The man retreated a few paces, but came back, grabbed the post as if his life depended on it, hanging onto it as if he could no longer stand, as if he had no ground beneath his feet.
“Why don’t you speak your own language?” the purser continued in English. The man didn’t hear, gazed into the water, and tears ran down his sunken cheeks and were caught in his stubble.
“I’ll give you an empty cabin. But don’t show your face again before everyone has disembarked. Understood?” yelled the purser, who was again calculating how he could rob him en route of the secret of the treasure or whatever it was he had with him. He nodded and ran quickly towards the gangplank as if it were his last chance of rescue.
The purser took him forward to a cabin full of rotting life jackets, which had not been opened for months. Still, the man seemed happy to be alone, and gave the purser another coin, slumped onto the crumbling cork and no longer moved. The vermin, which had at first crawled away, gradually returned and marched over his feet, and later over his clothes, but the swarm soon abandoned this field of operations.
After an hour the ship began creaking and rocking; he gave a sigh and got up. Then the door opened and the fat purser stood in the doorway and behind him a boy with a tray. He asked to be left alone. But the boy put the tray at his feet, and the purser sat down opposite him on another pile. “Have some tiffin,” he offered hospitably. The man tried, but couldn’t eat.
“If you’ve got any more of those coins, I’ll change them for you. And if you want to play fan-tan, I’ll teach you a system that will do brilliantly compared with the bank’s ten per cent.”
The purser waited. He now hoped to hear something about the location of the coins. But the man opposite him said nothing, but simply took hold of the water jug, emptied it and sighed.
“Those coins won’t be any good to you in Macao either, if that’s what you’re thinking. The casinos won’t touch them.”
The man took another handful of coins out of his pocket.
“I don’t know what fan-tan is. That’s all I’ve got.”
“But where are the rest then? Where did you find them?”
“Oh, a long way away, a long way from here. No one can go there. And there aren’t any left.”
The purser put the coins in his pocket, gave the man ten Mexican dollars and regarded the business as concluded. Looking back, he thought he had been ridiculously honest. Had he felt sorry for the man?
II
THE NEXT MORNING the Sui An started to sail around the peninsula. On the upper deck a few white men in white suits were walking around. On the deck below the Chinese were milling about. Macao lay impassively and gazed resentfully at the arrival of the steamer over the hosts of junks choking the bay in dense flocks, a great suburb across the water. The Sui An went through a narrow channel between them and moored at the ramshackle jetty.
The whites went ashore first, stepping into the waiting carriages, leant back and drove off. Then the passengers from steerage spilt from the ship across the quay. And last of all he left the ship. The purser lost sight of him.
He went into town, passed various hotels and ended up in an old inn in a narrow street. He obtained a room for one of his dollars. There was nothing in it but a kang sleeping platform with a headrest — no mosquito net. The light entered through a narrow window, high up between wall and ceiling.
He pushed the headrest off the kang and put his bundle of clothes in its place, which was warmer but softer. He stretched out and lay still. A boy brought in a pot of tea without a sound. He did not seem to be thirsty. It was getting on for supper time. The sickly sweet odour of rotting meat and dried octopus penetrated the room through the window, together with the clatter of crockery and the squeals of children. He did not move; neither heat nor insects, neither stench nor noise bothered him. His spirit had left his miserable body lying there for now and had set out to explore the town, which had already started dying a century ago, and now scarcely existed any more.
And in that way he easily found his way to the past. It was as if he were descending into a mine, and seeing the successive strata in a dim light. He finally reached the time when the castle and the first cathedrals were built and Guia lighthouse shone its light across the bay to show ships the way, a light unknown elsewhere in Asia. He could get no further. Down below, though, he did see another landing, a few tents on a beach, grave crosses, fishermen’s huts, a temple among the rocks, but all this remained dim and he went back. One of the temples he had seen was on fire, and smoke flew ahead of the flames. Black masses of people moved about. He tried to climb higher, but could not, struggled, after being seized from all sides, and woke on the hard bed, drenched with fearful sweat. The stench and din were unbearable to him now. He tossed and turned and when darkness fell he left the inn.
Outside, however, the light was still bright, and so for the time being he roamed the narrow streets of the old town and avoided the ocean side. Chinese and Portuguese districts kept alternating, so intimately mixed was the blood of the two races in the veins of the people of Macao. Only the Praia Grande was as pure as the three or four old families, who lived around it in magnificent mansions.
The sea wind twisted dwarf willows around the edge and occasionally hurled a blob of foam over the balustrade. Coolies spaced at equal distances sat resting on the stones. Every so often a carriage rolled past. On the other side facing the island a few junks were rocking.
Sitting among the coolies, he rested from the afternoon’s bleak journey. Now everything could be viewed as in an old copper engraving. When it was completely dark, he intended to leave. But the moon rose over the Praia Grande, and the houses and roofs became visible again, now coloured antique gold, until a cloud again blotted everything out. This was repeated many times and in his memory the periods passed like high and low tide.
Finally, after a more protracted period of darkness, he got up and caught sight of a black cross, which a cathedral on a hill was thrusting into the sky. In the lower town he kept losing sight of it, but he persisted in trying to find it and finally found himself at the foot of a wide flight of steps and saw a wide front surmounted by the steep front of the cathedral above it and very far away the black cross boring into the grey night sky. He climbed the steps slowly, with head bowed, so as not to lose his footing: the steps were crumbling and slippery. When he could feel no more steps he looked up and was standing at the edge of the cathedral precinct. The front of the church was black, like an awesome vertical coffin, and no light came anywhere from the stained-glass windows. He knew that something dreadful was hiding behind this dead expanse. He could not go back; it was as if the steps had collapsed behind him, so that there was a yawning abyss behind him, and he went giddily and quickly towards the church.
He stood in front of it: the windows were high, the gate closed; he piled a number of stones, hung over a window sill with his upper body inside and saw that behind this façade the church had been eaten away; he glanced into the empty space paved with gravestones. Vultures sat on the remains of rotten pews. He fell down into it, they flew up and one skimmed past him, so that he stumbled over a boulder and then fell through a decayed choir stall. He thrashed around in a soft mass of wood, and the mouldy dust blocked his eyes and nose. He finally rose to his feet half choked. In the meantime the church was fully resurrected and full of figures walking to and fro, most of them climbing onto sacks of pews at the windows and firing outside with heavy muskets. At one window an old monk was operating a cannon. Every so often a bullet would whistle through the church. He was standing near the altar. A man in military dress but with a silvery wreath of hair around a bald scalp pressed an old gun into his hand, in the name of God. He positioned himself at a window and ran his fingers over the rusty breech and barrel. There were bullets on the window sill. He looked down at the slope of the hill on which the church was built, which figures were trying to climb; some of them were constantly falling, and involuntarily he began firing into the mass. He felt the jolts of the heavy musket against his shoulder. But he did not hear the report and saw the flash only seconds later.