My Chocolate Redeemer (17 page)

‘I am a fancier,' says Monsieur Brown, ‘not unnaturally, being a member of the Wouff tribe. I read stories in stones, the sacred stones of my people, something which we never buy or sell, but may give only to our friends.'

I keep my hand round the stone. A girl with only one jewel is not easily placed. Leave it in some secret place and you risk robbery, keep it on you and risk its confiscation. Diamonds are not always a girl's best friend.

‘You are very modest,' he says again, ‘your father told me so himself. At the end, when we were exchanging promises.'

Under the sweet, soft flow of Monsieur Brown's voice, luscious and muddy, there is a sudden serration, as if beneath the smoothness lies a bed of gravel.

‘Tell me how he died!'

He begins walking again. He's really rather short, only an inch or two taller than I am. His polished shoes shine like little black ponds as we promenade beneath the thickly varnished eyes of the dead cardinals, eyes in which the fire has dimmed into single points, like eyes pressed to keyholes or the eyes of fish on slabs, cold and starkly amused. The old oak floor groans like a ship's deck.

‘As the tanks closed in on my palace with rockets landing in my wives' apartments, mortars bursting among the tapestries, your father and I embraced. I was determined to go down with the presidential palace, in the manner of a ship's captain with his vessel. As was no doubt the case with the late-lamented
Mary Rose
, or the
Titanic
– but your father, preserve his memory, wouldn't have it. “You're too humble, Majesty,” he said, “you've given me countless gifts. Now let me give you the gift of my advice – your country will not sink if you survive. Save yourself!” And that's what I did, escaping by the help of loyal friends, sailing by night in a dug-out canoe smelling of barbel, down the River Zan, which flows through our capital city of Waq. Your father fled into the interior, straight into the hands of the rebels. A ragtail bob and bag of traitors, renegades from the Ite and the Kanga. So much for turning the other cheek! So much for Mohammed! Led by a hot little parcel of noncoms, privates and sergeants. Wouff it seems they were, if that isn't to insult the name of my people! May the stones of my fathers fall on them and grind their bones to paste! May their wives bring forth pebbles! May the walls of their houses revolt and fall on them as they sleep! In the hands of such creatures your dear father could expect no mercy. That was the last ever seen of him. I smelt of fish, for days.'

I begin crying.

‘That was the last ever seen of either of us.'

I think he means to console me but I can hear the tone and the tone makes me realise that any consolation is inner directed. Well, that does it, the stopcocks are blown on all the pipes. I become a walking sprinkler system.

‘But my papa is dead!'

‘And I was once Redeemer of Zanj!'

I cry all the more, an absolute flood. He stops walking and takes my hand in his. Warm, soft hands like mittens they are, with their beautiful regularity, his cigar fingers settle on my wrists and an amazing thing happens, my crying stops. It dries and vanishes, I can feel the tears drying on my cheeks. He has cured my sobbing sickness and, though I know this sounds silly, I go weak at the knees, I have to command them to stiffen, to keep me up, not to buckle, not to let me fall, collapse at his feet, knocked over, out, by a feeling of ridiculous gratitude. It's really only my mind that keeps me upright, my mind that keeps telling me, yes, you were once the Redeemer of Zanj, and for all I know may be again. But Papa will not be anything again.

Tea is a reward, taken among talk of coups, in his bedroom, his monkish cell. Served by André, but brought upstairs by Tertius who, though he has carried the tray, doesn't come in though I can hear him outside the door. I am
meant
to hear him outside the door, giggling just loudly enough while André arranges the tray with its bone china and its little plates of patisseries, little rainbows of delicacies, pastries with the lightness of moths' wings, little cakes decorated and filled with mocha buttercream, and rose-shaped
petits fours
. ‘My
dujas
,' André calls them proudly. Each is crowned with a button of candied violet. They look like little sea plants, sugar seaweeds or sweet algae, edible corals and in the clear soft light that fills his bedroom, lying so beautifully neatly on the plates they could also be microscope specimens, to be studied not eaten. But they will be eaten, as I suppose all things that eventually come to be studied are at first eaten. Scholarship begins in the gut. Soon. But first I have to excuse myself while André is fussing with milk and sugar in cups, and go outside where I find the slug Tertius wheezing with laughter beneath the portrait of a yellow-faced pope and I say politely: ‘Stop,' and I add firmly, ‘Immediately.'

