Camões had carelessly asked a few questions, not realizing that the Portuguese in Macao, four hundred at the time, all knew each other, so that he was bound to call attention to himself. They asked in return who he was, and he did not know what to say; fortunately he was saved by the surging crowd. The fire had also spread to the centre of the monastery and the gate opened. The soldiers formed a double hedge, turning their lances outward against the thronging mass; some were run through and fell with a roar of pain, while the monks came calmly out. The last of them, a tall man with white waving hair, was going to close the gate behind him, as if wanting to protect the monastery for as long as possible, but two men plunged through the cordon and grabbed him.
“Are you going to let my daughter burn to death?” yelled one of them and yanked at his arms.
“She has never been here.”
“So where is she?”
“Safe. God will protect her.”
The soldiers surrounded the monks in a cordon three-deep and escorted them to where three Chinese in the robes of supreme judges were waiting. Ronquilho gave an order: the cordon opened and let the prior through. The Chinese judges seemed to question him briefly. Another order from Ronquilho: the soldiers withdrew and a Chinese force surrounded the monks and took them away.
The Procurador and the Hao Ting had agreed to satisfy the will of the people publicly by transferring them from Portuguese authority into the hands of Chinese justice. For the immediate safety of the monks this seemed preferable, though its effectiveness in saving their lives was doubtful. They would be lucky to die untortured. But Campos had justified himself to his compatriots and would be honoured for his strict justice among the Chinese people. For the second time after all the setbacks he had suffered, he had a good night’s sleep: on both occasions he had eliminated a powerful adversary, and on both occasions the expected booty had eluded him. First Velho, now the Dominicans. But on both occasions his lust for revenge had been satisfied. The monastery was slowly burning down. People were throwing books from one of the windows: the library was saved because Campos hoped to find compromising documents or clues to Pilar’s whereabouts.
As he stood there enjoying the fire, Ronquilho ran in through the gate, although stumbling badly, and disappeared into the monastery. No one expected to see him again, but he seemed to be fireproof, or perhaps his boots and cuirass offered some protection. Smouldering and giving off a pungent stench, he once again stood before Campos.
“She’s not there. They let her burn to death.”
The people gradually retreated back to the alleyways. It was dangerous to hang about for too long and Camões too slunk away, without realizing that he was being followed. Considering whether he should tell Pilar everything or keep back the fact that a man had gone into the burning building for her sake, he reached the place where the junks had been moored. But the junks had set sail. He stared along the empty harbour, and was grabbed from behind without having a chance to resist. He allowed himself to be carried off: he was beginning to resign himself to his fate, which henceforth would consist of nothing but transferring from one prison to another.
CHAPTER 6
IN THE AUTUMN OF 19… I was living half sick and completely destitute in a room on the top floor of a village hotel. If the shipwreck on the Trafalgar had not intervened, I could have remained all my life what I was: a radio operator, that is, a creature neither fish nor fowl, sailor nor landlubber, officer nor subordinate. I was not satisfied with my life that was no life, where you feel like a human toadstool if you spend all your time in a clammy, stinking cabin hunched on a worn-out office chair. But I was resigned to the fact that it would be like this to the end of my days or until my pension, from which even a frugal, sober man, such as I have become over those years of sedentary wandering, cannot live on shore, unless it be in some place of exile. Everything had remained as it was. My days were divided into a six-hour watch of listening, sometimes drowsily, sometimes intently, and six hours of dull, restless sleep.
The moments of rest and pleasure were the long nights’ sleep ashore, from early in the morning till late in the evening, and a visit to a brothel about once every three months.
No, this was not the good life.
But is that of a poor farmer in an Irish village, between the Atlantic on one side and the boggy meadows of the Emerald Isle on the other, any better?
In that lonely village my family and two others in turn formed a separate community, and within it I was alone. What had I, half grown, in common with my parents, frugal with words and miserly with kisses, with my brother, a born farm labourer, or my sisters, one of whom became pregnant by one of the other clan at the age of sixteen and no longer associated with us, the other dry and skinny, a milkmaid who did not look like a woman with her man’s gait and massive, raw red hands? Perhaps I would have been accepted by the others on my return from thirty years at sea and not despised as a member of the black jellyfish. Yes, that’s what they called my family and the two others. All of us had black hair and eyes, and were short and thick-set.
We weren’t Irish. We were the last scions of the accursed Celtic race that had lived here before the birth of Christ, said the parson. No, descendants of shipwrecked mariners from the Armada, said the schoolmaster, that is, cowards who had not fought, but had fled right around Scotland, constantly sailing the great galleons ahead of the fierce English vessels that were hunting them down.
So our forefathers had eaten the bread of charity there on that barren coast and had been the slaves of those who were themselves the vassals of the powerful distant English landlords. Some had nevertheless married the coast-dwellers’ least eligible womenfolk, but the children had looked like them and had been just as despised and subjected, short, black-haired and timid, and so it had remained.
With ten other survivors I had been put ashore in M…e…, the nearest harbour. I received no compensation for my lost belongings, and I had nothing but the emergency money sewn into my shirt, which wasn’t much. The din of the port, which did not stop even at night, threw me into a torment of insomnia, and I knew of a house in one of the narrow alleys that one could enter unseen and let oneself be transported by the smoke, but I felt that once there I would no longer be able to return to life, and so I called on my last reserves of strength.
One afternoon I left the town and stayed in a village three hours farther on, and spent the night there, ravaged by all the demons inside me (there were no ghosts in the room), and the next day was unable to continue. I was ill and confused and was running a high fever. Fortunately the good hotel-keepers kept me and over several weeks I came to myself after awakening from my clouded state.