Empress (30 page)

When Little Treasure parted my legs, my genitals were neither combed nor perfumed. I had the same nudity, the same lack of artifice as an ordinary woman. It was nearly twenty years since I had felt a phallus in my belly. The stranger tore me in two. For the first time I let myself neglect the man’s gratification to concentrate on my own pleasure. Little Treasure moved his hips with masterful skill. He listened to my shivers and conducted the music of my sighs. Where had he learned the art of copulation? It mattered little; the following day I would send him to his death.

Suddenly my body began to boil. A scream was torn from my lungs. With great assurance and little effort, the stranger had just delivered me an orgasm, a firework of ten thousand dazzling sparks.

I SPENT A feverish night.

One moment I dreamed that I had tied him up in a sack and thrown him into the river in the grounds; the next I saw him lying poisoned. I was suddenly afraid that I would not wake in time to receive the morning salutation. Then I wondered how I would look my servants in the eye and whether I should have all their eyes gouged out and their tongues cut off.

I woke with a start. In the half light, the stranger was sleeping naked on the crumpled sheets. His bronze skin gleamed. Filled by this giant frame, the bed looked narrow as a cradle. He was very young with a hint of a moustache on his lips. Quite suddenly he opened his eyes and smiled at me.

I had never seen such a happy smile. I was so surprised by it that I forgot my dark thoughts and let him draw me to him. He made love to me again. This time I realized that, in the distant past, Little Phoenix had never granted me such intense pleasure. Unlike my husband, who thought only of his own gratification, the young man guided my body and steered it till it folded on itself, stretched out, and executed contortions. I became his zither, and he made my every string hum, discovering resonances I had not known until then. Dawn was growing lighter. I realized that my muscles were almost intact, that my firm breasts were those of an adolescent. My belly that had brought forth six children had kept its vigorous round outline. Little Treasure’s dark eyes betrayed his furious passion and reflected this flattering truth: I was still beautiful and desirable.

GENTLENESS SCRATCHED AT the door and announced that I was late for the morning salutation.

“The Supreme Empress is unwell,” I replied. “She will not go to the audience. Tell the officials to withdraw and return to their ministries. Tell the Great Ministers to prepare written reports. There will be no meeting today.”

Little Phoenix had often announced this decree while in the grips of a short-lived passion for a young favorite. I remembered finding it irritating, but now how I regretted battering him with my moralizing! For the first time I could appreciate that, beyond the interests of the Empire and my duties as sovereign, I had an obligation to the impetuous demands of my body!

I let my serving women in at midday. They arranged my hair in silence, eyes lowered. I sent Little Treasure to Ruby, who washed him in a side pavilion. He came back wearing a eunuch’s tunic. I made sure he shared my morning meal with me. He devoured it, and his appetite and vulgar manners fascinated me. As he ate, he answered my questions, often simply smiling at me instead of speaking.

As the third son of well-to-do peasants, Little Treasure had been educated by the master scribe in his village. At fourteen he slipped away from home for the first time and tried his luck in the imperial competitions held in the regional academy. In the space of three years, he failed three times, but, as he loitered in the streets, he glimpsed a better world. At eighteen he fled an arranged marriage to a cousin from his village and made his way to Luoyang.

He came to the eastern city that I had just named Sacred Capital and wandered aimlessly with no money or relations to call on. He did have a few contacts, beggars from the same district as himself, who found him precarious work as a porter, a mason, or a swindler. He learned to lie, steal, and defend himself; he shivered under the bridges and was kicked by passers by as he gazed enviously at horses with precious stones in their harnesses and carriages draped in gleaming gold cloth. He was eventually taken on by a Taoist who secretly concocted aphrodisiacs and was entrusted with bamboo boxes carrying precious pills with mysterious ingredients. He walked through the streets improvising cheerful tunes expounding their miraculous effects. In the poorest quarters, he would sell a pill for one
sou,
claiming it would cure every kind of sexual ill. In the noble districts, he became friends with footmen and lackeys, swapping these so-called contraceptives for things stolen from their masters. These medicines proved curiously effective, and Little Treasure became famous. Wherever he went there was always someone calling to him cheerfully, warm bread waiting for him, cups of tea offered on the pavement, and children running behind him joining in the chorus of his songs. One day a guard who worked for the Princess of Gold asked him whether he knew a good masseur, and Little Treasure recommended himself. He went into the princely palace by the back door and had not set foot in the outside world since.

