The Forbidden Kingdom

by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

  I hadn’t seen a woman at such close quarters for years. Her mouth was small and half open, her nose rather thick, as with all Portuguese women, her eyes brown and alluring, or was I mistaken? No, she smiled for a moment—mocking or friendly? How could I distinguish? In any case she had taken note of me—no wonder that I was immediately entranced and ordered the coolie to follow her. He kept close behind and so we arrived in the broad Praia. I realized at once that I had been there before, certainly when I had walked there the night before, but the surroundings no longer attracted me: I was peering intently at the carriage in front; all I could see now was black hair worn up. I was convinced she was dazzlingly beautiful.

  You didn’t find anything like this in Hong Kong, and to think we were in desperately poor Macao! But it was true, the Portuguese, the real ones at least, and the few French who supposedly still lived here, were more choosy than the British colonialists. Or was she perhaps from a grand family? But in that case surely she would not be out driving alone at night?

  We trotted on and I looked neither to the left, where a number of sampans were rocking on the moonlit water, nor to the right, where another rickshaw or car occasionally passed us. I was preoccupied with myself and what I was going to do. Should I pull alongside? But that would give the game away. Should I wait till she turned into a side street and I go inside with her unnoticed? Perhaps she did not know herself and a rendezvous depended on what I did, and I simply went on following her. And what if she eluded me? Life ashore is certainly complicated.

  Finally we had driven halfway round the Praia and nothing had yet happened; any minute she would turn around or drive in somewhere. I gave the coolie a shove in the back, and he shot forward, so that I came alongside her, and realized at once that that I had made a mistake. She sat up and looked at me indignantly. I stammered a few words of apology in Portuguese, and now she actually smiled; I think I might have got on well with her after all. But it was too late: her rickshaw suddenly turned off, into a driveway. At the end I saw a large white building, which must be by far the grandest in Macao, and that was where she lived.

  My rickshaw stopped dead, as if it had run into an invisible wall, so that I half tumbled out of it. So as to be rid of him at once, I gave him far too much, but this had the opposite effect: he stayed waiting at the gate and I had difficulty in driving him back some way. I stopped outside the gate, in the shadow of a plane tree; at the end of the drive I saw lights through the greenery, as if there were a veranda with plants on it in front of the house. I could not stand still, and crept towards it. There was a group of rocking chairs, and she was sitting on one of them, with her face looking outwards, opposite two men, one tall, grey and thin, the other short and thick-set with jet-black hair, a real Portuguese. The three did not say much, and were obviously bored with each other’s company. The rocking chairs moved slowly up and down; a servant came, waited for orders and disappeared again.

  Suddenly she saw me standing there and her expression changed from surprise to indignation to fear. She must have given me away at that point, because the two men made straight for me, the fat young one shouting at me, and the old one grabbing me, though I had no difficulty in freeing myself.

  They let me go and started a conversation. I understood that the young man was warning the old man to be careful. A while ago a fanatical Scots Presbyterian missionary had watched a procession pass by with his hat on, which had caused a row, and they had thrown him in jail, but had had to release him again with humble apologies to the British government.

  What on earth would they have done with a Catholic Irishman who had failed to show respect? One could see the old man getting excited and the other man trying to make him realize there was nothing to be done. He kept shouting: “Farria Amaral Passaleão, all for nothing, humiliation,” and gesticulating wildly. Over their heads I stared at the woman and she at me. It was as if the whole business did not concern us; I forgot about it and went towards her. She took hold of my arms and a servant also came to help, but finally we all made the same gesture and let our arms fall to our sides and shook our heads: there’s no point. The old gentleman could no longer speak, and the other said: “We’ll let you go if you leave the garden immediately. Buy yourself a drink.” He gave me some money.

  I stood there for a moment, but the company went inside and walked slowly down the drive.

