Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

The Forbidden Kingdom

For Albino Forjaz de Sampaio

PROLOGUE

I

IN SEPTEMBER 1540, when the settlement of Lian Po had been in existence for almost eighteen years, an imperial delegation arrived at the North Gate, bearing the celestial name on its banner, but bringing no goodwill gifts and dressed in light-blue mourning robes. The head of the delegation requested an audience with the governor, Antonio Farria. As it was night-time, they were conducted through the city to an inn by the light of torches and lanterns and despite their impatient grumbling were not taken to see Farria until the following morning; instructed of their arrival and apparel, he awaited them seated on a throne, in armour.

The oldest member of the group stepped forward, without removing his skull cap, and said in measured tones: “Lian Po will be laid waste, the Portuguese and their slaves will be tortured till they curse the day they were born, if their brethren in the south continue their conquest of Malacca.”

Farria, without raising either his voice or his body, took a roll of parchment from the table next to him, unfolded a map of Malacca, indicated a red line that cut off the neck of the peninsula and pointed through the window to the river where the ships were raising ensigns and unfurling their standards. Then he gave a signal, a shot was fired and was answered by many blazing barrels, and rejoicing erupted across the city and the river. The envoys returned home through a celebrating city in closed litters.

At the end of the year an imperial fleet of well over a thousand sails appeared in the harbour mouth. That was one ship for every Portuguese in Lian Po. Spies reported the advance of a great army, three days’ march away. Farria left Lian Po under the command of Perez Alvadra and with the thirty ships at anchor in the harbour hurled himself at the junks. He had ordered a fortress cannon and a long-barrelled gun to be mounted on six of his vessels, and these now fired among the junks, as his fleet drifted slowly towards the enemy. Before contact was made, hundreds had sunk. Then an offshore wind suddenly got up, the heavy artillery was dumped overboard and with swift manoeuvres the Portuguese carvelas cut through the enemy, firing in all directions. But eventually scores of junks had attached themselves to each ship and hundreds of warriors with their blood-curdling cries had leapt on deck, cutlasses slashing. Grenades from the crow’s nests, musket fire from poop deck and stern, knives and lances on the decks exterminated the Manchus like swarms of locusts.

At night the battle continued by torchlight, armed sloops joined in the fray, and swarms of sharks, the hyenas of sea battles, fought over the bloody casualties as they drowned.

The torches were burning low when there was a great glow from the land. A broad red wall of slow-burning flames rose from horizon to horizon. Seeing this, Farria was beside himself with fury and signalled to his ships to assemble for a final assault. Nine clustered alongside his vessel; the others could not disengage themselves from the tangle or had been overrun.

Three times in quick succession, continuously firing and ramming whatever crossed their bows, they carved a path through the Chinese fleet. The dawn, breaking through on the horizon, lit up the fleeing junks and four tall ships turned away from them and headed back to the bay. But Lian Po had already disappeared, and a thick pall hung over silent piles of rubble from collapsed walls and charred beams.

Farria went to where his city had stood. The streets were almost buried under the fallen masonry, but he found a way through, spearing bodies and tossing them aside with his sword if they obstructed him, and finally stood in front of the ruins of his own house. He did not dare step over the threshold. Beyond, his wife and children lay burnt or… He rested on his sword and waited until a couple of soldiers approached. “Search,” he ordered hoarsely, “clear the beams away, open the cellar.”

He was now sitting on a stone bench that had once been set among flowers and shrubs facing a small pool. He scooped some water from the pool and cooled his head. His hair was covered in charcoal and soot, but he did not notice. A few blackened swords and an iron pitcher were laid at his feet: all that was still recognizable. Farria himself went into his gutted house, and took away a few handfuls of ash in his handkerchief.

That evening four ships, all that was left of the first settlement in Cathay, sailed south in close formation.

The little fleet was ringed by the stars, with the moon above them in the black sky. On the poop deck of the Mãe de Deus stood Farria and Mendez de Pinto. They gazed at the sails, at the wake, occasionally walked the deck from side to side, and stopped in silence again.

A lamp was burning over the hatchway, and the copper of the hatch and the bronze of the cannon gleamed, while everything else was shrouded in darkness; darkness surrounded both the two lonely men and the sails. But gradually the dark hull began to glow in a green twilight, which first revealed the topsails, then dredged the bow up from the night, where a faint mumbling rose, like that of men waking.

Finally Farria’s large figure and the small, frail Mendez were also lit up. “Green is the colour of hope,” said Farria without conviction, but Mendez disagreed. “It’s St Elmo’s Fire — it heralds doom and death. What else can it mean?” And suddenly a flood of words poured from the lips of the taciturn officer, who for days had not uttered a syllable and had done nothing except run from side to side, testing cannon, drinking — drinking heavily — and cursing silently at the railing.

At last he found a channel for his resentment.

“All for nothing. Twenty years of struggle, loneliness, negotiations with yellow villains, patience, pleas for ammunition, troops.

“The supercilious letters from the usurers in Malacca, the haughty administrators in Goa, who ask why we’re venturing so far when the spices that yield most profit await loading in Malacca. The aggrieved letters of the prelates asking when Cathay will finally be converted. Those of the King wanting to know why his embassy was not better received in Beijing, and why it did not bring back more gifts.

“All they want is to hold on to what they have, buy off their enemies and laze about on their country estates.

“On the brink of the most fabulous riches, constant skirmishes with the most cunning and cruellest devils in an indefensible post on which we have wasted our lives. We’re now reaping the reward of fools, our wives have been tortured to death, our children burnt alive or abducted.

“We’re as penniless as we were thirty years ago, when we sailed out of the Tagus as poor noblemen, happy with the blessing of a cardinal and a knighthood from the King.

“What awaits us when we return? Anathema for having become heretics, the displeasure of the King, prison perhaps. Think of Columbus, think of Da Gama, of so many.

“Where are we to turn? What we built up lasted for twenty years and burned down in a single night. Let’s go to some island no one wants, and wait for death. Or let’s lie in wait for everything flying the Portuguese flag and destroy it. No, we’d do better to undertake the journey back. Let’s bombard Malacca and Goa and Lisbon for all we’re worth. Why were we born and why did we set forth in the first place?”

His features were ashen in the green light, his hands broke off pieces of wood and his body leant twitching against the railing. Until Farria, in the slow, measured tones he always used, tried to persuade his second-in-command to adopt his point of view.

“It’s all true. In Malacca they’d jeer and lord it over us. In Goa we’d be interrogated about why the post was not held. Surely five hundred soldiers and thirteen ships, half of them warships, are an invincible force confronted with even the mightiest empire? In Lisbon we’d be thrown in jail. I’m not afraid; I think as you do. My vengeance extends further. I shall land again, fight, negotiate and build a second Lian Po, richer and stronger than the first. It will put Malacca in the shade and awaken the envy of Goa. Then, when I’m relieved of my post to make way for one of the King’s bastards, I shall hoist my own flag and with my fleet and my army I shall hold on to my creation, or if it proves indefensible destroy it with my own hands.”

Mendez shook his head sadly.

“We’re too old. It will take too long. I want to devote the years that are left to me to my vengeance. Give me the copies of the letters, the pleas and orders we wrote for reinforcements, give me the arrogant, contemptuous answers. They will be my daily breviary. I will derive strength from them, lest I succumb to bleak loneliness.”

Farria saw he was determined.

“You can be sure you will always find my harbour open, even if the whole Portuguese fleet is arrayed outside.”

“Don’t use that kind of talk. Never do that, or you’ll never be able to execute your plan of revenge. I may be the one who helps you.”

The green light faded and the two slept fitfully on the bunks in the saloon.

In the morning Farria gave Mendez, who was resolved to go his own way, a bundle of papers, a box and his commander’s ceremonial sword. The ships were hauled up into the wind. Sloops sailed to and fro. All those wishing to throw in their lot with Mendez were to board the Pinta, the smallest ship, on which the black flag was now hoisted. When Farria rowed out in the afternoon, he found Mendez standing gloomily by the gangplank and the ship very sparsely manned.

The farewell gifts were put on board; they clasped hands for a long time. Then there was a shot and Mendez set sail on the Pinta.

He was never heard of again.

II

FARRIA SAILED SOUTHWARD with three ships. In the waters between the coast of Fujian and the island of Formosa, where the wind from across Asia and the ocean converge, a typhoon approached, the great wind born of the union of many, which whips up the sea, and casts it into the sky, compresses, wrings and then tears apart sea and sky, and between tissues of air and water destroys everything that comes too close to this supernatural alchemy. The Mãe de Deus was just able to signal to the others that Nanwei would be the assembly point. Then the ships were separated by banks of cloud and fog, assaulted by tornadoes and tidal waves, which battered them from all sides beneath howling rain. Lashed to a mast, Farria stood shouting orders, but no one could hear him. He saw no one, heard nothing but the occasional desperate cry, the snap of a ripped sail with the accompanying creaking sound and the splash of a loose cannon plunging into the sea. Beneath him in the pitch-black and stifling saloon lay Dona Miles, the only woman to survive Lian Po, kneeling before Nossa Senhora da Penha. Sometimes she was hurled against the statue. Did this not make her prayers even more fervent? She prayed for a night and a day. Life had receded, and prayer had taken its place. Until the gusts died down, a light shone in through a crack in the door and Farria lifted her up. They were united in a short prayer and a long embrace, as there could now be no end to the love of those who had been saved. Death had retreated before ecstasy, or before a gentle sun, shining over the foaming but bending waves into a round open porthole.

III

THE MÃE DE DEUS had lain at anchor off the bay of Nanwei for a week waiting in the lee of a narrow peninsula. Finally the Coimbra rounded the headland, with one mast still standing. The Rafael never appeared. Some believe that this ship joined Mendez.

The occupants of the wreck — the Coimbra was no more than that — requested transfer to the big Mãe de Deus, but Farria did not want to lose any more ships, and the Coimbra with its shallow draught was indispensable for coastal reconnaissance.

The bare beach was alive with brisk shipbuilding activity.

Farria himself, having climbed aloft to see if he could catch sight of the Rafael, spotted a bamboo grove on the far side. This provided yardarms and ropes.

Nanwei would have to furnish water and provisions. But it lay inaccessible in the interior, beyond a bend in the river, half town, half fleet, huts and houses on the bank, junks in the river so close together that only a thin strip of open water lay between them. Between the land and the waterborne district stood a grey palace with gold statues and curlicued spires glittering in the sun, and many-coloured banners curling down from the beams of the gate.

A delegation with some scanty gifts must go there and request help and supplies.

Farria, knowing what a prized hostage he would be, did not dare go. Alvarez went with three men from Lian Po, baptized Chinese, and a gift of cloth and wine. Farria had nothing else. In a letter he pointed to the friendship that existed between the two monarchs, far apart only because the power of each extended so far; he alluded to services rendered in the destruction of the pirates, passing in silence over the battle and fall of Lian Po. Then he asked for help.

Alvarez returned after four days, alone and without an answer. The mandarin had received the gifts coolly, had burst into a rage when he saw a stain on one of the carpets, read the letter and erupted in even greater fury, praising his Emperor as Son of Heaven, belittling Portugal’s monarch as an insignificant vassal, a tributary of the celestial one, who anyway controlled the whole world, however far westward Portugal might lie. He ordered them to leave the city and remove their ships from the coast.

The admiral listened in silence and gave orders to prepare to set sail. But not to leave the coast. That evening the Mãe de Deus and the Coimbra lay a mile downstream from Nanwei and bombarded the floating half of the city by moonlight. Soon large holes appeared and suddenly the dark mass moved upstream. The two carvelas calmly took the place of thousands of junks and set fire to the city with rockets. In various places the fire flared up and then spread at lightning speed with bangs and hisses, the blossoming of intensely joyous colours, interwoven with green, red, purple, shot through with fiery serpents, revolving suns, fading stars, fire-spewing dragons and quickly fading monstrous flowers.

The Portuguese, at first alarmed, ceased the bombardment, which had become unnecessary, and became spectators of the awesome firework display.

The officers remembered Farria’s encouragement in response to their objections:

“This is not a finely balanced battle. This is a festive firework display. The people of Nanwei will give us a glorious reception, because it’s the 1st of February.”

The fact was that Farria, thinking of everything, had used the eve of the Chinese New Year for the attack, which, once begun, continued of its own accord.

By morning Nanwei had disappeared.

The grey palace on the outer wall, scorched black, stood amid a wilderness of black ash. Lian Po had still been recognizable, Nanwei had been wiped clean like a black slate. The mandarin’s palace rose graceful and alone.

They landed: a hundred soldiers and two artillery pieces which kept the roofs and windows under rapid fire, while the crew of the Mãe de Deus opened fire on the gate. To one side Farria waited with a column ready to charge. But after one salvo the gates flew open.

A horde of armed men, howling, and limbs convulsed, charged out of the gateway at the troops who had landed. Few reached their goal; in a few minutes the river bank was strewn with bloody corpses and pig-tailed heads. Then there was silence. A mighty gong sounded within the palace. Farria knew what was coming and withdrew a little.

The gate now spewed out more and more warriors and finally, amid a host of cavalry, the mandarin appeared in a chariot, wearing many-coloured war robes and wielding a huge broadsword.

Farria gave orders for the mandarin to be spared in the charge. And in the space of a prayer it was over. Again bodies covered the ground, in the distance scattered horsemen fled and the mandarin sat in his chariot, the horses of which had been shot.

Farria approached and placed the point of his sword on his breast, but met the resistance of metal. A sombre suspicion arose in him. He ripped the robes away with his blade and encountered an obsolete breastplate.

Farria recognized it. He himself had not seen the departure of Perez, the first ambassador to Beijing. All that was known was that he had been murdered en route.

Farria ordered the Chinese to take off the sullied armour. The mandarin pointed to the circle that had formed around them and Farria, deliberately misunderstanding, motioned to four soldiers who to the sound of loud cheers made the other man crawl from his stolen carapace. Shivering, the high lieutenant stood with his naked flabby upper body exposed to the scorn of the foreign devils. Farria drove him to the river and ordered him to clean the armour from his touch, washing and scrubbing it. Then he summoned his executioner, a huge Manchu, who, his eyes bulging with delight, tortured and dispatched his distinguished victim in exemplary fashion. In addition, a new ceremony took place.

Farria raised the now gleaming breastplate aloft, and the rays of the sun gave it new lustre. He swore, “I shall build a cathedral in my new city. This armour shall be the only relic. It shall not be ousted by any saint’s bones. The cathedral will also defend the fort and city from attack and siege. The breastplate shall hang from the groined vault in the nave of the church.”

For the executioner had done his work and the body of Nanwei’s lord hung from the gate beam of his palace.

IV

FAR TO THE SOUTH, in a lonely region, although no more than two days’ journey from Canton with its millions, a small uninhabited peninsula juts into the sea. In a circle of rocks on the strip of land there stands amid the boulders a rough redwood shrine, sparingly gilded. No elegant statues or perfumed censers. In an alcove is a crude stone statue of a sea monster, whose gaping jaws snap at the peaceful face of the goddess. From the roof beams hang rough wooden junks and sampans. On the steps in front of the altar are dried fish.

It is the shrine of A Ma O, the goddess of typhoons. Only fishermen and pirates honour her.

On the furthermost tip of the peninsula there is another stone. That is all that has been built by human hands here. No one remembers which tribe gave the goddess her sanctuary and sacrificial altar. The stone actually bears the name and date of its foundation. It is a padrão, a memorial stone, like many that commemorate a first landing on the coasts of Africa and Malabar, but like no other in China. And this is not only a memorial to exploration, but a tombstone. It reads: Here landed Joaquim Ferreio with the Padre and the Tejo. AD 1527.

He had a very modest aim in mind: to dry his cargo, which had become wet from the swamping seas, in the sun. Spices and textiles were spread out on the flat dry beach, next to a few tents occupied by himself and his men, while his ships were refitted.

One morning hordes of Chinese warriors surrounded the tents. And an envoy came to demand a thousand pieces of gold for the violation of their soil, which must not be trodden on by a foreigner with big eyes and long curls. Ferreio paid and left with his still half-damp cargo and hastily readied ships. He knew perfectly well that if he stayed the following day another mandarin would demand twice as much, hence wiping out the entire profit of his disastrous voyage.

He had a padrão hastily constructed, recording his stay on this bleak coast. The Chinese left it intact, fearing the spirit inhabiting the stone.

For twelve years the rough monument stood alone on the lonely spit of land.

Then again a ship was stranded there, whose only cargo was ten or so Jesuits on a mission to Beijing. They also had damage to repair, caused by their dysentery. Three of them died there and were buried around the padrão, covered by crude tombstones.

And the place was given a wide berth.

In this way there was from an early date a spot in the forbidden kingdom that belonged to Portugal, through its dead — before Farria sailed in and landed there to found the city he wished to hold and strengthen, against the Chinese and for the Portuguese.

It seemed as if he would achieve this secret aim, since the city had an impregnable location; at the narrowest point of the peninsula a small fort and three hundred men were sufficient to keep thousands in check. From the side it was protected by groups of islands and sandbanks.

He built a few forts and warehouses — churches came of their own accord.

The ships came and went in ever growing numbers: Macao lay halfway between Malacca and Japan on a protected anchorage, whereas Lian Po had been exposed to the stormy side of the Straits of Formosa. But Farria died as he was beginning to feel in a strong position, and Macao remained, even in the times of weakness and decline, almost alone: o mais leal, loyal to the King, even when there was no longer any king or any Portugal.

Neither Pinto nor Farria took revenge. And the way in which someone else later did so is nowadays seen not as revenge but as endorsement.

CHAPTER 1

I. Lisbon, August 15…

GOD KNOWS I avoided her as far as I could, but the King doesn’t know that. It might have been better if he had. Nor does he know that it was his own fault that the unforgivable happened. She is intended for the Infante, and though I loved her, my blood did not rebel at the prospect. The Infante is, like so many kings’ sons, someone whom one can meet, even be on intimate terms with, without being changed in the least by the experience. It’s as though they are state institutions, not people. She whom I call Diana could marry him, share his throne and bed, bear his children and yet remain Diana.

And what about me? We were to experience intense passions, she was to be swept from one emotion into another, and after a few years I would no longer love her, since she would no longer be the woman I now call Diana and always shall, not only not to betray her name but also because in that case I no longer need describe her to myself, or torture myself by freeing her from my heart where she lives, interwoven with the darkest secret core of my being in a helpless attempt to bring her to life in my words, which may be able to embrace worlds and seas, but not her essence.

Let me remind myself once more what her life would have been. A retreat to the desolate estate where she slowly changed into a sluggish woman, deprived of all attraction by motherhood and daily cohabitation; I on the other hand consumed by the longing for distant lands that I could not reach, and bearing my resentment against her in silence.

But who can overcome their desire with reason? Only those in whom it is like a fleeting spring wind. In me it was as scorching and constant as the trade wind. I did fight, though.

The struggle between renunciation and desire made my voice falter, my eyes wander and my attitude dither whenever I met her. She would turn away full of anger and boredom, and the eyes of the Infante and his royal father would shine with triumph.

Then I considered the moment opportune and went to the King to ask to be given a ship.

“Later, when you have more of the conqueror about you than now, I may be able to appoint you.”

He no longer feared my rivalry with his son. I turned away with a bow, hiding my rage at the royal provocation.

Very well. We shall not save that attitude for overseas, but shall adopt it here. It was Your Majesty’s will.

Now, in order to win her again, I was forced to fight with a weapon that I was proficient in but preferred not to use.

Diana was infected by the fashion that had reached us from Italy (the proverb says “the wind from Spain brings no good”, but I wanted us to add “and that from Italy nothing but ill”): she wrote poems and wanted others to write poems for her. What is poetry to a people that has better things to do than struggle with a recalcitrant metre, that for centuries has been crammed together on a narrow strip of land, has fought the violence of Moors, Spaniards and seas, whose language through a strange freak of nature happens to be melodious enough already, and is even called the language of flowers!

That women, who have nothing to do but weave, should alternate this with embroidering on the cloth of language, in imitation of others of their sex at the countless Italian courts, is all well and good. But that men should also participate in such vanity when there are still so many countries to conquer, to discover, and the Moors are still nestling just across the water, is worse.

Diana, then, presided over a literary court in her own summer mansion of Santa Clara. To be in favour there one had to read verses.

It is true that I had never opened my mouth (except to yawn or to answer the questions she put) and yet her big green eyes were often focused on me. I admired her from afar — she was beautiful, a true princess — and disdained the doggerel-writing suitors surrounding her. Now that I wished to approach her, I had to join in the fashion, mustered my knowledge of poetry, acquired in the years on my father’s deserted estate where reading, writing and hunting were the only recreations, and wrote a sonnet and a few redondilhas.*

These I took to Santa Clara on the Thursday afternoon following the King’s refusal.

My announcement that I would also read verses caused a stir. With sarcastic haste the sycophants surrounding her made ample room on both sides, but Diana remained serious and focused her gaze on me. I acted as if I were speaking to her alone, and in the silence I could not hear my own voice. I could tell from her eyes what was happening: she admired the sonnet, but was struck by the bold haste and shameless tumult of the redondilhas, so well was my feeling expressed in them for her alone, hidden from all others. The others muttered applause, despite themselves; only she did not speak, but an hour later walked with me in the courtyard of Santa Clara. There was a narrow, bright moon, but the daylight still persisted under the leaves of the avenues. Her eyes were light, soft as the moon, her nearness like the sun, her bosom the softest and most exalted thing on earth.

Never since the encounter with my love had I felt the presence of the feminine so powerfully. I no longer thought of mythology, although I spoke of Endymion and Diana, no longer thought of her high and my low rank. We were like the first beings in the rediscovered magic garden, though we walked on side by side calmly and with dignity, for from the window, we knew, the jealous world stared down at us; for an hour we were Luís and Diana.

And for that one hour…

No, my chain of disasters began after this hour but did not issue from it. It began with my birth. For over my first hour on earth hung the most malevolent signs in the heavenly constellations, and not a single good fairy was on hand to lighten my destiny. And this love was one more thing that imposed its arduous demands on me.

On the following occasions I came without verses — we did not go into the garden but stood together in the window alcove. The other men and women avoided us automatically while we were together.

A few weeks later the Infante went pale and Diana’s eyes shone when I moved towards her. Had she once despised me for my hesitation? Misunderstood? I forget what I said to her, and perhaps the words were of little importance, but the sound must have been right. I constantly fascinated her. The Infante, on the other hand, did nothing but stutter, blush and laugh, to the amusement of both of us.

Now my conquest in this forbidden field achieved what my goodwill had not been able to. If I had been a man versed in the ways of that world, instead of a country boy, I would have realized that sooner.

One afternoon I was standing in the window alcove with Diana; the Infante, in the centre of the room, was talking in a bitter, absent-minded tone with his chamberlain. An elderly lady-in-waiting, standing at the door, tried obstinately and in vain to catch his eye. She was disturbed in that endeavour when the door suddenly opened. A page came to fetch me. The King summoned me. I followed the page.

“We can now grant your wish. The Estrella is ready to sail. There are soldiers on board; you are too young for the command of a warship, but with a competent captain to advise you can certainly lead a troop. Are you ready?”

I pretended to reflect, with head and knees bent.

“Well?” snapped the monarch, betraying his tense mood.

I did not reply till I was fully prepared.

“I thank Your Majesty for your attention and favour. I still do not possess the virtues that some time ago you considered indispensable for a command. Moreover, an important matter detains me.”

I paused for a moment, peeped upwards from my bent position and saw the anger rising in the monarch’s face, impelled by my boldness.

“If you mean that you…” He could not continue.

“It is because of my father. He feels his time is near and summons me to settle the inheritance. I must therefore most humbly ask your permission to leave the court. My father may soon die, and I am his only heir.”

“Your father’s suffering may also continue for a long while yet.”

“In that case I am the only one whom he would want to be at his sickbed for any length of time.”

I lied quite consciously. My father did not have a moment’s peace when I was with him. The King knew that as well as I did, but officially fathers and sons love each other. I went on, since the King remained speechless:

“I therefore ask Your Majesty’s permission again to leave the court. On Monday a vessel is sailing up the Tagus, which will take me most of the way.”

“Of course you may go. Assure your father of my royal affection. And what afterwards?”

He made a gesture which meant more or less: “When your father is dead and life on an impoverished estate bores you?…”

The Infante must have been very afraid of my competition.

“…Then I request your permission to acquire the virtues of a courtier and commander in your proximity.”

“One of them you will never be. The other you are already by virtue of your birth. You may go. I give you leave to take part in tomorrow’s hunt. When you return another ship will be ready, though I don’t know if there will be a detachment of soldiers for you then. But you can be sure of a letter of recommendation for the viceroy of Goa.”

So I had been honourably banished from Portugal, with a reprieve because of my father’s illness. The audience was at an end. I made to kiss the King’s hand, but his face went purple, and all he managed to say was “Go… away!”, pointing convulsively at the door.

