Victory City(69)
“That was very prettily spoken,” Pampa Kampana conceded. “I see why it has affected you so deeply, as if you were the one struck by the arrows.”
“I think maybe I was hit too,” Zerelda Li said, “but because I didn’t know then about Kama the god of love and his bow made of sugarcane, I wasn’t aware of it.”
Pampa Kampana held her tongue, and only smiled a small enigmatic smile.
“Are you happy for me?” her great-great-great-great-granddaughter exclaimed. “You have to be. I need you to be very happy for me. I need you to be ecstatic.”
“I owe her everything,” Pampa Kampana thought. “My own daughter said so with her dying word, and her daughter, and hers, and so on. So I will give her everything. Hers is the glory. I will stand aside for her, remaining plain Pampa in the shadows, and I will learn that the deepest meaning of love is renunciation, giving up one’s own dream to fulfill the dream of the beloved. Also, I am tired of watching those I love grow old and die. Let the dying love the dying. The undying belong only to themselves.”
“I am ecstatic for you,” Pampa Kampana said, embracing her granddaughter tightly. “I am filled with divine joy.”
16
Pampa Kampana was at her favorite fruit stall in the grand bazaar tasting the first perfect mango of the season, an Alphonso from Goa, when the foreigner Niccolò de’ Vieri came into view, strolling down the street as if he owned it. He wore a soft burgundy-colored hat on his head and had a matching scarf draped loosely at his neck. He sported a thick russet beard whose color chimed with his clothes, and on his blouse a winged golden lion, rampant, could be seen. He looked like someone on his way to have his portrait painted. And the long hair on his head was bright red and his eyes were emerald green.
“It’s not possible,” Pampa Kampana said aloud. “But here you are, for the third time.”
Niccolò de’ Vieri—aka Signor Rimbalzo, the bouncing man—heard her. Like everyone in Bisnaga, he knew the tale of the two apsaras who had flown down from the sky. He wasn’t sure he believed it—it sounded like the kind of fabulous saga an ambitious ruler might make up and put about to justify his seizure of power—and, as we have seen, he had heard other accounts of how Krishnadevaraya became king. But as his gaze fell upon Pampa Kampana he found himself thinking, “I will believe anything this woman tells me and do whatever she asks me to do.” He bowed formally and replied, “If this were the third time I would surely remember the first and second, because such meetings would be impossible to forget.”
“You speak our language well,” Pampa Kampana said, “but where do you come from, foreigner?”
“My home is La Serenissima, La Dominante,” he replied, flamboyantly, as was his way. “The city of bridges, the city of masks, the city without a prince, which is to say, the Republic of Venice, more lovely to behold than any city on earth, whose true beauty and truest nature is invisible, being found in the unique and multifarious spirit of its citizens, who travel the world but never leave home, because they carry it within them always.”
“Oh,” Pampa Kampana said. “Well, at least this time you aren’t Portuguese.”
It turned out that Vieri was staying in what, ever since Fern?o Paes’s day, had been known as “the foreigner’s house,” that stone mansion with large, outward-facing windows, which had once boasted a green garden and a field of sugarcane but was now an inn whose lands had disappeared under new construction as the city grew. He invited Pampa Kampana to visit him there if she so desired. “Even your voice is the same,” she said. “You have that beard now, but underneath it I’m pretty sure you have the same face. I should be grateful, I think. Once in each generation you reappear to cheer me up.”
“Nothing would make me happier than to cheer you up,” Niccolò de’ Vieri said.
The vendor of fruits, the gentle, pot-bellied Sri Laxman who took great pride in his produce, interrupted. “Mangoes also make you happy, isn’t it,” he said.
“Mangoes make me joyful,” Pampa Kampana said. “Send me a basketful of Alphonsos, and another basketful to this foreign gentleman’s abode, just so he can see what the Portuguese are capable of.”
The Alphonso mango was a varietal created by the Portuguese in Goa, the product of their skills in grafting, and named after the general Alphonso de Albuquerque, who established his country’s colonial presence on the west coast. Niccolò de Vieri picked up a mango from Sri Laxman’s display and tossed it lightly in the air. “Anything the Portuguese can do,” he said, “the Venetians can do better, and in more elegant clothes.”
The vendor in the neighboring stall was Sri Laxman’s brother, Sri Narayan. He sold pulses, grains, rice, and seeds. “Buy from me also, sir, madam,” he called out in mock outrage. “Rice brings happiness also. Seeds bring forth the bounty of the earth, and what is more joyful than that.”
“Today isn’t the day for seeds,” Pampa Kampana said. “But your day will also come.”
* * *
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“When one can simply command the unconditional love of any woman in Bisnaga,” Krishnadevaraya said to Zerelda Li in the royal bedchamber, “it is impossible to give any of them my unconditional love in return. But you are different because you came to me out of the sky. If I can have a divine lover without being consumed by the power of her divinity, then I must contain in myself that selfsame power. You have revealed me to myself, and for that I will never fail to love you.”