My Chocolate Redeemer (11 page)

Chapter 5

Pass through the entrance arch of the Priory Hotel where the menus stand to attention in their glass cases on either side of the arch, fixed to the brickwork which is crumbling picturesquely like pink cheese (today we have jugged hare) and cross the tarmac parking lot where the three cars occupied by big men still have not moved, and you will see the rickety jetty where the pleasure craft are moored: paddle boats, windsurfboards and darkly varnished rowing boats hired by the old cross-patch Leclerc. On the other side of the jetty, before you come to the restaurant
Les Dents Sacrés
, lies one of the landmarks, or one of the watermarks, really, of La Frisette, the drowned boat, a dinghy lying in a few metres of water. She's been there for as long as I can remember, perfectly preserved and seen as if through a plate-glass shop window behind which someone has made a rather theatrical scene supposed to represent Davy Jones' locker. The tip of an anchor is peeping through the sand, a school of small fish investigate her ribbed belly, oars repose peacefully in the rowlocks and little crabs scuttle across their blades. So clear is the water you can read her name painted on the side,
La Belle Indifférente
. It's only when a breeze shivers the surface, or a paddle boat with a couple of kids, their knees pumping like mad, churns away from the jetty destroying the surface calm, that the illusion of shop windows and painted scenes melts as the drowned boat dissolves and crumbles, crabs run for cover, the fish swirl and vanish and you see that
La Belle Indifférente
isn't a prop at all. She really is lost beyond recall. But the funny thing is that although she lies in the shallows and could be got at very easily, no one has ever interfered with her. She is my guardian spirit, my protector, sister, friend. Her preservation is miraculous. She doesn't seem to rot, there are no holes that I can see in her timbers, her body holds together and the villagers of La Frisette regard her as a kind of monument. They pause as they walk by and stare into the water with a feeling of sadness, affection, gratitude that although she's gone, she's somehow still with us. The attitudes of the children of tourists who have never seen her before is very interesting because they come by, pause and perhaps giggle a bit at first as if they'd seen someone undressing. It's so strange: here is a boat not on the water but under it, and that's when they start to quieten down, when they realise they're staring into a transparent grave.

It is about ten in the morning, the shadows are just lifting from the water, and the lake, like a giant machine, is being cranked into action for another day, when I stop briefly to pay my respects to the drowned beauty,
La Belle Indifférente
, in her glassy coffin. Perhaps I should add that as I stand by the water's edge I'm leaning forward slightly, as is my habit, in order to get a closer view of the shadowy water spirit, resting my hands on my knees.

I'm wearing a pair of tight, long lemon shorts with brass buttons on the back pockets and an imitation snake-skin belt which, when pulled tight, gives me the wasp-waist look I am trying really hard for. I'm wearing as well (should you care to know it) a circus-tent top in red-and-white stripes, really floaty and light. Though I intend to spend a few hours on the private beach I'm not planning to swim this morning, the curse having descended with its usual irregularity the evening before.

‘What a charming prospect,' says a voice behind me, in English.

More a growl than a voice, water over stones, or gravel, deep yet flowing. I straighten pretty smartly. I do not take kindly to voices at play and I take a dim view of words like ‘prospect' which I thought went out with the California goldrush. But all straightening up does is to bring my ear into almost nibbling contact with his lips. And then I realise it is not on my body that this approval falls – his eyes are fixed on the drowned boat.

‘It should be lifted and preserved in its entirety, like the wreck of the
Mary Rose
, pride of the Tudor navy – Henry VIII's royal flagship – which I watched being raised from the deeps on an October morning some years ago. On the television. At the time I was esconced in my coastal retreat, not very far from Nice, a pleasanter spot was never spied.'