I could not sort things out in my mind. Was this a victory or a defeat? Had I achieved what I most wanted: the chance to travel to distant countries, or thrown away what I most loved? In any case I had the proof that I was feared. What joy it was to needle, provoke the hated, supercilious tyrant, till the blood in his brain burst out of its vessels here and there, destroying the tissue, damaging his mediocre intelligence even more!

I did not like Portugal, though it was the land of my birth. The country is monotonous and melancholy, and so is life there. There is no flourish or panache as in Italy and France, and my fatherland is inferior in everything save navigation. But it was still painful to see how this uncouth monarch with his coarse mind and misshapen body sucked it dry and drove it to its downfall, had everything in his power, used everything for his own profit: agriculture, industry, navigation. In gluttony and greed he was matched only by prelates and pirates.

In the evening I drank with the pages on guard, and then I went to my room. I felt light-hearted and thought only of the hunt. Diana was to go too. I would give her a sign and preceded by a fleeing deer she would stray down to where I was waiting. Then, afterwards…

The light shone through a chink in the window, through a bottle of wine, onto the black table, across my hands lying there, separately, as if they alone knew what was going to happen with the rest of this life. The change had begun. Soon the luxurious court robes would be exchanged for cumbersome armour. These hands would change, I would have to forget, unlearn many things: how to turn the head of a lady of the court with just looks, how to show one’s rival one’s contempt, put him in the shade and with a well-chosen last word cause him to disappear for days from court circles. Forget Portugal, the little country whose border one can reach in three days. And I knew nothing of the Eastern Hemisphere that awaited me; I as yet knew nothing except vague tales and the pungent smell of spices. Would it be as wonderful as I thought? I remembered how I pictured Lisbon, as a city of golden palaces, sunny feast days and silver nights. It’s certainly a beautiful city, no less, but certainly no more.

It grew lighter and became gloomier again. In the light of morning a smile from Diana struck me as more desirable than a voyage around the world. But it was too late. I had played the dangerous game of two great vital interests, betting blindly, playing boldly, and too late I realized that I was losing what I should have fought desperately for and winning what was less close to my heart. Suddenly all my thoughts again turned to the hunt. I would pursue her like a deer, until she could flee no more, until she begged for mercy. I already knew where it would be: at the spring where the drinking animals break the reed stalks and where people do not venture, fearful of water spirits that raise their mist-shrouded arms and pull intruders down into the depths till they drown. And I would be with her when she feared the worst.

* An intricate verse form at which the young Camões excelled, with seven-line stanzas of between five and seven syllables, and an abbaacc rhyme scheme.

II

BUT WHEN CAMÕES SAW DIANA in the hunting party, seated unattainably on horseback, he suddenly knew that she was not the game that he could hunt, but that he would be the fugitive, even though he fled to the other end of the world. Cautiously he edged his horse closer to hers and asked her if she would stray away from the company and come to the spring of fairies and ghosts. She agreed. For a long time he sat waiting on a fallen tree trunk, half in the lake, scooping up water with his hat. Finally the noise of breaking branches, the deer escaped from the trees and shortly afterward Diana rode her horse to where he sat; she placed her foot in his folded hands and descended to him.

In the evening she returned to the hunt alone, she did not talk of a sprained ankle or a misleading path and no one asked her. She never alluded to this day in a letter, and it never became a page in the chronicles, as did many days on which something less important happened, when a city was burnt to the ground or a battle was won. No confessor later betrayed it in his memoirs. The walls of the convent to which she consigned her body, abandoned by Camões and denied to the Infante, do not hold the echo which only centuries later returns the words whispered to their stones.

After that Camões abandoned love songs, forcing himself to obey the strict measures of the crude poem that transformed plundering expeditions into feats of heroism. Only in the depths of misery, while seated on a scorched rock by the Red Sea, did he lament the fact that he had lost, and had wilfully turned his back on happiness. — Perhaps Os Lusíadas was only written in order to throw up a word here and there among the innumerable stanzas, just as the long wide waves throw up a few planks from which a shipwrecked mariner later builds a house on distant coasts. But no one has ever collected those words: Os Lusíadas has gone on existing like the convent, as a remnant of fame; behind the joints, through the cracks and splits one does not glimpse the sweet and painful life walled up in it.

III

PATIENT AS A DEAD MAN, I sat waiting on the deck of the boat that was to take me upstream. It was a gloomy day. The myriad colours of Lisbon were blotted out by a mist found only extremely rarely round the mouth of the Tagus. It was a slow business. Time after time a few people or a few barrels would cross the gangplank — but suddenly a wide stretch of water was flowing between the river and the shore. I saw a horseman ride off; I knew his face: a courier whose duty it was to report that I had safely left. But who was to prevent me from jumping in the water and regaining the shore in a few strokes! I did not do it, though it would have been easy. Little did I know that I was later to make that leap to swim across a distance a thousand times greater, no longer to save my soul, but my skin, and a piece of paper.

When I looked up again the city was a distant panorama; only the Belem watchtower protruded in front of and above the houses. Again I drifted off: the days after the hunt were a basalt coast that I swam along, and tried to round in order to discover where my life had fractured, but I could not reach the site of the break.

Above my head sails were being raised. I heard iron scraping over wood, ropes creaking, canvas flapping. And then:

“Art thou heavy laden beneath thy sorrow, my son? Come unto me all ye whose hearts are weighed down. That was said for all and also for you. God has sent me, relieve your mind of its burden.”

I remained sitting there and tried to guess the face from the voice. It was unctuous and rotund, with a drawling intonation. I expected wrinkles, a red nose and watery eyes and my rancour was not abated when I saw I was mistaken. He was a young Dominican with a youthful, blushing face and small, short-sighted eyes behind spectacles: one of those herd animals that are lured by the security of one black habit a year and good food three times a day, filling the seminaries and besides the meals chewing over a few dogmas, and later always ready to spew them out over anyone who comes within range and appears to be their inferior in faith.

I did not move. Taking this to be humility, he continued, raising his voice:

“God has sent me!” And coming closer to me, “Desist from your errors before it is too late!”

I smelt the odour of sweat in my nose and this made me get up and reply:

“It’s no accident that an order should have been established for associating with the nobility, whose members may be pure in heart but are definitely pure in body and have well-manicured hands. Are you one of them? How long is it since you took a bath?”

That seemed to do the trick. He shrank back, muttered something about the Evil One and about the body that must be neglected, and crossed himself repeatedly. That afternoon I saw him in animated conversation with a couple of merchants; all day long I saw him walking up and down, now with one person, now with another. I was convinced he was setting them against me, but it left me cold. I had a cabin to myself, but at night still slept in a boat on the aft deck. I paid no attention to the other passengers; yet it didn’t escape me that some of them cast venomous glances in my direction. At night I saw the stars, in daytime the barren banks passing by. On the second night too I was in my favourite spot: the boat hanging under the poop deck; I was woken by steps pacing up and down and by a conversation, alternating with long silences. To my astonishment I heard the dominant voice in this conversation several times mention the King’s name with bitterness, which was answered with grunts of agreement by the other.

“…Keeping all tributes for himself, exploiting the colonies, squandering everything on wars and debauchery, letting his subjects perish on exhausted soil; he gives no chance to men of enterprise. I offered to cede a third of the profits to the state, but I wasn’t allowed to fit out a ship; why should he make do with a third? I tried to argue that twenty times more ships could sail to distant lands than the state could fit out, that it would make it possible to dismiss many thieving officials and that in that way he would be better able to withstand the attacks of the English and the Spanish, which were becoming increasingly shameless, since a free merchant is not a weak protégé but a powerful ally. That was my case, but his ears were under his crown and his sense was in his imperial orb.”

Again a growl of approval. I liked this conversation exceedingly, and climbed out of the boat onto the deck. The two merchants, caught in the act, saw me as a courtier who would denounce them to the King. The one who had been silent made a feeble effort to save the other:

“Forgive him, my Lord. He’s generally a good citizen, but he’s suffered heavy losses and drunk too much tonight.”

I said nothing.

“Forgive him. If you happen to have debts with the Jews…”

I shook my head.

“If you want to run some up, we’ll settle them.”

I wanted to deal carefully with the power I had acquired over these two people; the power I had had over the King for an instant, I had squandered too quickly; it also amazed me that the old man, who at court was governed by drink, his confessor and his sons, could close off whole seas and forbid ship owners to fit out ships; I was also amazed that two men experienced in commerce allowed themselves to be so driven by fear and did not simply deny what I, as an individual, accused them of. When I was young I didn’t yet know the power of the nobility, and when I later came to know it, I had lost my noble status. So I decided to dismiss one and question the other.

“So let him go and rest and sleep off the drink. I’ll deal with him tomorrow.”

The guilty man tried to say something, but his friend pushed him and off he went, forgetting to totter. I asked the other man:

“Why can’t you put to sea? The mouth of the Tagus isn’t barred with chains, is it?”

“We have no crew, my lord.”

“But I’ve often heard the King complaining about the widespread desertion in the army and the fleet.”

The merchant continued to give evasive answers, but when I promised him that I would not bring his name into it, he told me that trade with the overseas possessions, ships, everything, was the property of the King, that his councillors set the prices, and that all ships were searched to make sure those on board were not trading for themselves. It was made almost impossible for ordinary citizens to go into commerce. In Portugal a merchant was on almost the same level as a Moor or a Jew. I listened to him with great satisfaction. The spirit of resistance would grow, and collecting beneath the throne like an explosive gas would hurl it into the air and smash it to pieces.

“If you yourself or your father have influence,” the merchant concluded, “use it for the good of trade and hence of the fatherland.”

I laughed to myself. That was how they all talked, the priests about their church, the officers about the army and the merchants about their trade: as if it were the most sacred thing on earth. I thanked him for his information.

“You friend will come to no harm. The only penance I ask is that tomorrow he knocks the priest over and empties a bucket of water over him.”

The merchant looked at me in dismay and again raised the question of any debts I might have.

“Quite the contrary; that sweaty friar owes me and that’s how I want it settled. A little fresh water won’t do him any harm; he doesn’t see nearly enough of it.”

The next morning those on board were delighted by a totally unexpected occurrence. A good-natured merchant went up to an unsuspecting priest reading his breviary, grabbed a bucket and emptied it over the priest’s head. The cassock clung to his body, and he stood there as a laughing stock for all and sundry.

And in the afternoon the ship reached Abrantes, from where it was another six hours’ ride to the castle. I’d left it two years ago.

Night had almost fallen when I rode into the grounds. The trees and their shadows formed a single black mass, while the swans slept in the pond. Around it stood white silent figures: they were the gods and goddess I used to pelt with stones; I hated them because they represented virtues and commandments. From my earliest youth I had resisted the culture that they tried to teach me and that threatened to permeate me from all sides. I had a presentiment that they would make me ponderous and long-suffering and chain me to the places where it thrives, scattered across the world. Thus my lot, of roaming the earth light and carefree, would be reduced by bitterness to homesickness; after love I feared this power the most. Christianity never had a hold on me; I knew from too early an age the cruelties the Saracens underwent at the hands of these “meek” believers; in this way until I was sixteen I remained a boy who refused to go to church, who laughed in the face of his confessor, threw stones at the altar boys and pulled up flowers in the park. At night I often lowered myself from my window, roamed through the woods and strangled many a startled creature with my bare hands.

One autumn day it rained in torrents. I couldn’t be stuck indoors and took shelter in a summerhouse on the edge of the grounds. There was a book lying in it. I sat there all through that rainy day, but paid no attention to it. Finally I opened it, mocking myself. The poem swept me along and to my surprise I experienced a rapture that lightened the darkness again. I had acquired an Achilles’ heel, one I kept hidden and from which I hoped I would recover, but I went on reading and finally started writing, in utter secrecy, at night; during the day I refused to believe it myself. I had the same hatred for paintings and sculptures, and my father was deeply saddened by my barbaric attitude.

One afternoon, when I was again sitting in the summerhouse reading the Odyssey, I felt his hand on my head; I looked into his face: there was a happy expression on it.

“I’m reading this because it’s about faraway countries, and for no other reason.”

But his face retained the same expression; he took a few sheets out of his pocket and I recognized my own writing. I pushed him away in fury, jumped up and fled. I stayed in the wood all day like a wild cat, swearing I would never write again. However, a week later I started composing after all. I tried to console myself: a sculptor or a painter can’t travel freely; they have to toil away in a studio, but surely I, despite my weakness, could wander at will; a piece of paper, a scrap of tree bark if need be, can be found anywhere, if one can’t help writing. But I knew that this was just sophistry, that anyone afflicted with this malady always yearns for places where one’s fatherland is an intellectual one: Paris, Rome, Ravenna. Without this affliction I would have found my homeland everywhere, both at sea and in the desert, now I would be an exile everywhere, especially in my own country.

This fragment of my youth came into my mind as I rode through the grounds, past the silent statues that were now standing unmolested on their lawns and beneath their foliage.

IV

HIS FATHER WAS SITTING in his armchair in the entrance hall. He got up, not disguising the fact that it was an effort, embraced his son, then held him at arm’s length and praised his appearance in choice terms, but received only a surly reply.

A table had been laid for the two of them in the high-ceilinged, echoing dining room. Judith was not there. In reply to Luis’s question his father said that she was staying with her parents.

“So does that mean there’s another bastard on the way?”

He nodded, without looking up. They ate. Now and then the father asked about life at court, about an acquaintance, about the King, and then enquired hesitantly whether his poem had progressed. This was a sign for Luis to kick back his chair and burst into a flood of curses at the demon that still tormented and rendered him completely unfit for action.

“Why was I surrounded by statues since childhood, graceful and silent, as if that were the attitude one should take to life? Why so many paintings on the wall, so that it seemed to me that they were the windows, giving a view of a world where everything was beautiful and harmonious and near at hand, making it unnecessary to travel dangerous roads! If only you’d brought me up in the woods with an axe and double-edged hunting knife for my toys and the fleeing game as my target, then I’d have become efficient and decisive! As it is, I’ve done nothing but ponder and my deeds were badly aimed shots at a vaguely glimpsed reality.”

Luís drank a mouthful of wine, and old Camões surveyed him with silent sadness.

“I never forced you to write poems, though I was happy when I found them.”

“But you ambushed me with the Odyssey in the summerhouse! And I knew Homer was the blind man with a staff hanging in the entrance hall, I knew that he described distant journeys. That’s why I wanted to read it, and when I read it I was transported far away and wanted to try to achieve that myself, because I wasn’t yet allowed to travel. But it cheated my wanderlust and rocked me to sleep. Now I’m twenty and have never left Portugal.”

“Do you want to travel to Italy and Greece then?”

“No, never ever! If I do, I’ll be addicted for good.”

“Why do you want to leave? We have a large castle and extensive possessions. And the mountains are not far away. Why don’t you stay here and continue with your poetry? Do you think victories that eventually turn to defeats, commercial ventures that produce first profit, then loss are more illustrious? And all that travel will teach you nothing except that the earth is the same everywhere. Why not try to emulate Homer instead? Portugal will be forgotten and our name will live on.”

“What does it matter to me what happens to my name later? I’m living now and want the world! Anyway, I no longer have any choice. In a month’s time I must board ship. I’ve been exiled.”

“Exiled!” cried the old man. “Now I’ve only a year left to live? Don’t go! Hide here!”

“In six months’ time I’ll be in Goa. Now that I can’t have the woman I want, I want to forget everything, my homeland, my origins, but especially antiquity, poems and that woman.”

“Who is she? Tell me! You shall have her if I have to travel there myself.”

“Can you give me the woman who will shortly be Queen of Portugal? The King won’t survive his next stroke; the Infante will marry soon, since he is afraid she will be abducted.”

The father slumped back into his chair; Luís went into the garden.

He stayed a few more days. Little more was said; the father suffered, but no longer complained. When they parted he hung a reliquary round his son’s neck and tucked a book in his saddle bag. Luís returned to Lisbon on a narrow river barge, having chosen it so as to be the only passenger and not to have to share the deck with priests and merchants. Once the craft had rounded the bend, he tossed the reliquary into the river. He leafed through the book for a while. It was the first temptation of his youth; he hesitated, but finally let this souvenir too be carried away by the current.

CHAPTER 2

I. Macao, in the year of Our Lord 15…

IT WAS THE HOTTEST MONTH of the year. The town lay motionless beneath the shimmering sky, in the courtyard the birds sat dazed in the hedges, the dead goldfishes floated on the pond and the leaves shrivelled and fell, as if it were autumn and still hot. The crickets made a commotion as if they were being grilled alive. In the office of the Procurador, the Attorney General, the wide fans hanging from the roof beams were moved faster and faster, without creating a cooling draught.

The Procurador was sitting at the table with his head in his hands. His doublet was hanging from his chair; he was constantly wiping his forehead, rendered higher by his receding hairline and beaded with sweat. He wasn’t working; he was waiting too expectantly for the message from the look-out tower that the Malacca fleet, on which they were relying for the necessary weapons, provisions and lamp oil, was finally arriving, already a month late.

To add to his irritation it had been decided that his old enemy Pedro Velho, the merchant who controlled the Japan trade, was to be installed as a senator in the next session. They were opposed to each other in everything. Campos wanted to continue to use force against the Chinese, Velho preferred to use intrigue and bribery. Velho wanted to secede from Malacca, which had too much control over his Japan trade. When reminded of Macao’s motto, Não Hà Outra Mais Leal (None More Loyal), he replied that if Macao immediately became a direct vassal of the King, that would be all the more true. He constantly pointed out that Malacca was more aware of its rights than its obligations with regard to Macao. Hence the late arrival of the fleet always pleased him. Actually Campos was hoping that the fleet had been delayed by storms or had been attacked and had not set sail late from Malacca, and then he would be able to shut Velho’s rebellious mouth.

There was a loud knock. Once more filled with hope, he called out for the visitor to enter, but saw at once that it was the weekly complaint of the mandarin of Huangshan. The attendant brought him the rolled parchment.

“Has the eye of the barbarians, by the Emperor’s decree under-mandarin of Sian-fu, yet again been unable to prevent two honourable merchants from Huangshan from being abused and imprisoned? We demand their release and compensation of a thousand taels.”

This was the purport of the flowery circumlocutions on the roll. Campos summoned the treasurer. “Pay the sum!” he ordered, sighing as he did so that these humiliations and extortion were undermining the law and emptying the coffers.

Semedo, the oldest subordinate official in Macao, was announced. Campos swiftly donned his doublet and received him, complaining about the fleet and the extortion. Semedo pointed through the window at the Ilha Verde, visible through the line of trees along the Praia.

“There is the answer. Properly cultivated, it can produce fruit, vegetables, table wine, cooking oil, everything, and then we won’t need Chinese usurers any more.”

“Don’t keep giving me the same old story!” cried Campos angrily. “I can’t teach soldiers to plant cabbages! And what Portuguese peasant is going to be induced to leave home to come and work on a Chinese island? If you can’t let go of the idea, then write a memorandum and then I’ll at least have a couple of years’ peace. And now don’t let anyone else in, except the messenger from Guia, should he arrive.”

As soon as Semedo had closed the door, he threw off his heavy doublet again and poured himself a drink of wine from a large earthenware jug that had retained some coolness. He sighed at a small pleasure amid these major afflictions. But again the door opened. “The messenger, at last!” He turned round. A tall, thin monk was standing in the middle of the room and stretching out an arm towards him.

“Who let you in?”

“I come and go as God sees fit. I ask you in the name of God: when will you finally have the church built to accommodate the faithful, and when the seminary that will produce our missionaries?”

Campos was furious at having been caught without a doublet by this brown habit.

“Never!” he replied. “We have enough churches here: there’s one in every street, and I’m constantly tripping over processions. No more churches, singing or processions. The Chinese laugh at psalms.”

“Remember the last words of Saint Xaverius: China will be conquered not by the sword but by the word.”

“They don’t understand the word.”

“Please give us a church. The Jesuits have twelve, and we Dominicans, who have more followers, only two.”

“How often have I told you that I don’t want any Dominicans here? Jesuits are enough for me. But you go on squabbling with each other, compete, stir things up, all the better! In that way you will lose prestige and wipe yourselves out. No church, no monastery, no chapel, nothing more, but you can have the Ilha Verde, not to fill the churches, but to cultivate it. Didn’t the Dominicans always excel at agriculture? Provide the colony with grain and vegetables, and afterwards supply spiritual nutrition.”

“Your Grace should consider that we must devote all our strength to ploughing the hardened spirit of the Chinese.”

But Campos’s patience was exhausted. He got up and was about to push the troublesome Dominican through the door, when it flew open and Capitão Ronquilho entered and burst out laughing at the sight of the Procurador with bare arms and the imploring Belchior with wide, hanging sleeves confronting each other.

“Give him his church now, Excellency! He’ll never stop. Soon he’ll be serenading you with the choir begging for that church. That would be even more of a nuisance.”

Belchior shot a flaming glance at the soldier and at the governor, and hurried out, but turned on the threshold.

“I shall excommunicate you if you do not bow to God’s will!”

“There’ll be no excommunicating here. The Pope gave the Jesuits the sole right and we are the supreme authority here. You’re troublemakers and fanatics, you and your whole order! I’ll excommunicate you! You must leave the colony within the month. Head off further into China. Off you go! Off you go!”

The Dominican disappeared, leaving him panting and cursing. Ronquilho looked down at him with good-natured mockery, crossed his arms over his braid-covered chest, glanced in the mirror at the back of the room, which showed him the image of a heavily built, well-dressed officer, born to conquer both fortresses and women. He stretched, as he was fond of doing, to feel his muscles flexing. His face wore a peevish expression, but he was good-hearted and kind when he got his way — and he always did — which filled him with satisfaction of a more spiritual kind. What he was like when he did not get his way, he had yet to experience.

He now felt obliged to cheer up the sulking Procurador and, going up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder.

“No need to get angry with those priests. You know very well that their only weapon is talking big. Give him ten escudos for the poor every time he comes, which he has to accept. He’ll be bound to feel insulted at the paltriness of the gift and leave.”

“That Dominican isn’t the only one. I could handle that irritation. No, there’s much more.”

He clenched his fists and again thought of Pedro Velho, his enemy, whom he had to swear in, of the unceasing Chinese extortion, of the fleet that was late, his daughter who no longer obeyed him, which brought him back to the man in front of him. He motioned him towards a chair and asked him:

“Did you see Pilar this morning?”

Now the capitão’s unwrinkled brow also frowned.

“Yes, I saw her. This morning I went to pay my respects, hoping for a favourable glance, one word that would give me courage. But I found her kneeling before Nossa Senhora da Penha; she didn’t even look up. ‘May I come back after a hundred credos, Pilar?’ I asked her. ‘No,’ she said hastily and hoarsely, ‘I have to change.’ She said no more; I found her so strange and pale, blushing violently and with sparkling eyes as if she had been up all night praying. I left and had to drink three glasses of muscatel, to banish the sad thought that I shall never be closer to her.”

Now it was Campos’s turn to console.

“Patience! She’s still young. What is seventeen? Don’t dismiss your concubine yet; I swear she’ll be yours before she’s nineteen.”

In this way they tried to allay each other’s concerns, the father and the suitor of the young lady, both of whom imagined she was in a silent women’s chamber, with scarcely a thought in her head, albeit praying, but inhabiting a world to which they had no access.

II

THEY WENT HOME together, the Procurador in his palanquin, the capitão riding alongside on a small but noble and powerfully built Burmese horse. Everywhere the people of Macao stopped and greeted them respectfully. But in the new Rua Central it was their turn to stop and bow. The rearguard of the procession, whose beginning was now barring their way here, was moving from the open door of the cathedral in the square a hundred metres higher up. Cursing under their breath, they backed against the wall but soon a door opened, and an old man invited them in. They dismounted and saw the procession passing from the semi-darkness of a cool patio, both angry at having to wait and burdened by a premonition, and glad that they were not visible, could keep their hats on and could enjoy a cool drink which the old man soon sent them.

In the bright sunlit street, crossed only by the short narrow shadows of the trees, the procession passed. At the front were the Chinese converts, in their blue robes, with candles, followed by older Christians: Negroes in white choir surplices, against which their black faces and white bulging eyes stood out strangely. The latter, at the peak of ecstasy, walked along twitching and banging their sticks on the uneven pavements. Then there were little Japanese girls with woolly lambs and crudely embroidered texts between them. After a gap, surrounded by his brown monks, beneath a high canopy, came Belchior, the host in the golden box resting on his raised hands. The bells rang, booming and unrelenting. Around the corner of the street came Christ, in a short tunic, dragging the cross, barefoot, with a bleeding head. The bells stopped. All kneeled in the sudden silence. A softly sung lament became audible. From an open church door Veronica, in a red robe with her neck bared, came down into the street, went up to Jesus, jammed the crown of thorns onto her own head, tore off her veil and wiped the sweat and blood from the suffering face. A double cry rang out from a closed house: “Pilar! Come here!”—but no one heard. All were immersed in prayer, all eyes were focused on the broken figure pulling the cross over the hard cobbles and on the young girl bringing him a last consolation. They passed, another line of monks followed and four trumpeting angels brought up the rear.

