Yellow Emperor's Cure (9781590208823)

by Basu, Kanal

  “A few old manuscripts give him that much power?” Antonio was sceptical.

  Polly had nodded. “He is more than capable of bending their ears.”

  “A gypsy, a scholar, an adventurer, and a merchant rolled into one!”

  “And that’s only half of our Ferguson.” Polly beamed. “He’s a man of extravagant fantasies, blessed with the cunning of a fox.”

  On his arrival, Antonio was received by a young servant who led him through the gates into a lovely courtyard shaded by young plum trees and dotted with stone animals like those at the Summer Palace. A row of birds hanging from their cages started to twitter as soon as they entered the main pavilion, as if to announce the visitor and Antonio caught a glimpse of a row of porcelain jars on a windowsill making the loud noise of whirring looms. The servant smiled and called him over to examine the jars, lifting one of the lids for him to take a peek inside. It was a fighting cricket of the kind that owners prized for biting off the head of its opponent and scraped its wings to keep warm, producing a loud cricket song.

  Ferguson sat on a throne chair inside the parlor, dressed in a long gown looking like an early Jesuit at the Manchu court, and casting his reflection in multiple mirrors that lined the walls. An elderly Chinese man with a flowing beard held up an exquisite silk scroll before him. Tapping his fingers on a pile of books on his knees, the gypsy looked sceptically at the scroll bearer and motioned Antonio to take a seat. The two men spoke in low voices, while the young servant packed a trunk with piles of tattered manuscripts and dog-eared folios. A cup of tea arrived at Antonio’s side unasked for, and he smelled the padre souchong. Although windows had been left open, the heat of the brick floor warmed his feet.

  “It’s dated circa 746, and would fetch a large sum in the Peking book market.” Ferguson spoke to him conspiratorially, just like Polly. “The calligraphy is from the pen of Huai Su, the Buddhist monk whose ‘grass characters’ were typical of the Tang style.” Clearing his throat he spoke to the Chinese man in an authoritative voice, holding up a chit of paper with scribbled characters. The man shook his head and started to unroll yet another scroll, laying it out on the floor.

  Antonio admired the cranes flying over a snow-clad peak ringed by wispy clouds, brought to life by just a few deft brushstrokes. The elderly man gazed fondly at the painting and drew Ferguson’s attention to the artist’s signature at the bottom.

  “Fake! Just a piece of rubbish!” Ferguson growled under his breath, ordering his attendant to roll it up and return it to the seller, who drenched his robe in agitation and started to argue in a long monologue.

  “I wish the fool would shut up and sell me the Tang scroll.” Taking a quick look at the elderly man, Ferguson continued talking to Antonio as if he was his trusted partner. “The old fox doesn’t want an outright sale, but a large chunk of the profit after it has been sold to someone who can pay handsomely. He wants me to do all the dirty work, while he sits idle and skims off the cream!”

  “How would he know who you’ve sold it to and at what price?” Antonio asked. “Specially if it leaves China and …”

  “Oh no, they’ll know.” Ferguson sniggered. “Can’t go too far with the Chinese and their ring of spies, I’m afraid, surrounded as one is by unfaithful servants and treacherous friends! They’d burn down this house if they found out that I’ve fooled them.”

  After a vigorous round of bargaining, Ferguson ended up triumphant with his arms around the Chinese man, stroking his flowing beard in a show of affection. The servant rolled up the scroll, while the seller gave it a loving look as if parting with a long-held heirloom.

  “Lucky bugger, he’s got more than he expected. He knew I was in a hurry to finish with him, saw us chatting and seized his chance.” With the morning purchases safely put away, Ferguson rose and asked Antonio to accompany him to his library. “Come let me show you what we’ve got there.”

  Antonio smelled the dust of old libraries as he entered the “holding room.” Unlike the parlor, it was dark, with mahogany shelves and drawers rising from floor to ceiling, lit by their brass handles that glowed from the human wax of frequent handling. The young servant held out a fan to stir the desiccator’s fumes in the warm air.

