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Then my life as a millionaire began: I soon left Madame Marques's house, where, ever since she knew I was rich, she treated me to rice pudding every day and served me in person, wearing her Sunday silk dress.
I bought and occupied the yellow mansion at Loreto, whose magnificence became known through the indiscreet engravings of the French illustrated press. My bed became famous in Europe for its exuberant and barbaric taste: a frame covered in sheets of chased gold supported curtains of rare black brocade, upon which erotic verses by Catullus flowed in pearl embroidery. A lamp suspended within shed the milky, amorous light of a summer moon there.
During my first months of wealth, I admit, I spent my time in love, with the sincere heartbeat of an inexperienced page. I had seen Cândida, as though on the page of a novel, watering carnations on her balcony: she was small and blonde, lived in a chaste house covered with climbing plants in Buenos Aires and, in her grace and the outline of her waist, reminded me of Mimi, Virginia and Joaninha from The Valley of Santarém. Every night I fell, in a mystic's ecstasies, at her jasper-coloured feet. Every morning I covered her lap with twenty-thousand-réis banknotes; at first she pushed them away with a blush and then, as she put them in the drawer, called me her angel Tótó.
One day, I moved on subtle footsteps over the thick Syrian carpet to her boudoir and found her writing, utterly absorbed, with her little finger suspended in the air. When she saw me, trembling and pale, she hid the paper bearing her monogram. I tore it from her in a fit of senseless jealousy. It was the customary, inevitable letter which, according to my generalisation, women have written since Antiquity: it began 'My adored one' and was addressed to an ensign in the neighbourhood.
I immediately tore that feeling from my breast like a poisonous plant. I ceased to believe in fair-haired Angels who preserve in their blue gaze the reflection of the heavens they have crossed. From the height of my gold I let Mephistopheles's acid laugh fall upon Innocence, Modesty and other ruinous idealisations. And I coldly organised an animal, grandiose and cynical existence.
At the stroke of noon, I entered the rose-coloured marble bath, where the perfumes poured into the water gave it the opaque hue of milk. Afterwards, young pages with soft hands rubbed me with the ceremony of men officiating at a rite. Wrapped in an Indian silk robe, I crossed the gallery, casting glances at my works by Fortuny and Corot between silent ranks of footmen, until I reached the 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 whose furniture was made of fine Dresden porcelain and where the flowers composed a garden of Armida. There I savoured the Diário de Notícias while beautiful girls dressed in Japanese fashion cooled the air with feather fans.
In the afternoon I walked as far as the Pote das Almas, leaning on my cane, dragging my limp legs and opening the yawns of a sated beast, while the abject crowd stopped in ecstasy to contemplate the bored Nabob.
At times I was seized by a longing for my busy days at the government office. I would then shut myself in the library, where the Thought of Humanity lay forgotten, bound in morocco leather, and sharpen a duck-feather quill. For hours I covered sheets of my beloved old Tojal paper with the formulas: - Most Illustrious and Excellent Sir, 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 playing a solemn strain through the corridors on a silver tuba in the Gothic fashion. I rose and went to eat, majestic and alone. A multitude of footmen in black silk livery served rare delicacies and wines priced like jewels in the silence of gliding shadows, among flowers, lights, crystal and glittering gold. Coiling around the pyramids of fruit and mingling with the steam from the dishes, an unspeakable boredom drifted like a subtle mist.
Afterwards, apoplectic, I flung myself into the depths of the coupé and went to Janelas Verdes, where, in a seraglio garden amid Muslim refinements, I kept a collection of women. They dressed me in a tunic of cool, perfumed silk, and I surrendered to abominable frenzies. They brought me home half-dead at the first glimmer of morning; I mechanically made the sign of the cross. Soon afterwards I was snoring on my back, livid and covered in cold sweat, like an exhausted Tiberius.
Meanwhile Lisbon crawled at my feet, and the mansion's courtyard remained overrun by a crowd. From the gallery windows, I saw the shirt fronts of the Aristocracy gleam white, the cassocks of the Clergy loom black and the sweat of the Common People shine. With abject lips they came to beg for the honour of one of my smiles and some share in my gold.
