The Harmony Silk Factory (37 page)

“What on earth are you going to play this on?” Alvaro demanded of Gecko.

“My radio,” he said with utter certainty before wheeling himself away in his shiny new wheelchair.

I drifted to the back of the group and waited until our teenage minders were distracted by a poster of a young woman, tartily dressed and inappropriately named Madonna. Then, when I was sure no one was looking, I slipped quietly away, escaping via a nearby fire exit. Out in the open, I retraced my steps, heading down to the water’s edge. At Porta de Santiago I paused to buy myself a bottle of purple Fanta, for which I have an abnormal weakness. The athletic young woman who ran the stall smiled at me sweetly, and I felt obliged to buy a bag of pickled mango too; I discarded it in some bushes as soon as I was out of sight. On the esplanade that runs along the seawall, I strolled under acacia trees whose tiny leaves lay scattered like confetti across the ground. In the deep shadows of the undergrowth young men and women canoodled, too drenched in young love to notice my hobbling presence. I stopped at a dirty wooden bench, looking out at the mud-grey sea. A raft of flotsam, ensnared by a fisherman’s net, drifted placidly on the scum-topped waves. I did not have to wait long before I heard a tuneless whistle and a soft coo-cooing from the bushes behind me. “Hello-o, mister,” a voice called. I turned around and saw a young woman leaning against a tree, her powdered face accentuated by scarlet lips. She sashayed towards me, eyes hidden behind huge mirrored sunglasses. I knew at once that she was a transvestite, and a prostitute too. Slowly, I began to relax, washed by the waves of a familiar excitement as she sat with me and struck up the usual anodyne patter: what’s my name, where do I come from, what nice thick hair I have. The girls may come and go but their talk remains the same. Always, I invent the answers. It’s easier for both of us. How could I respond truthfully and fully to the question “Where is your home?” I couldn’t possibly begin. My only dwelling place is now no longer on this earth—I destroyed it many years ago. And so, over the years, I have sought occasional refuge in the fleeting company of these glossy-haired girls. Their hands are always quick and smooth, their lips cool and efficient. I do not seek these girls to relive the fervid longings of younger days. Memories are things to be buried. They die, just as people do, and with their passing, all traces of the life they once touched are erased, forever and completely. Many years may pass until another encounter with such a girl, but I know the next one will be just as this one was. She will finish with me, smiling kindly at my flaccid failure and earnest pleadings; she will take her small fee and deposit it swiftly in her handbag; and then she will walk away, leaving me whimpering quietly to myself, all alone before the silent, muddy sea.

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST TIME I saw Kunichika he was standing under a tree looking through a pair of binoculars. I was returning from an outing with Johnny and chose to walk along the ridge of hills that ran above the rest house. I walked down the path that led to the rest house, singing “La donna è mobile” with much
brio,
when I suddenly noticed a tiny mirrored glint, a pinprick flash of light from the escarpment above me. It took me a while to locate him standing in the shade of a small tree whose tiny, twisted trunk seemed all the more tiny and twisted next to his easy, erect figure. Never one to leave the itch of curiosity unscratched, I scrambled up the rocky path, through a tangle of trees, to where he was standing. He did not drop the binoculars when I approached; for a second I thought he had not noticed me.

“Don’t move,” he said, binoculars still held to his eyes. He spoke softly, in an even voice that compelled me strangely to obey without the faintest demurral. “Over there, in those trees,” he continued quietly in his tempered bass-baritone, “do you see?”

“What?” I whispered.

“A golden oriole. What a beautiful bird.”

I peered hard at the canopy of leaves ahead of us, expecting the flash of unmistakable yellow-and-black plumage, but I could see nothing in the shadowy recesses. “Where?” I asked.

“It’s gone now,” he said, lowering his binoculars and offering me his hand with an easy smile. “Mamoru Kunichika. Pleased to meet you.” I learnt that he had arrived in the Valley only that day; that he was staying at the rest house; that he was an academic with a position at Kyoto University.

“How wonderful,” I said. “What is your field of study?”

“Anthropology,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “And linguistics,” he added, as if it was an afterthought.

