1894
Aboard the vessel Wushan, Colonel Weicai was considered introverted and outlandish, infallible and petulant. He had never been good at scuttlebutt, never enjoyed the babble that was supposed to be a sailor's only source of pleasure. Tales of wealth, adamants of shore, the lowbrow gabbing over games of cards … he hated the uninterested chatter meant to sweeten loneliness, to affirm ties between the brotherhood of men.
On unurgent evenings when the ship wobbled on the sea and languished in the jangling light of orange, he would shut himself in his cabin and listen to the harp of salt–redolent wind splashing across the sails, and imagine if his experience had been parallel to the dreams of that unchildlike child in merchant school. Of muddy, slow–flowing rivers in the tropics … palms on the banks of deserts … native women wearing chrysanthemum wreaths greeting them at every port … the colognes and fancifuls of Europe … as a youth he wished to be the recipient of it all and nothing less. He might have even thought it his destiny.
But lonely and embittered at twenty–eight years old, Weicai had found himself in the same predicament that all sailors tried to fend but could not: he neither felt affinity for land or sea, for revelry or abstinence. Indeed, he had left his land for he felt it a jail, and touched the shores of three of the seven continents of the world. But a ship was a different kind of prison.
In his time, it had only allowed him to savour the pleasures of indulgence once. Weicai recalled in his cabin, without any cause to it, that distant evening moored in Tokyo, when he was taken to discover women…
Beyond the turbid waves, the pearl moon of high August outshone the poor lamps in the rush shacks, and cast into silver the concrete armour of the single high–rise which tinted the water its colour, and above were the earth browns of the bobbing Indiamen and their masts which spiked the stars. Weicai and an older officer who was his guide were in a carriage piloted by a middle–aged man. The crunch of the horse hooves on the sand did not manage to drown the din of festival drums and the approaching mist of rampant chatter, and when the clusters of red lights began to pass their heads, Weicai was hit by a wave of wet heat and suddenly he couldn't feel the sea air anymore.
They reached the brothel and descended. Passing against the velveted hall, Weicai saw reflected in mirrors watching through the crooks of panel doors his image, and by those that were closed he thought he heard whispering. He was told they were close. Slipping past, he tried to hurry.
The girls sat behind a grate partition and pretended not to notice them. Dipping their feet in a mass of chambre silk, they lay back on ceramic pillows – totally at ease – and swaddled in flower quilts otherwise they bore only porcelain chins to the chill. Tobacco smouldered in long lacquered pipes hanging from billowed, rose quartz lips.
"Which one do you want?" the officer asked. "They're all on me."
Weicai didn't answer. He was about to pick the first woman of his life and, having travelled eighteen–hundred kilometres across the ocean for this moment, felt strangely mute, perplexed. Nevertheless, he chose before the older man had a chance to offer a suggestion: the girl sitting in the middle, of obviously the highest status.
She had been seated in silence, cold with the scent of arrogance, but once Weicai stepped into her room, she laughed happily. And he found himself whole–heartedly believing in this happiness he was bringing her. Above the snake's hiss of the obi being undrawn, she asked his name and age.
"…Twenty–two. Colonel Weicai," he replied, in poor Japanese. "And yours?"
The girl answered almost imperceptibly. "Only Daki."
Her kimono dropped, and they performed soundlessly. He trembled a little out of vanity, as he did when he first scaled the watchtower. The woman's lower body, like a hibernating animal, moved lethargically under the quilts; he sensed the platelets of fate as stars tilting dangerously at the top of the tower. The mast slanted into the south, swung to the north, wheeled, whirled into the east, and seemed finally to impale and cement the platelets on the tip. Before he knew it, the girl balanced diamonds between her thighs, and he was choked, wet, ecstatic. Only afterwards, he found that a single, clear emotion reigned within him: a crumbling and sudden love, though not enough of it to change anything.