When I consented to receive an old man of historic title, he advanced across the room with his white hair almost brushing the carpet, stammered flattery and, with his strongly veined hand upon his breast, offered me his beloved daughter as wife or concubine.
Citizens brought me gifts as though to an idol upon an altar: votive odes, my monogram embroidered with hair, slippers, cigar holders and each person's own conscience. If my dulled gaze happened to settle on a woman in the street, a letter arrived the following day in which the creature, whether a wife or a prostitute, offered me her nakedness, love and the indulgences of lust.
Journalists spurred their imaginations to discover adjectives worthy of my greatness: I became 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 directorship of a religious brotherhood, and I always refused in disgust.
Little by little, the rumour of my wealth crossed the borders of the Monarchy. The courtly Figaro spoke of me in every issue and preferred me to Henry V. The immortal grotesque who signed himself Saint-Genest addressed convulsive apostrophes to me, begging me to save France. Foreign illustrated papers then began to publish scenes from my life in colour. I received envelopes bearing heraldic seals from princesses throughout Europe, in which photographs and documents set out for me the shape of their bodies and the antiquity of their genealogies. Two witticisms I uttered during that year were telegraphed to the Universe along the wires of the Havas Agency. I was considered wittier than Voltaire, Rochefort and that subtle intelligence known as Everybody. When my bowels relieved themselves with a report, Humanity learnt of it through the newspapers. I made loans to kings, subsidised civil wars and was cheated by every Latin republic along the Gulf of Mexico.
And yet I was sad.
Whenever I entered the house, I stopped with a shudder before the same vision, stretched across the threshold or lying athwart the golden bed. There lay the paunchy figure of Ti-Chin-Fú, with a black queue, yellow tunic and the paper kite in his arms. I rushed at it with raised fist, and the image dissolved completely.
I then collapsed, crushed and covered in sweat, into an armchair in the silence of the room, where the candelabra cast blood-red tones over the red damask. And I murmured: - I must kill this dead man!
Yet it was not the impertinence of that pot-bellied old phantom making itself comfortable on my furniture and coverlets that made life taste bitter to me. The supreme horror lay in the idea, driven into my mind like an iron spike that could not be pulled out, that I had murdered an old man.
It had not been with a rope around the throat in the Muslim fashion, nor with poison in a cup of Syracusan wine in the Italian manner of the Renaissance. Nor had I resorted to any of the classical methods consecrated in the history of monarchies: the dagger, as John II had done, or the carbine, as Charles IX had done. I had eliminated the creature from afar, with a bell. It was absurd, fantastic, comic. But that did not lessen the tragic blackness of the fact: I had murdered an old man!
Little by little, that certainty rose and turned to stone in my soul, dominating my whole inner life like a solitary column on open ground. However far my thoughts strayed, they always saw that accusing Memory looming dark on the horizon; however high my imagination flew, it ended by striking its wings against that monument of moral wretchedness.
Ah, even if Life and Death are regarded as commonplace transformations of Substance, it is dreadful to think that warm blood has been chilled and a living muscle made still! After dinner, when I stretched out on the sofa, languid and replete, with the aroma of coffee beside me, a murmur of accusations rose within me, as melancholy as a chorus coming from a prison.
- And yet it was you who prevented the venerable Ti-Chin-Fú from ever again enjoying the comfort in which you now indulge! In vain I answered Conscience by reminding it of the Mandarin's decrepitude and incurable gout. Fertile in arguments and avid for controversy, it immediately retorted in fury.
- Even when reduced to its most limited activity, life is a supreme good, for its wonder lies in its very principle, not in the abundance of its manifestations!
I rebelled against that rhetorical pedantry of a rigid schoolmaster and, lifting my head, shouted at it with desperate arrogance.
- Very well, I killed him! - What do you want from me? Your grand name of Conscience does not frighten me: you are merely a perversion of nervous sensibility, and I can do away with you using orange blossom!
