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My life as a millionaire then began. I soon left Madame Marques's house, where, ever since she had learnt of my wealth, she gave me rice pudding every day and served me in her Sunday silk dress. I bought and moved into the yellow mansion at Loreto. The luxury of the house became known through the indiscreet engravings in the French Illustration.
Across Europe, my bed became famous for its exuberant and barbarous taste, with its frame covered in sheets of worked gold. Erotic verses by Catullus, embroidered in pearls, flowed across the curtains of black brocade. A lamp suspended within cast the milky, amorous light of a summer moon.
During my first months of wealth, I confess that I loved with the sincere heart of an inexperienced page. I had seen Cândida, as though on a page of a novel, watering carnations on her balcony. She was small and fair-haired and lived in Lisbon's Buenos Aires district, in a little house of chaste appearance covered with climbing plants. Her grace and slender waist reminded me of fragile figures created by art: Mimi, Virginia and Joaninha from The Valley of Santarém.
Every night, I fell at her jasper-coloured feet with a mystic's ecstasy. Every morning, I covered her lap with twenty-thousand-réis banknotes. Cândida first refused them with a blush, but then put them in the drawer and called me her angel Tótó.
One day, I moved silently across the thick Syrian carpet towards her boudoir. She was writing with great concentration, one finger raised in the air. When she saw me, she trembled, turned pale and tried to hide a sheet of paper bearing her monogram. In a fit of jealousy, I tore it from her hands. It was a love letter that began with 'my adored one' and was addressed to an ensign from the neighbourhood. I took that letter as proof that my idealisations were false.
So I tore that feeling from my breast as though it were a poisonous plant. I ceased to believe in fair-haired angels, Innocence, Modesty and other ideals that I now considered ruinous. From the height of my gold, I cast Mephistopheles's acid laugh upon them and coldly organised an animal, magnificent and cynical existence.
At noon, I stepped into my pink marble bath, where perfumes made the water opaque like milk. Young pages with soft hands rubbed me with the solemnity of people celebrating a religious rite. Wrapped in an Indian silk dressing gown, I crossed the gallery between silent rows of footmen, glancing at my paintings by Fortuny and Corot. Thus I made my way to an English-style steak served on blue-and-gold Sèvres porcelain.
If it was hot, I spent the rest of the morning on pearl-coloured satin cushions, in a boudoir with Dresden porcelain furniture and flowers worthy of Armida's garden. There I read the Diário de Notícias while pretty young women dressed in Japanese style cooled me with feather fans. In the afternoon, I walked as far as the Pote das Almas. It was the heaviest hour of the day, and I, leaning on my cane, dragged my weak legs and yawned like a sated beast while the crowd stopped to contemplate the bored nabob.
At times, I missed my busy days at the government office. I would then shut myself in the library, where the Thought of Humanity lay forgotten and bound in morocco leather. I sharpened a quill and spent hours writing the old formulas: 'I have the honour of informing Your Excellency... I have the honour of placing in Your Excellency's hands...'
At the beginning of the evening, a servant announced dinner by sounding a silver tuba through the corridors in the Gothic fashion. I rose and went to eat, majestic and alone. A multitude of footmen in black livery glided silently about, serving rare delicacies and wines priced like jewels among flowers, lights, crystal and reflections of gold. Among the pyramids of fruit and the steam from the dishes, an indescribable boredom spread like mist.
Afterwards, heavy from the meal, I sank into the back of the coupé and went to Janelas Verdes, where I kept a secluded group of women in a garden arranged like a seraglio. There they dressed me in a cool, perfumed silk tunic, and I surrendered to abominable frenzies. At the first light of morning, they brought me home almost dead, and I mechanically made the sign of the cross. Soon afterwards, I snored on my back, livid and covered in cold sweat, like an exhausted Tiberius.
Meanwhile, Lisbon crawled at my feet, and the mansion courtyard remained overrun by a crowd. From the gallery windows, I saw the white shirt fronts of the Aristocracy, the black cassocks of the Clergy and the shining sweat of the Common People. They all came to beg for the honour of one of my smiles and some share in my gold.
At times, I received an old nobleman with a historic title, who crossed the room with his white hair almost brushing the carpet as he stammered compliments. With his strong-veined hand upon his chest, he offered me a beloved daughter as a wife or a concubine.
Citizens brought me gifts as though I were an idol on an altar: odes, my monogram embroidered with hair, slippers, cigar holders and even their own consciences. If my gaze happened to rest on a woman in the street, a letter arrived the next day in which she, whether a wife or a prostitute, offered me her nakedness, love and every sexual favour.
