The Pearl of the Orient

  The Pearl Of The Orient

  By Danielle Trussoni

  Copyright © 2015 by Danielle Trussoni

  One day Ánh, king of the great Nguyễn clan, split a gold bar in two.

  He touched the gold and it divided, as if by magic. The jungle quieted at this miracle; the sky brightened to brilliant pink. “Keep this as a sign of our love,” Ánh said to his wife, Phi. She took half of the gold bar and held it to her heart. She examined the gold and said, “It is sad how the gold still shines, even when divided.”

  According to Christian calendars, it was 1785, and Nguyễns were at war. The fighting was nothing new: the Trinhs of the north and the Nguyễns of the south had been at odds for as long as anyone could remember. The Trinhs had taken Saigon seven times in eight years and the king had struck back and taken Saigon six times. But now, the Nguyễns were growing desperate. They might not win Saigon again. And so the king summoned the missionary Monsignor Pigneau de Behaine, Archbishop of Adran, from his Mission House on Paulo Condor Island.

  “You have been my loyal friend for many years, Monsignor,” the king said. “I need your help.”

  “The Trinhs are at it again?” Behaine asked. A tall man wearing a silver cross and a black cassock, Behaine had plans of his own. He had been waiting for years to return to France, and now, here was his chance. The king’s misfortune was an opportunity for them both.

  “It is always the peasants or the Trinhs,” the king said, sighing dramatically.

  “I have an idea,” Behaine said. “That is, if you trust me?”

  The king did not usually trust foreigners, but he trusted Behaine. Years before, Behaine had given Ánh, then a boy of fifteen, safe harbor in his Mission House. Behaine had read from his translated Bible and the boy fell in love with the characters, with the stories, with the magic of that thick book. Behaine had said, “We must, with unquenchable ardor, propagate our sacred religion.” Ánh, hungry for a cause, agreed. When the Trinhs arrived, the archbishop hid Ánh in a cellar packed with crates of peppercorns.

  King Ánh thought, Where has the time gone? Twenty-five years had passed and not much had changed.

  “Of course I trust you,” Ánh said. “You have earned my trust.”

  “Then how about this: I will take your youngest son Cảnh as a sign of Christian friendship to my king’s men in Pondicherry. I will introduce the boy to these officials, he will charm them, and they will give us ships of men to restore you as rightful ruler.”

  “You will secure a treaty?” the King asked.

  “We should have done this years ago,” Behaine said.

  “A new ally is often a new foe.”

  “Frankly, it is your only hope.”

  Suddenly, it began to rain. Raindrops hit the leaves like hands hitting drums.

  “And besides,” Behaine said. “It is the will of God that a Christian rule Cochinchina.”

  King Ánh made the sign of the cross. He said, “God is most wise.”

  * * *

  The missionary and the young prince sailed the next week. They journeyed for days and nights and more days, the sky changing from blue to gray to black to blue to gray.

  They sailed until the port of Arikamedu lay before them. One thousand nine hundred years earlier, Ptolemy had called that particular stretch of land Paduke. Now, it was Pondicherry, a colony, France’s sole port in British India. Like Saigon, Pondicherry was a city under contest: it had passed, over the years, from the French to the British and back to the French. Behaine had lived in Pondicherry as a young man. Once, he’d believed the white beaches a sanctuary. He remembered the year the Siamese Jesuits took refuge at the Pondicherry Mission House, when he had helped them translate Latin into French. Then, the Mission had stood erect over the bay, but now the house seemed fatigued: the walls sagged as if weakened by the heat. Behaine imagined that one day the Mission would melt completely and the residents would wake on the open beach in the wet of a muddy puddle.

  Outside the Mission, three Jesuit brothers stood wait. The palm trees and scrub grass and sunlight contrasted the dark silk of their cassocks. Indian children ran bowls of water to Behaine’s party.

  “Welcome brother! Welcome!” a portly Jesuit said.

  “Was your journey a difficult one?” a redheaded Jesuit asked.

