.
THE ANCESTRAL HOME of the Da Silvas was a mud-walled compound to the west of the taxi park, where, for a week before the Mass, the noises of rasping, thumping, grinding and sizzling had drowned the infernal chatter of weaver birds as Dom Francisco’s descendants cooked the dishes he loved to eat.
Girls came back from market with pitchers of pigs’ blood. Boys rode bicycles with strings of offal slung from their shoulders. Fishermen brought baskets of oysters and blue-clawed crabs. Old men brought leaves from the forest. Old women crystallized eggs in honey.
The six-year-old Grégoire da Silva pointed to a column of ants marching into an unplugged refrigerator and said, ‘The refrigerator exists.’
Modeste and Pierre spent the week sloshing apricot limewash over the walls of Dom Francisco’s private quarters — two long low buildings set at right-angles around the main courtyard.
Both boys stripped to the waist but wore dunces’ caps of newspaper to stop the paint from caking in their hair.
They picked out the crosses over the lintels and took infinite care to mix the colour of the doors and shutters, a colour that was neither black nor purple nor brown but was the colour of themselves.
Then they set to work on the old gaming saloon.
They emptied the dead flies from a Japanese porcelain bowl. They mended a broken spittoon and nailed a hard-board sheet over the collapsed wicker seat of a sofa. They scrutinized the ruins of a billiard table, without being able to imagine how one played, and flicked an ostrich feather over the frames of the pictures — for the room was also a portrait gallery.
Around the blue-washed walls hung the heads of the Da Silvas, from the Founder to the present Chief.
Dom Francisco’s knotted brow and scarlet skull-cap glowered from a canvas of treacly impasto, done twenty years after his death by a wandering Sicilian artist who got stuck in Ouidah in the 1870s and had obviously earned his living from ikons of Garibaldi.
A far more competent likeness was that of his son, Isidoro da Silva, the Second Chief, painted in Bahia to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in 1837. The young mulatto dandy was shown standing in a book-lined library, wearing a blue frock-coat, a velvet cravat, and with a flowered white satin waistcoat shining over his paunch. One hand clutched at his lapel, the other fingered the diamond knop of his cane.
The portraits of his brothers, Lino and Antonio, were also the work of the Sicilian dauber. There was a sepia photograph of Cândido, the Fifth Chief, in the uniform of an Honorary Colonel of the Portuguese Infantry. And lastly there was a framed page of the souvenir catalogue of the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where Estevāo da Silva and his son Agostinho-Ezekiel were exhibited as ‘Fils et Petit-Fils du Négrier’.
Dom Francisco himself lay sleeping under his bed, in a chamber that overlooked a garden of red earth and plastic flowers where lizards sunned themselves on the flat white marble tombs. The room was the preserve of Yaya Adelina, a laundrywoman, who would allow no one to enter without permission.
The bed was a Goanese four-poster with ebony up-rights and a headboard set with ivory medallions. But the most arresting feature was a painted plaster statue of St Francis of Assisi, his brown cassock girdled with a rope of real knots, gazing at the mildewed sheets of his name-sake and lifting his hands in prayer.
A white marble plaque, set into the floor, read:FRANCISCO MANOEL DA SILVA Nascido em 1785 Brazil Fālecido a 8 de março 1857 em Ajuda (Ouidah)
A wreath of arums bore the legend ‘Pour Notre Illustre Aïeul!’ and on a shelf stood a gilt crucifix, a yellowing Ecce Homo and a silver elephant, which was the family emblem.
Yaya Adelina carried her veneration of the ancestor to such lengths that she kept a bottle of Gordon’s Gin open on the bed-table in case he should wake up.
Every morning, in case he wanted to wash, she refilled the silver water-jug cast from Maria Theresa thalers that melted when a British shell fired a warehouse in the 1840s.
From time to time she would remove the white cloth covering a rusty iron object resembling an umbrella, clotted with blood and feathers, and stuck into the floor.
This was an Asin, the Dahomean Altar of the Dead.
TWO DAYS BEFORE the celebration there was a moment of alarm when Lieutenant-Colonel Zossoungbo Patrice of the Sûreté Nationale burst in on Papa Agostinho’s siesta and banned the celebration.
