My Chocolate Redeemer (33 page)

‘They know him!' is all I can say to Sessou. ‘Look, they all know him!'

‘Naturally they know him. He is the Redeemer, he ruled us. Supreme ruler and great man of Zanj.' Sessou is pleased and proud to make the identification.

‘But in the capital they tell me they haven't ever heard of him. He doesn't exist.'

Sessou shrugs. ‘In the capital they say things because it is ordered. All memories of the Redeemer have been scratched from the mind of the nation. It is ordered from Comrade Atkins. Do you know him? The Number One Peasant? Thus it always goes in Zanj. Our Peasant belongs to the Kanga tribe, but the Redeemer, he was a Wouff, and the Kanga hate the Wouff …'

‘Yes, I know. They regard the Wouff as slaves.'

‘You know this country! It is true. The Wouff do make quite good slaves. That was once upon a time, but they needed much, much training.'

I gather from this observation that Sessou is a member of the Ite tribe.

‘I have heard it said that the Redeemer was very cruel.'

His face brightens. ‘He was the cruellest man in the world! This we all knew. God bless him! He was the King of blood and he made us very, very frightened. Oh yes! Now they say in the capital that we may not speak of him any longer. No more. All his pictures are gone. They take his pictures and they throw them in the River Zan: his books, his pictures, his money and his magic, they drown them all in the River Zan saying he is dead forever and no more. We must not say his name or the soldiers come and shoot us. But the people know, they remember, here in the country they know the Redeemer and who he is. They never forget him, never, never!'

‘But if he was so cruel why do they think so much of him?'

‘Because,' Sessou explains with superb logic, ‘he showed himself to the people. OK, he maybe say to this one, “You die!” and he died. Or to that one, “Crocodile meat!” and he is meat. But he came before his people and they saw him. He was very, very brave!'

‘He came before the people more often than Comrade Atkins?'

Sessou looks at me as if I am mad. ‘Atkins never comes. Not once in his life. He is frightened, not like the Redeemer who was a great, big man. You can see the Redeemer's house, there in Bamba, where we are going. This winter palace of the Redeemer – you wait!'

‘He had his house in Bamba?'

‘His palace. For the winter. The summer, he goes to the capital.'

Sweet Little Me
sways along under a night sky so vast, so mountainous, huge and rearing and brilliantly powdered, crowded and overflowing with stars, so many the sheer multitude makes me feel a little sick. But then I've been feeling off colour for some days. Look up and the galaxies are scattered across the heavens like cosmic foam, a billion trillion suns, stars, planets, moons, quasars, bits of cosmic string, black holes, white dwarves, red giants, supernova and interstellar dust, and through all this cosmic ocean the schools of particles stream like plankton: gravitons, muons, gluons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, baryons, as well as light matter, dark matter and anti-matter. All of which my Uncle Claude probes with the grace of a backstreet abortionist and the certainties of a priest of the Inquisition (here's the funny part), he scours it with the superstitious faith of some Neolithic dreamer looking in terror for the bogeyman who he believes hides in the heavens, but who all the time …

I think Uncle Claude, who I am sure even now is sweeping the section of the cosmos accessible to his cold eye above La Frisette, feels his telescope to be some kind of a straw through which he draws as much celestial matter as he can swallow at a gulp and then slowly digests it for signs of life, after which it passes through his system like so much waste matter. A scientist is an instrument for converting knowledge into sewage. Oh, Uncle Claude, why don't you come to Bamba! But he can't/won't! Only I come to Bamba on a yellow bus called
Sweet Little Me
which trundles through the night with a bad list, the good Mr Sessou at the wheel. My large companion is so warm and comfortable that I fall asleep against her shoulder and when I wake I find the monkey playing with my hair, its bright black eyes wide and wild.

The town of Bamba has seen better days. Nothing works. Water must be carried from the river of the same name which runs past the town. The only shop is a table under a tree selling dates, Egyptian cigarettes and Chinese razor blades. The houses are deserted. But this was a centre of substance once, there was a Sofitel hotel on the edge of town and a casino for visiting dignitaries, but both are now smashed and deserted, their windows are gone and their doors carried off. The roads are muddy but here and there a little grey macadam shows through to remind us that they were once paved.