Journalists strained their imaginations to find adjectives worthy of my greatness. I was the sublime Mr Teodoro, then the celestial Mr Teodoro, until the Gazeta das Locais called me the extra-celestial Mr Teodoro. Before me, no head remained covered, whether it wore a crown or a bowler hat. Every day I was offered the post of prime minister or the leadership of a religious brotherhood, and I always refused in disgust.
Little by little, the fame of my wealth crossed the borders of the Portuguese monarchy. Le Figaro spoke of me in every issue and preferred me to Henry V, while Saint-Genest addressed frantic appeals to me to save France. Foreign magazines then began to publish coloured scenes from my life.
Princesses from across Europe sent me envelopes with heraldic seals, photographs of their bodies and documents concerning the antiquity of their genealogies. Two jokes I made that year were telegraphed around the world by the Havas Agency, and I was judged wittier than Voltaire, Rochefort and everyone else. Even the noises from my bowels reached humanity through the newspapers. I made loans to kings, financed civil wars and was cheated by every Latin republic around the Gulf of Mexico. And despite it all, I was sad.
Whenever I entered the house, I stopped with a shudder before the same vision, stretched across the threshold or lying across the golden bed. There lay the Mandarin Ti-Chin-Fú, paunchy, with his black queue, yellow tunic and paper kite in his arms. I rushed at him with my fist raised, but everything dissolved. I would then collapse into an armchair, devastated and covered in sweat. In the silence of the room, amid the red light of the candelabra upon the damask, I murmured: - I must kill this dead man!
Yet it was not the impertinence of that old ghost settling upon my furniture and coverlets that made life bitter to me. The greater horror lay in an idea that had driven itself into my mind like an iron spike that could not be pulled out: I had murdered an old man.
I had not tightened a rope around his neck in the Muslim manner. Nor had I given him poison in a goblet of Syracuse wine, in the Italian manner of the Renaissance. I had not even used the classic methods consecrated by the history of monarchies: the dagger of John II or the firearm of Charles IX. I had eliminated that human being from afar, using only a bell. The method was absurd, fantastic and even comic, but nothing diminished the tragic darkness of the fact. I had murdered an old man.
That certainty rose little by little and hardened within me. Like a column in open country, it came to dominate my entire inner life. However far my thoughts strayed, they saw that accusing memory on the horizon. Even my loftiest imaginings ended by striking their wings against that monument of moral misery. I could call life and death mere transformations of matter.
But it was terrible to think that I had made warm blood grow cold and stilled a living muscle. After dinner, I stretched out on the sofa, replete, with the aroma of coffee beside me. At once a melancholy chorus of accusations rose within me. - And yet you prevented the venerable Ti-Chin-Fú from ever enjoying such comfort again. I reminded Conscience of the Mandarin's old age and incurable gout.
- Even when reduced to a minimum, life is a supreme good, because its charm lies in the very principle of living. That stern schoolmaster's tone irritated me, and I raised my head in desperate arrogance. - Very well, I killed him, and so much the better! - Your grand name of Conscience does not frighten me, for you are merely a disturbance of the nerves.
- I can silence you with orange-blossom water. The reply came as a humble, ironic murmur: - Then eat, sleep, bathe and love. I obeyed, but the fine linen sheets took on the livid colour of a shroud. The perfumed bathwater seemed to cool upon my skin like clotting blood. Even my lovers' bare breasts saddened me like marble gravestones over a dead body.
Then an even greater bitterness seized me. Without any proof, I imagined that Ti-Chin-Fú must have had a large family, with very young grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In my fantasy, I was spending on Sèvres plates the inheritance of which I had deprived them. I saw them endure the old torments of poverty: days without rice, bodies without warm clothing, refused alms and a muddy street for a home.
It then seemed to me that the apparition was finally explaining why it was pursuing me. - I do not grieve for myself, for I was already half dead; I grieve for the unfortunate people you have ruined. - While you return from your lovers, they groan with hunger and cold among beggars, people with leprosy and thieves, near the Temple of Heaven.
I could not raise a piece of bread to my mouth without imagining hungry children chirping in an abandoned nest. If I put on my warm coat, I saw women who had once lived in comfort and who now, in my imagination, shivered beneath scraps of silk. The ebony ceiling of my mansion reminded me of the family I imagined sleeping beside the canals, sniffed at by dogs.
My comfortable coupé made me think of endless walks along flooded roads during an Asian winter. And I suffered all this while the crowd outside envied the happiness it imagined existed in my mansion.
At last, I felt Conscience within me like an angry serpent. I decided to seek help from the one said to stand above Conscience because he possessed Grace. The problem was that I did not believe in him. I therefore turned to my family's old patron, Our Lady of Sorrows. I paid priests and canons generously to ask her to relieve my inner torment.
