What Am I Doing Here? (17 page)

 

1974

I
n January 1971, I paid my first visit to the West African country known then and from time immemorial as Dahomey, and in particular to the decayed slaving-towns on the coast – Ouidah, Porto Novo, Grand Popo – which in their heyday exported more slaves to the Americans than did any other part of the continent. The towns are referred to collectively as Little Brazil – a legacy of generations of mulattos and manumitted blacks who ‘returned' to Africa in the nineteenth century and set themselves up in the slave business.

At Ouidah the two sights of the town are the Python Temple and Sigbomey, the Brazilian
casa grande
built by the slaver millionaire Dom Francisco Felix de Souza. He had come to the Slave Coast sometime after 1800 as lieutenant of the Portuguese fort, and after staging a palace revolution in which he deposed one king of Dahomey for another, he set about reorganising the Dahomean army – with its corps of Amazon warriors – as the most efficient military machine in Africa.

As a reward for his services, Ghezo, the new king, awarded de Souza the title of
chacha,
or viceroy, of Ouidah and a monopoly over the sale of slaves, which had recently been declared illegal by the British government.

De Souza owned a fleet of slave-ships, some with the new Bermudan rig, which beat faster to windward than the frigates of the West Africa Squadron. Prince de Joinville, a son of Louis Philippe, came to call and described fantastic displays of opulence – silver services, gaming saloons, billiard saloons – and the
chacha
himself wandering about distractedly in a dirty caftan. Toward the end of his life, however, the slaver fell foul of his friend the king, was ruined by his Brazilian partners, and was abandoned by his brood of mulatto sons. He died a madman, and on Ghezo's orders, was buried in a barrel of rum, together with a beheaded boy and girl, under his Goanese four-poster bed.

The bed is still there. At its foot there was a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi – the slaver's namesake – while on the bed table stood a silver elephant, the family emblem, and a halfempty bottle of Gordon's gin in case the old man woke up thirsty. An old black woman showed me round, a de Souza herself, who expatiated in halting French on the days when her ancestors had been rich, famous, and white. When she pulled aside the bed sheets, she revealed, instead of a mattress, a mound of fetish material: blood, feathers, palm oil, and metal images of Dagbe the Holy Python.

Here plainly was a story worth telling, but when I came back seven years later, Dahomey had changed its name to the People's Republic of Benin. The ‘thought' of Kim Il Sung was all the rage and, to my amazement, I found myself one morning arrested as a mercenary, stripped to my underpants, and forced to stand against a wall in the searing sun while vultures wheeled overhead and the crowd outside the barracks chanted
‘Mort aux mercenaires!'
A platoon practised arms-drill behind my back, and the soldier guarding me cooed melodiously,
‘Ils vont vous tuer, massacrer même!'

After this interruption I lost the stamina to pursue my researches, though I had acquired ripe material for a novel. Since it was impossible to fathom the alien mentality of my characters, my only hope was to advance the narrative in a sequence of cinematographic images, and here I was strongly influenced by the films of Werner Herzog. I remember saying, ‘If this were ever made into a movie, only Herzog could do it.' But that was a pipe dream. The novel,
The Viceroy of Ouidah,
appeared in 1980, to the bemusement of reviewers, some of whom found its cruelties and baroque prose unstomachable.

About three years later I was travelling in the Australian outback, and on returning to the motel one day in Alice Springs, I found a note saying that Herzog was looking for me. Someone had given him one of my books when he was making
Fitzcarraldo
in the Amazon. He wondered if I'd be interested in helping with the script of a new film about the Aboriginals,
Where the Green Ants Dream.

He was at Melbourne airport to meet my plane, an ascetic figure in threadbare fatigue pants and a sweat-shirt that exposed the laughing-skull tattoo on his shoulder. Within a couple of minutes our conversation had taken off in various abstruse directions.

