by Basu, Kanal
Xu met them on the steps of a pavilion far grander than any Antonio had seen, and they entered a private chamber. Wicks had been dimmed on the cloisonné lamps, but he noticed the fans of peafowl feather and an altar full of clocks. Xu brought him to an antechamber, with silk curtains and satin portières on the windows and doors.
A young woman lay on a divan, her face as white as the covers. Xu checked her pulse then spoke to her in a low voice. She started to whimper, shaking her head, drawing up her knees to her chin like a scared child. As the whimpering grew, Xu scolded her. She shut her ears with her hands, and swayed onto her sides like a beached carp. Why would a victim deny treatment? Anything was better than the suffering of pox, he’d heard, unless, of course, the Chinese treatment was more painful, the antidote more frightening than the disease itself.
“Maybe you could help us.” Xu turned away from the patient and faced Antonio. “Can you treat her with your special instruments?”
His guide held up the surgical box. Curing syphilis with a knife! He thought Xu was making fun of him. He took a pair of obstetric forceps and held them out. “Why don’t you do it? Go on, catch it with these if you can. If you’re lucky you might find the syphilis poison in her belly!”
“Syphilis?” Xu looked surprised. “No, no … not syphilis. She doesn’t have Canton rash. Maybe you can clean up her belly with your instruments.”
“What’s inside her belly?”
In the few moments Xu took to settle the patient down, Antonio understood. He scolded himself for not diagnosing her properly right at the beginning – the bloodless face, emaciated limbs; the heaviness with which she moved from side to side, holding her stomach as if guarding it from all the troubles of this world.
“How long has she been with child?”
Xu shrugged as the girl’s moaning grew louder.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?” Antonio spoke roughly. “You have enough poison, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s too late for that. What we can give her will kill her, not just her child.”
“Kill her then.” Antonio turned his back on Xu. “It’s common practice here, I’m told.”
He was angry, called in to do the job of a quack. At the All Saints, the matron would shoo the tramps away, send them over to shady barrios of the Alfama. Sometimes she’d plead with Antonio, swayed by tears, to save a poor girl savaged by the quacks.
A shadow appeared on the silk screen – a woman’s face – frail in profile with a small but well-formed nose and an apple chin. Her hair was held up in a bun, and smoke curled from the lips. The shadow spoke to the sick woman. A few crisp words stopped the moaning. Is that the dowager empress!
“We hope you won’t disappoint us.” Antonio heard Xu’s voice behind him. The woman under the sheets looked at him beseechingly.
Was she the empress’s favorite? The maid who combed her hair, helped her in her toilette? He remembered Joaquim Saldanha telling him about little girls carried like chicken in baskets to be sold in Peking, a cartful of them waiting at the palace gates for an audience with the empress. She’d choose the best and turn the rest away. Pimps slaughtered the unlucky ones. Chosen maids won the privilege of spending ten years with their mistress and were rewarded for their loyalty with the farewell gift of a wedding dress. Only a few had the right to age and wither away inside the palace, fewer still the fleeting horror of being carried by a eunuch and sprung naked onto the emperor’s bed.
Why didn’t she order her killed? He recalled old China hands on the Santa Cruz gossiping about the mischief of eunuchs, the monsters, “half men, half beast.” Most have their jewels intact, Marcello Valignoni had claimed, to please the ladies of the palaces. “Can they grow them back after their little operation?” A foolish merchant had made everyone laugh with his question. Did the empress wish to save her maid only to offer her the “silk cord”? To have her strangulate herself for her sins?
“She may still live if you try.” Xu pleaded with him.
“Let her keep the baby then.”
By the silence, Antonio knew it’d be impossible to save them both. Snatching the surgical box from his guide, he barked out his orders and arranged the instruments in a neat row beside the bed: French forceps designed specially for a risky operation, the perforator to pierce the uterus if needed, the curette for cleansing, the carbolic spray pump to prevent infection, a spouted flask for inhaling ether to dull the pain of incision.
It took him just a few moments to rediscover the power of action and the comfort of holding a knife in his hand. As he dipped the instruments in warm water, he noticed his guide, now turned into a surgery nurse, a pair of amber eyes under the black band on her forehead.
