Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (24 page)

One day, a month or so after that evening of rage and shards, a short episode occurred which again changed the course of Wu's life.

He was swimming in the pond. It was morning, a bright, early autumn; the water was warm and full of tiny greenery. Wu swam quickly toward the sun, taking pleasure in his small, stocky body. He was so used to thinking of the censor at such moments that his mind had created a sort of feedback loop, checking every impression with the censor's imagined stream of thoughts.

Even now, as he swam, he posed himself the thousandth version of one and the same question: how would the censor feel about this? How would he — who is not me, and yet in some startling way is — perceive this motion, this meeting of water and skin, the glow of September sun on scalp; how would he see the mountain on the horizon, the white cloud? (The censor never went to the pond; he probably did not even know how to swim, but Wu experimented assiduously with every situation, hoping that one day, in one of them, he would find an answer.)

He glanced at the tips of his clasped hands, which surged rapidly forward. And suddenly, as he caught sight of his fingers, unusually pale beneath the water, slightly changed by the refracted light, seaweed wrapped around his ring-finger — suddenly he was outside himself, and outside everything he had ever known. His body dragged him toward the bottom like a weight. He looked up at a mountain towering over him, so alien that it was almost not a mountain. He breathed in as if someone were forcing air into his mouth.

That was all. It lasted only a moment and there is nothing more to say. But during those several seconds Wu realized once and for all that the censor was the censor and Wu was Wu — he and only he! — and that all his efforts were in vain, for nothing he could learn from the censor would ever be anything other than Wu.

We cannot rule out a purely physical origin for this feeling: for instance, a change in equilibrium, which can certainly occur while swimming. Wu tried many times that morning to recapture it, swimming back and forth across the pond, observing himself with great care, but the feeling never returned.

From that day forth he never called on the censor again. The
interest that had exhausted him for three years had suddenly subsided. The circle was full and the time bounded by his forty-second and forty-fifth years came to a close.

The palace, of course, noticed this change and ascribed it to a meaningless intrigue unfolding at the time. The censor himself silently accepted the turn of events and probably thought the same, but Wu's life was so marked by that moment of estrangement that he was unable to imagine what the censor might have thought of it, and instead put him out of his head as best he could.

Three hours after the censor left, Wu was still in the kitchen, working. He was searching. There was no sense now trying to sleep. It was still as dark as in the very depths of night, but Wu knew that at this time of year dawn came more quickly than an axe blow.

He worked as if entranced. Time dwindled like the smoldering logs. The night was drawing to a close. The confrontation he had been waiting for these thirty-three years and which had slipped by only minutes ago had deprived time of all elasticity. Haste possessed him.

Angry and headstrong, alone, without his servants' help, he lifted giant bowls and stoked the stove. It was nearly the death of him. The meat tongs fell on his hand and made his knuckles bleed, but he did not even notice. He pushed time aside.

Wu worked differently than ever before. He stopped relying on external aids. On sauces, spices, fruits, and additives, on all those glittering cosmetics of flavor. He turned to the very fundaments of his art. He focused his attention on the operations he performed every day, on each process, however simple. He investigated the element of fire, the element of water in braising. The hiss from under the pan, the steam on the ceiling, the hot gust from the oven doors. For ten minutes he stood motionless and, eyes closed, fingered the bottom of one of the pots. He penetrated the most primitive components of creation.

It was the most potent hour of the night, the last before dawn. Wu worked like a man possessed. He was certain he would find something. He no longer tasted. Taste was secondary. The meat's very consistency came alive in his hands. It hardened, softened, took on an unnatural brittleness; its very structure gave way, collapsing into other forms of being, and the chicken was already as little chicken as smoke in the sky is a tree in flames. Just before the potent hour gave way to morning, Wu knew that he had found it.

He was putting away his forks in the gray of morning when someone began to knock gently on the door. For a moment his heart stopped. In a lightning vision he admitted the censor, conducted a long and fateful conversation with him — and then opened the door to see his nephew standing there on the other side.

The poet was shaking. He was wet and bloated. Before Wu could recover, the young man had slipped inside like a mouse.

“What do you think you're doing? Out!” Wu roared.

Wu clenched his fists tight. Pain reminded him of his raw knuckles, but he no longer remembered why they hurt.

“Uncle! Uncle!” the boy squealed. Stiffly he pressed his knees together. “They want to kill me! I'm going to be executed!”

The boy's lower lip trembled. Just don't start to whimper, Wu thought. He was dead tired. The idea of tears on his nephew's fleshy and always slightly lubricious lips repelled him. Now, after hours straining his imagination to study the substance's essences and flavors, he would not be able to stand it. He closed his eyes and held his breath.

“What do you want?” Wu asked.

“Executed!” his nephew yelped. “They're digging a pit beyond the ramparts! It's raining! They'll bury me in mud!”

“I repeat: what do you want?”

Wu stamped his foot. The young man instantly sobered up. He blinked, shook his shoulders, and said quite forthrightly:

“Clothes.”

“What kind?”

“Doesn't matter. A servant girl's, maybe.”

“Who sent you here?”

Wu's nephew sniffled loudly. “The censor. He said you'd know.”