Campos and Ronquilho did not know which of them had stopped the other from charging in and pulling Dona Pilar from the clutches of the monks and into the house. A jealousy more overpowering than sexual envy made them clutch at their throats and then at the window bars, to support their bodies. Rage at the divine rapture in which they had no part and which had shone so powerfully from Veronica’s eyes paralysed them. Only when the procession had passed did they come to themselves. The father identified with the suffering of the suitor he wanted as his son.

“Tonight there’s a meeting of the senate. Go to her, make her yours, abduct her, do what you will. Those monks…” He could not go on.

Ronquilho shook his hand in silence, for the first time apprehensive at the thought of a night-time assault in which he would have no need to combat any dangers of the kind he was used to. The voice of their old, unexpected host startled them. He was one of the first free-thinkers in Macao, one of the few Galicians to come out. The Procurador thanked him politely for his support when temporal power was forced to yield to ecclesiastical and expressed his regret that he could not stay longer. The litter and the horse pulled up outside. They continued on their way, both weighed down by the same concern and Campos by many others besides, envious of Ronquilho. Their tasks were very different. While Ronquilho was going to carry off a woman he loved, who might still hate him but would one day be his, he had to invest an enemy for whom he felt a deadly hatred with an office that would give him yet more power to realize his plans.

III

THE POPULATION OF MACAO was thronging the streets this lunchtime. There were Portuguese, Malays, Japanese women, black slaves, Chinese servants, soldiers and many monks. All gave way respectfully to the litter, taking off their hats, bowing or squatting by the side of the road, depending on their national custom. The Procurador scarcely saw them, and Ronquilho turned into a side street, while the other man went on brooding about Velho who wanted to do everything with money and persuasion, wanted to bribe the viceroy of Canton, bribe the pirates, unconcerned about their prestige, provided trade could continue uninterrupted. As if that trade could sustain itself unsupported! As if a strong, impregnable Macao would not have the highest trading value! He was alone at lunch and so sent for his daughter. She chose not to leave her room. She did not open up in response to his knocking, and the door remained bolted. He went into the garden, and her figure retreated from the window to the back of the room, so that he could just see her red dress and black faldetta. This reminded him of the procession, to which he, the Procurador, had to give way, while his daughter, before his very eyes, wiped the sweat from the face of one of the Dominicans dressed as Christ. That sweat was the only real thing about that hypocrite! He charged back upstairs and pounded on the door.

“Pilar! Will you take off that fancy-dress costume and let your father in?”

There was not a sound from inside.

“Pilar! Are you my daughter or a bigot who consorts with priests?”

Now there came faint silvery lute music, mocking his brash words.

“If you don’t do as I say, I’ll have my soldiers break the door down!”

The sound of the lute died away.

“Wait a moment then, Father, until I’ve changed the dress that annoys you so much for another.”

“I’ll wait.”

A moment later the door opened, Campos forced his way in, went straight to the wash-basin and gasping for breath poured himself a glass of water. His daughter was sitting at the window in a simple house dress.

“Who gave you permission to take part in processions? I’ve known for a long time that you don’t love your father, but I forbid you to consort in public with his enemies.”

“I had a vision, Father. The Malacca fleet has been lost.”

She did not mention that she had seen more: a man who swam away from a wreck and struggled to reach a black coast. She kept seeing one hand sticking out of the water, even during the intervals when his head disappeared in the waves, and in that hand he held a rod or a roll, she couldn’t tell which.

“I don’t give any credence to your visions. I know only too well which greenhouse they were grown in. In a month’s time you’ll marry Ronquilho, and then they’ll dry up. You’ll hate me at first. Well, you hate me anyway, so that won’t change anything. But once you have children, you’ll be grateful to me.”

For a moment Pilar felt as if she saw the coarse Ronquilho and the man she had glimpsed half in a dream fighting over her; then she looked at her father.

“I’d like to have children. But I shall never allow my body to be used to continue the inferior Ronquilho dynasty.”

“So from what exalted dynasty was your yellow mother descended?”

“From one that existed when Portugal was still a Moorish province and its inhabitants slaves of the Muslims.”

Campos had to restrain himself. He supported himself with his hands on the table, and the thin rosewood top creaked. He didn’t fit into this room; it was as if a bull had charged into a lily garden. But soon his colour returned to normal, a smile that exuded a sense of power curled his lips, and he went slowly over to her.

“Don’t touch me. You accuse me of consorting with the Dominicans. You’re the one who forces me to seek protection, and I may yet end up doing what I don’t want to do: entering a convent.”

“In that case from now on you are the prisoner of your father and of the highest authority in Macao, that of the Procurador.”

He left the room and screamed an order. Pilar heard the shuffling step of two servants.

“You’re under guard!” shouted the Procurador as he went downstairs. She moved to the window: there was already a soldier on guard by the olive tree. Dispirited, she sank down onto the hard window sill.

After a few hours she crept to the door, but it was immediately pushed shut again. Standing out against the dark wood she again saw, more clearly this time, the face of this night: in one part of the sea, closed off by a layer of cloud lashed by driving rain as in a clash between an army of dwarves and an army of giants, a large ship reeled and sank, stern last. Then the man leapt off and swam through the raging waters, hand still in the air, toward the steep black coast. And now she saw further: a rolling yellow beach in the foreground suddenly slid beneath the swimmer, who lay there motionless; then the clouds obscured everything, the door suddenly opened and struck her on the forehead. She leapt back and went back towards the window, while a servant brought in a dish. She did not look round and the servant, imagining himself unobserved, calmly picked up a silver clasp lying by a table leg.

Campos could not rest after his meal that afternoon. He went on debating whether he had behaved too harshly or too indulgently with his daughter.

“Don’t startle the bird too much, or it will fly away,” he muttered. “Is there no chance of her escaping?” He determined to post sentries at the gate too, but still feared the power of the priests. He got into his litter earlier than usual. Close to the Senate building the clatter of hooves startled him out of his reflections, he was dropped abruptly to the ground and among the bewildered bearers he saw a horse and on it Ronquilho.

“What has got into you, running me down in the middle of the street?” Campos climbed with difficulty out of the lopsided litter, blinking at the sun and at Ronquilho, trembling with annoyance. Ronquilho dismounted, had his horse led away and pulled the Procurador along; after his opening words Campos listed in rapt attention.

“At lunch I was drinking a bottle of green wine from an old supply with Alvarez and Brandão. Alvarez, who has a sensitive throat, pushed his goblet away, saying: ‘This is like the wine that Velho will be given at his last supper.’”

“Well, what’s that got to do with me?” the Procurador interjected.

“As much as you want. Don’t you want to make it a matter of life and death tonight at his installation?”

They went on talking. When they reached the Senate building, Ronquilho leapt back on his horse and rode down a steep cross street. Campos went through the gate, deeply bowed, as if what he had just heard had been the last straw.

CHAPTER 3

I

PEDRO VELHO WAS bigger and calmer than his fellow-countrymen. He had been born north of the River Minho and was one of the few to set sail from Porto. His appearance seemed to have served as a model for the warning posted above one of the gates of Canton: None may enter here who has a red face, blue eyes, blond hair and a beard. Velho, the great merchant, had these characteristics in a very pronounced form. Yet he of all people was one of the few to have passed through this gate, the only one to have seen the great Guangxi, the first to have recognized Marco Polo in the temple of six hundred great spirits, in one of the huge bronze statues. The other Portuguese wanted to make up in courage and cruelty for what they lacked in number, but if they were perhaps superior in bravery, they were far inferior to their adversaries in cruelty. Velho was the only one who really understood that force of arms and heroics did not impress the Heavenly Ones, but rather filled them with contempt. He knew the only weapon: gifts, given in such a way that accepting them seemed like a favour. He used this weapon in masterly fashion; he never gave too much, never too little, sensing how much honour was due to the governor, how much to a mandarin, a priest, a spy. As a result Velho controlled a large part of the silk and tea imports and the whole of the food supply and had become the richest and most powerful man in Macao. But his power and wealth were based solely on his relations with the Chinese. His compatriots hated him: his fellow guild members out of envy, the officers because he wanted to sideline them, and the clergy because he scoffed at the rivalry between the orders and with his lavish gifts to charity put the lustre of church charity in the shade and made its paltriness look ridiculous. He had long been barred from all offices, before being reluctantly admitted. Finally he had to become a senator. They could no longer do without him now that food supplies to the colony were becoming more problematic, the Chinese again and again closed the warehouses and only Velho’s influence could make them open.

Now he was sitting at the corner window of his study, a roomy chamber with six windows facing the sea. This enabled him to see both the harbour and the Ilha Verde on the far side, the highest cathedral, São Paulo from one corner window, and the Monte citadel from the other. This gave him a constantly changing view as he moved easily about the large room in his flowered silk robe, a gift from the same governor of Guangdong who had once threatened to lay waste to Macao. He was sneered at for this housecoat. All the Portuguese kept their uncomfortable and heavy clothes; Velho shrouded his heavy bulk in the loose silk material, worked harder and paid no attention to the mockery. In this garb he received everyone who came to his consultation meeting, from the most lowly Chinese merchant to the Ouvidor, to ask his advice on how to appease some enraged mandarin. Then Velho would sit back at his table, throw his arms in the air, so that the wide sleeves fell back and revealed his fleshiness. Then he waxed eloquent and indicated in what way the favour of the angry one could be regained. The Procurador was irritated beyond measure by his practices, which were considered humiliating for royal power.

Once, when Velho had given a princely dowry to a poor coloured girl, the Procurador came to criticize his liberality to yellow-skinned Chinese and lack of commitment to the homeland.

“If you had put your wealth at the army’s disposal, Macao would long since have been independent, free of these humiliating measures, your trade would be free, since we might have occupied Guangdong, and more.” The eyes of the old soldier sparkled. “Didn’t Alexander conquer a worldwide empire with a small army?”

Velho laughed and placed his hand on a map. He pointed to a dot in the Heavenly Kingdom and somewhere far away a small patch.

“That is us.”

Then, passing his hand over almost the whole of Asia, he said:

“And this is them. Three centuries ago Genghis Khan came to conquer the whole of Europe. It was defenceless, but he disdained to take it. He was right. A few castles of renegade knights and a few squabbling towns, are those the spoils of war? And now you want to take the greatest empire on earth with a few banners? And I’m supposed to give you my hard-earned money for the purpose? No.”

Campos had departed in fury and wanted to indict him. But he could not formulate an indictment without making himself look ridiculous, so none was issued.

Now, tonight, Velho was to be installed as a member of the Senate. No one came to congratulate him. Respected in public life, but shunned socially, he remained indoors in solitude. A pair of freed Malay slaves and a girl presented to him by the mandarin made up his silent family. He surrounded himself with bronze statues, porcelain and lacquered screens, which were considered ugly by whites at that time. He dealt with his memories like a father with his large family: they came to keep him company in the evenings and made him laugh or stare gloomily ahead. This one often returned:

Long ago an aged apostle had spent his last days with him. The man had worked for twelve years in Shansi and brought about countless conversions, including among the higher class, and even among writers. Finally he had tried to attack the last bulwark of paganism: ancestor worship. He soon realized their growing resentment of him, even among his best friends. At the same time an order had arrived from Beijing that no other order besides the Jesuits would in future be allowed within the borders of the country. One evening, as he was passing a temple, he was seized, tied up, thrown into a junk, transferred to a Spanish vessel at sea and deposited half-dead in Macao. There were not yet any Dominicans in the town at that time, as the Jesuits believed that their zealotry would be the undoing of their mission. He had had a letter of recommendation from Schaal to Velho, but had lost it. Velho did, it is true, take pity on him, but had endless conversations with him, in late evening and early morning. Still, he was always able to conceal his exhaustion. Once they spoke about death, and Velho announced that he would like to know his death in advance.

“I’d prepare myself, settle my affairs, divide my fortune and apart from that base my thoughts on the best safe conducts for the other country, the Bhagavad Gita and the Analects of Confucius.”

The old missionary, looking at him sadly, punished him for straying from the true path.

“You shall know your death in advance. When the wine you drink tastes as bitter as gall and as sour as vinegar your end will be nigh. And then there will be only one consolation for you: the Gospel. All the rest is vain, heathen speculation.”

Velho was about to demonstrate the splendour of the Indian doctrine of salvation, when he heard coughing. He looked round: the commander of the fort was standing at the door to the chamber. Velho had heard nothing, but the man said he had been announced and started talking about a delivery of food to the garrison. Velho dealt with the matter and the monk withdrew. That night he reflected fearfully on the fulfilment of his wish; he determined to ask for a revocation the following morning, but the monk had died that same night, long since worn out by the torture and deprivation, and perhaps also by the nocturnal conversations, in which he had to take a firm stand and defend his faith against the wide-ranging attacks of Velho, whose weapons were quotations from the whole of Oriental philosophy.

For a while Velho renounced the pleasures of wine, but then had it tasted before he drank and was soon drinking again as he always had, sometimes with a vague uneasiness at the first draught, but finally convinced that just as water could not really be turned into wine, the wine on his lips could not turn to vinegar.

II

RONQUILHO COULD NOT wait for evening. From the ramparts of the citadel he kept looking through his telescope at the house. Just as dusk was starting to fall he saw the Procurador leave home; he waited for a further half-hour and then set out. In the Rua do Bom Jesus he tied up his horse in a deserted garden and continued on foot.

The back gate was open. He went from the mild evening light into the chilly twilight; the densely planted and rather overgrown garden was full of shadows, and between the wall and the trees it was completely dark. After searching for a while he found the narrow path that led to the back of the house; it was silent and deserted, and most windows were closed, except for the three of Dona Pilar’s room on the third floor.

Ronquilho saw that there was a ladder standing against the tree, as if the fruit had been picked that afternoon. Tonight the supreme fruit would be picked, he thought, as he climbed the ladder leaning against the olive tree, glad that things were being made so easy for his heavy frame. He reached the branch opposite the balcony. There stood Pilar; he could not move a muscle, or she would see him. He waited like that, sitting on the branch, his foot on the top rung of the ladder. And Pilar simply remained on the balcony, staring into the evening sky. His limbs began to hurt and stiffen from the enforced period of sitting, pressed against the dark branch, and the longer he saw Pilar standing there, the more unattainable she appeared to him. He almost rejected his abduction plan. It had seemed so easy: putting Pilar, half resisting, half helpless with surprise in his arms, into a litter, taking her on board the lorcha of his friend Ramirez, raising anchor and in a gondola voyage across the bay claiming what he longed for by entreaty or by force. Or better: entering the room, standing by her bed and simply, as if it had long since been decided, taking her in his arms and not allowing her to come to her senses until the irrevocable had happened. But how was he to enter so softly and naturally? His limbs were becoming stiffer, his blood had cooled and in his heavy, damp clothing he felt more like a pathetic bandit than a triumphant lover.

Suddenly she looked up, and he tucked his head in, but Pilar, with a last look at the evening sky, went into the room. This was the moment. He slid laboriously along the branch he had chosen over the balcony; as the tip was already bending he was just able to grasp the railings of the balustrade, but could not make his way upwards without a din. When he reached the balcony the room was dark, and he could make out only a bouquet of white flowers on the table. He wriggled his way inside and immediately fell full length on the carpet in a pool of water and fragments of the vases over which he had tripped.

He got up hurriedly, but heard a key turn in the lock and a short laugh. He leapt back to the balcony, but the big branch had broken off. No way out! Desperate and suddenly dog-tired, he threw himself on the bed, but immediately got up again: to lie there alone was a disgrace that caused the blood to rush to his face. He still felt Pilar’s presence everywhere, in the robes that hung around him, in the mirror where she had looked at herself so much, in the flowers on the table.

He banged his fist on the table. Yet another vase smashed on the carpet; the confusion in the room was an indictment of him; he tied silk blankets, dresses, sheets together, did not estimate the distance but lowered himself down and found himself hanging by two sleeves over twenty feet above the ground. He let go, landed with a thump, and was able to hobble away groaning with an injured ankle to where his horse was tethered. There he hoisted himself into the saddle, realizing that she would be far away by now, and had perhaps sought sanctuary in the Dominican monastery. But she wasn’t as safe or invisible there as she thought. He knew of the Procurador’s hatred of the Dominicans, since that very morning he had witnessed the fury of Campos at the impudent Belchior. They would clean out that wasps’ nest, smoke it out if necessary. He rode back to the citadel at a jog, and had to be carried up the steps; he ordered wine and bread and told them to leave him alone, and then bandaged his ankle himself. The pain became more intense. He sat there thinking, more and more convinced that Pilar had fled to the monastery. He drank lots of wine. If they were able to banish the Dominicans, the monastery would be pulled down. Tao Hsao, the viceroy of Canton, still kept threatening to starve the colony out, the traditional, endlessly applied method, if the seminaries and the monasteries, which he saw as disguised forts, were not demolished. Why should they not do that right away? He imagined how the outer walls would be demolished, then the main building, and how Pilar would appear, surrounded by nuns. He imagined how he would grab her; he held her tight, but it was the jug of wine; he sank back, and the wine flowed over his boots onto the floor.

III

CAMPOS CREPT CAUTIOUSLY upstairs and stopped outside the door. He listened; not a sound. He debated with himself for a moment whether to enter, but when he went in, he would appear to be complicit. All he could see through the keyhole was a fallen vase in the faint moonlight. He went back downstairs, stared into a grey garden and saw the snapped-off branch. So Ronquilho had got in, he could set his mind at rest: their alliance had been sealed, and together they would subdue the merchants. Who had founded this city, a merchant or a priest? No, a soldier. Campos again thought of his favourite story: the triumph of Alexander. But in those days the merchants were fighting men and the Jesuits hadn’t yet been invented. So both groups must be wiped out, at all costs and using any means, as both of them, in their own way, taught. Then, once they were rid of them, a reign of terror along the Chinese coast, an advance with a force of ten thousand, straight to Beijing. It was as if he could hear what Farria had said on his deathbed: “Don’t admit any priests, or merchants, otherwise Macao will soon be burnt, like Lian Po, or slowly consumed by strife. Farmers and soldiers, no one else. A royal monopoly of trade. Portugal is too far away, they are too slow in sending reinforcements. Then you can found a kingdom of your own.”

These words, like all the adventures of the old pioneer, had become one with Campos’s being; sometimes he felt Farria living on in him, but mostly, oppressed by the usual slow progress of events, he mocked himself for what he called his heroic fantasies.

He slept badly, woke early and waited for Ronquilho, bragging and triumphant, or Pilar, pale and tearful, to appear, but no one came. At six o’clock he crept upstairs again, peered through the keyhole and again saw nothing but overturned furniture. She had put up a fight, had his daughter! They mustn’t think that a woman of his line would surrender like a meek sacrificial lamb. But his impatience became too much for him. He opened the door with his own key: he saw even greater devastation, but an empty bed. Across the window sill ran a colourful strip; he went closer, carefully hauled in the tied blankets and dresses and untied them. But the traces of the heavy weight they had borne could not be erased: everything was twisted and torn. Furiously he kicked everything into a wall cupboard and sent a messenger to the fort. He had had to abduct her, very well, but why in such a crazy way? The stairs creaked, the front door slammed, but surely Ronquilho could be confident that he had removed the servants, or had the romances of chivalry turned his head too?

The messenger returned, mission unaccomplished: the capitão was not available to see anyone. So had he taken her with him to the fort? That was too shameless! Everyone would know how the marriage had been brought about; it did not befit their status! Campos hurried to the fort. It was still early and there was no one in the streets. He would be able to return home with Pilar before the town woke up, as if coming from an early mass.

Ronquilho was lying on the sofa, with a thick bandage round his leg, and received Campos with an angry laugh.

“A failure, the bird has flown, and I was almost caught in the cage.”

“Run away? But why didn’t you wait for me to return home, and then we could have given chase at once?”

“Bear in mind that it’s only a five-minute walk from your house to the Dominican monastery.”

“The monastery? Do you think she’s there?”

“Have you forgotten that masquerade then? Believe me, at the moment Pilar is playing Veronica or Egyptian Mary. Who knows?”

“Then they must surrender her! Paternal authority is higher than the church’s.”

“That would be asking for trouble. The monastery is a recognized place of sanctuary. And hasn’t the father transferred his authority prematurely? Wouldn’t the authority of a father and lieutenant receive a blow harder than that branch received from my boot, from the revelation of this story? No, let’s clear out the whole nest at once, and raze it to the ground. Think of the benefits! We’ll be rid of that brood of Dominicans at last, we’ll embarrass the merchants and we ourselves will bask in the favour of the Chinese.”

“Why?”

“By finding a pretext for the destruction of the monastery.”

“What riddles are these?”

“Listen. The merchant Lou Yat has a son and a daughter who have become devout converts through the Dominicans. They confess, go to church and can already cross themselves, much to the fury of the honourable Lou Yat, who I believe is the deacon of the temple of A Mao. The whole Chinese district is abuzz with the apostasy of his children. Well, today is Tuesday. On Thursday morning he will be found at his counter with his throat cut, and the son and daughter will have disappeared. What will the Chinese authorities think, what will they demand? What will the merchants’ guild not agree to? What will we not do only too gladly to satisfy the mandarins?”

“But won’t we actually find Lou Yat’s children in the monastery?” objected Campos.

“They will never be found. But there will be ex cavations in a monastery garden and children’s bodies will be discovered in an unrecognizable state of decom position and with their eyes gouged out.”

“But that’s going too far!” cried Campos. “That will deal a blow to everyone who calls himself Portuguese.”

“Not to us. Consider the consequences: the clergy driven out, the power of the merchants, who this time cannot hush up the matter with money, curtailed, and the strictly upright Procurador, the armed forces fighting against their own priests for the sake of justice, feared and honoured in every corner of China.”

“But who will carry out the murder of the Lou Yat family, so that we won’t be unmasked as the orchestrators?”

Ronquilho grinned.

“I have three men in my garrison, about whom I know enough to have them strung from the yardarms of all the seafaring powers. They’ll hold their tongues.”

“Won’t they betray us?”

“Never. I myself will run them through in the confusion of the assault on the monastery. The dead tell no tales.”

Campos gave in. He surveyed Ronquilho with respect and remembered in astonishment that only that morning he had called him brave but stupid.

IV

IT WAS THE NIGHT of the Senate session at which Pedro Velho was to be installed. In his suddenly lonely house Campos prepared himself for the onerous task. He had to dress by sparse candlelight.

The fleet from Malacca had still not arrived, so that there was still a shortage of lamp oil. So the vision of Pilar appeared after all to have been a reflection of reality. The house of the Procurador was better lit than any other; many burnt no more than a single candle, but he must not seem to be extravagant. In his mind it was darker still. Still no sign of his daughter, and Lou Yat and his children were still alive. When asked about it, Ronquilho smiled craftily and gave evasive answers. He himself had made a few attempts to unearth some blot or dubious transaction, but Velho was either totally spotless or too smart for them: there was nothing that formed an obstacle to his becoming a senator. This evening would be the ultimate test of whether Velho’s superstition would actually be fatal. If this too failed, he would have suffered a heavy second defeat.

Campos stared out of a window in the back wall: the dark shape of Macao was stacked against the hills. Why hadn’t they drawn on the oil resources of the Ilha Verde? Then they would at least have light. In this darkness a nocturnal attack by pirates or Spaniards could be disastrous. Again Campos remembered the pleas of Farria in the Senate to occupy the Ilha Verde strongly and colonize it. But Campos had always regarded Farria’s pleas as the stubborn thoughts of a patriarch in his dotage, who thought that one could still create colonies as described in the Bible.

Now, in the dark, Campos saw that he had been right in this too. The island was deserted and unsafe. The town was still short of food; by the gate at the neck of the peninsula they had to trade at a market with Chinese from distant Pak Lang, who stayed away when they felt like it or the governor of Canton ordered them to. Because of the constantly late arrival of the fleet from Malacca, Macao had periodic blackouts, and every evening there were fewer lights burning; Guia, whose light was designed to show the fleet the way, held out longest, and if it was no longer possible to light this lamp, great bonfires were burnt at the entrance to the bay. Things had yet not reached that point, but already everyone was going to bed earlier; nightlife was impossible, one could not read, and talking to each other in the dark was too frightening. People went to bed early; in a few months’ time the birth rate in Macao would have risen again, which was the only advantage. It was ten o’clock. A herald went through the street, proceeded by a drum and a wobbly light.

“The Senate of Macao informs residents that lights may be lit only for the sick and dying, that anyone who still has oil must surrender it to the light patrol. Anyone found in possession of oil will be punished with a fine and the stocks.”

