to oriental eyes
There lay Mars and Venus, close bound together, a shameful sight. The gods
were highly amused, one of them prayed that he too might be so shamed. They
laughed aloud and for long this was the best-known story in the whole of heaven.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV
New Year. The cold up through the floor. This crisp once a year air might clear
the head, depending on what one had been doing the night before to see the year
in. If you're up for it, the view across to Macao is clear, uncannily. The
statue of A Ma sunstruck from first light. The fire crackers are resuming after
the late undeclared ceasefire. If you can't sleep through them then you won't
have slept much. A red wine cough from the night before? It's cold, unreasonably
cold for Macao. The year of the Monkey has begun. So cold some of the gweilos
were quick to call it the year of the brass monkey.
Dália de Camões surveys the world through eyes as jaundiced - no more nor less -
than those of any other day. Dália de Camões. The name itself suggests privilege
in this place, but should to any who study carefully, suggest certain
deprivations as well.
A slight hangover, only slight. Dália had been drinking by herself, by herself
because a friend of hers, a female friend, had stood her up. In favour of what?
Staying at home with the family, a secret liaison? Hard to say. Anyway she
didn't come. Drinking by herself is not good, Dália knows, but there are times
when it seems to be the answer.
This morning she will paint. Perhaps the view, things are so clear. This will be
a break from painting with herself as subject. She paints in oils. They are a
little toxic, she thinks. But then again Dália smokes. All the advantages there
are in living alone. One can be obsessive, an egotist, a poisoner, anorexic,
bulimic. One can suit oneself. In case you hadn't quite yet guessed, there's no
one in this world for whom Dália feels more sorry than for Dália. And while it's
true that she deserves pity, as a Catholic such an extreme attitude cannot be
the best policy. You're supposed to pray to Our Lady of Sorrows, not become one.
Being like that isn't going to get you into a relationship either. Not that
Dália has ever had serious hopes in that department. Nor has she entirely
abandoned the idea of being a ‘normal' woman. How loudly that biological clock
comes pounding after her.
Despite the self pity, Dália does actually think of herself as sexy, ugly sexy
is what she thinks. It sounds like strange Chinglish in her heavy Cantonese
accent but it makes sense in its way. She thinks that no man could find her
beautiful but that all men must find her irresistible. There's no evidence for
either assertion. The big problem for Dália is that men never notice her. It's
curious and counter intuitive but Dália has observed that the shorter her skirts
get the less men notice her. According to this calculation, it being mid-winter,
the multi-layered Dália should be at her most recognisable right now.
The calculation proves prophetic on the first working day of the new lunar year.
In the office (import-export), where Dália has worked as a secretary since time
began, the new manager, Mr Fox, notices her at last. I mean he'd met her before,
but he'd never looked at her.
‘Where have you been?'
‘Nowhere. Here.'
‘But?'
‘Just here.'
‘Right. And tomorrow?'
‘I'll be here.'
Not much of a conversation. But then Fox is not much of a talker. The glum
girl is inconspicuous, was. Now that she has all these layers on and smells of
mothballs rather than the expensive perfume she buys duty free whenever she
flies, he notices her. Of course. Expensive perfume is something Dália believes
in, like she believes in the gym, like she believes in personal massage three
times a week, like she believes in pedicure fortnightly, like she believes in
her own rotten luck. When other girls tell her the same perfume is cheaper in
SaSa in Macao, Dália winces, thinks ‘bitch' and makes a mental note to not smile
or converse with that one. If there were a candle lit somewhere, Dália would be
blowing it out. Dália believes income is for disposing of, you never know how
long it will last. But that's all to do with her childhood.
Dália files, Dália inputs on the computer. She's fast enough, she doesn't make
mistakes. Dália used to speak to customers, she used to greet customers at
reception. She wasn't exactly rude, abrupt perhaps, more honest than helpful.
She'd been with the firm a long time and that was the old culture, that was very
pre-handover. The thing was now to be more... ‘customer oriented', ‘global in
outlook', ‘user friendly'.
Mr Fox is friendly. Is Fox a user? Dália feels coquettish just thinking the
thought. She's home painting again, herself again. Macao has disappeared from
the view now, so she paints her favourite subject. She's not listening to Bach,
Telemann, but she's heard it's good for her, good for her mind, so she plays it,
like muzak. Dália's usually calm, that's her demeanour, she thinks it's her
‘style'. She always thinks of style when she's painting. But she thinks of it
often besides. Dália thinks of style as often as a man thinks of sex. She gets
that look in her eye. She seems aloof to colleagues on her level or below her.