He didn’t hear Xu whispering to the shadow or the sighs of his patient after he had started his work, till the dilation had been completed and the fetus expelled without the need to cut her open. He could feel his own breath of relief as his patient slept, a cushion of tea leaves crushed under her shapely palms.
Xu escorted him back over the marble terraces that shone under the moon. They walked in silence. The doves shuffled their wings as they passed under their nests, and the fireflies danced, putting on a late-night show for the benefit of the hooting owls.
Sleepless, Antonio thought of the girl in the peasant’s smock. Her hands had trembled at the sight of the bloody fetus, eyes aglow as she kept her gaze fixed on him.
Next morning he saw her having tea with the attendants in the kitchen, poking out her head through the window like a duck. The courtyard had darkened under clouds, and a flash of lightning lit up the pavilion. She dropped her bowl and rushed out as it started to rain. The storm had shed a harvest of yellow bottle-shaped gourds from the trees, and she ran around to gather them up in a pile, her blue smock floating over the mist.
He waited to see her again, and in the days following went looking for her along the serpentine paths and the temple gardens. He climbed the barren hills dotted with haystacks and trespassed into the Tower of Fragrance, coming face to face with the grand deity, the ten-armed Bodhisattva. Standing on the Jade Bridge, he kept his eye on both banks of the lake to spot her entering or leaving the pavilions. Gardeners were surprised to see him loitering at the lotus pond that was visited by the empress to play cards with her consorts.
She might be among the palace attendants, eating her early rice. He waited for a gust to blow off their wide-brimmed hats. A dozen eyes reminded him of those he’d seen in the empress’s antechamber, eyes that didn’t match the lips or the nose; or arms like lotus stems, slender and sunburnt.
“The air of yin – the feminine flavor – comes from the lower orifice. It tempts the yang. If healthy …”
Listening to his teacher with one ear, Antonio thought he should ask Wangsheng and Tian. Perhaps they could help him find Xu’s assistant.
“If healthy, the yang enters the yin, the flavors of both float like clouds around the sun and the moon.”
Maybe his teacher has sent her to the empress, to take the place of her fallen maid. Antonio imagined her in the antechamber, surrounded by the curtains.
“Forget the flavors. Tell me about your assistant.”
Xu seemed surprised. “My assistant?”
“The one who helped me to do the dirty work.”
“Ah!” A strand of hair flickered on Xu’s face as he considered Antonio’s words. “You mean Fumi? She can tell you all about herself, if you like.”
“If you can bear to bring her back from wherever you’ve hidden her.” Antonio snorted, and pointed at Xu’s stick–“make her appear at the wave of your wand.”
Folding up the parchments, his teacher smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking of asking her to be your teacher.”
Teach …? He read the question on Antonio’s face, then added, “Yes, she knows Nei ching very well.”
He’d have to go away to the north for a few days, Xu said, to attend to the wounds of a cavalry captain. He gave Antonio a broad sm
ile. “I’ll be going home to escape from Peking’s sun!”
Antonio thought his teacher wanted to tell him more about himself. The antechamber incident had loosened their tongues. Even without words, they shared with each other a greater comfort than before.
“You mean to the grasslands?” Antonio asked him.
“Yes, in Mongol territory. That’s where I was born.” Xu made a neighing sound with his tongue.
“So you must know all about horses.” Antonio was excited at the prospect of discovering a fellow equestrian. Maybe he wouldn’t feel so lonely after all, if he and his teacher shared their common joy. Happy to take a break from Nei ching, he put his notebook down and told Xu about his friend Ricardo Silva’s stables.
“In Portugal we have two breeds, the Sorraia horse and our very own Lusitano, which is most popular among bullfighters. My friend Ricardo has both types. He thinks the Sorraia has come to us from China. Maybe it’s a cousin of your Mongol horses.”
“I was born among horsemen,” Xu said with a distracted look on his face, “who tamed wild horses and sold them to soldiers.”
“Did you want to be a cavalry captain yourself?” Antonio asked him. “There must be nothing more exciting than growing up with horses!”