The colonel was twenty-four, and had long curly eye-lashes and knife-edge creases to his green paratrooper fatigues. Two grenades, the shape of scent-bottles, were slung from his belt.
Papa Agostinho wrapped a towel round his tummy and rocked his rocking chair, while the young revolutionary paced up and down, waving a North Korean sub-machine gun to emphasize important points:
Family festivals, he shouted, were the barbarous and fetishistic survivals of the colonial period . . .
But the afternoon was hot and the colonel was tired.
His voice rose to a childish treble. He was terrified of not making the right impression and, when Papa Agostinho made a very modest cash offer, was so relieved and grateful that he allowed the Da Silvas to go ahead — on one condition (he had to make a condition): they must listen to the Presidential broadcast at eight o’clock.
Then, with a smile of radiant innocence, he doffed his cap as if it were a schoolboy cap, and edged out backwards.
His boot crushed a begonia as he went.
The colonel’s visit explained the brown plastic radio blaring martial music as the guests came in to dinner.
There was a table covered with red-chequered oilcloth. Kerosene lamps spread streams of yellow light over the aerial roots of the banyan. Two mango trees, glimmering with fireflies, cut arcs of blacker velvet in the sky.
NEVER, NOT EVEN in the time of Dom Francisco, had Ouidah witnessed so unctuous a feast
Pigs’ heads were anointed with gumbos and ginger. Black beans were frosted with cassava flour. Silver fish glittered in a sauce of malaguetta pepper. There was a ragout of guinea-fowl and seri-flowers, which were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. There were mounds of fried cockscombs, salads of carrot and papaya, and pastes of shrimp, cashew nuts and coco-flesh.
The names of Brazilian dishes were on everyone’s lips: xinxin de galinha, vatapà, sarapatel, muqueca, molocoto. There were phallic sweetmeats of tamarind and tapioca, ambrosias, bolos, babas and piles of golden patisseries.
Yaya Adelina, her head shaved and her cottons whirling with the rings of Saturn, lumbered round the table, scooping up a sample of each dish into a calabash carved with totemic animals.
Uncle Procopio moved towards the petits-pains au chocolat murmuring, ‘Byzance!’ He had all but thrust one through his moustachios when Adelina slapped his back:
‘Shame on you, sir! Eating before the Father eats!’
She set the calabash on a table outside Dom Francisco’s bedroom window and covered it with a cloth of broderie anglaise.
Everyone waited for something to happen.
A GONG CLANGED. A drum rolled. Grégoire da Silva hurtled from the shadows shouting, ‘Dom Francisco! Dom Francisco!’ and a differently dressed procession filed into the yard.
Men in white loincloths came in with images wrapped in red stuff. Others carried chickens and a pot-bellied goat. Everyone was chanting the Founder’s song: ‘The Elephant spreads his net on land and sea ...’ Their bodies were smeared with white powder and their cicatrices stood up like lumps of candlegrease.
Three young drummers were calling the Ancestor back to Earth. The sweat stuck their shirts to their skin and dark patches spread from their armpits like ink on blotting-paper.
Papa Agostinho wore coral chokers and an opera hat sequined with butterflies and a bleeding heart. His son, Africo da Silva, had on a yellow petalled crinoline, while Yaya Felicidade, in a headscarf of purple pansies, waved about a nineteenth-century English naval cutlass.
The drumbeats took the women and propelled them into the juddering movements o
f the dance. An effeminate in pink satin pants groaned, swayed and fell rigid as a lank.
Other women knelt before the window kneading the hamstrung goat and bellowing, ‘Za! Za! Zanku! It is Night! Night!’ Chickens squawked and fell silent. The knife fell on the goat’s neck and its life gurgled away.
The shutters burst open to reveal Papa Agostinho standing inside his grandfather’s bedroom. The women handed him the foaming red calabash. He sprinkled food and blood and feathers and Gordon’s Gin over the bed, the grave and Altar of the Dead.
Africo called out, ‘The Dead has eaten now!’ Someone predicted that rain would water the maize, and from the far end of the courtyard could be heard the booming voice of Father Olimpίo: ‘Syncrétisme!’