That calm! The trouble sleeping, that's something else.
Is Fox a user? She could ask, she won't. She won't talk to those girls because
she knows they hate her, they hate her for her mixed blood, her Portuguese
heritage, they hate her for being who she is. But if you could see Dália and the
picture she's painting you'd see there are two different people here. Dália's
always been annoyed whenever she's shown her self-portraits to anyone. The
response has always been the same. Who's the girl? Of course most of those
asking were wondering whether she'd copied the picture. Ten times bitten, still
learning to be shy, story of her life. But the occasions on which she exposes
herself to this particular risk have become rarer and rarer. The two women in
the room when Dália's painting? One exists in the same world you and I inhabit,
one is only in the picture. You'd realise, if you could see the picture, that
most of Dália's colleagues have no idea she's not just Chinese like them. Most
of them know her as Leung Ka Mei anyway, although anyone who'd spoken to her for
more than a few minutes would have realised she prefers Dália, which is to say
she prefers the girl in the picture.
The funny thing, the tragic thing, is that Dália's never had much to do with the
Portuguese community. She learned a few words of Portuguese on holiday there for
a week ten years ago. Otherwise her knowledge of the language is confined to
what's in street signs and public notices. The Macanese don't really know her at
all. But Dália's not just Chinese.
Mr Fox had spoken to her, looked at her in a certain way suggestive of a certain
weakness men have, can be relied on to have. This is excitement for Dália, as
close as it gets. She could while away the night with this. The fact is Dália's
view of life has become steadily flatter since her childhood years, and though
in this sense it has become less and less traumatic, any trained psychologist
would have continued to classify her throughout as at least mildly depressed, in
the good times ‘mildly'. She's a single girl, and though never resolutely so,
she's never been burnt in love. She's never had any kind of a relationship with
a man. Worried about her body, worried about putting on weight she can no longer
easily shed, she herself still finds her body alluring; if she were Mr Fox she
would. It's her face she thinks is ugly. The funny, tragic thing is that her
face is beautiful, Chinese, not what she thinks. She prizes her ugliness as what
sets her apart. Dália thinks of herself as a kind of sexy virgin. If she weren't
a virgin? Dália paints quite well. Her work's not realistic, but if she had a
show the paintings would probably sell.
***
Dália has always been hard to get to know. She's a
girl lost between cultures, between empires, between aspirations and sordid
reality. Sometimes it takes a next generation to realise the dreams its parents
had in mind.
Dália went to school in Hong Kong, a boarding school first, then a regular
school. She'd been at a boarding school in Macao before that, the kind of school
she shouldn't have been able to go to. The nuns took her in and treated her with
that vicious brand of kindness for which they are so well known. They needn't
have taken her in. They'd taken pity on her, on her mother really. Her mother
was a truly pitiable figure and only nineteen years old when Dália had first
needed taking in. The principal cause in all these matters was poverty. Shame
had to take a backseat, as it so often does, to poverty.
Dália Augusto de Camoens alias Leung Ka Mei is the not quite completely
unacknowledged ‘daughter' of a great Macanese patriarch of the old school. (Is
there any other?) This man, whose progeny are today so numerous that he shall
for the purposes of this narrative remain anonymous, was a collector of virgins.
He collected them for the purpose of defloration, a ritual sanctioned neither by
his nor by any other religion and yet for which he was well known, and dare one
say, even respected, certainly feared. For the purposes of this story let's just
call him ‘the old man'. The virgin peccadillo contributed to the aura of power
with which both Chinese and Portuguese communities regarded the old man. There
was always a story about him, just to mention his name was to titillate or
disgust or enrage the listener, all good things for a story to do.
But back to Dália's seamy origins. The old man wouldn't acknowledge this
daughter as he had several others of his illegitimate offspring. He wouldn't
acknowledge her for several years and then he did. What had changed? He had
fallen on hard times, it was true, just at the time Dália's mother was making
her representations to the nuns. While Dália was boarding in Macao, her mother
was making a new life for herself in Hong Kong. It wasn't until she was safely
married that she'd confided Dália's existence on planet earth to her husband.
This upright Chinese working man - a man of traditional values - had had an
inkling his bride wasn't a virgin, but a gentleman needn't ask certain
indelicate questions. When he learned those parts of the truth it was his
privilege to learn, it took him a long time to adjust to the step-father idea.
