He left. While I translated, struggling to find attenuating words and turns of phrase, the Living Dictionary of the Forbidden City stared at me with eyes bulging from their sockets, his smooth beard and white hair stiff with rage.
It was only after his blue-robed figure had vanished, still reeling, through the doorway and I had closed my scribbled notebook in relief that—without even searching my memory—the thing I could not remember earlier came to me. Tang Li, well, of course! The author of The Secret Biography of Cixi. I stood up, reached the door, launched myself into the corridor, bumped into someone and thundered down the stairs, which were still heaving with future Mozarts so I had to zig-zag my way through them on every floor. As if finally seeing the Bearer of Good News, the highly strung crowd, tortured by their long anxious wait, sprang to life again. The fact that I was obviously in a hurry, my little translator’s notebook, my Western appearance … all insignificant details, granted, but enough to whip up their emotions and create ripples of excitement that escorted me all the way down to street level, along with waves of questions, supplications and fears concerning the choices made by the king of violins. They clearly took me for his powerful assistant who worked behind the scenes scheduling the on-camera auditions. Despite my explanations (and my futile swearing in the name of film and of another king—this time of cinematography), the young performers’ parents continued to hound me, God knows why. One mother of about thirty, a hunchback with permed hair and a sweaty face, picked up the hem of her cheap skirt, dragged her offspring by the arm, followed by her bald husband, and bore down on me like a determined predator, descending the stairs with the fervent energy of a good soldier, close on my heels all the way. But she must have tripped on a step, because her bag fell, scattering tins of food, sandwiches, bottles of water and a red apple, which bounced from stair to stair right to the bottom of the flight.
It was almost dark outside. I had to leave my bicycle where it was parked and, by dint of various acrobatic manoeuvres, cross the tightly packed streams not of cars (which were rare commodities at the time) but of bicycles advancing inexorably, in order to catch up with the old man in the long blue robe at the tram stop on the other side of the widest boulevard in China, built in the passion for all things huge that was the 1950s, in imitation of Moscow’s Red Square. Another couple of seconds and I would have missed the tram. The driver set off, but my relief evaporated when I saw—still running and now out of breath—the father, the boy and the violin case, but not the mother, at least. I rushed to the door, which shuddered under the father’s blows and eventually opened. Once more they interrogated me furiously; I explained who I was, helped by the testimony of the old historian who had come to my aid and whose hostility seemed to have vanished on that imposing grey boulevard, known the world over for its military parades, its huge mass demonstrations and, years later, the student massacre. The father, floundering between the names Menuhin, Bertolucci and Puyi, eventually gave up and a group of schoolchildren surging towards the door pushed him and his son aside, helpless.
Rather than the old historians steady, motionless, almost bulging eyes, it is his voice that comes to mind and still rings in my ears, a quivering thread of a voice, cracked and very gentle, drowned out most of the time by the racket of the tram. His voice and the way he cleared his throat when he succumbed to a wave of sadness or indignation. Standing among the other passengers, holding on to a leather strap, with no comment on the lurching corners which threatened to throw him over, without looking at me, he took up the subject of Puyi exactly where he had been interrupted that afternoon, as if nothing had happened in between and the meeting were carrying on quite naturally in that dusty tramcar.
“History tells us that the two child emperors, Guangxu and Puyi, appointed successively and thirty years apart by their aunt, the empress Cixi, were struck by the same mysterious disorder: impotence, to give it its name, and this