The Forbidden Kingdom (8 page)

T
HE CHINESE PEASANTS WHO
, returning from harvesting, found the blond barbarian in their home, did not kill him or hand him over. They let him wander at will, did not stop him from picking and
eating
vegetables, and taking the leftover rice from their bowls. It was impossible to decide from their faces or gestures whether they even saw him. This denial of his existence was even more painful for Camões than enmity or imprisonment. It was as if he had landed on another planet, whose inhabitants, equipped with
different
senses, were unaware of his presence. There was no way that he could connect, through either laughter or gestures, with this outside world. It was a loneliness more dreadful than that far out at sea or in an icy waste, more oppressive than confinement in the ship’s hold. Still, in the midst of this mental torment his physical strength slowly returned. Driven by instinct, he dragged himself up the slope to the highest point on the island. The hillside was not steep, but he was still so weak that it took him days. On the town side the mountain fell away
quite steeply and the summit surveyed the bay and the surroundings. Only now could Luís view the new world.

Despite his wretched state, the wide vista gave him some sense of liberation. All around there were islands in the water, and the mainland could be seen in the distance, while across the bay the town lay on the side of three hills. On the top was the lighthouse, which had continued to blaze above the darkness of the town; on the second hill, in an angular garland, were the ramparts of the citadel; and on the third stood the cathedral with a great cross on its spire. Beneath lay the town, with white, brown and grey buildings and between them many boulders and clumps of trees. Out to sea the junks had swarmed across the water in dense flocks; even when the fishing fleet took refuge in the Tagus from an Atlantic storm, there were not as many masts on view as this.

Below him, on the island, the roofs of the fishermen’s huts stuck up like pointed saddles that had been scattered about; on the beach, pulled up well above the tide line, were the sampans. Luís scanned the line of the coast as far as he could, and at the far end, in a wood, was something that resembled a white roof. This had the same effect on him as a sail on a shipwrecked mariner floating around in the sea: he was determined to make for it, unconcerned whether it belonged to a pirate or
a friendly vessel. He descended from the summit and tried to follow the most direct path. But he had to avoid villages and ravines and finally lost his way completely, so that he had to climb back to the summit to find it again; when he descended again he tried to keep on course, but again went astray.

Toward night-time, too tired to go any further or to look for a hiding place, he dug a trench in a ploughed field and covered himself with leaves, too weary and feverish to sleep. Late at night ethereal singing reached his ear from a very long distance away. He sat up to listen; it must be the night wind carrying the sound, as in the intervals of calm it could not be heard. Camões leapt out of the trench, and walked into the wind, stopping when it fell silent, continuing when it was audible again. But it became fainter and fainter, and it also began to rain and grew lighter and he found himself back in the same grey field. The wind had turned; even the wind and rain were conspiring against him. He spent a night in his trench. At night it began again: he pretended not to listen and gnawed a few roots; it became louder, he crawled deeper into his hole, but it continued and finally he lifted his head. There was not a breath of wind, so that the wind could not mislead him; he went cautiously in the direction of the sound, and realized he was walking along the bed of a stream. Suddenly
the sound stopped, but he continued to follow the stream and came to a high wall. He felt his way along it, but his hands found no door; suddenly the ground gave way and he found himself knee-deep in the water. He now started exploring the wall in the other direction. Again he finished in the stream, but noticed that it was not becoming any deeper; also, the moon was rising, so that he ventured farther. Finally the wall turned inwards. In the moonlight he could see a small dome, just above the water: a slender arched roof on six thin pillars, between which wound chains of flowers that occasionally twirled in the wind.

With a great effort he hoisted himself into the dome, after which he had to lie still to get his breath back. When he stood up, he saw that his dirty, wet clothes had left the crude outline of his body on the mosaic of the floor. It was as if he suddenly saw his present appearance in a mirror; he tried to wipe away the smudge from the white floor, was unable to and for a moment melancholy overcame his dulled state of mind, before being dispelled by the urge to go on.

