Yellow Emperor's Cure (9781590208823)

by Basu, Kanal

  The terrace by the lake was empty and he strolled along aimlessly, overcome by a searing pain. I’ve lost her now. … He was certain that he’d never see Fumi again. He blamed himself for ignoring the danger signs, even after Joachim Saldanha was tortured. I should’ve left Peking with Fumi. For the first time, he questioned his strange obsession with syphilis, asking himself all the questions that friends had asked him, from Ricardo to Dona Elvira and Polly. I’ve hung on to pox and lost Fumi. … Unable to think any further, he started to weep as shadows loomed over the lake turning to gray its icy waters.

  A boatman tapped him on the shoulder and smiled through his toothless mouth. He pointed toward the horizon with his oar, at the empress’s barge floating like an island in the middle of the lake. Lanterns had lit up the deck and the cabins. The sound of music wafted across to the shores, and it seemed that a tea party was in progress with the dowager’s favorites, her ladies-in-waiting, actors and musicians. He strained his ears to catch the notes and heard the song of a dying swan, too weak to fly away with its flock.

  The American first secretary’s mansion was lit up with Chinese lanterns for the New Year and the masquerade was in full swing when he arrived with Fumi. Antonio had assured her that it was customary for single guests to bring along a friend, that neither Linda Harris nor her husband would mind her presence at the ball. “Jacob never went.” Fumi had looked at him accusingly before they left the pavilion. “They are vulgar, he used to say. Men and women act like animals, get drunk and vomit all over. Married couples do naughty things behind each other’s backs. Jacob thought them a terrible waste of time.”

  “I’m not Jacob,” Antonio told her, slipping on a tattered robe that Joachim Saldanha had left behind. Fumi asked him to shave off his long beard. “You can’t go looking like this!”

  “It’s a fancy dress ball. You must go dressed like someone you’re not.”

  “And who have you dressed up as?”

  “A padre.” He told her to wear her white silk robe. She looked startled. “You want me to come along with you? A priest accompanied by a courtier! What will people take us for?”

  “Lovers. They’ll take us for what we are.” He had shut her mouth with his palm and asked her to hurry as the bearers were waiting.

  Their hosts John and Linda Harris, dressed up as Mad Hatter and Gooseberry Fool, received them in the hallway of their mansion, which was lavishly decked with plum-blossom bouquets. A giant paper rat hung from the parlor’s ceiling. Distracted by their guests, the American couple didn’t ask too many questions and as Antonio started to introduce Fumi, Polly arrived to whisk her away. “We know about your teacher, Tino, know all about her!”

  They entered a large room full of light but chilly for the breeze that blew in through the porch where a bunch of athletic men, dressed as gladiators, had gathered to smoke cigars. Monsieur Darmon in an explorer’s jacket and leaning on his fusil de chasse was entertaining them with stories interrupted by bursts of laughter. Mr. Pinchback hovered around the room, dipping his Roman headgear to the ladies, battle-axe perched firmly on his shoulder. Antonio caught sight of Linda Harris’s niece Patty and her fiancé, the two dressed appropriately as bride and groom. She didn’t recognize him at first in his priest’s smock, then nudged the junior doctor to come over and thank Antonio for his timely help and extend a warm welcome to visit them in their future home in Philadelphia. He held up his hand to bless them, making Patty giggle.

  “You should’ve asked for more than a measly night’s stay in bloody Philadelphia.” Antonio could see Ferguson’s dancing eyes behind a Venetian mask. He moved away to find himself a drink. Drawing his magician’s cape around him, Ferguson followed him and brought his face close to Antonio’s ear. “It’s brave of you to bring her with you! For a moment I thought it was Jacob who’s come with his golden …” He stopped, noticing Antonio’s icy gaze. “She came with him once, but that was different. She even looks different now … like a proper guest.”

  “What did she look like before?” Antonio glanced around the room to catch the eye of some one he knew, just to be able to shake off an obviously drunk Ferguson.

  “Like an ordinary Chinese. Now she’s extraordinary!”