  Right next to the grand house was a run-down pub in semi-darkness; that was the place for me. I tried to drown my consciousness as soon as possible and I must have lost it fairly quickly; I caught sight of the same coolie standing waiting outside again. Such loyalty moved me at first, and then made me bitter, but a surge of resentment finally won the day; I had a change of heart and I was determined to gain access. After all, that governor was just a Portuguese, and what was his daughter? A half-caste, more Chinese than white. I went back into the garden; the house was dark and all I could see was a vague white patch. Wasn’t that Waglan that the ship had to pass in the foggy night? A root caught my foot. I went flying into black mud and stayed lying where I fell.

  I woke in my room in the Chinese hotel, penniless and bruised, but feeling more enlightened than in years, since I had lost my job on the Trafalgar. How had I got back? Perhaps it was the same coolie who had waited so faithfully. On the way he had probably driven me into a dark alley, beaten me unconscious and then robbed me. Well, he had to make sure he was paid, and I didn’t hold it against him.

  But how was I supposed to get back to Hong Kong without any money? I went to the quay, made myself inconspicuous and got on board with a mob of steerage passengers. The fat purser was standing by the hatchway, but he seemed to know me, because he pretended not to see me. Perhaps all white men coming from Macao, where they had lost a fortune at the tables, are given a free passage back at the expense of the Portuguese administration; perhaps I could have gone first class. I didn’t try my luck as I was happy to be able to travel at all. The boat slid slowly away from the ramshackle jetty, the engine creaked, the steam whistle shrieked, the crowds of people on board and on shore screeched at each other.

  Slowly I felt something slipping off me. I would no longer have those dreams: perhaps that nocturnal scuffle had done me good. But probably I had rid myself of most of it on the trek after the attack on the Loch Catherine and that fight was the finishing touch. I thought of the fear I used to feel, I was amazed and wondered how it was possible. But suddenly I felt sad: I myself had been freed, but someone else who had sought sanctuary with me had not found it. Had I arrived too late?

  Perhaps we had relieved each other, and I had become him and he me? So was I someone else now? But didn’t I want to be relieved of myself? I felt the old confusion taking hold of me and chased those thoughts away like germs I could now resist.

  I became sad, because Macao was slowly receding into the distance, lying there on its peninsula. We sailed around it. For a moment the city was narrow, and then I saw its full breadth again from the other side, and among the many brown houses a white one. I would never go back. A kind of tenderness for the poor dilapidated old place grabbed at my throat. I hated Hong Kong, with its emporiums and warehouses, its mansions and its thousand sea castles floating there in the wide blue bay. I should have liked to spend my life in Macao; I fitted in there: no one bothered about me either. Still, I had to remain part of the life in which one must always become something in order not to fall into decline.

  It was over. I was returning on a ship to the old life, but more hardened against the deprivations, the heat, the taunts, determined to repulse further meetings with others, to remain myself.

  As Macao lay behind me and slowly slipped away into the distance, I felt a melancholy courage growing in me: all right, I was going to become like other people, but from now on my actions would no longer be inhabited by the thought that I was a lost soul, but would be strengthened by the conviction that I had nothing left to lose and that the peaceful, decaying past could not absorb me to help me escape
my own life.

  I was going back. But I would not stay on a ship for long and would head into the interior of this country, of which I had so far experienced nothing but a journey through an arid steppe, a few half-dazed, half-drunken days in a deserted city, then coastlines, low and rocky, crumbly and even, but always receding, then ports where the exchange of secretions between Europe and Asia takes place and the people are nothing but fermenting agents that accelerate the process.

  First I would make for the place I had most shunned, since it is so cruel to the penniless and the weak that people are simply allowed to die in the street. First to Shanghai. From there, at right angles away from the coast, across the plains, to where the mountains rise from the distant, hazy rice paddies, with the poppy fields lying among them like red lakes.

  If any happiness was to be found anywhere on earth, it must be there. There the oldest wisdom, the most exalted nature and the purest pleasure were to be found. Blissful in the present, armoured by the many scars from the past, I would be able to confront all the ghosts and demons, without merging with them, offering them hospitality, without myself changing one hair, a single cell.

