Victory City(54)

Pampa Kampana examined him even more intently. “Fern?o Paes,” she repeated.

“At your service,” he declared.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “You really do all look alike.”

“May I sit with you?” he asked.

“I’m too old for you,” she said. “But I’m a sort of foreigner here too. Nobody recognizes me. I built this city and I’m a stranger in it. So we are both strangers. We are both just passing through. We have things in common. Sit down.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fern?o Paes confessed, “but I’d like to find out.”

“I’m one hundred and eight years old,” Pampa Kampana said.

Fern?o Paes smiled his most ingratiating smile. “I like older women,” he declared.

He had become wealthy selling horses to the king and his nobles and cavalry, so he built a stone mansion in the Portuguese style, with large shuttered windows facing outward to the city, a green garden watered by one of the first canals to be built to bring water from the enormous reservoir created by the new river dam. He had a field of sugarcane also, and even a small piece of woodland. Pampa Kampana moved out of the astrologer’s house and into the foreigner’s residence. “I’m a homeless person now,” she understood. “I have to rely on the generosity of others.”

Fern?o Paes was a man of emotional substance and complexity, who could love Pampa Kampana even though he didn’t believe the stories she told him about her life. When a man traveled across continents and oceans he heard life stories in which no sane person could possibly believe. He met an impoverished sailor in the port of Aden who swore that in happier times he had discovered the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, but the formula had been stolen from him when he was captured by corsairs in the Mediterranean Sea, and now, owing to a blow on the head, he could not remember it, et cetera. And he had met a dwarf who said that she had formerly been a giant, until a sorcerer’s magic spell had shrunk her, et cetera, et cetera; and a young boy in Brindisi who had the sharpest eyesight of anyone Paes had ever met, who claimed he had been born as a hawk until a sorcerer’s magic spell brought him down to earth transformed into a hawk-eyed child, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

There were people everywhere in the world telling stories of how they were not what they seemed to be, how they had been better before, or worse, but certainly different, different in a hundred ways. Paes had even met a hundred-year-old woman begging for alms by the shore of the Red Sea, who told him that when she was twenty-one years old an angel had fallen in love with her and carried her off to heaven, but when living human beings arrived in heaven it did not go well for them, they aged very rapidly and died within hours, so I begged the angel to bring me back to earth, she said, and when I landed I looked like this, sir, and this was only two years ago, sir, and you must believe that two years later I am still only twenty-three years old. Because Fern?o Paes had listened to that old woman pretending to be young it wasn’t so unusual for him to hear a young woman pretending to be old, so he went along with what Pampa Kampana told him, and did not judge her. The whole world was mad. That was his deepest belief. He was the only person who was sane.

Pampa Kampana in Paes’s house at first thought herself to have fallen in love but then realized that what she was experiencing was relief. Ever since her return from the forest she had felt upset, even offended, at the disbelief with which she had been greeted by everyone except Madhuri Devi, a skepticism which had culminated in the discourteous laughter of the king, but now her feelings of being insulted had been replaced by a sensation of pleasure in her new anonymity. For the first time since she was nine years old she could be excused from being Pampa Kampana, or rather she could be “this” Pampa Kampana, the nobody with the famous old name, instead of the “real” Pampa, who, in the opinion of almost everyone, no longer existed except in memory. She was being given a second chance at life, and had been granted the possibility of having an ordinary place in the world instead of a relentlessly extraordinary one. This man, Paes, was lively and adventurous, appeared to be sincere in his feelings for her, and, best of all, was absent for long stretches of time, traveling back and forth between Bisnaga and the lands of Persia and Araby in search of fine horses to sell. “Truly, this is the best of all possible men,” she told herself. “He’s loyal and loving and has put a good roof over my head and food in my belly, and most of the time he isn’t even here.”

In this way Pampa Kampana entered the second phase of her exile, during which she was physically present in Bisnaga but agreed with the general opinion that she was not the person she knew she was, but simply a different, unimportant person with the same name. Her one continuing anguish, compounded by Fern?o Paes’s astonishing resemblance to Domingo Nunes, had to do with her daughters, who did not require mothering, that was true, they were elderly ladies by now, but not to know how they were, well or unwell, happy or unhappy, alive or dead, that was difficult. Zerelda had chosen a path in life that suited her, a traveling life not unlike Domingo Nunes’s, so she inherited that from him, Pampa Kampana thought, and Yuktasri was at home with the wild forest women and had even become one of them, Pampa Kampana reassured herself often, so that was two out of three. Yotshna was the problem. Yotshna was the one with a grievance, the one who would not forgive her mother. It was Yotshna’s accusatory eyes that haunted Pampa Kampana in her dreams.