“There wasn’t much excitement killing them.” Xu spoke with a sad face. “My father was butcher among horsemen. We killed the ponies that couldn’t be broken in. And camels and goat for meat.” He kept silent. “I wanted to get as far from horses as I could.”
Antonio wondered what made the butcher’s son turn to Nei ching. “Did you run away from home then?”
Xu shook his head. “Locusts and droughts drove us from the grasslands, with the animals dying for lack of water. My father died too, and I was sent away to a monastery. The priests there taught me Nei ching, and saved me from becoming a eunuch.” Xu smiled and pointed to the kitchen. “I could’ve become just like them!”
A horseman, a butcher, a doctor, an abortionist and a spy who keeps an eye on the empress’s visitors … Antonio wondered what else was left to know about Xu.
“Your new teacher is the same as me.”
“A horsewoman?”
“No, no … she has learned Nei ching the hard way too.”
Unable to follow, Antonio asked Xu to tell him more. “What will you ask her to teach me?”
“She’ll start with the twelve channels and the flow of qi through them. She’ll tell you how the organs are connected to one another.”
“How will I understand what she says?” Antonio complained about his meager Chinese, hurriedly acquired in Macau and yet to be put to a stern test.
“But your Chinese is very good. And it’s getting better every day. Your attendants can understand you, and you them. I’d say it’s almost as good as your padre friend’s.”
Antonio shook his head. “No, I’d need much more than I’ve got to understand what she’ll say about the channels and organs.”
Xu smiled mischievously and rose to leave. “She won’t speak Chinese but use a different tongue, you’ll see …”
“Wait!” Antonio tried to stop him. A peasant using a different tongue? How many more surprises does Xu have up his sleeve?
“You must tell me more about my teacher.”
“She worked with a Dutch missionary who came to China with his printing press. She helped him print Bibles in Chinese and some in English too. She can tell you anything you want to know about printing blocks and ink.”
“From Bible to Nei ching!” Antonio exclaimed.
“She had no choice but to leave when the press was burnt down and her master killed.”
“Killed by whom?”
His teacher looked surprised. “You mean you haven’t heard about the Boxers yet? Those who are going around burning churches and killing foreigners?”
Wangsheng’s eyes danced as Xu gave him his orders. He ran back to the kitchen to tell his young friend. Kowtowing before the elderly man, the two turned to Antonio and each gave him a broad grin.
He sat before the mirror and held up the scissors, the surgical box open on his lap. The face seemed unfamiliar, as if the features had rebelled against their owner. The mirror showed the sea, the sun from his travels and the battle with insects, not the blue-eyed lady killer with strong jaws, a proud nose, and a pleasing cleft on the chin. The scraggly stubble and burnt skin made him look much older, like a traveling monk. A shipwrecked Candide in El Dorado! Arees would’ve teased him. He called across the courtyard for a bowl of warm water, and picked up the pocket scalpel instead.
Antonio imagined the peasant girl’s hand on his face. It traced the jaws till her fingertips brushed his lips. Plaits of hair fell onto her shoulders as she leaned forward, her force greater than his, leaving a mark of blood on the scalpel. Will his new teacher teach him everything about syphilis? I must tell her to hurry. Antonio wondered if he should confide in her about his dying father.
Finished with grooming, he sat in the courtyard in the full finery of a gentleman. Lanterns flickered; the breeze blew in the song of the boatmen on the lake. Plum wine simmered in the brazier, and it felt like a festa.
That night he dreamed of the awful things Xu had told him. A mob had gathered before his pavilion, calling for the blood of the foreigner. Burning haystacks filled the courtyard with smoke, covering the kitchen and the lodge. A voice exhorted the men to set everything on fire and he saw himself, dressed like Joaquim Saldanha in a priest’s robe, dashing about to find a way to escape. The lion dog cowered behind a shrub, its tail between its legs, and he whistled for it to come out. But there were no signs of his attendants. Soon the mob was all over the pavilion, smashing windows, ripping up the plum tree by its trunk, torching the kitchen and building a fire in the middle of the courtyard to burn him alive.
