Odd Jobs (118 page)

The winding yet winning way in which this biography covers the ground of Ricci’s life almost defies description. In brief, each of the four ideograms discussed in the book on mnemonics that Ricci presented to Governor Lu and each of the four religious illustrations contributed to Cheng Dayue’s
Ink Garden
inspires an essayistic chapter that deals with an aspect of Matteo Ricci’s life experience. The first ideogram,
wu
, representing war and construed by Ricci to show two warriors grappling, leads Mr. Spence to discuss: the violent atmosphere of Macerata, an Italian town in the papal domain where Ricci was born and grew up, amid blood feuds and banditry and war refugees from the north and rumors of Turkish attack on the Adriatic coast; the changes in military technology during Ricci’s youth and the political turmoil in these times of Counter-Reformation; the Spanish siege of Antwerp, the Ottoman defeat at the naval battle of Lepanto, and the disastrous battle between the Portuguese and the Moors at Alcazarquivir; the bustling, tawdry Portuguese settlements at Goa and Macao, where Ricci prepared for his mission to China; his impressions of China’s indifferent warrior spirit and cruel corporal punishments; the competition among both missionaries and traders in the Far East; the Spanish slaughter of close to twenty thousand Chinese in the Philippines in 1603; and a personal incident in 1592 when a gang of youths invaded Ricci’s compound in Shaozhou and was repelled by a bombardment of roof tiles, but only after Ricci suffered an ax cut and a twisted ankle, which ever after caused him to limp.

For another example, the third picture, showing an angel blinding the men of Sodom, leads Mr. Spence into fascinating disquisitions upon the moral and religious condition of Rome in the late sixteenth century, the same of Lisbon, the social make-up of Goa and Macao, Chinese slavery, Ricci’s ambivalent attitude toward Chinese institutions, the Emperor Wan-li’s colossal tomb, eunuchs in China, drunkenness and misery and poverty and prostitution in Peking, Chinese accusations of sexual immorality among the Jesuits, Oriental toleration of homosexuality as contrasted with Christian abhorrence and Inquisitorial persecution, Loyola’s proposed exercises in the correct contemplation of
sin, and Ricci’s Chinese translation of “Thou shalt not commit adultery” as “Thou shalt not do depraved, unnatural, or filthy things.”

Each chapter pursues its theme with a similar wandering through the palace of fact. Mr. Spence’s powers of correlation and connection are dazzling. Ricci’s limp returns in a later chapter as a counterpart of Loyola’s crippled right leg, the surgery upon which gave rise through the pain to a vision of Mary and her Child that left his heart ever serene. These instances of lameness then suggest the limp that Dante seems to describe in the Infernal line “
Si che’l piè fermo sempre era ’l più basso
” (“So that the firm foot was always the lower”). From these anatomical considerations Mr. Spence effortlessly hops to holy relics, to the relics Ricci carried with him, to Marian sodalities in China and elsewhere, to the Counter-Reformation cult of the Virgin, to the observation by a Chinese contemporary of Ricci’s that “the image used for the Christian God is the body of a woman.” Quite dazzlingly, Mr. Spence shows that Ricci’s fourth ideogram (
hao
, meaning “goodness” and represented by a servant girl with a child in her arms) and his fourth religious picture (Virgin and Child) converge and embody the same unsatisfied longing, a longing obliquely exposed by a misprint that Ricci allowed to remain in the etching of the Virgin—“
plena
” became “
lena
,” a noun meaning “a woman who allures or entices.” To convey so much information about a man, a religious fraternity, and two globally opposite cultures three hundred years ago by means of eight images and the themes that ramify from them is a rare tour de force, achieved by a scholar determined to refresh not only our knowledge of the past but the very forms in which history is presented.

