“No. Before supper and after.”
“And what did you have for supper?” Wu would persist, growing louder and louder, until the servants on the terraces stopped to look.
“Duck.”
“With what?”
“Something green. Broad beans, perhaps? No, probably string beans.”
“What did you think about during supper?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why not?”
At some point Wu’s desire to understand the censor turned into an obsession. He tracked him like a hunter. Day after day he prized intimate details out of him, longed to lay bare his heart, and still failed to get even the most everyday confidences so easily shared among his cooks.
“You have to know what you were thinking! It was yesterday evening! Any idiot knows what happened yesterday!” Wu would shout.
“Aha, now I know. I was thinking about the fact that the west wing is the oldest part of the entire palace. They should really get the roof repaired. The administrator isn’t forward-looking enough to anticipate the autumn rains,” was his exhaustive, obliging, and empty answer.
As the sunlight over the terrace gradually faded, Wu would wander deeper into ever more inconclusive interrogation. Finally he would stalk off, full of anger, each time bewildered that a poem created not an hour after this tiresome chatter could be a crowning achievement of refined insight and an astounding inner likeness.
At that age Wu was already quite powerful and dangerously irascible. He ruled the fate of hundreds and took hard the feeling that the censor was making fun of him. One day, using a minor palace conflict as a pretext, Wu shouted at him that he’d had enough of his supercilious glances. The censor gave him a kindly smile. In the grip of an insane rage, Wu grabbed a bowl of boiling water and hurled it at the censor’s feet. The puddle soaked their boots, which were made of the same thin material. It got him no further with the censor.
One day, a month or so after that evening of rage and shards, a short episode occurred which again changed the course of Wu’s life.
He was swimming in the pond. It was morning, a bright, early autumn; the water was warm and full of tiny greenery. Wu swam quickly toward the sun, taking pleasure in his small, stocky body. He was so used to thinking of the censor at such moments that his mind had created a sort of feedback loop, checking every impression with the censor’s imagined stream of thoughts.
Even now, as he swam, he posed himself the thousandth version of one and the same question: how would the censor feel about this? How would he — who is not me, and yet in some startling way is — perceive this motion, this meeting of water and skin, the glow of September sun on scalp; how would he see the mountain on the horizon, the white cloud? (The censor never went to the pond; he probably did not even know how to swim, but Wu experimented assiduously with every situation, hoping that one day, in one of them, he would find an answer.)
He glanced at the tips of his clasped hands, which surged rapidly forward. And suddenly, as he caught sight of his fingers, unusually pale beneath the water, slightly changed by the refracted light, seaweed wrapped around his ring-finger — suddenly he was outside himself, and outside everything he had ever known. His body dragged him toward the bottom like a weight. He looked up at a mountain towering over him, so alien that it was almost not a mountain. He breathed in as if someone were forcing air into his mouth.
That was all. It lasted only a moment and there is nothing more to say. But during those several seconds Wu realized once and for all that the censor was the censor and Wu was Wu — he and only he! — and that all his efforts were in vain, for nothing he could learn from the censor would ever be anything other than Wu.
We cannot rule out a purely physical origin for this feeling: for instance, a change in equilibrium, which can certainly occur while swimming. Wu tried many times that morning to recapture it, swimming back and forth across the pond, observing himself with great care, but the feeling never returned.
From that day forth he never called on the censor again. The interest that had exhausted him for three years had suddenly subsided. The circle was full and the time bounded by his forty-second and forty-fifth years came to a close.
The palace, of course, noticed this change and ascribed it to a meaningless intrigue unfolding at the time. The censor himself silently accepted the turn of events and probably thought the same, but Wu’s life was so marked by that moment of estrangement that he was unable to imagine what the censor might have thought of it, and instead put him out of his head as best he could.
Three hours after the censor left, Wu was still in the kitchen, working. He was searching. There was no sense now trying to sleep. It was still as dark as in the very depths of night, but Wu knew that at this time of year dawn came more quickly than an axe blow.
He worked as if entranced. Time dwindled like the smoldering logs. The night was drawing to a close. The confrontation he had been waiting for these thirty-three years and which had slipped by only minutes ago had deprived time of all elasticity. Haste possessed him.
Angry and headstrong, alone, without his servants’ help, he lifted giant bowls and stoked the stove. It was nearly the death of him. The meat tongs fell on his hand and made his knuckles bleed, but he did not even notice. He pushed time aside.
Wu worked differently than ever before. He stopped relying on external aids. On sauces, spices, fruits, and additives, on all those glittering cosmetics of flavor. He turned to the very fundaments of his art. He focused his attention on the operations he performed every day, on each process, however simple. He investigated the element of fire, the element of water in braising. The hiss from under the pan, the steam on the ceiling, the hot gust from the oven doors. For ten minutes he stood motionless and, eyes closed, fingered the bottom of one of the pots. He penetrated the most primitive components of creation.
It was the most potent hour of the night, the last before dawn. Wu worked like a man possessed. He was certain he would find something. He no longer tasted. Taste was secondary. The meat’s very consistency came alive in his hands. It hardened, softened, took on an unnatural brittleness; its very structure gave way, collapsing into other forms of being, and the chicken was already as little chicken as smoke in the sky is a tree in flames. Just before the potent hour gave way to morning, Wu knew that he had found it.
