Under the Sun (34 page)

Parakou | Benin | 29 December 1976

 

Teacher's at under £2 a bottle. La lutte continue. B

c/o Sebastian de Souza | P.B.40 | Porto Novo | Rep du Benin | 14 January 1977

 

Maxine,
⁴²⁹

Here am I sweltering in a room I've rented from an aged doctor in a street lined with Portuguese houses built by creole nabobs who returned from Bahia in the 1850's. It is infernally sticky and I have to confess the whole of this part of the trip is something of a trial – climatically. I went to see Lynda Price's brother
⁴³⁰
(that is, Gerald Brenan's girl friend) in Ibadan in Nigeria. That country has diabolical energy which one can't but admire, however impossible it may be to exist there. A room in Lagos costs about £40 a night at the cheapest reasonable standard. Dreadful English misunderstood nursery food dinner
⁴³¹
at least £10 per head. Here is quite expensive if you go in for French food but otherwise not so.

Hope K[asmin] has rung you up with details of our run-around. Quite exhausting because one could never tell when he would begin one of his British sense-of-fair play outbursts. One or two near scrapes but he was an excellent fellow traveller and we both enjoyed our little tour. Saw the game park in the south. Beautiful but an irritating atmosphere in the hotel.

At Ibadan I met the famous Pierre Verger
⁴³²
Afro-Brazilian scholar of encyclopaedic knowledge but little practical use. Tight with information. A fantastical old queen, having a tiff with his Yoruba boyfriend.

I've been reading some Balzac and think the only way to treat de S[ouza] is to write a straight Balzacian account of the family beginning with a description of the place and then switching back to him and writing through to the present. Quite a mouthful.

Frankly I don't now see any point in your coming out because it isn't a joyride and the only way is to get it over as soon as I can.

I'm a bit alarmed about my affairs with Sotheby's, somewhat in desperation I borrowed £1500 on a whole lot of my little things – and frankly F[elicity] N[icolson] thought she promised one thing and then asked for more things later. I don't mind selling the haematite frog and the Eskimo man – if I have to – but the others I do rather mind about especially if there's going to be money coming in from the book. At any rate I couldn't let myself be put off doing this for the sake of a few things. But I leave it to you to do what you think. Perhaps we ought to protect them by saving them up. Feathers are now at K[asmin]'s.

But, O dear, what are we going to do about the farm? I really can't stick the Alistair
⁴³³
situation again, and as you know, find it very hard to work there. On the other hand, travelling about the world makes one less and less feel like quitting England – which I think will get better not worse. But I do think we have to be comfortable there.

Let me know how it was in N.Y. With the market crowing outside my window, I envy you . . . Rambling letter written in the light of a guttering lamp. Must plunge under the mosquito net.

XXXX B

P.S. Going with Sebastian de Souza
⁴³⁴
to a football match in Togo and will write from there again with more news. Please tell Charles Tomlinson that I had no success in getting anything on Blacks in the French Revolution. Perhaps he should look at the career of Toussaint L' Ouverture.

 

On the way to the football match Chatwin was caught up in a coup. Mercenaries had landed at Cotonou in a DC-7 and shot their way through the western suburbs with the intention of overthrowing President Kérékou's Marxist state. ‘By eleven the President reported a “glorious victory” for the Benin Armed Forces with news of the enemy fleeing towards the marshes
“en catastrophe”.'
A “witchhunt” for foreigners took place in which Chatwin and several hundred others were taken to Camp Ghézo and strip-searched. Three days later, he flew to the Côte D'Ivoire from where he rang Kasmin, who wrote down their conversation:

c/o Brit Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 7 March 1977

 

Dear K,

Necessity will damn well have to be the mother of invention. Everything's gone wrong! Where was it we were hexed? Somewhere I have it in my mind you said we'd been hexed. Well, not only the arrest, the visa withdrawn, the traveller's cheques stolen, the bronchitis (from the Beach Hotel of Cotonou), the bags sent to Cairo instead of Rio, the ten-day pointless wait, now Tom's proof of
Patagonia
has got lost in the post between Rio and Bahia just when I have to go off north.

