by Basu, Kanal
“Did you. …?” Antonio made the sign of scissors and pointed at his loins.
“No.” The older eunuch shook his head. It wasn’t him. But he had made the arrangements, discussed it with the chief eunuch and sought the empress’s blessings. He had consulted with a priest to know the auspicious hour and paid with his savings for offerings of paper money and a pig’s head, tried to prepare his nephew’s mind by telling him what was about to happen.
“Did he know what it meant?”
Wangsheng shook his head again. “He thought he’d have trouble peeing, that he’d feel better in a few days. That it’d become normal.”
“Did you want him to change his mind?”
“Yes, I wanted him to run away, and make me angry. Wanted him to die of hunger, or become a soldier and be killed. …”
“Was there no other way left?”
Wangsheng fell silent. Antonio pressed him to say what happened after the arrangements were complete. If there was anything more to be done.
“I held the boy down, just like you held the dog.” Wangsheng raised his troubled eyes to Antonio. “And then the doctor did his job.”
“Doctor?”
“Dr. Xu.”
The sun shifted the shade and made them come out of the temple to the graveyard of pets, Tian trailing after with a forlorn look. Small tombstones dotted a sloping hillside. The empress had her favorites buried there – horses and dogs, along with the peacocks which died every winter once it started to snow.
His bout of oriental sickness started the day after the festival of insects. For months he’d seen it coming, yet it struck him with an unexpected fury, gnawing at his inflamed stomach, which felt dull and heavy like an abscess. When not on his back, Antonio sat with his knees drawn up to his chest. His tongue tasted bitter, and he breathed heavily. The fever would come soon, he knew, with vomiting and rapid discharge. He tried to stay calm as he ground the medicine from his traveling cabinet in a mortar and swallowed it without a drop of water.
Wangsheng and Tian were kept busy all day, after he had unknowingly relieved himself on his bed. They applied hot and cold compresses to his stomach when the pain became unbearable. Ants crawled all over the warm saliva drooling from his mouth, as he was too weak to brush them away. Periods of unquenchable thirst followed nausea. Restless all night, he slept all day, forcing his worried attendants to check his breathing under the nostrils with their fingers. Nothing troubled them more than his deliriums, when he seemed a different man altogether, slamming his fists and cursing, killing them with his murderous looks.
Xu had poisoned him, he thought, when he emerged from his nightmares. Baby killer! Master of castration! He must’ve hatched the plot in the kitchen, added something to his porridge. Was he jealous for Fumi? He tried to bribe Tian, begging him to rescue Fumi, imagining that she lay helpless in the empress’s antechamber, then cursed him the curse of sailors as the young eunuch stood by and shook his head sadly.
“You might go mad or fall sick in China,” Ricardo Silva had said. He cried out in his sleep, dreaming that his friend had turned into a bumbling animal.
One night he woke to find an arm, like the stem of a lotus with five petals holding out a cup. A light force raised him up on the bed. The lip tilted toward him, and he smelled water – the kind that has lived inside a jar and acquired its smell – with the sound of heartbeats encouraging him to take a sip. As the evil-smelling potion burned his throat, he screamed, “Poison!” smashed the cup and struck out at the invisible form.
He was woken again and thought a moth had entered the room and perched on the bridge of his nose. Weakened by fever he struggled to speak. A cloud stood over the courtyard, the trees dead silent, everything as still as the pair of eyes that kept staring at him. A jade cup hung over his face like an unripe apple. Someone nudged him on his back.
“Poison,” he whispered dryly.
The shapeless form leaned closer to catch his words. “What did you say?”
“Poison!” He shouted into her face.
“Anger is injurious to the liver,” she murmured, shrinking from his side, “as wind is injurious to fire.”
