The viceroy is Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian peasant turned picaro turned slave trader, and Ouidah is the port city on the slave coast of Africa where he ascends to unrivalled power as the chief slave trader for the kingdom of Dahomey. As viceroy for the insane African king whole rules Dahomey, da Silva makes Ouidah into his own personal kingdom, but circumstances make the city into his prison. The story follows the longs years of reign and incarceration in the city, as he amasses huge wealth, accumulates offspring that would best be counted by the dozen, and struggles futilely to find a way back to Brazil.
For all its darkness, the story feels vivid, its colors immediate. The Dahomeyan court is a grand guignol of magicians, albino dwarves, and women warriors with teeth filed into fangs. As in all of his works, Chatwin draws on his experience as an auctioneer at Sotheby's to furnish the scenes of his story, and he does so elaborately. Thus, da Silva's childhood home is shielded from pampas winds by a "barricade of bromellias" and guarded by "a statuette of Onuphrius" and one of St. Blaise, the latter "to keep off ants." Simpler, more direct furnishings adorn the Dahomeyan kings' palace, built of mud and bamboo, but adorned by an "architecture of white skulls," the king's vanquished enemies. The adult Dom Francisco's own bedroom is furnished with a "wardrobe painted with Chinese landscapes" and contains a "collection of Swiss clocks" and a hoard of gold coins from nearly every European nation.
The framing devices that constitute the book's first half are like the particularly ornate frames of an icon painting, threatening to swallow up the rmodestly-sized story at the center. This a journey upriver into slavery's dark heart, and it proceeds in stages. Thus, the story begins in the present day (coup-plagued Benin in the 1970's), where Dom Francisco's descendants, only slightly more fair-skinned than their countrymen gather to pay homage to their ancestor. Next, is an account of the Dom's only white daughter.
The novel is slim (156 pages, as reckoned by my Kindle) and the story contained in it is relatively brief, but the entire work, owing to its density of detail, both visual and psychological, genuinely feels longer and feels more substantial than its size would lead one to suspect.