And after finishing this statement the old man smiled.
“Is that the whole story?” asked Gunny Jack.
“Of course not, let him finish.”
“But he is finished. As I told you, he understands nothing of foreign things.” Mr. Wong’s face was shiny from the grease of the duck. He licked a grain of rice from his lip-corner.
“Ask him, has he got any children?” said Gunny Jack.
“How can he have any children? He’s a eunuch, didn’t you hear?”
“Well, he coulda had them before he took the veil.”
“Sometimes it was so,” said Mr. Wong, “but not with him. He lives with his nephews. He became a eunuch when he was eighteen, and now he is over eighty.” Gunny Jack swore loudly. Mr. Wong explained that Mr. Chen had handled much money and was considered to be beyond temptation by women.
“The subject is too sad,” Jackson observed. “Listen. I desire to hear his views on the current situation. Ask him who, in his opinion, is to blame for it. Tell him he may speak without fear.”
Mr. Wong cleared his throat and spat in the corner. The two Chinese spoke together. “Yuan Shih-Kai,” said the old man. He spoke in a tone of cold contempt. As if you ask a rich old lady, who made those marks on your lovely wallpaper? And she tells you the name of a dirty little boy from the next block.
“Yuan Shih-Kai,” said Mr. Wong. “The first president of China. Because he broke the link.”
Both Americans asked together, “What link?”
“The link between China and its past. Under the empire, he says, we were the Children of Heaven. The emperor was our earthly father. Once a year he, as Son of Heaven, would go to the Altar of Heaven at the Temple of Heaven, and worship Heaven. And so, whatever was wrong, it was still one family. But then Yuan Shih-Kai, under pretense of establishing reforms, overthrew the Imperial House. He made himself president, then he proclaimed himself emperor and ascended the Dragon Throne, but the link was broken and the armies rebelled, so he swallowed his ring and died. Then there was Sun Yat-Sen and the war lords and the Kuomintang and the Japanese and the Communists. All—he says—because Heaven is not worshipped and there is no harmony either above or below, no filial piety, no national unity; and it is all the fault of Yuan Shih-Kai, who broke the link.” Mr. Wong drank.
The Gunnery Sergeant put his head on one side and nodded it. “Well, it’s a point of view,” he said. “Not without merit.”
“He is a very stubborn old man,” Mr. Wong said. “He never recognized the Republican Government, even though they gave him a free pass to the Forbidden City, where he lived and worked in imperial times.”
“When did the last emperor die?” Howard asked.
“Ho, he is not dead. He is a prisoner of the Russians.”
Jackson said, “What?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Wong. “The last emperor was only a boy of four when he ascended the Dragon Throne.”
Two waiters came in with hot towels rolled up, very graylooking, and probably crawling with diseases, which Howard waved aside; but the two Chinese swabbed their faces in them with loud grunts of pleasure, and even the Gunny used one.
“The Japanese made him emperor of Manchuria, the land of his ancestors, and he was captured there by the Russians when they went to war against Japan … his first wife is dead. A Manchu princess, I remember the wedding. 1922? or 1924?”
The Gunny, tugging each end of his mustache in turn, said, “Am I to understand—that the Emperor of China—of China?—is not only alive, but is a prisoner in the hands of the Russians?”
“That is quite correct. A foolish boy.”
“Fabulous!” the Gunny exclaimed. “And nobody knows, and nobody even cares.” He shook his head.
“All that belongs to the Old China,” said Mr. Wong. They began to clear off the table. “The New China, with the friendly assistance of the United States—who, by returning the Boxer Indemnities for scholarships, enabled so many Chinese to secure a Western education—the New China will arise, like the phoenix from its ashes, and drive the rebels back beyond the Kalgan, beyond the Great Wall.”
He tilted the teapot, or, rather, the winepot, but it was empty, so he finished the old man’s beer instead. He tried to fix his eyeglasses, but they kept slipping off on one side.
“Why won’t they fight, these phoenixes?” asked the Gunny. “I desire to know why the armies of the New, or should I not say, the middle-aged, China—the Kuomintang forces—will not fight? Hey? Why no fight Reds? Retreat, only.”
Mr. Wong waved his hand. “They fight.” He fell off balance, but quickly righted himself. “They fight”—he waved his hand and moved his mouth—“fiercely,” finally finding the word.