It became the nightmare of nightmares, kept him awake even as fever shut his eyes under a burning forehead. Much against his attendants’ wishes, he forced them to leave the lodge to allow him to spend the night by himself, to have the measure of his torturer, who was bound to return. Yet, his sickness prevented him from knowing who it was when it did appear: a pair of almond eyes, plaits coming down the back, the white folds of the dress like a sculpture in ice. He noticed a blue flower behind her ear. She walked across the courtyard and stepped into his room holding an ivory cup, dressed not as a peasant girl but like a courtier. Coming up to the bed she gazed down, then let her plaits fall as she knelt facing him. Ah! The torture of poison. He closed his eyes and sensed the still air between them, the drizzle of moonlight through the window. With the rustle of silk he found Fumi bare to the waist, the robe unclasped at the back to fall from her shoulders, arm raised for modesty. He saw her pour the drink down on herself, and offer him the golden slurry glistening on her breasts.
As his fever fell he wondered who he was and what he was doing in the oriental pavilion. What on earth had brought him to China from thousands of miles across the seas? He tried to recall his nightmares and mad dreams, wondered too why his body, flushed and glowing, smelled so sweetly of love.
III
LITTLE EUROPE
The price of knives
“Our Ellie has been worrying about you,” Polly Hart mentioned “the letters her friend Dona Elvira had written to her while she led Antonio on a tour of her house. It was a lovely Chinese villa shaded by mature trees of an English garden, with a bell tower at the entrance to commemorate the jubilee of Queen Victoria. Inside, expert eyes and deft hands had arranged everything in perfect order: walls showed photos of the Harts in the company of Indian nawabs and dead tigers; corollas of lily floated with jasmine in shallow bowls; the fireplace was crowned with sporting trophies, and a silver opium pipe gleamed inside a cabinet of curios.
“That’s why we’re here, aren’t we?” Polly pointed to the pipe. “Without opium, we’d all be happily home!”
Antonio wanted to ask her about Dona Elvira and her menagerie of friends and domestics, but his mind was still full with the journey from the Summer Palace to the Legation. Leaving on the shoulders of sedan bearers, he had been reassured by the sight of jostling crowds after a whole month spent alone in his pavilion. The farther they went from the gently sloping hills and grand imperial arches, the more the spectacle of bustling lanes and smelly markets captivated him like a child at a festa. He was amused by the private acts that were performed openly in public places, like masseurs plying their trade at the roadside, dentists scolding screaming patients, and a team of barbers shouting down each other as they fought for customers. A leper band trailed dangerously close to the sedan, but he was unruffled by their maddening gongs and frantic pleas for alms. A naked lunatic tossed a watermelon at him as they slowed for a funeral procession, missing him narrowly, and Antonio shouted at his bearers to speed up to catch a glimpse of the brilliant headdresses of the mandarins who passed him at galloping speed. They had started early to reach the Legation in time for afternoon tea, but the twenty miles or so went by in the blink of an eye, leaving him hungry for more of the real sights of Peking.
Noticing the absent look in his eyes, Polly Hart changed the subject. “How did you manage to escape your prison?” She sat Antonio down in the reception room and ordered the domestics around as they made final arrangements for the garden party. “We have been expecting you ever since you arrived.” She waited for him to answer, then added merrily, “Lucky the dowager doesn’t fancy you, otherwise it’d be mighty hard to get away. She allows none to escape barring the clean shaven … you know!” She made the sign of a knife slamming down on a chopping board.
Without a touch of paint or powder, she did
n’t look like a Legation wife but like someone who dressed up just enough to remind everyone else to dress properly. She’d make a real contrast with Dona Elvira, Antonio thought, imagining them giggling over the fate of palace eunuchs. “Polly is the perfect friend,” he remembered Dona Elvira telling him. “She makes no demands except that of total confession. If she speaks ill of others it’s because it’ll do them good. Her gossip is the gossip of angels!”
“Ellie has told me everything about you, even about your …”
Her eyes sparkled and there was a hint of laughter when she spoke, lifting her average looks to something extraordinary and giving the impression that there were two Polly Harts – the finicky housewife, and the impish prankster.
“She thinks you’re mad, of course, leaving behind a glittering career for China! Why must he waste his life simply on a whim?”
