The Forbidden Kingdom

by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

  I had, though, stolen a bottle of brown liquid from the sick bay; whenever the emptiness of the life I was living made me dizzy, I took a few drops, and was filled with a dull sense of well-being. I was perfectly capable of doing my work. It was as if I were surrounded by a wall of wool, which only the sounds I had to hear could penetrate.

  I envied the steerage passengers who inhaled the same pleasure in ethereal smoke; while I sank into dulled consciousness, their lightness made them float. I could tell from their blissful faces and the indifference with which they died when they had contracted cholera or dysentery.

  In the evenings I sometimes saw the whole ship lying open before me like a beehive with the top taken off. On the bridge the third helmsman hanging round in a corner smoking; the captain in his cabin with his elbows on the table and a glass in front of him. On the right the helmsmen’s cabins, the first sleeping, the second lying on his bunk, with a pornographic book dancing over his head. On the left the engineers’ cabins: the first engineer reading the Bible, with his glasses on the tip of his nose, the second knitting stockings or weaving mats, unaware that in so doing he was revealing the feminine nature he was so good at concealing, the third engineer on watch deep in the ship, with a smoking light and the stench of oil, constantly wiping the sweat from his already balding head with a duster. Forward, the sailors packed closely together. Aft, the tally clerks gathered, playing mah-jong at a long low table. In the dark area between decks was a squashed mass of people, lying on their cases and baskets full of cabbage and birdcages, their limbs intertwined, relieving themselves where they lay, almost choked by their own stench. Beneath them the dark areas where the sacks of sugar and beans lie, the rats run to and fro, the cockroaches gnaw and scuttle against the wall; outside was the sea, inhabited by fish and molluscs. The hulls of ships like clouds and their lights like constellations low in the sky—and, enclosing everything, night and the firmament. What does a ship in the night have to do with the world? Even the thoughts of those on board no longer focus on it.

  And in that time of desolate freedom, when I was apart from the earth, as completely as I had wanted to be in the past, no, more so, I began to long for some attachment, a different life, since my own was no longer sufficient to satisfy my soul. It had nothing to nurture, entertain or affirm it; my origin uncertain, my parents indifferent, my country hostile. I had also lost the friendship of the sea, which had once been so good to me; once I had heard its roar as an encouragement, now it was a dirge.

  Certainly my egotism had been satisfied over the years, and I had freed myself from the few things that held me back. Now I was beginning to yearn for a power that would take possession of me; there was little hope of a woman: where was I to see her? In the past there had been on the promenade deck, when a slim hand passed me a telegram and I saw part of a sweet face, an eye, a pretty ear, a lock of hair, through the small hatch. Now there was nothing but women with black jackets, long indigo-coloured trousers and coarse grins.

  Not a woman then! What then? A mind in this state, open to outside influences, becomes an easy target for demons eager to prey on a living being like parasites. But at sea there are no spirits, at least so I firmly believed. That absence, or that belief, saved me for a long time; when I yearned to be freed from my emptiness, I would not have excluded even the most malevolent of them. The sea saved me, it’s true. But I wasn’t grateful to the sea.

  CHAPTER 7

  I

  THE DUNGEON was far below ground, as he had been brought down countless steps. He saw neither sun nor moon, the night was black, the day an ashen twilight. Every twenty-four hours, at some point during the morning, the guard would bring him food and a jug of water which, after standing for a few hours, would become turbid and undrinkable, so that after a few times he drank it up at once. His calculation of time was based on the visit of the guard: a scratch on the beams that he could later feel. When there was already a long ladder he asked the guard when it would be his turn. The guard shook his head. When? First the child murderers, and then the deserters.