It happened that he and I were tackling the same subject, the relation of Aboriginals to their land. He had his ideas. I had mine. I felt that to mix them would only add to the general confusion. I did, however, find him a dog-eared copy of
The Viceroy of Ouidah.
He said, ‘This is a text I like. One day we will make it into a movie.' The line he liked best was given to me by the eight-year-old Grégoire de Souza, who, contemplating a trail of white ants that led into an unplugged refrigerator, said,
‘Le frigo existe.'

I saw Werner once or twice after that. And he would phone me from fishing trips in Northumberland, where his brotherin-law was an Anglican parson. He was, I discovered, a compendium of contradictions: immensely tough yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual, not particularly well-adjusted to the strains of everyday life but functioning efficiently under extreme conditions.

He was also the only person with whom I could have a one-to-one conversation on what I would call the sacramental aspect of walking. He and I share a belief that walking is not simply therapeutic for oneself but is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills. He sums up his position in a stern pronouncement: ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.' A striking example of this philosophy was his winter pilgrimage to see Lotte Eisner.

Lotte Eisner, film critic and associate of Fritz Lang in Berlin, had emigrated in the early 1930s to Paris, where she helped found the Cinémathèque. Much later, after seeing Werner's
Signs of Life,
she wrote to Lang in California, ‘I have seen the work of a wonderful young German film-maker.' To which he replied, ‘No. It is impossible.'

She was soon to become a guiding spirit of the new German cinema, giving young directors the benefit of her immense experience and, because she was Jewish, helping to reestablish continuity with a great tradition of film-making that had been shattered under Hitler.

Werner, I'm told, was her favourite. And in 1974, when he heard she was dying, he set out walking, through ice and snow, from Munich to Paris, confident that somehow he could walk away her sickness. By the time he reached her apartment she had recovered and went on to live another ten years.

As for filming
The Viceroy,
quite unexpectedly I had a call from a New York agent offering to buy an option on the rights. The man had the grace to say the book was not hot property, and the sum he mentioned was derisively small. I called up Werner, who without a flicker of hesitation said, ‘I'll buy the rights' – and did so.

I thought no more of it. The difficulties of filming in West Africa seemed insuperable. I then picked up an impossibly rare disease in Western China, yet rumours reached my hospital bed that the project was under way. Klaus Kinski would play the part of Dom Francisco, the slaver. The title would be changed to
Cobra Verde
(the book is peppered with references to snakes and snake worship). The first half of the film would be shot in Colombia, not in Brazil. Ouidah would be Fort Elmina on the coast of Ghana, and the up-country palace of the Dahomean kings would be the mud-brick complex that Werner was having built in a grassland dotted with baobabs in the north of the country, near Tamale.

I first saw the palace on a Tuesday, as my plane came in to land. It could have existed since the Iron Age but had, in fact, been finished on Saturday. Werner's girlfriend, Christina, saw us dip our wings and came to fetch me from the airstrip.

 

Breakfasting in the shade. The cameras are turning and the king of Dahomey (played by a real king) is carried from his palace in a litter. His courtiers surround him, yelling their heads off. Most of them hold the
asin,
which are animalheaded standards covered in gold leaf. The king himself is smothered in gold jewellery, much of it real, and wears an imposing gilded crown. All the actors wear robes of yellow, orange, or tawny brown, which, set against the mud wall, gives an effect of sombre and glittering richness.

The king flexes his biceps and flicks his fly whisk. Chintz umbrellas float like jellyfish above his head.

‘It's too much for me,' says the set doctor, who is Portuguese. ‘I can't believe it. Really it's too
much.
'

 

Other film-directors, faced with the problem of recreating a nineteenth-century African court, would have put it in the hands of the set and costume designers and ended up with a fake. Werner, by hiring a
real
court and not changing a thing except the odd Taiwanese watch, more than makes up for lack of historical accuracy by establishing an authenticity of tone.

 

Dust-stained, wearing broken plastic sandals and a wet handkerchief tied around his forehead, Werner sprints about from the camera to the actors and back. He bumps into the fetish priest, an androgynous figure pirouetting round and round in white crinoline. He apologises and sets the man spinning once more.

