II
THIS WAS A LARGER and lighter chamber than Camões had entered for as long as he could remember. The instruments of torture had been assembled in the centre of the room. He did not understand the function of many of them. The torturer and his assistants stood there in an attitude of fearful tension, as if they had to guard the instruments and were frightened that they would be dragged away at the last moment.
There stood the Dominicans, shackled together in a corner, still calmer. As always, they wore their rough cassocks and sandals and were talking quietly but animatedly, as if involved in a theological conversation. Most of them were cross-eyed and squinted at each other, as if they only half trusted each other. This was so out of keeping with the situation, in which they could expect support, only moral that is, from no one but each other, that Camões at first did not understand and was sure that they would betray each other when first put to the question. In addition one of them had a shrill voice, which kept breaking amid all the hoarse whispering. It was only later that he noticed their inner peace. One of the judges called out, “Quiet!” And once the captain, who was also present, said, “You’ll be singing a different tune soon!”
The judges were sitting under the light that entered through low barred windows at ceiling level. Through those windows Camões saw countless feet passing: the soft felt shoes of the Chinese, the goats’ hooves of their wives; far less often the leather shoes of soldiers, and two or three times fawn-coloured boots with long silver spurs. Never before had he seen so many of the inhabitants of Macao. It lasted perhaps a few moments, while the judges arranged court documents and seemed to be making bets. Scarcely any attention was paid to him.
Then Campos gave the signal to the torturer. The assistants went over to the Dominicans, but they had fallen on their knees. The prior spoke a forceful prayer, and as yet not an assistant laid a finger on them. Camões wondered what would be more effective against torture — his powder, or that prayer. Campos ordered them to say amen, and make a start, and soon they were swinging from the ceiling with heavy weights attached to their toes.
There was no room left for Camões to hang and to pass the time he was put in the thumbscrews, and his ankles were put in sharp irons. It remained deathly still, apart from the weights that occasionally collided with a dull metallic thud, and Campos’s regular cry of “Confess, confess!”
Finally a young monk started groaning faintly.
“Confess,” cried Campos. “Speak the truth and free yourself from these pains and those ten times worse that are still to come. Confess.”
The scribes held their pens poised above the paper. But the prior admonished him, speaking of the Church fathers, who endured much worse, and conjured him not to forfeit immortal salvation because of a few hours of earthly pain and not to betray their innocence.
However, the young monk, under increasingly severe torture, broke down, and admitted that Lou Yat’s children had been lured into the monastery. But he did not know what had happened to them.
“But you heard their groans? You saw them burying something in the courtyard?”
“Yes, yes,” cried the victim. “Untie me, I saw it, they buried them. Untie me.”
“He’s lying,” cried the prior. “We had no part in it. Torture me till I die, no lie will escape from my mouth. He’s a coward who wants to save his skin.”
“No, he’s sensible. The evidence is overwhelming; denials won’t help. Do you wish to recant?”
“No, no; untie me, now I’ve said it!”
They were all released. A statement was read out, but most of them were no longer aware of anything, and leant against the wall, or had collapsed onto the floor. And Camões had almost been forgotten, since he had made no sound. Campos went over to him.
“And you confess too, then we have all the information we need.”
But Camões smiled, shook his head and gave no reply. The blood was dripping from his thumbs.
He was awakened by a strange warm feeling on his face. He could not understand what it was and did not move, frightened to open his eyes. At the same time he could feel a dull pain in his thumbs and ankles. Finally he opened his eyes with a great effort. He was lying on a bed in a large, bright room. A chair and a table stood by a window. He crossed to it and in the distance saw the sea and a few islands on the horizon. He could not see any ground beneath the window. Again he was far from the earth, no longer in the darkness beneath it, but in the light above it.
The water, which another guard brought him, was clear and did not go bad as it stood there, and the food was good. After three days he was able to get up, and first gazed out to sea for a day towards the distant islands, to where a solitary ship sometimes crossed. He asked this guard for an explanation too. This one did not answer at all. Were they trying to lure him into treachery again through good treatment? Or did they expect the King to revoke his edict?
One morning he also found his papers again. He resumed work, and in uninterrupted peace and quiet, facing the sea, he wrote of the adventures of the navigators in the gardens of the Hesperides, where they were fed on fruit and while they were caressed forgot the privations of their wanderings.
One morning all his papers had disappeared again. He pestered the guard with questions, grabbed hold of him. But this guard seemed to be really deaf and dumb, and to belong more to the underworld than to this light-filled place. For a day he was filled with a fearful premonition, and he could no longer feel at one with the calm of the sea by gazing and reflecting. Late at night he slept for a few hours, sitting upright. When he awoke everything had been returned, but a sheet from the garden of Hesperides had been creased and stained. He wanted to continue, but felt as if his work had been fractured, in that very place. A fearful intuition plagued him, and he no longer dared think of Pilar.
Finally he summoned the courage to read back over what he had written, and he saw that without his realizing it the mythological garden had begun to resemble that across the water. He was seized by a rage against poetry greater than any he had known in his youth. It was good for nothing but to reveal secrets, to make the writer the betrayer of his own inner life, precisely of what he wanted to hide most deeply and preferred to bury deep underground. But surely it was impossible. Campos’s mind was not that subtle — to have thought of this possibility!
And so Camões, more of a prisoner than ever, kept oscillating between the window and his bed, between hope and fear, anxiety and enlightenment. And this torment, worse than any his body had endured, lasted another six or seven days. He no longer ate, no longer wrote, stared out of the window at the sea and longed for oblivion.
One afternoon the guard was accompanied by a junior official and a servant carrying a set of military kit, which he threw down in front of Camões. The official read out a letter, an edict. Camões was to join as a soldier the escort accompanying the embassy to Beijing which was leaving Macao that very afternoon. Camões made no move to get ready. The official advised him to do so, or else he would be transported with them in chains for three days’ journey from Macao. He waited. Camões got dressed.