Silk (2 page)

I
N
those days Japan was, in effect, on the other side of the world. It was an island made up of islands, and for two hundred years had existed in complete isolation from the rest of humanity, rejecting any contact with the continent and prohibiting any foreigner from entering. The Chinese coast was almost two hundred miles distant, but an imperial decree had taken care to make it even farther, by forbidding throughout the island the construction of boats with more than one mast. Following a logic in its way enlightened, the law did not, however, prohibit emigration: but it condemned to death those who attempted to return. Chinese, Dutch and English traders had tried repeatedly to break through that absurd isolation, but they had been able only to set up a fragile and dangerous smuggling network. They had got little money, many troubles and some legends, good for selling in the ports, in the evening. Where they had failed, the Americans, thanks to the force of arms, succeeded. In July of 1853 Commodore Matthew C. Perry entered the bay of Yokohama with a fleet of modern steamships, and delivered to the Japanese an ultimatum in which he ‘hoped for’ the opening of the island to foreigners.

The Japanese had never before seen a ship capable of crossing the sea against the wind.

When, seven months later, Perry returned to receive the answer to his ultimatum, the military governor of the island yielded, signing an agreement in which he sanctioned the opening of two ports in the north of the island to foreigners, and the start of some modest commercial relations. From now on – the commodore declared with a certain solemnity – the sea around this island is not so deep.

B
ALDABIOU
knew all these stories. In particular he knew a legend that turned up repeatedly in the accounts of those who had been there. They said that that island produced the most beautiful silk in the world. It had been doing so for more than a thousand years, following rites and secrets that had achieved a mystic precision. What Baldabiou thought was that it was not a legend but the pure and simple truth. Once, he had held between his fingers a veil woven of Japanese silk thread. It was like holding between his fingers nothingness. So when everything seemed to be going to hell because of the pebrine and the infected eggs, what he thought was:

‘That island is full of silkworms. And an island that no Chinese merchant or English insurer has managed to get to for two hundred years is an island that no infection will ever reach.’

He didn’t confine himself to thinking this: he said it to all the silk producers of Lavilledieu, after calling them together at Verdun’s café. None of them had ever heard talk of Japan.

‘We should cross the whole world to buy healthy eggs in a place where when they see a foreigner they hang him?’

‘Hanged him,’ Baldabiou clarified.

They didn’t know what to think. An objection occurred to some.

‘There must be a reason that no one in the world has thought of going there to buy eggs.’

Baldabiou could bluff by reminding them that in the rest of the world there was no Baldabiou. But he preferred to say things as they were.

‘The Japanese are resigned to selling their silk. But the eggs, no. They hold on to them tightly. And if you try to carry them off that island, what you do is a crime.’

The silk producers of Lavilledieu were – some more, some less – gentlemen, and would never have thought of breaking the law in their own country. The theory of doing so on the other side of the world, however, seemed to them eminently sensible.

I
T
was 1861. Flaubert was finishing
Salammbô
, electric light was still a hypothesis and Abraham Lincoln, on the other side of the ocean, was fighting a war whose end he would not see. The silkworm breeders of Lavilledieu joined together in a consortium and collected the considerable sum necessary for the expedition. To them all it seemed logical to entrust it to Hervé Joncour. When Baldabiou asked him to accept, he answered with a question.

‘And where, exactly, might it be, this Japan?’

Straight that way. At the end of the world.

He left on October 6th. Alone.

At the gates of Lavilledieu he embraced his wife, Hélène, and said to her simply

‘You mustn’t be afraid of anything.’

She was a tall woman, she moved slowly, she had long black hair that she never gathered on to her head. She had a beautiful voice.