Hence the boarding school in Hong Kong. Once they'd had a few sons of their own,
this daughter who could be the family's maid didn't seem like such a bad idea.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong boarding school had been expensive. It had only been
possible because Dália's mother had gone back to Macao and managed to extract
the wherewithal from a man who now seemed to be well past keeping up those
rituals which were so much a part of his reputation. No one knows what threats
or promises were exchanged between these two, but whatever they were they kept
Dália in a Hong Kong Ladies College for the next four years of her life.
How the mighty are fallen. Family maid? Dália hadn't gone to a ladies' school to
become a servant to some boy brats in a Sheung Wan slum. She hardly knew her
mother when her servitude and public schooling had begun, the catalyst for this
decline in the girl's fortunes being the old man's having fallen on hard times
again, and having again turned off the tap. He was apparently at death's door
now, but struggled on somehow for almost another decade. Dália's hatred and
distrust of her mother - though she would herself date these things back to
conception - stems from events of this time. In fact the haughtiness predates
the hatred. It was what Dália had learned in boarding schools that allowed her
to despise her mother in such a thoroughgoing manner and with such inimitable
style.
After all this, the tap was miraculously turned on again just once more before
the old man's death. It sent Dália to the United States for a college education
of the two year kind. When the great patriarch finally did depart this earth,
neither Dália nor her mother rated a mention in the will.
Although having lived in America would be something Dália would continue to lord
ever after over those of her acquaintance, she had found the experience
chastening at the time. For a start her meagre A levels and the trickle from
daddy's tap had only got her into a college in South Dakota, a place with a
preternaturally cold winter, not at all the place for a Macao girl. Her roommate
there had christened her with the nickname ‘Alias', which quickly stuck,
something Dália never lived down while she was there. Before she'd come to
America, Dália had had no conception that ‘alias' might have any criminal
connotation. Several times since she has commenced proceedings to have her name
altered on official documents to remove this offending slur. But it's always
been too much trouble, there's always been a document missing; she doesn't want
all that attention drawn to her birth certificate. It was in South Dakota, Dália
had first heard that sixties Supremes' song ‘Love Child'. Her roommate had
played it to her once as a reprisal for some trivial misdeed of hers, only
because she'd been stupid enough over a few glasses in the campus bar to divulge
something of her lurid origins. After that, whenever Dália had been lax in some
obligation at college - in class or in her digs - roommate would hum the tune
until Dália obliged. To this day that tune still sticks in her head and when it
does it infallibly marks the onset of migraine.
***
Flowers on her desk. A first time for everything.
Dália's not the kind of girl though to notice that the flowers have disappeared
from someone else's desk. Cross-examination might have revealed some minimal
awareness that from time to time there were flowers somewhere on the floor. How
could that be of importance to her? The flowers have come to Dália now, that's
what counts.
‘You're very efficient Dália, you get the job done and you bring a certain style
and elegance to everything you do. I'm impressed.' He sits very close to say all
of this. And then he's just gone.
A few days later, chocolates, though only a very small, very expensive box.
Mr Fox's wife has taken the kids back to the States. Dália - out of the loop -
hasn't heard about Mr Fox's marital meltdown.
At home she commences a new self-portrait. There's a kind of Mona Lisa smile to
this one. Where did that come from? Spirits are lifting.
‘You're beautiful, you're smart. Your eyes are so special... You're not like the
others, are you?' Left with the rhetorical question, swooning inwardly, working
to maintain her outer composure, Dália doesn't see the eyebrows raised all
around her.
When one morning she finds a packet of condoms in the top drawer of her desk, it
actually takes her a while to work out what the object is, before she feels
insulted, resentful of her colleagues. Which of them? All of them? She throws
the offending item in the waste paper bin, then within a few minutes, glancing
around furtively, she retrieves them and re-wraps them in some inconspicuous
plastic supermarket bag, before she throws them in the bin again. All this is
noted in the tea room, in Dália's conspicuous absence.
‘Gossiping bitches' is what Dália thinks. She knows they talk behind her back.
But she's proud as well of her impending conquest, her change of status, her
self-discovery. Does Dália think ‘He really loves me, there can be no doubt'?
She's never thought such thoughts before.
It's not just at work, those bitches are everywhere. There's that one in the
gym, she looks like she's been computer generated, she looks Macanese, but she's
Chinese, Dália knows she's Chinese. Dália's seen her at the buffet, putting away
fatty food like there's no tomorrow. If she ate that stuff, she'd be... Dália has
redoubled her efforts in the gym now that she has someone to impress, now that
she is planning to reveal what lies beneath that mothball exterior. Now those
perfumes will come into their own.
But now in her desk, where the condoms had appeared before, there's a note that
says simply ‘Fox is a wolf'. ‘Bitches' she thinks again, but she folds the note
away. She will compare some handwriting samples.