An extremely narrow bridge had been built across three or four boulders to the shore, without any railings. Below, the waves were churning around the rocks. He walked unsteadily across and again was met by a wall. In the centre was a barred oval opening, with creepers trailing up the bars, and beyond was the green vista of a garden.

He shook the bars one by one, but they would not budge. Why did he want to go inside, where it might be a prison? After all, there was no more awful prison than the hunger and loneliness of the outside world! He slipped as he was holding the outermost bar; the bars turned, and he tumbled into the garden. The gate closed behind him, branches and bunches of leaves forced him back, and there was scarcely room for him between the wall and the outermost bushes; hitherto unknown scents alarmed him like the presentiment of an existence subject to such severe conditions that he could never live up to them.

I
F ONE COULD EVOKE DEATH
as easily as love by thinking of it, then every night many would go to bed and never rise again. But the body is too powerful: at the slightest movement, the grasping of a gun, the pouring of a few drops into a glass, it rebels and asserts its
sluggishness
and its attachment to the earth, perhaps most of all when grievously ill. Fortunately the spirit can detach itself, if not immediately for ever, and can cross the river of oblivion, leave suffering behind on the near shore and once back with the body can no longer recognize what it had endured in its company, in its imprisonment.

Especially when one had just crossed an ocean, seeing and smelling nothing but water, sky and rotting wood, and had then been bewildered by a three-day storm and weeks of hunger and wandering. Perhaps among the plants growing round about there were ten deadly poisons. I didn’t pick them.

When I finally got up again, dead leaves and clumps of earth rolled off me, a cloud of insects zoomed into the air and long worms crawled lazily down my legs.

The parasites fled the body that had one foot in the grave but no longer wanted to be a corpse. Between the wall and the trees was a narrow, deep path that could be negotiated only sideways and even then the body had to scrape its way along the wall as if it were blind as a bat. The branches with their thorns and snags tore my ragged clothes to shreds; nettles caused an itching and burning rash on those parts of my skin that had been spared by the mosquitoes.

After this battering I finally found myself in a clearing in the trees that had once been open; dead tree trunks had fallen at right angles across each other, and a dense mesh of thick creepers crossed the space at head height. On the far side an avenue opened up. I struggled through this too. I went down the avenue and stood before a single-storey building, dilapidated but made of stone. It was the hunting lodge where I had had a rendezvous with her. Apart from that I knew nothing. It could be summer or autumn, probably the latter, as I was
shivering
and was covered in cold dew.

Inside it would be warm and safe from insects,
solitary
, without people on all sides, without the din I had heard in the island villages, the meaning of which I was ignorant of. The door was closed, but the window at the back was usually open, as it was now. Diana would probably not come here any more. All the better. It had
been rebuilt inside, and all the rooms were
interconnecting
. It was better before, when they all opened onto a courtyard; you know where you are like that, and you can close the door behind you, and escape if you are taken by surprise. No matter: the big rough wooden bed was there; in a jug there was water, green and
ill-smelling
; it was no good for thirst, but did serve to dab the most inflamed spots.

Trembling hands stripped my body of what tatters were still hanging about me, and a pile of material lay on the ground. Nothing was left of the man who had sailed forth to cover himself in glory, only the bruised, emaciated body. All I had left with which to cover my shame was a deeper, heavier sleep that still lay on me when I woke.

I could not move a muscle. Through the blinds chinks of light, criss-cross and parallel like a trellis, picked out a figure squatting by the wall opposite me staring intently with sparkling green eyes. A smell hung about the room: not incense, but heavier and more pungent…

I lay motionless, for hours, not out of fear of the guard, but for fear of breaching the wall of silence, and
tumbling
back into an existence I hoped to have done with.

The blind flew open at a sudden gust of wind. In the niche where the statue of St Sebastian had been sat a saint very unlike the emaciated and contorted figures
with ascetic limbs and ecstatic, deathly pale,
hollow-eyed
faces that I had up to now taken for saints. This seemed to be a mockery of my old acquaintances and the situation in which I found myself.

