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At dawn, two Lazarist priests on their way to Tien-Hó had found me unconscious on the road. As cheerful Father Loriot said, 'not a moment too soon', for a black semicircle of large, sombre crows from Tartary was already watching my motionless body greedily.
They carried me without delay to the convent on a litter. The community rejoiced on learning that I was Latin, Christian and a subject of the Most Faithful Kings. The convent formed the centre of a small Catholic settlement, huddled around the massive residence like serfs' dwellings at the foot of a feudal castle. It had existed since the days of the first missionaries who had travelled through Manchuria. We were on the borders of China; beyond began Mongolia, the Land of Grasses, an immense dark-green expanse of endless meadowlands flecked with the bright colours of wild flowers.
There stretched the vast plain of the nomads, where from my window I saw dark circles of tents covered with felt or sheepskins. At times I watched a tribe depart in long lines of caravans, taking their herds westwards.
The Lazarist superior was the excellent Father Giulio. His long residence among Chinese communities had given him, in my eyes, an almost Chinese air: when I met him in the cloister, in a purple tunic, with a long queue and venerable beard, slowly waving an enormous fan, he seemed to me a learned Mandarin silently commenting, in the peace of a temple, upon the Sacred Book of Chú. He was a saint; but the smell of garlic he gave off would, I thought, drive away the most afflicted souls in need of consolation.
I retain fond memories of the days spent there. My room, whitewashed and marked by a black cross, had the seclusion of a cell. I awoke at the bell for matins and, out of respect for the old missionaries, went to hear Mass in the chapel. So far from my Catholic homeland, in those Mongolian lands, I was moved to see, in the clear morning light, the priest's chasuble and embroidered cross bow before the altar and to hear 'Dominus vobiscum' and 'Cum spiritu tuo' whispered in the cool silence.
In the afternoon I went to the school to admire the Chinese children as they declined 'Hora, Horae'. After the refectory meal, I walked in the cloister and listened to stories of distant missions and apostolic journeys into the Grasslands, with imprisonments, marches, dangers and chronicles extolling the heroism of faith.
I did not recount my fantastic adventures at the convent and presented myself merely as a curious tourist taking notes across the Universe. While I waited for my ear to heal, I surrendered, in a weariness of spirit, to the peace of the monastery.
I was nevertheless determined to leave China quickly, that 'barbarous Empire' which I then claimed to hate prodigiously. I reflected that I had come from the farthest West to bring a Chinese province the abundance of my millions and that, as soon as I arrived, I had been robbed, stoned and wounded by an arrow. A sullen resentment filled me, and I spent hours pacing the room, brooding over savage acts of revenge against the Middle Kingdom. Withdrawing with my millions seemed to me the most practical and easiest revenge.
Besides, the idea of artificially resurrecting Ti-Chin-Fú's personality for China's benefit now seemed absurd to me, the folly of a dream. I understood neither the language, the customs, the rites, the laws nor the scholars of that people, whom I then called 'that race'. And, steeped in resentment, I asked what I was doing there except exposing the display of my wealth to attacks by a people to whom I attributed forty-four centuries of piracy at sea and plunder on land.
Meanwhile, Ti-Chin-Fú and his paper kite remained invisible, perhaps having ascended, as I imagined, to the Chinese heaven of the ancestors. As remorse ceased to be visible, my desire for expiation diminished remarkably. No doubt, I told myself, the old scholar had grown tired of leaving the ineffable regions to come and stretch himself across my furniture. He had seen my efforts and my desire to serve his descendants, his province and his race and, satisfied, had settled comfortably into his eternal siesta. I would never again see Ti-Chin-Fú's apparition in the form of the 'yellow paunch' I attributed to him.
An appetite then gnawed at me to find myself peaceful and free once more, enjoying my gold at the Loreto palace or on the boulevard, sipping the honey from the flowers of Civilisation.
But what of the woman I supposed to be Ti-Chin-Fú's widow, the delicate ladies among his descendants and the little grandchildren? Was I to leave them cruelly exposed to hunger and cold in the black alleys of Tien-Hó? No: they were not to blame for the stones the crowd had thrown at me.
I was a Christian, sheltered in a Christian convent, with the Gospel at my bedside and surrounded by lives that embodied Charity. For that reason I could not leave the Empire without restoring to those I had dispossessed the abundance and honest comfort commended by the Classic of Filial Piety.