Immediately, however, I felt a humble murmur of ironic voices pass through my soul with the slowness of a breeze.
- Very well; then eat, sleep, bathe and make love...
I did so, but the very fine linen sheets on my bed took on, before my terrified eyes, the livid hue of a shroud. The perfumed water into which I lowered myself cooled upon my skin with the thick sensation of blood clotting. And the bare breasts of my lovers saddened me like marble tombstones enclosing a dead body.
Then a greater bitterness assailed me: I began to imagine, as though it were certain, that Ti-Chin-Fú had left a large family, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren still young. In my fantasy, I was devouring their inheritance from Sèvres plates with the pomp of a prodigal sultan, while they endured in China every traditional hell of poverty. I saw them without rice or warm clothing, denied alms, with the muddy street for their home.
I then believed I understood why the obese figure of the old scholar pursued me. From the lips covered by the long white moustache of shadow, a desolate accusation seemed to emerge. - I do not mourn for myself, a form already half dead; I mourn the wretches you have ruined. - While you leave the cool arms of your lovers, they groan with hunger and freeze in the cold, huddled among people with leprosy and thieves on the Bridge of Beggars, beside the Temple of Heaven!
What an ingenious torture! A truly Chinese torture, I would say. I could not raise a piece of bread to my mouth without at once imagining the hungry children of Ti-Chin-Fú's supposed descendants, like unfledged birds crying in an abandoned nest. If I wrapped myself in my overcoat, I saw women once cosseted by comfort, now purple with cold beneath silk rags on a snowy morning. The ebony ceiling of the mansion reminded me of that imagined family sleeping beside the canals, sniffed at by dogs. And my well-upholstered coupé made me shudder at the vision of long, wandering walks along sodden roads beneath a harsh Asian winter.
How I suffered, precisely when the envious crowd came to admire the mansion and discuss the unattainable happiness it imagined must dwell within!
At last, recognising that Conscience was an angry serpent within me, I decided to implore the help of Him who is said to stand above Conscience because He commands Grace.
Unfortunately, I did not believe in Him; nevertheless, I turned to my old private divinity and family patron, Our Lady of Sorrows. Royally paid, priests and canons in city cathedrals and village chapels asked her to turn her merciful eyes towards my inner affliction. But no relief descended from those pitiless heavens, towards which the heat of human misery has risen in vain for thousands of years.
I then plunged into pious practices, and Lisbon witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a rich man, a nabob, prostrate humbly at the foot of the altars. With folded hands, I murmured phrases from the Hail, Holy Queen, although I saw in Prayer and the Kingdom of Heaven little more than a fictitious consolation invented by those who possess everything to placate those who have nothing. I belonged to the bourgeoisie and believed I knew that it displays a distant paradise to the dispossessed common people in order to divert their attention from full coffers and abundant fields.
Growing more uneasy, I then had thousands of masses, both plain and sung, celebrated to appease Ti-Chin-Fú's wandering soul. It was the childish folly of a peninsular mind: I supposed that the old Mandarin had been a scholar, a member of the Han-Lin Academy and a probable contributor to the colossal Khou-Tsuane-Chou. I imagined him an adherent of Confucius's morality, untouched even by the worship of Buddha, and presumed that the mystical sacrifice would have seemed to him a clown's pantomime.
Astute, experienced prelates then advised me to win the favour of Our Lady of Sorrows with flowers, brocade and jewels, as one might purchase the favours of a courtesan. At a priestly suggestion, I tried to bribe the gentle Mother of Mankind by building her a cathedral entirely of white marble. Among the carved pillars, the flowers opened vistas of paradise, and the multitude of lights suggested a stellar magnificence. Useless expense: the refined and learned Cardinal Nani came from Rome to consecrate the church. When I entered to visit my divine guest, beyond the bald heads of the celebrants and amid the mystical haze of incense, I did not see the Queen of Grace in her blue tunic. I saw Ti-Chin-Fú, with his slanting eye and the paper kite in his arms. It was to his white moustache and goose-coloured belly that an entire gold-embroidered priesthood, amid the roar of the organ, was offering an eternity of praise.