Dark windows leered at this announcement that no one heard. Then it became quiet and dark again. Only Guia shone from on high, and the waves hurled themselves languidly at the sea wall of Praia square. The wind blew into a standard on the Senate building, and the material flapped at intervals. The square remained empty until midnight. Figures in long cloaks hurried across it, entered by a side door, descended a staircase and found themselves in the cellar where a few lamps were lit. The flickering light moved the features of the dead man, who lay in the centre on a bier, eyes not yet closed, body under a flag, and a staff in the right arm crossed over the chest. At the head and the foot of the bier stood a man in the same garb. One after another joined the circle, which was completed with twenty-four. Then the man at the head spoke; he looked much older than the man whose funeral was the apparent purpose of the nocturnal gathering. He stretched out his hand over the body, and from his beard too a shadow fell across it and moved along with his address.

“Now you are dead, Pereira, the last of the pioneers, without whose arrival this city on the edge of the known world would not exist, the one that you planted on the ruins of another and the graves of your family. We feel as if the strongest pillar on which our existence rests has broken, as if it is subsiding on one side, as we can feel it wobbling on its foundations. Let each of us try his utmost. Let each of us beg you to let a portion of your strength pass into him.”

He stepped aside. One by one the senators passed by the corpse, placed their hand on Pereira’s heart and said a brief prayer. Then the eldest, Guimares, closed his friend’s eyes and continued:

“We all know that the one who is to take the place of the departed has none of his qualities and yet is as powerful as he, through diametrically opposed qualities. We know that the successor is not esteemed for his chivalrous virtues or for his distinguished origins. But let all consider that the common interest demands that, now he has been elected, he shall be treated as one of us. Magistrate, show in the new senator.”

The Magistrate went outside and returned with a short fat figure whose head was covered by a cloth that had been thrown over it. He led him first around the body, then let go of him and said curtly: “Take the staff from the hands of your predecessor.”

Velho, having been released at the foot end, stood reflectively, as if wanting to feel in silence where he must grope, then took a step forward, suddenly grasped in the right direction and relieved the dead man of the staff. A murmur of surprised approval went through the line. Guimares again gave a short address, once more signalling the difference between the dead man, who was a great warrior, and his successor, who was a great merchant, which could serve as a symbol of changed times. He now asked Velho to exert his great influence for the benefit of the body of which he now formed part.

Velho replied coolly and reticently. Guimares then gave the Magistrate a sign, and the latter lowered a hatch in the wall and the glass of wine that came from the original ship’s store of the Mãe de Deus, which every senator had to empty as an initiation, was ready in the alcove. Velho went over to the niche and drank from the glass, but became deathly pale, staggered, and would have fallen if the Magistrate and a senator had not caught him and put him on a chair.

He was brought a glass of water. He drank and again spat on the ground, and seemed to faint again. They all surrounded him. It was some time before he could speak again.

“My body will soon lie there, and my successor will take the staff from my stiff arm. Don’t waste any time in appointing him. My days are numbered. It was prophesied to me: when the wine you thought was the sweetest tastes like vinegar, the Angel of Death will be at your door. And this wine was bitter as gall.”

Campos replied:

“We hope that fateful coincidence spoilt this wine. Perhaps seawater forced its way into the bottle. In the darkness the servant could not detect the cloudiness of the wine, but if you want to prepare for death, then immediately keep your oath to do as much for the colony as is in your power. We know that you have a great fortune and no children, except your adopted daughter; make your will this very day, assure her of a legacy and bequeath the rest to the colony.”

Velho had come to his senses again and stared straight at him. Finally he spoke:

“I see that you are unconcerned about, indeed hostile towards the kind of man I cannot help being. You won’t have my money. It is safe from your greed. But I shall make my will. Write it down. Velho,” he continued to the Magistrate, “bequeaths his fortune to Macao on the day that it breaks free of the crown of Portugal and becomes a part of the Chinese empire.”

“Do you realize, Velho, that you’re writing another death sentence? If you do not die your own death, we can have you shot as a rebel.”

“It’s all the same to me. You call me a rebel? Am I not expressing the last will of him who is lying here before me, and of the man who first landed here, Farria?”

Campos motioned him to be silent; some wanted to attack him. Order was restored with some difficulty and the following decisions, to be taken in the session, were tabled:

To agree to the request of the Jesuits to deprive the Dominicans of the right of settlement and conversion; to give legal status to the proposal of five senators to declare all donations and bequests made to religious orders null and void and to use the funds for the benefit and strengthening of the colony itself.

Pedro Velho got up.

“Gentlemen, I shall take no part in your work. If I should die, my possessions shall fall neither into your hands, nor into those of the greedy church. If I live, then you will find out who you are dealing with.”

He left the senatorial cellar. Outside it was chilly and dark, and waves of thick fog poured through the streets; it was as if he could already feel the damp shroud on his face.

The following day Velho made preparations to leave Macao. He had rented a large junk and had all his possessions loaded onto it, and made no secret that he was going to live in Canton, which no other foreigner was permitted to do. He would not be able to have his house within the city walls, but would live on one of the islands in the Pearl River.

The inhabitants sent a petition to the Senate asking that Velho be persuaded to stay. They were afraid that trade would move away if other people followed Velho’s example. Many senators preferred to have Velho, though he was hated, in their midst rather than as a neighbour. If he survived he would certainly be of one accord with the Chinese. But a request to stay could not be issued by the Senate after that night.

The senior citizens went themselves. Velho received them, offered them good wine, which he significantly tasted himself in advance, listened to them benevolently and said that he might come back and that it was not certain that he would stay in Canton, and might go further north. But he would probably die soon anyway!

He was to leave next morning; a large junk was lying close to the quay. When it was light, the many people standing waiting on the Praia saw that during the night the junk had been painted black and strewn with white flowers. The author of this lugubrious joke remained a mystery.

Velho arrived on the quay with his household, shrugged his shoulders. The flowers were swept into the water and the junk sailed away, black as it was.

Later they heard that Velho, after just three days in Canton, had sailed further up the Pearl River in a narrow river boat. A week later the junk drifted past the quay, right across the tidal current, and disappeared out to sea. Velho’s absence and mysterious fate remained a threat to Macao. It was difficult too to decide from trading activity whether he was dead or whether his influence would start operating from further inland.

CHAPTER 4

I

IN THE EARLIEST PHASE of the discoveries the ships crept almost unnoticed down the Tagus. Most were manned by criminals, and it was hard to find a low-ranking priest to bless their hulls before they set sail. The kings generally pretended not to know anything about the voyages, though there was one monarch who sailed with them for some distance in disguise. That changed when the first fleets returned with gold and spices; on the quay long stands were erected for the courtiers and the women in their finery; it was like tournaments used to be. It was true that one now only saw the beginning of the contest but it was a much greater and more momentous one: not horses and knights fighting each other, but big brown ships pitted against the Unknown. There was more at stake too: the men were no longer fighting over some matter of honour. The winner could buy a castle or a whole region — that was better than a trophy, a blue flower or the golden grail. And the danger was so much greater; that was especially attractive. Only a few returned, in ships ready to sink, and did not trouble their brides for long with the desires of their premature old age.

But who thought of future wrecks when he saw the splendidly decked-out ships and nobles? The sails were no longer grubby and tattered like great rags, but spotlessly white, with a vermilion-red cross painted on them.

Cardinals in purple robes blessed the ships. Chorales were sung by a thousand voices as they set sail, and continued for an hour after the ships had cast off and were far downstream. The crews of criminals had been replaced by noblemen eager to make their fortune. This did not improve navigation. Da Gama sailed on that first outward voyage as an unknown skipper, but now his surly face bore a more cheerful expression than ever. Later he became Admiral-in-Chief and had to wear a splendid uniform or kiss ladies’ hands, bow to the King, kneel before the Cardinal; then he thought of his incompetent crew, twisted his mouth into shape, but failed to produce a smile, just a grimace of irritation. On the Cape Verde islands those incurably homesick or seasick who, finding themselves on dry land again, refused to go back on board except to return home at the first opportunity were left behind. On São Thomé the ranks were thinned yet further, and there was room to move about the deck — only then did Da Gama feel that the ceremony of farewell had ended and the voyage had begun. At the end of his life the keen interest subsided somewhat, and people became used to the fact that gold came in and noticed that the country did not grow any richer, but if anything poorer. The nobles now knew that fame was not achieved on a pleasure cruise, but on a perilous voyage lasting years. The criminal type of nobleman was best suited to the profession of conqueror. Send-offs were no longer conducted with full pomp and ceremony. The King and court no longer attended. Nor did the Cardinal, but here and there on the half-collapsed stands sat a weeping woman. An ordinary priest in a grey cassock rattled off the prayers and from the quayside sprinkled the brown hulls, most of which would soon submerge in unblessed water, holed below the waterline, riddled with bullets or torn apart by exploding gunpowder. Within a generation the old days had returned. In his old age Da Gama aimed to regain the turbulent calm of the voyages of discovery alone.

Then he was forced to become viceroy of the Indies and to realize before his death that the discoverers had become plunderers, that a global Portuguese empire had not been established, that they had only attacked another global empire, which tolerated the foreigners and the damage they wrought, like the elephant tolerates a troublesome itching rash that it cannot reach, but which apart from that does not disturb its ponderous existence.

Why now, for the departure of Fernando Alvares Cabral with a fleet of five ships, of which only the São Bento rose above the edge of the quay as it sat in the water, was half the court once again present, many prelates in their regalia, the King and the Infante himself? Surely not to show the Spanish envoy they still had ships?

No, the eagerness to set forth, the urge to do great deeds was already declining. Once the despised discoverers had paid homage to the court. Now it was the other way round. The tacit and respectful request was: “Don’t return empty-handed. It’s already becoming difficult to live in the grand style. Don’t settle in the East. Let the fatherland enjoy the riches. Come back.”

But most of them stood indifferently on deck and did not join in the hymns that the canons struck up with trembling voices and the choirboys with shrill ones.

Cabral had bowed to the King, the prelate had sprinkled the holy water over the few who knelt bare-headed, and at the bow they were already casting off.

Then something happened, unexpectedly.

A tall old man — no one knew where he had come from — forced his way through the guard, stood in the open between the ship and the court and uttered — no one understood and everyone listened — a curse that was like a long-awaited storm that finally erupts. All felt themselves under the spell. The sun hung low in the west on a bank of cloud that blocked the mouth of the Tagus. Its shadow, together with that of the Tower of Belem, fell over all of them. The choirs fell silent, he spoke to the ships with his back to the court, so that at first they heard nothing. But the old man, who had begun in a calm and measured fashion, now yelled louder and louder. “…Is there nothing better to do than to convert and exterminate heathens living on the other side of the world? It took you centuries to drive the Moors out of the country, and before you know it they’ll be back. They’re waiting just across the water. They can learn a thing or two here. For centuries they have searched for the philosophers’ stone. In twenty years you have converted the country’s best blood into gold. Who profited by it? Even the court is here as a covert form of begging.”

On the ships there was muttered approval, on the quayside deathly silence.

“Let the English and the Norwegians, who in their own countries are stricken by poverty and damp, sail to the East. This country is fertile and rich, never too cold and never too hot. Da Gama and Albuquerque have mausoleums and statues. They should have been strung up. And so should the first man who raised a sail on a boat and left the coast. Accursed be all who seek the unknown, accursed be Prometheus, accursed be Odysseus.”

Still no one intervened. But on the São Bento a man climbed onto the railings and shouted, “Leave those Ancients in peace, Father. We’re going anyway, because we don’t feel like staying in this country for ever, however beautiful it is.”

Now the spell had been broken, and everyone started talking at once, and the ladies of the court laughed loudly and shrilly.

The old man was no longer the threatening Jeremiah, but a poor, sorely tried man who stood craning his neck at the water’s edge, weeping: “Luís, don’t leave your father, don’t go yet. In a year’s time you’ll be able to sell your ancestral lands and do whatever you want… I’ll be dead by then!”

Soldiers dragged him away.

On board no one admired Luís for his stoicism. A sailor yanked him off the railings.

The manoeuvring began. The officers ordered the men to sing and cast off. But soon the ships were far from the shore, and one could just see the courtiers getting up from the stands and hurriedly making their way home. The quay was empty before they were out of sight, and no one looked back any more.

Only Luís, who had nothing to do, gazed from the stern at the disappearing land. He looked at the Tower of Belem as if it were his father still standing there. False modesty had made him commit a cowardly act. His father would soon die now, Diana would become queen and forget him. He didn’t intend to return like a hero and participate in a feeble comedy at court.

But was that why he had made a clean break with the past?

The birds continued to follow the ship for some way, until the coast was a vague strip of brown. That would soon cease. But it was as if those he was trying to evade were following him, as if he were constantly encountering them on the narrow ship and would soon find it claustrophobic. Was this the broad, liberating horizon that his departure was supposed to bring?

His eyes filled with tears, his thoughts with lines of verse. He hid in his cabin. In order to appease his father, who was still standing in front of him as he had stood there on the quay, at first tall and threatening, then pleading and weak, he began to write, and tried to transform the painful scene into a great prophetic event, but he failed. He could not master difficult stanzas; he lacked the patience. Instead, two lines kept booming through his head:

Though we’ve bid farewell to the land,

all the pain sails with us on board…*

and could get no further with that either.

He went back on deck, which was empty and shiny with moisture in the moonlight; the coasts that he knew slid past deathly pale in the distance. Occasionally a sailor went past without a greeting, pushing him aside if he was in the way. He saw the other ships small, black and deserted on the sea. It was as if these were outcasts like himself, the only silent friends he had left.

Then he realized that they were ships too, where it was even worse than here. Sleep seemed to him all he could still manage to do, but that proved equally difficult.

* Quoted in Schneider, p. 107.

II

THE NEXT MORNING he was back on deck, and the sea was empty. The São Bento was the only ship with a proper complement of sails; the others were not much more than decked-out hulks. Off Mozambique those that were left would rejoin them. So those distant friends too were lost.

Actually he had nothing to complain about: he was sailing on the biggest ship, where the food, for the time being at least, was good, and enjoyed all the rights pertaining to his rank. He sat at the captain’s right hand at table, inspected his standard, which was raised along the railings twice a day, and occupied an airy starboard cabin on the poop deck, in which he spent a great deal of time thinking constantly of the life he had left behind and often regretting it. His longing for the East diminished the closer he got to it.

The rigging of the mizzen mast ran over the railings just in front of his cabin. The twenty parallel taut cables and the thin ratlines between them formed an Aeolian harp. Camões liked listening to their swelling and subsiding song, growling or whistling but unceasing.

The movement of the ship — the large São Bento too was tossed about on the waves — fighting the ever-stronger ocean swell, did not make him seasick, as his fellow-officers secretly hoped. He did dream a lot, though, being unaccustomed to the narrow berth beneath the low ceiling of his cabin.

One morning the Cape Verde islands lay before them — the first landfall that was found on the tentative medieval voyages of discovery, without a compass or a sextant. Now they were the first mooring place on a voyage taking them a hundred times farther. Camões, however, viewed them as if he were already infinitely far removed from the fatherland and here had a last chance to return and escape an impending disaster. He had the same impulse as a few months ago when they had sailed from Lisbon down the Tagus: to let the ship leave without him and jump ashore. Now it was to let the fleet sail without him and disappear into the interior.

They moored for a day at Fogo. He went ashore alone. The town was next to the jetty. He walked straight up a burning-hot slope of rubble, impelled by the desire to see what was behind it. In this way he climbed over a further two ridges and was then able to follow a fold in the terrain, a strip of shade, and finally arrived in a valley, in a rose garden more luxuriant than those in Algarve. He spent the afternoon in this scented solitude, in grottoes of intertwined buds and flowers, thinking the whole time: “It would be best if I killed myself right here.” And when in spite of this he left: “This is the last charming thing I shall see in my life.” He hastily climbed the ridge, and in the falling dusk descended the slope of rubble, hurting his feet.

He half hoped that he would sprain his ankle, and leapt hazardously over the stones. Then he slowly climbed the last ridge, sat down and tried to fall asleep, so that the ship might sail without him. Then he heard voices and two men crept past, Juromena and Margado, both of whom had lived lavishly on board, with a change of costume every day, three lackeys… Camões fled back on board, afraid of his own cowardice.

The ship was far from ready to depart. The heat of the day persisted in the cabin, and the whole night was filled with a rattling din.

He had a dream:

My dignity is diminished; 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 assemble 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. They circle the globe, they fall where I wish — like seed from heaven. So why don’t I feel like a God, but like someone lost and humiliated among the people I must obey?

He woke up. The din of the loading had stopped. He went back to sleep.

The dream kept returning. 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 and manned by beings he had never seen on earth, white, but speaking different languages, and wearing strange, close-fitting robes.

He woke up. Loading was continuing more intensively. Morning was approaching, and they were not yet ready.

Again that dream… Now a host of yellow-skinned people forced their way into the cramped cabin, which was already filling with strange objects, more and more of them, until it was ready to burst. That did not happen, but it was being more and more compressed. Suddenly it was alone on a great empty plateau, and it was as if it were about to explode.

He woke up. The anchor chain was being raised; the men on the capstan sang. Now he fell into dreamless sleep and did not wake up until the ship was out at sea. The rose garden was over there, beyond the grey mountains, scarcely visible any longer above the sea.

The following day the sealed orders were opened in the Admiral’s quarters. First came the regular orders: call in at Mozambique, take fruit on board, and slaves if possible, leave the sick behind. Then there were letters for the Governor of Calico and for the Viceroy in Goa. That was usually all. But now a couple of other documents emerged from the chest. Cabral and the Captain looked displeased, since neither of them liked reading, especially orders. The Admiral read the document, and then gave it to the Captain, but the latter preferred not to strain too much and asked what was in it.

“Things haven’t yet been resolved in Goa, so we’ve got to sail on to Malacca; the stragglers will have to head straight for there from Mozambique.”

“There’s more profit to be made in Malacca than in Goa, where we’ve been for fifty years: Malacca is rich and the population is weak.”

“We’re not staying in Malacca either, we have to move straight on from there to Macao.”

“That’s unheard of, a ship having to sail straight from Lisbon to Macao in one go. Anyway, it’s impossible: we’re fouling too much. In Malacca we’ll have to spend at least a month in dry dock to scrape the hull.”

“Those are the orders. We mustn’t stop for more than a week in Malacca.”

“There’s something behind this; let’s read the last letter, and perhaps that will explain things.” It was an order bearing the royal seal. Cabral appeared to be moved as he read it. He ran his hand over his head, gave it to the Captain and said, “Read it for yourself.”

The Captain laughed and said, “I suspected as much.” But suddenly his laughter dried up. “Of course they want him as far away as possible; that’s why we have made for that godforsaken outpost instead of staying in the right neck of the woods. If we’re not caught in a typhoon, we’ll have to surrender all we’ve got; they’re short of everything there. Then on to Japan empty, back fully laden, and by that time we’ll have been at sea for a year, and none the better for it, except for a bit of freight commission. And all for that outcast. If I were you, I’d leave him behind in Mozambique.”

“That’s not what the orders say.”

“The idea is for him to disappear, the sooner the better.”

Camões was summoned to the saloon. Cabral looked at him pityingly with the letter in his hand.

“This concerns you, Dom Luís. The King wants you to make the voyage as a prisoner, and to serve as a soldier in furthest East Asia.”

Camões stared uncomprehendingly.

“Read it for yourself.” The Admiral handed him the letter. The vengefulness of the King (or the jealousy of the Infante) could be read in the well-formed characters and sober style of the private secretary.

An argument developed about the meaning of “prisoner”. The Admiral wanted Camões to stay in his cabin and be allowed on deck in the evening under guard, while the Captain felt that he should be locked in the hold, and stay there in chains until their arrival. After all, his intended function as a soldier branded him as a common prisoner.

The Admiral asserted his authority. Camões stayed in his cabin as far as Mozambique. He was still able to see this harbour through the porthole.

Four days later the ship stopped, with all its flags at half mast. From the poop deck the body of the Admiral was lowered into the waters of the Indian Ocean, accompanied by the singing of a litany and the thundering of all the ship’s cannon — almost a hundred of them. The very same day Luís de Camões was put at the bottom of the hold in a damp stinking hole prepared for mutineers and thieves. That was how he spent the second half of the voyage. He saw nothing of Goa or Malacca; all he perceived of those harbours was the ship at anchor and the muffled din that penetrated to where he was.

Such was his glorious entry into the East.

While other prisoners made bird cages from fruit stones, and model ships from slivers of wood, he passed the time in fashioning stanzas for the poem he thought he had abandoned for good. Since he saw nothing of the foreign countries, like the other prisoners with improvised tools, he had to make do with mythology to give colour and coherence to his story, and he reluctantly resorted to it. However, he gradually came to enjoy his work, the only thing that helped him through the interminable hours.

The passage from Mozambique to Malacca took almost two months; the winds were not favourable. Two months! Camões gradually forgot that he had ever lived on dry land and been free. It was as if he had squatted in that swaying hold with a crumpled piece of paper on his painful knees, since time immemorial.

III. Ilha Verde

THREE DAYS AFTER we left the roadstead of Malacca I was set free. I blinked at the light, and at first had difficulty in moving, but was not downcast or thoroughly embittered and was resolved to seize my chance, and not grant the King the pleasure of seeing me pine away ignominiously. One day, even if it were many years later, I hoped to return, raised into a new aristocracy by reason of my fortune. I hoped that he would still be on the throne, old, languid and joyless… ravaged by maladies and ruling over an impoverished land, when I appeared before him with my companions. Our scars would be so numerous that there would be no room left for decorations; the triumphs we had left behind us were so great that in comparison Portugal seemed a paltry little country! Soon, after this final visit, paid like prodigal sons, we would embark once more without compunction and with great wealth for the territory we had conquered for ourselves and where, surrounded by luxury and sustained by power, we would die.

But what good was that to me, when I had to climb the mast with my stiff limbs to help with lowering the sails, squaring yards and doing other rough work I had never been trained for?

Prior to my imprisonment the deck and quarters were full of seamen. Those not on duty got in the way of the others. Now there were scarcely enough hands to manoeuvre the ship. Even black slaves had to help. Had disease or desertion taken such a toll that every crewman was precious? One of the ship’s surgeons told me that scurvy in particular had claimed many victims. The new admiral was an energetic man. In order to gain time, we had not stopped off at Madagascar, where fresh meat and vegetables were taken on board for the crossing. Supplies were inadequate. Then came the great epidemic: hundreds of deaths in a few days. Many ships had lost more than half their crews. There was not enough sailcloth to sew the bodies into, no lead shot to weigh down the feet, no time to heave to each time. Every morning there was a clear-up; six sailors who performed the work for double pay, dragged the bodies between-decks and pushed them out through an open gun port. The procession of sharks following the ships grew and grew.

How had he managed to survive down below, where the sun never shone and there was never any fruit with meals? Was there a tacit agreement between disasters who should be struck by them and who not?

In order to keep those who were left healthy, a lemon and a cucumber were handed out every day. I enjoyed these more than I did the choicest foods I used to eat. I relished my freedom — the wind most of all — and refused to be embittered by my exhaustion, my gashed hands, inflamed eyes and gums. I hoped that a storm would set me free in time, for I knew that in Macao I would first be thrown back in prison.

Once, when I was scrubbing the deck, the captain came by. He had grown thin, I noted with satisfaction. I stopped, but did not move aside and looked him in the eye. He made as if to fly at my throat, but thought better of it, spat on the deck and went on. We had both been in mortal danger: he from my eager hands, I from a hemp noose that was always at the ready. His cowardice saved him, and saved my life too.

Since Malacca the weather had stayed calm. The swell was less than on the other side of the archipelago and was often dead calm. The wind was weak but constant. One day we sailed past the coast of Cambodia, and the next day the sea was empty and I knew that the next time a coast came into view my imprisonment would recommence. The weather became ever calmer, the wind gentle and the sea seemed to be stretching in slow, lazy waves and on board people were become more and more anxious that a storm would blow up from this treacherous calm, just before we reached the coast where Macao lay. The longer it remained calm the more frightened we became of encountering a storm before we arrived.

It was Easter. A High Mass was celebrated; the holy banner blessed by the Pope was taken round in procession. Those who wished could kiss the hem of the flag. Most did so, to be on the safe side.

I hung over the railings and saw a distant blue coastline: Hainan. Three more days, if all went well.

The sky was as blue and calm as the coast, apart from some feathery clouds that seemed to be flocking to some meeting place deep below the horizon.