  Then he begged for more light. He still had a gold coin and offered that. But the guard refused and left. He lay down with his face to the wall, ashamed and weary of life. When he looked up many hours later, a narrow beam of light struck his face—a jet of cool spring water could not have been more refreshing. Where did the light come from? Had the guard rolled away a stone up above, so that that the light found its way through a straight, narrow opening? Or had the sun or the moon reached a point in the heavens where the light could shine in through half-collapsed passageways? He suspected the latter. That meant that the light would soon disappear again. He wanted to enjoy every minute of it, drink it in. But the light roused another desire in him and he started writing, half reluctantly at first, perhaps so as to be able to know later, to feel tentatively what these light hours had meant to him, perhaps also so as to stay awake, for as long as it lasted. Then again he reproached himself for not deriving pure enjoyment from the light, instead of using it to write. And he sat and gazed into it and thought of it without moving. But a big cockroach ran across his foot; now it was light, he was able to grab it and kill it; he was seized by a great urge to clean out his cell. He began hunting for them, but there were too many. More and more kept appearing from the corners of the cell. And suddenly it was dark. He blamed himself for having abused the divine light, and resolved, if it came back, to do nothing but worship it. But the following day too poetry and hunting for vermin alternated.

  Twelve days after his incarceration, he had to climb back up the steps and stood blindfolded in a room that was anyway in semi-darkness and where black judges sat at a green table. Campos himself conducted the interrogation.

  He stated that he had been shipwrecked, and had received a head injury, that he could not remember his name or rank, and had walked from a remote part of the coast to Macao, the light of which he could see at night. No more could be got out of him and he was soon led away again. He hoped that he would be incorporated in the colony’s troops as a private soldier, and that he would have an opportunity to desert and get back to the island. But Fate had decided otherwise. Again he was led up the steps, thrust into the courtroom and he stared into the face of the captain whom he had never expected to see again in this world, sitting next to Campos.

  “Do you know who you are now?” the latter asked him.

  “I know who I was, Luís Vaz de Camões, but through ill will or resentment I am now a man without a name.”

  “No, through the will of the King. A danger to the state and guilty of lese-majesty. You must remain in prison.”

  “Stop,” said Campos. “The laws are applied rather differently here. Here every man is of some use. He will be given employment.”

  “He’s a deserter.”

  Goaded by the captain, Camões became quick-witted.

  “Is it desertion if after being washed up on a remote stretch of coast, I walked to Macao with my last remaining strength?”

  But he got not further; Campos had him taken away. In the evening he visited the cell. A lantern was put in a corner and shed red light on Camões. Campos himself remained in darkness.

  “What did you see over there across the water?”

  “Chinese, their houses and their graves. Mainly the latter!”

  “Not a white woman hiding anywhere? A young lady of high birth has gone missing for the last three weeks; it’s as though she has been abducted by the Chinese. If you can tell us anything it will be to your advantage.”

  Camões shook his head.

  “You don’t know anything? You must know. Otherwise you’ll be tortured together with the Dominicans.”

  Camões pointed out the impossibility of a shipwrecked sailor in the great unknown country having met a captive of his own race. On the contrary, if the Chinese had abducted her they would certainly have kept her hidden from him. But Campos was not susceptible to reason, seemed to have inherited a sixth sense from the Inquis
ition, or to have been warned by an instinct that Camões had been in contact with the fugitive. Had his face given anything away? Had something of her remained clinging to him? He had not touched her, but felt himself anyway. He now envied the Chinese their impassive features, not knowing that as a result of all his suffering his own features had acquired almost the same immobility. He feared torture, but knew that he was brave in war and had stayed calm during an earthquake in Lisbon. He had actually revelled in the hurricane that sank the São Bento, but squirmed with revulsion at the thought of having to undergo torture bound and helpless. He imagined what he would do if he really knew nothing. Probably tell some story when he first felt pain; he was inventive. But now he did know… Should he indicate a place as far as possible from the real one? No, now, he knew, he must be silent. He tried to muster his resistance by standing stock-still against a wall, rather than tiring himself out with excessive muscular movements, but his weak body could not take it, and the narrowness of the cell did not permit it either.

