Daughter of Fortune (20 page)

His aged master was a placid man, slow to speak, with a face as round as the moon, and bony, sensitive hands, his best instruments. The first thing he did with his servant was give him a name. He consulted astrological and seers' books to find the name that corresponded to the boy: Tao. The word had several meanings, among them “way,” “direction,” “sense,” and “harmony,” but especially it represented the journey of life. The master gave Tao his own family name.

“You will be called Tao Chi'en. That name will start you on the road of medicine. Your destiny will be to ease pain and achieve wisdom. You will be a
zhong yi
, like me.”

Tao Chi'en. . . . The young apprentice received his name gratefully. He kissed his master's hands and smiled for the first time since he had left his home. The impulse of joy that once made him dance with happiness for no reason at all beat again in his chest, and his smile did not fade for weeks. He skipped around the house, savoring his name like a sweet in his mouth, repeating it aloud and dreaming of it, until he was fully identified with it. His master, a follower of Confucius in practical matters and of Buddha in ideology, taught him with a firm hand but with great gentleness the discipline that led to making him a good physician.

“If I succeed in teaching you everything I mean to, someday you will be an enlightened man,” he told him.

He maintained that rites and ceremonies were as necessary as the norms of good behavior and respect for hierarchies. He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism. He liked the ready smile of his apprentice.

“You have already traveled a good distance along the path of wisdom, Tao. The wise man is always joyful,” he maintained.

Throughout the year, Tao Chi'en got out of bed at dawn, like any student, to do his hour of meditation, chants, and prayers. He had one day of rest on which to celebrate the New Year; working and studying were his only occupations. Before anything else, he had to learn Chinese script to perfection, it was the official medium of communication in that enormous land of hundreds of peoples and languages. His master was inflexible in regard to the beauty and precision of calligraphy, which distinguishes the refined man from the scoundrel. He also insisted on developing in Tao Chi'en the artistic sensitivity which, according to him, characterized the superior being. Like all civilized Chinese, he had an immeasurable aversion to war and was, in contrast, inclined toward the arts of music, painting, and literature. By his side, Tao Chi'en learned to appreciate the delicate lace of a spider-web pearled with dewdrops in the light of dawn and to express his pleasure in inspired poems written in elegant calligraphy. In the opinion of the master, the only thing worse than not writing poetry was writing it badly. In his master's house the boy attended the frequent reunions in which the guests admired the garden and created verses in the impulse of the instant, while he served tea and listened, enthralled. One could win immortality by writing a book, especially a book of poems, said the master, who had written several. To the homespun practical knowledge he had acquired by watching his father at work Tao Chi'en added the impressive theoretical volume of ancestral Chinese medicine. The youth learned that the human body is composed of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and that those elements are associated with five planets, five atmospheric conditions, five colors, and five notes. Through the proper use of medicinal plants, acupuncture, and cupping glasses, a good physician could prevent and cure various maladies and control masculine energy—active and light—and feminine energy—passive and dark: yin and yang. The goal of this art, however, was not so much to eliminate illness as to maintain harmony. “You must choose your food, orient your bed, and conduct your meditation according to the season of the year and the direction of the wind. In that way you will always resonate with the universe,” the master counseled.

