The Viceroy of Ouidah (2011)
The Viceroy of Ouidah
“It was the usual suffocating afternoon in March. He had been dead a hundred and seventeen years.
The Mass was said in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a stuccoed monument to the more severe side of French Catholicism that glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish.
Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.
Father Olimpío da Si...lva had come into town from the Séminaire de Saint-Gall. A white-haired presence in a crimson cassock, he stood on the south steps, surveying his relatives through steel-rimmed spectacles and swivelling his luminous bronze head with the authority of a gun-turret.
Not only a priest but an ethnographer by calling, he had attended the lectures of Bergson and Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne; had published an intricate volume, Les Sacrifices humains chez les Fons, and was unable to begin a sentence without a qualifying adverb: ‘statistiquement .MoreLess
The Mass was said in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a stuccoed monument to the more severe side of French Catholicism that glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish.
Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.
Father Olimpío da Si...lva had come into town from the Séminaire de Saint-Gall. A white-haired presence in a crimson cassock, he stood on the south steps, surveying his relatives through steel-rimmed spectacles and swivelling his luminous bronze head with the authority of a gun-turret.
Not only a priest but an ethnographer by calling, he had attended the lectures of Bergson and Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne; had published an intricate volume, Les Sacrifices humains chez les Fons, and was unable to begin a sentence without a qualifying adverb: ‘statistiquement .MoreLess
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