Now let's just hold it right there. I had also seen the
Mary Rose
being raised from the ocean floor, in bad weather with TV cameras nosing through the depths like sharks, and this big yellow mechanical cradle breaking the surface like a cat with a mouse in its mouth. The remains of the ship were no more than a few old bits of wood. Talk of an excess of technology over artefact! It was like sending a bulldozer into a reliquary. The scientists went fishing with a computer-controlled cage and bags of balloons and came up with this sad little fishbone saved from the deep. The mountain of media laboured and brought forth the backbone of a mouse. And for what? In order to dredge up the spirit of the past they sent in a mechanical digger. Maybe one day they'll invent a robot archaeologist, like the sort of mechanical dog they use for sniffing out bombs, and cut out the human factor altogether – ‘Hullo, my name is Colin, I'm a remote-controlled researcher investigating the pollen count in a cess-pit of an iron-age settlement – press my nose for a print-out …'

It's at times like this that I vow to put on my earphones and never take them off again. I distinctly object to finding strange men in my ear. I move forward sharply and return to my study of the drowned beauty but not before taking a good look at the invader.

A white suit and panama hat sporting a black-and-gold ribbon, a pair of enormous wrap-around sunglasses. His shoes are white with gold laces. This is the first time I've seen him with clothes on. He moves beside me, places his hands on his knees, and we both now bend and stare into the water. We must make an odd sight. Several passers-by give us curious glances.

‘Do you believe it to be an antique?'

‘No. Just an old rowing boat. She's been there for years.'

‘Pity just to leave it there to rot. Of course I know what you're going to say. Why bother? After all, this is a disposable age. I dispose. You are disposed. We are disposed of! You in the West live off your technological cornucopia. We in Africa are tossed the fag-ends and they are not, if I may say so, finger-licking good. But allow me to place my finger on what I sense to be the root of your objection to rescuing this craft from the water and at the same time give me the chance to correct the old assumption among those who know nothing about Africa that it's a place of warring tribes who run around with bones through their noses.' He lifts the finger referred to, big and round, like a black cigar tube, and lays it across his nose. In fact all his fingers are distinctly tubular. ‘I happen to know that once the timbers of this ship are exposed to the air they can be preserved by an application of a solution of polyethylene glycol, after which the relics are freeze-dried to preserve them for posterity. Freeze-drying is a process which is used, as possibly you know, to preserve instant coffee. Coffee is an interesting case, since it's an important cash-crop of several South American as well as of some African countries and its price is manipulated by brokers in the West to the detriment of its growers. Coffee, I might add, is also a by-product of the cocoa bean whose origins are magnificently South American, though we have made its bronze acquaintance in Africa. The bean was first used by the ancient Aztecs and other South American Indians. The tree from which it comes was a gift of the feathered snake god, Quetzalcoatl, who gave it as a gift to man. From the bean the Aztecs made chocolate, not as we know it, but a hotly spiced, rather bitter beverage which was frothed up before drinking. In this form it was presented to the conquistadors as a royal drink. Coffee came from the court of a king whom Cortés killed.'

He likes this ghastly alliteration because he repeats it twice. I do not need to be lectured on the history of chocolate. Besides, the thing to do is not to study it – but to eat it.

‘Montezuma.'

‘Monte – precisely – Zuma. As you say. You know about these things?'

‘I more or less have to live on chocolate. I don't seem to be able to eat anything else. Well, maybe a little fish. And fruit. But mostly chocolate.'

‘Ah well, then we have something to share.'

‘You also?'

‘I eat more than I should. I break the taboo when I eat it. I belong to the Wouff tribe. D'you know them? They are the number one people in my country of Zanj and, as a rule, they do not touch it,
cannot
touch it, believing it will kill them to eat it. I've tried to coax them out of this superstition, but they are traditionalists, the Wouff, and do not change easily. It's a damn shame. We could make a considerable success if we introduced the cocoa plant in my country. We know it well. My people were among the very first to raise the crop on the African continent. Now others do it, like Nigeria and Ghana, but we were the first. We learned the hard way that the young cocoa trees thrive best when planted in the shade of yam or banana trees. As the green armoured pods begin to swell and glow, we watch like mothers! We see the golden hue that speaks of the ripening seed within. We carefully cut the pods, scoop out the beans from their envelopes of rubbery white pulp, ferment them, dry them and pack them in bags to feed the chocolate-crazy thousands of Europe.'

‘You grow cocoa beans in your country?'

