by Basu, Kanal
“And so it’s a simple matter of finding someone and getting him to spell out the method, isn’t it?” Antonio inched forward on his seat, unable to hide his excitement. “There must be hundreds of such doctors in Macau.” He recalled seeing a line of sick people waiting before a door marked with the sign of a hat.
“That’s the undertaker’s shop. The place one goes to buy one’s gravestone when they think they’re about to die,” Joachim Saldanha said. “Macau has more quacks than doctors. One visits temples to pray when one’s sick. Few can afford to make their way over to Hong Kong to be treated in a Western hospital. It won’t be easy to find a good Chinese doctor, unless one takes a sampan and goes up the Pearl River to Canton, braving the opium smugglers. Peking will be far superior, especially if a true master agrees to help you out.”
“Do we know any such doctor?” Dom Afonso appeared to be in a hurry. The time was approaching for his servants to prepare his opium pipe, and he wished to bring all official matters to a close before retiring for the evening.
“There is one. Dr. Xu, the empress’s physician. He’s known to be the best, and she trusts him completely. He’d know if …”
“Would Dr. Xu accept our friend here as his student?” The governor pointed to Antonio and rose to leave. “What can the Brotherhood do to convince him and advance the cause of syphilis?”
Joachim Saldanha looked at Antonio with his unblinking eyes. Dona Elvira poked him in the side and had him bow to the padre.
“Couldn’t you for once help us rather than lavish favors upon the heathen?” asked Dom Afonso, seeming a touch irritated at the Jesuit father’s silence.
“You can help him.” Joachim Saldanha circled the total under the column of expenses, and passed on the note to the governor. “Dr. Xu might be willing if you wrote to him.”
“The imperial doctor accepting a Portuguese request?” Dom Afonso was sceptical still.
His mistress the empress is more open to foreigners now than ever before, Joachim Saldanha said. “Loss in the two opium wars has taught her to respect the white devils. It could even make her feel superior to us, the barbarians.”
Dom Afonso nodded and smiled at him. “I shall help, if you promise to help our friend learn enough Chinese to conduct his business in Peking.”
“Enough Chinese by when?” Joachim Saldanha looked worried.
“By spring, when he can safely take a barge up the Yangtze.”
“In less than half a year?” the padre exclaimed. “That’s impossible!”
Dona Elvira patted him on the back, and motioned her maid to enter with the tea tray. Smiling kindly at the padre, she lifted the hem of the finely crocheted cloth and urged him to take a look under it. Joachim Saldanha peeked cautiously, running his eyes over the feast of roasted turkey and pickled cabbage, ringed by bowls of fresh fruits and a steaming pot of jasmine tea. It didn’t take long for the frown to disappear, and make his face break out into a smile.
Antonio hoped he’d sleep soundly at the governor’s villa, but his nightmares kept him awake. On successive nights he dreamed that his father was riding on a Chinese sedan, not the type with glass windows used by mandarins, but on a hammocklike bed made of rope. His bearers were shouting to clear the road as onlookers thronged to watch him pass by. Faces peered down from balconies; shopkeepers came out of their shops to join the crowd. It seemed none had seen a syphilitic before. With his spotted face, he looked like a new species that had arrived at the docks. Everyone fell into a hushed silence at the sight of him. Then an old woman covered her face and started to wail. Street urchins ran after the bearers and pelted them with stones. Men formed a wall to guard the street shrines from his father’s passing shadow, and the head priest of Ama Temple led the sedan down a blind lane to a shop marked with the undertaker’s hat.
Antonio woke and heard the surf roaring. The cool breeze of the receding monsoon blew in through the open window, and the chill of late autumn made him shiver. Soon it’d be the best time in southern China, he recalled Dona Elvira telling him. Winter would calm the typhoons, and spread a glow around the horizon. It was the time for nest-building, and children enacting plays by the street side. The Chinese like to hold their weddings in winter, to have babies arrive the following year at the autumn moon festival. Macau’s weather was far better than Peking’s, she had boasted, known for its harsh winters and scorching summers.