He was putting away his forks in the gray of morning when someone began to knock gently on the door. For a moment his heart stopped. In a lightning vision he admitted the censor, conducted a long and fateful conversation with him — and then opened the door to see his nephew standing there on the other side.
The poet was shaking. He was wet and bloated. Before Wu could recover, the young man had slipped inside like a mouse.
“What do you think you’re doing? Out!” Wu roared.
Wu clenched his fists tight. Pain reminded him of his raw knuckles, but he no longer remembered why they hurt.
“Uncle! Uncle!” the boy squealed. Stiffly he pressed his knees together. “They want to kill me! I’m going to be executed!”
The boy’s lower lip trembled. Just don’t start to whimper, Wu thought. He was dead tired. The idea of tears on his nephew’s fleshy and always slightly lubricious lips repelled him. Now, after hours straining his imagination to study the substance’s essences and flavors, he would not be able to stand it. He closed his eyes and held his breath.
“What do you want?” Wu asked.
“Executed!” his nephew yelped. “They’re digging a pit beyond the ramparts! It’s raining! They’ll bury me in mud!”
“I repeat: what do you want?”
Wu stamped his foot. The young man instantly sobered up. He blinked, shook his shoulders, and said quite forthrightly:
“Clothes.”
“What kind?”
“Doesn’t matter. A servant girl’s, maybe.”
“Who sent you here?”
Wu’s nephew sniffled loudly. “The censor. He said you’d know.”
“There are clothes in the alcove,” the young man added pragmatically. “And a cap. And some kind of … basket or something.”
Wu sighed. It was part of his old age, of that empty, ever narrowing path, that he could not even remember anything about his servant girl. He groped blindly around the alcove, feeling various sorts of things whose existence he would rather leave be. The minute he ceased to need her each evening, she simply melted into nothingness — and any clothes she did not need were already in such an abyss of oblivion that he probably would not have noticed them if they were right under his nose. Finally he felt a soft material.
“Did the Head Censor have a message for me?”
“No.”
When Wu returned to the kitchen, his nephew was lounging on the chair, looking as if he did not know he was to be executed that morning.
“That crook!” the poet announced, his voice full of rancor. “That stuffed old mummy!”
Wu closed his eyes again. He did not want to watch his nephew disrobe. He was utterly exhausted and experiencing a strange feeling: he wanted to go to sleep.
“He’s an ignoramus, “ the youth continued. “An imbecile. He acted so clever!”
The poet drew in his greasy lips and mewed in an old man’s voice:
“‘Too soon, young man, too soon. This age isn’t ripe for you’ — he’s a moron!”
Wu did not even realize he had fallen asleep. For an illusory moment he was ten again and a small, frightened monk … creeping through the leaves and grubbing in the wet soil with his fingers —
“I can’t stand him!” his nephew mumbled through the clothing’s material. “His stench is everywhere. He’s crawling with maggots, but won’t let anyone else near the trough. It’s not like anyone reads his doggerel. If I ever come back, it’ll be to spit on his grave!”
The youth said this with the gloomy resolution of the swarthy southern prophets of old. The end of the world is nigh, they most often claimed. But also: the sun will grow cold, the universe will fall into small black holes — and this strange, age-old fascination with the end had always found them hordes of worshipers.
Wu’s nephew pulled on a shapeless gray cap.
“Well, Uncle, I’m off.”
And then suddenly he burst into caustic laughter:
“And he’s still frightened of me! He’s scared witless. I know he is! And the best thing is, he doesn’t even know why!”
Wu woke up. The young man stood in the doorway in the servant girl’s clothes, looking particularly unappealing. The insipid shapelessness of his sex, his age, his character, and the fate that had marked him forever was only heightened by those bedraggled rags, hurriedly fastened and lopsided.
“He told me to go around the pond. Promised to call off the guards.”
Wu rubbed his warm, dry eyes. His nephew casually opened his arms to embrace him. The old man shrank back.
“Run along,” he said, exhausted.
His nephew had already stepped across the threshold. But the youth turned around.
“I am the only one, remember,” he whispered deliriously, “who could have saved the emperor … and everything. Just me, who is myself and no one else. I and only I!”
“It’s dawn,” Wu answered.
The morning fog seeped through the partly closed door. Wu moved closer to the oven. He did not even watch the boy totter off and disappear into the gray rain. He forgot him so completely that the young man vanished from his life long before reaching the pond.
Wu carefully brushed off the hot ash. He removed the lid. The substance steaming in the pot did not in the least resemble meat. It was pulpy, shiny white, broken here and there by a vivid pink streak. If his nephew had returned at that moment, Wu would have thought it was the servant girl come to wash the dishes.
The palace shone. Lights burned in both its halls. The main impression the majority of guests took away that night was luminosity. Several small children, who were allowed to roam the hall during the festivities, would remember, even sixty years and two sadistic wars later, the gold-tinged glow, the thousands of candles, and the iridescent smoke up near the ceiling.