There's an irony in those condoms no one in the office could possibly
appreciate, simply that ‘the old man' - that proud sperm pump on legs - had a
lifelong aversion to condoms. The laughable thing is that he thought they were
unhealthy. Had he wanted all those illegitimate children, their mothers making
constant demands on him? From our twenty first century vantage, it's hard to
know. What is common knowledge is that by the time he'd acquired Dália's mother
for his ritual purposes, he'd already contracted and been cured of a few
diseases that could in a sense be put down to his prophylactic aversions. You
see it hadn't just been virgins, there'd been a youth squandered - yes, and as
well a fortune made - on Rua de Felicidade and in the sleazy alleys around.
To return to the moment of Dália's conception, while the girl's family were
receiving the varied and copious largesse of the great man, product of Portugal,
all of it... You're not losing a daughter, you're gaining all kinds of consumer
goods. Dália's mother, having had a crash course from an aunt in the facts of
life, grim as they were in her case, and having been tipped off about a few of
her new patron's funny ideas, was going through calisthenics, mental and actual,
in order to preserve that which she had been procured for the purpose of losing.
That had been the year of the Monkey too and it was thought the old man was able
to put up with a certain amount of playful nubility before those instincts,
which would today land him in gaol for a long time, had fixed her to his iron
will. The gifts were given, the deal was done, there was only a certain amount
of playing about to be tolerated now. Dália's mother had been picked out by one
of the old man's henchmen, picked out from a religious procession, which proves
I think something about the metaphoric connection between religion and opium.
The long and the short of it is the girl had arrived for the Great Heat and she
was pregnant for all to see by the next Ching Ming. It seemed miraculous to many
that she never contracted a disease from the old man.
***
Dália had not seen her mother in the last five
years, and she was reluctant to go even now, even pressed by her step-brothers
with the news that the woman was on her deathbed and wished to confide something
in her only daughter. Her excuse was that she couldn't go to Hong Kong, she had
a powerful aversion to the place. This was only partly true. In the years since
she'd returned to her Macao roots, Dália had managed on a more than annual
basis, to gird up her loins for Hong Kong shopping expeditions, with or without
girlfriends. Her aversion was to what she thought as the side of the family
she'd cut off (i.e. her mother's). They were still in Sheung Wan and that was
just a little too close to the ferry terminal, a little too close for comfort.
Dália made a special effort not to look Macanese whenever she came off the
jetfoil for one of her shopping trips. She did not want to be recognised, and
she never was. The fact was Dália was pre-occupied now in ways she had no
intention of disclosing to her mother. She wouldn't give that bitch the
satisfaction.
But the calls were persistent now. They'd come every day for the last week, now
they were every few hours. She had to be reasonable, this was a dying woman's
wish. And so Dália's formidable defences crumbled. She realised that her mother
must be swallowing a lot of pride to beg her estranged daughter like this. This,
thought Dália, was what a mother's unconditional love must be like. Ever since
Dália had come to the Sheung Wan slum aged sixteen, mother had known that
daughter, though illegitimate, carried herself with an air of superiority and
always regarded herself as being above her mother because of her Portuguese
blood. So now she was putting pride aside to be a proper mother at last? Still
Dália had her suspicions. That bitch had been in the gutter before, she was the
kind who dragged you down.
Such was the charitable train of thought with which Dália gingerly stepped over
the vestments and the furniture of death which crowded the stinking room from
which her mother would depart this life. Those nuns had done their job well!
The boys are waved out of the room and the daughter dutifully kneels beside the
bed to receive the extremity of her mother's no doubt unravelling mind. The
woman is agitated, but she speaks in whispers, staccato fragments. A deathbed
confession. Dália can't get the cynical look off of her face.
‘It wasn't him... it was his henchman, lackey, sworn to secrecy... you're not what
you think... he was from Fujian, but pale skin...' After a pause of perhaps half a
minute, a wicked smile creeps over the woman's face and she lapses into
lucidity. ‘The old man just couldn't get it up... it was a relief at first. He
tried and tried. A relief before I saw the gorilla they were sending in after
me... Just a common thug... The old man chose him because he was a lighter shade
than the others. There was no Viagra in those days. Otherwise, your dream might
have been true...' Another lapse from lucidity, but the smile remains. ‘He's still
alive... the address...' And the dying woman folds a piece of paper with a Hac Sa
Wan address into her daughter's hand... ‘You must see your real father.'
The old woman doesn't expire then and there though. There are breathless weeks
more like this but Dália is long gone from the scene when finally one of her
half-brothers rings her with the glad tidings.
