The Ten Incarnations of Adam Avatar (18 page)

Castillo's eyes, bloodshot, stared into my own. I wondered if his mind had come slightly unhinged. Then he smiled at me. It was a smile of great warmth, as though a golden sun had broken through sullen cloud. He suddenly looked years younger. He said, ‘I am sorry, my friend. You are right. They were only Negroes.' He stood up and held out his hand. ‘Thank you. I needed to speak to a man of your experience.' I shook his hand. ‘It is no trouble,' I replied. I watched him walk away and was pleased to note that his gait was quite steady. Apparently, my firm common sense had had a good effect.

September 20 
— Our departure delayed by an hour. Portillo hanged himself from the yardarm of his ship last night. We weighed anchor at 0730 and left harbour under a good headwind. The sun hangs in the sky like an unripe orange behind the sandy haze blown in from the Sahara.

November 30 
— Reached Luanda at 1600 hrs. Went ashore at once. The sight of the fort gave me a feeling of relief. Throughout the outbound journey I have been plagued with intuitions of disasters of one sort or the other. Oddly, I am always more nervous when sailing towards Africa than when sailing back. I think it is because an empty hold makes me uncomfortable. When it is packed with slaves, I have the feeling that the
Kush's
hull is reinforced by a living curral of sorts and that nothing can happen to her.

The sergeant at the fort told me that everything has been quiet. He took me to see the four new cannon. I paid for two of these in Portugal but they were delivered on another ship. The barrel is six feet long, fires a three-pound ball, and has a range of 2,000 feet. The cannon face seaward since, if the fort is threatened it will not be by the Africans, but by the Dutch or Danes or French or, lately, the English. The dungeons are empty; the last ship was in three weeks before. The weather is as cool as I had hoped, which should help reduce the number of slaves I will lose on the journey back. There were two Congolese guides at the fort. I told them I need 600 slaves. They said there are two villages we could raid. Both are over 300 miles away: all the suitable villages nearer the coast have already been raided. I will not get 600 slaves from those two villages, since I want mostly young, healthy males. But the sergeant said a Fon chieftain has promised a delivery of captives some time in the next two weeks, so that cargo should be in the dungeons by the time I return. I authorized the sergeant to barter for 50 slaves and to hold the rest until I return to buy the rest myself. I have set a fee of ten ducats with the two guides. We will leave at dawn.

December 1 
— We have been walking all morning and have stopped for the midday meal. I hesitated about bringing the log with me but now am glad I did. It will be good to have a complete record of my last trip. Perhaps it will comfort me in my dotage, as well as serve as an aid to failing memory when I regale my grandchildren with tales of my adventures on the Dark Continent. The party consists of 20 men, not including the guides, and we have between us seven blunderbusses, four pistols & 23 cutlasses. I have brought along sufficient shackles for 300 prisoners – we can make more if need be. This morning we tramped through long grass and thickets, up and down humid ravines, and over endless savannas with their giant termite mounds. Over everything there was a silence save for our breathing and the rustle of our clothes and the clink of our weapons. Even the sounds of the animals seem to echo in the vast and quiet sky. We passed through several abandoned villages – all that is left are sagging grass or mud walls, the blackened stones of cooking fires, some broken spears. As always, I feel this strange sense of familiarity as I gaze out on plains so vast the horizon is a shimmering, misty line. Although I am a regular visitor to the coast, I have ventured inland only about six times. This country should be strange to me, with its small striped horses and leathery monsters with mismatched horns and dancing antelope who wander in immense herds and always come close enough to be easily shot. It is strange to me yet, somehow, I feel at home here. Perhaps it is because the Africans have never tamed this land, whereas we Europeans, who have been here less than 200 years, have already begun to exploit the riches that are so abundant. But, beyond all these things, a certain difference now nags at my mind. Perhaps it is a greater emptiness, compared to when I first set foot here 35 years ago. It is as though the land and the sky have grown more immense. At any rate, I have an odd feeling of gazing upon the land with two sets of eyes: one pair of eyes finds this country foreign while the other pair finds it as familiar as my own face.

My nightmares have stopped.