So what do you wear for a visit to a Redeemer's winter palace? The expectation is there, whether you like it or not. I go top of the range, eventually, after much thought. A black linen halterneck top and a chocolate linen jacket plus chocolate bermuda shorts. Yes, I
know
, it is woefully inappropriate. But it's also cool and convenient. I wash my hair in tepid water and simply comb it back. The comb grates on particles of sand – this is river water!

The winter palace of the Redeemer is a series of Spanish-style villas set within a compound behind walls which were once pink, the shade of old blood stains, and mounted with spikes. You push on the big gates and they rasp noisily on their rusted hinges. A black boy scuttles out of the compound as I enter and crouches in half appeal, half bow of welcome. ‘Missy, Missy, Missy! Come see, I'll show you the gaols of the Redeemer. Place of torture!'

I give him five dollars. He nearly faints and I realise it's far too much but he reminds me of Clovis and I can't help it. He must be about twenty, with a beautifully smooth face and cloudy eyes, his skin polished. He stares at me, at my clothes and when he sees my diamond pendant he becomes frantic:

‘I will show you things of great cruelty, for the Redeemer was a great monster.'

Here is the same excitement I heard in Sessou's voice. To many people the fabled cruelty of their former leader is a source of pride. Because of the nearness of the river the growth in the garden is luxuriant behind the steel gates and the high walls. Lizards peer from the spreading fronds of the encroaching bush, a red bird with a bright green eye looks down its long curved nose at me and nods as if information received is being confirmed. My guide scampers before me, turning around repeatedly and calling me on by throwing out his hand, keeping it low and rubbing the fingers together as if he is spreading breadcrumbs to lure a bird. The palace is now no more than a series of empty, looted rooms around a central courtyard where a stagnant pool covered in green scum moves like a carpet beneath the hovering dragonflies.

‘Come this way,' the young man beckons.

The first room shows broken taps protruding from walls and a channel, or sluice, cut into the floor and running out into the River Bamba.

‘Come in, come in.' My guide pulls me into the gloom of the first chamber and then through a little passage into a second room where there are the remains of a giant fridge. In the fridge are rails and butchers' hooks which he sends spinning along the rails with a musical clash of steel.

‘Here people were killed, on a table here,' – the young man shows me precisely – ‘the blood and other parts were washed down the drains in the floor into the River Bamba outside. Sometimes the meat was rolled. Sometimes they hung the whole person on a hook and then the cook came here to make his choice. All this I saw, me,' says the young man and touches his eyes, ‘myself.'

On the floor of the giant fridge are fragments of bones. And scattered among the bones, little white flakes of something. Rice! Next door is the dining room.

‘Here stood the table.' With the flat of his hand he gives me not only the position but the height of the Redeemer's table, then a swift tracery in the air describes the glittering chandelier which hung above it and the twenty places it could accommodate. Again there is that curious sparkle of pride. ‘The Monster ate here with his guests. Afterwards they watched the lions.'

The lions' cage is out in the open and the throne is there where the Redeemer sat to decide the fate of his enemies. The young man sits on the marble throne, beside which are dead fountains that once sprayed scented water and played tunes, the ‘Marseillaise' and ‘Waltzing Matilda', I know this because my guide whistles them while sitting on the throne. Those not fed to the lions went to the crocodile pool, now simply a sludgy trench, and those who escaped the crocodiles were thrown into the snake-pit, all now empty, nondescript, decaying, dirty, non-existent you might say, were it not for the brilliant performance of my guide, the living theatre of the Redeemer. It's all cheaper, poorer, hotter than I thought it would be. Nothing is ever like the movies except the movies and sometimes I think I made a mistake in drowning my walkman.

‘Where is he now?'

‘He?' The question appears to amaze him, he scratches his head, he pulls at his lips. ‘He was a bad man, very cruel. An animal!'

I'm beginning to think the record's stuck. ‘Where can I find him?'

I don't really expect an answer but I get one and it staggers me. ‘Maybe his mother tells you.'