Antonio was grateful to Dona Elvira. Her unexpected warmth had taken him by surprise, till he realized that she too had thought of him as her son, having lost both her children in a terrible shipwreck when they were still young. It was stranger still how the cynical governor had come alive playing Sailors’ Bluff with him, a card game for hardened rogues, during evenings mellowed by opium. He wished Dom Afonso would tell him about China and the Chinese. Was it true that they were smarter than Europeans, having invented the compass and gunpowder, tea, ink and paper, even the umbrella? He hoped the governor could tell him about the secret workings of the Chinese mind, how it went about solving puzzles and inventing things.
“The mystery of the Chinese is like the mystery of the sea. It fools those who claim to know it best. No one understands them, that’s the plain truth.” Dom Afonso had curtailed further talk about China when Antonio raised the subject during one evening, and had returned to Sailors’ Bluff.
Has Ricardo told the governor and Dona Elvira about my father? She didn’t probe him about anything, except his women. “Boys become naughtier when they grow up.” She had chided him for remaining a bachelor, when all his friends had already got sick of their wives. What did she know about him and Arees? Had Ricardo kept his father’s illness a secret, to keep him eligible in her eyes?
“Why must Tino learn Chinese when you could go with him to Peking and help him with the empress’s doctor?” Dona Elvira pressed Joachim Saldanha one evening after Dom Afonso had left for his opium. The padre was busy feasting on a roasted chicken, his lean frame standing in sharp contrast to his large appetite, the maid rushing back and forth to refill the fast emptying tray.
“Why can’t you simply translate for Tino, which will make life a lot easier for all?”
With half the bird inside his mouth, Joachim Saldanha shook his head, speaking with difficulty as he munched on the juicy meat. “He won’t need Chinese for his lessons.”
“Then why?” Dona Elvira gave him a puzzled look.
“You mean the empress’s doctor knows English?” Antonio asked. Dom Afonso had told him that Chinese of the highest class had learned to speak that “foreign tongue” given their dealings with British merchants and officers. If that is true then he could get what he wanted a lot quicker than expected. A month’s trip to Peking on a barge and a few more with his teacher … that’s all!
Wiping his face on his sleeve, the padre reached for the fruit platter. He held up a bunch of grapes to check by the color if they had ripened well. “Senior mandarins in Peking know enough English to quarrel with officers of the foreign legation led by the British. They’ve had to negotiate two full treaties with them, and know how dangerous words can be. English speakers are everywhere in China and the Chinese are learning fast.” To prove his point, Joachim Saldanha spoke at length about the Irishman Robert Hart and William Martin from Indiana, who had won the trust of high officials and entered the inner circle of imperial advisors in Peking.
“Dr. Xu can speak to Antonio not in English but American. He has worked with the Locke Mission in China, helped American doctors treat peasants. He has known men from Boston and Chicago, known their wives too, who came with their husbands and learned to speak Chinese even better than the natives!”
“Then why must our young friend spend half a year of his life mastering a tongue he’ll never use, when he could be back home sooner doing what he does best?” Dona Elvira seemed more than ready to disagree with her husband’s plans for Antonio.
“Because he must talk to his servants.” Joachim Saldanha bit into the white flesh of
litchis after he had carefully peeled their prickly skin.
“Talk to servants!”
He nodded. “He’d have to stay in Peking in order to learn everything from Dr. Xu. He’d have to tell his servants what he likes to eat, what turns his stomach, when he would take his lunch and dinner, the ‘early rice’ and ‘late rice’ as they call it. He must scold them if his bath-water is too hot or too cold. He must instruct his sedan bearers about his destination. He must bargain with a shopkeeper if he chooses to buy a dog to keep as a pet. He must …”
“You can speak to his servants for him, can’t you?” Dona Elvira scolded the padre for going on about trivial matters. “Nothing that you’ve told me so far makes much sense.”
Finished with fruits, Joachim Saldanha looked around the table for more food, then grabbed a fistful of almonds and put them inside the flaps of his robe. “If I go with him, then he might have to do my work.”
“What work?” Antonio was interested in finding out what Joachim Saldanha did besides putting his Chinese to the service of the Brotherhood.