  He saw Fumi through the glass doors, sitting next to Sally Hollinger at the kitchen table and reading her pulse as her patient, dressed as a Welsh farm girl, waited nervously. Antonio smiled. It wouldn’t take her long to captivate the guests. She’d win over the neurotic lot with her accurate readings and sage advice. They might even forget that she had come on the same sedan as him and take her for a senior mandarin’s wife invited by the American diplomat. He looked for Polly and found her conspiring with Yohan, her snake-like Medusa braids contrasting with the wide-brimmed mariachi hat of her Chinese friend. She gave Antonio an impish grin and continued chatting with the spy who was without his pregnant wife. Cedric was engrossed as well with John Harris, the pirate and the Gooseberry Fool catching up on important matters as Sir Robert’s band played the opening number of the evening.

  “Let me tell you why you won’t find syphilis in China.” Mr. Pinch-back edged up to Antonio and spoke in his usual measured voice. “Men with longer foreskins are more easily infected than others. The germ hides under the tender skin and breeds easily in its moist nest. The Chinese are born with shorter hoods on their weapons than Europeans. You can say they’re born circumcised, with fewer than one in one thousand getting the pox even when they’re severely exposed to it.”

  Antonio dismissed Pinchback’s theory, which he knew to be false from watching the peasants relieving themselves by the river from his barge on the Yangtze.

  “How many Chinese hoods have you examined?”

  Mr. Pinchback wasn’t ready to give up. “It’s a well known fact. Most women who’ve had the taste of both Chinese and European types will confirm what I’m saying.”

  He was saved by Polly. Making her way through the gladiators, raising battle cries and crowding the dance floor, she reached Antonio and dragged him away to the cozy corner between the hall and the dining room. “Come, or you’ll miss out on Ferguson’s treasure, the most precious book in all of China!”

  Heads crowded over a coffee table with Ferguson hovering around, like a proud father showing off a newborn. The Italian minister’s wife turned the pages of the old manuscript gingerly with her long fingernails with Hanna Mueller from the German mission holding down the parchments for everyone to see, accompanied by spirited commentaries from Ferguson, speaking like a true Confucian expert.

  Hanna gasped as she eyed an illustration: “To think that a primitive people could produce something so extraordinary!”

  “Who are you calling primitive?” Ferguson shot back. “The Chinese are the fathers of pornography, with the oldest books in the world. It goes back to 200 B.C. The Han emperors were even buried with their favorite ‘recipes of the bedchamber’ and the ‘secret arts’.”

  “Just so they could please the angels!” Polly laughed.

  “The yellow emperor slept with twelve hundred wives and concubines and ascended to heaven a pure soul,” Ferguson boasted, then lectured on the virtues of having multiple partners over an entire lifetime. “By sleeping with many women a man has an infinite supply of yin energy. It prolongs life, cures illnesses, gives him the power to father children even when he’s eighty.”

  “And what do women get by sleeping with multiple men?” Linda Harris asked with a look of disapproval even as she stole glances at the illustrated book on the table.

  “Sagging breasts and heartaches, what else!” Polly announced as gravely as Ferguson amidst peels of laughter. “For men it’s medicinal and for women fatal.”

  “Tell me what it says.” The Italian minister’s wife drew Ferguson’s attention to the Chinese characters underneath a sketch of a man stroking his lover’s face.

  “It starts with a ‘reddened face,’ it says, the first of the five signs of desire. It advises a man to prepare to unite with his
lover.”

  “Unite!” Someone in the group murmured under her breath.

  “Yes, to be ready for her nostrils to flare, for her skin to burn and nipples harden, which is the second of the five signs.”

  “What’s the fifth?” With an eye on the dinner table, Linda tried to hurry him along.”

  “Wait! Let him take it slowly …” The Italian lady had her eyes glued to the illustrations.

  “American men go from one to five in five seconds, unlike us Europeans.” René Darmon had crept up to the group and offered his vast expertise on cultural mores based on his extensive travels.

  “European, American or Chinese, the third step is the most vital.” Ferguson kept everyone in suspense then read out the characters, translating them with his usual flair. “The third stage is about the opening, the most precious one, the lips. When a woman is ready for love her lips moisten naturally like ripe cherries, and her lover must be brave to pluck them without asking.”