Yet
The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
does not feel like a tour de force: it feels simply like a life explored from within, in terms of a mind exposed to certain influences, hardened in certain convictions, subject to certain shocks, and retentive of vast amounts of information now preserved only in libraries. Freed from the restraints of chronology, a life reveals its inner veins, its pattern of threads. The image of the memory palace returns rhythmically, as each ideogram is placed at one of the four corners of the reception hall, which is “suffused in an even light”—the light, it may be, of a Platonic heaven, or of the mind’s delicately impassioned glow. The sense of mentally created spaces stretching extensively is eerie and majestic. The brief concluding chapter has the memory palace, about to be closed, yield a selective inventory of its contents, one vivid item for each of the five senses:

If this is not quite as moving as the similar coda to Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria, perhaps being a queen is more poignant than being a missionary. A queen cannot help being one, but a missionary to some extent chooses his fate, his isolation and loneliness. The cool and evenly lit halls of the memory palace as rebuilt by Mr. Spence do not contain the flame of Ricci’s vocation and will, which drove him to his slightly absurd though courageous pose as a pseudo-mandarin—“a heavy, bearded man, in his robe of purple silk trimmed with blue”—importunate outside the Emperor’s walls in Peking. But perhaps the shadowless atmosphere of the memory palace is the historian’s way of suggesting that China quenched that flame, that Ricci’s intricate mission ended in limbo.

C
URFEW
, by José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. 309 pp. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

A
NTHILLS OF THE
S
AVANNAH
, by Chinua Achebe. 216 pp. Doubleday, 1988.

It is sometimes urged upon American authors that they should write more politically, out of a clearer commitment or engagement or sense of protest. Two foreign novels, one by a Chilean and the other by a Nigerian, demonstrate that having a political subject does not automatically
give a novel grandeur, urgency, or coherence.
Curfew
, by the Chilean José Donoso, takes place in 1985, in a crowded time span of less than twenty-four hours, centering upon the funeral of Pablo Neruda’s widow, Matilde. The occasion collects a number of varied friends and admirers—Mañungo Vera, a folk-singer returned from twelve years in Europe; Judit Torre, a blond, aristocratic revolutionary who looks like the young Virginia Woolf; Fausta Manquileo, a matronly literary figure of distinction; Don Celedonio Villanueva, her husband and a literary figure of perceptibly less distinction; Juan López, called Lopito, a former poet and present drunkard and abrasively obnoxious hanger-on; Lisboa, a Communist Party zealot; Ada Luz, his girlfriend and a docile handmaiden of the late Matilde Neruda; and Federico Fox, a corpulent cousin of Judit Torre’s and the only significant character who actively works with the ruling Pinochet regime instead of hating and resisting it.

Pinochet (who is never mentioned in the novel’s text) came to power in 1973, in a bloody coup that ousted and killed President Salvador Allende; by 1985 the dissidents have had time to go into exile and return, to be imprisoned and released, to grow middle-aged in their youthful fury and frustration, to lose faith and make ironical accommodations and die of natural causes. Lopito says, “All of us have retired from the political scene, even though we keep telling ourselves that the people united will never be defeated when for more than ten years they’ve had us more defeated than I can imagine, Mañungo. This is total defeat.… A bomb here, another there, but they don’t do anything, like swearing by nonviolent protest or violent protest, or the opposition, or the people united, et cetera. They broke our backs, Mañungo.”

Pablo Neruda, the triumphant embodiment of Chilean culture and left-wing conscience, “returned to Chile to die of sadness.” Now his widow, Matilde, whom he had nicknamed “La Chascona, the wild woman … because of her tangled mop of hair”—Matilde, who had been “a young, desirable woman of the people, as juicy as a ripe apricot, who took long, wine-soaked siestas with the poet”—has died in a Houston hospital, after receiving last rites and confiding to Ada Luz that she wants a mass said at her funeral. The suppression of this request—by Lisboa, because the presence of a revolutionary priest at the graveside would detract from Communist domination of the ceremony—is the main political thread wound around the observance. The main cultural thread is Federico Fox’s acquisition of control over Neruda’s valuable
papers and letters in exchange for his removal of bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of establishing a Pablo Neruda Foundation. The main romantic thread is the coming together again of Judit Torre and Mañungo Vera, who had first romanced in their student days. The principal moral event, I suppose, is Mañungo’s decision to stay in Chile, with his seven-year-old French-speaking son, after his round-the-clock experience of life under the regime. In his youth, Mañungo was a rock star, a “guerrilla singer … possessed by the potency of his guitar-phallus-machine gun”; his career, pursued since the coup in America and Europe, has been lately bothered by a “softening of his politics” and a chronic tinnitus in his left ear, a subjective sensation of noise that he identifies as “the voice of the old woman”—a certain wheezing sound made by the sea on the coast of Chiloé, his native island, calling him home.

