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.
The priests had talked about that, but she did not know she had one. She knew that her body had parts that were more tender and more easily aroused than others; she did not long for them to be loved, she wanted to be untouched. She liked looking at herself in the water, but did not touch herself. She never desired anyone else.
Of the Chinese, apart from her mother and the Hao Ting whom she had seen a few times at an audience, she knew only the servants, of the Portuguese only those who ruled by force or lived in prayer and ostensible humility. Neither group had the feelings capable of moving her. But the figures that she did not know, the courtiers and poets and scholars from Lisbon would also have left her cold. She could not understand how one could admire heroes and poets and out of admiration love them. That one could suffer because of unrequited love and as a result be unhappy for years or even a lifetime seemed stranger to her than the complicated ceremonies of a Chinese wedding or funeral.
If she had been told that at the same time as she was living all alone in the overgrown quinta, a strange shipwrecked mariner was wandering around the island, and suffering unspeakably because no one could understand him, no one looked at him or took him in, she would have been astonished and would have felt no pity.
III
IT WAS DIFFERENT when she unexpectedly caught sight of him.
During her stay at the quinta, the nurse noted with secret satisfaction, she was becoming more and more Chinese. She left her hair, which she had combed into a quiff low on her forehead as a disguise in her flight, as it was; she only felt comfortable in the robes that the nurse laid out for her, she made herself up at length and with great care, she had brought no books with her. Her feet, without having been deformed in childhood, were extremely narrow and small. She exchanged only a few words with the nurse, having forgotten her language, and did not sing.
She saw little of the nurse herself. They took turns to keep watch. No unnoticed attack was possible from the mainland side. The area was overgrown and surrounded by rocks; on the ocean side one could spot an approaching craft from a long distance. Usually they looked out from the roof of the house. What would happened if people came to look for them here? There was a well overgrown by creepers, in which she could hide. She could also run away with the nurse to Canton and become fully Chinese, and perhaps find Pedro Velho, further up the Pearl River, and place herself under his protection. Her thoughts were gradually turning in that direction.
Then she found the stranger lying in the unused room in the wooden house. She had stayed up that night, because the moon was so full and she slept badly on moonlit nights and because she liked seeing the waves glisten and surge like a herd of sea animals. She had overlooked him at first.
At first she thought he was dead. He was not breathing. He did not look like the men she knew, but like a supine Jesus, a Cristo jazente, with his protruding ribs, his thin goatee beard and the cadaverous colour and pained features of his face. But she felt that he could not be anything but an escaped prisoner or a deserter from the army.