The princess liked to bring on a dozen or so beautiful young men in the Side Court of her palace. They were bathed, fed, and perfumed, living like parrots in a cage. Eunuchs taught them how to massage their aging mistress, and on Her Highness’s orders, servants offered them their bodies to improve their performance. At night they were summoned in rotation. Occasionally some of them performed services outside the palace-gifts the princess gave to her friends. On her very first night with Little Treasure, she had recognized such exceptional sensuality in him that she set him up in his own pavilion and insisted that he followed a strict diet to purify his skin, hair, intestines, and blood. Apart from the experienced women whom the princess sent to him to widen his knowledge, Little Treasure never laid eyes on anyone. He was dying of hunger and boredom. Then, one evening, someone had called him from his rooms and entrusted him with the sacred mission for which he had been intended.

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked him, amazed that a stranger should reveal his shameful past without embarrassment or artifice.

“Because when I opened my eyes this morning, I saw the gleam of a sword in your eyes. You will have me executed; I know you will. I left my village five years ago, and I have done nothing but invent lies ever since. I have not had a single friend I could tell the truth about my life. I will die later today. When I’m dead, I will no longer be ashamed of where I came from or my past! Thank you, Majesty, for listening to me.”

“It’s true, you may well die. Any man who enters the Inner City without my decree is punished with death. But your life has touched me, and I would, therefore, like to give you a chance. You will be castrated, and you will become my eunuch. To ensure that you keep silence about the favor granted to you last night, you will be given a poison that will strike you dumb, but you will be given a position on a par with the fifth imperial rank, and I will allow you to hold my horse’s bridle when I ride out.”

Little Treasure gave a derisory snort: “Supreme Majesty, fortune and rank mean nothing to me if I lose this little tool between my legs, this gift from my ancestors. It is thanks to him that I live and breathe. If he is taken from me, I would waste away. I would rather die straight away!”

I had never heard such vulgar language, and I marveled at it.

“How old are you, my child? Are you not afraid of death?”

“Supreme Majesty, I was born in the deepest darkest corner of the countryside. My life brought me to this palace, and I have loved the most beautiful and noble woman on this earth. I shall never have another night like that. My twenty-fourth year can be my last-I would die with no regrets!”

I liked his reckless attitude. I would not decide on Little Treasure’s fate before the moon was next full. I kept him hidden in my palace like a domesticated animal. Day after day I would come back from the Great Meetings still weighed down with concerns, and I grew accustomed to his enthusiastic greetings and his jubilant chirping that made me forget my busy day. As he gesticulated enthusiastically and told me about what he had done, he revealed a Sacred Capital that I had not known existed: sordid suburbs peopled by lepers and freed slaves converged on plots of wasteland where acrobats, magicians, and monkey-tamers performed. Waterborne gambling clubs and brothels glided along the rivers Luo and Yi. In mid-autumn every year, crowds gathered around the crossroads where executions were carried out. The saber whistled through the air, the head flew off, leaving the body motionless while a stream of crimson blood jetted out of it.

Little Treasure’s voice became more serious when he spoke of his homeland. Then scenes would unfold before my eyes with low houses made of beaten earth, and little boys running through the fields naked. I could smell the sheep and the fragrance of apple blossom. I could hear the bustle of a river and the birdsong at dusk. I forgot my serving women, those cold pale dolls, and my ministers with their fabricated elegance and false virtue. The village of Wu loomed in my memory with its mulberry trees and fields of wheat. I pictured a sturdy, little girl with bronzed skin jumping, singing, and climbing. I felt the sun burning my forehead once again and inhaled the happy smell of wet straw mixed with pig dung.

At the age of sixty, I learned that a man could give me more different kinds of pleasure than a woman. Little Treasure had revealed the wealth of all the senses to me. His inevitable death and my desire to hold him in my arms one last time made my ecstasy all the more intense. My face changed imperceptibly: Roses bloomed in my cheeks once more, ^he____________________ hard edge had gone from my eyes. My ruby-red lips glowed without makeup. Sitting on the throne for the morning salutation, I displayed my metamorphosis unashamedly. My voice had new energy, and my responses came more swiftly. I would sometimes smile for no reason during a political debate, and my embarrassed ministers would lower their eyes and prostrate themselves.