Among these many—too many—threads, the most interesting psychological one traces Judit Torre’s peculiar form of political and erotic deadness, induced by a traumatic episode when she was being held for questioning with some other members of her shadowy little group of anti-regime women. Tied and hooded and naked, she hears in her cell the other women being tortured and raped; but
her
torturer merely tells her in his nasal voice, while he puts his warm moist hand on her knee, to shout as if she were being raped. She remembers:

This moment of feigned torture evidently constitutes Judit’s supreme orgasm and forms the novel’s most intimate and meaningful vision of the relation between the regime and its enemies. It also warrants revenge. Judit is given a pistol by her women’s group and goes forth in the night to find and slay the impotent torturer whose “complex humanity” robbed her of solidarity and unqualified revolutionary purpose: “Sensitive, the bastard with the nasal voice. His sensitivity tore away my right to hatred and revenge.” This loss is cause, in the murky atmosphere of contemporary Chile, for murder.

Curfew
packs a baggage of Dostoevskian ambition which its action and conversations do not quite carry. Judit seems not so much tormented as whimsical, in the way of well-born beauties. The novel in Spanish was titled
La desesperanza
(“Despair”)—but the English title refers to a section of the narrative which shows Judit and Mañungo wandering the “green ghetto” of an upper-class Santiago neighborhood during the five hours of curfew, from midnight to five. The curfew, to judge from the number of people they encounter and noisy incidents that take place, isn’t very effectively enforced. With her feminist pistol Judit shoots not her impotent torturer-savior but a skylight and a little white bitch in heat who has attracted a disgusting crowd of nocturnal dogs. This eerie section, called “Night,” in which the hiding, sometimes sleeping couple haunts the empty streets and merges with the vegetation, is the one effortlessly magical passage of the novel. A luxuriant, dreamlike atmosphere is evoked: “On the sidewalk, in their pale clothes, their arms around each other, hidden by plants that were so strong they looked carnivorous, Judit and Mañungo resembled inhabitants of a strange universe which barely needed the flow of love and sleep.” Latin-American writers have a way of seeing their major cities as desolate and powerful, as awesome wastelands—one thinks especially of Borges’s Buenos Aires, but also of Vargas Llosa’s Lima, Cabrera Infante’s pre-Castro Havana, and the Buenos Aires meticulously traversed in Humberto Costantini’s
The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis
. Donoso here does something like that for Santiago.

Elsewhere, however, his will to significance generates too much sticky, tangled prose. “The only sure way to eliminate his demons was to eliminate himself, to drown in the slow green waters of the Cipresales River that mirrored the vertigo of the air tangled with the vines of madness; waters in which the tops of the oaks and elms sank, and out of whose lazy
current emerged trunks of tortured pewter, bearded with moss and covered with a cancer of lichens and fungus.” Just across the gutter of the book, a shorter sentence also numbs the mind: “Five years ago, Bellavista seemed immersed in the anachronistic anorexia of oblivion.” The translator, perhaps, should share the blame for such heavy-handed conjurations as “Sartre, with whose words he had fertilized the Chiloé dirt from which he’d sprung,” and “She gave him only the scrap of her body, which she did not succeed in relating to herself, leaving Mañungo outside the tangle of her feminine failure.” Donoso’s touch has lost lightness and impudent ease since
The Obscene Bird of Night
, written during the democratic rule of Eduardo Frei and published in 1970, the year Allende took power. In
Curfew
, the dominant metaphor—a mythical “ ‘ship of art,’ the
Caleuche
, which was manned by a crew of wizards”—fails to float. The symbols in the background of the book—Carlitos, the toothless lion in the Santiago zoo; Schumann and his attempted suicide in the Rhine; the floods and fogs and witchcraft of Chiloé—have more life than the foreground. The links between history and the novel’s character disorders seem forced: “Nadja’s coldness was gratuitous, an aesthetic, an experiment with her own limits and the limits of others, while in Judit it was a vertiginous destiny that someone else, or perhaps history, had established.” Woolf-like Judit and Mañungo with his “rabbitlike smile” are rather pale and wispy posters to be blazoned with such portentous words as “the incarnation of the despair the current state of affairs was pushing them to.” Most unfortunately, the novel’s climax of political violence befalls a character, Lopito, so repulsive, verbose, adhesive, and tiresomely self-destructive that the reader is sneakily grateful when the police do him in. The surge of indignation and sympathy that the text indicates should greet his demise does not come. Lopito makes a poor martyr.