I have to say Brazil is very fascinating. Not very taken with the big cities to which I have been chained, but last night for instance I went to a
candomblé
in a
teneiro
(fetish house) way up a mountain with the ‘daughters of the god' trance dancing in colossal white lace crinolines and the boys – girlie boys – in silver and lace all shuddering as the God Shango
⁴³⁵
hit them through the shoulder blade and one boy twisting and whirling off the platform his silver thunderbolts glittering down the mountain and coming back up again and collapsing into the arms of the ‘mother' – a middle aged white lady with spectacles, hair in a scarf and the air of a bank manager's secretary.

As and when I get the proof I am going north through the
sertão
– cactus scrub – to San Luis de Marañón, where Ghézo's mother Agontimé was sold into slavery and was got back by de Souza. In the meantime I'm kicking my heels in the country round Bahia, walking round crumbling plantation houses. The architecture is wonderful. 18th century Rococo with genuinely Chinese overtones brought direct from Macao whose towns look like the willow pattern. Bahia itself is rather a bore, one of those self-congratulatory places like San Francisco.

I may meet E. and her mother for a week in Spain or Portugal in April and then come back to England. I think I'll sit out the summer at the farm because
this
will need a lot of other men's books if it's to be anything – though I'm still taken with the story. Have traced Domingos José Martin's family and will in Bahia. An interesting figure is a man called Joaquim Pereira Marinho – Martin's and de Souza's banker – who made his first fortune in charque salt dried beef and was known as a
carne seco
who died in the 1880's in a colossal palace, a Viscount of the Empire. (The de Souza's are convinced they still have a fortune in Bahia).
⁴³⁶
Pereira Marinho in turn was a cousin of the biggest family in N.E. Brazil, the Garcia d'Avilas who – from 1550 on were the biggest cattle barons the world ever knew with ranches stretching 1000 miles. Their house is in ruins but still standing – a palace of granite blocks in a coco plantation. The only medieval castle in the Americas. In the
souzala
or old slave quarter the blacks are all de Souzas!

But then everyone is a de Souza or has de Souza cousins in Brazil.

Much love. Be good. Hope your love life is working out. See you all summer.

B

c/o British Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 9 March 1977

 

Dear E.

Oh, I hope this new arrangement works out. Probably because I have had to kick my heels round Bahia so long, I am heartily sick of it. Full of folklore, bad art, intellectuals in search of Atlantis and smart folks who go to candomblé in jangling earrings. I am staying with the missionaries of the British Church and when got down I retire into a damp retreat in the graveyard where I read while marble personifications of sleep mourn our English gentlemen victims of yellow fever.

I don't promise Portugal or Spain until a. the wretched proof comes b. I don't find something wonderful in the province of Pianhy or Marañón. In any case I'll phone you again 1 week before you go i.e. round the 23rd. Incidentally, I do think you're going very early for Spain. You remember how perishing it was when we were in Madrid. Also the weather in April is liable to be tricky in Andalusia. Downpours for Holy Week in Seville. Never been so cold as in Ronda in April. You may be lucky, but I would have left it till 2nd half of the month and then go from Madrid to Aula, Salamanca, Trujillo and the Extremaduran towns (I imagine you are hiring a car) then to the south Cordoba, Seville, Granada. Don't miss Yuste, Charles V's retreat or the monasteries of Guadalupe with the Zurbarans – there's an equally good series in Cadiz. You shouldn't miss Salamanca either – cold or no cold. The best city in Spain. Old cathedral out of this world.

I can fly Varig very easily direct to Portugal and want just a snuff around Lisbon for a few days. Perhaps we could meet in the Hotel Seite Aix in Cintra – the most beautiful looking hotel in the world. One night wouldn't break the bank.

Next day.

All this is, as I said on the phone, rather dependant on future timing, posts etc. and whether any startling development occurs. In any case I'll phone you from wherever on the 26th/27th to find out how things are . . .