That night the storm arrived. At twelve o’clock when I came off watch it was still calm but also pitch-black and brooding, as if the full moon and a sun that had set in flames had been smothered in the thick layer of clouds and the fire of the celestial bodies was smouldering close to the earth, without flaring up. Almost no one was left in the crew’s quarters, since most people were sleeping on deck or among the cannon, which always retained a little coolness. The terminally ill and dying lay in the bunks and squeaked at me for water when they heard me. I gave them whatever I found, and then collapsed myself, faint with apprehension, oppressed by the premonition that I would soon awake and would then not be able to sleep for a long time. It cannot have been long before I woke and was lying on the boarding that divided the crew’s quarters from the bow. Sick sailors had grabbed hold of me, then that board flooring became the ceiling. We rolled back and the quarters were already half full of water. I grabbed hold of the stairs and did not let go, shook everyone off me and reached the deck bruised, scratched and perhaps infected.

Neither the figurehead nor the crosses helped. Who gave them any thought in a wind that now seemed to come from all directions at once, pressing one’s mouth closed and every object against the deck, now sucked everything up again, as if the atmosphere were escaping this part of the earth?

At first the waves came quite slowly and regularly like rearing mountains, and the ship moved without juddering from peak to trough, sometimes rising steeply, sometimes almost flat on its side. Afterwards it was surrounded by mountains of water that all collapsed at the same time, so that it was constantly under water.

At first I was grateful that this was happening, that I was experiencing this violence, that the ship that had imprisoned me for six months, where I had been robbed of all I possessed, down to my name and my shirt, was being destroyed, but that intoxication of freedom had passed in five minutes and all I did was yearn for peace and quiet: all thought was suspended.

When the storm subsided the coast was still in sight. The wind had dropped again, but the waves were still rising above the hull. At night we saw a wide expanse of flickering light and above it a great steady glow: that was Macao with its lighthouse. I was worried that we would after all find a safe haven. I hid in a corner of the poop deck, and a few survivors were still lying against the railings. But the ship would not see the sight of day. At about four o’clock it was lifted up, smashed against a quay, and fell back; the cannon in the hold rolled from side to side and some discharged. The São Bento sank quickly, sucking down most of those on board with her. Only those who had been able to grab a plank or buoy in time kept their heads above water. I floated on a small barrel, which I had kept ready for some time. It contained a few ship’s biscuits, and also… my work.

Day dawned again, this time over empty waters. The coast was a long way off, the island we had crashed into had disappeared. I was beginning to feel exhausted, since the barrel, in the water, kept revolving and so I was constantly being given a ducking. But the feeling that I wasn’t yet to die in this adventure made me hold on and after a few hours it became clear to me that the waves were impelling me in the direction of the bay. I could now make out the town in the distance, no different from a small Portuguese or Spanish harbour. There were a few ships at anchor, but there were lots of junks of the kind I had seen previously: low bow, high stern, ungainly sails. I regarded the town as a piece of the old country; I would have much preferred a Chinese harbour.

Opposite, partially closing off the bay, was a long island, low-lying at its shore, with a mountainous summit in the middle perhaps fifteen hundred metres high. It looked quite deserted, with small woods here and there — would there be any shelter to be found? Slowly I jerked my rolling barrel towards it, and after endless struggles I reached the beach, half-swimming, half-hanging. I waded towards dry land with my possessions on my shoulders. Ahead of me was undergrowth. I advanced perhaps a hundred metres into it, and could go no further, since sleep overwhelmed me.

I came to in a pale twilight, which quickly grew darker, so that I remained motionless. In the middle of the night I crawled out of the bushes to the beach, but I could see no lights across the water. Was it foggy? Were my eyes misted over? Were they afraid of an attack? Still, it troubled me that the lights were no longer burning. I also felt so weak now that I could scarcely put one foot in front of the other, but I was a prisoner on this island and decided to explore it this very night. There was a little moonlight now. I ate a little of the ship’s biscuit, but however exhausted I was, I seemed to have lost my appetite. I realized that I was ill and was afraid that the sickness would very soon gain the upper hand. My bones hurt, my gums were swollen and bleeding, the taste of blood in my mouth made me feel nauseous. So I set out, staggering along. It was deathly quiet; from the distance came the rush of the sea, completely calm now. I could see no houses anywhere, and could not find a path. I climbed a gentle slope, and from a wood I heard dull lowing. Could there be a house there among the trees?

A young cow was tethered by a rope. I released the animal, but changed my mind just in time, tied it up again and tried to milk it. I remembered with a start that raw milk is the antidote to scurvy: I had almost let my chance of survival escape! The small amount that I was able to swallow — I could scarcely open my mouth any longer — did me good. I made a mental note of where the animal was and continued on my way. I now reached the edge of a field that had been regularly planted. I was not familiar with the crop, but ate it raw and unwashed anyway in my desire to survive, possibly risking a more serious disease.

So I wandered around until a new danger threatened: that of being seen, since it was becoming light. I found a cleft in the rock and spent the day dozing and suffering cramps. Sometimes I peered outside, but never saw a living soul.

The next night the cow had disappeared, but I found a different, better kind of root vegetable and finally chanced upon a house. During the following day, I kept watch on it from the trees. It appeared to be deserted. At night I broke in and found food in earthenware jars, but it was disgusting. Only then did my desperate situation come home to me: my own people would put me in prison, while the Chinese could not understand me, and I could not live on their food. I could not go back to the sea. As I was reflecting on this, I felt a roaring in my ears and collapsed. I tried to get up but could no longer manage to and lay on the bumpy clay floor.

IV

THE CHINESE PEASANTS WHO, returning from harvesting, found the blond barbarian in their home, did not kill him or hand him over. They let him wander at will, did not stop him from picking and eating vegetables, and taking the leftover rice from their bowls. It was impossible to decide from their faces or gestures whether they even saw him. This denial of his existence was even more painful for Camões than enmity or imprisonment. It was as if he had landed on another planet, whose inhabitants, equipped with different senses, were unaware of his presence. There was no way that he could connect, through either laughter or gestures, with this outside world. It was a loneliness more dreadful than that far out at sea or in an icy waste, more oppressive than confinement in the ship’s hold. Still, in the midst of this mental torment his physical strength slowly returned. Driven by instinct, he dragged himself up the slope to the highest point on the island. The hillside was not steep, but he was still so weak that it took him days. On the town side the mountain fell away quite steeply and the summit surveyed the bay and the surroundings. Only now could Luís view the new world.

Despite his wretched state, the wide vista gave him some sense of liberation. All around there were islands in the water, and the mainland could be seen in the distance, while across the bay the town lay on the side of three hills. On the top was the lighthouse, which had continued to blaze above the darkness of the town; on the second hill, in an angular garland, were the ramparts of the citadel; and on the third stood the cathedral with a great cross on its spire. Beneath lay the town, with white, brown and grey buildings and between them many boulders and clumps of trees. Out to sea the junks had swarmed across the water in dense flocks; even when the fishing fleet took refuge in the Tagus from an Atlantic storm, there were not as many masts on view as this.

Below him, on the island, the roofs of the fishermen’s huts stuck up like pointed saddles that had been scattered about; on the beach, pulled up well above the tide line, were the sampans. Luís scanned the line of the coast as far as he could, and at the far end, in a wood, was something that resembled a white roof. This had the same effect on him as a sail on a shipwrecked mariner floating around in the sea: he was determined to make for it, unconcerned whether it belonged to a pirate or a friendly vessel. He descended from the summit and tried to follow the most direct path. But he had to avoid villages and ravines and finally lost his way completely, so that he had to climb back to the summit to find it again; when he descended again he tried to keep on course, but again went astray.

Toward night-time, too tired to go any further or to look for a hiding place, he dug a trench in a ploughed field and covered himself with leaves, too weary and feverish to sleep. Late at night ethereal singing reached his ear from a very long distance away. He sat up to listen; it must be the night wind carrying the sound, as in the intervals of calm it could not be heard. Camões leapt out of the trench, and walked into the wind, stopping when it fell silent, continuing when it was audible again. But it became fainter and fainter, and it also began to rain and grew lighter and he found himself back in the same grey field. The wind had turned; even the wind and rain were conspiring against him. He spent a night in his trench. At night it began again: he pretended not to listen and gnawed a few roots; it became louder, he crawled deeper into his hole, but it continued and finally he lifted his head. There was not a breath of wind, so that the wind could not mislead him; he went cautiously in the direction of the sound, and realized he was walking along the bed of a stream. Suddenly the sound stopped, but he continued to follow the stream and came to a high wall. He felt his way along it, but his hands found no door; suddenly the ground gave way and he found himself knee-deep in the water. He now started exploring the wall in the other direction. Again he finished in the stream, but noticed that it was not becoming any deeper; also, the moon was rising, so that he ventured farther. Finally the wall turned inwards. In the moonlight he could see a small dome, just above the water: a slender arched roof on six thin pillars, between which wound chains of flowers that occasionally twirled in the wind.

With a great effort he hoisted himself into the dome, after which he had to lie still to get his breath back. When he stood up, he saw that his dirty, wet clothes had left the crude outline of his body on the mosaic of the floor. It was as if he suddenly saw his present appearance in a mirror; he tried to wipe away the smudge from the white floor, was unable to and for a moment melancholy overcame his dulled state of mind, before being dispelled by the urge to go on.

An extremely narrow bridge had been built across three or four boulders to the shore, without any railings. Below, the waves were churning around the rocks. He walked unsteadily across and again was met by a wall. In the centre was a barred oval opening, with creepers trailing up the bars, and beyond was the green vista of a garden.

He shook the bars one by one, but they would not budge. Why did he want to go inside, where it might be a prison? After all, there was no more awful prison than the hunger and loneliness of the outside world! He slipped as he was holding the outermost bar; the bars turned, and he tumbled into the garden. The gate closed behind him, branches and bunches of leaves forced him back, and there was scarcely room for him between the wall and the outermost bushes; hitherto unknown scents alarmed him like the presentiment of an existence subject to such severe conditions that he could never live up to them.

CHAPTER 5

I

IF ONE COULD EVOKE DEATH as easily as love by thinking of it, then every night many would go to bed and never rise again. But the body is too powerful: at the slightest movement, the grasping of a gun, the pouring of a few drops into a glass, it rebels and asserts its sluggishness and its attachment to the earth, perhaps most of all when grievously ill. Fortunately the spirit can detach itself, if not immediately for ever, and can cross the river of oblivion, leave suffering behind on the near shore and once back with the body can no longer recognize what it had endured in its company, in its imprisonment.

Especially when one had just crossed an ocean, seeing and smelling nothing but water, sky and rotting wood, and had then been bewildered by a three-day storm and weeks of hunger and wandering. Perhaps among the plants growing round about there were ten deadly poisons. I didn’t pick them.

When I finally got up again, dead leaves and clumps of earth rolled off me, a cloud of insects zoomed into the air and long worms crawled lazily down my legs.

The parasites fled the body that had one foot in the grave but no longer wanted to be a corpse. Between the wall and the trees was a narrow, deep path that could be negotiated only sideways and even then the body had to scrape its way along the wall as if it were blind as a bat. The branches with their thorns and snags tore my ragged clothes to shreds; nettles caused an itching and burning rash on those parts of my skin that had been spared by the mosquitoes.

After this battering I finally found myself in a clearing in the trees that had once been open; dead tree trunks had fallen at right angles across each other, and a dense mesh of thick creepers crossed the space at head height. On the far side an avenue opened up. I struggled through this too. I went down the avenue and stood before a single-storey building, dilapidated but made of stone. It was the hunting lodge where I had had a rendezvous with her. Apart from that I knew nothing. It could be summer or autumn, probably the latter, as I was shivering and was covered in cold dew.

Inside it would be warm and safe from insects, solitary, without people on all sides, without the din I had heard in the island villages, the meaning of which I was ignorant of. The door was closed, but the window at the back was usually open, as it was now. Diana would probably not come here any more. All the better. It had been rebuilt inside, and all the rooms were interconnecting. It was better before, when they all opened onto a courtyard; you know where you are like that, and you can close the door behind you, and escape if you are taken by surprise. No matter: the big rough wooden bed was there; in a jug there was water, green and ill-smelling; it was no good for thirst, but did serve to dab the most inflamed spots.

Trembling hands stripped my body of what tatters were still hanging about me, and a pile of material lay on the ground. Nothing was left of the man who had sailed forth to cover himself in glory, only the bruised, emaciated body. All I had left with which to cover my shame was a deeper, heavier sleep that still lay on me when I woke.

I could not move a muscle. Through the blinds chinks of light, criss-cross and parallel like a trellis, picked out a figure squatting by the wall opposite me staring intently with sparkling green eyes. A smell hung about the room: not incense, but heavier and more pungent…

I lay motionless, for hours, not out of fear of the guard, but for fear of breaching the wall of silence, and tumbling back into an existence I hoped to have done with.

The blind flew open at a sudden gust of wind. In the niche where the statue of St Sebastian had been sat a saint very unlike the emaciated and contorted figures with ascetic limbs and ecstatic, deathly pale, hollow-eyed faces that I had up to now taken for saints. This seemed to be a mockery of my old acquaintances and the situation in which I found myself.

I got up, and saw Sebastian suddenly retreat far into the wall of the room; he seemed to have suffered greatly since I had last seen him, when he had been close to death, which must now lie far behind him. I went up to him: in the past I had had an aversion to him, but now I felt sympathy. He must have felt this, since he responded to me. Yet I was frightened of him, and stretched out my hand, I don’t know whether to greet him or ward him off. It was my own form, seen in a weathered mirror. I turned round; the fat saint was still sitting immovably on a low chair, his fingertips touching but with a belly that flopped over his thighs, and a fat grin around his mouth, as if, making fun of his own saintliness, he had consumed a heavy meal and was already looking forward to the next. The hunting trophies, elk antlers and bear and fox pelts had been removed. A wide painted screen hung down, as far as I could see depicting an old man, bald, with long moustaches, riding on a small horse and holding out a book at the end of a bending stick to two bowing figures on the other side of a purple river: all that could be transmitted to those left behind from his onward-moving life. In the place of the lances and swords hung fans and peacocks’ tails. The ponderous old furniture was replaced by slender and shiny lacquered items, including some whose purpose was incomprehensible to me. One would have to acquire a different bearing and different attitudes to be able to live with them.

Instead of rejoicing that the old world, which had brought nothing but disaster and sadness, had vanished so completely and permanently, I was flooded by an overwhelming melancholy, like the sea flooding a sinking ship, like a second shipwreck.

Only the bed was the same; I could swear to that, and I lay there on it as if on an island, the only survivor of an all-engulfing deluge.

Then, with a shiver, I became aware of my nakedness. I saw clothes lying in front of the bed, hauled them ashore and put them on. They hung about me in wide folds. It was a uniform; the decorations that I had hoped to win before my departure had been attached to the sleeves and shoulders. Was this a mockery? The rough lining chafed my hurt and irritated skin: this robe humiliated me more than anything I could remember; I threw it off in a fury. Rather than wear this I would stay naked all my life. All my life, would that be so much longer? But there was more lying in front of the bed — food. I devoured it. I grabbed for the jug, thinking there might be a few dregs at the bottom, and found myself drinking fresh water.

On the ground there was another item of clothing, a long, wide garment. I put it on and found it tolerable, though I became almost a stranger to myself. Still I kept it on, but lowered myself out of the window to come to myself again in the wood. The plant world at least had not become totally alien.

But now I was beset by heavy unknown perfumes, and kept stumbling over treacherous roots, impeded by the long garment. I wanted to rest, hidden among the trees, but now it was no longer autumn, and it was hot; I sought the shade, but the leaves were smoky hot, the earth seemed to be heated from within and was alive, with armies of ants advancing from all sides, big red ants that bit, while spiders lowered themselves from the branches and the buzzing of the mosquitoes resumed. I fled, running to where there was a clearing, and was suddenly back in front of the gate, yanked at the bars in order to escape hellish torments of this unbearable paradise, though outside I could see nothing but the sea, that other hell. This time the gate did not budge. Again I turned and went into an avenue, but my legs gave way and I stopped as if turned into a tree trunk.

At the end of the avenue, lit beneath the foliage by a shaft of light, stood Diana, like a Madonna in a green niche.

I stalked her like a panther in the wild. She would no longer escape me now, evaporate into a cloud or fade into the wood.

She did not move a muscle; she seemed to be bending intently over something — a flower or a book, what did it matter?

One more leap: she turned round, I stumbled backwards just as fast. It was Diana, but with the slanted eyes of a Chinese woman.

II

PILAR HAD HAD NO MORE SLEEP since her father had left and her door was guarded. She herself watched out for the attack that was bound to come. The man supposed to prevent her flight was asleep, or if not, he was keeping his eyes shut. Gold is a good sedative too. It took a long time, but Pilar also knew a herb that banished sleep. Yet it came as a relief when she finally saw the halberdier leave and a little later saw an ungainly body clambering into the foliage of the tree. She now had a reason to leave her father’s house.

Yet she still dawdled, and suddenly a great calm descended on her. She looked out into the twilight; then she went inside and heard the thud on the balcony, she went into the hall and was able to slip unimpeded past the guard who was sitting against the wall with his knees bent.

Darkness had just fallen, and she passed the walls of the houses. But before she reached the monastery she turned off into the Chinese district; the whole population was out in the street. Whenever she walked through the centre of Macao she was greeted with respect and regarded with disrespect on all sides. Here no one paid any attention to her. She was wearing the clothes that would have angered her father far more than Veronica’s costume. It reminded him that he, a Portuguese, had married a Chinese wife. But she felt comfortable in these wide-fitting silk trousers, the jacket, with her hair combed into a quiff on her forehead.

There was a great commotion in the narrow streets, but it calmed her as if it had been the roar of the sea; it did her good after the silence of being shut up in the house. In the bustle, in the darkness where the light of burning resin flickered, between the filthy overhanging houses, she felt safe and at home. And so she finally found herself at the house of her nursemaid, whom she had not seen for ten years, and who by now must be seventy and was even more wrinkled and grubby than she had been back then. Pilar was received without astonishment, and was given a mat on which she rested for two whole days. But she couldn’t stay. So the nurse’s son, who was as stupid as the hulk he sailed in and the lampreys he fished for, took the woman across the water at night.

Pilar had only a vague memory of there being a garden with dense vegetation, and a little wooden house that her father called a quinta—usually accompanied by an expletive — a bridge and a stone roof over the sea. She was often alone there with her mother. Her mother sat on a mat, drank tea, stared into the distance and paid little attention to her. Sometimes her father was there too, and then they sat on chairs and there were papers and documents strewn everywhere. Her mother said nothing, but just looked at him pityingly, until he got up and went into the garden. Her mother lay down on the mat, Campos wandered round the garden, hacking off branches and trampling on flowers. Then he got drunk.

It was a happy moment for everyone when the sloop came to take him back across to the town. Sometimes they both had to go with him, sometimes her mother would refuse and he would take her under his arm and set her opposite him on a beautiful cushion. But little Pilar screamed and whined; then he would put her under the canopy, and she would walk back unsteadily over the narrow bridge, and sometimes fall into the water and be fished out by the nurse. Amid universal laughter the sloop would then finally row off and they were left behind in peace.

Since she was twelve, since the death of her mother, they had never been back there and always remained, in both the hot and cold seasons, in the sweltering or chilly town. Campos had no nostalgia for the way his wife looked at him with a mixture of contempt and pity, for the strange feeling that came over him when he was alone among the trees, as if they were whispering about him, as if all kinds of eyes were looking at him. No drink or singing helped. He preferred to stay where he was top dog: among his councillors and officers who always agreed with what he said.

Campo never talked of the quinta again. Perhaps he had forgotten all about it. In any case he wouldn’t look for Pilar there, and he couldn’t imagine that, having had as spoilt an upbringing as was possible in a colony, she would be able to live in a neglected country estate that over the years must have turned into a wilderness.

The father and the frustrated lover stared obsessively at the thick walls of the monastery and imagined Pilar, the disobedient fugitive, the object of helpless desire, behind them, engaged in subdued conversation with the fathers, walking in the cloisters. Ronquilho sometimes had the subsequent vision of Pilar in a whitewashed cell, kneeling on a narrow bed above which was a crucifix, and then she undressed and the setting changed: Pilar kneeling at a bench on which he was sitting, with the sword between his knees, its hilt like a cross. His disappointed senses did not conjure up reality: Pilar wandering down silent avenues, moving more freely and gracefully than she had ever done, dressed more airily than he had ever seen her.

To her great astonishment the garden was a tangle and half overgrown, but the wooden house had not been looted, and the effects and furniture, though covered in a thick layer of dust, were undamaged. The nurse was able to tell her that the islanders regarded it as an abandoned temple, and believed her mother’s ghost still went there and that it was inhabited by spirits: they kept hearing voices. Pilar heard them too, but after a few days she realized what it was: the wind whistling through the gaping cracks in the walls and creatures nestling invisibly under the overgrown bushes and tall grass. There were still rumours that she could not explain, but she did not fret about them. She was happier living here than in her father’s house, over which his constant outbursts of rage hung like a lowering storm, where scarcely a day went by without the turmoil attendant on his office spilling over into it. The fisherman brought supplies, and the nurse prepared them; in a few days she had grown used to the Chinese food and ate it as if she had never known any different. It was as if she was growing further apart from her father every day, and closer to her mother.

Autumn was approaching, and the heat was only intense in the middle of the day. In the mornings and evenings she could walk down the cool avenues, dressed as she felt like. She did not ask herself how this was going to end. And why should it end?

The boundaries and direction of her life were not clear to her, as they were to other women. She did know that Chinese women, if they were not infirm, were sold to a man they had usually not seen and had to serve him for the rest of their lives. No man had been proposed as a possible husband except Ronquilho. There seemed to be no one in the whole settlement who met her father’s requirements: this one she did not want, this one she had run from, others she did not know, and so she would not serve, would have no children. At present the future of her existence was as vague to her as the islands and coastlines she could see in the distance: perhaps she would sail past them one day, but probably they would be little different from the ones she knew.

She had an equally vague notion of Portugal, the land where her father and other powerful men and also the Dominicans came from. She had heard that women of quality there lived as they wanted and had their own entertainments, indeed that they could be merciful and accept a man or let him pine for years, as their heart or whim dictated, but she could not understand how that was possible. She could not understand how one could escape men like Ronquilho and her father other than by flight, as she had done; she could not believe there was anywhere where a simple refusal was sufficient to be free of their desires.

She associated with the church because it was all that existed besides the narrow, coarse society of the ruling soldiers. If instead of the Dominican order alone there had been nothing but a commedia dell’arte in Macao, she would of necessity have resorted to it and instead of representing Veronica would have played such stock characters as Genoveva, Melibea or Sigismunda. Cut off from everything, she was now living in a vacuum that would have driven a European woman to despair and soon afterwards to suicide; the Mongol half of her race helped her, and she let time pass without worrying, not caring what direction her earthly existence took. Her body remained alive, was thriving with food and more exercise than before, her eyes had the clouds and the sea to help the days pass, her skin had the cool water, which she could enter at any time undisturbed. Everything is subject to change, the immovable rocks, the sea’s waves lapping unaltered for centuries, just the same as the spiralling leaf and the butterfly that lives for a single day, and how and when she would join them, she did not know; for as long as her body was left in such peace, her soul did not suffer.

The priests had talked about that, but she did not know she had one. She knew that her body had parts that were more tender and more easily aroused than others; she did not long for them to be loved, she wanted to be untouched. She liked looking at herself in the water, but did not touch herself. She never desired anyone else.

Of the Chinese, apart from her mother and the Hao Ting whom she had seen a few times at an audience, she knew only the servants, of the Portuguese only those who ruled by force or lived in prayer and ostensible humility. Neither group had the feelings capable of moving her. But the figures that she did not know, the courtiers and poets and scholars from Lisbon would also have left her cold. She could not understand how one could admire heroes and poets and out of admiration love them. That one could suffer because of unrequited love and as a result be unhappy for years or even a lifetime seemed stranger to her than the complicated ceremonies of a Chinese wedding or funeral.

If she had been told that at the same time as she was living all alone in the overgrown quinta, a strange shipwrecked mariner was wandering around the island, and suffering unspeakably because no one could understand him, no one looked at him or took him in, she would have been astonished and would have felt no pity.

III

IT WAS DIFFERENT when she unexpectedly caught sight of him.

During her stay at the quinta, the nurse noted with secret satisfaction, she was becoming more and more Chinese. She left her hair, which she had combed into a quiff low on her forehead as a disguise in her flight, as it was; she only felt comfortable in the robes that the nurse laid out for her, she made herself up at length and with great care, she had brought no books with her. Her feet, without having been deformed in childhood, were extremely narrow and small. She exchanged only a few words with the nurse, having forgotten her language, and did not sing.

She saw little of the nurse herself. They took turns to keep watch. No unnoticed attack was possible from the mainland side. The area was overgrown and surrounded by rocks; on the ocean side one could spot an approaching craft from a long distance. Usually they looked out from the roof of the house. What would happened if people came to look for them here? There was a well overgrown by creepers, in which she could hide. She could also run away with the nurse to Canton and become fully Chinese, and perhaps find Pedro Velho, further up the Pearl River, and place herself under his protection. Her thoughts were gradually turning in that direction.

