The Forbidden Kingdom

by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

  “Those coins won’t be any good to you in Macao either, if that’s what you’re thinking. The casinos won’t touch them.”

  The man took another handful of coins out of his pocket.

  “I don’t know what fan-tan is. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “But where are the rest then? Where did you find them?”

  “Oh, a long way away, a long way from here. No one can go there. And there aren’t any left.”

  The purser put the coins in his pocket, gave the man ten Mexican dollars and regarded the business as concluded. Looking back, he thought he had been ridiculously honest. Had he felt sorry for the man?

  II

  THE NEXT MORNING the Sui An started to sail around the peninsula. On the upper deck a few white men in white suits were walking around. On the deck below the Chinese were milling about. Macao lay impassively and gazed resentfully at the arrival of the steamer over the hosts of junks choking the bay in dense flocks, a great suburb across the water. The Sui An went through a narrow channel between them and moored at the ramshackle jetty.

  The whites went ashore first, stepping into the waiting carriages, leant back and drove off. Then the passengers from steerage spilt from the ship across the quay. And last of all he left the ship. The purser lost sight of him.

  He went into town, passed various hotels and ended up in an old inn in a narrow street. He obtained a room for one of his dollars. There was nothing in it but a kang sleeping platform with a headrest—no mosquito net. The light entered through a narrow window, high up between wall and ceiling.

  He pushed the headrest off the kang and put his bundle of clothes in its place, which was warmer but softer. He stretched out and lay still. A boy brought in a pot of tea without a sound. He did not seem to be thirsty. It was getting on for supper time. The sickly sweet odour of rotting meat and dried octopus penetrated the room through the window, together with the clatter of crockery and the squeals of children. He did not move; neither heat nor insects, neither stench nor noise bothered him. His spirit had left his miserable body lying there for now and had set out to explore the town, which had already started dying a century ago, and now scarcely existed any more.

  And in that way he easily found his way to the past. It was as if he were descending into a mine, and seeing the successive strata in a dim light. He finally reached the time when the castle and the first cathedrals were built and Guia lighthouse shone its light across the bay to show ships the way, a light unknown elsewhere in Asia. He could get no further. Down below, though, he did see another landing, a few tents on a beach, grave crosses, fishermen’s huts, a temple among the rocks, but all this remained dim and he went back. One of the temples he had seen was on fire, and smoke flew ahead of the flames. Black masses of people moved about. He tried to climb higher, but could not, struggled, after being seized from all sides, and woke on the hard bed, drenched with fearful sweat. The stench and din were unbearable to him now. He tossed and turned and when darkness fell he left the inn.

  Outside, however, the light was still bright, and so for the time being he roamed the narrow streets of the old town and avoided the ocean side. Chinese and Portuguese districts kept alternating, so intimately mixed was the blood of the two races in the veins of the people of Macao. Only the Praia Grande was as pure as the three or four old families, who lived around it in magnificent mansions.

  The sea wind twisted dwarf willows around the edge and occasionally hurled a blob of foam over the balustrade. Coolies spaced at equal distances sat resting on the stones. Every so often a carriage rolled past. On the other side facing the island a few junks were rocking.

  Sitting among the coolies, he rested from the afternoon’s bleak journey. Now everything could be viewed as in an old copper engraving. When it was completely dark, he intended to leave. But the moon rose over the Praia Grande, and the houses and roofs became visible again, now coloured antique gold, until a cloud again blotted everything out. This was repeated many times and in his memory the periods passed like high and low tide.

  Finally, after a more protracted period of darkness, he got up and caught sight of a black cross, which a cathedral on a hill was thrusting into the sky. In the lower town he kept losing sight of it, but he persisted in trying to find it and finally found himself at the foot of a wide flight of steps and saw a wide front surmounted by the steep front of the cathedral above it and very far away the black cross boring into the grey night sky. He climbed the steps slowly, with head bowed, so as not to lose his footing: the steps were crumbling and slippery. When he could feel no more steps he looked up and was standing at the edge of the cathedral precinct. The front of the church was black, like an awesome vertical coffin, and no light came anywhere from the stained-glass windows. He knew that something dreadful was hiding behind this dead expanse. He could not go back; it was as if the steps had collapsed behind him, so that there was a yawning abyss behind him, and he went giddily and quickly towards the church.

  He stood in front of it: the windows were high, the gate closed; he piled a number of stones, hung over a window sill with his upper body inside and saw that behind this façade the church had been eaten away; he glanced into the empty space paved with gravestones. Vultures sat on the remains of rotten pews. He fell down into it, they flew up and one skimmed past him, so that he stumbled over a boulder and then fell through a decayed choir stall. He thrashed around in a soft mass of wood, and the mouldy dust blocked his eyes and nose. He finally rose to his feet half choked. In the meantime the church was fully resurrected and full of figures walking to and fro, most of them climbing onto sacks of pews at the windows and firing outside with heavy muskets. At one window an old monk was operating a cannon. Every so often a bullet would whistle through the church. He was standing near the altar. A man in military dress but with a silvery wreath of hair around a bald scalp pressed an old gun into his hand, in the name of God. He positioned himself at a window and ran his fingers over the rusty breech and barrel. There were bullets on the window sill. He looked down at the slope of the hill on which the church was built, which figures were trying to climb; some of them were constantly falling, and involuntarily he began firing into the mass. He felt the jolts of the heavy musket against his shoulder. But he did not hear the report and saw the flash only seconds later.