December 2 
— Last night we heard the drums, faint yet seeming to fill the starry sky. The sound seems to resound in my very blood in a way the music of my native land does not. Perhaps it is the very primitiveness of the drum which accounts for this, for one attends to civilised music with ear and heart. These African drums seem to beat in the very pit of one's stomach.

December 7 
— Each day has been the same: tramp the hours away, make camp at evening, cook, spend the night in dreamless sleep, strike camp and tramp the day away again. But the Congolese tell me we shall meet a village tomorrow. We are camping tonight on the edge of a forest and I am writing by firelight. The forest is a dark and living presence beyond the camp, the trees poised like perfectly-disciplined soldiers while behind them strange chitterings, whistles and muted snarls emerge. It is as though the trees stand guard to some abyss of madness.

I am becoming too fanciful, I think. It must be a sign of old age.

December 8 
— A successful raid. Although I have never had any formal training as a soldier, and although I have only rarely been involved in battle, I think I would have made a good general. We approached the village through the forest from the river just after 1300 hrs, when the inhabitants would be sluggish and sleepy from the midday meal. I placed the four best marksmen at our flanks, two and two, and led the charge myself armed with a cutlass and three pistols. The first warriors who attacked were cut down by shot, while we tackled the next wave hand-to-hand. Some of them had large wood-and-leather shields – these we shot. The others, armed only with assegais, were no match for our cutlasses or the hail of shot from behind us. The battle was furious but short. I was relieved at this: the drawback to raiding is that you always end up killing or maiming those who would fetch the highest prices.

Nobody was killed. Four men received minor injuries and I was stabbed in the thigh. The second physician, whom I had brought along (figuring he should earn his pay) bound the wound for me and expressed amazement that I limped only slightly. But that is another reason I would have been a good soldier: I have always borne physical distress stolidly and I handle my cutlass like a Toledo blade. It is just a matter of willpower and concentration.

December 9 
— From that village, we got 82 slaves – 44 men, 26 women & 12 children. But that village was the farthest point of our trek. We bound our captives together in groups of 5-6, by height. I was not especially versed in this, never having been too involved in the first passage from interior to coast. But the Congolese guides are well-practised in the methods of transporting prisoners with a minimum of trouble and in no time at all had everyone well set. The men's hands were bound behind, the women in front with their children tied to them by a long rope. They then divided them into groups of various sizes and ran lengths of chain through their manacles, so that no one could run off. The biggest and strongest men were chained together by iron collars or had wooden yokes put on their necks. It is a most efficient system.

December 15
— The journey becomes a little onerous now. The prisoners slow us down and we have the additional chore of feeding them at night. But I push them hard and I feed them very little. This is not impatience or cruelty: there is no point in carrying any but the strong and healthy slaves back to New Spain. Indeed, there is no point in even carrying those who are weak or sickly aboard the
Kush
 – if they cannot survive this first passage, they certainly will not survive the middle one. Already, I have had to leave three behind: two women and a man who was wounded in the leg, which turned gangrenous. (I have given the physician a good tongue-lashing for letting this happen.) I shot the man: the women could not carry him and it was more merciful than leaving him to the wild beasts. The women had been fainting regularly – I considered shooting them but since they appear to be weak rather than sick, I thought it better to let them take their chances. These are the unpleasant duties which I have never shirked but which, I admit, I shall not be sorry to leave behind. The other slaves are bearing up well.

December 25
— We took a different, looping route on the return, which brought us to four other villages. Three of these we raided; from the fourth we were able to buy 38 slaves for a price much lower than I would have got on the coast. We now have 292 slaves. We will not march any further today. It is the day of the birth of Our Lord and we are camped in a glade beside a pleasant stream. I spent the morning writing a letter to Maria. [Here appended - A.A.]

My dear wife:

I lie here in a far off land but my thoughts are of you and the little ones we shall be celebrating our next Christmas with. Above me, the tall trees form a green canopy through which sunbeams play like ethereal arrows, seeming to carry the constant singing of the birds upon their golden shafts. I am writing to you besides a tinkling stream in which small silver fish dart and turn. Yet within this idyll there is no contentment in me, since you are not here. I think only of the time when we shall be together on our farm with the happy cries of children about us.