‘Not the beans, no. What we did was to grow the slaves. Then our slaves went off and grew the beans.
Voilà!
as the French say. The first cocoa was grown in big amounts on the West African Islands of São Tomé and Principe, off the coast of Guinea. They were owned by the Portuguese. In my country of Zanj, the tribe known as the Kanga, who are Moslems, were developers of the African cocoa trade. Do you know the Kanga? They were converted by the Arab slavers who visited our part of the world for centuries.'

‘Which is your part of the world?'

‘Do you know where Uganda is?'

‘More or less.'

‘Well, we're not more than about a thousand miles from Uganda. And not far from the Central African Republic either, as distances go in Africa. The Arab slavers were pretty free around those parts. Picking things up. Passing things on. They passed on to the Kanga, up in the central highlands of my country, a taste for the laws of the Prophet – and a big love for the business end of slavery. When the slavers left towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Kanga took over. The Kanga would kidnap members of my tribe. They say the Wouff are idiots and pagans! That's what they said, because we worship the sacred stones, and so they marched us to the coast. The Wouff are a brave strong people, and great fighters, but the march killed many and those who grew too weak to walk were murdered. The Kanga had rifles! Yet the Kanga disliked this aspect of the work because they love to stay at home among their wives or their mosques. And the trek to the coast took weeks, even months! The Kanga count like this.' He lifted one cigar finger after another: ‘ “One-day-away-from-wives, two-days-away-from-wives, three-days-away-from-wives …” and that's all. They do not count more than three. They just say “too many!” Also the Kanga hated the Portuguese who were Catholics. But the Kanga are lucky, lucky people. They brought the Ite to work for them. The Ite were very, very primitive. Fetishists. They worshipped snakes, until they became Christians. Christians are sensible. And they need money, so the Ite took on the transport of Wouff slaves to the coast. To this day, in my country, when an Ite person comes creeping into a Wouff village it makes the children run screaming for their mothers. Maybe you say this is ridiculous, you might say “you live and learn”.'

‘I don't say that.'

‘Good. It's a stupid expression. Our Wouff children long past, in the slave years, understood that if you waited around to learn, you might not live. To this day chocolate and death are twins. Not only sin and guilt and luxury, as it is in the West. The Wouff believe chocolate is made from the blood of their fathers. They believe that this blood was taken from the bodies of their sons, together with certain fats, and sent to the Quakers.'

‘The Quakers!'

‘Yes, the Quakers, across the seas in England. It sounds silly, but you see it was the Quakers who bought so much of the cocoa crop from the islands of São Tomé and Principe. For their chocolate works and their cocoa factory at Bourneville. As Hamlet might have said, if he had been a Wouff, the souls of the Wouff slaves are fled to a Bourneville from which no traveller returns. Not that my people are particularly superstitious, they don't see visions of angels in baobab trees like the Ite, they don't cut their women – you know the Kanga circumcise their women? – hence the Wouff proverb: “When a Kanga makes love, his wife makes bread” …

And here he laughs. He is one of those men who laughs with his shoulders and chest, and his head shakes as if it's on a spring. ‘I did what I could to change their minds, I said to my people: Look, I will be your example and eat! I ordered chocolate to be brought to me in front of the tribe and melted into a golden bowl.'

‘Like Montezuma in the presence of Cortés?'

‘Well read! Well read!' he says, rather as an Englishman will say ‘Well played!' ‘Exactly. But it didn't work. The very word for chocolate in the Wouff language means “death of fathers”. So one fine cash-crop goes out of the window and we're left with our palm oil, our diamonds and our poverty.'

‘I suppose you could say I have an addiction. I'm a chocolate junkie.'

‘Then you are as much a victim as anyone else. As much as the poverty-stricken peasant toiling to produce it beneath the pitiless sun. You are the victim targeted by the merchants for its consumption, the ultimate casualty of an economic system which feeds some children of the world on chocolate and thousands of others on nothing at all. Remember the words of your former queen, Antoinette: let them eat cake! Well, let them drink chocolate! I have a good memory for the remarks of royal personages – be they Henry's boat or Antoinette's cake. Victims crying out to be saved. Like this drowned boat here. She's so little. A man could lift her in his arms, a crane would not be needed.' He steps forward. ‘Shall we save her?'