By the time the emperor arrived, the festivities were almost over. The emperor was an old man, and celebrations exhausted him. He was only a winged golden wisp waving half-asleep over a cosseted empire, dreaming the occasional short, pale dream.
All the winning poems had been recited. Now a small ephebe — the son of a court lady, probably the emperor’s bastard child — took the stand and began to read, or rather to chant, the one that had received first prize. He had a strange voice, as tiny as if it were made of foam, and the voice and poem matched exquisitely.
Wu walked among the tables and checked the settings. The twenty-two bowls were already sitting on polished trays; there was a white cloth over each bowl and a waiter was placing sprigs of jasmine on them.
Wu stopped. The poem was rippling down the usual stairway of sin – sa syllables like a multicolored runner. Dominating it, as expected, was yet another elephant. This time it was an almost supernatural one, with diamond eyes, golden hair, and a set of classical enchantments skillfully woven into its elephantine anatomy.
This poem is simply beautiful, Wu thought, without the slightest sense of enchantment. “Perfect!” the old empress announced loudly, and in doing so completely expressed his feelings.
When the poem came to an end, there was an appreciative murmur. Everyone bent as if beneath a strong wind, and in their tiny bows to the emperor, empress, and Mr. Hayo, the winner, they made their satisfaction plain.
Finally came the time for the meal. By now the twenty-two bowls were on the tables. Wu could not help noticing as here and there someone tried inconspicuously to sniff or to ascertain with a brief touch at least whether it was to be a hot or cold dish. An unexpected disquiet seized him. Far away, in the gallery, a spoon fell, and the chilling reverberation of its tone raced sharply down his spine.
It was strange. He had lived a tumultuous life. He had destroyed many people and saved others. Nothing had passed him by. He had known hatred, passion, revenge, power and glory. There were many bodies he had known from inside and at least einmal he had experienced a moment of love. Wu had walked through that boisterous throng of people, been covered in their stigmas. But now, at the end, the only people he noticed were those twenty-two utterly alien beings, of whom — other than the emperor, the empress and the Head Censor — he barely knew a one. In most cases, their death would not have given him a moment’s pause, and yet now he breathed their breath and suffered their impatience. In a moment, the last great work of his life would vanish into their hidden senses.
Finally the drum rolled. The headwaiters threw back the cloths. The hall fell quiet like footsteps on moss as the guests placed the first morsel into their ceremonially cleansed mouths. The quiet lasted a moment before the whispers began. It was not common practice to speak during this meal, but now a whirlwind of amazement swept round the hall.
Wu saw the guests raise their heads. His ready pride swelled up inside him. He knew full well why the amazement: the substance they had put in their mouths was so utterly unlike meat that tiny scandals were being played out in the delicate interplay of their senses. They had experienced all the world’s tastes, but inevitably conveyed by the soft tissue of meat. What crunched between their teeth was fresh pulp.
“Master!” the old empress shouted energetically. She tapped her spoon against her necklace. “Where is that man?”
Wu smiled. He did not try to restrain the waves of proud delight washing over him. The lights blinded him as he strode into the hall, and it was only by memory that he found his way to the fat dowager.
“Listen here, boy,” she said reproachfully, “what is this supposed to be?”
>
“I don’t know what you mean,” Wu modestly replied. Delays on both sides would only heighten the impression.
“This thing! This is what I mean!” she snapped, poking her finger into her supper. “It’s trickery! Sleight of hand! Is this supposed to be chicken?”
From anyone else — even the emperor — it would have been unconscionable, but this powerful, gold-adorned idol had a right to her quirks.
“It most certainly is chicken, O mighty empress.” Wu spoke firmly, as if on stage. He noticed fleetingly that the emperor had closed his eyes and was fumbling around the dish with his spoon turned round side up.
“It has been prepared using special, completely new methods in order to celebrate the greatest of all emperors!”
“M-hm,” said the empress, loudly enough so that half the court could hear it. Then she leaned over and pulled a ring off her finger.
“Your hand!” she ordered, tapping imperiously on the table. She placed the ring on Wu’s bony middle finger. It was far too large for Wu to wear, but he quickly bent his finger like a claw and with a bow retreated from the table.
Everyone stared decorously at this act of heavenly favor, and as if the empress’s naughtiness had been a signal to relax, everyone suddenly began to speak and bow in Wu’s direction.
“A miracle! In our age of reason — a miracle!” shouted Mr. Hayo, apparently believing that with fame he could relax his standards a bit.
“The crow got the golden feather!” another poet said. “The tear has turned into a pearl!”
In front of everyone Wu finally uncovered his bowl and placed a morsel on his tongue. His pride glowed like never before. It was not the youthful pride of an initiate (no crown of promise weighed him down anymore); it was the sonorous pride of departure. Extinction’s mighty vibrations pervaded the entire hall. Wu knew that, for a few moments, he had called into existence something no one would ever make again, which even now was disappearing from the face of the earth. In a timeless flash he had wrenched his portion from unreality, defied the inertia of all things — and unreality would swallow it along with him.
Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else Page 14
