than submitting, like a virgin sheet of paper that accepts having print over its entire surface, sometimes even being deeply dented in the process.
“That evening the Sanskrit scholar, exhausted by his new pupil’s ardour, took his leave immediately after dinner to sleep in one of the many empty bedrooms. Puyi, on the other hand, as he later recounted, spent a sleepless night learning the alphabet and a dozen or so Sanskrit words by heart, floundering in the contrast between long and short vowels, their solemn weight, the way they alternated, and in the framework of consonants, the voiced and unvoiced, the aspirates and the unvoiced aspirates. He even tried to compose a sentence—his first in Sanskrit—to taste the pleasures of passive experience and passive desire; he succeeded and it was beautiful. Then he discovered, and this too was beautiful, how to decline the concept of despair in the passive form and, better still, in passive past participles. Oh, the power of passivity!
“He did not close his eyes until daybreak, sinking into a half sleep, and, in a fleeting fraction of a second, he saw two strangers leaning over him, one tall in a monk’s habit with a beard that completely covered his cheeks, the other small and slight, still young but with a greying goatee on the tip of his pointed chin. They disappeared just as they had appeared, before a single word had been exchanged. Only afterwards did Puyi recognise them as An Shih-Kao and Huizong, even though the latter had not been wearing an imperial headdress. He had two votive altars erected to them in a large hall in recognition of his gratitude for this first visit, which he saw as a very good omen, a mute baptism of the sacred language.
“In the last fine days of autumn—which were also, although he did not know this yet, the last fine days of his apolitical life as emperor—to be sure that he could immerse himself in this language to which he was recently converted, whatever the time of day and wherever he might be (in his study, the dining room, the bathroom, the toilet, along a dark corridor, in the disused ballroom or the deserted courtyard), he gave his guest, the professor, sheets of white paper and asked him to write out the names of almost everything in Sanskrit, as in the village struck down with amnesia in One Hundred Years of Solitude. His servants copied out the labels in whitewash letters a hundred times the size on the ground, the walls, doors, windows, armchairs, beds … even the sumo, who pinned the words raja purusa, ‘the emperors servant,’ on his capacious tunic. For the first time in a long while Puyi could be heard roaring with laughter again, yes, real laughter, in his falsetto voice, granted, but glorious laughter which filled the gloomy house with joy. One morning he met his scholarly visitor in a corridor and greeted him in Sanskrit but, instead of saying ‘Good morning,’ he employed a polite formula with all its attendant protocol, meant for the emperor alone, without realising he was making a mistake. His guest bowed to thank him but, moments later, was packing his bags, and it was only when he came into Puyi’s study with his suitcase and said a simple ‘Goodbye’ in Sanskrit that light dawned in the emperor’s mind and, understanding the absurdity of his mistake, he was filled with elation and laughed till he wept. He experienced similar sensual ecstasy when his wife—a general’s daughter he had married six years earlier and to whom he vowed platonic love, although he did not truly know her sweet face or her tender body—came into his study disguised as a young Indian prince, sat on his lap, covered his face in kisses and whispered in his ear: ‘sā bhāryā yā pativratā,’ a Sanskrit sentence which he had made her learn by heart in the tomb-like chill of her bedroom, impregnated by a strong smell of opium, and which could be translated as: ‘me wife devoted to my husband.’
“But time had run out for Puyi to use the words of this sacred language, which he had learned so quickly and with such appetite as an effective means of defence. Events took an ironic turn when two Japanese officers, in civilian dress, came to fetch him and take him out to a car parked by the front door of his residence (for the rest of his life he would remember the squeak