H
ERVÉ
Joncour left with eighty thousand francs in gold and the names of three men, obtained for him by Baldabiou: a Chinese, a Dutchman and a Japanese. He crossed the border near Metz, travelled through Württemberg and Bavaria, entered Austria, reached Vienna and Budapest by train, and continued to Kiev. On horseback he traversed two thousand kilometres of the Russian steppe, crossed the Urals into Siberia, and travelled for forty days to reach Lake Baikal, which the people of the place called: the sea. He followed the course of the River Amur, skirting the Chinese border, to the Ocean, and when he arrived at the Ocean he stopped in the port of Sabirk for eleven days, until a Dutch smugglers’ ship carried him to Cape Teraya, on the western coast of Japan. On foot, taking secondary roads, he went through the provinces of Ishikawa, Toyama and Niigata, entered Fukushima, reached the city of Shirakawa, and rounded it on the east side; he waited two days for a man in black, who blindfolded him and led him to a village in the hills, where he spent one night, and the next morning he negotiated the purchase of the eggs with a man who didn’t speak, and whose face was covered by a silk veil. Black. At sunset he hid the eggs in his bags, turned his back on Japan, and prepared to set off on the journey home.

He had just passed the last houses in the village when a man came running up, and stopped him. He said something in an agitated and peremptory tone, and led him back with polite insistence.

Hervé Joncour didn’t speak Japanese, nor was he able to understand it, but he grasped that Hara Kei wanted to see him.

A rice-paper panel slid open, and Hervé Joncour entered. Hara Kei was sitting cross-legged, on the floor, in the farthest corner of the room. He had on a dark tunic, and wore no jewels. The only visible sign of his power was a woman lying beside him, unmoving, her head resting on his lap, eyes closed, arms hidden under a loose red robe that spread around her, like a flame, on the ash-coloured mat. Slowly he ran one hand through her hair: he seemed to be caressing the coat of a precious, sleeping animal.

Hervé Joncour crossed the room, waited for a sign from his host, and sat down opposite him. A servant arrived, imperceptibly, and placed before them two cups of tea. Then he vanished. Hara Kei began to speak, in his own language, in a sing-song voice that melted into a sort of irritating artificial falsetto. Hervé Joncour listened. He kept his eyes fixed on those of Hara Kei and only for an instant, almost without realising it, lowered them to the face of the woman.

It was the face of a girl.

He raised them again.

Hara Kei paused, picked up one of the cups of tea, brought it to his lips, let some moments pass and said

‘Try to tell me who you are.’

He said it in French, drawing out the vowels, in a hoarse voice but true.

T
O
the most invincible man in Japan, the master of all that the world might take away from that island, Hervé Joncour tried to explain who he was. He did it in his own language, speaking slowly, without knowing precisely if Hara Kei was able to understand. Instinctively he rejected prudence, reporting simply, without inventions and without omissions, everything that was true. He set forth small details and crucial events in the same tone, and with barely visible gestures, imitating the hypnotic pace, melancholy and neutral, of a catalogue of objects rescued from a fire. Hara Kei listened, and not a shadow of an expression discomposed the features of his face. He kept his eyes fixed on Hervé Joncour’s lips, as if they were the last lines of a farewell letter. The room was so silent and still that what happened unexpectedly seemed a huge event and yet was nothing.

Suddenly,

without moving at all,

that girl

opened her eyes.

Hervé Joncour did not pause but instinctively lowered his gaze to her, and what he saw, without pausing, was that those eyes
did not have an Oriental
shape
, and that they were fixed,
with a disconcerting intensity
, on him: as if from the start, from under the eyelids, they had done nothing else. Hervé Joncour turned his gaze elsewhere, as naturally as he could, trying to continue his story with no perceptible difference in his voice. He stopped only when his eyes fell on the cup of tea, placed on the floor, in front of him. He took it in one hand, brought it to his lips, and drank slowly. He began to speak again as he set it down in front of him.

