Jan Slauerhoff - The Forbidden Kingdom

Yet she still dawdled, and suddenly a great calm descended on her. She looked out into the twilight; then she went inside and heard the thud on the balcony, she went into the hall and was able to slip unimpeded past the guard who was sitting against the wall with his knees bent.

Darkness had just fallen, and she passed the walls of the houses. But before she reached the monastery she turned off into the Chinese district; the whole population was out in the street. Whenever she walked through the centre of Macao she was greeted with respect and regarded with disrespect on all sides. Here no one paid any attention to her. She was wearing the clothes that would have angered her father far more than Veronica’s costume. It reminded him that he, a Portuguese, had married a Chinese wife. But she felt comfortable in these wide-fitting silk trousers, the jacket, with her hair combed into a quiff on her forehead.

There was a great commotion in the narrow streets, but it calmed her as if it had been the roar of the sea; it did her good after the silence of being shut up in the house. In the bustle, in the darkness where the light of burning resin flickered, between the filthy overhanging houses, she felt safe and at home. And so she finally found herself at the house of her nursemaid, whom she had not seen for ten years, and who by now must be seventy and was even more wrinkled and grubby than she had been back then. Pilar was received without astonishment, and was given a mat on which she rested for two whole days. But she couldn’t stay. So the nurse’s son, who was as stupid as the hulk he sailed in and the lampreys he fished for, took the woman across the water at night.

Pilar had only a vague memory of there being a garden with dense vegetation, and a little wooden house that her father called a quinta —usually accompanied by an expletive — a bridge and a stone roof over the sea. She was often alone there with her mother. Her mother sat on a mat, drank tea, stared into the distance and paid little attention to her. Sometimes her father was there too, and then they sat on chairs and there were papers and documents strewn everywhere. Her mother said nothing, but just looked at him pityingly, until he got up and went into the garden. Her mother lay down on the mat, Campos wandered round the garden, hacking off branches and trampling on flowers. Then he got drunk.

It was a happy moment for everyone when the sloop came to take him back across to the town. Sometimes they both had to go with him, sometimes her mother would refuse and he would take her under his arm and set her opposite him on a beautiful cushion. But little Pilar screamed and whined; then he would put her under the canopy, and she would walk back unsteadily over the narrow bridge, and sometimes fall into the water and be fished out by the nurse. Amid universal laughter the sloop would then finally row off and they were left behind in peace.

Since she was twelve, since the death of her mother, they had never been back there and always remained, in both the hot and cold seasons, in the sweltering or chilly town. Campos had no nostalgia for the way his wife looked at him with a mixture of contempt and pity, for the strange feeling that came over him when he was alone among the trees, as if they were whispering about him, as if all kinds of eyes were looking at him. No drink or singing helped. He preferred to stay where he was top dog: among his councillors and officers who always agreed with what he said.

Campo never talked of the quinta again. Perhaps he had forgotten all about it. In any case he wouldn’t look for Pilar there, and he couldn’t imagine that, having had as spoilt an upbringing as was possible in a colony, she would be able to live in a neglected country estate that over the years must have turned into a wilderness.

The father and the frustrated lover stared obsessively at the thick walls of the monastery and imagined Pilar, the disobedient fugitive, the object of helpless desire, behind them, engaged in subdued conversation with the fathers, walking in the cloisters. Ronquilho sometimes had the subsequent vision of Pilar in a whitewashed cell, kneeling on a narrow bed above which was a crucifix, and then she undressed and the setting changed: Pilar kneeling at a bench on which he was sitting, with the sword between his knees, its hilt like a cross. His disappointed senses did not conjure up reality: Pilar wandering down silent avenues, moving more freely and gracefully than she had ever done, dressed more airily than he had ever seen her.

To her great astonishment the garden was a tangle and half overgrown, but the wooden house had not been looted, and the effects and furniture, though covered in a thick layer of dust, were undamaged. The nurse was able to tell her that the islanders regarded it as an abandoned temple, and believed her mother’s ghost still went there and that it was inhabited by spirits: they kept hearing voices. Pilar heard them too, but after a few days she realized what it was: the wind whistling through the gaping cracks in the walls and creatures nestling invisibly under the overgrown bushes and tall grass. There were still rumours that she could not explain, but she did not fret about them. She was happier living here than in her father’s house, over which his constant outbursts of rage hung like a lowering storm, where scarcely a day went by without the turmoil attendant on his office spilling over into it. The fisherman brought supplies, and the nurse prepared them; in a few days she had grown used to the Chinese food and ate it as if she had never known any different. It was as if she was growing further apart from her father every day, and closer to her mother.

Autumn was approaching, and the heat was only intense in the middle of the day. In the mornings and evenings she could walk down the cool avenues, dressed as she felt like. She did not ask herself how this was going to end. And why should it end?

The boundaries and direction of her life were not clear to her, as they were to other women. She did know that Chinese women, if they were not infirm, were sold to a man they had usually not seen and had to serve him for the rest of their lives. No man had been proposed as a possible husband except Ronquilho. There seemed to be no one in the whole settlement who met her father’s requirements: this one she did not want, this one she had run from, others she did not know, and so she would not serve, would have no children. At present the future of her existence was as vague to her as the islands and coastlines she could see in the distance: perhaps she would sail past them one day, but probably they would be little different from the ones she knew.

She had an equally vague notion of Portugal, the land where her father and other powerful men and also the Dominicans came from. She had heard that women of quality there lived as they wanted and had their own entertainments, indeed that they could be merciful and accept a man or let him pine for years, as their heart or whim dictated, but she could not understand how that was possible. She could not understand how one could escape men like Ronquilho and her father other than by flight, as she had done; she could not believe there was anywhere where a simple refusal was sufficient to be free of their desires.

She associated with the church because it was all that existed besides the narrow, coarse society of the ruling soldiers. If instead of the Dominican order alone there had been nothing but a commedia dell’arte in Macao, she would of necessity have resorted to it and instead of representing Veronica would have played such stock characters as Genoveva, Melibea or Sigismunda. Cut off from everything, she was now living in a vacuum that would have driven a European woman to despair and soon afterwards to suicide; the Mongol half of her race helped her, and she let time pass without worrying, not caring what direction her earthly existence took. Her body remained alive, was thriving with food and more exercise than before, her eyes had the clouds and the sea to help the days pass, her skin had the cool water, which she could enter at any time undisturbed. Everything is subject to change, the immovable rocks, the sea’s waves lapping unaltered for centuries, just the same as the spiralling leaf and the butterfly that lives for a single day, and how and when she would join them, she did not know; for as long as her body was left in such peace, her soul did not suffer.