“They run like hell, is what you mean.”
Howard, to divert the subject, said, “This is very good tea.”
“It is very bad tea!” Mr. Wong exclaimed. “They cheat you here. Swindle.”
The Gunnery Sergeant said, “Well, that’s the New China for you. We give them artillery, and they leave it behind. We give them cartridges, and they retreat without shooting them. We give them gasoline, and then it turns up on the black market.”
“Lies,” muttered Mr. Wong. “All lies.”
Suddenly Old Mr. Chen gave a tremendous yawn. They all looked at him. He smiled and murmured something.
“We must take him home now,” Mr. Wong said. “He is old and sleepy tired.”
Howard realized that he wasn’t going to get any more stories, or, rather, that he wasn’t going to get any. But there was nothing to be done about it. He paid the bill and left cumshaw money, and they were bowed out of the restaurant.
It was dark out, but the streets were as full as ever. The trolleycars, coupled together tandem-fashion, rattled by, the people hanging on the outside, and the rickshaws and bikeshaws swirled around. Private cars blew their horns furiously. The street lights went on and off, as they always did, but all the sidewalk vendors and shopkeepers had little gasoline or oil lamps. There was a yelling and clamoring and the sound of gongs and cymbals. Pretty soon they arrived at Mr. Chen’s stop and they got out and Howard paid off two of the rickshaws. While he was doing so a Marine from their company came along and greeted them.
“What’s the news from Kalgan?” the Gunny asked.
“Please tell Mr. Chen how much I enjoyed being with him,” Howard said. Mr. Wong was taking a package from the hollow place under the rickshaw seat, and grunted.
“The way them Reds are acting, there ain’t going to be no more Kalgan before very much longer. We sure aren’t going to stick it out, and you know Chiang’s boys, Gunny,” the Marine said.
“You are speaking of the New China,” said Gunny.
Mr. Wong and Mr. Chen conferred.
“Now, when I was in the Old Corps, in the Old China, we had a way of dealing with such a situation. We beat the drum. The dragon skin drum. We beat the cotton-picking hell out of it. That saved the day.”
“Mr. Chen says, he thanks you. He asks you to give him a dollar, gold.”
“What,” asked Howard, startled.
“One dollar—not Mex, U.S.—for a souvenir.”
“Gunny,” said the Marine from Kalgan, “what in the hell are you talking about?”
Corporal Howard took out a dollar bill and gave it to Mr. Chen. The old man took it, but his face fell, and he pouted and muttered. Bill asked what was the matter. Mr. Wong laughed. This time he didn’t sound embarrassed. He adjusted the bundle under his arm. It was beginning to show stains on the newspaper wrappings, and from it came the smells of the fish and the shrimps and the duck and the mutton, and Bill realized what had happened to the food that wasn’t on the table after the first helping. Mr. Wong had claimed it from the restaurant as his cumshaw for interpreting the orders.
“Mr. Chen is angry. He says that you have made him lose much face by giving him the money in public as if he were a beggar. But he says you have lost face yourself by doing so.”
&n
bsp; “Why didn’t you tell me how to do it?” Bill cried.
He felt terrible. The old man cast him a reproachful look as he left, but Mr. Wong laughed and walked off with a swagger.
AFTERWORD TO “DRAGON SKIN DRUM”
In his autobiographical sketch “The Great Coast of China” Davidson laments that he wrote so little of his stay in China at the close of the Second World War. The two Chinese fictions he crafted (“Dagon” and “Dragon Skin Drum”) are brilliant—rich in observed detail and arcane knowledge, and alert to the contrasts that postwar China presented to an American. “Dragon Skin Drum” is a deftly rendered clash of cultures from which there emerge images and incidents of heart-stopping intensity—punctuated by the caustic remarks of Gunny Jack. “Dragon Skin Drum” is one of the few pieces by Davidson published in a “mainstream” literary journal, the Kenyon Review. In a 1991 letter to R. W. Odlin, Davidson wrote that Kenyon Review editor Robie Macauley “advanced to be fiction ed at Playboy and thence onto Houghton, Mifflin … and he never ceased to say of whatsoever story, ‘Not as good as the Dragon Skin Drum, of course.’”