At first there is no way of telling whether the little old lady in front of me in the dust, in the tiny mud house, with the pink, marbled gums, smooth of any hint of teeth, and the rheumy eyes, is who I take her to be. My guide claims that she is the mother of the Redeemer and who am I to contradict him? What can we do when we are faced with configurations we do not recognise but which others insist are perfectly matched to our expectations, sorry, our theories – what can we do but watch and study and wait for the clue, the evidence which might suggest that what we are seeing is what we think we are seeing. I don't see any family resemblance. In fact if she looks like anybody she looks like the lead guitarist with Giuseppe and the Lambs – but perhaps I'm rather tired. What I see in front of me, in so far as I
can
see in this gloomy little hut, is a lady of about ninety, I guess, her old black face wrinkled and lit by the astonishing pink of her gums when she smiles. She points to my pendant and says something to the boy. He nods vigorously. The diamond seems to fascinate everyone who sees it. I remember the warning of the customs' man to keep it hidden. Except that these people aren't in any way threatening. They seem pleased to see the stone.

‘Say that I know her son.'

The old woman smiles and nods as if this isn't news, that everyone in the world, if they know what's good for them, knows her son.

‘Say I knew him in the country where I live, in France.'

He tells her and I can see that this information is a bit puzzling, because she interrupts the translator with a series of brief little barks and when he argues with her she shrugs her shoulders and seems to be prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt, to say, OK, so this crazy child thinks she knew him in her country, but then he is world-renowned, they know him everywhere, so if you want to know him in France, good luck to you.

‘Ask her if she knows where he is now. Is he here?'

She gives a short emphatic grunt. My chest is so tight I find it difficult to breathe and my heart is loud in the darkness and noisy, it's beating so that it actually moves me as I try to stand steady on the earth floor peering down at the little lady who lifts her hands and points them in an arrow shape, fingers extended to show us where he is. Her fingers! Each and every one of them the same; tubular, uniform fingers that made it so difficult to wear rings, so difficult when your subjects wish always to kiss your rings …

‘She says her son is near. Her daughter will take you. We go.'

Strange, again, how when one piece of evidence emerges, others follow, first her fingers and then her daughter. Daughter-in-law, more likely, for as soon as the woman approaches us outside the old lady's hut, I recognise her. Certainly she may have put on a little weight since the days when she made a wonderful Venus to his Mercury, after Correggio, the one with the wings that gave Brest the butcher so much pleasure, the recreated painting in which my Redeemer plays Mercury in the baseball cap and is seen with one of his sixty-five children as Cupid. Harp, his third wife! The very same.

‘She leads, we go after,' my guide answers.

We go after, as he says we should. This outfit was certainly not the right thing to wear: the grass is high and sharp and tears at my bare legs and although my outfit is pretty light, the heat is intense; this might be winter but the temperature is surely well into the thirties as we walk behind Harp who leads us to the centre of the little town of Bamba where there is a kind of rocky table of land surrounded by trees and heavily overgrown with vines and creepers. It was walled once, though there are great breaches in the walls as if this place has been under heavy bombardment. Harp, who has not spoken and only turns now and then to make sure we are following her, will go no further. The guide nods me towards the entrance, which carries the very faint sign painted high on the wall in ornate script,
Jardin de Thé
– Tea Garden.

‘You go in. He is there.' My guide pushes me. ‘The daughter says.'

‘Won't you come with me?'

He gives an embarrassed laugh, shakes his head and says nothing. I can see he's frightened.

At first I see what I think is a glass altar set in a kind of arena or amphitheatre. There are tattered flags, their ends eaten by the winds, hanging from four flagpoles set at each corner of the altar. There is a steel turnstile, long rusted and no longer turning. In the tall grass I find fragments of statues. There is a Victor Hugo asleep on his face in the sun; and Napoleon without hands; an orb and a sceptre that can only have come from some statue of Queen Victoria of whom there is now no sign. And the altar is not really an altar, I see this as I get closer, nor is it made of glass but probably of perspex, like Clovis' boot. It's a tomb, a hero's tomb. There are also shreds and tatters of some kind of canvas in the grass, a livid green with yellow stipples, and it occurs to me that this was probably some kind of tent or canopy to keep off the sun which beats down mercilessly. Strewn in the long grass are pieces of rusting equipment, cogs and wheels. Into the frieze at the base of the tomb messages had once been cut but these have been removed by the simple expedient of rubbing cement into the carving. This tomb has been defaced and then desecrated. I step closer to the glass coffin which is covered with dust and leaves and bending over I sweep away one corner and look inside. I feel as I did when I looked through the lake water at
La Belle Indifférente
in her watery grave, so perfectly preserved and so remote, lost to us and yet so near.