Mrs Rosemary da Silva shook her fist and shouted, ‘Ah no go fo com heah fo no juju!’ and stamped off, followed by her husband.
Everyone agreed the Nigerians had no manners.
While the votaries dressed and changed, the band relaxed into a Brazilian samba. Father Olimpίo took his place at the head of the table:
‘Bénissez-nous, Mon Dieu, pour la nourriture que nous mangeonscesoir . . . ’
THROUGHOUT DINNER, THE President’s voice came in cracked bursts: there was something the matter with the radio. He called on the People to break the ‘umbilical cord of International Imperialism’ and, when lost for words, would howl, ‘Down with Intellectuals!’ or ‘Death to Mercenaries and the Lackeys of Capitalism!’
Nobody took much notice.
Stuffing his face with cornpaste, Hermengildo da Silva made no secret of the fact that he had sacrificed a goat to Gu, the God of War. Mama Benz hiccoughed. Adelina sneezed and sprayed pineapple juice over the table. Uncle Procopio offered to play Dvořák’s Humoresque; and the twin brothers, Euclides and Policarpo, squabbled about whether the family motto should read, ‘Flies are not visible in society!’ or ‘Flies are not acceptable in society!’
But as usual, the favourite topic was the loss of Dom Francisco’s fortune; and as usual, the family’s ‘German’, Karl-Heinrich (Gazozo) da Silva, set his fists on the table and began his annual dissertation:
‘I have it on the authority of my late father, Anton Wilhelm, that Our Illustrious Ancestor deposited thirty-six million U.S. dollars in a Swiss bank . . . ’
‘It wasn’t a Swiss bank,’ Agostinho interrupted. ‘It was the Banco Coutinho in Bahia.’
‘Petrification,’ shrieked the President, ’ . . . Paralysation! . . . Mystification! . . . Mummification!’
‘And that your Uncle Antonio ...’
‘They weren’t dollars. They were cruzeiros . . .’
‘ . . . lost the paper . . . ’
‘He didn’t lose it. He drank it.’
‘ . . . to sensibilize . . . to organize . to mobilize . . .’
‘I tell you, he burned the paper from the bank. He put it in a glass. Then he poured in a bottle of champagne and drank the lot.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It was a big glass.’
‘And the fleet?’ asked Yaya Adelina. ‘What happened to the fleet?’
‘Sunk by the British.’
‘ . . . to defeat this macabre plot to massacre our people . . .’
‘Stlen by the Brazilian Government.’
‘They should give it back.’
‘They won’t give it back.’
‘We should start a process.’
‘ . . . to steal the incredible riches of our country . . .’
‘Peanuts,’ said Uncle Procopio.
‘Peanuts?’
‘We’d starve without peanuts.’
‘ . . . and the thunderous riposte of our Armed Forces . . .’
‘And palm-oil . . . ’
‘ . . . and our scientific and operational regime . . .’
‘But peanuts give you cancer.’
‘But they’re all we’ve got.’
Africo da Silva said the President was giving him a headache. Gustave said you got headaches from the harmattan. Someone else said you got them from fruit bats, and Papa Agostinho wound up wearily by saying that Dom Francisco was ruined the year the United States stopped using cowrie-shells for money.
Mama Benz asked what a cowrie really was.
‘Cowrie is a snail,’ he said. ‘It lives in a river called Mississippi. In the old days, the Americans would throw a slave in the river, the cowries would feed on the body, and then they’d haul it up and that’s how they got money to buy more slaves.’
‘Revolution or Death!’
‘So when they passed the law, there were no more cowries ...’
‘Marxist-Leninism is our only philosophical guide!’
‘ ... and that’s how Dom Francisco was ruined!’
‘Ah! Cette chinoiserie de la Révolution!’ Gustave da Silva shook his lovely head.
‘And the fleet?’ wailed Yaya Adelina. ‘Whatever became of the fleet?’
TWO
AT TWENTY-FIVE minutes past eight, a woman’s wail rose up from the belly of the compound.
‘Ey . . . yeo . . . yo . . . yo . . . o . . . o . . . o . . . wo . . . wo . . . we . . . !’
The diners widened their arms and went silent. A girl, all arms and legs, rushed in.
‘It’s Mama Wéwé,’ she shouted. ‘She won’t eat.’