‘And if I won't?' Tertius tosses his rather lank hair in a gesture which he no doubt believes to be flirtatious.

‘Then I will drive this shiny pin from my black bandana deeply within your parts. I will split a testicle like an olive, possibly two.'

Tertius says nothing. I am rewarded with the instinctive, protective gesture, crossed hands like butterfly wings across the top of the thighs, the footballer's gesture when faced by the penalty. Why, I wonder, does affection inspire insolence? Watching André leading away the sullen Tertius I cannot understand why someone reputed to have been such a terror in Lyons inspires so little fear in his young friends.

The Redeemer's room really is very plain without even a view of the lake and I see he has his pictures up and his books, lives of generals, politicians, dictators: Hannibal, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mazzini, Gandhi, Mussolini and Hitler.

‘I devote much energy to the study of revolutionaries and their methods,' he says and eats a
duja
with its button of candied violet.

More like dictators, it looks to me. All the pictures are of women, photographs framed in gold. The poses are pretty weird.

‘Sit down, please. Take that little sofa in front of the fireplace. I will sit on the bed.'

His bed is raised on bricks, two red bricks beneath each leg.

‘I observe the custom of my country. We believe that by sleeping high we escape the horrid little spirit who haunts bedrooms and steals the souls of men while they sleep. A trick our mothers teach us.'

‘My uncle lines the floor of his room with aluminium foil. That's my Uncle Claude. He's an astronomer. And an atheist. He believes that the earth's magnetic currents affect him, and so does radiation. It's something called geopathic stress. In fact the best way to guard against it is moving about a lot, that way you don't get cooked in the same place night after night. Like you move the food in a microwave oven. Strictly speaking he should shove the furniture in his room about every week or so, but that gets to be a bit of a drag, so he puts down the aluminium foil instead and bounces the rays back into space. That's the theory.'

‘You live with your uncle?'

‘If you can call it living. And with my grandmother. I'm really their prisoner. I used to live with my mother, in England. But then she went off to America, and got lost. So I came here. Everything's gone wrong since Papa died.'

‘Has your uncle always had these ideas? About moving the furniture?'

‘He's full of ideas.'

‘Europe is riddled with superstition. Full of blood and darkness. Sometimes a person dares not venture outside.'

‘My Uncle Claude's a kind of scientist. He believes we're all descended from viruses.'

‘Germs?'

‘Yes. He says human beings are probably just here to keep the germs immortal. They live on in us. We're just by the way. When the earth was young and hot, about a billion years ago, these germs got into the early cells that swam around in the primal soup, drilled into them like crazy with their little tails that go round and round, and took up residence – those they didn't kill, they consorted with. I'd really like to drill into Uncle Claude sometime. But my aim wouldn't be to consort, let me tell you.'

‘I don't think you like your father's brother.'

‘I don't like being accosted by someone with his views. About how he's going to finish off God. And how man is really just the germ's Eiffel Tower. Uncle Claude has two views of us: cosmic and planetary. Cosmically speaking, we don't rate at all – a minor planet of an indifferent sun in a tenth-rate galaxy. In planetary terms we're really just a means for getting the microbes about. And we serve as manure.'

He's shocked. ‘Dung?'

‘Yes. Mammals are just here to fertilise the planet. To keep the plants growing.'

‘In Zanj we have punishments for these mockers and madmen.'

‘You do? What punishments?'

‘If I were in Zanj I would feed him to the crocodiles.'

‘You would!'

I don't believe him for a moment but I have to say I'm warming to the idea of Zanj. ‘Tell me about these creatures who steal souls.'

‘Tiny little men – but their genitals are large.'