  I, who at first was so weak and did not set foot even on its outermost edge, will penetrate this land that has always remained pristine, that does not repel, but tolerates, that allows itself seemingly to be conquered and destroys all barbarians and foreigners in its languid, slowly suffocating grip and under the pressure of its mass.

  To be one of the for ever unconscious millions—what joy—or if that is unattainable, someone who knows every thing, for whom everything is behind him and who nevertheless goes on living.

  AFTERWORD

  The Dutch writer Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) was born in Leeuwarden, the provincial capital of Friesland in the northern part of the Netherlands. He trained as a doctor, though he never followed a conventional career path. Slau, as he was known to his friends, combined medical practice with writing in what was to be a short and intensely nomadic life. He left behind the small world of the Netherlands to travel, first in Europe and later in the Far East, working as a ship’s doctor on the China-Java-Japan route. These wanderings gave rise to one of the most famous lines of Dutch poetry—Alleen in mijn gedichten kan ik wonen (Only in my poems can I dwell) from the poem Woninglooze (Homeless). This nomadic sensibility was highly unusual for the time in which Slauerhoff was writing; it both harks back to nineteenth-century Romanticism and anticipates today’s extreme mobility.

  In Dutch literary history of the last thirty years, Jan Jacob Slauerhoff tends to feature most strongly as a poet—the Netherlands’ own poète maudit, in fact. This is no facile comparison—it comes from the writer himself whose self-identification with Tristan Corbière is evident from both his critical writings and letters. Slauerhoff’s biographer Wim Hazeu discusses his poetic personality in relation to Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue as well as Corbière. At the same time, Slauerhoff is most frequently described as a Romantic poet because of his themes of loss, longing, doomed love, dreamlike landscapes, and of roaming the seas. Fellow Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman emphasized in his review of the cycle of poems Eldorado in 1928 that though Slauerhoff’s preoccupations were “as Romantic as hell”, his sensibility and his poetic diction were modern.

  Slauerhoff was already well established as a poet when he published his first prose works—two collections of short stories, Het lente-eiland en andere verhalen (The Isle of Spring and Other Stories) and Schuim en asch (Foam and Ashes)—in 1930. The Forbidden Kingdom followed in 1932; it appeared in nine instalments in the literary magazine Forum and immediately afterwards in book form. It is one of the most vividly written and experimental novels in the Dutch language. Set in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, rather like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, its journey through time is accompanied by its central character’s transformation. But whereas Orlando is transformed from man to woman in the course of the centuries, Slauerhoff’s character is a twentieth-century ship’s radio operator who “becomes” the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Camões. In its disregard for the norms of realist fiction, The Forbidden Kingdom establishes itself as a modernist novel.

  The narrative techniques used by Slauerhoff had never been used before in Dutch literature, and some reviewers certainly found them challenging. Slauerhoff does not allow himself to be confined by his readers’ expectations; instead he unsettles them at every turn. Ultimately he fails to deliver the historical writing promised by his prologue to The Forbidden Kingdom, which narrates the founding of the Portuguese colony of Macao in the sixteenth century. Or rather, he interrupts it with other narratives. Take the first chapter, for instance—it is also set in the sixteenth century, though the location is the Portuguese homeland. The narrative switches back and forth between Camões as storyteller and a third-person narrator as it relates the poet’s banishment from Portugal because of his love for the Infant’s betrothed. Readers are never given the opportunity to settle into a comfortable relationship with the text, though the Camões story does eventually merge with the story of the founding of the colony, since Camões’s place of exile turns out to be Macao. But Chapter Six introduces a new story and simultaneously breaks the time frame—it is set in the twentieth century, told in the first person by a new character. The reader is asked to believe—or perhaps to make-believe—that the radio operator somehow “tunes into” Camões, while the sixteenth-century character in turn “colonizes” the twentieth-century character.