  The ghostly battle lasted for many hours. Finally, as the sky was turning grey as if it were morning, the defenders, including him, jumped out of the windows, and drove the attackers back. He saw them close up, and at first did not understand why he was fighting against them and with the others, since they were both equally alien to him.

  Then he saw that those he was fighting belonged to a race of which he had recently been part, but he remained indifferent; he could just as well have turned round and fought with them against the defenders of the church, but he did not.

  He stopped, with the musket, which he intended to use as a club, and stood at ease. A black adversary mistook his ease for fear and leapt on him; he saw the bulging eyes in front of him and a wild fury at the thought of being seized by someone of the race of slaves led him to attack again: he jumped back and felled the black with a blow of his gun butt. Then he dived back into the fray, seeing nothing more, fighting his way forward until he collapsed and lay where he fell. He could feel himself being walked over, but not being carried away.

  III

  THE NEXT MORNING the Procurador sat alone in the quietest and darkest room in his house, but there too he could hear the bells ringing and there were many of them, summoning the population to the churches. Thanksgiving masses were celebrated in all the churches. The Procurador’s absence from the cathedral would be noticed, and his reputation as a priest-hater would grow further. He bit back his fury, unable to rejoice at being rescued from the awkward siege.

  Had it not been for two events, the victory of his small garrison of two hundred men (the rest were away on an expedition along the coast destroying nests of pirates) over a seaborne ar
my of two thousand would have been eternally attributed to him. But Father Antonio’s well-aimed shot, which hit the powder magazine of the flagship, saved Macao as its ammunition was on the point of running out.

  He had had to visit the hero in the Dominican hospital and was the first to recognize him.

  The embassy had been given up for years. Not a soul had returned; a later embassy, which did manage to reach Beijing, had heard no word of them. So it was assumed that all had perished en route from hunger, or been murdered by hostile Chinese.

  Camões.

  Even more dangerous than when he washed up here: if he could then be safely presented as a deserter, now the people would sing his praises and it was harder to frustrate the people than the priesthood. He must be eliminated at all costs.

  As the Procurador leant over him and with seeming pity surveyed his deathly pale face, he had quickly made a plan. He gave orders for the sick man to be brought to his house. His own physician would attend him. It had been an unexpected triumphal procession, with himself on horseback ahead of the litter, but he was well aware that the acclaim was for the stranger, whose body was covered by the canvas, and not for him.

  After a day he regained consciousness. Campos had ordered the guard, his oldest servant, who knew no Portuguese, to call him immediately when the patient opened his eyes. Cautiously he began questioning him.

  “What happened? Where were you attacked?”

  From his first answers Campos realized to his great relief that Camões must have lost his memory and no longer knew anything about it. Greatly satisfied, he left the sickroom. He would have no further trouble from this quarter: Father Antonio was old and would soon die. He was still reminded of Velho’s enmity now and then, when negotiations with a Cantonese mandarin suddenly and inexplicably broke down. And it was sometimes as if in Lisbon Macao had been forgotten about as a possession; sometimes no ship or orders arrived for a whole year. The city freed itself and stood alone at a vast distance, with no need for rebellion to gain its freedom.

  He had the sick man transferred at night by two trusted agents to the Casa de Misericordia, with instructions that he should not receive good care.

  After a few days he had escaped and soon the rumour spread that the hero of the siege, who had saved the city, had become a hermit and was living in a kind of cave on the hill above the city. A flat stone lay across two boulders, creating a kind of shelter, under which it was fairly cool and dry. At first people did come to him to seek a cure for ailments, and to ask him to lay on hands, but he never answered and he was soon forgotten, so that Campos did not need to intervene.

  He received two more visits before he was totally swallowed up by oblivion. Father Antonio, who had led the defence of São Paulo cathedral, came and was anxious to make him a religious hero, if possible a saint, whose confused utterances could be interpreted as visions. But Camões said nothing at all and stared blankly right through the monk.

  The second visit was from Pilar, who apart from her father was the only one to recognize him. She almost fell to her knees when she saw what he had become. He did not recognize her, which actually came as a relief. Since she had borne Ronquilho’s children, she had resigned herself to the fate that, as she now knew, awaits almost all women, all Chinese and virtually all white women: to acquire a husband they do not love, who is at best indifferent to them, and to conceive and bring up his children. Campos’s prophecy had proved correct: when there were children, fanciful passions evaporated by themselves.

  From her robe she produced a bundle of parchment sheets and placed it in front of Camões. He seemed to recognize them, stroked them as if they were the skin of someone he had loved. She embraced him cautiously, felt no response and left. Now he sat writing for as long as light shone in through the chink. He lived in what he wrote and as soon as he was no longer in it and sat in the dark, he ceased to exist.