I then wrote to Camilloff. I told him of my abject flight beneath the stones of the Tien-Hó crowd. I also told him of the Christian refuge the mission had given me and of my keen desire to leave the Middle Kingdom. I asked him to remit to the woman I believed to be Ti-Chin-Fú's widow the millions I had left on deposit with the merchant Tsing-Fó. The deposit was held on Cha-Coua Avenue, beside Tong's triumphal arch and near the temple of the goddess Kaonine.
Cheerful Father Loriot, who was travelling to Peking on a mission, carried the letter, which I had sealed with the convent seal: a cross rising from a flaming heart. The days passed. The first snows were whitening the northern mountains of Manchuria, and I spent my time hunting gazelles across the Land of Grasses. How vigorous and intensely alive those morning hours were, when I galloped through the harsh air of the plain among Mongolian hunters who beat the scrub with their lances to a vibrant ululating cry! At times a gazelle would spring up and, ears lowered, slender and outstretched, flee along the thread of the wind. We then released the falcon, which flew serenely above her and, at regular intervals, struck her skull sharply with the full force of its curved beak. At last, we would bring her down beside stagnant water covered with water lilies. The black dogs of Tartary crowded over her belly and, with bloodied paws, slowly teased out her entrails with the tips of their teeth.
One morning, the lay brother at the gate at last saw cheerful Father Loriot hurrying up the settlement's steep road from Peking, with his knapsack on his shoulder and a tiny child in his arms. He had found the child abandoned, naked and dying beside a road. He had immediately baptised the child in a stream and named the child Bem-Achado, and was carrying the infant tenderly, breathless from having hurried so much, to give the starving little one the convent goat's good milk without delay.
After embracing the religious brothers and wiping away the great beads of sweat, he took an envelope bearing the seal of the Russian eagle from his breeches pocket. 'This is what Papa Camilloff sends, my friend Teodoro. He was very well. And the lady too... All in fine form.'
I ran to a corner of the cloister to read the two sheets: my good Camilloff, with his severe bald head and owl's eye, combined with singular originality the keen judgement of a skilled chancery man and the roguish foibles of a comic diplomat.
The letter began with this greeting: 'My friend, guest and dearest Teodoro.' 'The first lines of your letter dismayed us, but those that followed brought us welcome relief by assuring us that you were with those holy fathers of the Christian mission.' 'I was setting off for the imperial Yamen to lodge a severe protest with Prince Tong over the scandal at Tien-Hó.' 'His Excellency displayed unrestrained delight: although as a private man he deplores the insult, robbery and stoning suffered by my guest, as a minister of the Empire he sees in them the sweet opportunity to extort a fine from the town of Tien-Hó.' 'As punishment for the offence committed against a foreigner, the profitable sum will be three hundred thousand francs or, by the calculations of our shrewd Meriskoff, fifty-four contos de réis in the currency of your beautiful country; an excellent result for the imperial Treasury, leaving your ear copiously avenged.' 'The first cold weather is beginning here and we are already wearing furs; good Meriskoff continues to suffer from liver trouble, but the pain alters neither his philosophical judgement nor his learned verbosity.' 'We have suffered a great sorrow: the lovely little dog belonging to good Madame Tagarieff, the wife of our beloved secretary, the adorable Tu-tu, disappeared on the morning of the fifteenth.' 'I made urgent representations to the police, but Tu-tu was not returned to us, and our distress is all the greater because it is said that the Peking mob has a particular fondness for these little dogs stewed in sugar syrup.' 'There was also an abominable event with disastrous consequences: at the latest legation dinner, the pert Madame Grijon of the French legation, that withered branch, as Meriskoff calls her, gave her arm and the place on her right at table to a mere English attaché, Lord Gordon.' 'What do you say to that? Is it credible? Is it rational? It is the destruction of the social order!' 'Her arm, the place on her right, to an attaché, a brick-coloured Scotsman with a monocle wedged in his eye, when all the ambassadors, the ministers and I were present!' 'The affair has caused an indescribable sensation in the diplomatic corps; we await instructions from our governments and, as Meriskoff says while sadly shaking his head, it is serious... very serious indeed!' 'Everything proves, and no one doubts, that Lord Gordon is the withered branch's favourite. What rottenness! What filth!' 'The general's wife has not been well since your departure for ill-fated Tien-Hó.' 'Dr Pagloff cannot make sense of her ailment: it is a languor, a wilting, a wistful listlessness that leaves her motionless for hours on the sofa in the Pavilion of Discreet Repose, her gaze vacant and her lips full of sighs.' 'I am under no illusion: I know perfectly well what is wearing her away; it is that wretched bladder complaint she contracted from the bad water when we were at the legation in Madrid. The Lord's will be done!' 'She asks me to send you un petit bonjour and wishes you, as soon as you reach Paris, if you do go to Paris, to send her through the Embassy bag to St Petersburg two dozen pairs of twelve-button gloves, size five and three quarters, of the Sol brand, from the Louvre department store.' 'She also asks for the latest novels by Zola, Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, and a box of bottles of Opoponax.' 'I was forgetting to tell you that we have changed bakers: we now obtain our bread from the British Embassy bakery and have left the French Embassy's so as to have no dealings with the withered branch.' 'There you have the drawbacks of our having no bakery at the Russian Embassy, despite all the reports and protests I have sent on the matter to the chancery in St Petersburg!' 'They know perfectly well that there are no bakeries in Peking and that every legation has its own as an instrument of establishment and influence.' 'But what can one do! At the imperial court the gravest interests of Russian civilisation are disregarded!' 'I believe that is all the news from Peking and the legations; Meriskoff and everyone at this Embassy send their regards, as do little Count Arthur, Zizi from the Spanish legation, Focinho caído and Lulú, in short, everyone.' 'I, more than anyone, take my leave with longing and affection. General Camilloff.'
