straight into the cooking pot (which had already swallowed up several chunks of plywood and where our evening rice soup bubbled and steamed, having simmered quietly since lunchtime—one of my mothers special recipes) when, luckily for me, the fatally pointed end of the broken beam which had cut through my trousers and injured my sexual organs succeeded in burying itself in my left thigh, holding me suspended in the air, like a miraculous exhibit in the middle of the hole. Startled and terrified, my friend stopped what he was saying and never wanted to go back to the subject, however much I begged and whatever pressure I put on him.
“I haven’t thought about that incident for a long time and it’s reminded me of something else buried deep in my memory, an escapade which radically altered my adolescence and cost me dearly: three years of reform school.
“One evening a few weeks after my aerial castration (as I called the incident in the attic), Ma and I went into the Forbidden City by the Noon Gate, which is the main entrance. Along with a few museum employees and the emperors themselves (who were once the only representatives of the male sex in a place peopled by thousands of women and eunuchs), Ma and I became members of the elite club of nocturnal visitors, setting foot beyond the city’s wall after sundown.
“I’ve mentioned Ma’s uncle, the Assistant Security Manager. He was nicknamed Old Deng and was just as small as the other Deng who became the Chinese leader twenty years later, and he, too, was from Sichuan, spoke with the same Sichuan accent and professed the same passion for chillies, cigarettes, opera and bridge. One evening as he came out of the palace, he spotted us playing ball on a poorly lit square outside the main entrance. He came over to us and I told him we were waiting for my mother, who was late coming out, probably kept in by her work. I had forgotten my key, so couldn’t go home. Old Deng kindly took us to the gate house and asked the night watchman to let us in.
“Even if we’d been good, timid little boys it would have been impossible to go straight to the building where my mother worked and not take advantage of that heaven-sent opportunity for a detour … How many children over the centuries had savoured the pleasure of an evening walk in that place, crossing the vast square paved with age-old stones, hearing the hollow ring of their footsteps on the uneven paving, climbing onto the white marble dais in all its crushing, funereal beauty, where a row of crows on the rail greeted us with their cawing? All at once the biggest building in the palace—if not in all of ancient China—loomed before us: the Hall of Supreme Harmony, which housed the imperial throne and where a few carpenters were still working, perched on stepladders repairing something or other by the feeble glimmer of a few temporary light bulbs. They knew the Assistant Security Managers nephew and let him sit on the emperors throne, which made my friend so happy he started spouting nonsense, as if presiding over an important meeting. Meanwhile, I took a couple of sticks and beat out a rhythm on ritualistic musical instruments, punctuating every pronouncement made by the little usurper and accompanying his speeches. It was a set of sixteen gleaming metal bells by the entrance to the hall, under awnings hanging from a portico which had the head of a Milu—a sort of mythical stag which was once the imperial emblem—carved on every side with ropes in five different colours between their teeth. Some of the bells had a mysterious muted ring, others a pure, crystalline, more musical vibration, a light, luminous sound like silvery gauze. As I struck them with my sticks, those bronze bells slowly but steadily, note by note, played the tune of a popular Chinese song. Under the spell of this music, the whole vast courtyard became an echo chamber for a melody I had heard my mother hum.
“Then we realised it was late and, worried that my mother would already have left, we started to run. We went round the Hall of Central Harmony, along a three-tiered terrace with a white marble balustrade, jumped down, carried on running, cut through the Back Left Gate and eventually reached the huge area where the concubines used to live, not before going through the Palace of