He didn’t answer Polly’s question, which was worded as cleverly as Dona Elvira’s, and kept staring instead at the bouquet of red flowers on a carved table.
“Why must he live among strangers when he can live freely among friends?”
“Maracujá,” he said, pointing at the flowers. “That’s what we call them in Portugal. The passionflower. Brazilians use it as an aphrodisiac.”
“Ah, passion!” There was more than laughter in Polly’s eyes. “I’ve heard about your passions as well, about a whole choir of lovers waiting in Lisbon to trap Dr. Maria! And about a special passion too.”
He was saved from confessions as guests walked in through the hallway ringing the doorbell for good luck and greeting fellow guests with a raised hat or a polite bow. Everyone seemed to know each other, fanning out easily to circles gathered on the lawn with drinks in hand. Servants dashed around madly, dressed in black like an army of busy ants. Standing at the patio door, Polly introduced her guests to Antonio and whispered her real introductions into his ear as if confiding secrets to an old and trusted friend.
“He’s the most important man at the Legation,” she dropped her voice, smiling pleasantly at Monsieur Darmon and raising herself on her toes to receive his kisses. “Without him and the Messageries Maritimes there’d be no champagne in Peking. He brings in the bubbly and takes back opium like a beau garçon, under the very noses of our Chinese mandarins!”
There was a false laugh in Polly’s voice as she greeted “Casanova” next, Mr. Pinchback, the Hong Kong banker, carrying an ominous black portfolio under his arm. “He’s a closet pornographer, whose pen is sharper than his withered limbs and frozen tongue!”
With a wave of her hand at the “rugby boys”–the young and unmarried under secretaries, deputy secretaries and customs inspectors – she drew Antonio to the veranda, from where he could have a full view of the guests assembled like the cast of a grand opera under rows of colored streamers and Chinese lanterns. Antonio was struck by the sight of so many Europeans gathered together, just like passengers on the Santa Cruz. The din of voices made it hard to catch Polly’s words, and they stepped behind the patio doors.
“You’ll find only eccentrics here.” Polly chuckled. “Even if they were perfectly normal before, they become eccentric once they come over. Back home they call it Eastern fever, but it has more to do with the boredom of garden parties, I can assure you!”
Turning his back to the garden, Antonio peered inside the rooms and spotted an elderly woman sitting under a glass mirror. Her florid face and unruly mop made her look tired and worn, her arms hung listlessly by her side. “That’s Norma.” Polly sighed. “You’ve heard about Reverend Cook, haven’t you?”
“The Iowa martyr?” Antonio remembered Joaquim Saldanha’s gory account of the murder. Polly nodded.
“She’s the widow.”
Sarah Hollinger, the deaconess of the Anglican Mission, slouched on a sofa by her side and sighed constantly – the two women sitting obtrusively like a pair of mourners among the jolly crowd.
“She’s still quite raw, you know …” The tragedy, Polly said, was the greater because she had never wanted to be in China, never wanted her husband to take up the assignment at the pioneer mission in Shanxi. The farthest she wanted to go from Des Moines, where Reverend Cook studied for his divinity degree at Oberlin College, was Chicago, to become a portrait painter. She had thought they could work among the poor blacks, recently arrived from the slaving South after the Civil War. “She draws faces of children that she never had.” Polly sighed again. On her ship from Honolulu to Kobe, Norma had met Sarah Hollinger returning to China from a congress of missionaries in Boston. The ocean breeze was still fresh in her hair when they docked in Tientsin, only to be received by the first secretary of the American mission with the tragic news.
Antonio thought of Joaquim Saldanha’s box in his lodge. The dried blood he had seen on the lashings could’ve been Jeffrey Cook’s.
“It’s a funny place we’ve got here, a top venue for parties and funerals.” Polly Hart led Antonio to her “trophy guests”: the eleven ministers of the eleven nations that had a permanent home at the Legation. They received Antonio with polite nods. The Italian minister sat with his beautiful wife on a chaise longue looking like a pair of leopards, beside the Japanese consul who was the proud owner of a remarkable aviary in his garden. “He has his men scrambling all over China, ready to pay in gold for rare birds. Looks like one himself, doesn’t he?” Antonio agreed with Polly, and observed the bird-faced man, his eyes darting as if he were expecting his flock to descend any minute.