  Antonio saw Fumi through the glass doors, talking to an elderly Chinese woman wearing a maid’s apron. Is this how it’ll be when they were back in Lisbon, Dr. Maria and his oriental wife visiting the quinta of one of his friends or that of a rich patient? Would they ignore her as she chatted with the domestics or show kindness, allowing her to lay her fingers on their wrists? He could imagine the looks of reproach among those who had had their eyes on Dr. Maria for their daughters or sisters, and the gleam of revenge at his sorry state of affairs, turning down a “proper match” for a piece of yellow trash.

  His heart throbbed, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her lips ripe like cherries and waiting to be plucked.

  Ferguson finished his treatise on the five signs of desire, and moved on to the best parts of the Memories of the Plum Cottage, which was a rare find even by his standards, a book “he’d almost had to kill to lay his hands on.” One might call it a “harlots’ manual” of the kind used by madams to train their nubile recruits. It contained instructions for giving the greatest enjoyment to the clients, and the serious matter of sexual hygiene. “Those outside the brothel were never allowed to cast their eyes on what you’re about to see.” Flipping quickly through the pages, he stopped at one with pictures of the thirty most enjoyable “postures of intercourse,” then read aloud the note that accompanied each for the benefit of everyone.

  “This one’s called the Butterfly, where a man lies on his back with his legs wide open and his lover sits lightly on his thighs resting her weight on her feet. This the Flying Pigeon, which is the very same as the Butterfly, but the woman chooses to sit with her back to her lover. Then there’s the Dance of the Phoenix, Merry Turtles, and the Cat and the Mouse Sharing the Same Cove, which is the most demanding of all, where a woman takes in two lovers at the same time.”

  “Two at the same time?” Hanna Mueller gasped even louder than before.

  “Yes, the first man lies on his back, while the lady climbs up to …”

  Not willing to be outdone by Ferguson, René Darmon raised his voice to drown him out. “You can see all this and more in pure flesh in Peking. Just have to go to the ‘lookie shows’ at the Tartar market where peasant girls are kept in cages behind the stalls. You can pay and look under their skirts, or pay their owners to take up the thirty positions with them.” Scandalizing the ladies, he smirked and nudged Antonio. “Dr. Maria, of course, doesn’t need a filthy Chinese book or a lookie show. He can see all he wants every day in his pavilion – free!”

  Antonio punched and bloodied his nose, the blood spilling out in spurts and dropping down on the pages of the Plum Cottage.

  “Go home, Tino. The world will die of poor French jokes before it dies of syphilis.” As she bandaged his bruised and bleeding knuckles in the bathroom, Polly spoke almost in a whisper. “Look what you’ve done now. With one blow you’ve scotched all the gossip I’d whipped up about you and kept going for so long. Who’s going to believe me now?”

  Polly had quickly led him away before the men could gather around, preventing them from catching the sight of blood that would’ve excited them surely. Her quick glance at Cedric was enough to have him keep the party going with his usual wisecracks, and instructions to the band to play the liveliest of tunes.

  “He isn’t like the others, I’d told everyone, not Casanova’s cousin, collecting golden lilies. There’s someone waiting for him back home.” She gave Antonio a look of reproach. “What will happen to Arees, now that you’ve got Fumi?”

  He jerked his head up. “What do you know about Arees?”

  “Everything. Everyone knows about you two. That you’re to marry soon, that she’s waiting for you to return.”

  She cleaned the bloodstains off his shirt. “You should’ve told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That Fumi has caught another one of us now. How smart of her to spot the love-starved foreigners.”

  He wrenched his arm away from Polly and rose. “You make her seem like a man eater on the prowl. It wasn’t she who made the moves. I did. I chased her, begged her to teach me; I followed her at the palace; I dragged her here against her wishes to this vulgar lot of foreigners.” He took a swig from the glass that Cedric had brought over, and smashed it on the floor. “And I shall leave with her now.”