I'm amazed by the old-fashioned Germanic courtliness with which he handles his African cast. Without a hint of condescension he takes a woman by the arm, as if he were escorting her to a ball, and shows her how to walk through the Great Gate. The others follow. For the next shot he says, ‘Ladies, you now have the privilege of giving us the best screams.' Or to the king: ‘Nana, would you please lean back so we can see your very royal face.'

 

On the tie-beams of the Great Gate stand the hunters: real hunters, members of a hunting tribe in the North. Their trousers are sewn from strips of indigo cotton, their jerkins covered with gris-gris. They wear quivers full of arrows, and civet skins dangle from their belts. Their basketwork helmets are equipped with buffalo horns, which, silhouetted against the sky, make them look like the guardians of Valhalla.

Werner cannot resist the old Wagnerian touch. He renamed two Brazilian girls in the script Valkyria and Wandeleide, and when I tax him that the music of Wagner could not have reached Brazil in the early 1800s, he laughs.

 

When he first suggested I come to Ghana, I was too weak to climb stairs and said, ‘Do you want a corpse on your hands?' Later I decided I'd be fit to travel, with one proviso: if I brought a wheelchair, someone would push me around. The answer came back: ‘A wheelchair will get you nowhere in terrain where I am shooting. I will give you four hammockeers and a sunshade bearer.' Now that invitation, even if one had been dying, was irresistible.

 

The king, His Highness Nana Agyefi Kwame II, Omanhene of Nsein, is a man of magnificent presence and a slightly extended upper lip. When Werner first floated the idea of using a real king instead of an actor, his Ghanaian colleagues said it was unthinkable. But Nana, like most kings, was obviously longing to play in a movie. The snag was how he, a good king, could assume the role of a bad king and be deposed. Yet he comes across as a far more convincing character than the cardboard tyrant of my book, as a man who knows he is doomed and faces his fate with equanimity. While his women get ready to strangle him, he says with all the weariness in the world, ‘I will go now and get some sleep.'

 

The courtyard wall is lined with skulls, and the lintels and steps are paved with skulls. ‘How', I asked Werner at lunch, ‘did you get away with all those skulls? What did the villagers think?'

‘Oh, they liked them. They built with enthusiasm.'

 

The trouble with making the skulls out of plaster instead of plastic is that they tend to get chipped and have to be repainted with a thin layer of mud and water. This mixture is known as swish, and the ‘swish boy' – who has skin and hair of a uniform golden brown - carries a sheaf of paintbrushes stuck in his curls, steps about gingerly, and paints out the whitish scars.

 

A huge crowd has assembled on the fringe of the set: villagers, townspeople, Peace Corps workers. The problem is to keep them quiet while shooting, since, as always in Africa, a lively trade goes on. Women sell fritters and boys sell lurid-coloured sweets. One young man is peddling a substance in plastic packets. This, I assume, must be ganja but turns out to be false teeth.

 

The ladies of the court are forever slipping off between scenes to change into something fresh.

Werner asks, ‘Do they understand nothing of continuity?'

 

The Viceroy of Ouidah
has a complicated time structure and ends with the
chacha'
s daughter on her deathbed remembering the death of her father over a hundred years earlier. This seemed impossible to incorporate in the film, and Werner was puzzled how to end it until Kinski took the matter from his hands.

The week before my arrival, at Elmina, there was a scene in which Kinski had to haul a canoe down the beach. Along this coast there are two lines of breakers, with a strip of white water in between. Beyond the second line there are sharks, but swimming is always dangerous because of the undertow. A freak breaker caught him unawares and thumped him onto the beach. Suddenly conscious that he was playing the final scene, Kinski allowed himself to be dragged back into the waves and rolled back, time after time, onto the sand.

In retelling the story, Werner seems almost overcome with gratitude (there were some bad scenes later in Colombia, for which gratitude would not be appropriate). ‘This wonderful human creature,' he says. Or ‘This exceptional human being. I tried to consider the film without Kinski. It was impossible. It was inevitable he should play it.'