I love the idea of this horrid, horny little black troll. Now that's what I call something to worry about! In fact I think everyone should start building their beds on bricks, it really makes sense if all these funny little guys are running around all night.

He waves a broad black hand around the room to include his gold-framed portraits of women. ‘My wives. Dear girls. To be seen in the National Gallery in Zanj. I started it. We are poor and can't afford originals. So I brought science to the rescue. My dear consorts, whom you see here displayed before you, are photographed after the styles of certain famous paintings. Some modern. Some after the Renaissance masters. I often thought it wasn't so much a collection of wives as an orchestra. Here is my wife Viola, posing in the manner of the Degas painting of a woman drying herself after her bath. Isn't she nice? And here is Tympany, portrayed as a Roman Venus. What they call a
Venus Pudica
, hence the hand rather carefully draped. Now this is my third wife, Harp, in her recreation as Venus with Cupid, after a painting by Correggio. The man you see standing beside her is Mercury.'

‘It looks like you!'

‘It is me. I am Mercury.'

And indeed he is. Wearing a strange cap, and not much else.

He sits on the white counterpane, on the high bed, with the tray beside him and I look at his pictures. His orchestra of wives. We might be in an art gallery. Two people, tired of looking, resting between pictures.

‘I hope you will give me the pleasure of painting you, one day.'

‘What painting will I become?'

‘I have just the one! It's called
Les Beaux Jours
, by the modern master Balthus. You will be perfect in the part.'

He looks at his pictures fondly. ‘I adore art. So did my wives.'

I understand. There had been other casualties when the mortars began exploding among the tapestries.

‘Sitting among my wives I feel like a child. In the mountains.'

I see this. They do rather loom. Viola turns her broad back on the camera, Harp shows her enormous breasts with pride and he sits beside her on the rock wearing a funny kind of feathery baseball cap.

‘Harp wears the wings of the goddess Venus. And my cap signifies my godhead.'

‘Who is the child standing between them?'

‘Cupid, played by one of my sons.'

‘What's his name?'

‘I forget. I have many children.'

‘How many?'

‘Over sixty-five, I think.'

‘Where are they now?'

‘With their mothers, I expect. When the rebels moved in on the presidential palace, my surviving wives went back to their villages. To melt among their people. To wait.'

‘Wait for what?'

‘For my return. And here is my fourth wife, Dulcimer. She is a copy of St Ursula, a very fine carving by the Master of Elsloo from the sixteenth century.'

St Ursula, alias his fourth wife Dulcimer, wears an elaborate head-dress. Her breasts are small and high and she carries a book, looks down modestly and wears a diamond pendant around her neck. Her pendant is the image of my own. Her eyes are downcast modestly.

‘Ours is not a rich country. To decorate the presidential palace I was determined to hang the very best art. We have one of the lowest standards of living in Africa, a position which our first leader, my Uncle Richard, did very little to alleviate. He was more concerned with playing off the French and the British against one another to see which side would give him more aid, which he spent as quickly as they gave it to him. He negotiated independence for our country from the French in the sixties. He gave us a parliament based on the British system and a constitution based on the French model. He ignored the fact that the Wouff, the Ite and the Kanga desire nothing more than to skin each other alive. Though not himself a member of the Ite tribe, he appointed most of his ministers from that group. A fatal mistake. It took into account none of the traditions of our country. When I was approached by a small band of patriotic colonels from the national army I told them, after due thought, that I could drive a Lagonda through the constitution, and I did. When I came to power, all appointments of any importance were made from the Wouff tribe. This is the way it had always been done and I am a great respecter of tradition.'

‘Isn't that cheating?'

‘Not at all. Take my wives. First wife Viola was a Wouff. My second, Tympany, was an Ite, so I converted to Christianity. Harp, my third, belonged to the Kanga tribe – though you'd never think so to look at her – so I became a Moslem.'

‘And Dulcimer?'

‘A Wouff. Back to stage one. You see how even-handed I was? One of the first things you learn as a redeemer is that you must be everything to everyone. It's not easy.'