The
zhong yi
was content with his fate, although the lack of descendants weighed like a shadow over his serenity of spirit. He had never had sons, despite the miraculous herbs regularly ingested during an entire lifetime to cleanse his blood and fortify his member, and the remedies and spells applied to two wives, both dead in their youth, as well as the many concubines who followed. He had to accept with humility that it had not been the fault of those self-denying women but the apathy of his virile liquors. None of the remedies for fertility he had used to help others aided him, and finally he became resigned to the irrefutable fact that his loins were barren. He stopped punishing his wives with fruitless demands and enjoyed them to the full, in accord with the precepts of the beautiful pillow books in his collection. However, the aged physician, far more interested in acquiring new knowledge and exploring the narrow path of wisdom, had long ago, one by one, shed the concubines whose presence distracted him from his intellectual pursuits. He did not have to have a young woman before his eyes in order to describe her in elegant poems; memory was sufficient. He had also surrendered hope for sons of his own, but he needed to prepare for the future. Who would help him in the last stage of his life and at the hour of his death? Who would clean his tomb and venerate his memory? He had trained apprentices before, and with each had nourished the secret ambition of adopting him, but none was worthy of the honor. Tao Chi'en was no more intelligent or intuitive than the others, but he carried within him an obsession for learning that the master immediately recognized because it was identical to his own. He was, besides, a sweet and entertaining lad; it was easy to become fond of him. In the years they lived together, he gained such an appreciation of Tao that often he asked himself how it was possible that he was not a child of his blood. Nevertheless, esteem for his apprentice did not blind him; in his experience the changes of adolescence may be very profound, and he could not predict what kind of man Tao would make. As the Chinese proverb says, “Brilliance in youth does not guarantee worth in maturity.” He feared he would be mistaken, as he had been before, and he preferred to wait patiently for the true nature of the boy to be revealed. In the meanwhile, he guided him, as he did the young trees in his garden, to help him grow straight. At least this one learns quickly, the aged physician thought, calculating how many years he had left to live; according to the astral signs and careful observation of his body, he would not have time to train a new apprentice.

Soon Tao Chi'en learned to select their supplies in the market and herb shops. Watching the physician as he worked, he came to know the intricate mechanisms of the human body, procedures for cooling fevers and fiery temperaments, for giving warmth to those who suffered the cold of approaching death, for stirring the juices in sterile men, and for stopping the flux of watery bowels. He made long trips through the fields to look for the best plants at the precise point of maximum efficacy, then wrapped them in damp rags to keep them fresh on his way back to the city. When he turned fourteen, his master considered him ready to practice and regularly sent him to attend prostitutes, with the stringent order to abstain from any commerce with them because, as he himself would see when he examined them, death rode on their shoulders.

“Diseases of the brothels kill more people than opium and typhus. But if you carry out your obligations and learn at a good pace, in due time I will buy you a young virgin,” his master promised.

Tao Chi'en had suffered hunger as a boy, but his body stretched until he became taller than any other member of his family. At fourteen, he felt no attraction toward those girls for hire, merely scientific curiosity. They were too different from him; they lived in a world that was so remote and secret that he could not consider them truly human. Later, when the sudden onslaught of nature unhinged him and he was staggering around like a drunk tripping over his shadow, his teacher regretted having let his concubines go. Nothing so distracted a good student from his responsibilities as the explosion of virility. A woman would calm him, and in passing be useful in giving him practical knowledge, but the idea of buying one was bothersome—the master was comfortable in his solely masculine universe—and he gave Tao herbal teas to calm his ardor. The
zhong yi
did not remember the hurricane of carnal passions, and with the best intention gave his student the pillow books from his library to read as part of his education, not thinking to measure the debilitating effect they would have on his wretched pupil. He made Tao memorize each of the two hundred twenty-two positions of love, along with their poetic names, until he could identify them unhesitatingly in the exquisite illustrations of the books, all of which added immeasurably to the young man's distraction.

