Jan Slauerhoff - The Forbidden Kingdom

The water, which another guard brought him, was clear and did not go bad as it stood there, and the food was good. After three days he was able to get up, and first gazed out to sea for a day towards the distant islands, to where a solitary ship sometimes crossed. He asked this guard for an explanation too. This one did not answer at all. Were they trying to lure him into treachery again through good treatment? Or did they expect the King to revoke his edict?

One morning he also found his papers again. He resumed work, and in uninterrupted peace and quiet, facing the sea, he wrote of the adventures of the navigators in the gardens of the Hesperides, where they were fed on fruit and while they were caressed forgot the privations of their wanderings.

One morning all his papers had disappeared again. He pestered the guard with questions, grabbed hold of him. But this guard seemed to be really deaf and dumb, and to belong more to the underworld than to this light-filled place. For a day he was filled with a fearful premonition, and he could no longer feel at one with the calm of the sea by gazing and reflecting. Late at night he slept for a few hours, sitting upright. When he awoke everything had been returned, but a sheet from the garden of Hesperides had been creased and stained. He wanted to continue, but felt as if his work had been fractured, in that very place. A fearful intuition plagued him, and he no longer dared think of Pilar.

Finally he summoned the courage to read back over what he had written, and he saw that without his realizing it the mythological garden had begun to resemble that across the water. He was seized by a rage against poetry greater than any he had known in his youth. It was good for nothing but to reveal secrets, to make the writer the betrayer of his own inner life, precisely of what he wanted to hide most deeply and preferred to bury deep underground. But surely it was impossible. Campos’s mind was not that subtle — to have thought of this possibility!

And so Camões, more of a prisoner than ever, kept oscillating between the window and his bed, between hope and fear, anxiety and enlightenment. And this torment, worse than any his body had endured, lasted another six or seven days. He no longer ate, no longer wrote, stared out of the window at the sea and longed for oblivion.

One afternoon the guard was accompanied by a junior official and a servant carrying a set of military kit, which he threw down in front of Camões. The official read out a letter, an edict. Camões was to join as a soldier the escort accompanying the embassy to Beijing which was leaving Macao that very afternoon. Camões made no move to get ready. The official advised him to do so, or else he would be transported with them in chains for three days’ journey from Macao. He waited. Camões got dressed.

AT THE GATE separating the Portuguese peninsula from the Chinese Empire, a flower-covered stand had been erected. The Senate of Macao and the principal officers with their wives were watching from there as the embassy passed by. The procession approached from the distance; Metelho, the chief envoy, sat in a palanquin, slung from the shoulders of six bearers. Behind, on horseback, were four accompanying envoys. Twenty coolies were laden with gifts for the Emperor. For now the escort, whose function in dangerous regions would be to surround the embassy, brought up the rear.

The procession halted in front of the stand. Only the envoys were allowed to bid farewell to their wives, which they did in a peremptory and forced fashion; the wives leant over the balustrade and embraced their spouses, who would be gone for a year or for ever. This did not take long, and after a few horn blasts everyone resumed their seats. Now Campos and Metelho exchanged formal greetings and the latter received his sealed orders. A priest blessed the five envoys, and sprinkled holy water on the chests full of gifts. The soldiers were not included in these ceremonies, and the rearmost ranks could only just see the stand. Camões stood among them and stared straight ahead, making an effort not to see anything. He was longing only for the moment, many days hence, when he would be beyond the gravitational pull of Macao, when everything would be over for ever and a yellow emptiness would lie ahead of him.

The sign to move out was given, and the whole column advanced, and he passed the stand with head bowed. But as he passed the central section, he could not stop himself and in the second row saw Pilar, pale and dressed in white, beside Ronquilho, red and fat, in ceremonial uniform. They looked at each other. He wanted to shout, “I didn’t betray you,” but immediately felt: actually I did betray you. He bowed his head and left things as they were. He marched past.

The very first march exhausted him, but it was five days before the exhaustion of his body and the pain in his injured feet were bad enough to extinguish the pain in his brain. After several days he had marched beyond tiredness, his step became lighter, and he felt the attraction of the unknown ahead of him and the compelling thrill of the long journey through a country where no one of his race had penetrated before him.

After the very first stretch they marched at night by the light of the full moon, beneath which the countryside extended colourless and gently undulating. A few narrow villages, spindly bamboo groves and crumbling graves lay strangely and shrilly in this emptiness. Marching order soon disintegrated by itself: after all, they could see each other hours away. Later, when the country became more densely populated, the terrain hillier and the interests of safety required them to stay in a close-knit formation, discipline had already become far too slack; Metelho lacked sufficient authority over the soldiers. Many men were suffering from dysentery, and two of the Chinese guides had already died. Metelho, seeing the danger of finding themselves without guides in the strange, deep, hostile interior, tried to recruit new ones, but in vain; everywhere their reluctance to venture into the alien north was so great, that even large sums of money could not awaken their enthusiasm. The third Chinese guide also fell sick. So that in case of emergency we would at least be able to find the way back, Metelho had a stone erected each afternoon, on which was carved: “The first non-tributary Portuguese embassy passed by here”, followed by the date and the position of the sun. It was difficult to find volunteers for this hot work, and Camões was always pressed into service. The population was not hostile, just fearful, but that made it difficult to make contact with them and obtain food. When the procession had gone, they surrounded the stones with boulders in order to deprive the stones of their power.

The company increasingly disintegrated and everyone marched in no particular order. Only Metelho and a learned Jesuit, who was travelling with them in order to visit the court in Beijing and introduce the principles of both astronomy and of religion, always had their litters carried side by side and conversed en route.

Once a day Metelho summoned Camões to walk alongside his litter, and asked, scarcely raising his head above the edge, if he had any complaints. Camões replied that, like the other soldiers, he had nothing to complain about, except for the inadequate food, and he knew as well as the rest that this was not Metelho’s fault. Then Metelho would try a more familiar tone and find out something of Camões’s past, and adopting the tone of an equal, asked him about conditions at court, which he had frequented a few years before Camões. But Camões pretended to have forgotten everything. Then Metelho, in the same haughty tone with which the conversation had begun, would tell him to rejoin his troop. Once Metelho had ordered them to sing to help them march in time. But the languid tone of Portuguese folk song lowered the men’s morale and made them long for home. And the Europeans could not keep time with Chinese singing, confused and cacophonous. After one day the attempt was abandoned and they continued in a silence more oppressive than before; the countryside was also quieter, no gongs sounded like dull thunder in the distance and no more did they happen upon noisy funerals.