  “You’re looking rather thin. I hope you’ve outsailed the scurvy,” a third Jesuit said.

  “I’ve come in the name of the Cochinchinese King,” Behaine said.

  “You serve him still?”

  “It has been ages!”

  “Ten years at least.”

  “Twenty!”

  The young prince tried to understand these strange men. They spoke like the wind.

  “What news from your Mission?”

  “And who is this thin child?”

  “Is he ill?”

  “He simply lacks nourishment,” Behaine said.

  “Follow us.”

  “This way!”

  The portly Jesuit led them to the Mission House.

  “You are just in time for dinner!”

  The Jesuits held the edges of their cassocks to their knees as they walked, mud staining their ankles carnelian.

  Behaine and the prince followed them inside the Mission House, where the dark hallways were narrow and cool.

  The Jesuits led them to a banquet room. A large table at the center of the room held a roasted boar on a silver platter, the smell of spiced meat filling the air. Men in old-fashioned dress drank wine from golden cups. Small golden nameplates displayed nine names, including Behaine’s. At the far end of the table, there remained a number of empty places with smooth golden nameplates as yet unetched. The empty seats had been set for unknown explorers, those Europeans who would one day arrive to join the feast. Behaine opened his arms to his former friends, while Prince Cảnh hung back, near the door.

  The venerable Alexandre de Rhodes, dead nearly one hundred years, called the guests to table.

  “Come in! Come in!” he said, brushing the boy from the door and bolting it fast. “We must welcome our guests: the Archbishop of Adran and the future of Cochinchina, Prince Cảnh.”

  The men clapped. A servant placed seven silk pillows on Cảnh’s chair and he sat as high as the others, his golden nameplate mirroring his black hair.

  Monsignor Behaine cleared his throat. He said, “I have come to ask for assistance. The Nguyễns need allies in battle. We need ships and men and arms.”

  The burly Vasco de Gama stabbed the boar with his bodkin and cleaved off a leg. He said, “If only I were alive!”

  “Alive?” the prince asked, confused. He looked more closely at the party: the opalescence of the men’s skin brightened then dimmed. Their hands, translucent as orchid petals, turned gold while gripping a cup and gray when placed in shadow.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, child,” Odoric de Pordenone said. “I haven’t seen one of your people since the fourteenth century. I was the first missionary in your country, you know. The Franciscans were—”

  “You are Christian, yes?” Pope Nicholas V interrupted.

  Pope Clement XIV said, “But of course he is Christian! Why else would the Archbishop work on his behalf?”

  “Well, the archbishop has always followed his own path,” said Pope Nicholas V.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Behaine said, his mouth full of boar.

  “My father is the king of—,” the prince began.

  “And what of the temples in your country?” Marco Polo demanded. “Are they covered in gold as the temples of Burma? Do gems litter your beaches?”

  Cảnh adjusted the pillows and looked into the circle of ashen faces. He felt a sudden affinity with the bo
ar. He said, “My father is rich with gold! Only last week, he split a bar of it in two.”

  The guests nodded with approval. Behaine, pride in his voice, concluded: “There is much wealth in Cochinchina.”

  “Yes, yes, those people excrete valuables,” Prince Henry the Navigator said. He emptied his cup and, as he did not believe in ceremony, poured another round of wine. “I know if I simply opened the seas to the Portuguese, everything would work out in the end.”

  “Speaking of, how have the Portuguese faired in your country?” A small man behind the nameplate Antonio Da Faria asked. He raised his glass for Prince Henry the Navigator to fill with wine. “We never hear news of Portugal’s Faifo. But of course, how would we, with the French controlling everything these days?”

  “Jealousy will get you nowhere,” Alexandre de Rhodes said.

  “And who is jealous? History won’t forget that the Portuguese were the first Europeans in Cochinchina!”

  Pope Nicholas V nodded in agreement. He said, “Nor will your savoir.”

  “Indeed, the Portuguese provided the country with its name!” Da Faria said, getting more and more excited as he spoke.