I studied him closely. Pressed white shirt, maroon-and-red tie, nicely fitting trousers. He was, I had to admit, an impressive-looking man. “I suppose the two go hand in hand,” I said, noticing that he was almost exactly my height. His hair, too, was combed in much the same way as mine, parted to the right—though his looked somewhat neater. He had much broader shoulders than mine and his frame suggested that the rest of his body bore similar musculature under his immaculate clothing. Nothing was out of place with him—everything in appallingly perfect proportion. Next to him, I suddenly felt very skinny and malnourished.

Though our rooms were at opposite ends of the rest house, I expected that our paths would cross—over breakfast, say, or when taking tea on the verandah. Two educated gentlemen, each with a background that might interest the other: I certainly wasn’t inclined to avoid him the way I might have had he been European. But I rarely saw him. Often he remained in his room for long periods; other times he would slip away noiselessly, and it became impossible for me to tell if he was in or out. When I was certain that he was in his room, I would listen at my door for some clue as to the activities behind his firmly closed door. Nothing—not even the scrape of a chair on the floor or the closing of a cupboard door. We were the only two people at the rest house and yet we remained solidly encased in our separate cells.

One morning I left the rest house to join Johnny on his continuing quest for a new house. I had bicycled some distance before I realised that I had forgotten my camera, a handsome Leica (stolen, no doubt, from some unsuspecting foreigner) I had bought “secondhand” for a few dollars from a rickshaw-puller in Singapore. As I approached the rest house I heard music. It was so perfect and so strange in this setting that it took me several moments to realise that it was really playing, that my imagination wasn’t running wild in this tropical heat. It was music I knew well and held very dear—I had in fact been humming the tune some days before—“Porgi, amor,” from
Le Nozze di Figaro.
I knew, as I entered the house, that it was coming from Kunichika’s room. I felt compelled to share my enthusiasm for this music with him, and so I went to his room and knocked on his door. The music stopped immediately, and after a few moments Kunichika opened the door, looking perfectly
soigné
and unruffled.

“What marvellous music,” I said, “and how lovely to hear it played here. I haven’t heard that in a long while—except in my own head, of course, where it replays endlessly.”

He stood squarely in the barely open doorway; behind him I could see only a low, empty set of bookshelves. “Thank you,” he said simply.

“Do you have a gramophone? You must have taken some trouble to bring it here.”

“Yes, it was slightly cumbersome.”

“All the way from Japan?” I continued, feeling myself wilt slowly under the steadiness of his gaze. “I wouldn’t have associated the Japanese with opera—well, apart from
Madama Butterfly
of course and, oh,
Turandot
—no, that’s China, isn’t it? I take it you listen to a lot of opera?”

“Only a little. I studied in Europe for a time.” His manner of speech was
legato
as
legato
can be, flowing effortlessly from the depth of his chest to his throat to his perfectly drawn lips. He lifted a hand to smooth his already smoothed hair, and I noticed the quiet gleam of his signet ring. Instinctively, I reached to feel my own ring; I could have sworn that his was, in shape, weight, and colour, identical to mine.

“Well,” I said, shifting on my feet, “perhaps we might exchange views on Mozart sometime.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he said, closing the door.

I left the rest house and found Johnny waiting for me by the riverbank a few miles to the south. He was impatient to see a house we had glimpsed several days earlier; his eyes were narrowed in a frown and he did not seem to want to hear about my strange new neighbour. When we found the house, it was smaller than I had remembered it: a compact whitewashed cube, its only ornamentation a pair of pilasters on its façade. It appeared abandoned, and we did not have any trouble pushing the heavy wooden doors open. The space inside seemed far too large for the shell that contained it; it swelled up above us in the one enormous room that made up the front portion of the house. It contained no upper floors: when I lifted my head to look at the ceiling I could barely make out the rafters in the inky darkness above me. Beyond that initial cavern a door led into a small courtyard overlooked on all sides by a further building concealed behind the unprepossessing exterior we had frowned at from the street. Instantly I imagined that courtyard filled with heavy earthenware pots containing ferns and goldfish; I saw the shutters painted
eau de Nil
green; I heard the haphazard clanging of saucepans and smelled the aroma of pungent curries. We clambered up the steep narrow stairs and ran through each of the empty rooms, flinging open the shutters to let in the light. One of the smaller rooms reminded me of my bedroom at Hemscott, its low ceiling instantly recalling the lonely sanctuary of my childhood. I looked out the window. The great silty river meandered gently by, so slowly it barely appeared to move at all. An ancient tree, its massive trunk enrobed in a tangle of epiphytic roots, hung thickly over the water beside a frail pontoon that protruded into the river. Small cherubic children swung naked from the thick hanging vines and splashed into the water below; their laughter filled the still morning and made me inexplicably sad. When Johnny came into the room he found me standing at the window, blinking into the distance. He asked if I was alright.