“Close a church that’s been gutted, for example.” The padre spoke slowly. “Take stock of the damages, and collect the remaining things.”
“What remaining things?” Antonio asked.
“A hacked angel or an apostle smeared with dung. Pieces of a gutted altar, the severed head of our Lord, a torn Bible.”
Dona Elvira had fallen silent with a knowing look on her face.
“There might still be more work remaining.” Joachim Saldanha went on.
Antonio gave him a questioning look. The padre shrugged then rose to leave. “Might have to bury a pair of nuns who’d slit each other’s throat to escape their tormentors.”
Antonio went for the first time to the Jesuit College for his lessons with Joachim Saldanha a few days after his arrival in Macau. He’d expected to find a full class of students. Demand had grown among foreigners to learn Chinese in the aftermath of the opium wars. “Half of China belongs to us now,” Marcello Valignoni had boasted. “Our gunboats have wrested five treaty ports from the emperor, where we can do whatever we like without his permission. The Chinese gold rush has started! You can buy and sell as much as you like, if you can understand what they say, that is!” Dom Afonso had confirmed the optimism of the Italian artist. European merchants were sniffing around the country, trying to sell everything to the Chinese, from cannons to railways. Their agents, arriving by the score, had turned the fortunes of Hong Kong and Macau. “China had always supplied the West, now she’s hungry for the miracles of Europe and America. It tells you what the vanquished will do to win back their pride!” The governor had pulled Antonio’s leg as they played cards: “You might never hold a scalpel again, if you learn Chinese and become the richest Portuguese merchant in history!”
At the college he was asked to wait for Joachim Saldanha in his attic. Climbing the long flight of stairs, Antonio wondered where the students and teachers had disappeared to. Stories of Jesuit orphans regularly made their rounds at the governor’s villa. Dona Elvira never tired of telling her teatime guests about the brave Brothers who rescued abandoned children of opium addicts and the orphans of sailors and their shore wives and raised them at Santa Casa de Misericordia – the Holy House of Mercy – before enrolling them at the Jesuit College.
Light through the open windows blinded Antonio before he could take a proper look around the attic. Signs of the padre were all around him – a tattered robe hanging from the doornail and the smell of stale food. The desk was cluttered with sheaves of papers, resembling a clerk’s cubbyhole. A row of boxes lined the walls, some with their lids open, looking like coffins. Antonio walked around the desk and glanced at the papers, then peeked inside one of the boxes. A soot black face with gouged eyes stared back at him. The head seemed to have been hacked off a female figure carved out of wood, the neck showing rough marks of a blunt axe. Someone had painted the male member on her forehead, and a dark streak ran down her locks.
“She’s our Lady of the Sorrows.” Antonio heard Joachim Saldanha’s voice behind him. “Come from the Coromandel Coast to grace our mission in Souzhou.” He read the bewilderment on Antonio’s face then came around to shut the lid. “She was called a baby eater after a dozen children died of typhus in surrounding villages.”
A pair of wings stuck out from another box; an arm holding a quill and a shepherd’s staff among a jumble of wooden bits, some old and rotting and some that showed the fresh paint of their makers.
“You’ll find the archangel there, and each of the twelve apostles.” Joachim Saldanha led Antonio to a largish crate arrived recently. It had the marks of the French steamship La Gascogne which had brought it from Peking as cargo. He unlocked the hinges and nudged Antonio to take a look.
“It’s the work of the mob that looted the nunnery in Jilin province.” Antonio slammed the lid down seeing a pig’s head, carved neatly in rosewood on the shoulders of Jesus.
“Why do you …?” Antonio searched for words.
“You mean why do I collect these things?” Joachim Saldanha filled in his question, and went about pushing the boxes around to create more room. “To remind us that we aren’t ready yet.”
“Ready for what?”
“To live together as brothers.”
Later as they sat across the desk, Joachim Saldanha taught Antonio the Chinese symbol for God and sighed, gazing out of his attic.