One afternoon, during a concert when Little Treasure was sitting behind me, I noticed that he was secretly stroking Gentleness’s hand. My breast seethed with anger. As a prisoner in the gynaeceum, he could seduce all the youngest, prettiest, and sweetest serving women behind my back. These women who had been cut off from the outside world all dreamed of knowing the pleasure only a man could offer. Who could resist this incorrigible charmer with his tireless member? I was overcome by morbid jealousy. I had never been so determined to have exclusive rights to a body, a skin, a beating heart. Little Treasure was my little dog, my toy. I, the Supreme Empress, was his owner, his goddess, the depository of his life or death. I knocked over the table and dismissed the musicians with one violent gesture. Alerted by my anger, the young man swore he was faithful to me, and Gentleness prostrated herself at my feet, bathing the hem of my gown with her tears. Ruby pleaded her innocence, and I gave full vent to my anger: “You are all accomplices in this crime! Call the doctors! Have every orifice examined! Throw Gentleness into the Cold Palace for one hundred strokes of the stick!”

The Palace guards tied Gentleness up and pulled her out by her hair. With the young girl’s terrified screams still echoing, Little Treasure dragged me forcibly into my bedroom and began massaging me to relax me. He slipped his clothes off in a flash and held me in his arms.

“Supreme Majesty, let me kiss you before I die.”

“I shall have you grilled on a fire; I shall have you flayed by a thousand knives; I shall have you cut in half.”

“Supreme Majesty, don’t scream. Your threats don’t frighten me. There is nothing that can hold me back when I desire a woman. At the moment, it is you that I want.”

As I lay beneath him, I was wracked by violent spasms and crushed by huge burning waves. It suddenly seemed as if it was my husband holding me by the hips. Men’s freedom is their unfaithfulness: the Son of Heaven or the son of a peasant, they could both reduce me to the mediocre torments of a woman.

THE PRINCESS OF Gold informed me that the Outer Court had heard of Gentleness’s disgrace and had learned that there was a man in the gynaeceum.

“Supreme Majesty,” she said, “if you cannot bring yourself to eliminate him, give him back to me, and I shall make him disappear.”

“Princess, this matter is of no concern to you.”

My old governess Emerald had the courage to whisper in my ear: “Supreme Majesty, you cannot keep a man in your rooms for ever. Even if your servant watches night and day over the virtue of the Court ladies, I shall stumble across the inevitable one morning. Lord Little Treasure is twenty-four-he is a bull, and you are shutting him away in a birdcage. Let him go, I beg you.”

“My poor Emerald, if he leaves, he will talk about me to the whole world! I must kill him. But I cannot…”

One of the eunuch officers who oversaw palace protocol wrote to me: “Some time ago the Emperor Eternal Ancestor appreciated the talents of a pipa-player from the Western Kingdom, but it was only once he had been castrated that the sovereign gave him permission to go into the gynaeceum and to teach the Court ladies his divine art. If Little Treasure’s knowledge can be of use to Your Supreme Majesty, your servant asks that he undergoes the procedure of castration before having access to the Inner Court. If not you shall be covered with opprobrium.”

In the end, my daughter Moon, the Princess of Eternal Peace, released me from my predicament: “Supreme Majesty, Little Treasure is an indispensable remedy to maintain your health and the balance of your energies, and those are qualities that warrant reward. Your child has found a solution that will satisfy both protocol and your own requirements. The Emperor of Clarity of the Eastern Han dynasty erected the Temple of the White Horse to the west of Luoyang some time ago. It was the first Buddhist temple to be built on Chinese soil. Alas, having survived countless dynasties and frequent wars, its fires no longer attract any pilgrims and the temple has fallen into ruins. Why does Your Majesty not present her servant with this sacred place? With his shaven head and his rosary in his hands, a master monk would be allowed to circulate freely in the Inner Palace and no one would be able to reproach Your Majesty for wanting to listen to the wise words of this Buddhist.”