Then she found the stranger lying in the unused room in the wooden house. She had stayed up that night, because the moon was so full and she slept badly on moonlit nights and because she liked seeing the waves glisten and surge like a herd of sea animals. She had overlooked him at first.

At first she thought he was dead. He was not breathing. He did not look like the men she knew, but like a supine Jesus, a Cristo jazente, with his protruding ribs, his thin goatee beard and the cadaverous colour and pained features of his face. But she felt that he could not be anything but an escaped prisoner or a deserter from the army.

She left him lying there; she would not wake him for the time being, perhaps never. Tomorrow the stupid fisherman was coming. He could take him with him in his empty sampan and set him down somewhere on a deserted beach, so that he could get on with dying, if he wasn’t dead already. She saw nothing cruel in this: think of all the people you saw die by the wayside, already covered in bluebottles that they could no longer shoo away! Even death was nothing but change.

But when morning came she wanted to see his face again. Now it had a half-resentful, half-attractive expression. He could not be like the others. Now she was curious to see his eyes open too. She put down food and water beside him, so that he could see it when he woke up, and let the boatman leave without him, however much the nurse insisted and pointed to the dangers. She herself didn’t know what she was supposed do with him: he was probably a fugitive and would want to keep hidden and could help them keep watch, but he might also betray them…

She stopped, bent over a flower and picked its petal. When she stood upright again, he was standing in front of her, looking at her at first happily and then reproachfully. Then he burst into a hectic tirade, a torrent of words, half of which she did not understand; though he spoke the words of her father’s language, the sound, the sentences, everything was different. Pilar closed her eyes so as to hear nothing but the voice, so as not to see the battered, emaciated man in front of her, his thin arms sticking out of his robe, the bloodshot eyes, the scab-covered lips open wide. The voice was also hoarse, yet not broken, and even seemed to be speaking contemptuously of everything across the water in Macao and of those who ruled it.

She went on listening. The voice became sad and reproachful again, and finally, because he was repeating himself, she realized that he was talking about her and blaming her for something.

This annoyed her; she laughed loudly, leapt aside among the bushes and observed him through the leaves. He lost his balance, tried to find her, but in vain, put his hand to his head, stamped his foot and suddenly turned. He went down the path, but did not get very far; after a few steps he slowed down, steadied himself on a tree trunk and leant his head against it. Slowly Pilar went towards him and waited patiently until he looked up. She treated him the way a child treats a wounded animal. But he just stood there. She made the branches crack, nudged him, laughed. Finally he looked up again, helpless and silently now, but still with a bitterly reproachful expression.

When he started talking again, Pilar was once more astonished; she had never heard this tone before: her father’s voice was always loud and imperious, Ronquilho’s boastful and shrill, while the monks spoke unctuously and full of devotion as if they were talking missals. But she suddenly realized that the stranger was delirious and had mistaken her for someone else who resembled her but had different eyes, obviously Portuguese. She now tried to calm him, but since she spoke Macao dialect, he had difficulty in understanding her. Still, he eventually allowed her to take him to the room he was occupying. She called the nurse, who knew of a remedy against fever.

The next morning he seemed calmer and Pilar went to see him again. When she opened the door, she had the momentary feeling that she was returning to her own room, from which she had fled. She was about to close the door again, but it was too late: he made straight for her, went down on one knee and took her hand in gratitude. He asked her who she was and for want of a house and a sword put his life at her disposal. She asked him to make himself known first. He did not give his name, but told her that he was a Portuguese nobleman who had fallen out of favour.

“You’re a strange kind of knight to say such things about her face to a woman whom you have known for less than a day: that it would be as beautiful as that of a former lover, if only the position of the eyes were different. I don’t know what you’ve been through in Portugal; perhaps your mind is confused. Anyway, I’ll tell you who I am: Dona Pilar, the daughter of the Procurador of Macao. Because Portuguese women do not venture so far from the fatherland, my father chose his bride from a Chinese family. That is why I have my mother’s eyes. She is dead, and my father wants to force me to marry a man I hate; I have no protectors but the Dominicans and they themselves are open to persecution. So I fled here, in the hope that no one will look for me in this place. The nurse and I take turns watching for an attack. We are tired; you can help us. I think you are also afraid of danger from across the water; keep your eyes open and don’t think of mine. I’m only here to escape from a man and I don’t want anyone else. Don’t keep comparing me with your former sweetheart or with a phantom. Keep watch at night and stay in your room during the day, and then you can stay.”

Camões was left alone, sad at learning of a truth that left no room for any more hope. He stayed in the room, sometimes dizzy as if his life were about to explode and plunge into events that were unconnected with that life. When it was dark the nurse came in, motioned him to follow her and took him to the wall where he was to keep watch. The old woman put wine and fruit down beside him and left him alone. He kept a sharp watch over the bay; though some sails slid past, they never came close. The town was still in darkness, with only a faint beam from the lighthouse. In the middle of the night it was extinguished, and shortly afterwards a fire flared up in the same place on the dark cliffs which stayed alight all night. At sunrise, before he got a clear view of the town, the Chinese woman came to relieve him.

IV

SO IT CONTINUED for many days and nights. Sometimes the moonlight was so clear in his thoughts, so calm that he started writing, but he never got very far, and it was as if Diana and Pilar were looking down mockingly at him from each side. He had kept watch twelve times perhaps — the moon was on the wane — when one night the wind had turned and was blowing from the town to the island. He thought he could hear a commotion; the bonfire had not been lit, but on the other side of the town a wide column of smoke rose up, which gradually turned to flame. Should he warn Pilar? It occurred to him that he might find her with her eyes closed. He walked round the house, saw a faint light and pulled open the closed blinds. Pilar was lying undressed under a mosquito screen but was not asleep; she was not alarmed by his arrival, but got up calmly and wrapped a cloak around her.

“Are they close by?”

“They’re not coming.”

“So why have you disturbed me?”

“There’s a big fire in town.”

Without saying another word she went with him to the shore. At first she saw nothing; had the blaze been extinguished? Camões pointed in the direction of the smoke: at that very moment the fire reappeared and flames flared up. Pilar grabbed his arm.

“It’s the monastery. The Dominicans are being driven out. That must be because of me. Go across and see what’s happening.”

“Must I leave you unprotected then?”

“No one will come tonight and you can be back before morning.”

Camões took the sampan that was moored by the wall and in an hour and a half had crossed the bay; on the way back, with a following wind, it would be quicker. He forced his craft among a huddle of junks, so that it would be hidden, and committed the location to memory; then he climbed ashore. All the streets were empty. He hurried along, sometimes losing his way, but then he saw the smoke and fire rising above the houses again.

The monastery was situated in a wide open square; both wings were on fire, but the central section was still untouched. In front of the heavy locked gate he saw a hole with earth beside it, as if it had been freshly dug. A detachment of troops kept back a throng of ordinary Chinese. Amid the cries of mourning that rose from their midst, he heard the call for revenge and torture. Gradually Camões was able to make out from the conversations of the colonialists around him that the Dominicans had been accused of a murder for ritual purposes; the bodies of two children had been found in the monastery garden, and had been recognized as the children of a Chinese merchant. The people were yelling for revenge. If the Dominicans went unpunished, it would mean the end of the colony. The authorities had put a guard on all approaches to the monastery; tonight it had nevertheless been set on fire, and the rabble were waiting until the Dominicans had been smoked out in order to vent their anger on them. It was doubtful whether the weak guard would suffice to keep them in check.

Camões had carelessly asked a few questions, not realizing that the Portuguese in Macao, four hundred at the time, all knew each other, so that he was bound to call attention to himself. They asked in return who he was, and he did not know what to say; fortunately he was saved by the surging crowd. The fire had also spread to the centre of the monastery and the gate opened. The soldiers formed a double hedge, turning their lances outward against the thronging mass; some were run through and fell with a roar of pain, while the monks came calmly out. The last of them, a tall man with white waving hair, was going to close the gate behind him, as if wanting to protect the monastery for as long as possible, but two men plunged through the cordon and grabbed him.

“Are you going to let my daughter burn to death?” yelled one of them and yanked at his arms.

“She has never been here.”

“So where is she?”

“Safe. God will protect her.”

The soldiers surrounded the monks in a cordon three-deep and escorted them to where three Chinese in the robes of supreme judges were waiting. Ronquilho gave an order: the cordon opened and let the prior through. The Chinese judges seemed to question him briefly. Another order from Ronquilho: the soldiers withdrew and a Chinese force surrounded the monks and took them away.

The Procurador and the Hao Ting had agreed to satisfy the will of the people publicly by transferring them from Portuguese authority into the hands of Chinese justice. For the immediate safety of the monks this seemed preferable, though its effectiveness in saving their lives was doubtful. They would be lucky to die untortured. But Campos had justified himself to his compatriots and would be honoured for his strict justice among the Chinese people. For the second time after all the setbacks he had suffered, he had a good night’s sleep: on both occasions he had eliminated a powerful adversary, and on both occasions the expected booty had eluded him. First Velho, now the Dominicans. But on both occasions his lust for revenge had been satisfied. The monastery was slowly burning down. People were throwing books from one of the windows: the library was saved because Campos hoped to find compromising documents or clues to Pilar’s whereabouts.

As he stood there enjoying the fire, Ronquilho ran in through the gate, although stumbling badly, and disappeared into the monastery. No one expected to see him again, but he seemed to be fireproof, or perhaps his boots and cuirass offered some protection. Smouldering and giving off a pungent stench, he once again stood before Campos.

“She’s not there. They let her burn to death.”

The people gradually retreated back to the alleyways. It was dangerous to hang about for too long and Camões too slunk away, without realizing that he was being followed. Considering whether he should tell Pilar everything or keep back the fact that a man had gone into the burning building for her sake, he reached the place where the junks had been moored. But the junks had set sail. He stared along the empty harbour, and was grabbed from behind without having a chance to resist. He allowed himself to be carried off: he was beginning to resign himself to his fate, which henceforth would consist of nothing but transferring from one prison to another.

CHAPTER 6

IN THE AUTUMN OF 19… I was living half sick and completely destitute in a room on the top floor of a village hotel. If the shipwreck on the Trafalgar had not intervened, I could have remained all my life what I was: a radio operator, that is, a creature neither fish nor fowl, sailor nor landlubber, officer nor subordinate. I was not satisfied with my life that was no life, where you feel like a human toadstool if you spend all your time in a clammy, stinking cabin hunched on a worn-out office chair. But I was resigned to the fact that it would be like this to the end of my days or until my pension, from which even a frugal, sober man, such as I have become over those years of sedentary wandering, cannot live on shore, unless it be in some place of exile. Everything had remained as it was. My days were divided into a six-hour watch of listening, sometimes drowsily, sometimes intently, and six hours of dull, restless sleep.

The moments of rest and pleasure were the long nights’ sleep ashore, from early in the morning till late in the evening, and a visit to a brothel about once every three months.

No, this was not the good life.

But is that of a poor farmer in an Irish village, between the Atlantic on one side and the boggy meadows of the Emerald Isle on the other, any better?

In that lonely village my family and two others in turn formed a separate community, and within it I was alone. What had I, half grown, in common with my parents, frugal with words and miserly with kisses, with my brother, a born farm labourer, or my sisters, one of whom became pregnant by one of the other clan at the age of sixteen and no longer associated with us, the other dry and skinny, a milkmaid who did not look like a woman with her man’s gait and massive, raw red hands? Perhaps I would have been accepted by the others on my return from thirty years at sea and not despised as a member of the black jellyfish. Yes, that’s what they called my family and the two others. All of us had black hair and eyes, and were short and thick-set.

We weren’t Irish. We were the last scions of the accursed Celtic race that had lived here before the birth of Christ, said the parson. No, descendants of shipwrecked mariners from the Armada, said the schoolmaster, that is, cowards who had not fought, but had fled right around Scotland, constantly sailing the great galleons ahead of the fierce English vessels that were hunting them down.

So our forefathers had eaten the bread of charity there on that barren coast and had been the slaves of those who were themselves the vassals of the powerful distant English landlords. Some had nevertheless married the coast-dwellers’ least eligible womenfolk, but the children had looked like them and had been just as despised and subjected, short, black-haired and timid, and so it had remained.

With ten other survivors I had been put ashore in M…e…, the nearest harbour. I received no compensation for my lost belongings, and I had nothing but the emergency money sewn into my shirt, which wasn’t much. The din of the port, which did not stop even at night, threw me into a torment of insomnia, and I knew of a house in one of the narrow alleys that one could enter unseen and let oneself be transported by the smoke, but I felt that once there I would no longer be able to return to life, and so I called on my last reserves of strength.

One afternoon I left the town and stayed in a village three hours farther on, and spent the night there, ravaged by all the demons inside me (there were no ghosts in the room), and the next day was unable to continue. I was ill and confused and was running a high fever. Fortunately the good hotel-keepers kept me and over several weeks I came to myself after awakening from my clouded state.

I could not think of signing up for a ship, and anyway I had conceived an intense dislike of the profession. I had no aim to strive for.

I did not consider going back to Glencoe. I did not keep up a correspondence, like many sailors do who want to fool themselves when they arrive in a faraway foreign harbour with a piece of paper sent from a place where they were once at home, a piece of paper containing the invariable words written without heart or attention, as ridiculous formulae of a ceremony lacking all basis in reality.

The Irish on board hated the English, but I could not even draw closer to them in their hatred, since I wasn’t a real Irishman. But I couldn’t get on with the English either; I was even less of a real Englishman. So I was left alone and had only the occasional almost wordless friendships with the inhabitants of the Baltic coast and fjord fishermen who often find their way into tramp shipping when the catch is poor or their own poor country cannot fit out enough ships.

Yes, if the Trafalgar hadn’t run aground, if that cliff had not been on its slightly off-course route (the steering was bad and careless on that ship, one of the wettest I have ever known), things would have gone on like that until my old age. I would have muddled along, signalled along, listened along, until I had gone deaf, which in this business usually happens before you reach fifty.

The shipwreck had disrupted my life at this low, easy level. The impact could have helped me rise above it, and start a life of my own on shore after all. But I went under; the languor of my race, aggravated over the years, was dragging me down to the lowest point. I was only interested to know where that point was. And I started thinking about the how and the why and the whence. That is dangerous work for a person not firmly anchored by family ties; that is putting to sea without charts and taking soundings off an unknown coast.

I could live at this cheap hotel for a few months from my emergency funds if I spent nothing else. I did so and waited to see what would happen if I did nothing else. I stayed in that hotel, in that room for a long time. It had one great attraction for my body, which for years had been accustomed to heat: an open fire. When the sun set, I piled on the logs, set them alight and sat at it, in the attitude of devotion adopted by a sun-worshipper turned fire-worshipper. First I automatically dozed off. The evenings grew long and I tried all kinds of liqueurs. Were my efforts crowned with success? I will pass over that in silence, in my case not the “only true greatness”, but the admission of a humiliating defeat.

I cannot remember the date of my deepest decadence, but it must have been the year of the great earthquake that largely destroyed Lisbon. I remember that because it gave me the only feeling of joy I knew at that time. It was like the wreaking of a vengeance that had been waiting for centuries. It may seem odd and yet that was how it was. Every new report on the many victims and ever-mounting destruction gave me a thrill. When it was too dark to read, I picked up the newspaper and stroked the columns where the earthquake was reported, until my fingers became sticky with printer’s ink. Then I slung the paper into the fire and, as it blazed, I saw houses curl up, towers topple, people scorched. Then there was a crackle and it was over.

I slowly began to recover. From the only window I saw the sun languishing, the last brown leaves withering on the protruding branches of the beeches that moaned in my sleep at night. During the day I sometimes walked along the curve of the bay in the hope that the sun would once more shine fiercely over the foothills, but I never saw it again. I had to content myself with the moon, which in the evening would sometimes accidentally slide out from among the clouds; then I would sit at the fire again and fall asleep, wake with a shudder in the night, stare at the glowing embers, too tired to undress, and would roll onto my mattress and go back to sleep.

One day a woman I had known in the past came to see me there. I didn’t know how she had managed to find me and I never asked. She simply stayed. Sometimes I possessed her, with my eyes squeezed shut, on the floor or the window seat, just as it happened, but I didn’t lose a minute’s sleep over her. It had become too raw to go out. I now constantly read a book on the history of the three empires, which had the advantage that you never finished it, since by the end you had forgotten the beginning. The woman — strangely! — did not feel I was living in the underworld; she was quite content like this. I sometimes told her that she might just as well go, but she stayed.

One afternoon there was less wind. I walked alone down the road to the big port city that — how long ago was it? — I had fled. Then I felt that the sickness that had taken hold of me and rendered me powerless as long as I was on shore had left me, but strangely I felt not relieved, but rather very lonely, as if a trusted friend had gone for ever without saying goodbye. I would never see him again in this world. Was that not a cause for happiness? But it was as if the wind were rustling through the gaunt palms which do not really belong at this latitude, just as I do not, and were saying: “Gone away, gone away…” I leant against a trunk for a long time and came back home late at night. Much later, one afternoon when she and the weather almost matched each other in colour: her dull blond hair had the hue of the fading wood, her eyes that of the sky beyond, her voice did not rise above the pouring rain — I crept away. The light was fading and her presence in the room was no more than that of a ghost. Perhaps mine was too, and she did not notice my leaving, but I felt that my strength was now sufficient to reach the port city.

The sun was still shining briefly above the horizon, like a life lived in vain that is about to be extinguished and flares up again for a moment for one last time, as if the draught is blowing up from the grave and fans it before it is smothered. The wind began to worry at the palms and leafed through their ranks. I remember a paradise that I had wilfully abandoned, a garden sloping down to the sea, evergreen towards the ever-rustling sea, a cool abode containing sufficient for the frugal needs of one blissfully happy. What was I still doing there? I would be bored there now, since in the meantime I have been damned, but not according to the rules of the barren hopeless faith that had been introduced to the coasts of Northern Ireland by the dominant British (who have it so cushy here on earth that they can paint the hereafter in colours as ghastly as they wish). This faith deprived the indigent coast-dwellers of the only thing that, even as a delusion, could bring them a little joy. In southern and central Ireland people live drunkenly and happily, in the northwest soberly and disastrously.

No, being damned means being bored everywhere, except in the most wretched places. That explains the consuming yearning for polar regions, deserts and endless seas.

I walked on again with my head empty of thoughts. The next morning I was in Me…e…. The whole day long I walked along the quay, and at night I slept behind a few chests, woke feeling shattered, almost determined to return to S… where there was at least a bed, an open fire and silence. But again I walked along the quays; a big ship was about to depart, the cranes had already stopped working, but the gangplank had not yet been pulled up, and a body was carried ashore on a stretcher. I pushed forward and heard “They can’t sail now, radios have just been made compulsory. We can’t find anyone qualified.”

Radio? How long ago was it since I had sat in a narrow cabin with headphones on and my hand on the key? It was very difficult in my tattered clothing to get through to anyone in command, but once I unfolded a few sheets of paper from my pocket — carefully, as they were falling apart — and my identity and status became known, I was welcomed and signed up on the spot. So I again left my old life behind me and assumed my previous one. Forward, or rather backward, to the deserted kingdoms of the Far East with a longing equal to the hate with which I had once left them.

I did my work moderately well, slowly, sometimes missing an important instruction, a letter or figure for a stock market or weather report. News reports did not have to be recorded in those days, but the Captain still required me to do so. He was one of those unfortunates who are physically at sea but whose thoughts are at home and on land, and was keen on the most trivial items. So I concocted bank robberies, anniversaries and elopements. I sometimes had the urge to insert old facts and dates as if they were new, such as the rounding of the Cape in 1502, but I restrained myself.

The Captain, who had at first given me a warm welcome, soon became more measured and gruffer, passing me without greeting; we often ignored each other completely, the only two denizens of the upper deck.

The heat of the Red Sea didn’t bother me. The Indian Ocean, storm-free, indeed almost totally calm at this time of year, stretched to every horizon like a soft grey layer of molten metal. But I felt comfortable in those hot, indistinct distances, which as it were blurred my own existence. Not until we had passed Colombo did I again have a feeling of oppression, as if I were reverting to my old ways, which I thought I had abandoned for good.

Up to then my work had been passable, but from now on it became definitely inadequate, as if I were deaf. No, not deaf, but other sounds kept buzzing around the signals I had to take down; did they originate in my middle ear or in the ether? I don’t know, but my fictitious reports were now noticed, as well as the fact that I had taken down courses and weather reports completely wrongly.

As a result I was paid off in Singapore with the offer of a second-class passage back, which I refused; with considerable effort I obtained two weeks’ subsistence pay. With a chest and a suitcase I slunk into the cheapest, hottest hotel in Singapore, European only in name, and sweated my way through the afternoons beneath a mosquito screen so full of holes that I had to watch out for mosquitoes on all sides. Time passed, my money ran out, and with my last few dollars I went to a concert that I was mad keen to see: a violinist whom I had heard in Brighton in the good old days. This extravagance was my salvation. In the interval I bumped into a British passenger, for whom I had managed to send off a coded telegram, quite against the rules (I was still good at transmitting!). I was about to pass him with a brief greeting; I knew by experience the great contempt in which the British hold half-castes — they always took me for one, because of my complexion and my eyes — but he seemed to realize my plight, caught up with me and spoke to me. The next day he helped me regain my self-respect by inviting me to stay with him in the most fashionable hotel in Singapore and advanced me the money for a new suit. (I have always resisted the notion, but it’s true: good clothes and a good shave do more to raise one’s morale than a whole night spent reading Goethe or Confucius, to say nothing of the Bible.)

Two days later I had a post on a small coaster that scavenged for cargo between second-rate ports, that was a regular visitor to Ningbo, but never went to Shanghai or Manila, the two metropolises so yearned for by the carousing and drinking seaman. The officers had fully adapted to the situation; except for the second officer, who collected porcelain and actually took the trouble to spend his wages on worthless crockery in antique shops, and the third officer, who had taken it into his head to find a virgin and to that end scoured the houses and flower boats, no one set foot on shore. The Captain went to and from his office by rickshaw; during the day traders came on board with everything a seaman needed, and at night they came alongside in their sampans to rent out their daughters. For most of them the shore was unknown territory; they lived on their ship as on a tiny asteroid, where life was different. True, they ate, drank and breathed, but they scarcely spoke or walked about. As if even the small space left on deck among the cranes and hatches was too much, they all stuck in their cabins, in the winter by a paraffin stove and in summer without a fan, drinking hot grog whether cold or hot, since there was no ice on board and in the heat a hot drink is better than a lukewarm one. Some played cards without a break for days on end and at first I joined in the cards and the drinking; I was soon able to withdraw from the former, for the valid reason that I had lost my wages for months in advance, while I continued drinking until the day I noticed my hands were trembling as I operated my instruments and that the roaring in my ears was almost drowning out the signals.

At that point I gave up drink too, felt like a wet rag for a week, and drank coffee day and night. Finally I was over it. Now I ought to give up smoking too. But what is life worth if one isn’t addicted to some vice or other, especially on a dirty iron ship with nothing on it, not a bush, not a bird, that is evidence of some other life? Actually, sailing should mean living in a perpetual state of intoxication, and indeed all the others obeyed this moral law, but I had to stay in contact with the outside world, and could not afford to let myself fall into a swoon, while a helmsman, as long as his eyes are open, can distinguish lights and plot a course, and a stoker, a veteran of service in the tropics, ninety-nine percent of the time nodding off on his bench, can still tell from a slight variation in the pounding of the engine whether something is wrong. Perhaps I am doing these gentlemen an injustice, but they did me one too, so I ask no forgiveness.

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 Inquisition, 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 hours, 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.

The procession halted in front of the stand. Only the envoys were allowed to bid farewell to their wives, which they did in a peremptory and forced fashion; the wives leant over the balustrade and embraced their spouses, who would be gone for a year or for ever. This did not take long, and after a few horn blasts everyone resumed their seats. Now Campos and Metelho exchanged formal greetings and the latter received his sealed orders. A priest blessed the five envoys, and sprinkled holy water on the chests full of gifts. The soldiers were not included in these ceremonies, and the rearmost ranks could only just see the stand. Camões stood among them and stared straight ahead, making an effort not to see anything. He was longing only for the moment, many days hence, when he would be beyond the gravitational pull of Macao, when everything would be over for ever and a yellow emptiness would lie ahead of him.

The sign to move out was given, and the whole column advanced, and he passed the stand with head bowed. But as he passed the central section, he could not stop himself and in the second row saw Pilar, pale and dressed in white, beside Ronquilho, red and fat, in ceremonial uniform. They looked at each other. He wanted to shout, “I didn’t betray you,” but immediately felt: actually I did betray you. He bowed his head and left things as they were. He marched past.