  A few days later Campos put him aboard a ship, the oldest and most decrepit in the fleet.

  IV

  I COLLAPSED BY A STONE, somewhere in the interior, and woke up in a dirty Chinese hotel in Macao. I only realized I was there when I went out into the street. So I had escaped the Loch Catherine disaster, perhaps as the sole survivor. I would probably never discover how. I remembered dream events as distant adventures.

  I walked around a bit, down the alleys and along the waterfront, where only junks were moored; I peered across towards the mainland and drank a glass of beer in a liquor shop. Bars, dives and other establishments to which seamen on shore resort did not exist here. I had heard that there are many sights in Macao from the olden days: churches, monuments and suchlike, a cave where a poet lived and wrote a great poem to the voyages of Vasco da Gama. But whoever visits somewhere like that? I stayed and sat in the semi-darkness of the shop and enquired when there was a boat to Hong Kong, because I realized I wasn’t going to find a ship here. Not until the next day. So I had to wait here till then.

  There’s nothing else to do in Macao. Opium is smoked in closed houses with thick stone walls, while in others, open day and night, fan-tan is played, for cash, by poor coolies; there are probably brothels too. One occasionally meets a Portuguese. Most of them are fat and ponderous and do nothing. I once saw a procession approaching. I thought they were feeble and handicapped inmates from an institution. When they got closer I saw they were wearing uniforms and were the soldiers who were supposed to protect the colony.

  I couldn’t help smiling contemptuously, and for a moment I felt I was an Englishman after all, but the smile died on my lips. I spent the whole evening wandering through the streets; perhaps I was getting tired, but by the end I was really concerned about the fate of this colony.

  Still later in the evening I wandered a little along the waterfront, where during the day there’s a nice view. In the dark I began to brood on why on earth I was here and what it all meant. It would probably pass once I was back on board. I stumbled over a sleeping coolie and tottered on a few steps. The man had half stood up and was staring after me. I walked on and tried not to think.

  I returned to the hotel and planned to stay in the room until the Hong Kong boat left, however oppressive. But before night had fallen I was back in the street. It was so hot and the kitchen blasted out a disgusting smell, and the squealing of the coolies and the women was becoming shriller. An attempt to have a bath failed, even though I kept my shoes on so as not to slip. Everything I touched was so greasy and dirty that half from revulsion and half because it was so slippery I let go of it again, like everything I tried to tackle in this damned country. However, I mustn’t blame China, since wouldn’t it be exactly the same on shore in Europe? Yet there was a difference: here it slid away and the wretchedness was yellow and monotone; in Europe everything intruded on me and was black and leering.

  These thoughts and others made me realize I was well on the way to going mad again. I hurriedly got dressed again, and now it was as if I was encased not by a month’s old layer of dust, as was actually the case, but by an old skin that I could never peel off. I stood outside in the alley next to the boarding house and suddenly ran away, resolved after all to play fan-tan on my last night. As I ran down the alley, I almost broke my legs on the shafts of a rickshaw waiting there and rolled right into it. It was almost dark by now, and there were not many people in the street, as there usually are in all towns in the Orient. There was also little light in the houses, since they were too poor to afford a tallow candle. I wanted to get out of this district fast and drove my coolie on without telling him where he was to take me.

  Somewhere, in the centre of a Chinese city, I forget which, is the entrance to the underworld. There is a hole in the street on the river side. One simply goes down the steps and one is in the underworld, just as in London one descends in order to take the Underground. Thirty steps down, and you’re there.

  And wouldn’t the coolie stop at a gaping hole like that, knowing that I simply can’t stand it in the inhabited world? Or at sea, and
so couldn’t find refuge anywhere else? Rickshaw coolies have a great gift of intuition for guessing their passengers’ desires. But this one only took me to the end of the street and stopped in a narrow square, with his ugly mug half turned towards me. I could see a house with a lantern outside and opposite a filthily transparent “first-class fan-tan house”, but I wanted to go on, feeling embarrassed to have troubled the coolie for such a short distance. I was dying for a change or more fresh air and blurted out: “More far, Praia!” Could he understand me? He hoisted himself up again from the half-squatting position he had assumed, while he appeared to dither between two lamp posts. Those pulling vehicles have much less to do here and tire and get out of breath quicker than in other places, where they trot along for hours in the heat of the day, even uphill.

  We were still on the Chinese side and still had to climb over the high, mixed central section, before he could descend on the other side. That was even more difficult, since he now had to hold back myself and the rickshaw with his puny weight and strength. Luckily the streets were soft and muddy. A couple of times I made as if to get out, but then he put his back into it for a moment, obviously frightened of losing his fare. That gave me some confidence. Finally I saw a wide strip in the moonlight at the narrow end of the street, and already felt a cool breeze.

  A rickshaw emerged from a side street, and drove close behind me, until I waved my coolie to move aside so that the other vehicle could pass; I didn’t like the idea of having someone on my heels in this town where there were few if any police. I must have been feeling attached to life again, to worry about that. The other person’s vehicle drove past, carrying a woman who was leaning back languid or exhausted; the small dark face came just above the edge and a bare arm lay slim and seductive on the paintwork.