In haste. xxx x B

 

At last, in early March, Cape's proofs of
In Patagonia
arrived from England.

c/o British Vice-Consulate | Salvador da Bahia | Brazil | 9 March 1977

 

Dear Belinda Foster-Melliar,

Many thanks for your letter which got stuck in the post between Rio and Bahia – 2 weeks instead of two days and was unstuck for me by a gypsy cabocla or fortune teller who prophesied, after a certain amount of greasing, that it would arrive today – which it did.

Answer to your queries:

P41. He was white, sickly white. We might even put in ‘
unhealthy
white body.' Persians pride themselves on their whiteness anyway. Aryan = Iran = fair . . .

P133 Don't like either. What about this? ‘When he had to retire, he couldn't face the coop of England and had sought his own camp taking with him 2500 sheep and “my man Gomez.”'

. . . P278 Don't know what ‘at night' is doing here at all. Should read: ‘He came back to breakfast . . .'

MacLennan. I simply can't do without a ref book in Glos. My impression is MacLennan. Is that a Scottish name at all? The name is taken from an Argentine book which may well have got it wrong . . .

I hope this is comprehensible and I do apologise for the delay.

Yrs ever, Bruce Chatwin

My love to Susannah.
⁴³⁷
Say I'm a bad correspondent.

PS Please confirm by
cable
that you have received this. Then my mind will be at rest.

PPS Don't really care too much for dedications.

c/o Price Waterhouse | 63 Praca Machada Assis | Recife | Brazil | 10 March 1977

 

Dear Francis,

Do you still have any clout on the magazine? Or is it not worth bothering with?

The matter is this: In 2 weeks I'll be in Recife where there is a most interesting man: Its bishop Dom Hélder Camara
⁴³⁸
who is a. perhaps the greatest expert in the world on the problems of the urban poor (The Brazilian N.E. being a testing ground like Bangladesh) b. an anti-Marxist of the Far Left c. with Sister Cecilia
⁴³⁹
of Calcutta the nearest thing to being a saint and who will probably be canonised at once when he dies.

He is, I have to add, much lionised by certain New York ladies, who gave me his stuff to read. Also Oriana Fallaci
⁴⁴⁰
has already interviewed him. But as far as I can judge, his position is one for which I have the greatest possible admiration. The Camaras were (and are) great sugar moghuls with old slave plantations in Pernambuco.

Let me know by cable what you think. If the magazine proves hopeless perhaps the paper might take something. I imagine, Recife being a colossal city, that I could get a reasonably decent colour photo of him. The money I can arrange through the above company, but we'll have to pay them back.

Otherwise Brazil is rather lowering. People in Rio cowed and lacking in personality.

As always, B

Juazeiro | Rio Sao Francisco | Brazil | 11 March 1977

 

Dear E,

The last letter was posted in a rush. I am now on my longdelayed tour of the north-east. The arid cactus and thornbush country that stretches from Bahia to the Amazon. I am making for San Luis de Marañón which is almost up to Belem, and is where Queen Agontimé of Dahomey was sold into slavery and brought back by de Souza. I know exactly what to do with the book: write it in one long stretch without even the favour of chapters. Balzac's
Eugénie Grandet
gave me the idea. You begin in the present in the present tense and you flash back into the past and then write through to the present. I am beginning with the family celebrating their annual commemorative mass in the Church in Ouidah and retiring for the dinner in Simbodji which means the Big House or Casa Grande in Fon. None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa. The scene is then set for his life and what a life! Cattle drover turned man drover who ends up the prisoner of the King of D[ahomey] and dies of rage at being trapped when all he wants to do is get out of Africa and retire to Bahia. I hadn't quite realised we had got as far as March 11. However, I'll ring up as planned on the 26th probably from Recife. But I may want to try and get an interview with the Bishop Hélder Camara for the old
Times
(if they'll have it).
⁴⁴¹
He is the greatest world expert on the problems of the urban poor and the nearest thing to being a saint. He and Sister Cecilia of Calcutta are in fact the 2 who are up for immediate canonisation.