The postscript added: 'As for Ti-Chin-Fú's widow and family, there has been a mistake: the astrologer from the temple of Faqua misread the stars, and that family does not in fact live in Tien-Hó.' 'It is now said that the family lives in southern China, in the province of Canton; but there is also a Ti-Chin-Fú family beyond the Great Wall, close to the Russian frontier, in the district of Ka-ó-li.' 'The head of each family has died, and poverty has overtaken them both.' 'Therefore, while awaiting fresh instructions, I did not withdraw the money from Tsing-Fó's establishment.' 'His Excellency Prince Tong sent me this fresh information today, accompanied by a delicious preserve of calombro.' 'I must inform you that our good Sá-Tó has turned up here after returning from Tien-Hó, with a split lip and slight bruising to his shoulder.' 'From the plundered baggage he saved only a lithograph of Our Lady of Sorrows which, from the ink inscription, I see once belonged to your respected mother.' 'My two valiant Cossacks, however, were left dead in a pool of blood.' 'His Excellency Prince Tong condescends to compensate me for them at the rate of ten thousand francs each, using the sums extorted from the town of Tien-Hó.' 'Sá-Tó tells me that, if my guest, as is only natural, were to resume his travels through the Empire in search of the Ti-Chin-Fú families, he would consider himself honoured and delighted to accompany him, with canine fidelity and Cossack docility.' 'Camilloff.'
'No! Never!' I roared furiously, crumpling the letter as I strode through the melancholy cloister. 'No, by God or the Devil! Take to the roads of China again? Never!' 'What a grotesque and disastrous fate! I leave the delights of the Loreto palace and my lover's nest in Paris, am dragged by the sickening swell from Marseille to Shanghai, endure the fleas of Chinese riverboats, the stench of the alleys and the dust of the arid roads... for what?' 'I had a plan that rose to the heavens, grand and ornate as a trophy, glittering from top to bottom with every kind of good deed; and behold it falling to the ground, piece by piece, in ruins!' 'I wanted to give my name, my millions and half my golden bed to a Ti-Chin-Fú lady, and the social prejudices of a race I call barbarous will not allow it!' 'I intend to reshape China's destiny with the Mandarin's crystal button and bring her civil prosperity, but imperial law forbids me!' 'I aspire to shower endless alms upon this starving rabble, and I run the thankless risk of being beheaded as an instigator of rebellion!' 'I come to enrich a town, and the riotous crowd stones me!' 'At last I was going to give the Ti-Chin-Fú family the abundance and comfort praised by Confucius, but the family vanishes, evaporates like smoke, while other Ti-Chin-Fú families loom vaguely to the south and west like deceptive flashes of light!' 'And was I to go to Canton and Ka-ó-li, expose my other ear to brutal bricks and flee once more across the wastelands, clinging to a pony's mane? Never!'
I stopped and, with my arms raised, spoke to the cloister arches, the trees and the fine, silent air around me. 'Ti-Chin-Fú!' I cried. 'Ti-Chin-Fú! To appease you, I did what was rational, generous and logical!' 'Are you satisfied at last, venerable scholar, you, your charming kite and your official paunch? Speak to me! Speak to me!'