—Henry Wessells
EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS
Ah, las islas encantadas! Ah, in fact, the visions which the name itself enconjures! How many other archipelagoes, some of them quite nonexistent, have borne that enchanted name, before it was finally settled on the group of islands in the South Atlantic … settled at least by some, that is. Perhaps these wild, wild islands had indeed not ever been visited by Da Gama, Vespucci, the brothers Pinzón, Sebastian Cabot, Ponce de Leon, Cartier, Drake, Sir Jno. Hawkins, and many another. And then, after all, perhaps they had. As Lope de Vega (¿Cervantes? ¿Calderón?) puts it in his dry, spare style, ¿Quien Sabe?
Not I.
My friend Diego had driven up with the Land Rover of his choice—a Safari Wagon, with space for twelve passengers and the driver (much good it would be without one), or, say, two people and lots and lots of baggage: a point which he made almost at once.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” I said, admiring the spare tire, and fancying myself … almost … in Kenya, with Papa.
“How would you like to drive down to the Straits of Magellan?”
“Sorry. I just washed my beard, and I can’t do a thing with it.”
“No, I am not joking; how would you like—”
“Diego. Please.”
And that was how I came to be driving down to the Straits of Magellan. Can one drive up to it? (them?) Certainly … if you start in Tierra del Fuego. Nothing to it, I suppose. Diego told me many stories of his boyhood, his family, his young manhood, his family, his country. And his family. After we crossed the Equator (I had crossed it twice, by sea, and was able to contain my enthusiasm this third time) the stories grew fewer, and his sighs more frequent. I do not wish to, indeed I can’t, dismiss the entire South American continent cavalierly (or, for that matter, in any other way)—but this is not that story. As we went further and further South, of course, it grew colder and colder. As for the land along the Straits of Magellan, I realized that they had never been fully developed as Summer resorts; they were, I understood, cold. Very cold. And very, very wet.
After rising from sleep and sleeping bag one morning almost in slow motion, I faced not only the foothills of the Andes (I was looking westward), but the fact that I was not only no longer young, I was not even middle-aged any more. “Diego,” I said, “my osteopath told me there would be days like this: plain old degenerative osteoarthritis done got me. Leave me here to sink my bones into some hot bath, and catch me when you come back.” Although Diego gave me much sympathy, I felt that he was in some way rather relieved. Often and vividly as he had described to me his family, it was by now certain that he faced returning to them with something less than the wilder zeals. Folklore has prepared us for the Latin Americans with very many stereotypes, so that when they pick up their guitars and burst into “¡Alla en rancho grande!’—and sometimes they really do—we feel that this is all as it should be, and we are prepared for that. But folklore has not prepared us, in North America, with any stereotypes at all, really, for Latin Americans of the deep south of South American latitudes. Reunited with his family after many years in the United States, how would Diego react? How would his family react? And how would I react? Perhaps these considerations also engaged Diego’s mind, for, although he assured me that hot baths were available in his family home, his tone lacked something of its once-enthusiasm.
“At any rate,” he said at last, “I cannot simply leave you,” his arms swept the chill, sparse landscape, “here.”
“Well, in the next town or city, then.”
“No, no: mucha bronca gente. Ah!” his face lit up, “I shall leave you with people I know, in Ereguay! It is not far, no, no, not even so far as the distance between New York and Milwaukee. I know some people there very well, no, nonsense, they are very nice people, they will be very glad to have you.” All this (I thought to myself) was as it may be; but it was no time nor place for an argument; once there in that other country, about which I knew next to nothing, surely I could find what we used to call “reasonable accommodations”; Diego might assure me till his breath stopped smoking, but, face to face with the realities of the situation, he would accept my decision.
Gad! he’d better!
The rest of the trip, that is, of my trip to Ereguay, was rather painful, bodily; but the spirit or the journey seemed to have lightened with our common realization that, after all, Diego would not have to explain his family to me, and me to his family. That all the reproachful scenes beginning, “Far be it from me to reproach you, but,” could now do without the intrusive presence of an outsider and a foreigner, de populo barbaro, as it were. Populo? Popolo? Oh, well.
Descriptions of the fertile vineyards, the empires of wheat, the plantations of yerba mat(t)e, herds of kine and swine: these I must leave to others: lo! are they not already waiting in the wings?