  When the guard came in, he was lying half dazed in a corner. He leapt up, thinking that he was already being fetched, but the guard, an old Kwantung Chinese, stood in front of him and handed him some brown powder on a willow leaf. Camões stared, not understanding at first that this was a powder that made one insensible to all pain. It finally dawned on him, and he asked to whom he owed this. The guard made it clear to him that he thought it was just to torture child murderers but not a shipwrecked sailor, who was under the jurisdiction of the goddess Amah, who pacifies storms and rescues fishermen and whose priest he had been. No more information could be got out of him. Camões took some of the powder. Very soon he felt himself drifting calmly and languidly into a great feeling of comfort. Suddenly a jolt of mistrust went through his body. Had Pilar heard of his imprisonment and smuggled this poison to the guard through her duenha, with instructions to silence him? Why else would this old Mongol be so sympathetic, contrary to the nature of the Chinese, who see torture as a work of art? Was Pilar so fearful of her safety that she had him calmly murdered in his dungeon? Sorrow turned to hatred, but subsided just as suddenly. For wasn’t she doing him a favour, even by killing him now? Camões stretched out, the stone floor became as soft as velvet, the low, cobweb-covered roof became a heaven sprinkled with stars, with her eyes glittering among them, and everything merged into a light distance. He allowed himself to drift off to sleep, or to death—time would tell.

  II

  THIS WAS A LARGER and lighter chamber than Camões had entered for as long as he could remember. The instruments of torture had been assembled in the centre of the room. He did not understand the function of many of them. The torturer and his assistants stood there in an attitude of fearful tension, as if they had to guard the instruments and were frightened that they would be dragged away at the last moment.

  There stood the Dominicans, shackled together in a corner, still calmer. As always, they wore their rough cassocks and sandals and were talking quietly but animatedly, as if involved in a theological conversation. Most of them were cross-eyed and squinted at each other, as if they only half trusted each other. This was so out of keeping with the situation, in which they could expect support, only moral that is, from no one but each other, that Camões at first did not understand and was sure that they would betray each other when first put to the question. In addition one of them had a shrill voice, which kept breaking amid all the hoarse whispering. It was only later that he noticed their inner peace. One of the judges called out, “Quiet!” And once the captain, who was also present, said, “You’ll be singing a different tune soon!”

  The judges were sitting under the light that entered through low barred windows at ceiling level. Through those windows Camões saw countless feet passing: the soft felt shoes of the Chinese, the goats’ hooves of their wives; far less often the leather shoes of soldiers, and two or three times fawn-coloured boots with long silver spurs. Never before had he seen so many of the inhabitants of Macao. It lasted perhaps a few moments, while the judges arranged court documents and seemed to be making bets. Scarcely any attention was paid to him.

  Then Campos gave the signal to the torturer. The assistants went over to the Dominicans, but they had fallen on their knees. The prior spoke a forceful prayer, and as yet not an assistant laid a finger on them. Camões wondered what would be more effective against torture—his powder, or that prayer. Campos ordered them to say amen, and make a start, and soon they were swinging from the ceiling with heavy weights attached to their toes.

  There was no room left for Camões to hang and to pass the time he was put in the thumbscrews, and his ankles were put in sharp irons. It remained deathly still, apart from the weights that occasionally collided with a dull metallic thud, and Campos’s regular cry of “Confess, confess!”

  Finally a young monk started groaning faintly.

  “Confess,” cried Campos. “Speak the truth and free yourself from these pains and those ten times worse that are still to come. Confess.”

  The scribes held their pens poised above the paper. But the prior admonished him, speaking of the Church fathers, who endured much worse, and conjured him not to forfeit immortal salvation because of a few hours of earthly pain and not to betray their innocence.

  However, the young monk, under increasingly severe torture, broke down, and admitted that Lou Yat’s children had been lured into the monastery. But he did not know what had happened to them.

  “But you heard their groans? You saw them burying something in the courtyard?”