I got up, and saw Sebastian suddenly retreat far into the wall of the room; he seemed to have suffered greatly since I had last seen him, when he had been close to death, which must now lie far behind him. I went up to him: in the past I had had an aversion to him, but now I felt sympathy. He must have felt this, since he responded to me. Yet I was frightened of him, and stretched out my hand, I don’t know whether to greet him or ward him off. It was my own form, seen in a weathered mirror. I turned round; the fat saint was still sitting immovably on a low chair, his fingertips touching but with a belly that flopped over his thighs, and a fat grin around his mouth, as if, making fun of his own saintliness, he had consumed a heavy meal and was already looking
forward
to the next. The hunting trophies, elk antlers and bear and fox pelts had been removed. A wide painted screen hung down, as far as I could see depicting an old man, bald, with long moustaches, riding on a small horse and holding out a book at the end of a bending stick to two bowing figures on the other side of a purple river: all that could be transmitted to those left behind from his onward-moving life. In the place of the lances
and swords hung fans and peacocks’ tails. The
ponderous
old furniture was replaced by slender and shiny lacquered items, including some whose purpose was incomprehensible to me. One would have to acquire a different bearing and different attitudes to be able to live with them.

Instead of rejoicing that the old world, which had brought nothing but disaster and sadness, had vanished so completely and permanently, I was flooded by an overwhelming melancholy, like the sea flooding a
sinking
ship, like a second shipwreck.

Only the bed was the same; I could swear to that, and I lay there on it as if on an island, the only survivor of an all-engulfing deluge.

Then, with a shiver, I became aware of my
nakedness
. I saw clothes lying in front of the bed, hauled them ashore and put them on. They hung about me in wide folds. It was a uniform; the decorations that I had hoped to win before my departure had been attached to the sleeves and shoulders. Was this a mockery? The rough lining chafed my hurt and irritated skin: this robe humiliated me more than anything I could remember; I threw it off in a fury. Rather than wear this I would stay naked all my life. All my life, would that be so much longer? But there was more lying in front of the bed—food. I devoured it. I grabbed for the jug, thinking there
might be a few dregs at the bottom, and found myself drinking fresh water.

On the ground there was another item of clothing, a long, wide garment. I put it on and found it tolerable, though I became almost a stranger to myself. Still I kept it on, but lowered myself out of the window to come to myself again in the wood. The plant world at least had not become totally alien.

But now I was beset by heavy unknown perfumes, and kept stumbling over treacherous roots, impeded by the long garment. I wanted to rest, hidden among the trees, but now it was no longer autumn, and it was hot; I sought the shade, but the leaves were smoky hot, the earth seemed to be heated from within and was alive, with armies of ants advancing from all sides, big red ants that bit, while spiders lowered themselves from the branches and the buzzing of the mosquitoes resumed. I fled, running to where there was a clearing, and was suddenly back in front of the gate, yanked at the bars in order to escape hellish torments of this unbearable paradise, though outside I could see nothing but the sea, that other hell. This time the gate did not budge. Again I turned and went into an avenue, but my legs gave way and I stopped as if turned into a tree trunk.

At the end of the avenue, lit beneath the foliage by a shaft of light, stood Diana, like a Madonna in a green niche.

I stalked her like a panther in the wild. She would no longer escape me now, evaporate into a cloud or fade into the wood.

She did not move a muscle; she seemed to be
bending
intently over something—a flower or a book, what did it matter?

One more leap: she turned round, I stumbled
backwards
just as fast. It was Diana, but with the slanted eyes of a Chinese woman.

P
ILAR HAD HAD NO MORE SLEEP
since her father had left and her door was guarded. She herself watched out for the attack that was bound to come. The man supposed to prevent her flight was asleep, or if not, he was keeping his eyes shut. Gold is a good sedative too. It took a long time, but Pilar also knew a herb that banished sleep. Yet it came as a relief when she finally saw the halberdier leave and a little later saw an ungainly body clambering into the foliage of the tree. She now had a reason to leave her father’s house.