  “The Chinese are selling off their grannies at dirt-cheap prices!” Ferguson opened a drawer and peeked in. “Take the Yung-lo Encyclopedia, for example, a work of great rarity in six volumes. In London it’d fetch five thousand pounds easily, even more if auctioned at Sotheby’s. And here …” His voice trailed off, leading Antonio to another set of shelves with cutlery drawers to hold scrolls. “You can see what only a few could hope to see with their mortal eyes – the autograph of the Manchu emperor K’ang-hsi, who ruled at the same time as Louis XIV. It’s more precious than everything put together in the British Museum’s oriental collection, but the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales has set its sight on it and it might well end up in Paris.”

  He opened and shut the drawers one by one, stroking the old and tattered manuscripts like a lover.

  “For just five or ten pounds you can buy an immaculate copy of a Sung or Ming book of poems, inscribed by the poet. For a mere five hundred pounds an entire library of two thousand books. With a bit of luck a palace collection might fall into your lap and barely lighten your pocket! No wonder the vultures are out there waiting!”

  “Anyone can get rich then,”–Antonio shrugged–“on the back of rotting paper!”

  “Not anyone. For that you’ve got to know the real from fakes. Peking is full of master forgers. They’ll sell you whatever you want, pass off yesterday’s doodles for century-old treasure. Your buyers don’t know either. In paying for these, they’re really paying for your word, paying for you!”

  A stack of crates stood at the lighted opening of the holding room, marked with their destinations. Ferguson pointed at a largish case. “This one’s off to the Findlay estate in Chicago. You know about them, don’t you? Descendants of a famous slaving family from Alabama”–then to another–“This one to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, packed meticulously as per the orders of the librarian. And this to Penang, to grace the home of a Peranakan trader who’s made his wealth from gambier farms.”

  They returned to the parlor with Ferguson insisting on a glass of whiskey prescribed by his English doctor for raising his blood pressure. Back to his gossipy self, he chuckled over the hottest topic at the Legation following Patty’s miraculous recovery.

  “You’re the new star! Poor Roger has bitten the dust, your stethoscope triumphed over his telegraph. Too bad you’re Portuguese though.” He chuckled. “If you’d been American, John Harris would’ve brainwashed Patty into marrying you instead. You’d have made a far better addition to the clan than that scoundrel medical officer.”

  Antonio recalled a feverish Patty holding on to his arm as if he was her missing fiancé.

  “Could try the Italians though.” Ferguson smirked. “They might need a good Portuguese doctor!” Taking a large sip from his glass, he spoke about Antonio’s marriage prospects at the Legation with as much assurance as he had about old Chinese manuscripts.

  “Everyone’s worried about you. What’s he doing in China, wasting his life with the Chinese?” Ferguson’s imitation of Polly mimicking an agitated Dona Elvira made Antonio laugh.

  “No, seriously. Sooner or later you’ll fall into the clutches of a Manchu temptress, they think. The longer you stay at the Summer Palace, the greater the chance that the Old Buddha will capture you for her secret pleasures. You’d be lost to civilization.”

  “Is that why you have called me over?” Antonio said, finished with his drink and ready to leave.

  The cry of a water seller came from behind the wall of casuarinas. Smoke from a mud furnace rose in a steady column from a smaller pavilion at the back. Colored banners hung limp from the arched gate, and added to the eternal moment of stillness at the Chinese villa.

  “I wanted to show you something.” Ferguson ope
ned the lid of a jade box and brought out an elegant case holding an old manuscript. “This will answer the question that has brought you to China.”

  Antonio turned the parchment pages marked with Chinese characters and drawings of human organs that were similar to the medical charts that Xu had brought over to his pavilion.

  “It’s an old palace edition of Nei ching, the Yellow Emperor’s Canon.” He paused, waiting for Antonio to turn a few more pages. “What you are holding in your hands is two thousand years old, contains forty thousand ideographs and is the oldest medical book in the world. It describes everything the Chinese know about the human body and the cosmic order. Surely it’ll tell you how to cure syphilis.”

