Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“I suppose it’ll have to be.”

“I can move you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I want gold taps on the bath.”

We laughed; it is such a well-known Chinese vice, the gold taps.

“No problem,” she assured me.

I wondered what other petty revenge I could exact upon her at this point, but none came to mind so I wished her a good night and went to the basement mall and bought a cigar. The relojerias were open and I went into a few to try on some Piaget watches. It was, to say the least, a novel experience. I couldn’t quite afford them just yet, but I had to savor the way the salesmen came tumbling over to fawn upon me. I said I wanted diamonds in there somewhere, perhaps around the face but certainly not on the band. “Try them on,” they cried, “try them on!” In the end, however, I couldn’t make up my mind and went watchless for my Horlicks and chocolate cake. I sat at an outer table so the high-class Mongolians could see me and lit my Havana. It was, in our humble terms, the kind of moment for which we addicts live but which I had never experienced before with such fullness. Nine times nine was a cosmic run if I had ever heard of one, and it could not be repeated, I was sure of that. By the same token I was also sure that it had never happened before. And perhaps I would never have to play the tables ever again. I could retire.

Just at that moment, though, I wondered to myself what would have happened if I had played a tenth hand. Would I have won with a tenth nine?

I even thought of going up to the Mona Lisa and trying it, just to remove the nagging doubt. I thought about it, but in the end I controlled the urge. It was too much, and sometimes one has to not know. And when all was said and done I was fine as I was. At one o’clock in the morning I was a Midas in the Noite e Dia, and everyone knew of my nines. Men stopped at my table and congratulated me in Chinese. They asked me what my secret was and who I was praying to. When I said no one, they didn’t believe me but they were too polite to object. It seemed as if I was concealing a secret, and some of them merely passed the table and held up a signing hand and said gao , nine, as if that were enough to establish an understanding. And at length I took off my gloves.

The following day I decided not to gamble for a few hours. After moving to the suite with the gold taps, I assembled my winnings in my room and counted them out note by note, with a relish bordering on miserly precision. I then packed it all in a single Adidas bag bought for the purpose and put it under my bed. Why I did this I was not sure, but I was convinced that the attitude of the Lisboa toward me had now changed as a result of my brief run of luck and the reputation it had generated for me. Sure, they had moved me to a suite with gold taps, but good luck for me was bad luck for them, and I was certain that management had instructed the staff to be a little less friendly and helpful to me than they had been before.

When I went to the Galera for lunch there was a frost in the air. The waiters eyed me coldly and their politeness was formulaic. In the lobby the staff gave me a similar treatment, though I daresay it was preferable to being hunted like a rat in debt. Of course, one can too easily become paranoid, and I was perhaps too sensitive after the strange events of the preceding night, which could be chalked up to the fluctuations of chance and nothing more. But the Chinese, I knew, wouldn’t see it that way.

I walked that afternoon after lunch to the Se Cathedral. Around the little square, the wet palms, the yellow bishop’s villa with its green shutters, and the mosaic pavements with a monochrome solar disk. There was usually no one in the church but a few elderly Chinese ladies kneeling in the pews, and it was no different now. I sat there with my dripping umbrella trying to clear my head between the pale green apse and the blue glass windows, and I knew that I needed to be in a Christian place like the churches of my childhood, and to listen to the voice that always emerged inside me whenever I was before an altar. I was developing the somber idea that I was not in command of events in the normal way, and that this flow that I have already described was something I could not steer in any particular direction. What attracted me to this idea was that it relieved me of any responsibility for defying the laws of mathematics. Any explanation for my winning streak was magical and therefore oppressive. Either it had to be explained rationally at some point, and could not be, or it could never be explained at all, in which case I was stepping into an unknown land inhabited by centaurs, hunchbacks, and drooling elves.

That’s how it is. You enter the dreamland of nutters and you get to like it and you find it convincing and soon enough you stay. You become magical, which is a terrible thing to be. All of Western civ is against you. You give Western civ the middle finger and before you know it you’ve become an oriental faun. You’ve grown a tail and snout and you pray to goddesses. You smell like a box of camphor.

Fragmentation, slow and silent. The old women kneeling before their Portuguese god who is no longer there. I sat in the aisles to the left side of the nave and looking up I saw a bas-relief panel showing Christ Falling for the Second Time. Jesus Cai Pela Secunda Vez . I lit a candle and prayed for a tenth nine, a coup de grâce. I swore I would stake everything on it.

For dinner I went to the Clube Militar near the Lisboa. It’s the former Portuguese officers’ mess now converted into one of the few genuinely European restaurants on the territory. Around its pale pink walls lies a garden of terraces and palms and fountains, where I often used to pass my empty afternoons. To one side rises the Calcada Dos Quarteis, at the top of which is a square surrounded by more of the pink military buildings. Giant ficus trees burst through the walls of the Jardim de S. Francisco. Inside, the Clube’s wainscoting and fans and dusty bottles of Quinta dos Roques were what I wanted. The staff put a screen around me while I ate their dim sum with clams and their baccalau asada , and among those white columns and faded mirrors I felt as alone as I had always aspired to be but had never managed to be. It was the solitude of the leper, the success .

As I sat there with all the pomp and circumstance of a coffee plantation owner, I was changing hour by hour into something I had always wanted to be but never had been. I could see it when I looked down at my own fingers grasping the edge of a napkin or the stem of a glass. My fingers looked white and elongated, smooth and refined, and the little hairs on their backs seemed to have vanished as if they had been waxed. I was growing more sensitive to my surroundings, my senses becoming more acute. I was sure of it. The wine tasted like the best wine I had ever drunk. The rolls were the best rolls. Everyone smiled at me. The doll-like waiters in their aprons, the girls wheeling the dessert trolleys, the government officials eating urchins with their mistresses. I had been turned inside out, from failure to Lucky Man, and the conversion made me supernatural, especially to myself.

I walked down the Patio do Gil with banknotes crushed in my pockets. Down Felicidade, or Happiness, where the whorehouses used to be but which is now filled with tea shops and windows of sticky buns. Misted banyans with dripping trailers, faces like disappointed dough, the dim sum plates salty with clams as small as keyholes. I resolved to get myself some new suits made, dandy affairs with waistcoats and satin linings that matched the stripes — more lordly if you like — and some Church’s shoes in Hong Kong. The prospect of money about to materialize in the very near future has this effect upon the mind, making it soft and dreamy and forward-looking, and this was what happened as I went down Felicidade. I walked forward into the future, where I felt I belonged, and indeed I stepped quietly into it in my slippers.