In the months that followed, Antonio surprised his hosts. They had expected him to struggle with his lessons, to be frustrated by the earful of strange notes, revise his plans even, to pay a visit to Peking. Most foreigners give up on Chinese within days of starting, Dom Afonso had warned Antonio. “It’s the way they use their mouth and nose to control the flow of air. Something one learns as a child, not after tissues have hardened.”
Dona Elvira disagreed with him. There was no shortage of fluent speakers among foreigners. She didn’t doubt her Tino’s abilities, but quarreled with the harsh regimen imposed by Joachim Saldanha on his student. “He’s killing him with work,” she complained to her husband after Antonio had failed to make his appearance, yet again, at her “early rice,” asking for his meal to be sent over to his room. “He’s behaving like a child eager to please his teacher.” Dona Elvira scowled as she filled a plate and thrust it into the maid’s hand. Waking early, Antonio walked every day to the Jesuit College refusing the sedan as it’d give him a chance to practice his Chinese with pedestrians and shopkeepers. He spent the whole morning in the attic with Joachim Saldanha, kept his teacher on his toes with sharp questions, turning down even his offer to visit the Catholic mission’s gruel kitchen. When the college filled with students, he found himself a place in Mr. Gutzlaff’s phrenology studio to pore over his notes. The German head reader was only too happy to lend Antonio his room filled with plaster models of human heads marked with strange notations, as he went about visiting his rich clients and assuring them of continuing good fortune.
Back in the evening, he buried his nose in his books, ignoring the governor’s call to join him for a game of Bluff. Dom Afonso shuffled the cards and waited for his young guest, till he heard the rush of the dinner table being set for “late rice.”
“He can’t be studying during the Chinese New Year.” Dona Elvira told Joachim Saldanha sternly when he came to collect her dues to the Casa. “Even schoolchildren are forbidden to touch their books.” The padre smiled. He had brought news to cheer up his hostess: “Riots have broken out again all over China with the passing of winter. The anti-Christian gangs are up to their mischief and I must go soon to Tientsin to help the mission there. Given my student’s rapid progress, I could accompany Antonio to Peking and introduce him to Dr. Xu,” Joachim Saldanha said, and eyed the empty dining table.
“And who’ll bring him back if they get up to mischief in Peking?”
“Maybe you could ask your friends, Polly and Cedric Hart of the British Legation, to keep an eye on Antonio?”
“Polly! Of course she’ll look after him.” Dona Elvira’s mood lifted at the mention of her friend, and she clapped for her maid to serve everyone her favorite claret.
“Is your student ready?” Dom Afonso asked Joachim Saldanha after Antonio had retired from dinner, and the padre had emptied every tray on the table. “Will he be able to hold his own among the Chinese?”
Joachim Saldanha smiled. “He’s more than ready. I’d keep him here at the College if he wasn’t in such a rush to solve the mystery of pox.”
Dona Elvira seemed both happy and sad at the turn of events, trying her best to keep calm as she fussed over Antonio’s travel arrangements. “He should take gifts for Dr. Xu and his hosts, shouldn’t he?” she asked her husband. “Chiming clocks and musical boxes, the kind the Chinese love?”
The telescope might interest the Chinese more, Dom Afonso thought, but Joaquim Saldanha scotched all talk of gifts. “They might want his services in exchange. Have him cut open a stomach and remove a stone, sever a gangrenous limb, or take out a dead baby from its mother’s womb.”
Dona Elvira went to Antonio’s room after the padre had left and the governor had started to doze. She drew the curtains and arranged the scattered notes by the bed. She sighed as she watched him sleep. It was time to fill up her Tino’s traveling portmanteau. Two seasons seemed to have passed quickly, and she regretted losing him again. Why must he leave everyone behind just on a whim? What made him learn Chinese as if his life depended on it? His face had turned red and she stroked his forehead to smoothen the knitted brows, speaking to him gently as he muttered in his sleep. Joachim Saldana’s burnt angels must be troubling him; she blamed the priest and his morbid obsession. Or could it be the curse of China that had started to affect him too, the curse that turned everyone to opium?
Waking, Antonio thought his dead mother had come to relieve him from his nightmare. He sank his face, drenched in tears, in Dona Elvira’s arms just as he would when he was a boy.