In the grayness Wu nodded slightly. The ties binding me to others in this world are fewer day by day, he realized. Other people's paths still cross behind my back, but each day even those are further away.

“There are clothes in the alcove,” the young man added pragmatically. “And a cap. And some kind of … basket or something.”

Wu sighed. It was part of his old age, of that empty, ever narrowing path, that he could not even remember anything about his servant girl. He groped blindly around the alcove, feeling various sorts of things whose existence he would rather leave be. The minute he ceased to need her each evening, she simply melted into nothingness — and any clothes she did not need were already in such an abyss of oblivion that he probably would not have noticed them if they were right under his nose. Finally he felt a soft material.

“Did the Head Censor have a message for me?”

“No.”

When Wu returned to the kitchen, his nephew was lounging on the chair, looking as if he did not know he was to be executed that morning.

“That crook!” the poet announced, his voice full of rancor. “That stuffed old mummy!”

Wu closed his eyes again. He did not want to watch his nephew disrobe. He was utterly exhausted and experiencing a strange feeling: he wanted to go to sleep.

“He's an ignoramus, “ the youth continued. “An imbecile. He acted so clever!”

The poet drew in his greasy lips and mewed in an old man's voice:

“‘Too soon, young man, too soon. This age isn't ripe for
you' — he's a moron!”

Wu did not even realize he had fallen asleep. For an illusory moment he was ten again and a small, frightened monk … creeping through the leaves and grubbing in the wet soil with his fingers —

“I can't stand him!” his nephew mumbled through the clothing's material. “His stench is everywhere. He's crawling with maggots, but won't let anyone else near the trough. It's not like anyone reads his doggerel. If I ever come back, it'll be to spit on his grave!”

The youth said this with the gloomy resolution of the swarthy southern prophets of old. The end of the world is nigh, they most often claimed. But also: the sun will grow cold, the universe will fall into small black holes — and this strange, age-old fascination with the end had always found them hordes of worshipers.

Wu's nephew pulled on a shapeless gray cap.

“Well, Uncle, I'm off.”

And then suddenly he burst into caustic laughter:

“And he's still frightened of me! He's scared witless. I know he is! And the best thing is, he doesn't even know why!”

Wu woke up. The young man stood in the doorway in the servant girl's clothes, looking particularly unappealing. The insipid shapelessness of his sex, his age, his character, and the fate that had marked him forever was only heightened by those bedraggled rags, hurriedly fastened and lopsided.

“He told me to go around the pond. Promised to call off the guards.”

Wu rubbed his warm, dry eyes. His nephew casually opened his arms to embrace him. The old man shrank back.

“Run along,” he said, exhausted.

His nephew had already stepped across the threshold. But the youth turned around.

“I am the only one, remember,” he whispered deliriously, “who could have saved the emperor … and everything. Just me, who is myself and no one else. I and only I!”

“It's dawn,” Wu answered.

The morning fog seeped through the partly closed door. Wu moved closer to the oven. He did not even watch the boy totter off and disappear into the gray rain. He forgot him so completely that the young man vanished from his life long before reaching the pond.

Wu carefully brushed off the hot ash. He removed the lid. The substance steaming in the pot did not in the least resemble meat. It was pulpy, shiny white, broken here and there by a vivid pink streak. If his nephew had returned at that moment, Wu would have thought it was the servant girl come to wash the dishes.

The palace shone. Lights burned in both its halls. The main impression the majority of guests took away that night was luminosity. Several small children, who were allowed to roam the hall during the festivities, would remember, even sixty years and two sadistic wars later, the gold-tinged glow, the thousands of candles, and the iridescent smoke up near the ceiling.

By the time the emperor arrived, the festivities were almost over. The emperor was an old man, and celebrations exhausted him. He was only a winged golden wisp waving half-asleep over a cosseted empire, dreaming the occasional short, pale dream.

All the winning poems had been recited. Now a small ephebe — the son of a court lady, probably the emperor's bastard child — took the stand and began to read, or rather to chant, the one that had received first prize. He had a strange voice, as tiny as if it were made of foam, and the voice and poem matched exquisitely.

Wu walked among the tables and checked the settings. The twenty-two bowls were already sitting on polished trays; there was a white cloth over each bowl and a waiter was placing sprigs of jasmine on them.

Wu stopped. The poem was rippling down the usual stairway of
sin – sa
syllables like a multicolored runner. Dominating it, as expected, was yet another elephant. This time it was an almost
supernatural one, with diamond eyes, golden hair, and a set of classical enchantments skillfully woven into its elephantine anatomy.

This poem is simply beautiful, Wu thought, without the slightest sense of enchantment. “Perfect!” the old empress announced loudly, and in doing so completely expressed his feelings.

When the poem came to an end, there was an appreciative murmur. Everyone bent as if beneath a strong wind, and in their tiny bows to the emperor, empress, and Mr. Hayo, the winner, they made their satisfaction plain.

Finally came the time for the meal. By now the twenty-two bowls were on the tables. Wu could not help noticing as here and there someone tried inconspicuously to sniff or to ascertain with a brief touch at least whether it was to be a hot or cold dish. An unexpected disquiet seized him. Far away, in the gallery, a spoon fell, and the chilling reverberation of its tone raced sharply down his spine.