Shooing Muscovy ducks before them, the Da Silvas followed the girl down an alley to the house with purple shutters.
They peered in. Moths whirled around a glutinous patch of lamplight.
Dom Francisco’s own daughter, Wéwé the White One, the proof that he was white, lay dying at the far end of the room.
Mademoiselle Eugenia da Silva, a skeleton who happened to breathe, lay dying on an etruscan couch of jacaranda wood carved with anacardiums and passion flowers. Beside her was a plate of shredded papaya, uneaten.
Her tongue had locked to the roof of her mouth. Her lips had sunk without trace into the crevasses of her chin. Only her nose was visible, rearing from the tatters of a black lace bonnet, and the great white hands lying between the bones of her pelvis in a hollow of black bombazine.
The Da Silvas gazed at the miracle. That she should continue to live was not incredible. She was not that much older than Sagbadjou the King, who lived with his wives and retainers in a bungalow behind the palace at Abomey.
That she should die was unthinkable.
Sometimes, on cooler evenings, her shutter would creak open. The boys playing naked in the yard would cluster round and a withered white arm would reach through the close black curtains and feel for their heads.
Sometimes they saw her face, the skin transparent as a gecko’s and the green eyes milky with cataracts.
She still had power in her fingers. They would skim over the tight curls, but if they touched a head of straight hair, they would stroke and caress it, and the second hand would pass through the curtains and reward its owner with a coin of Louis Napoleon or Queen Victoria.
She lived en princesse, they said, on a diet of bean paste and papaya, drinking a little mango juice or an infusion of citronella grass. Her only companion was a withered crone called Mãe Roxa, who prepared and tasted her food: Mama Wéwé was still terribly afraid of being poisoned.
In 1953, at the celebrations of her hundredth birthday, she had pointed a finger at her relatives and said, ‘Remember you are Brazilians!’ She had never spoken since. The years went by without her ever opening her mouth except for food.
Before she withdrew into silence, Papa Agostinho was the one man whose presence she would tolerate. He would listen as she rambled over the disordered events of the century: of Amazons drumming in the courtyard; of the arms of General Dodds, ‘quite hairy for a mulatto’, or ‘that animal’ by which she meant Mere Agathe of the Petites Sœurs des Pauvres.
But when Agostinho asked her about the existence of some lost papers and tried to steer the conversation to the events of March 1857, she curled her lip.
EXACTLY NINETY-EIGHT years ago she
fell in love.
She was tall and beautiful. Her skin was golden and her black hair streaked with auburn. She had eyes of greenish amber, the colour of a troubled sea. The corners of her mouth lifted in a perpetual smile from pronouncing the slushed, suggestive consonants of Brazilian Portuguese. At the sight of her swaying walk men had to hold themselves — yet, at the time, she was a virgin.
One evening, when the harmattan was blowing, she met the English agent coming up from the beach. He told her of a merchantman at anchor in the roads. On board was a professor who had come to collect the plants and animals of Dahomey.
That night she lay awake and tried to picture the professor. At sunrise she put on a dress of white muslin embroidered with blue flowers. She tied a ribbon to her straw hat and went with Mr Townsend to the shore.
Crabs scuttled sideways as they trod down the scarp of white sand. Through the mist they saw the hull and rolling yardarms: as it cleared they saw the red of her ensign and black dots which were the passengers and crew.
But the surf was running high. No passengers could land and the krumen went back to their huts.
Five days later the sea was down. Mr Townsend signalled the ‘All Clear!’ She watched the canoe prows rear through the foam, and the backs of the krumen in a fitful sun.
Sharks swam between the inner and outer line of breakers, waiting for a capsize: they were said to have a taste for white flesh. The fetish-man stood in the shallows rattling a chaplet as the first canoe came in. She prayed as well. She could hardly bear to watch the men paddling as they tried to keep it straight.
The canoe roared over a crest and thudded on the shingle: black arms whisked the passengers ashore before the next wave broke.
The professor shook hands with Mr Townsend, rubbed the salt from his spectacles and began checking his pile of equipment. He was a heavy man, purple in the face, wearing a jacket with a lot of pockets and a pithhelmet and a veil.