***
The lights of the city show bright on the water -
the fireworks are recommencing. So much for the year of the Monkey. What will
the Year of the Rooster hold? Something to crow about! At least in the coming
year Dália will have company.
Mr Fox has returned to the U.S., to the arms of his family. He has for the
umpteenth time been forgiven.
Dália takes out the oils. She begins painting again. This time she's painting a
Chinese woman, heavily pregnant. Still, there's something in the cheek and
there's something in the eye. People don't change for a whim or a lie. She is
who she always was. She's not so easily shamed or deflected.
Still she must admit to herself, there was something pleasant, something
satisfying, in her mother's death. There can be no more ‘revelations'. She no
longer feels any trepidation when she thinks of a Hong Kong shopping expedition.
Dália's thinking baby clothes. Dália's grown up at last.
February
this is that season
when bones creak
brain's too damp to fire
there's no more carting round clouds
when you're in them
how much depth to the rain?
the town climbs through it
like a sea in stages
the sky in its speech
is shy
but unending
how much height to the rain?
there are no eyes up
no cupped hands to catch
between skies
out of doors
umbrellas come open
then heaven lets down with its rope
dark of office
I hear this adjusting
like an old building
lost in thought
of how to preserve
its nonchalance
knowing the ivy
holds it up
the world sticks to me
too much this day
Rua de Felicidade
in memory of the misery there
I write red shutters in my red cornered book
...innuendo won't avoid me
the past and the future
smashed glass lies between them
tradition, the postcard
this was the street: naughty Macao!
today
the mahjong rattle
and the menu looming
even in English
so you see where you can
and can't come in
the street has its alleys
and dark of shrine
dodgy construction
meat vendors, steam of the restaurant's back
the street sweats with its reputation
behind those brothel flaps the action
truth of the street
this hysterical danger:
the creatures like locusts
are men
red shutters now
and nothing behind them
yet there is an alchemy:
laconic business
still conjuring money
everyone wins and everyone loses
in absence of what
you came for: Macao
the picture box
each time streets are different
no two turnings alike
you come to the wall
bulb still burns
but the dark stairs are gone
instead at their angle loose wires hang
there's a cough from indoors
a boy kicks his cardboard broken box
goes into the dusk
where the new stairs lead down
to a part of the city no one has seen
grime's heavy here
mist hovers upon it
no voice distinct but
all about their business
the cargo bobs
tight in its lacquer
sun strikes through the boards
loosely nailed
see the prow is painted with the surge
the church each time a different saint's
(in muddy boots
inveigling the storm,
so are the saints forever distracted)
one must not read their stillness for stone
theirs is a long and standing siesta
every day lost to the motion they sight
prayerful eyes
wake always
salt air drifts
in a cloud in the market,
cloud carried on a mother's back
dream then
sun's square sides lit for home
cloud in a box in a cloud
they inhabit
where
rain would be a futile gesture
some days no one breathes for the rain
*
some days the colours won't stir
but
you mustn't shake the box from without
it is a conch to your ear
(there is no translation)
the box bobs
weed crested
rusted in tides
like a sword won't wash up
*
a new road into the sea each week
neither ships nor the sea ever finished
they wash
this crate in a cloud
weed crested, tide blessed
the town is a tale on this theme, it's invention,
a frieze on the walls of the cloud they are building
there's a mirror
hidden where streets corner you
it's to deflect the untoward turns
there's a map of the buried town
in the skin
lies under the map
in the skin
prow and stern
composed in wakes
sun casts through
the maze,
peels and flakes
from idle breath of habit
ghosts come
*
through paint flaking layers of lichen and moss
sage four character hunches gone soft
a whole country lost this way
when the cloud went
there wasn't a trace
just the sun shone
and land adjoining
bridges like rainbows hung off in mid-air
built in the purest of pure faith, they were
*
this and then nothing
prayers at the temples
A Ma and Guan Yin
for myself - it's as simple
the knack mundane
saintly, and yes, in borrowed stigmata
I come out of my own apartment door
on the wrong floor
I tell it all
in the air which attends me
this is the cloud I carry for the day
shrine
a spit
in the river's mouth,
an island
the city is shrine
to borrowed landscape
of mountains sunk, shallows
the world in miniature is what concerns this
weed gathers to the raft of dreams
then day takes down
what light was leant
the wall shrine and the street shrine fade
through a doorway
deep in that dark
where night begins
the red electric flame
is lit
pale beyond accounting
spirits guide steps
roads drift
ghost thick
in the mist's flimsy fists
Christopher Kelen