“with a broken rice-bowl begging for money. I see the slave girl who was told by her owner that if she kept a silver coin in her mouth her new owners wouldn’t suspect she was diseased. But of course they found out and threatened to drown her in the river.
When I was making my way east, I made a friend in Italy, a leper. About that, Father, I’m not willing to speak to you.
Still, I thought of him in Canton. I think of him when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed at night. I think of him when I translate and when I dress and make my tea.
It’s said that lepers don’t suffer any pain, only numbness. Often a paralysis of the face ensues. The body dismantles itself bit by bit. And yet the mind, what of the mind?
It’s late now. Time to stop. No need to sign what I won’t send.
Aosta, May 11
My Friend,
By the time you read this I’ll be dead. There’s a man here who’ll make his way to China within the next few years. He’s agreed to take these letters to you. I think often of that day when you passed accidentally through the gate near the tower in which I live. There, in the garden, you extended your gloved hand to me before you left. It had been fifteen years since I’d felt, even through cloth, another’s touch. I still wonder why you weren’t afraid.
You had come to see the ruins of the 15th century castle where René of Chalans is said to have starved to death his wife, Marie of Braganza. Hunger Tower it’s called, and many claim to see on dark nights the white-clad figure of a woman holding a lamp between her hands, but I think this is nonsense.
The hospital of Saint Maurice still supplies me with food and books and clothing A messenger comes once a week to drop them off. Other than that I see no one. I tend my garden and read.
I wonder what you’ve found in China. That day you took my hand and we talked for hours, two strangers, when you asked me to write to you, I refused.
There’s something called the “Mass of Separation.” Do you know of it? It’s a medieval mass spoken by a priest and performed at the site of a leper’s dwelling. This is part of what it said: “I forbid you to touch the rim or the rope of a well, I forbid you to share your house, I forbid you to touch any child or give anything to a child, I forbid you to eat or drink in any company but lepers, I forbid you to leave your house without your leper’s costume or your bell.”
Still, I write to you. My garden’s doing well. But I think it’s too pristine—no one walks in it but me, there are no signs of the offhand, irregular life of another, a twig dropped idly or by accident, a piece of scrap paper, a shopping list’s ripped edge.
I want only to speak plainly to you. I don’t know if I’ll know how, or even what I mean by “plainly.” I feel a distrust of words, a strong dislike of them even. Isn’t any word an embellishment and covering over of something more precise and starker? Mostly I distrust myself. I think, of you—
Your Friend
Clerval returns his letters to the shelf, pours himself some tea. He’s not hungry, only tired. He straightens his papers, lies down on his narrow mat on the dirt floor, tries to sleep.
_______village
My friend,
Sometimes it seems almost everyone in this book I’m translating is falling ill or suffering in some way. So many of them are young and live in a beautiful garden and still they get sick. The boy, Baoyu, endures many terrible fevers and hallucinations; at one point he falls into a coma, lies unresponsive to any herbs, drugs or charm water. And Daiyu, the cousin whom he loves, is often racked with nightmares. She lies on her couch, too weak to sit or eat, her face turned to the wall. There are many prescriptions and remedies but they rarely seem to work. When Baoyu loses his precious jade for a while, things only get worse. He grows deranged and Daiyu dies. But even before that, as if each life were either the incarnation or the result of a faltering dynasty, a corrupt system that must re-make itself in greater understanding, so many