Convinced that Lisbon's drowsy atmosphere encouraged those imaginings, I left with a trunk and a footman, travelling soberly and without pomp.
In the classical order, I visited Paris, commonplace Switzerland, London and the taciturn lakes of Scotland. I pitched my tent before the evangelical walls of Jerusalem and travelled, from Alexandria to Thebes, through Egypt, monumental and sad as the corridor of a mausoleum. I came to know seasickness aboard packet ships, the monotony of ruins, the melancholy of unknown crowds and the disappointments of the boulevard; my inner affliction continued to grow.
I was no longer tormented merely by having dispossessed a family I supposed venerable; I was assailed by the vaster remorse of having deprived an entire society of a fundamental figure. In my fantasy, Ti-Chin-Fú became an experienced scholar, a pillar of Order and a support of Institutions, a man worth one hundred and six thousand contos who could not be torn from a state without disturbing its balance. Anxious to know whether his disappearance had truly proved disastrous for China, I read newspapers from Hong Kong and Shanghai, spent nights poring over travel accounts and consulted learned missionaries. Articles, men and books told me of ruined provinces, dying cities, starving multitudes, plagues, rebellions, collapsing temples and laws without authority: a world decomposing like a grounded ship broken plank by plank by the waves.
And I attributed all those misfortunes of Chinese society to myself. In my diseased mind, Ti-Chin-Fú had acquired the disproportionate stature of a Caesar or a Moses, one of those providential beings who, as I imagined it, sustain the strength of a people. I had killed him and persuaded myself that his country's vitality had vanished with him; perhaps his mind could have saved that old Asian monarchy, but I had brought his creative action to a standstill. His fortune might have restored the treasury, while I squandered it on offering peaches in January to the Messalinas of the Hélder. Friends, I thus came to know the colossal remorse of having ruined an empire!
To forget that complicated torment, I gave myself up to debauchery and installed myself in a mansion on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, where I became monstrous. I gave parties in the manner of Trimalchio: bands launched into can-cans amid the brutal blare of brass, bare-breasted prostitutes yelped obscene songs and bohemian guests insulted God with raised glasses of champagne. Seized by bestial fury and hatred of thought and consciousness, I threw myself on all fours and brayed tremendously like a donkey.
I then wanted to descend still further, into common debauchery and the alcoholic squalor of the Assomoir. In a workman's smock with my cap pushed back, arm in arm with Mes-Bottes or Bibi-la-Gaillarde, I staggered along the outer boulevards in a wine-soaked rabble.
Between belches, I howled the Marseillaise: - Arise, children of the fatherland... The day of glory has arrived...
It was one morning, after one of those excesses, at the hour when a vague spiritual dawn rises in the darkness of the debauchee's soul, that the idea of leaving for China suddenly came to me. Like soldiers waking in a camp at the sound of the bugle, other ideas rose, gathered and formed a formidable plan in my mind. I would go to Peking and find Ti-Chin-Fú's family, whose existence and whereabouts I still only imagined. By marrying one of the women, I would legitimise my possession of the millions and restore that scholarly household to its former prosperity. I would hold a magnificent funeral to appease the Mandarin's spirit and make colossal distributions of rice throughout the impoverished provinces. By obtaining the crystal button of a mandarin from the Emperor, which I thought easy for a graduate, I would take Ti-Chin-Fú's vacant place. In this way I would restore to his country, if not the authority of his learning, at least the power of his gold. At times, the whole programme seemed to me vague, nebulous, childish and idealistic. But the desire for that original, epic adventure was already carrying me away like a dry leaf in a gust of wind.
I longed to set foot on Chinese soil; after great preparations, hastened by handfuls of gold, I finally left one night for Marseille. I had chartered the entire Ceylão. The following morning, over a steel-blue sea beneath the white flight of gulls, the first rays of the sun reddened the towers of Our Lady of the Guard upon the dark rock as I set my course eastwards.