F
RANCE
, the ocean voyages, the scent of the mulberry trees in Lavilledieu, the steam trains, Hélène’s voice. Hervé Joncour continued to tell his story, as he had never in his life done. The girl continued to stare at him, with a violence that wrenched from every word the obligation to be memorable. The room seemed to have slipped into an irreversible stillness when suddenly, and in utter silence, she stuck one hand outside her robe and slid it along the mat in front of her. Hervé Joncour saw that pale spot reach the edge of his field of vision, saw it touch Hara Kei’s cup of tea and then, absurdly, continue to slide until, without hesitation, it grasped the other cup, which was inexorably the cup
he
had drunk from, raised it lightly, and carried it away. Not for an instant had Hara Kei stopped staring expressionlessly at Hervé Joncour’s lips.

The girl lifted her head slightly.

For the first time she took her eyes off Hervé Joncour and rested them on the cup.

Slowly, she rotated it until she had her lips at the exact point where he had drunk.

Half-closing her eyes, she took a sip of tea.

She removed the cup from her lips.

She slid it back to where she had picked it up.

Her hand vanished under her robe.

She rested her head again on Hara Kei’s lap.

Eyes open, fixed on those of Hervé Joncour.

H
ERVÉ
Joncour spoke again at length. He stopped only when Hara Kei took his eyes off him and nodded his head slightly.

Silence.

In French, drawing out the vowels, in a hoarse voice but true, Hara Kei said

‘If you are willing, I would like to see you return.’

For the first time he smiled.

‘The eggs you have with you are fish eggs, worth little more than nothing.’

Hervé Joncour lowered his gaze. There was his cup of tea, in front of him. He picked it up and began to revolve it, and to observe it, as if he were searching for something on the painted line of the rim. When he found what he was looking for, he placed his lips there and drank. Then he put the cup down in front of him and said

‘I know.’

Hara Kei laughed in amusement.

‘Is that why you paid in false gold?’

‘I paid for what I bought.’

Hara Kei became serious again.

‘When you leave here you will have what you want.’

‘When I leave this island, alive, you will receive the gold that is due you. You have my word.’

Hervé Joncour did not expect an answer. He rose, took a few steps backward, and bowed.

The last thing he saw, before he left, was her eyes, staring into his, perfectly mute.

S
IX
days later Hervé Joncour embarked, at Takaoka, on a Dutch smugglers’ ship, which took him to Sabirk. From there he went back along the Chinese border to Lake Baikal, journeyed over four thousand kilometres of Siberian territory, crossed the Urals, reached Kiev, and by train traversed all Europe, from east to west, until, after three months of travel, he arrived in France. On the first Sunday in April – in time for High Mass – he reached the gates of Lavilledieu. He stopped, thanked God, and entered the town on foot, counting his steps, so that each one should have a name, and so that he would never forget them.

‘How is the end of the world?’ asked Baldabiou.

‘Invisible.’

For his wife, Hélène, he brought a silk tunic that she, out of modesty, never wore. If you held it between your fingers, it was like grasping nothing.

T
HE
eggs that Hervé Joncour brought from Japan – attached by the hundreds to little strips of mulberry bark – turned out to be perfectly healthy. The production of silk, in the region of Lavilledieu, was extraordinary that year, for quantity and for quality. Two more silk mills were opened, and Baldabiou had a cloister built beside the little church of St Agnes. It’s not clear why, but he had imagined it round, so he entrusted the project to a Spanish architect named Juan Benitez, who enjoyed a certain notoriety in the field of
plazas de toros
.

‘No sand in the middle, naturally, but a garden. And if possible dolphins’ heads, in place of bulls’, at the entrance.’

‘Dolphins,
señor?
’

‘Do you know the fish, Benitez?’

Hervé Joncour did the accounts twice and discovered that he was rich. He acquired thirty acres of land, south of his property, and spent the summer months designing a park where it would be pleasant to walk, and silent. He imagined it being invisible, like the end of the world. Every morning he went to Verdun’s, where he listened to the news of the town and leafed through the papers that arrived from Paris. In the evenings he sat for a long time beside his wife, Hélène, beneath the portico of his house. She read a book, aloud, and this made him happy because he thought there was no voice more beautiful in the world.

He turned thirty-three on September 4, 1862. His life fell like rain before his eyes, a quiet spectacle.