slightly raised, shod with iron shoes nailed into place, the sheathed penis with its pattern of thick veins, the raised head, three-quarters turned, the eyes studying you, one less sparkling than the other, the dark pupil gleaming in a milky iris … nothing escapes the Italian Jesuit, not even the shadow on the soft, pink gums through the half-open jaw. The horse is whinnying through flared nostrils, while a fleeting wind ripples its sumptuous mane; the latter, a striking russet colour, is the most beautiful thing about it. Being a scrupulous observer, Father Castagnari presents us with every nuance of red to admire—glowing, dark and matt, or lighter—in the minute details of the long, waving hairs standing up along the neck and quivering in the wind, while others fall in a slow avalanche along its flanks, suspended in the air as if frozen for all eternity.
Tumchooq handed me the calendar open on the page of that red horse, and said:
“I’m going to write a dedication for you.”
His slightly leaking quill formed a series of strokes in the white space above the horse; working from right to left, they slowly created strange, exquisitely sinuous shapes. Some signs appeared several times, like the letters of some alphabet I didn’t know, an enigmatic alphabet, abstract drawings rather like a cryptogram or a message made up only of the initial letters of each word.
“What language is it in?” I asked.
“That’s Tumchooq, the language I’m named after.”
He smiled at me. When he had finished his dedication in Tumchooq, he read it out several times, syllable by syllable; his voice reverberated around the greengrocer’s shop and the sound of it reawakened the feeling I had the evening I first heard his name, beneath a veil of fine rain, bordering on mist. The words he murmured sounded like a secret formula full of unfamiliar sounds, producing a vertiginous dizziness in me, a sweet intoxication, like drifting grains of sand bathing all my senses.
“I am a red-haired horse,” he then translated, “called Tumchooq.”
By nature he always exaggerated a little, but he genuinely was different to his fellow Chinese, and when he took off his hallmark cap I saw, in among his black crew-cut hair, a considerable number of upright hairs that gleamed a pure, fiery red, just as on his ill-shaven cheeks some of the hairs were red; quite the self-portrait by van Gogh!
But he didn’t talk about Paul d’Ampère that day, not yet. And certainly not about why some of his hairs were red.
I need to go back to a family trip during my teenage years to dig up memories of my first contact with that prestigious name, which rings round the Ivory Tower of Oriental Studies: Paul d’Ampère. It was a grey day almost devoid of light and, travelling in a hire car driven alternately by my mother and father, we went to the chateau at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet in the heart of the western Pyrenees, about a hundred kilometres from Perpignan. I don’t remember much about the chateau itself, except that it was in the Romanesque style, was open to the public, had a collection of gloves in a glass display case and the pair I remember best was in white kid with masses of tiny buttons, and the estate was so vast that, to visit it, you had to take a little steam train, its trail of smoke describing a wide curve along a narrow gorge edged by a torrent plunging down from goodness knows where, while a man—who was at once driver, conductor and tour guide—recited through a microphone his inflated history of the previous owners, the d’Ampère family, their long and glorious past, and their connections and inter-marriages with other prestigious families of European aristocrats.
My clearest memory of that visit was a hanging garden on the side of a cliff; you climbed down to it along a wooded, little-used path, and when I arrived the sun made a timid appearance, then swiftly tore through the clouds, building power until the garden glittered in the middle of dark green vegetation, like a desert island bathed in light. The garden had no plants or flowers, but was made up entirely of minute, slippery-smooth pebbles meticulously arranged to create the illusion of undulating waves, each driven forward by the next, so that I felt I could almost hear the sound of their jostling embrace, like the whisper of seas calling to each other. A tide frozen in time, overlooking the tops of huge trees, beech, pine, lime,