Your loving husband

Antam

Maria often boasts that she has the best husband in all Portugal. She is correct: I rarely beat her and I provide her with the best of everything. Of course, she also is a good wife: obedient, able to hold her tongue, and firm with the servants. My meals are always hot and my home always clean. The other husbands sometimes make jokes about my wife ruling me, but I notice that it is those men who make the most jokes whose wives with the sharpest tongues. I always write several letters to Maria on my trips and present them to her when I return. They bring a blush of pleasure to her cheeks and, sometimes, even tears to her eyes. I have had two great satisfactions in my life: being master of my own ship and knowing that there is another person on this earth who loves me more than life itself. I shall continue writing these letters, I think, for now that I shall be in her company every night it is even more important that the household be pleasant. Women often became tempestuous at Maria's age. Yet I begin to feel that, with a family and with the growing of things from the earth, that the life ahead of me will be even more contented than the life that lies behind me. I have indeed been blessed by the Lord and, on this anniversary of the day He sent His only begotten Son, I thank Him for all my blessings.

The slaves have been quiet, lying like a set of black paper dolls along the muddy river bank. This is the other reason for treating them harshly on the march, so they will not have the strength or the spirit to attack us. We have allowed them to bathe in small groups, however. I assigned the men to watches so that they can take the women into the forest in turns. I do not allow my men to take the females in front of the captives, for the male slaves tend to become restless when this happens. It is a foolish man who throws matches at a powder keg. However, I always let my crew indulge despite the risk. Men have needs and they would become frustrated otherwise. I do not always indulge myself, but I did this time as it is my last trip here. The female I chose had small, firm breasts and a tight cunt. I took her around a curve in the river where we would be hidden from the party. She struggled at first, but after a few slaps lay quiet with her legs open. To my surprise, although she must have been about fifteen years old, she was a virgin. The mat of dry leaves crackled beneath her back while the trees provided a pleasant shade on my own as I stabbed my cock into her. She let out one short, sharp cry. When I withdrew, I saw with satisfaction that the head of my penis looked like a bright-red plum. I rolled off her, suddenly aware of the silvery stream and the green bower scattered with scarlet flowers and the blue sky with small white clouds above. A cooling breeze blew and the birds sang in the trees above. We experience only a few perfect times in this life: that moment shall remain in my memory as one of those times.

December 30 — The guides tell me we should be back at the fort within four days. The country we are passing through looks familiar and, when I inquire, it turns out I have been here before, 15 years ago when I visited the village of the Congolese king. But that is not why the area sticks in my mind. We had stopped in a small village on our way there and, to my great surprise, there was a white man living among the Africans. He may once have been a missionary or he could equally well have been a sailor or a soldier or a tinker, for all I knew. But he had become an African. He wore a loincloth and wore several wooden and leather bracelets and a necklace made of coloured shells. He even had tribal scars on his cheeks and breast. He had let his hair and beard grow unwashed so they had become matted and fibrous. His skin had been darkened by the African sun, and he could well have been taken for an Indian save that the shapeliness of his nose and the thinness of his lips revealed his white blood. It occurred to me for the first time then that, just as we find the Africans strange-looking with their kinky hair and thick lips, so too must they find our pale skins and straight hair odd. Indeed, I have since then always felt alien when I go into the villages although, as I have said, I feel at home in the open country.

I did not ask the man about his past. I assumed that he had stayed too long here and been driven mad by the sun or by disease. But, when we spoke at the evening campfire, he seemed quite rational. Moreover, he had taken two wives from among them; the children were beautiful creatures with golden-brown skin and sensual features. The man – I have forgotten his name, because he had taken a Congolese one – offered no explanation as to his presence there. We spoke only of the hunting and the weather and the king. However, although I cannot recall what brought on the comment, he did remark that Africans viewed people of Europe as men whose colour had been washed away by the gods and who had therefore become living ghosts. I did not ask him why he lived with the Africans as one of them nor did anyone else in my small party. I think we were all embarrassed at the sight of this Christian man become a savage. He, I believe, was amused at our discomfiture. Several times that evening I saw him watching us and I am sure he was smiling behind his beard. That was how I knew his very soul had changed, for the free Africans are great laughers.