  “Wait.” Polly stopped him before he could open the door. “It’s going to be tougher than you think. Taking her away from China won’t be as easy as leaving on your sedan. You don’t know who’s behind her, none of us do.” She came up to him and laid a hand on his face. “I knew you were trouble the moment I met you. I knew you wouldn’t like it here at the Legation, that your mind was elsewhere. It’d be easy for you to go astray.” She sighed. “Do you know what Ellie wrote about you?”

  Antonio shook his head.

  “She wrote to say that I must keep you safe even if I had to fall in love with you.” She sighed again, then opened the door for him. “Now I must help you get out of your little trouble.”

  The party had taken on a harder edge when he returned. Voices rang louder across the hall, champagne corks popped like gunshots, and the gladiators stomped on the dance floor as if pounding an arena with their iron-clad boots. Everyone greeted each other with the Chinese greetings for the New Year they had learned from their servants. Pinch-back had dropped his Caesar’s axe by mistake on a Ming vase, and crawled on the floor looking for broken pieces of the priceless item; Ferguson plied everyone with his usual stories of “stupid foreigners,” with more than a touch of malice. Past sufferers of his barbs kept a safe distance, secretly wishing for the sign of a bleeding hand to appear on his door.

  Antonio looked for Fumi, unable to find her anywhere. Maybe someone had said something rude to her and she had left by herself. His skirmish with Darmon seemed to have set off alarm bells among the guests. The telegraph operator smiled nervously when he enquired about his chronic indigestion, his wife pretending not to recognize him in his priest’s attire. A gloomy Linda Harris avoided eye contact, drifting through the room with her Chinese maid and ordering her to clean up the mess on her rosewood furniture and Persian carpets. The Golden Waterfall brought everyone out onto the lawn as the first of Pinchback’s fireworks bathed the night sky with sparkling mist. A hushed silence greeted the Spring Peony, opening petal by petal around the bud, followed by Heaven’s Rings in colors of the rainbow. A roar went up with the deafening boom of the Red Chili crackers.

  Herr Mueller’s voice rang out from the balcony as the guests were about to leave: “Boxer!” followed by shrieks and shouts. All eyes turned upward, as if expecting a mythical beast to descend from the clouds. The gladiators dashed out to fetch their swords and daggers, tumbling on the slippery lawn. Sally Hollinger screamed at those trying to open the hallway doors for a look, warning them against the barbarians who might be waiting in force outside. Several of the guests ran toward the fence of trees at the far end of the garden, looking for the servants’ gate that’d allow them to slip out through the back. No one
expected the dreaded attack on the Legation to begin so soon, and wondered if it was a false alarm. “Surely our spies would’ve warned us!” Polly too seemed confused by the unlikely turn of events, until a measure of calm was finally restored by John Harris, who appeared on the balcony and made an announcement.

  A Boxer soldier had slipped in through the Legation’s cordons and was found loitering the streets. The German guards had captured him, and taken away his country-made rifle. “He’s a village lad, and looks pretty harmless,” the American minister assured everyone. He had come to buy chickens at the market, the boy had confessed on interrogation, and lost his way in the Legation.

  “Liar!” A seething Sally Hollinger raised her voice to catch Mr. Harris’s ear. “Must’ve come to raid a mansion or two while everyone was busy with the party.” Several others joined in with strong views about the intruder’s intent, forcing John Harris to invite everyone to come up to the balcony if they wished to have a look at the Boxer boy.

  Julius Caesar led the charge up the stairs followed by the pirate and the vampire, Mad Hatter and Medusa, the entire cast of the masquerade following suit with the gladiators bringing up the rear as the guests thronged the balcony and strained their eyes beyond the mansion’s walls to catch a sight of the Boxer soldier in his comical hat and rags held by the scruff of his neck by a German guard brandishing his Mauser, each as scared of the other as bullfighter and bull.

  “Why did you fight for me?”

  Inside the sedan, he lay on his back with legs wide apart, resting his head on Fumi’s lap. A gray mist sped past them. Grunts of the bearers reminded him of carriage horses, letting out a scream every now and then to warn those who stood in their way.

  She stroked his injured fist. “What’s the use? People will always say what they think.” She spotted a bloodstain on his priest’s smock. “Can you stop them?”