Victory City(20)

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Domingo Nunes, being a Christian heathen, had of course not been present at the dedication of the temple. But that night Pampa Kampana came to him. After many years in the hayloft he had finally acquired a small house in an anonymous quarter of the city, which he was filling with sheaves of paper on which he was writing his account of his time in Bisnaga. It is a windy place, he wrote, a flat country, except for the mountains; but to the west the wind blows less fiercely, because of the many groves of trees where the mangoes and the jackfruit grow. It seemed interesting to him to list banalities, to enumerate all the livestock and produce of the region, the cows, buffaloes, sheep, and birds, the barley and the wheat, as if he were a farmer, though he had never spent a single day working on any kind of farm. On the way here from the port at Goa I found a tree under which three hundred and twenty horses could be kept safe from the sun and rain. And so on. He spoke of the droughts in summer and the floods in the rainy season. He mentioned a temple with an elephant-headed god and the women who belonged to the temple and danced for the god. These are women of loose character, he wrote, but they live in the best streets of the city, and they can visit the concubines of the king, and chew betel with them. They also eat pork and beef. He wrote a great deal on a variety of subjects, such as the oiling of the king each day with quantities of sesame oil, and the feast days of the year, and other matters of no interest to local people, who knew all this already. The writing was clearly intended for foreign consumption. When Pampa Kampana saw the writing, in a language she could not read, she guessed its purpose and asked him if he was planning to leave Bisnaga, not just to buy horses and return, but for good. Domingo Nunes denied any such intention. “I am merely making a record for my own interest,” he said, “because the place is so marvelous, it deserves a proper chronicle.”

Pampa Kampana didn’t believe him. “I think you are scared of the king and getting ready to run,” she said, “even though I have told you many times that with my protection it is impossible for you to be harmed.”

“It isn’t that,” said Domingo Nunes, “because I love you more fiercely than I have loved anyone in my life. But it’s become clear to me that you love me less—and not only because I have to share you with the king!—but yes, partly because of that!—and not even because you have obliged me to deny!—never to see!—the three lovely girls about whom nobody can so much as whisper that they look exactly like me!—but yes, partly because of that too!—and I have agreed to all of it—all of it!—because of my love for you!—but still I sense this every day: that I am the one who loves more strongly than he is loved.”

Pampa Kampana heard him out without interruption. Then she kissed him, which did not placate him, and was not intended to. “You are so handsome, and I have always loved your body as it moves against mine,” she said. “But you’re right. It’s hard for me to love anyone with my whole heart, because I know that they are going to die.”

“What kind of excuse is that?” Domingo Nunes demanded, anger rising in him. “Everybody in the entire human race faces that fate. You do, too.”

“No,” she said. “I will live for nearly two hundred and fifty years, and look forever young, or almost young. You, on the other hand, have already aged, you have developed a round-shouldered stoop, and the end…”

Domingo Nunes put his hands over his ears. “No!” he shrieked. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!” He was aware that he was aging badly, that his health was no longer robust as it had formerly been, and he already feared that he would not make old bones. Sometimes he thought that his end would be violent, that it might very well come on the horse road between Goa and Bisnaga, where the marauding Kallar and Maravar gangs were still dangerous. He even suspected that the reason Hukka Raya I did nothing about the horse thieves was that he privately hoped they would waylay Domingo Nunes and do the king a service by ripping out the foreigner’s treacherous heart. But Pampa Kampana had a different ending in mind for him.

“…and the end is near,” she said. “You will die the day after tomorrow, because your heart will explode, and perhaps it will be my fault. I’m sorry.”

“You are a heartless bitch,” Domingo Nunes said. “Leave me alone.”

“Yes, that’s best,” Pampa Kampana said. “I don’t want to watch the finale.”

The truth behind Pampa’s hard words was that her refusal to grow older was almost as much of a conundrum to her as it was to everyone else. From the age of nine, after the goddess spoke out of her mouth, she had grown up like any other girl until she reached eighteen, but things had been different ever since the day she gave the sack of magic seeds to Hukka and Bukka Sangama. Twenty years had passed since then and when she looked carefully at herself in the polished shield hanging on the wall of her bedchamber in the palace, she estimated that she might have aged two years at most in those two decades. If that was correct then by the end of the more-than-two-centuries-long span of life the goddess had allotted her she would have the appearance of a woman in her early-to middle-forties. This was a surprise. She had expected that by her third century of life she would have become a stooped and wizened old crone but it seemed that this was not to be. Her lovers would die, her children (who already looked more like her sisters than her offspring) would look older than their mother and fade away, the generations would flow past her, but her beauty would not fade. The knowledge brought her very little pleasure. “The story of a life,” she told herself, “has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But if the middle is unnaturally prolonged then the story is no longer a pleasure. It’s a curse.”