Tao Chi'en became as familiar with Canton as once he had been with his small village. He liked that ancient, chaotic, walled city of twisting streets and canals, where palaces and huts were jumbled together indiscriminately and there were people who lived and died on boats on the river without ever stepping onto dry land. He grew used to the humid, hot climate of a long summer lashed with typhoons but pleasant in the winter months of October to March. Canton was sealed to foreigners, although from time to time pirates flying flags of other nations made a surprise raid. There were a few locations where from November to May foreigners could trade their merchandise, but there were so many taxes, regulations, and obstacles that most international merchants chose to set up business in Macao. Early in the morning, when Tao Chi'en was on his way to the market, it was not unusual to find newborn baby girls thrown like garbage into the street or floating in the canals, often chewed on by dogs or rats. No one wanted them, they were disposable. Why feed a daughter who had no value and was going to end up as a servant in the home of her future husband? “Better a deformed son than a dozen girls as wise as Buddha,” was the popular saying. There were too many children anyway. Brothels and opium dens proliferated on all sides. Canton was a populous city, rich and lighthearted, filled with temples, restaurants, and gaming houses, where all the festivals of the calendar were noisily observed. Even punishments and executions became a cause for a celebration. Great crowds gathered to cheer on the executioners with their bloody aprons and collections of sharp knives that could lop off a head with a single sure-handed blow. Justice was meted out promptly and simply, with no appeal or unnecessary cruelty except in the case of betrayal of the emperor, the worst possible crime, which was paid for with slow death and the banishment of all relatives, thereby reduced to slavery. Minor crimes were punished by lashing or by placing the guilty party's head in a wood stock for several days so that he could not rest or reach his head with his hands to eat or scratch. Squares and markets were home to the popular storytellers who, like mendicant monks, traveled about the country preserving a centuries-old oral tradition. Jugglers, acrobats, snake charmers, transvestites, traveling musicians, magicians, and contortionists performed in the streets, while all around them seethed a commerce in silk, tea, jade, spices, gold, tortoiseshell, porcelain, ivory, and precious stones. Vegetables, fruits, and meats were offered in colorful profusion: cabbages and tender bamboo shoots were displayed beside cages of the cats, dogs, and raccoons that at a client's request the butcher killed and skinned in one maneuver. There were long alleys where only birds were sold—for no one was ever without birds—and their cages, from the simplest to those made of the finest woods inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl. Other passageways in the market were devoted to exotic fish, which were known to attract good fortune. Tao Chi'en, always curious, would entertain himself looking at everything and making friends, and then he would run to complete his errands in the sector where the supplies for his vocation were sold. He could identify it blindfolded from the penetrating scent of spices, plants, and medicinal barks. Dried serpents were rolled up and set in heaps like dusty coils of rope; toads, salamanders, and strange marine creatures were strung on cords like beads; crickets and large beetles with hard phosphorescent shells languished in boxes; monkeys of all kinds awaited their turn to die; bear and orangutan paws, antelope and rhinoceros horns, tiger eyes, shark fins, and claws of mysterious nocturnal birds were sold by weight.

Tao Chi'en's first years in Canton were spent in study, work, and service to his aged mentor, whom he came to respect like a grandfather. Those were happy years. The memory of his own family faded and he forgot the faces of his father and his brothers, but not his mother's, because she appeared to him frequently. Study soon ceased to be a task and became a passion. Every time he learned something new, he flew to his master to blurt it out to him. “The more you learn, the sooner you will know how little you know,” the ancient would say, laughing. On his own initiative, Tao Chi'en decided to learn Mandarin and Cantonese, because the dialect of his village seemed very limited. He absorbed the knowledge of his master so swiftly that the old man jokingly accused him of stealing even his dreams, but his passion for teaching made him generous. He shared with the boy everything he wanted to investigate, not only in matters of medicine but other aspects of his vast reserve of knowledge and refined culture. Magnanimous by nature, he was nonetheless severe in his criticism and demanding of effort, because, as he said,” I do not have much time left and I cannot take all I know to the other world, someone must use it upon my death.” However, he also warned his pupil against greed for learning, for that could fetter a man as surely as gluttony or lust. “The wise man desires nothing; he does not judge, he makes no plans, he keeps his mind open and his heart at peace,” he maintained. He reprimanded Tao Chi'en with such sadness when the youth failed that he would have preferred a lashing, but that practice went against the nature of the
zhong yi
, who never allowed anger to determine his actions. The only occasions on which he ceremoniously punished Tao Chi'en with a willow switch, without anger but with firm didactic purpose, was when he could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his apprentice had yielded to the temptation of gambling or had paid for a woman. Tao Chi'en used to juggle the market bills in order to make bets in the gaming houses, whose attraction he could not resist, or for a brief, student-rate consolation in the arms of one of his patients in the brothels. It never took the master long to discover these offenses, because if Tao lost in gambling he could not explain what had happened to the change, and if he won he was incapable of hiding his euphoria. As for women, his master could smell them on his skin.