  Slauerhoff’s experiment with narrated time appears at first to involve two separate unrelated narratives, but in fact moves towards contact across time between the main characters of each narrative. The double time frame, and the way it is given expression through the characters, raises questions both about the perception of time and about the way time is traditionally represented in the realist novel. These preoccupations can be seen as a broader cultural phenomenon which had its origins in Einstein’s theories. Slauerhoff is known to have read and discussed J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927). What is interesting about Dunne’s book is not his theory, which comes across as pseudo-science, but the indication it gives of a popular interest in exploring ideas relating to time and space. In it Dunne develops a theoretical model which “explains” how in dreams one can see the future as well as the past, because the dreamer is “in a field of existence entirely different from that of ordinary waking life” (An Experiment with Time, p. 164). The two main characters of The Forbidden Kingdom, Camões and the nameless ship’s radio operator, dream each other, and experience visions which are not subject to linear time.

  In Slauerhoff’s sequel to The Forbidden Kingdom—Het leven op aarde (Life on Earth, 1934)—the twentieth-century character who resembles the protagonist of The Forbidden Kingdom not only has a name, but he also carries out the planned journey into China with which our novel ends. This man’s name is Cameron, and after his death Slauerhoff’s papers revealed that he had originally planned three Cameron novels. Although Cameron’s counterpart remains nameless in The Forbidden Kingdom, in what follows I will use this name, especially when talking about the composite or hybrid character Camões/Cameron.

  The moments of contact between the two main characters represent a kind of Modernist version of time-travel—one that, in keeping with Dunne’s theory, takes place in the mind. The unnatural or magical quality of the moments of contact emphasizes the time gap which has to be bridged by some special means. A more traditional time-travel novel, such as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1898) to which Dunne also refers, not wishing to violate the sense of a coherent realistic fictional world, resorts to science to invent special machines to make it possible to visit another time. This way the overall time frame is preserved, since the other time is inserted into the dominant frame. Slauerhoff’s character Cameron escapes clock-time altogether and briefly inhabits a dimension where, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, he can see through the centuries that have gone before. Camõe
s, on the other hand, is facing in the other direction, toward the future.

  One important difference between a story of time-travel and the “journey” the radio operator makes through time is that in The Forbidden Kingdom the past is not seen through the eyes of the present. The twentieth-century character is not imported unchanged into another time in order to view and comment on it; confrontation between past and present is not an explicit theme of the narrative. Rather, the novel performs the impossible communication between past and present by subtle and mysterious means—“clues” as to what will happen build up to a climax. The anticipated, but impossible dissolution of linear time does actually take place. The first clue to the existence of a parallel character to Camões comes in a recurrent dream during Camões’s sea journey to Macao, narrated in Chapter Four:

  […] I am a lowly figure among men and have to work and obey for a paltry wage. Yet I am more powerful than when I laboriously assembled words and ordered them on paper. Now I hurl my words into space; they travel infinite distances, driven by a vibration that I nonchalantly produce with my hand […]

  Sometimes he had a tight-fitting hood on his head, sometimes he felt that the ship was no longer made of wood but of blistering iron […]

  Now a host of yellow-skinned people forced their way into the cramped cabin […] (pp. 125-26)

  If the reader is at first puzzled by the reference to words being hurled into space, the cumulative references to anachronistic elements of the dream, such as wood being replaced by steel in the ship’s construction and the strange close-fitting clothes worn by those on board, soon make it clear that Camões’s dream represents some kind of vision of the future.

  The functioning of the “clues” depends on the reader developing a sense of their reliability, which happens at moments of recognition later on in the novel—what is sensed by Camões in one chapter, is realized by the radio operator in another, and vice versa. Slauerhoff achieves this by the repetition of a particular situation, and of certain key words. So, for example, in Chapter Six, narrated by the radio operator, we read: Radio? How long ago was it since I had sat in a narrow cabin with headphones on and my hand on the key? Distinct echoes of Camões’s dream.