Awake, he looked for the insects, but they weren’t there. A quiet night cleared his mind of the usual things, and for once he didn’t think about his father, wondering instead about the new nightmare that had replaced the old. Boxers. … He mulled over rumors he’d heard on ship and in Macau, the gory accounts of rioting that he had dismissed as plain hysteria. “The noose is tightening around our necks,” a nervous man had commiserated with his fellow merchants on the Santa Cruz. “It won’t be a repeat of the opium wars this time. This time they’ll strike first, catch us by surprise.” Mr. Danziger had tried to calm their nerves. “We won’t sit idly by and kiss the empress’s arse, will we?” He had reminded everyone of the sacking of the Summer Palace–“We can hit where it’d hurt her the most”–but no one was impressed, merchant or priest. “This time there’d be no war”–a miner from Edinburgh had made his gloomy prophesy–“They’ll trap us one by one, and kill us like geese.”
You’ve come to take their best. … Antonio remembered Joachim Saldanha saying. Did his hosts resent him for that? What if they were no better than the Boxers themselves, Xu and the eunuchs, fooling him with the Yellow Emperor’s Canon?
He started to compose his letter to Arees in his mind. She’d want to know more than her brother. Don’t write me about horses, she’d say. Or how much it costs to buy a Mongol sword. She wouldn’t be interested in boat races on the Pearl River, or in the pretty mestizhinas. What if he wrote her about the songbird that refused to sing, or his mysterious teacher? Tell me about the empress, she might ask. Was it true that she’d imprisoned her nephew because he wished to surrender his throne to foreigners? He wished Arees was here for the two of them to spy on the invisible empress. What could he tell her about the Chinese? His mind went over everything he’d heard and came up with a simple phrase, They know as little about us as we do of them.
Perhaps Arees would want him to write about his “adventure.” When will Candide come home? He hoped she’d be waiting to read not simply about China but about him.
Dozing, Antonio eyed Joaquim Saldanha’s box. He had almost forgotten about it. Does it hold our best, the reason why so many have been slaughtered? How many more were left to co
llect? He imagined his attendants groaning under their weight, spurred on by their triumphant owner.
As dawn broke, he opened the box, which smelled of the dung that had been used to seal the lid. A few knocks with his surgical mallet were enough to crack the crude lock. The lashings had almost come apart, and needed a tug or two to snap. Before he could take a peek inside, Antonio heard a sound, a steady rap like a carpenter tapping wood with his hammer. It stopped for a moment, then resumed, changing its pitch as if starting afresh.
He laid his ear against the box and followed the source that seemed as human as he could imagine. Whoever was inside was aware of him outside the box, responding with silence if he moved and with a flurry of sounds whenever he stood still.
Armed with the vicious bone saw, he flung open the lid and waited for the dust cloud to settle. The morning haze darted rays inside the box like spring showers, lighting up the burnt Madonna with her soot black feet and her crown strangling her like a serpent. A pair of blue eyes ringed with ash gazed pitifully from her cradle.
He slammed down the lid and turned away. The sound stopped too as the fat woodworm wriggled out of the box and scurried for cover under the bed.
Gunshots woke him, and Antonio thought his dream had come to life. It was impossible to tell from the sound if soldiers were firing blanks or fighting an enemy. He noticed Tian poking his face through the door. The young eunuch had come with his early rice, instead of the breakfast of lotus porridge. New replacements had arrived at the palace, he told Antonio, to relieve the garrison, and were testing ammunitions. The volleys would stop soon. The troops had strict orders not to disturb the empress’s afternoon nap.
He scolded Tian for bringing his early rice too early, then realized that he had slept through the morning after the sleepless night. His new teacher had come and left, his attendants too scared to wake him up. His heart sank, but he stopped himself from flaying them, knowing that he’d need them to stand by his side.
He must use the day to write to Rosa Escobar, Antonio thought. Arrangements had been made to pass on his letters through the British minister to Macau and on to Lisbon. “Cedric Hart will help you,” Joaquim Saldanha had assured him, “to do your business with Europe.” He had cautioned him though, not to mix up the two: “Favor neither side as you flit between the palace and the Legation.”