I nodded and said, “This is it. This is home for you.”

 

 

 

 

ARTEMISIA ABSINTHIUM,
commonly known as wormwood, is a hardy perennial with feathery silver-green leaves. It thrives in a variety of garden conditions, its fine foliage providing useful contrast to broader, darker leaves in mixed borders such as those we had at Hemscott. Even after the garden began its descent into dilapidation, the artemisia remained vigorous, its pale green glowing amidst the creeping, darkened tangle around it. It is also reputed to have hallucinogenic properties, and is a principal ingredient in the making of absinthe. One of its qualities stands out over the others: its bitterness. Simply crush a leaf and place it on your tongue and its acridity will be evident. The ill effects of wormwood have assumed legendary status, enshrined in no less a work than the Bible: the end of the world will, according to the simply divine St. John, be announced by seven angels. For those of you lucky enough to have escaped a religious education, you need only know that the third of these angels causes a great star to fall from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood and many men died of the waters because they were bitter.

There. Repeated verbatim, after nearly seventy years. Brother Anthony was right: I would remember it for the rest of my life. I was nine when I first encountered that passage. I had allowed myself to become embroiled in an unseemly spat with a foulmouthed boy who had scrawled CUNT on my tuck box, and before long our feud developed into a pathetic little fistfight—more shoving and kicking than actual grown-up punching, if truth be told. I was brought before the gigantic Brother Anthony, my housemaster, who, before he administered what was to be the first of the many thrashings I suffered at his hands, sneered at me and called me the work of the Devil. “Wormwood,” he said, as if tasting something odious on his brutish palate, “that says it all.” He opened his drawer and produced two things: a short cane and a Bible, bound in cheap black leather. He bent me over the edge of his desk and set the Bible in front of my face; with a thick nicotine-stained finger he tapped at a spot on the page and said, “Read that aloud.” I began to read the verse. He struck the first blow and I cried out. “I didn’t tell you to stop, you dirty troublemaker,” he said. I continued to read through choking breaths; my eyes clouded with hot tears. The name of the star is called Wormwood and many men died because the waters were bitter. “You’ll remember that for the rest of your life, Wormwood.” Every time I was punished I was made to read that passage, as if repeating it would rid me of the bitterness of my name, my self. After only a short while I could recite it by heart without recourse to the Bible, and the beatings, too, became bearable. I stopped hating the good Brother Anthony, but when I meet him in Purgatory I will have to tell him that it didn’t work: I remember the words, but all my bitterness is still there. Except for a few brief days in 1941, I have carried it inside me all my life.

 

 

 

 

WHEN DID THE TIDE of wormwood begin to rise within me after I got to the Valley? I thought I had rid myself of it. On all my walks with Johnny I felt nothing but uninterrupted happiness. Even when I searched for some lingering trace of malevolence within myself, I found none. And then one evening I experienced the prick of discontent, a sickly tingle at the back of my throat that I had not felt since coming to the Valley. I had been invited by the Soongs to join them at the
wayang kulit,
or shadow theatre, which I understood was a kind of Oriental Punch-and-Judy accompanied by wind instruments with trenchant chords similar to those of a bagpipe. I dressed appropriately for a tropical evening—open-necked cream silk shirt and flannels—and dabbed some Essence of West Indian Limes on my jowls. I arrived at the Soong house feeling fresh and very lively. I was looking forward to seeing Snow again.