  “Yes, yes,” cried the victim. “Untie me, I saw it, they buried them. Untie me.”

  “He’s lying,” cried the prior. “We had no part in it. Torture me till I die, no lie will escape from my mouth. He’s a coward who wants to save his skin.”

  “No, he’s sensible. The evidence is overwhelming; denials won’t help. Do you wish to recant?”

  “No, no; untie me, now I’ve said it!”

  They were all released. A statement was read out, but most of them were no longer aware of anything, and leant against the wall, or had collapsed onto the floor. And Camões had almost been forgotten, since he had made no sound. Campos went over to him.

  “And you confess too, then we have all the information we need.”

  But Camões smiled, shook his head and gave no reply. The blood was dripping from his thumbs.

  He was awakened by a strange warm feeling on his face. He could not understand what it was and did not move, frightened to open his eyes. At the same time he could feel a dull pain in his thumbs and ankles. Finally he opened his eyes with a great effort. He was lying on a bed in a large, bright room. A chair and a table stood by a window. He crossed to it and in the distance saw the sea and a few islands on the horizon. He could not see any ground beneath the window. Again he was far from the earth, no longer in the darkness beneath it, but in the light above it.

  The water, which another guard brought him, was clear and did not go bad as it stood there, and the food was good. After three days he was able to get up, and first gazed out to sea for a day towards the distant islands, to where a solitary ship sometimes crossed. He asked this guard for an explanation too. This one did not answer at all. Were they trying to lure him into treachery again through good treatment? Or did they expect the King to revoke his edict?

  One morning he also found his papers again. He resumed work, and in uninterrupted peace and quiet, facing the sea, he wrote of the adventures of the navigators in the gardens of the Hesperides, where they were fed on fruit and while they were caressed forgot the privations of their wanderings.

  One morning all his papers had disappeared again. He pestered the guard with questions, grabbed hold of him. But this guard seemed to be really deaf and dumb, and to belong more to the underworld than to this light-filled place. For a day he was filled with a fearful premonition, and he could no longer feel at one with the calm of the sea by gazing and reflecting. Late at night he slept for a few hour
s, sitting upright. When he awoke everything had been returned, but a sheet from the garden of Hesperides had been creased and stained. He wanted to continue, but felt as if his work had been fractured, in that very place. A fearful intuition plagued him, and he no longer dared think of Pilar.

  Finally he summoned the courage to read back over what he had written, and he saw that without his realizing it the mythological garden had begun to resemble that across the water. He was seized by a rage against poetry greater than any he had known in his youth. It was good for nothing but to reveal secrets, to make the writer the betrayer of his own inner life, precisely of what he wanted to hide most deeply and preferred to bury deep underground. But surely it was impossible. Campos’s mind was not that subtle—to have thought of this possibility!

  And so Camões, more of a prisoner than ever, kept oscillating between the window and his bed, between hope and fear, anxiety and enlightenment. And this torment, worse than any his body had endured, lasted another six or seven days. He no longer ate, no longer wrote, stared out of the window at the sea and longed for oblivion.

  One afternoon the guard was accompanied by a junior official and a servant carrying a set of military kit, which he threw down in front of Camões. The official read out a letter, an edict. Camões was to join as a soldier the escort accompanying the embassy to Beijing which was leaving Macao that very afternoon. Camões made no move to get ready. The official advised him to do so, or else he would be transported with them in chains for three days’ journey from Macao. He waited. Camões got dressed.

  III

  AT THE GATE separating the Portuguese peninsula from the Chinese Empire, a flower-covered stand had been erected. The Senate of Macao and the principal officers with their wives were watching from there as the embassy passed by. The procession approached from the distance; Metelho, the chief envoy, sat in a palanquin, slung from the shoulders of six bearers. Behind, on horseback, were four accompanying envoys. Twenty coolies were laden with gifts for the Emperor. For now the escort, whose function in dangerous regions would be to surround the embassy, brought up the rear.