  From the drawing of the second channel, Antonio could recognize the passage of qi that excited the veins and regulated blood pressure. A Chinese doctor would’ve warned Ferguson against the whiskey that stirred the yang, opting for the gentle tea of dandelion roots that came with the additional quality of purifying the blood.

  “Take it. You can have it for a nominal price, practically free. It’ll save you from wasting your time here. You can read for yourself and judge if your doctor friend is lying to you or not. Better to have the answer from the yellow emperor than a horseman who’s a secret supporter of rebels and pretends to be a Nei ching master, don’t you think?”

  “Read …?”

  “Ah, I see your difficulty.” Ferguson rolled his eyes. “I should’ve known. What you need is a translator, not a teacher.”

  “To translate Nei ching you mean?”

  “Yes, then you can kill two birds with one stone!”

  Antonio smiled. “Which two did you have in mind?”

  “Fame from curing syphilis, and fortune by selling this ancient copy to a European prince!”

  Antonio set down his glass and stood up as Fergusson looked on quizzically.

  “It’ll be harder than that.”

  “Harder?” Ferguson raised an eyebrow.

  “Simply reading the Materia Medica doesn’t make a doctor. Or Nei ching for that matter. For that there must be more, cultivating the ear to listen to the pulse; unlearning what we’ve learned in the West and accepting what seems absurd to the mind.” Walking toward the arched entrance he spoke to Ferguson, who followed a few steps behind. “It means taking different views about the liver, for example; or knowing when to treat the yang to cure the yin, and its opposite; learning the color of each disease, and judging the difference between men and women when it comes to causes of pleasure and pain.”

  “Different views about the liver!”

  A faint smile appeared on Antonio’s face. “Their liver is like the maple leaf – green in summer and red in autumn – while ours is evergreen.”

  “Did your teachers tell you that?”

  “Yes, and they haven’t finished yet. There are three hundred sixty-five parts in a man’s body that’ll take three hundred sixty-five days |to learn.”

  Ferguson stood under the arched gate of the villa and raised his voice to reach Antonio, sitting on his sedan. “Better hurry! You may not have that many days left before the Boxers cut everyone’s throat and burn everything down!”

  He mulled over the Boxers on his way back from Ferguson. What if they were to descend suddenly on Peking? What if all foreigners were forced to leave at short notice? Even long-term residents were planning to evacuate their homes within weeks, he had gathered from Polly’s guests. He could see himself seasick and crestfallen on the Santa Cruz, returning empty-handed after his long trip. I must see Xu immediately. I must remind him of his promise to take me to examine the pox victims. Simply “imagining the disease” won’t do, he must learn the Chinese cure firsthand, otherwise it’d be no better than the gypsy’s plan. After almost four months with his teachers, the eleven notes of the pulse rang clearly in his ear, and he was able to name the illnesses that rose from the blockage of each of the twelve channels. He was certain that he knew enough to begin the hardest part of his education. He must speak with Fumi urgently, he thought, to find out when Xu would be back from his trip.

  Antonio’s pulse quickened as he entered the pavilion and heard Tian chattering in the kitchen. Perhaps Fumi had returned earlier than planned from her medical visits. He expected to see her sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing mahjong with the eunuchs.

  In the kitchen, Antonio found Wangsheng lying on the floor without his loin cloth, needles stuck into his bulging stomach like the hump of a porcupine. Tian sniggered and made fun of his nakedness, while Xu crouched on a stool and smoked his pipe, scolding the elder eunuch for his gluttony. Seeing Antonio, Wangsheng tried to get up, but Xu ordered him to lie still.

  “He’s receiving his treatment,” Xu said, greeting Antonio. “I’ve been forced to use acupuncture needles to disperse the storm brewing inside his rotten belly.” He looked wryly at Wangsheng. “His channels are choked with the shit of dead birds!” Tian giggled. “That’s why he hasn’t been able to poop for three days!”