The weather grew warmer, though never hot. The suburb where my friend’s friends lived was old, and, I have imagined, Romansuburb-like, with many a well-tended vegetation, lots of well-kept walls, and even (the plant which I chiefly recognized) roses, roses; the señores Murphy were at home—what? yes, Murphy. It would be indeed charming to write they still, after three, or who knows maybe more, generations, still spoke English with a lovely brogue; not so. No brogue at all? No brogue at all, he had brought me to Murphys with no brogue at all. Of course, yes, they did speak English, only English did they speak as soon as it was realized that this was my language; it was a rather flattened-out English, you would never in a million years have guessed, had you met them in, say, Switzerland, what part of the world they were from. And they expressed no surprise at all on learning that Diego proposed to deposit me with them; evidently this was, really was, the way things were done down there. Diego lingered three days, so it was scarcely that he was dropping me abruptly. And, as we waved him off, laden with gifts for his parents, I seemed to be part of the family which belonged in that villa, in that never-before-heard-of-by-me suburb of Ciudad Ereguay—of which, in fact, I had hardly heard of, itself, until then. A papal person had not long before said, publicly, that he was there to represent church interests in Paraguay, Uruguay, Ereguay, “and every other kind of-guay” (i.e. “woe”); it was curious how very suddenly the Vatican had need of him at home, after all. I make no claim that I saw “the real Ereguay,” indeed, even the unreal Ereguay I scarcely saw outside the very far-stretching walls of the villa where, twice a day, a hot bath was drawn for me, and where I received every conceivable creature comfort and every conceivable courtesy. In very little time the youngest children climbed into my lap, and even the next to youngest also came over and gave me a good morning and a goodnight kiss. Beside my ample bed, a “matrimonial” in the grand old style, upon the nightstand were laid such items as an English-language newspaper (rather thin, as though the fat had been stripped off it), an elderly novel by Michael Arlen, but one which I h
ad never read, and a fairly recent copy of the Illustrated London News.
But if I were to go into detail we should never get anywhere, so let us gel to a sort of small garden party, no, not a party, an informal gathering, well, it was in the garden; it was only a few days that I had been a guest, I was sure that I had yet to meet every single member of the extended Murphy family, let alone very many members of the English-speaking population of Ciudad Ereguay. There was a señora Angela de Something, whose husband was Someone in the civil service, un burócrata, as it was, I thought, succinctly put; a doctora Maria del Pilar Guzman, I am not certain of the area of her doctorate—gastroenterology perhaps, early colonial rent-rolls perhaps, you can’t tell any more, men or women; however—I am aware of opening myself to all sorts of attacks, but nevertheless I shall make this statement: I seldom saw a woman of the upper middle or upper classes there who did not have lines of discontent around the mouth, and I seldom saw a woman of the working class there who was not happy and smiling and laughing. Spit on me, stone me, that’s the way I saw it. There was an older man all in black and white, who at first glimpse I thought was a priest, but upon further attention was revealed to be an attorney; and there was a younger man, lighthaired, in open shirt and khakis, whom I did not assess: he turned out to be a priest. Presently there entered a young man who was not introduced, he had rather longish and very brown hair, a farmer or perhaps a hunter by the look of him, and I don’t recall that he said three words all the time he was there. And also someone was there, a doña Alberta, certain to be recognized everywhere as a Universal Grandmother; she was a moderately well-known British novelist on a visit from her home in the Isle of Wight. There were one or two others. I do not remember.
Someone had politely asked doña Alberta something, and she said, “I am always interested in hearing of the legends and folklore wherever I am. Vin du pays, one might say. Won’t someone please tell me something of that?” She was a courageous woman; very often one is told fairly crisply that there are no legends, no folklore, all such things have passed quite away. But now, almost at once, licenciado Huebner said, “Ah, of course! We have the tragical tale of la llorona,” and he proceeded to tell us, in great detail and with much local color, the story of The Weeping Woman, which is found wherever Spanish is spoken and mis-spoken throughout the world; right at this moment in your city someone is telling it now, and naming the very neighborhood, through which you have unwittingly passed, where the unfortunate events occurred. I purposely do not tell it here; let it come, perhaps, as a surprise.
The Other Nineteenth Century Page 26