I listened and looked: at noon the well pulley creaked slowly in the courtyard; beneath the mulberry trees, along the arcades, leaves from the October tea harvest were drying on tissue paper; and through the half-open schoolroom door came the slow murmur of Latin declensions. It was an austere peace, composed of the simplicity of labour, the honesty of study and the pastoral air of that hill, where the religious settlement slept beneath a white winter sun. Amid that surrounding serenity, I suddenly felt absolute peace enter my soul. I lit a cigar with fingers that were still trembling and, wiping a bead of sweat from my brow, said this, the summary of a destiny: 'Well, Ti-Chin-Fú is satisfied.'
I went at once to the cell of the excellent Father Giulio, where he was reading his breviary by the window, nibbling sugar sweets with the convent cat on his lap. 'Most Reverend Father, I am returning to Europe... Is any of our good fathers by chance going on a mission towards Shanghai?' The venerable superior put on his round spectacles and, piously leafing through a vast register in Chinese script, murmured: 'On the fifth day of the tenth Moon, Father Anacleto leaves for Tien-Tzin, for the novena of the Brothers of the Holy Crèche; in the twelfth Moon, Father Sanchez also goes to Tien-Tzin, for the work of the Catechism for Orphans. Yes, dear guest, you have companions eastwards.' 'Tomorrow?' I asked. 'Tomorrow,' he replied. 'Parting is painful at the ends of the earth when souls understand one another well in Jesus... Let our Father Gutierrez prepare good provisions for you. We had already come to love you as a brother, Teodoro... Have a sweet; they are delicious.' 'Things rest happily when they are in their natural place and element; the place of man's heart is the heart of God, and yours is in that safe refuge... Have a sweet... What is that, my son, what is that?'
I was placing upon his open breviary, on a page of the Gospel of poverty, a roll of Bank of England notes. 'Most Reverend Father, for your poor...' I stammered. 'Excellent, excellent... Let our good Gutierrez prepare you ample provisions... Amen, my son... In Deo omnia spes!'
The next day, between Father Anacleto and Father Sanchez, mounted on the convent's white mule, I rode down through the settlement to the pealing of bells. We travelled to Hiang-Hiam, a black, walled town where the boats bound downriver for Tien-Tzin put in. Along the Pei-Hó the land was already white with snow and the water was beginning to freeze in the shallow inlets; wrapped in sheepskins around the brazier in the stern, the good fathers and I talked about missionary work, matters Chinese and, at times, the concerns of Heaven, continually passing around the stout bottle of gin.
I parted from those holy companions in Tien-Tzin and, two weeks later, at noon beneath a mild sun, I paced the deck of the Java smoking my cigar, watching the bustle on the Hong Kong quays as the ship prepared to weigh anchor for Europe.
I was moved at the moment when, with the first turns of the propeller, I watched the land of China recede. Ever since I had woken that morning, a dull unease had once more weighed upon my soul. I now reflected that I had come to that vast Empire to quiet a fearful protest from Conscience through expiation and that, in the end, driven by nervous impatience, I was leaving having done no more than dishonour the white moustaches of a heroic general and be struck on the ear by stones in a town on the borders of Mongolia. What a strange fate mine was!
Until nightfall I leant gloomily against the rail, watching the smooth sea, like a vast length of blue silk, fold into soft pleats on either side; little by little, great stars began to throb in the black vault while the propeller worked rhythmically in the darkness. Overcome by a soft weariness, I then wandered about the packet ship, looking at the illuminated compass, the heaps of capstans, the machinery beating in time in a fiery light, and the sparks escaping from the funnel in a coil of black smoke. Red-bearded sailors stood motionless around the helm, and the pilots' figures on the upper deck rose tall and indistinct in the night. In the captain's cabin, an Englishman in a pith helmet, surrounded by ladies drinking cognac, was playing the air of Bonnie Dundee mournfully on a flute.
It was eleven o'clock when I went down to my berth; the lights had already been extinguished, but the round white moon was rising level with the water and striking the cabin window with a beam of light. In that pale half-light, I saw the paunchy figure stretched out on the bunk, dressed in yellow silk, with the paper kite in his arms. It was he, once again!
And it was he, perpetually! It was he in Singapore and in Ceylon. It was he rising from the desert sands as we passed through the Suez Canal and advancing to the bow of a supply boat when we stopped at Malta. It was he gliding over the rose-coloured mountains of Sicily and emerging from the mists surrounding the Rock of Gibraltar. When I landed in Lisbon at the Cais das Colunas, his portly figure filled the whole of the Rua Augusta arch. His slanting eye was fixed on me, and the paper kite's two painted eyes seemed to be watching me too...