Yet she still dawdled, and suddenly a great calm
descended
on her. She looked out into the twilight; then she went inside and heard the thud on the balcony, she went into the hall and was able to slip unimpeded past the guard who was sitting against the wall with his knees bent.

Darkness had just fallen, and she passed the walls of the houses. But before she reached the monastery she turned off into the Chinese district; the whole
population
was out in the street. Whenever she walked through
the centre of Macao she was greeted with respect and regarded with disrespect on all sides. Here no one paid any attention to her. She was wearing the clothes that would have angered her father far more than Veronica’s costume. It reminded him that he, a Portuguese, had married a Chinese wife. But she felt comfortable in these wide-fitting silk trousers, the jacket, with her hair combed into a quiff on her forehead.

There was a great commotion in the narrow streets, but it calmed her as if it had been the roar of the sea; it did her good after the silence of being shut up in the house. In the bustle, in the darkness where the light of burning resin flickered, between the filthy overhanging houses, she felt safe and at home. And so she finally found herself at the house of her nursemaid, whom she had not seen for ten years, and who by now must be seventy and was even more wrinkled and grubby than she had been back then. Pilar was received
without
astonishment, and was given a mat on which she rested for two whole days. But she couldn’t stay. So the nurse’s son, who was as stupid as the hulk he sailed in and the lampreys he fished for, took the woman across the water at night.

Pilar had only a vague memory of there being a
garden
with dense vegetation, and a little wooden house that her father called a
quinta
—usually accompanied by an
expletive—a bridge and a stone roof over the sea. She was often alone there with her mother. Her mother sat on a mat, drank tea, stared into the distance and paid little attention to her. Sometimes her father was there too, and then they sat on chairs and there were papers and documents strewn everywhere. Her mother said nothing, but just looked at him pityingly, until he got up and went into the garden. Her mother lay down on the mat, Campos wandered round the garden, hacking off branches and trampling on flowers. Then he got drunk.

It was a happy moment for everyone when the sloop came to take him back across to the town. Sometimes they both had to go with him, sometimes her mother would refuse and he would take her under his arm and set her opposite him on a beautiful cushion. But little Pilar screamed and whined; then he would put her under the canopy, and she would walk back unsteadily over the narrow bridge, and sometimes fall into the water and be fished out by the nurse. Amid universal laughter the sloop would then finally row off and they were left behind in peace.

Since she was twelve, since the death of her mother, they had never been back there and always remained, in both the hot and cold seasons, in the sweltering or chilly town. Campos had no nostalgia for the way his wife looked at him with a mixture of contempt and pity,
for the strange feeling that came over him when he was alone among the trees, as if they were whispering about him, as if all kinds of eyes were looking at him. No drink or singing helped. He preferred to stay where he was top dog: among his councillors and officers who always agreed with what he said.

Campo never talked of the quinta again. Perhaps he had forgotten all about it. In any case he wouldn’t look for Pilar there, and he couldn’t imagine that, having had as spoilt an upbringing as was possible in a colony, she would be able to live in a neglected country estate that over the years must have turned into a wilderness.

The father and the frustrated lover stared obsessively at the thick walls of the monastery and imagined Pilar, the disobedient fugitive, the object of helpless desire, behind them, engaged in subdued conversation with the fathers, walking in the cloisters. Ronquilho sometimes had the subsequent vision of Pilar in a whitewashed cell, kneeling on a narrow bed above which was a
crucifix
, and then she undressed and the setting changed: Pilar kneeling at a bench on which he was sitting, with the sword between his knees, its hilt like a cross. His disappointed senses did not conjure up reality: Pilar wandering down silent avenues, moving more freely and gracefully than she had ever done, dressed more airily than he had ever seen her.