  Antonio left the kitchen and sat under the shade of the plum tree. The north wind blew in from the desert and stung his arms, and he drew them into his sleeves. Waiting for Xu to finish with Wangsheng, he thought over Fumi’s words about treating pox. Only a Nei ching master can teach you. … Did she know that for a fact, or was she simply guessing? Why couldn’t she ask her master and learn the cure for him? Xu must’ve mentioned to her the reason for Antonio’s visit, the reason why he was prepared to spend a whole year learning Nei ching. Now that she knew about his father, she’d understand why the very mention of syphilis made him tense. A dying father was worse than a dead one, every letter carrying the scent of a rotting corpse. She’d know why he sometimes seemed cold and remote; why on certain days his lodge smelled of burnt paper; why he seemed anxious when Tian ran to fetch a lamp from the kitchen as he waited to read a newly arrived letter.

  Is she hiding the cure from me? He wondered if it was a simple ploy to hold him back in the pavilion.

  “You’ve surprised us!” Xu said, coming out of the kitchen. “It takes years to learn what you’ve learned in just a few months. Your teacher claims you’ve already mastered the twelve channels.”

  The old doctor seemed a bit leaner than before and walked with a slight limp. With the box of needles under his arm, he made the usual enquiries about Antonio’s meals, and if insects were still keeping him awake at night.

  “Most of them die in the summer. Those that live become more ferocious than before.” He smiled kindly seeing Antonio squint at the sun. “You must have your lessons inside the lodge rather than in the open courtyard.”

  “Lessons for what?”

  Xu closed his eyes to recall. “After the twelve channels you must learn about the eleven organs. Mastery of these and the pulse will prepare you to understand how the five viscera bring perfection to bodily functions. You must start now to study the first of the five, and it might be best”–Xu paused for a moment–“to have Fumi continue to teach you, given that you’ve learned so quickly from her.”

  “I must start now with syphilis.” Antonio spoke gruffly.

  “Syphilis?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here. Have you forgotten? Syphilis, also known as the pox, Portuguese disease, Canton rash, or whatever you call it.” He stared into Xu’s eyes. “You must take me to see the victims now, teach me how to cure them.”

  “But that can wait. It’s better that you learn the principles first.”

  “You must take me to your hospital. You’ve pox patients there, don’t you?” His voice hardened.

  “My hospital?” Xu showed surprise. “There are several hospitals in Peking, which one do you want to visit?”

  “The one where you can show me your trick.” Antonio waited for Xu to answer, and continued when he did not. “I’ve waited long enough for you to treat your cavalry captain, or whatever you were doing while you were away. It’s time now to learn the treatment of pox that you promised me.”

 
“I promised to teach you Nei ching in four seasons if you so wished.”

  Antonio rose from his seat and came up to Xu, standing barely inches from him. “Do you think I’m a fool? That I’ve come here to throw my life away? Your canons are worthless at home. Worthless, unless they can teach me how to cure the pox. Didn’t Dom Afonso de Oliveira of Macau write to you just that?” He brought his face closer to Xu’s. “Were you lying when you said “The Chinese doctor knows how to cure a patient even before the illness has struck’?”

  “No,” Xu whispered, shaking his head.

  “Then show me how.”

  Wangsheng poked his head through the kitchen window and asked if Antonio was ready for his early rice. Running across the courtyard, Tian handed Xu a needle he had left behind, its arrow head crusted with blood.

  “Very well. I’ll take you to see a patient of Canton Rash. Fumi will bring you word in a few days when we’re ready.” Wiping the blood off the needle on his robe, the Chinese doctor bowed and disappeared into the mist beyond the pavilion’s gates.

  Walking along Peking’s silk market under a large parasol, Polly ignored the hawkers to steer Antonio past the jumble of shacks. Without shop windows, it was hard for him to know what the keepers were selling, if the promised treasures were nothing more than items of master forgery as Ferguson had claimed. Polly seemed to know her way around the narrow alleys that smelled of filth, covering up her nose as she trotted along merrily. “Fine feathers don’t make a fine bird.” She hurried him along. “You’re never ‘done’ with Peking till you’ve examined every shop. The darker they are and filthier the lane, the better it is for the treasure hunter.”