The Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online Page B

aguardiente on the tongue; the pleasures of hot blood spurting over his hands, or of pissing down the leg of his horse.
    He lived in Indian villages. He rode with gipsies who sold dud slaves and scapulars of St Anthony. For a season he washed gravel, working shoulder to shoulder with negroes, at a diamond-camp. It astounded him to find their fetor so exciting: he would compare their uncreased foreheads with the battle raging inside his own.
    He knew he was brave. One night, a face loomed red in the firelight: he was amazed by the ease with which his knife slid into the man’s belly. Another time, bivouacked on the Raso da Catarina, he shared his meat with a bush-wanderer whose clothes were a patchwork of green silk and whose fingers were stiff with gold rings. The man walked eighteen leagues a day, barefoot through the cacti:
    â€˜I trust no one,’ he said. ‘Why should I trust a horse?’
    Not for months did Francisco Manoel realize that this was the bandit Cobra Verde who robbed only rich women and only for their finery.
    And he too believed he would go on wandering for ever: yet, on Santa Luzia’s Day of 1807 — a grey, stifling day that held out the promise of rain — the aimless journeys ended.
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    HE HAD BEEN riding through the village of Uauá when the potter’s daughter rushed from her house with an apronful of green oranges. A week later he brought her trinkets: within a month they had married.
    He found work on a ranch nearby. His employers were a family of absentee landlords called Coutinho, who had ranched in the Sertāo for two centuries, but now lived on their sugar plantation by the sea.
    He learned the equations of grass and water; the flight of birds around a stricken cow, or the presence of an underground spring. For leagues around he could distinguish all the neighbours’ brands: it was a point of honour to return a lost animal no matter how far it had strayed.
    Not far away, along the river-bed, there were cotton fields worked by poor sharecroppers. Knowing him to be cool and resourceful, they came to him when they were cheated and he would force the landowners to admit their miscalculations and pay up. But when the sharecroppers came again, with gratitude and humble presents, a bitter taste rose up his throat, and he brushed them aside.
    The Coutinhos paid no wages, but each round-up entitled the cowhands to one calf in four.
    For two years he sold his animals, preferring coins in his pocket to wealth on the hoof. But for the third season he ordered a branding iron from the blacksmith and set about ‘humanizing’ his property.
    He coralled young bulls, tied their legs and lashed them to a wooden post. He sliced off their testicles and sawed the tips of their horns. They slavered and moaned as the iron sizzled into their flanks: it gave him pleasure to rub the hot tallow into his own initials.
    And he enjoyed his simple house with its gourds and melons straggling over the porch and its ochre walls that sucked up the sunlight. After a hard day he would unhook his guitar and strum the old songs of the Bandeirantes.
    His wife dressed always in pink. She could sew, plant vegetables, cook, and squeeze the poisonous juice from manioc. Yet her movements were stiff and mechanical. Making love meant no more to her than sweeping the floor. A dazzling set of teeth froze the words in her throat. She would make her eyes glitter if she wanted something, or cloud them over if ever she was afraid. More often, she sat, staring into the distance, stroking an orange cat.
    She would wake in the night and scream, ‘Father! Father!’ Twice a week she went to see the potter and came back red to the elbows in clay.
    The strain of living with her told on his nerves. The sight of her vacant smile made him pale with anger and tempted him to sink his fingers in her throat. He took to sleeping rough, hoping to recover his equilibrium under the