  “A misnomer at that!” Alexander de Rhodes asserted.

  “Every name is a worthy name in God’s kingdom,” Nicholas V said.

  Behaine raised his hands heavenward and said, “Imagine, all the Orient living under one church. If only the English would come to their senses!” He looked around the table, as if checking for Englishmen. “The Church of England? What, may I ask, is the Church of England?!”

  “England, France, Portugal, Italy: we are all God’s children,” Odoric de Pordenone said gently.

  “France, Portugal, Italy. These are God’s children,” Pope Clement XIV corrected.

  Marco Polo played with his food, looking bored, as if death were a too-long pause between adventures. “Ah, but really, it wasn’t for our countries or for God that we came to the Orient, was it? We didn’t come here for fame, or riches, or glory. We came here for the thrill of it. We came, in the end, for ourselves.”

  “Here, here!” Vasco de Gama said. “I’d do it all again, for nothing but the thrill.”

  “They know not what they say,” said Odoric de Pordenone as he made a sign of the cross. Pope Nicholas V, his neighbor, patted his shoulder, in sympathy.

  “It is my dream to make the world one under God,” Behaine said.

  Cups and forks and napkins stopped midair. The prince felt the ghosts’ chilly stare.

  “It is best to let God’s dream make the world,” Odoric de Pordenone whispered.

  “Is there a difference between God’s dreams and my own?” Behaine replied. He thought not. If France conquered the land, the souls would soon follow.

  “Of course, you must ask the lieutenant for aid,” Alexandre de Rhodes said. “The British have only recently granted Pondicherry amnesty. The lieutenant may be loath to irritate the British with Cochinchina.”

  “But surely he will see the benefits,” Behaine said.

  “You have the prince. This will curry favor.”

  Of all assembled at this banquet of ghosts, Alexandre de Rhodes had, perhaps, spent the longest amount of earthly time in Prince Cảnh’s country. He had given Cochinchina its Romanized system of letters and converted more natives to faith than the entire population of Pondicherry. He raised his glass and said, “A toast to God’s Orient! To young Nguyễn Cảnh! May he be a source of light to his people! May God aid him to victory!”

  The group muttered approval and drank. For a moment, the prince saw the empty chairs at the far end of the table fill, as if their occupants, not yet born, couldn’t wait to join the feast. Prince Henry the Navigator poured more wine. The conversation moved on to Papal bulls, the still-shocking news of American independence, and the dubious fate of what some people termed the New World.

  * * *

  Outside the banquet hall, the three Jesuits eavesdropped.

  “Surely the archbishop is foolhardy! France involved in yet another skirmish? Look at the result of the war in America.”

  “I fear a long battle.”

  “These Orientals will fight among themselves ad infinitum!”

  “France will be drawn in.”

  “Ships and men! And the king does not even feed us properly!”

  “Yet, Behaine wants ships and men.”

  “And arms. It is absurd!”

  “Foolhardy!”

  “Surely France cannot afford to send ships and men.”

  “While we are hungry here in Pondicherry.”

  “And what of the boy?”

  The portly Jesuit brandished a cutlass from his cassock.

  “I suggest we eat him.”

  “We have not yet sampled Prince—”

  “That is certainly un–Christian.”

  “This is true: eating another is un–Christian.”

  “Yet, God made in us hunger.”

  “But surely you have noticed: the boy is lean.”

  “He is of the same thickness as the Indian children.”

  “And they are no great feast.”

  The third and most reasonable Jesuit said, “In any case, the lieutenant of Pondicherry will not help Behaine. The prince will be sent on to other lands”

  “We must make this a certainty.”

  “We will visit the lieutenant in his dreams.”

  “He must send the prince to France.”

  “Louis XVI, I am certain, will fatten the child.”

  After the banquet, the Jesuits led Behaine and the prince to their quarters. White stones, cemented unevenly through the hallway, left a residue of bright mica in the shadows. The Jesuits retired to their tower and schemed to thwart Behaine’s plans. They prayed and chanted and made strange potions. They appeared to the lieutenant in the form of heat and shakes and visions.

