The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online

formations of duck flying south. She hugged him and said, ‘The ducks are flying to the river.’
    Hot winds blew, hiding the horizon in dust and blowing pellets of goat dung across the yard. When the tank dried up, the cattle stood around the patch of green slime, groaning, with their muzzles full of spines.
    In a cabin behind the house lived an old Cariri Indian called Felix, who looked after the widow’s few animals in return for food and a roof. One evening, he collapsed in the kitchen and, in a hoarse and hopeless voice, said, ‘All of them are dying.’ He had cut lengths of cactus, stripped them of spines, and set them out for fodder: but the cattle had gone on dying.
    Blood flowed from their flanks from the little pink lumps that were ticks. They slashed themselves trying to reach a single unwithered leaf and, when they did die, the hides were so tough that carrion birds could not break through to the guts.
    Fires tore through the country with a resinous crackling, leaving velvety stumps where once there had been trees. The flames caught Felix as he was hacking out a firebreak, and they found him, charred and sheeny, with a grimace of white teeth and green mucus running out of his nose. The woman dug a grave, but a dog unearthed the body and chewed it apart.
    Rats ran down the boy’s hammock strings and bit him as he slept. Rattlesnakes came into the yard, attracted by anything that still had life. When a column of driver-ants swept through the house, the woman had only the energy to save a saucepan of manioc flour and some strips of wind-dried beef.
    Finally, when she had lost hope, Manuelzinho rode out of the thornscrub, where he had lived on the halfroasted bodies of rodents. He dug deeper down the wellshaft and came back with a dribble of foul ferruginous liquid. But within a week all three water jars were empty.
    The boy’s mouth cracked and ulcerated. His eyelids blazed. His legs went stiff. They gave him mashed palmroots to eat but they swelled in his stomach and the cramps forced him to lie down. All the moisture seemed to have drained from his body. There was no question of being able to cry — even as his mother entered her death agony.
    They woke that morning to find her left leg hanging limply over the lip of her hammock. Manuelzinho lifted the cloth that covered her face from the flies. Unspeaking, and with the terrible tenderness of people pushed to the limit, she pleaded for the son whom she had starved herself to save.
    Her oases were not of this world: she died in the night without a groan.
    The boy watched Manuelzinho bury her. They started south for the river. They passed knots of migrants too tired to go on. Black birds sat waiting on the branches.
    The horse died on the second day, but men are tougher than horses.
    They reached the river at the ferry station of Santa Maria da Boavista, where Manuelzinho left the orphan with the priest and rode away.
    The boy remembered nothing of the journey, yet for years he would keep back a lump of meat and sleep with it under his pillow.
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    SANTA MARIA DA Boavista lay on the north bank of the Sāo Francisco River as it sweeps in a great arc through the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco.
    It had a single street of pantiled houses strung out along a rocky ridge. Below, the muddy waters sluiced by, carrying rafts of vegetation from a greener country upstream. A white church crowned the highest point: above the scrolls of its pediment, a plain blue cross melted the sufferings of the Crucifixion into a cloudless sky.
    The boy’s guardian, Father Menezes Brito, was a fat conceited Portuguese, who had been exiled here for some misdemeanour: his one amusement was to baptize Indian babies with his spittle. He fed Francisco Manoel and let him sleep in a shed. Hoping to claim him for the Church, he taught him to ring a carillon of bells, the rudiments of Latin, some simple mathematics and the art of writing letters