Where are the Chinese? He looked around the garden, failing to spot any except the domestics who moved about, filling up glasses with great speed.
Locals aren’t welcome here, are they? Antonio thought to question Polly, but she gave him her answer even before he could ask. “We’ve had rotten luck with the Chinese, I’m afraid. They make everyone very stiff, as if we were negotiating a treaty or declaring war. Their ladies never quite know what to make of us, and in any case they think we foreigners smell badly! Except, of course, our …”
A Chinese man, his arm around a tall German woman, made his way past the throngs at the drinks table. “She’s Helga, the unofficial correspondent of the Nord-deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and he’s Yohan, the resident spy.” Catching Polly’s eye, Yohan left his heavily pregnant wife and came over to greet Antonio with a flourish.
“Ah, finally a Portuguese minister in Peking! The last time we had one was during the Ming dynasty.”
“Not a minister, a doctor.” Polly tried to cut in, but Yohan seemed confident of his facts. “A doctor can be a minister too, can’t he, even if he’s only here to study Canton rash?” He smiled seeing the look of surprise on Antonio’s face. “I hope I haven’t let out your little secret. Maybe you could bribe my wife not to report it in the Nord-deutsche, that way the Germans won’t know anything about it!”
“You must tell me who’s paid you to keep an eye on our Antonio?” Polly assumed the tone of a fake conspirator. “Why should the mandarins care when half of them have the rash anyway?”
“Is he really after Canton rash or Peking fever? That’s what they want to know. The fever that scares foreigners, not the Chinese.”
Polly scolded Yohan for speaking in riddles. “Why bring a doctor from Lisbon to protect us in Peking? Could’ve got one from Goa, if we wanted a Portuguese, couldn’t we?”
“Who does he spy for?” Antonio asked her, after Yohan had excused himself to fill up a plate for his wife, who was busy gossiping with Mr. Pinchback. “Who’s given him that name, anyway?”
“He’s a spy, it’s his job to know everything. In any case, everyone knows why you’re here. You’ve no place to hide, Dr. Maria, not with Ellie writing plaintive notes to her friends to keep an eye on her Tino!” The Chinese, Polly said, have set Yohan up in a villa at the Legation to keep an eye on foreigners. “But he’s great fun. You should hear his stories, changing his faith and his name whenever he gets into trouble– from Anglican to Baptist to Catholic!”
Her final introducti
on was reserved for her dearest friend and she ran across the hall to fetch him. Stepping into the garden Antonio found a small circle of men gathered around an archery range, testing bowstrings and the nocks on the arrows. He wondered what Polly would say to her friends in private about him. Just like her other guests, she’d think of something suitably colorful, describe him perhaps as the doctor of the unspeakable disease!
Ferguson, “her best friend,” Polly had told him, was a gypsy. One of few foreigners who didn’t live in the Legation, he was most often found in the company of lower classes. “Not among ministers or merchants, but artists and actors of Chinese opera, even rebels.” He wasn’t just a clever linguist and a bookworm, a master forger of precious manuscripts, the best mahjong player in Peking and an avowed homosexual, he could see through everyone even though his clear brains didn’t go well with his dirty clothes. “His only fault is that he’s a cynic, doesn’t spare anyone, not even me!”
A peacock eater! Antonio smiled, thinking about the young men of Lisbon who had eyes only for other young men, as they danced to the Moorish guitar or with mulattos singing the modinha of the Amazon.
Arms entwined, Polly and Ferguson swept into the portico, with the gypsy acting like the star of the show, smiling through his curly mustache and speaking in a mocking voice to the guests.
“You’re the only one he can’t make fun of,” Polly had told Antonio, smugly. “He knows nothing about curing patients. You can teach him a lesson or two, slap his face in public. That’ll make you the most popular foreigner in Peking!”