  As the lieutenant dreamed, the Jesuits took the prince from his bedchamber and led the boy up 9,329 stairs to the top of a tower. The portly Jesuit unlocked the door and pushed the boy inside. The room was filled with bolts of cloth. A spinning wheel sat next to a window that offered a full view of Arikamedu. The prince looked over the city and to the sea. Salt air chafed his face. He thought for a moment that he saw his father drowning in the waves.

  “Sit,” said the redheaded Jesuit.

  Prince Cảnh slumped into mounds of cloth.

  “You see,” said the third Jesuit, “how he is thin?”

  “Never mind. We’ve decided to send him on.”

  The third Jesuit turned to the boy. He said, “Do you know, child, to where you will voyage?”

  “With Monsignor Pigneau de Behaine?”

  “Correct!”

  “A bright boy!”

  “Yes, yes. An observant child.”

  “You will travel to the Kingdom of the West.”

  “A place called Versailles.”

  “A rich place.”

  “A luxurious place.”

  “Very different from your home.”

  “Different from Pondicherry.”

  “Different from this Mission House.”

  “But,” the portly Jesuit said. “You will one day return to us.”

  “We will make gifts to aid you. They will protect you from the wily ways of courtiers and ladies.”

  “And those who wish you harm.”

  “You must guard yourself.”

  “Especially from the queen.” Even the Jesuits in faraway Pondicherry had read the pamphlets about Marie Antoinette’s lasciviousness.

  The portly Jesuit stepped to the spinning wheel, spun a shiny material from which he cut and stitched a pair of golden slippers. He gave them to the prince and said, “These slippers allow wide-ranging sight.”

  The redheaded Jesuit kicked the spinning wheel until the stand cracked. He pulled from its hollow center a perfectly formed puppet. The fig-wood cheeks were as creamy as coconut milk. The redheaded Jesuit said, “This puppet speaks only the future.”
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br />   Always one for the simplest approach, the third Jesuit leaned toward the prince and kissed him fully on the lips. He said, “From this moment, your words will be precious pearls.”

  The prince put the slippers on his feet. He held the puppet under his arm. He felt a pressure in his throat and opened his mouth: a gush of pearls, a whole basketful of compacted words, fell from his lips.

  The Jesuits clapped their hands and Prince Cảnh was back in his bedchamber, asleep.

  * * *

  The next day, Behaine visited the lieutenant’s quarters. He had rehearsed his plea all morning, exchanging tact for euphony and then euphony for sense. He remembered the lieutenant from his first visit to Pondicherry, twenty years before. Even then they had avoided each other. Behaine thought, It is amazing that such imbeciles govern the world.

  The prince and Behaine walked to the lieutenant’s quarters together. They sat, waiting, until a graying man with red breeches stepped to the podium. Clerks entered from hidden doors until the room was as full as a courtroom.

  “You will get no treaty from me, sir,” the lieutenant said. His eyes were bright: he had seen more of the East than a man ought. His sleep had been full of dark dreams.

  “But France—”

  “Pestilence! Malaria! This is the fate of France in Cochinchina.”

  “But God’s—”

  “God’s missionaries must act in God’s name—not the king’s.”

  “But the prince—”

  “Bring the prince forward.”

  Behaine led the prince to the front of the room.

  “Your father has been fighting the Tây Sơn for eight years. He has won and lost Saigon six times. Either he lacks talent or he lacks the support of his people. The Nguyễn clan has ruled the south of Cochinchina for many years, but to what benefit? In short, my child, what can you offer my country that we do not already have?”

  The prince looked at the swoop of the lieutenant’s boutonnière felt hat. The ostrich fringe arched over the Lieutenant’s powdered hair. The prince had never seen such clothing. He thought, The world is very strange.

  “Speak!”

  The prince remembered his country, the aphids and crocodiles. His imagination traced the flow of the Mekong. He wondered if he would ever see his home again.