The prayers rose from cathedrals and chapels, but no relief descended from heaven. I then gave myself to pious practices, and Lisbon saw a nabob kneeling before altars to recite the Hail, Holy Queen. I myself regarded prayer and paradise as fictitious consolations invented by the rich for the poor. I said that the bourgeoisie promised distant pleasures to the common people to divert their attention from full coffers and abundant harvests.
Growing more anxious, I ordered thousands of Masses to be celebrated for Ti-Chin-Fú's wandering soul. But I was only supposing that he had been a scholar of the Han-Lin Academy and a probable contributor to the immense Khou-Tsuane-Chou. I also imagined that he had followed the morality of Confucius, had never worshipped Buddha and would have scorned the Catholic sacrifice.
Experienced prelates then advised me to win Our Lady's favour with flowers, brocades and jewels. The advice turned devotion into a bargain like that of a banker who gives a house to a dancer. At the priests' suggestion, I tried to bribe the Mother of Mankind with an entire cathedral of white marble. I filled it with flowers and lights, creating a magnificence intended to evoke heaven.
The learned Cardinal Nani came from Rome to consecrate the church. Amid the incense, I did not see the Virgin in her blue robe, but the apparition of the old man with the paper kite in his arms. It was to his white moustache and his belly that all that gold-covered priesthood seemed to offer eternal praise.
I thought Lisbon encouraged those imaginings, and I left with only a trunk and a footman. I travelled through Paris, Switzerland and London, and by the sombre lakes of Scotland. Then I went to Jerusalem and travelled from Alexandria to Thebes through monumental, melancholy Egypt. I knew seasickness, the monotony of ruins, the sadness of unknown crowds and the disappointments of the great Parisian boulevards.
None of it cured my inner torment. My guilt was no longer confined to the family I believed I had dispossessed. I began to imagine that I had deprived an entire society of a fundamental figure capable of supporting its institutions. By my reasoning, one could not remove from a state someone connected with one hundred and six thousand contos without disturbing the country's balance.
I read newspapers from Hong Kong and Shanghai, spent nights poring over travel accounts and consulted learned missionaries. Those sources told me of ruined provinces, decaying cities, hunger, disease, revolts and laws without authority. Yet I attributed all those misfortunes of Chinese society to myself. In my sick mind, Ti-Chin-Fú acquired the disproportionate importance of a Caesar or a Moses.
It seemed possible to me that his genius might have saved that old Asian monarchy. I convinced myself that the bell had stopped his work and that his fortune might have restored the state treasury. While I spent that money on luxuries and January peaches for courtesans of the Helder, I knew the colossal remorse of believing I had ruined an empire.
To forget that torment, I installed myself in a mansion on the Champs-Élysées and gave myself up to debauchery. I held lavish parties to the sound of brutal music and the cancan. Bare-breasted prostitutes sang obscene verses while drunken atheist guests insulted God with raised glasses of champagne. At the height of the party, I dropped on all fours and brayed like a donkey in a deliberate attempt to reject thought and conscience.
I then sought what I myself called the debauchery of the common people and plunged into still more degrading alcoholic excesses. Dressed as a labourer, I staggered along the boulevards with Mes-Bottes and Bibi-la-Gaillarde, singing the Marseillaise at the top of my voice. One morning, after another excess, a faint spiritual light dawned in the darkness of my soul.
It was then that the idea of leaving for China suddenly came to me. Other ideas immediately joined it and formed a complete plan. I would go to Peking and seek Ti-Chin-Fú's family, whose existence I still merely imagined. By marrying one of the women in that family, I thought I could legitimise my possession of the millions.
I would restore that scholarly household to its former prosperity. I would have a magnificent funeral held to appease the Mandarin's spirit. I would travel through poor provinces distributing enormous quantities of rice. And I would ask the Emperor for the crystal button that marked the rank of Mandarin.
In my vanity, I supposed that a university graduate would gain that rank without difficulty. Thus I would replace Ti-Chin-Fú in public life and return to the country, if not the power of his imagined wisdom, at least the power of his money. At times, I recognised that this programme was vague, nebulous, childish and idealistic.
Yet the desire for an original, epic adventure already swept me along like a dry leaf in a gust. I longed to set foot on Chinese soil. I prepared everything in haste, spending gold by the handful. One night, I finally left for Marseille.
I had chartered the entire steamship Ceylão. The next morning, the sea was blue-black, white gulls flew overhead and the sun reddened the towers of Our Lady of the Guard. I then set a course for the East.