The very first march exhausted him, but it was five days before the exhaustion of his body and the pain in his injured feet were bad enough to extinguish the pain in his brain. After several days he had marched beyond tiredness, his step became lighter, and he felt the attraction of the unknown ahead of him and the compelling thrill of the long journey through a country where no one of his race had penetrated before him.

After the very first stretch they marched at night by the light of the full moon, beneath which the countryside extended colourless and gently undulating. A few narrow villages, spindly bamboo groves and crumbling graves lay strangely and shrilly in this emptiness. Marching order soon disintegrated by itself: after all, they could see each other hours away. Later, when the country became more densely populated, the terrain hillier and the interests of safety required them to stay in a close-knit formation, discipline had already become far too slack; Metelho lacked sufficient authority over the soldiers. Many men were suffering from dysentery, and two of the Chinese guides had already died. Metelho, seeing the danger of finding themselves without guides in the strange, deep, hostile interior, tried to recruit new ones, but in vain; everywhere their reluctance to venture into the alien north was so great, that even large sums of money could not awaken their enthusiasm. The third Chinese guide also fell sick. So that in case of emergency we would at least be able to find the way back, Metelho had a stone erected each afternoon, on which was carved: “The first non-tributary Portuguese embassy passed by here”, followed by the date and the position of the sun. It was difficult to find volunteers for this hot work, and Camões was always pressed into service. The population was not hostile, just fearful, but that made it difficult to make contact with them and obtain food. When the procession had gone, they surrounded the stones with boulders in order to deprive the stones of their power.

The company increasingly disintegrated and everyone marched in no particular order. Only Metelho and a learned Jesuit, who was travelling with them in order to visit the court in Beijing and introduce the principles of both astronomy and of religion, always had their litters carried side by side and conversed en route.

Once a day Metelho summoned Camões to walk alongside his litter, and asked, scarcely raising his head above the edge, if he had any complaints. Camões replied that, like the other soldiers, he had nothing to complain about, except for the inadequate food, and he knew as well as the rest that this was not Metelho’s fault. Then Metelho would try a more familiar tone and find out something of Camões’s past, and adopting the tone of an equal, asked him about conditions at court, which he had frequented a few years before Camões. But Camões pretended to have forgotten everything. Then Metelho, in the same haughty tone with which the conversation had begun, would tell him to rejoin his troop. Once Metelho had ordered them to sing to help them march in time. But the languid tone of Portuguese folk song lowered the men’s morale and made them long for home. And the Europeans could not keep time with Chinese singing, confused and cacophonous. After one day the attempt was abandoned and they continued in a silence more oppressive than before; the countryside was also quieter, no gongs sounded like dull thunder in the distance and no more did they happen upon noisy funerals.

Still, the villages grew larger and more numerous, and had often grown together; one day there was no end to the houses, there was no longer any sign of the plain and finally the last remaining Chinese guide admitted that they had found their way into a town where he no longer knew the way. Behind the houses they saw a high black embankment, where the walled city must be. But how were they to find their way round it? In a kind of square Metelho gave the order to stop and sounded the assembly, but the trumpets were drowned by blaring and wailing flutes being blown inside the houses. Coelho, the commander of the embassy guard, had the ten musketeers he still had with him fire a few salvos in the air, expecting that the stragglers would hear and the people who were crowding in from every alley issuing into the square would rapidly retreat.

But from all sides this was met with explosions more violent than cannon fire, of which it at first reminded them; in panic they sought cover behind in the rubbish heaps which made the clay square a hilly terrain. But no one was hit and they saw that they had dirtied themselves for nothing, and were a laughing-stock for the population. Thousands of grinning faces and high-pitched screaming showed that the white barbarians’ fear had been noticed and that the fireworks, which would not have troubled a child of two, had terrified them. The furious Coelho now wanted to have his men fire into the crowd, but fortunately Metelho stopped him in time.

They stood indecisively bunched together: neither Metelho nor Coelho had any idea what to do. Camões yelled at them to advance into the widest of the streets, and later they could get their bearings with the compass. Coelho ordered him to be quiet, but Metelho seized on his advice: anything was better than standing still, and they advanced. The Chinese let them leave in silence, without attempting to surround them. The fireworks also stopped. They had been taken for demons and their departure was imagined to be the outcome of the wailing flutes and fireworks and who knows how many prayers. All windows and doors were closed, and only the smell of rotting food and large numbers of bodies squashed together proved that they were not passing through a city of the dead.

After three hours they encountered the high black rampart that they had seen in the distance a while ago. A deep dry moat went round it. At long intervals semicircular watchtowers protruded from the smooth wall; it was as if they were standing in front of one of their own castles, only ten times higher and infinitely larger. They halted by a group of bare trees. Twelve men were missing, four of whom returned in the course of the day; one told how he had been tortured, another that he had been pulled into a house by a woman, who had only released him after he had possessed her, while the other two were completely blank.

The next morning he wanted to set out and skirt the city, but the Chinese guide prevented him, saying that the city was vast and that he should send an embassy to the Mandarin and ask his permission to pass through it. The guide gestured towards one of the watchtowers, and a narrow gate opened above the bank of the moat. Coelho and two soldiers bravely went in. One of the chests of presents for the Emperor was unloaded.

It was three days before the wall opened again and the messengers were let out. The Mandarin’s answer was that the embassy would be escorted by Hu Nan as far as the shores of Lake Dongting, which was as far as his jurisdiction extended. But first the banner with its arrogant declaration must be lowered, since there were no countries that were not tributaries and subjects of the Emperor. Then the barbarians would be conducted through the streets, but they were unworthy to behold the glory of the eternal Hantan and would be led blindfolded through its streets and past its palaces. Otherwise they would have to go around the walls, which would take many, many days.

They held a council. The disaster cancelled out rank, and each man gave his opinion. In order to shorten the journey, most of them wanted to give in and allow themselves to be taken through the city, although this was humiliating. But Metelho and Camões and a few others stood firm; better remain outside the city than put yourself in their power blindfolded. Once within the walls, who could guarantee that they would ever re-emerge?

The minority won the day and the next day they proceeded slowly, preceded by four guides and followed by a large troop of soldiers along the wall. The distance between the towers was sometimes half a mile, sometimes a hundred metres. The wall was high everywhere, but at a place where it had half collapsed, they had a view of the city, which extended inwards as far as the eye could see.

Night fell, but they did not rest. The Portuguese hoped to be out in the plain by daybreak. Lanterns were alight on the tower and the commotion in the city did not die out even for an hour. As dawn rose the view was the same: on the one side scattered groups of houses, on the other the dry moat, the wall and the towers. Dazed and down-hearted, the Portuguese marched on; a flock caught between the mute guides ahead and the military escort behind. Suddenly Camões, now walking beside Metelho’s litter, stopped and let out a cry and picked up a scrap of cloth to which he had tied a stone. “Halt!” Metelho poked his head out of the litter, and then stood up.

“We’ll never get out of here. It’s as I thought. Last night in the dark, I threw this stone attached to this cloth down. We are being led round and round the city, in order to be impressed by its size. Take the guides hostage.”

The soldiers seized the guides, and the troop of Chinese charged to their rescue, but a few shots kept them at a distance; a full battle did not ensue.

Under threat of death, with a musket at their ear, the guides led them away from the city. The banner was unfurled again. They did not look back, and went faster and faster. Not until afternoon were they allowed to rest, since no one could go any further. The city, which had seemed so insurmountably huge and high, now lay on the horizon low and insignificant in the setting sun, and a large cloud could cover it all.

They now made directly towards the north; often there were no roads and they went straight across rocky plains, straight across soggy rice fields, at first a delicious feeling for battered feet, but soon unbearable when they had to pull their feet out of the mud at every step. Finally they reached a narrow river, which according to the guides was a tributary of the Yangtze, while others thought it flowed into Lake Dongting, but at any rate they could follow it. They set up camp; while the sick were allowed to rest, the others went in search of boats. After a week they returned with four narrow hulls, with room for no more than half the company. The rest marched along the banks. At first the boats made slow progress, because of the winding course and the slow flow, and those on foot had been at their camp for hours before they arrived. But soon the river became fast and straighter, the boats disappeared from sight and often it was the middle of the night before those on land caught up with them. Finally one night Camões and the ten soldiers on foot lost sight of the boats completely, even the next morning. Left to their fate, they stood on the bank of a huge yellow expanse of water. The other side could not be seen and there was no sign of the boats. They waited and waited. Had the boats crossed or capsized? Then they saw something black in the distance that drifted closer, and towards evening one of the soldiers swam out to it. It was one of the boats. Lost or left behind?

Again there was a dispute. Half of the soldiers embarked in order to find the embassy. They did not return. Camões felt a longing stir that he thought was dead. Again he was a free agent in the great kingdom. He could go where he wished. And he went back, taking a few others with him, either to reach Macao again, or to die in some distant desolate plain.

And the day came when Camões, without companions, but with a little water and food left, sat in front of one of the stones he had helped to erect on the outward journey. He now had the whole expanse of heaven and earth to himself alone, not a soul came to disturb or torment him. Lisbon and Macao seemed as distant as burnt-out stars, and equally far in the past.

And yet this was another kind of imprisonment.

Yet he didn’t worry, but remained calmly sitting with his back against the stone. When at noon the sun became too fierce and too dangerous, he dragged himself towards a bamboo grove. From there he ambushed a passing peasant, beat him unconscious, robbed him of his supply of food and water and put on his clothes. All this he did calmly. He had come to China as a soldier, but it did not worry him that his first action there was that of a footpad. In a daze he made his way south. As dawn broke he glanced back; the bamboo grave and the stone seemed to be still close. He quickened his step, no longer looked round, but had the feeling that someone could soon take his place there by the stone, and that he himself would be lost in the desert.

CHAPTER 8

I

THIS LIFE CONTINUED FOR YEARS, and I scarcely went ashore any more; I lost touch with the earth, like so many who go to sea. Now and then I picked up messages: war between Bolivia and Paraguay; a receiver embezzles £10,000 from a council’s coffers; the third daughter of the Earl of Middlesbrough and the third son of Lord Leverhulme marry. Do you think these reports made me feel any attachment to that life over there? The others, however, loved reading them and talked about them for hours.

There were still two places where I occasionally went ashore. Near Taishan a yellow beach stretched for hours along the sea shore; a vertical slate cliff hid the hinterland. Here along this shore I walked for hours, just to exhaust myself, so that for days afterwards I could find some comfort in lying on the narrow bunk in the cabin. And then there was Dingshan, a peninsula where, unlike everywhere else in China, the trees had not been uprooted. Those there had reached an advanced age and shed mild light and shadow on the gardens far below. I walked the deserted paths there, and as I passed the heavy trunks and great funeral urns met no one; I forgot my life and penetrated an ancient China, well protected by its walls, where no ships had yet brought strangers from afar.

In the garden of Tsung El, at the water’s edge, I felt good soil beneath my feet, and in that of Ho Kam Yong I forgot the sea; I must have been in that of Jou Shuan Wang, in the middle of the island, before, because I never lost my way in the labyrinth there, and all the paths were familiar to me.

Yes, it was in that garden that I was first overtaken by the feeling of having been here before, when once, instead of walking towards the house, I took a side path, and past huddled bushes came round the back way and stopped at a summerhouse, the windows of which were covered in a green film. One pane was broken, but this did not make it any lighter inside. I stopped. I need take only one more step, and time would split in two, I would become someone else, with a different face, different hands, eyes, blood, still myself, but having forgotten myself. I was seized by fear, like becoming dizzy and jumping off a tower onto the ground which receded as you fell; I shrank back and walked along the path, as if across the deck of a sinking ship. I fled from the garden, went straight to the landing, had them row me aboard and only came to myself back in my cabin. Strange that I had to have taken leave of the world in order to feel sure of myself again.

Myself. I’m not old, and I’ve already forgotten how to live. I wanted to remain in solitude and I have come into contact with all the filth the world produces.

I feel grey and clammy, and can never wash the sediment off me. Will I ever again be able to drink of life without disgust, in a wind not infected by the miasma of a rotting ship or a people-spawning city, coming from the pure atmosphere, and feel it brush my skin like a caress? And walk through a pinewood, accompanied only by my shadow? To let a cold brook flow round me, let myself be instructed by flowers…

Never again. I have become contaminated by contact with many people who have allowed their lives to become sullied and have also besmirched mine. I can only save myself in a different life. It is waiting, it is as shapeless as a robe long unworn, it is waiting to receive me and make me invisible to my contemporaries. But I do not dare let go of this old torn one. There is one other person in this present life who can save me. But she is unattainable for me. When I arrive in a harbour she leaves, when I walk round this island and turn round in order to meet her, she also turns round, and if I cross the centre of the island she evades me. Let me jump into the boat, row away and live as I have become, no longer as I was. And think only that she lives there in the distance, imperishable and unattainable!

But the next morning everything was back to normal: I lay in my narrow bunk that was too short for me, tired out from the hot night, drowsy from the previous day, and drank the lukewarm coffee the boy brought me.

II

A FEW MONTHS LATER we were again moored off Dungshan. An oppressive heat hung over the harbour, the sea and the land, a heat so overwhelming as can only persist in China. Yet men were working at all the hatches and everyone (there were not many crew on this ship) was involved with the cargo. I was the only one who did nothing, since recently I have made repeated mistakes in tallying and they preferred to do without me, as I had been informed scornfully. I did not regret this, but on this occasion I would rather have helped and tired myself out standing by the hatch. Like this it was unbearable on board. Heat, noise, stench and idleness drove me from the ship: I did not want to go ashore, but the urge was too strong.

I landed on the island and started walking. I should have liked to sit very quietly somewhere against a wall. But when I sat I could feel the ground blazing under my body and my body catching fire. I had to walk and went where I did not want to go. And so it happened.

I stood quietly resting in front of the stone summerhouse, since there was a little coolness there. Gradually it became fresher, cooler, chillier, darker and within it lightened to yellow twilight. Apart from that it was empty inside, I thought, until I saw a man sitting there; I could not see his face, and his clothes were the kind worn centuries ago. He was sitting writing, and on a tall black chest lay rolls of parchment, which sometimes moved to and fro, like scraps of birch bark or wood shavings when there is a breath of wind in a deserted corner of the wood, or a neglected workshop. For the man writing the world seemed no longer to exist. I only saw him occasionally clench his fist and seemingly shiver with pain; he paused for a moment and then went on writing. What concern was the writing man of mine? Come on, I must be going, but I noticed that I was no longer myself. I had disappeared. I was no longer standing there or on my way to the beach. Where was I then? Surely I wasn’t that writing man, not that! I wanted to shout, drive him away, like an animal that leaps across our path at night, but I had no tongue and no limbs. Yet the sweat kept dripping on the ground — but wasn’t it my blood, colourless with extreme old age? Wasn’t I standing there catching up with the backlog of dying, wouldn’t I soon be a little pile of dust in a narrow-necked urn? Rather that than be him, who in a fate, in a fate…

He rose and came very slowly over to the window, very close to it; I couldn’t see his face, but in a moment he would touch the green glass and I would see him, then he would withdraw and I would be him. The glass tinkled and I stared down at my bloody hand. Inside, beyond the broken pane it was dark, there was only a hand moving up and down over grey parchment, another that hung down limply, an eye that stared at that hand, and next to it a hollow cash box with red edges. I was able to escape; my body dragged itself through the garden; it was as if the landing stage had been reached in a bound… Fearfully slowly, the rescuing sampan rowed nearer, picked me up and took me aboard. I saw the black, filthy ship lying in the water as the only safe place on earth, the same ship that — for how long? a few hours? — I had fled in disgust. A jump onto the gangplank, a dollar in an astonished hand, and the escape had been successful!

Yet panting in my cabin, I felt that nonetheless a part of myself had already been stolen from me and transformed, just as the effect and secretion of a malignant tumour, once established, changes an organism. True, I was still the radio operator, who did his work, sending off and receiving telegrams, who talked with the other crew members in time-honoured ways, but my thinking was conducted in long convoluted sentences concerning the consequences of adventures that were alien to me: disappointment, banishment, love of a woman, for a country, both unworthy, both unattainably far away and for that reason attractive.

What country, what woman? I didn’t know and didn’t want to know, because if I knew that too… But then why was I not released from that unbearable existence on board ship?… Yes, and banished to an even more unbearable one. Not that, not that! Rather remain the man, the creature, who sits in his cubbyhole, with the hood on his head, who drifts across the wide, hot, hated water, together with a filthy ship.

Work rattled on under arc lamps. There was a dim light on in the cabin, everything was in its place, so wasn’t it safe here? Wasn’t I free? There was no spot, no person on shore I longed for, I could sign off wherever I wanted. After an hour the loading stopped and all the lights went out. The ship would leave tomorrow at first light. I lay between the silence of the hot iron and the wood, without sleeping. What I had feared did not happen; I felt lucid and free, more than I had for years. Everything would come right, I would be content with my life, and no one would be able to force their way into it and then it would not be bad, then it would be better than anywhere on land. If only one could accustom one’s head not to think and one’s body not to long for movement, then it was all right, it was a good life. I was excited; I stroked the edges of my bunk, into which I fitted so well. I was floating on air and halfway through the night I fell into a light, dreamless sleep.

The next morning my intoxicating sense of freedom had gone. I was once more the radio operator on a tramp steamer, the lowest of the low. My right hand was out of action, so that I had to signal with my left, and now in broad daylight, while the ship was at sea, I was still afraid. After a few days, when my hand was better, it passed, especially once I had firmly resolved never to go ashore in China again, except in Hong Kong, which was still tolerable. In the past China had seemed to me only filthy and disgusting, as I knew nothing but the coolies, the docks and the port areas, and then I suddenly saw what lay beyond them: the vast country with its endless arid fields, which people had to fertilize with their own manure to produce a yield, living, that is, from their own excrement; in the fields the millions of graves, the cities where the overpopulation spilt over into the surrounding area, where the stench of food and corpses competed with miasma emanating from the sick living, and among them were the grimacing dragons and statues of idols, the gnawing, never-ending antiquity of it all.

Now I was far removed from this wretchedness, as resigned and grinning as the Chinese themselves, and I could despise it. It had been my experience that the greatest misery lies not in a starving, fatally ill body, but in a tortured mind. Desperately I clung to what was left of the old life, and sought, in order to strengthen it, the company of those who shared my fate, my fellow-mariners, as if I wanted to surround myself with their din, and joined in their conversations and drank with them.

At first I was warmly accepted into the small circle: just as the pious rejoice at the conversion of a Christian, so the drunks rejoice at the fall of a moderate man. But later they started mocking me, since I did not really belong with my past, which I used arrogantly as a barrier between them and me. I could not do it. It is difficult to assume a cultured personality, and it is even more difficult to appear coarse when one is not. After that they began to avoid me. Life on board became hell, a thousand times more unbearable than the real one, because of its very smallness.

But it became a thousand times worse when I was back in my cabin at night. At the beginning all that happened was that it shrank, becoming narrower and narrower until I was nearly stifled; it became a cell that was detached from the ship, and the immensely deep base of the Chinese mainland pressed against the walls. Sometimes I broke out, went to the radio cabin, was alarmed by the instruments, which had become instruments of torture, primitive and refined. I escaped the narrow cell like a bullet fired from the barrel, and collapsed onto an open, wide, yellow, cruel plain. The only problem was that there was nothing on earth but scattered dots, immovable boulders and grey vultures soaring in the sky.

In the morning, awake, I felt increasingly hopeless; I would become a prey if I could not oppose them with a stronger being, but what was I, the most rootless, most raceless person alive, to do? And then it also came when I was sitting on watch with the headphones on. Signals that cannot have been sent by any transmitter kept intervening between my listening and the other signals. I did not dare write them down, though something sometimes came through that resembled a word, but fortunately I knew only English and French. Two words formed themselves quite often, but I managed to forget them. The dream of the cell and the plain became worse.

After three months we put into Hong Kong, and in all that time I had not set foot on shore. I was summoned to the company office. I was unused to walking, and had become like the others: after ten paces I got into a rickshaw, and without saying or asking anything the coolie rode me to the red-light district, where I spent half an hour in one of the houses with a Japanese woman. For the first time in months, a moment’s life. Would it be the last? Softness, melancholy and the bitter, wry aftertaste it all leaves. At the office, I was offered a position on a ship bound for England: the Captain had reported that that I was mentally disturbed. I reflected for a moment and refused, and made out that it was nothing. It was too late: a few months ago I would have seized that chance of saving myself, but now I could no longer escape, being pursued at a great distance was worse.

I was kept on the ship. It moored in the bay for two nights, close to Stonecutter’s Island; I slept soundly and well, as do many condemned men, the night before. I still had time.

III

IN THE EVENING we steamed back out of the bay. The weather was bad, and a mixture of foam and rain blew over the bow, and sometimes over the bridge. The white patch of Waglan Island was like a ghost in the dark and as we passed it, the buoy that always sounds there let out, at long intervals, a bellow like a slaughtered cow. Then came the Lingding rocks, then the Ladrones islands, and we were out in the open sea, in the dead of night.

I was able to get four hours’ sleep and had to take down the weather reports. I woke up on time, but it was as if I had been asleep for months and for the time being would need no further sleep, so completely rested was I, so certain was I that a new life was about to begin, although we were in the middle of the ocean. I switched on the power and waited, with the headphones inevitably round my head, for the weather report from Zi-Ka-Wei, where the Jesuits observe the atmosphere of the Yellow and South China Sea and warn shipping of storms. They watch over the ships, as others do over the welfare of souls. They have many sins to expiate. It took some time, and I read while I waited, but finally the introductory signals came, and I was ready: typhoon originating north of Luzon, moving south-westwards, speed…

I felt something cold on my forehead. I tried to brush it away, still absorbed in receiving the signals, but my hand was grasped, and another claw grabbed me round the neck, while yet another pulled my hand off the signal key and several at once tugged at the headphones.

How did all those hands come to be on me at the same time? I was able to look up for a moment, and then my head was forced down again. The radio cabin was full of Chinese: I had never realized so many people could fit into it; less than half the number of white men could have done so. Even without a revolver against my temple I would not have been able to resist. I could not move, the cabin was so full. They tied me up, then some of them left the cabin, leaving four behind, who smashed the dynamo; they knew what they were doing. I had to show them where the elements were and they were destroyed too. Then I was carried outside. The bridge was full of Chinese, and the Captain stood among them. We were thrown into a cabin together. Some of us were injured and at first were able to lie down, but the engineers were also stuffed into the cabin one by one, so that everyone had to stand up again.

There was no great problem if one did not resist and waited calmly: the ship was steered into a shallow bay until it ran aground. Then the pirates left the ship with the valuables, went ashore somewhere among the mountains and immediately disappeared, while we stayed on board until a torpedo boat with a shallow draught came and took off the rest of the crew, or a storm finished us off. The pirates could not be caught, and the ship could not be refloated. That was the normal outcome. If the torpedo boat came quickly and one had kept one’s possessions, one could just sign on for another ship. The company’s losses were covered by the insurance.

This time it was different, frighteningly different. Usually about twenty men attacked the ship, whereas this gang numbered at least a hundred, as many as there were crew. And then the way they acted proved that there were as many leaders as foot soldiers. Normally one of the officers has to steer the ship with a couple of revolver barrels trained on him. This gang did not need a helmsman. The third different thing was… the typhoon, which only I knew about. If we kept heading straight for the shore, we were bound to encounter it, as we would be heading straight for it.

Fortunately the Captain was standing next to me, so that I could whisper news of the approaching catastrophe in his ear without causing panic among the others. He went pale, motioned me to be quiet and wait until one of the Chinese came by and then ask to speak to the man in charge. It was morning before they brought us some food, which was actually to make a mockery of us. We did not have a hand free, or the room to raise it to our mouths. It was put on the corner of a cupboard, to taunt us. I tried to signal that I wanted to speak to their chief, as did the Captain, but they didn’t understand us.

Fortunately they had also taken the Chinese contractor or comprador prisoner. He was probably part of the plot, but even if he was they obviously wanted to save his face. To that end the comprador endured hunger, thirst and near-suffocation with us, and I must say with great composure. So he was still subject to the Captain’s authority and translated his request.

A quarter of an hour later I and the comprador were untied and taken forward to the Captain’s cabin. Five Chinese were sitting there. On the table revolvers lay among whisky bottles. Four of them were sitting on the bunk, while the fifth occupied the Captain’s office chair. Beneath a black mask hung a grey moustache. The man was very fat and scarcely moved. I had a suspicion that he was a white man. The Chinese fired questions, the comprador translated, and one of the four retranslated. I told them about the last signal I had received and warned them that we were heading for a typhoon if we kept on this course. The chief muttered incomprehensibly, and we were grabbed again and taken back to the cabin where we were being held. The comprador whispered to me: “Because of his superior wisdom he knows all about currents and typhoons, and doesn’t need the Westerners’ machines.”