To her great astonishment the garden was a tangle and half overgrown, but the wooden house had not been looted, and the effects and furniture, though covered in a thick layer of dust, were undamaged. The nurse was able to tell her that the islanders regarded it as an abandoned temple, and believed her mother’s ghost still went there and that it was inhabited by spirits: they kept hearing voices. Pilar heard them too, but after a few days she realized what it was: the wind whistling through the gaping cracks in the walls and creatures nestling invisibly under the overgrown bushes and tall grass. There were still rumours that she could not explain, but she did not fret about them. She was happier living here than in her father’s house, over which his constant outbursts of rage hung like a lowering storm, where scarcely a day went by without the turmoil attendant on his office spilling over into it. The fisherman brought supplies, and the nurse prepared them; in a few days she had grown used to the Chinese food and ate it as if she had never known any different. It was as if she was growing further apart from her father every day, and closer to her mother.

Autumn was approaching, and the heat was only intense in the middle of the day. In the mornings and evenings she could walk down the cool avenues, dressed as she felt like. She did not ask herself how this was going to end. And why should it end?

The boundaries and direction of her life were not clear to her, as they were to other women. She did know that Chinese women, if they were not infirm, were sold to a man they had usually not seen and had to serve him for the rest of their lives. No man had been proposed as a possible husband except Ronquilho. There seemed to be no one in the whole settlement who met her father’s requirements: this one she did not want, this one she had run from, others she did not know, and so she would not serve, would have no children. At present the future of her existence was as vague to her as the islands and coastlines she could see in the distance: perhaps she would sail past them one day, but probably they would be little different from the ones she knew.

She had an equally vague notion of Portugal, the land where her father and other powerful men and also the Dominicans came from. She had heard that women of quality there lived as they wanted and had their own entertainments, indeed that they could be merciful and accept a man or let him pine for years, as their heart or whim dictated, but she could not understand how that was possible. She could not understand how one could escape men like Ronquilho and her father other than by flight, as she had done; she could not believe there was anywhere where a simple refusal was sufficient to be free of their desires.

She associated with the church because it was all that existed besides the narrow, coarse society of the ruling soldiers. If instead of the Dominican order alone there had been nothing but a
commedia dell’arte
in Macao, she would of necessity have resorted to it and instead of representing Veronica would have played such stock characters as Genoveva, Melibea or Sigismunda. Cut off from everything, she was now living in a vacuum that would have driven a European woman to despair and soon afterwards to suicide; the Mongol half of her race helped her, and she let time pass without
worrying
, not caring what direction her earthly existence took. Her body remained alive, was thriving with food and more exercise than before, her eyes had the clouds and the sea to help the days pass, her skin had the cool water, which she could enter at any time undisturbed. Everything is subject to change, the immovable rocks, the sea’s waves lapping unaltered for centuries, just the same as the spiralling leaf and the butterfly that lives for a single day, and how and when she would join them, she did not know; for as long as her body was left in such peace, her soul did not suffer.

The priests had talked about that, but she did not know she had one. She knew that her body had parts that were more tender and more easily aroused than others; she did not long for them to be loved, she wanted to be
untouched. She liked looking at herself in the water, but did not touch herself. She never desired anyone else.

Of the Chinese, apart from her mother and the Hao Ting whom she had seen a few times at an audience, she knew only the servants, of the Portuguese only those who ruled by force or lived in prayer and ostensible humility. Neither group had the feelings capable of moving her. But the figures that she did not know, the courtiers and poets and scholars from Lisbon would also have left her cold. She could not understand how one could admire heroes and poets and out of admiration love them. That one could suffer because of unrequited love and as a result be unhappy for years or even a lifetime seemed stranger to her than the complicated ceremonies of a Chinese wedding or funeral.

If she had been told that at the same time as she was living all alone in the overgrown
quinta
, a strange
shipwrecked
mariner was wandering around the island, and suffering unspeakably because no one could understand him, no one looked at him or took him in, she would have been astonished and would have felt no pity.