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The Mandarin
by Eça de Queirós
Original language: Portuguese
| Published by Dedalus | | Pub. Date: 1992 | | Pub. Place: UK | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 0946626987 | | List Price: $10.99, £6.99 | | Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99 | | Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.99 |
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Critics waste time on dating Eça de Queiros’s movement from Romanticism to Realism to Fantasy, for these — along with satire, the macabre, farce and, latterly, the sentimental — were ready on his palette when he needed them. The Mandarin has a prologue, from an unpublished play, which leaves no doubt about the colour with which he chose to load his brush; we are urged to:
‘rest a while from the harsh study of human Reality. Let us depart instead for the fields of Dreams and wander those blue, romantic hills where stands the abandoned tower of the Supernatural, where cool mosses clothe the ruins of Idealism. Let us, in short, indulge in a little fantasy!’ Teodoro, the government clerk who tells the moral fable, is a pipsqueak nonentity with ‘certain ambitions’ who suffers routine indignities with rational resignation and a little hope. ‘Happiness would arrive one day and to hasten its arrival I did everything that a good Portuguese and a constitutionalist could do: I prayed every night to Our Lady of Sorrows and bought lottery tickets, the cheapest available.’ At his lodgings he drugs himself with old books from the flea market; one day he reads about a fabulously wealthy mandarin: ‘all you have to do is to ring the bell placed on a book by your side. In that remote corner of Mongolia, he will utter a single sigh. He will then be a corpse and at your feet you will see gold beyond the dreams of avarice. Mortal reader, will you ring the bell?’ Teodoro debates with the Devil he doesn’t believe in before he rings the bell. The story follows the consequences of that act, his life of indulgence and extreme pleasure, of ennui and guilt, his pilgrimage to China to offer reparation, his discovery that humanity does not deserve justice, his attempted return to his old life (the picture of his lodgings in Lisbon’s Travessa da Conceição is more enjoyable than any oriental extravagance) and his irremediable haunting by the dead mandarin. When he was consul in Havana, before taking up the post in Newcastle upon Tyne, Eça bore an unfulfillable responsibility for thousands of Chinese labourers shipped from Portuguese Macao. Did this burden find perverse expression in Teodoro’s mind? ‘The flowers in my rooms wither and no one replaces them; the dullest of lights dazzles me as if it were a blazing torch; and when my lovers in their white peignoirs come to lie in my bed, I weep, as if they were the shrouded legions of my dead joys.’ At the point of death Teodoro challenges us with his own choice. The Mandarin is a novella about getting what you dream of and wishing to be rid of it. Also in this volume, along with part of The Relic, is the wonderfully mature, delicately realised short story, José Matias, about not taking what you desire. From the perspective of his funeral, it contemplates a rich man’s decline, consumed by unconsummated passion for the married, widowed and re-married Elisa. His obsession takes hold:
‘And love began to seep out of our impenetrable friend José Matias, like thin smoke through the invisible cracks in a locked house engulfed by flames.’ When we learn that José turned Elisa down, perception shifts, the tale becomes a critique of Romantic alienation and, at last, we understand the phrase ‘a locked house.’ Whose victim is he?
‘Convinced that I would never be able to placate Ti Chin Fu. I spent the whole of that night in my room in my palace on the Largo do Loreto, where the innumerable candles still dappled the damask curtains with reds the colour of fresh blood, and I considered how best to rid myself of those supernatural millions, as if I were ridding myself of the trappings of sin. That way I might perhaps free myself once and for all of that paunch and that hateful kite! I left my palace and gave up my nabob existence. I put on a threadbare jacket and went back to Madame Marques’ house. I returned to the office, my spine bent, to beg for my 20 mil-reis a month and my beloved quill! But a greater suffering came to sour my days. Assuming I was bankrupt, all those whom my wealth had once humbled now heaped insults on me, the way people smear with filth the fallen statue of a ruined prince. In a triumph of irony. the newspapers mocked my poverty. The Aristocracy, who had fallen tongue-tied with adulation at the feet of the nabob now ordered their coachmen to run down in the streets the flinching figure of the ministry scribe. The ‘Clergy, whom I had enriched, accused me of being a ‘wizard’, the People threw stones at me and, when I complained meekly of the granitic toughness of her steaks, Madame Marques planted two hands on her hips and shouted: “Well, what do you expect, Pipsqueak? You’ll just have to put up with it! Beggars can’t be choosers, you know!”’ p72
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