Fine, I thought, if that’s how you want it. I hope he’s caught in the middle of it with his superior wisdom. But actually I expected him to use our advice to his advantage, and have them change course. I was wrong, but I’m convinced that he, and he alone, realized the importance of the warning, but could not pay any attention to it in front of the others without forfeiting his authority.

At first, though, the chief’s wisdom seemed superior to the sensitive instruments of Zi-Ka-Wei. For two days we sailed across a calm sea. We were tied a little less tightly, and the sickest of us could lie in the two bunks, and we could eat food. The Captain and the second engineer suffered worst, as we were given no alcohol at all. The Captain especially was going visibly downhill, shivering, stuttering and weeping.

On the third night it arrived after all, despite the fat chief’s wisdom. We saw nothing of the storm. Now no one could lie down any more and still we were thrown on top of each other at intervals. It went on for two days. Three men died. The Captain went mad and started biting; all his teeth were knocked out. The rest could scarcely breathe. If it had lasted a few hours longer we would all have suffocated. But the door opened, and the wind had dropped, though the waves were still splashing up sky-high. But things soon improved. In the afternoon we were laid out on the deck, and buckets of water were thrown over us till we got up, and then we had to drag the bodies to the railings; we refused to throw them overboard, and they lay there for hours, until another high wave came and did the job for us and washed them away.

How could it be so calm the following day? The sea was no longer a swirling mass of water, we were floating in a soft blue mist, with a few brown islands beside us and a few ragged clouds above us. We no longer felt our bodies, and pain and exhaustion were forgotten. It was as if the hurricane had abolished gravity. We sailed on, and the clouds faded into a complete blur, but the islands were becoming more numerous; in the evening hosts of them lay off a low, hazy coast. The sky above seemed like the real world, where between vertical cliffs wide fissures opened onto azure seas.

Between them the Loch Catherine drifted like a foreign body, a meteor, hurled down onto a still fluid planet that had come to rest but not yet found solidity. The ship floated into the bay.

The next morning we lay a hundred metres from the sandy shore. This time the pirates seemed not to be content with carrying off cash and precious possessions. All tools, all the iron and copperware, loose equipment and provisions were landed and carted off by hundreds of coolies to a large shed further inland. The lifeboats were lowered and pulled up onto the beach. All the indications were that the pirates had had enough of going on board as passengers and as in the old days wanted to fit out pirate junks for themselves. It was possible that those on board were on a mission to obtain materials.

IV

AFTER THE LOCH CATHERINE had been thoroughly plundered and looked like a stripped wreck, we were also taken off. We were tied by the arm two by two and taken ashore escorted by four Chinese soldiers. Then the ship’s engines were started and it was freed from its moorings. It swung rudderless across the bay, and quickly ran aground. The engines went on churning for a while, then grated to a halt, and the ship formed a new cliff at the entrance to the bay.

The black iron cauldron in which the food for the deck passengers was always cooked had also been brought ashore. The cook was busy preparing a meal for us. Then the comprador distributed the portions as we moved past him in a line. He had now finally discarded the mask of a fellow-prisoner, and handed us the bowls with a grin. He saw the humour of the reversal of roles with an almost Western sensitivity. But he gave a kick to a few of us whom he hated especially, and he spat in the engineer’s face.

We did not have much time to empty our bowls. We were soon kicked to our feet, blindfolded and led away. Were we being taken to our deaths? If so, why had they given us food? Or was this an extra refinement? We walked for four hours in uncertainty, and probably only a few of us were seriously afraid of death, and perhaps a few longed for it. But we were all filled with fear of torture — no one was too jaded for that. Anyone stepping out of line, through stumbling, was immediately pushed back, which proved that we were surrounded by a sizeable escort. We stumbled on like this for hours. It was becoming hotter, and the sun was blazing down more fiercely on our uncovered heads. If only the blindfolds had been tied over our skulls, that would have been a relief.

Suddenly the sunshine became less fierce. Was it evening? No, we were passing between high walls and we could hear and smell a great mass of people surrounding us. A screeching that grew louder and louder, the fumes of sweat and cooked and burnt meat and rotten fish; we had experienced this often enough when sighted to know that we were being taken through a Chinese town. At first we walked along a wide road, then we were constantly prodded to turn a corner. We were grabbed from all sides and hot hands groped at us, curious hands, large coarse ones and also small children’s hands, and nails cut into our flesh, accompanied by shrill laughter. Sometimes one of us was hauled into a window, had long pins stuck into him and was pushed out again.

This ordeal lasted for hours. Then we suddenly halted, bumping into each other like the carriages of a braking train. We heard a loud creaking sound, and a fierce wind hit us, the shreds of our clothes flapped around us, and the smells of decay departed. Behind us was the crowded town, and ahead of us must be a broad empty plain. It was as if we had been submerged in oil and mercury and were now suddenly surfacing in a vacuum. At first it was painful, and our breathing accelerated. Then most of us revived, but for some the transition was too violent, and they fell down unconscious; it took many blows with rifle butts to get them to their feet. On we went again, and the wind remained strong but the sun was no less fierce for that and this plain was sandy, so that the soles of our feet baked as we walked. Our escort must be less numerous now, and no longer prodded us in the right direction, and many stumbled, hitting their heads or arms on sharp stones, and continued bleeding, while sometimes people fell into a mouldy, soft mass of wood and landed on dry human bones.

Finally it became dark. The sun ceased tormenting scorched heads, but the plain remained just as hot. The guards drove their herd through a narrow doorway into a stone enclosure. The blindfolds were removed, and we could see the stars above us. On the top of the wall stood the food bowls, too high to reach, and after an hour a hand passed them down to us, moving quickly — which meant that the man doing it was walking upright. So the prison was a half-sunken pit; on the outside one could walk at ground level, and escape, but where to?

Everyone remained lying down and slept heavily, sometimes groaning. Many could not stand the following day, and they were left where they lay. The day was less hot, the ground softer and undulating. Some could smell that a great expanse of water was approaching. We approached it at about midday, and waded in it to cool down, but as for quenching our thirst it was a disappointment: the water was brackish, almost salt. In the evening we stopped in the middle of the plain. A prison was unnecessary now, since all of us stayed lying where we had been allowed to slump down.

The same applied the following morning when we struck camp. Those who could still walk were blindfolded again. The ground remained flat, but many of us stumbled over our own feet. By midday people were no longer prodded till they stood up. They were allowed to get up calmly. It was frightening to be left alone in this way. I managed to wrench off the blindfold. In the middle of the bleakest desert we had been left to our fate. In the far distance was a black strip, moving as slowly as a caterpillar: the Chinese escort returning. Scattered across the plain, people were wandering round in circles, and every so often one would fall and not get up again. I tried to yell and call a few of them together, but my voice could not escape my parched throat.

I went over to the closest one, untied his blindfold and told him we were free. He no longer understood me, sat down and stared vacantly around him. I sat down too, simply to await death. It seemed horrific to me to lie there on the plain and be eaten by vultures. My hands started digging a hole, but did not go very deep.

At night a cool wind crossed the plain, on its way to the sea. It passed over the down-hearted, cooling their bodies, and driving away death, which was sitting ready in the shape of vulture to start the process of decomposition.

Nevertheless I woke, very early, as the sun was just poking its head above the horizon, and a shadow fell across my feet; I saw the stone casting it. It was a hexagonal chunk of basalt. There seemed to be some characters on it. But I knew that the Chinese, as children, have a mania for writing on everything. So why not on this stone? But underneath I saw Latin characters too. So people of my race had once been in this desert. They had had the energy to carve letters on a stone. One doesn’t do that at death’s door — or had it been their own tombstone? It was a language I could not read. The letters had almost worn away.

It was midday, and the stone was a crude sundial, so that I could determine a direction, and I headed south. In order to get back to Hong Kong? I scarcely dared hope, but something compelled me to go south. Perhaps also because in that way when I set off my injured left cheek and neck stayed facing west, in the shade. Towards evening the following day I saw a black dot on the horizon, and approaching it, saw another such stone — so that I was on a path that had been trod before. I felt an impulse to depart from it, since I had no desire to tread in long erased footprints. But a hundred metres farther on there was some water in a hole, brackish, murky water, yet not undrinkable for someone who has endured thirst for three days. I drank and felt sleepy, but did not want to sleep here, and went on till I could go no farther.

My scorched skull was pounding, and my hair was thinning. Among Europeans, only the Portuguese can stand the tropical sun on their bare heads with impunity. My consciousness shrank in my hot head, as if my brains were being boiled and my life was exiting through my cracked skin. But I wanted to be free. Now, here, in the greatest kingdom on earth, far from the hated sea, I was lost; no one at all still thought of me or tried to penetrate the depth of my soul. A man cannot live without reason, without disasters, without desire and antipathy. Perhaps, though, I needed to be here for something, and then at any rate I would stay alive. But first sleep, and somewhere cool. Another mile, then I would find it, or else death.

Another grave; I used to skirt them, afraid that something was lying in wait for me. But now it was different, a spot where there was at least shade and perhaps some coolness. I walked round it. It was not a grave like so many others, though the womb shape was retained. The entrance was lined with green and blue porcelain tiles, which in the arid wasteland had the effect of splendid flowers. The grave was almost intact. Around it stood three crudely carved stone horses up to their bellies in the sand. I sat on the saddle of one of the horses, and jumped off again — perhaps I had already gone mad; sitting on a horse here, amid the white heat, in the harsh red and yellow desert, beneath the clear blue sky, like a child on a roundabout, that was a good way of doing so.

The grave seemed to me a more appropriate resting place. It was so tall and the smooth, dark stones of the entrance were inviting. The world rejected me. I crawled into the grave without revulsion. It was cool inside, and I pushed the dried bones aside. In the darkness I bumped into a funerary urn. Perhaps there was something still in it — indeed there was liquid, but I dared not drink it though my thirst was pressing.

Was this not a safe hiding place from the misadventures that threatened me, such as the great empire itself within its walls and mountain chains, protected against everything, the invasions of barbarians, the present and the disturbances that will dislocate and shatter the whole world in the future, when its forces are unleashed and descend upon the kingdom? The grave was the gateway through which I could leave my own life and enter the past. I raised my head and looked through the opening, my eye lit on a hexagonal stone, the kind I had seen before. I had to leave the grave again, the deep ever-silent past in which I did not yet belong, and I focused on that stone from the recent past in order to escape from my own time.

I took a few determined steps, but the desert was surging like an ocean, and I thought I saw a piece of driftwood floating, or was it a shipwrecked mariner, or was it me? No, I was standing here, but I could see myself walking in the distance, coming towards me, and I tried to run away from myself, but I could not: the two people — which of whom I was I no longer knew — would merge. Then the wind began to roar with swelling volume, the sky let loose a long scream, and I fell and nearby the ghost fell too.

I awoke in a yellow light, not the sun’s: I had never seen the moon so full. I tried to recover the thread of my memories, but everywhere I encountered confusion. Had we not just been by a larger stretch of water than the narrow pond here — had it dried out so much? Surely I could not have slept for more than a few days.

What happened before this journey of the dead through the desert began? I kept coming back to a shipwreck, a storm, an attack by Chinese, but surely it was much longer ago and we had no Chinese on board back then. What came afterwards? Imprisonment. Why? A journey to the north, to Beijing. Why? I didn’t recognize the clothes I had on or the ones lying next to me. Had I been taken prisoner, released again and had these things set down beside me?

I tried to put them on, but they disintegrated like cobwebs; a few coins fell out. I had also had these in the prison, but the guard had refused to accept them. But I didn’t remember any more about a prison.

I looked around in desperation, searching; in the distance was a stone that I recognized, and I went slowly up to it. It was a marker, erected so as to be able to find the way back, but the inscription had almost worn away. With great difficulty I read: Em nome d’El Rei Nosso Senhor D. João III mandou pôr este letreiro em fé da muita lealdade—*

I clung to the stone, I leant against it and after a while it was as if in this squatting position new strength flowed into me, and as the light turned from yellow to pink in the morning, I was able to go on, at first quite quickly, then slower and slower as if my strength were failing again, then faster from fear, and finally I saw, like a beacon at sea, another hexagonal stone in the distance…

* In the name of Our Lord the King, Dom João III, I ordered this inscription to be erected in token of my great loyalty.

CHAPTER 9

I

IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, when Macao was increasingly losing its former sense of power, and lay on its peninsula half forgotten by its own country and entirely forgotten by Europe, great mansions were built on the steep slopes of the rocky island of Hong Kong and lush gardens laid out for the rich, who were later to live off the docks and wharves down below on the narrow strip of beach that encircled the island, and off the ships that were to load and unload in the ample, still empty bay. Macao was unconcerned. The occasional large vessel called in, mooring far outside the silted-up harbour. Apart from that, there were only flat-bottomed coasters, the slender lorchas, popular as armed escorts for rich Chinese merchants, and the odd smuggler’s ship.

Macao was quite unperturbed. The merchants were rich and remained so. The other colonists and the Chinese inhabitants were poor and remained so. The city’s independence had been recognized in name by the Emperor, four centuries after its foundation, since it now posed no threat. Despite that freedom the mandarins did not negotiate as they used to, but ordered, and their orders were mostly obeyed. The ruling class became even richer: opium smuggling and slave trafficking to South America brought in more than the laborious honest trade they had once conducted. Macao did not fear Hong Kong; what trade could grow up around a bare rock?

Almost out of the blue, after having languished for five years as a dead city and a failure from the outset, Hong Kong took off, the bay became a busy port of call, rich Chinese merchants from the still turbulent Canton came and settled on the peaceful island. It became a free port. So did Macao, for all the difference it made: it simply meant that the customs revenues were lost.

People continued to sneer at Hong Kong, until there was an exodus of many leading merchants, whose families had been established in Macao for centuries, and of all the artisans and shopkeepers. Life in Macao became almost impossible. There was nothing to buy, nothing could be made, everything had to come from Hong Kong. As a last desperate measure, casinos were introduced in Macao and indeed some people did occasionally come to lose the wealth they had acquired in Hong Kong.

Portugal sent ever-increasing numbers of civil servants to improve the situation, ensuring that it became increasingly hopeless. Eventually a kind of equilibrium asserted itself, giving Macao a last exiguous lease of life. Then in about 1900 a regular steamship service was established between Hong Kong and Macao.

It was as if in this way the city of the future was giving a few crumbs of its progress to the city of the past. The two low steamers were the only ones linking Macao with the outside world. All that was moored in its harbour these days were a few mouldering craft and the odd decommissioned steamer with old-fashioned paddle wheels, or an obsolete coastal patrol vessel. The civil servants whose salaries swallowed up the last income of the unfortunate colony had to travel on English ships from Lisbon to Hong Kong and there change to one of the shuttle steamers.

One afternoon a thin, scruffy-looking man stood on this wooden jetty, from where the ships in question sailed, leaning against one of the fenders. He was constantly being bumped into by coolies lugging packages or hurrying travellers and almost pushed into the water, but he moved no further than a branch that is pushed aside and springs back. When he had stood there for a large part of the afternoon, the harbour-master, a half-caste but largely Chinese, came and asked him what he was doing. In the harbour-master’s own opinion he spoke good English, and in any case had risen infinitely far above pidgin level. But this white man, because he was white beneath the grime, appeared not to understand his English. Then they were joined by the purser of the boat, a corpulent and pock-marked individual from Macao, who made up for the insignificance of the vessel on which he sailed by wearing five rings on his sleeve (one more than a mail-boat captain). His cap too bore a heavy gilt band. Nevertheless he preferred to go about barefoot. The authority figure squared up to the man and asked him in Portuguese what he wanted. This time the loafer answered immediately, but in pure English, which infuriated the harbour-master, who thought he had not been considered worthy of an answer and started to make it clear to the pauper that however white he was, he was still a scrap of dirt compared with the harbour-master, who was also known as shore captain.

The waiting man stared at him blankly. Then the purser, who realized that the man did understand him, tried to explain that he must have a ticket if he wanted to sail on the boat. If he wanted to work as a porter, he must buttonhole the passengers coming from the rickshaws, but a white man couldn’t really do that. If on the other hand he didn’t want anything at all, it would be best if he didn’t hang around that post, where he was getting in everyone’s way, but instead sat on a bench in the park — that was no problem. The pariah did not go away. He replied — to the harbour-master’s renewed rage, again in English — that he had to get to Macao, and had money, but that no one would accept it. Even if they kicked him off the ship ten times, he would still jump back on an eleventh time. The purser was prepared to have a look at that non-legal tender and was shown a few coins that at first seemed to him to be copper, and he was about to return them contemptuously. But when he examined them more closely they looked like old gold coins from Macao, which he must have once seen in his grandfather’s coin collections. This man was someone who had been driven crazy by treasure-hunting, but he did seem to have found a hoard! Perhaps it was possible to get some more out of him.

“That thing isn’t worth anything. But for three I’ll let you have a third-class passage.”

“Must I, who was once a member of the great embassy to Beijing, be put in steerage?”

“That embassy didn’t do you any good. What was your job?”

It was as if the man had been seen through, caught cheating and he winced.

“And you’re not dressed for first-class travel. Come on, what kind of fancy-dress party did you steal those ceremonial clothes from?”

The man retreated a few paces, but came back, grabbed the post as if his life depended on it, hanging onto it as if he could no longer stand, as if he had no ground beneath his feet.

“Why don’t you speak your own language?” the purser continued in English. The man didn’t hear, gazed into the water, and tears ran down his sunken cheeks and were caught in his stubble.

“I’ll give you an empty cabin. But don’t show your face again before everyone has disembarked. Understood?” yelled the purser, who was again calculating how he could rob him en route of the secret of the treasure or whatever it was he had with him. He nodded and ran quickly towards the gangplank as if it were his last chance of rescue.

The purser took him forward to a cabin full of rotting life jackets, which had not been opened for months. Still, the man seemed happy to be alone, and gave the purser another coin, slumped onto the crumbling cork and no longer moved. The vermin, which had at first crawled away, gradually returned and marched over his feet, and later over his clothes, but the swarm soon abandoned this field of operations.

After an hour the ship began creaking and rocking; he gave a sigh and got up. Then the door opened and the fat purser stood in the doorway and behind him a boy with a tray. He asked to be left alone. But the boy put the tray at his feet, and the purser sat down opposite him on another pile. “Have some tiffin,” he offered hospitably. The man tried, but couldn’t eat.

“If you’ve got any more of those coins, I’ll change them for you. And if you want to play fan-tan, I’ll teach you a system that will do brilliantly compared with the bank’s ten per cent.”

The purser waited. He now hoped to hear something about the location of the coins. But the man opposite him said nothing, but simply took hold of the water jug, emptied it and sighed.

“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 army 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.

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. Camões, 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.

At the heart of the novel is a dangerous journey into the interior of the forbidden kingdom of China, which in the sixteenth century had not yet been successfully penetrated by Europeans. When Camões, half dead from exposure to the relentless sun in the desert, finds himself by a large stone to mark the route, he has the sensation that someone else will take his place even though he himself may be lost. In the following chapter, Cameron’s ship is attacked by bandits who abandon the crew in the desert. Cameron finds the stone, clings to it, feels mysteriously revived and survives the ordeal.

The circumstances leading to the temporary integration of the characters, which is also a temporal integration, are laden with symbols. The radio operator enters a tomb in the desert in search of shade and cool. The tomb is a multiple symbol — as an enclosed, protective space it represents a pre-natal state which in turn could indicate a kind of rebirth. The radio operator is protected from the world enclosed in the tomb with its “womb shape”. To the reader, a tomb initially indicates death, but must now be seen as suggesting a beginning as well as an end. Of course, if the character remains in the tomb, he will never be found and will die there, but his instinct for survival expels him into the hostile conditions of the desert again. The tomb is more than a symbol of death and birth — like the stones that mark out the road (to survival), it is itself a survival from the past, a piece of history, a refuge in the present. It too escapes clock-time. But if the dimension of eternal time has been accessed in this way, it is space that plays the crucial part; it is only when the physical place is identical for the two characters that time opens up.

The difference between this magic box and Dr Who’s police box, for example, is that the latter, like Wells’s time machine, actually travels to the new time zone, whereas Slauerhoff’s remains immobile. The travelling has apparently occurred in the characters’ minds, but there is one problem confronting the reader. When the main character returns half crazed and in rags from the desert, he is carrying gold coins from old Macao, wearing ancient clothes, and only understands Portuguese, though he speaks English. The setting may be the twentieth century, but the character is a hybrid — the radio operator has been colonized by Camões. The man finds a hotel, and while his body lies on the bed, his mind travels easily through the centuries. The experience is depicted as akin to passing down a mine shaft with the sedimented past in view, including a brief reference to the opening scene of the novel. This is a prelude to the final coming together of Camões and Cameron. This time the stone edifice to which Cameron is taken back in time is the cathedral of Macao, a ruin in the twentieth century, and the scene of a fierce battle in the fifteenth. The hero of the fight turns out to be Camões, unexpectedly returned from China, but the reader also knows from the hybrid character’s own account that Camões/Cameron was anything but a hero. In fact, he was so traumatized by his extreme experiences that he was hardly aware of what he was doing.

The Forbidden Kingdom is much more than a modernist experiment with time and narrative; it is a novel of adventure, of the pioneer spirit of those early European expeditions to discover new territory and new ways of generating wealth for those who sent them on their journey. It is also a novel about the outcast, whether poet or sailor, a man exiled from the familiar world in which he grew up. He is nomadic, he yearns for happiness, he falls for a beautiful and unattainable woman, who may be drawn to him, but whose circumstances forbid closeness: a modern romantic who experiences intense feeling and suffering. Yet the novel also invites reflection on the colonial enterprise and the violence it involved. While the immediate focus in Slauerhoff’s novel is on the alienation of the individual in a hostile world, its depiction of colonialism and its negative view of established European culture give it a political undertone.

The two main characters find themselves on the other side of the world from where they were born — exiles not just from their country of birth, but also from European civilization. However, while Camões and the ship’s radio operator have a great deal in common as victims, their experiences and above all their attitudes to the forbidden kingdom of China set them apart from one another. In Macao, Camões is a victim of the social norms both of the homeland and of the colony: deprived of his freedom, he is tortured by his fellow countrymen and forced to join the fated embassy to Beijing. Instead of finding refuge among the colonialists, Camões is treated brutally by them. Although he is physically weak, and not an obvious threat, the mentality of the Portuguese in Macao is one of suspicion towards all outsiders. They are afraid that he possesses knowledge which they do not have. This is also why they torture the Dominican friars. During the extreme conditions of the excursion into China with the failed embassy to Beijing, Camões loses all sense of his Portuguese identity. Perhaps there is a residual identity — that of a universal figure, the poet. Slauerhoff’s portrayal of Camões is particularly striking to a twentieth-century reader who knows that Camões has, in the intervening centuries, become Portugal’s national poet, a symbol of Portugal and its culture. In the world of Slauerhoff’s text, the poet is shown as alienated from the Portuguese culture into which he was born, and also from the Portuguese colonial culture to which he is banished — a far cry from the symbolic Camões.

The radio operator is also alienated from his country of birth, Ireland. By his own account, this was a result of rejection by the community in which he was living. He and his family were felt to be different and were not recognized as truly Irish: We weren’t Irish. We were the last scions of the accursed Celtic race that had lived here before the birth of Christ, said the parson. No, descendants of shipwrecked mariners from the Armada, said the schoolmaster, that is, cowards who had not fought, but had fled right around Scotland.

The priest and the schoolmaster foster the notion of his family’s otherness by providing “historical” explanations. In Slauerhoff’s novel, national identity is problematic and exclusive, and exclusion can occur because of perceived otherness, but also because of a refusal on the part of individuals to conform. Cameron turns his back on Europe when he chooses to enter the forbidden kingdom at the end of the novel.

Issues surrounding nations, nationality and nationalism were at the root of European unrest in the 1930s, so Slauerhoff’s preoccupation with national cultures is not particularly surprising. In his journalistic writing, he seems to accept the historical differences between European cultures, while rejecting a fixed national identity for the individual. In this flexible view, an individual is capable of being shaped by contact with other cultures. Slauerhoff’s text offers three types of culture: European, colonial and the forbidden “other”. The Forbidden Kingdom has an uneasy relationship with history, which the novel shows can be used to marginalize individuals. The novel itself abandons the linear historical narrative of the prologue for the unsettling dual narrative of past and present. The past is a powerful force when encountered by a lost individual like the radio operator. It liberates him from himself, and enables him to move on towards exploring a new culture, no longer a forbidden kingdom.

Jane Fenoulhet

University College London

Content

Jan Jacob Slauerhoff
The Forbidden Kingdom

PROLOGUE

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 1

I. Lisbon, August 15…

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 2

I. Macao, in the year of Our Lord 15…

II

III

CHAPTER 3

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 4

I

II

III. Ilha Verde

IV

CHAPTER 5

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

I

II

III

CHAPTER 8

I

II

III

IV

CHAPTER 9

I

II

III

IV

AFTERWORD