Suddenly she saw me standing there and her expression changed from surprise to indignation to fear. She must have given me away at that point, because the two men made straight for me, the fat young one shouting at me, and the old one grabbing me, though I had no difficulty in freeing myself.
They let me go and started a conversation. I understood that the young man was warning the old man to be careful. A while ago a fanatical Scots Presbyterian missionary had watched a procession pass by with his hat on, which had caused a row, and they had thrown him in jail, but had had to release him again with humble apologies to the British government.
What on earth would they have done with a Catholic Irishman who had failed to show respect? One could see the old man getting excited and the other man trying to make him realize there was nothing to be done. He kept shouting: “Farria Amaral Passaleão, all for nothing, humiliation,” and gesticulating wildly. Over their heads I stared at the woman and she at me. It was as if the whole business did not concern us; I forgot about it and went towards her. She took hold of my arms and a servant also came to help, but finally we all made the same gesture and let our arms fall to our sides and shook our heads: there’s no point. The old gentleman could no longer speak, and the other said: “We’ll let you go if you leave the garden immediately. Buy yourself a drink.” He gave me some money.
I stood there for a moment, but the company went inside and walked slowly down the drive.
Right next to the grand house was a run-down pub in semi-darkness; that was the place for me. I tried to drown my consciousness as soon as possible and I must have lost it fairly quickly; I caught sight of the same coolie standing waiting outside again. Such loyalty moved me at first, and then made me bitter, but a surge of resentment finally won the day; I had a change of heart and I was determined to gain access. After all, that governor was just a Portuguese, and what was his daughter? A half-caste, more Chinese than white. I went back into the garden; the house was dark and all I could see was a vague white patch. Wasn’t that Waglan that the ship had to pass in the foggy night? A root caught my foot. I went flying into black mud and stayed lying where I fell.
I woke in my room in the Chinese hotel, penniless and bruised, but feeling more enlightened than in years, since I had lost my job on the Trafalgar. How had I got back? Perhaps it was the same coolie who had waited so faithfully. On the way he had probably driven me into a dark alley, beaten me unconscious and then robbed me. Well, he had to make sure he was paid, and I didn’t hold it against him.
But how was I supposed to get back to Hong Kong without any money? I went to the quay, made myself inconspicuous and got on board with a mob of steerage passengers. The fat purser was standing by the hatchway, but he seemed to know me, because he pretended not to see me. Perhaps all white men coming from Macao, where they had lost a fortune at the tables, are given a free passage back at the expense of the Portuguese administration; perhaps I could have gone first class. I didn’t try my luck as I was happy to be able to travel at all. The boat slid slowly away from the ramshackle jetty, the engine creaked, the steam whistle shrieked, the crowds of people on board and on shore screeched at each other.
Slowly I felt something slipping off me. I would no longer have those dreams: perhaps that nocturnal scuffle had done me good. But probably I had rid myself of most of it on the trek after the attack on the Loch Catherine and that fight was the finishing touch. I thought of the fear I used to feel, I was amazed and wondered how it was possible. But suddenly I felt sad: I myself had been freed, but someone else who had sought sanctuary with me had not found it. Had I arrived too late?
Perhaps we had relieved each other, and I had become him and he me? So was I someone else now? But didn’t I want to be relieved of myself? I felt the old confusion taking hold of me and chased those thoughts away like germs I could now resist.
I became sad, because Macao was slowly receding into the distance, lying there on its peninsula. We sailed around it. For a moment the city was narrow, and then I saw its full breadth again from the other side, and among the many brown houses a white one. I would never go back. A kind of tenderness for the poor dilapidated old place grabbed at my throat. I hated Hong Kong, with its emporiums and warehouses, its mansions and its thousand sea castles floating there in the wide blue bay. I should have liked to spend my life in Macao; I fitted in there: no one bothered about me either. Still, I had to remain part of the life in which one must always become something in order not to fall into decline.
It was over. I was returning on a ship to the old life, but more hardened against the deprivations, the heat, the taunts, determined to repulse further meetings with others, to remain myself.
As Macao lay behind me and slowly slipped away into the distance, I felt a melancholy courage growing in me: all right, I was going to become like other people, but from now on my actions would no longer be inhabited by the thought that I was a lost soul, but would be strengthened by the conviction that I had nothing left to lose and that the peaceful, decaying past could not absorb me to help me escape my own life.
I was going back. But I would not stay on a ship for long and would head into the interior of this country, of which I had so far experienced nothing but a journey through an arid steppe, a few half-dazed, half-drunken days in a deserted city, then coastlines, low and rocky, crumbly and even, but always receding, then ports where the exchange of secretions between Europe and Asia takes place and the people are nothing but fermenting agents that accelerate the process.
First I would make for the place I had most shunned, since it is so cruel to the penniless and the weak that people are simply allowed to die in the street. First to Shanghai. From there, at right angles away from the coast, across the plains, to where the mountains rise from the distant, hazy rice paddies, with the poppy fields lying among them like red lakes.
If any happiness was to be found anywhere on earth, it must be there. There the oldest wisdom, the most exalted nature and the purest pleasure were to be found. Blissful in the present, armoured by the many scars from the past, I would be able to confront all the ghosts and demons, without merging with them, offering them hospitality, without myself changing one hair, a single cell.
I, who at first was so weak and did not set foot even on its outermost edge, will penetrate this land that has always remained pristine, that does not repel, but tolerates, that allows itself seemingly to be conquered and destroys all barbarians and foreigners in its languid, slowly suffocating grip and under the pressure of its mass.
To be one of the for ever unconscious millions — what joy — or if that is unattainable, someone who knows every thing, for whom everything is behind him and who nevertheless goes on living.
AFTERWORD
The Dutch writer Jan Jacob Slauerhoff (1898–1936) was born in Leeuwarden, the provincial capital of Friesland in the northern part of the Netherlands. He trained as a doctor, though he never followed a conventional career path. Slau, as he was known to his friends, combined medical practice with writing in what was to be a short and intensely nomadic life. He left behind the small world of the Netherlands to travel, first in Europe and later in the Far East, working as a ship’s doctor on the China-Java-Japan route. These wanderings gave rise to one of the most famous lines of Dutch poetry—Alleen in mijn gedichten kan ik wonen (Only in my poems can I dwell) from the poem Woninglooze (Homeless). This nomadic sensibility was highly unusual for the time in which Slauerhoff was writing; it both harks back to nineteenth-century Romanticism and anticipates today’s extreme mobility.