Dao of Language

“Zhāohuán Wen”, I hear, and Lianhua’s voice slips into the dream that is already escaping between my fingers. “Breakfast will begin to be served shortly.”

I open my eyes slowly, blinking against the brightness that filters through the blinds of the room, and for an instant I stay like that, lying down and motionless, while I finish returning to the world of the awake. And the first thing my body registers, even before my mind finishes coming fully to its senses, is the heat.

That thick and sticky heat that has installed itself in the Pavilion like a guest who has no intention of leaving, and that with the fire Qi surge has become the permanent backdrop of my life.

And then, while I shake off the grogginess on the basis of willpower, I surprise myself missing, with an almost comical intensity, the Temperature-Regulation Formation of the Imperial Theater.

Because however much I found fault with it last night, however much I dedicated myself to calculating whether its half-coolness was due to a limitation of the technique or to the stinginess of some functionary who was not willing to pay for the last degree of comfort, the truth is that that half-coolness was infinitely better than this swelter with which I wake up each morning. And it turns out that the human body gets accustomed to luxury with an astonishing speed, because a few hours breathing cool air were enough for me so that now, back to reality, the hot air of my own room strikes me as even more unbearable than before.

I let out a sigh, swallow my nostalgia for an arcane air conditioner that I probably could not maintain at the same time as my cultivation and finally turn my head toward Lianhua, who waits beside the bed with her patience of always.

“Lianhua”, I tell her, still with the pasty voice of the newly awakened. “How is it that breakfast is already going to be served? Have you let me sleep until late?”

“That is so, Zhāohuán Wen”, she replies to me without the least hint of apology, because she never apologizes for the decisions she makes convinced that they are the right ones. “Since last night we returned so late from the Imperial Theater, it seemed more prudent to me to let you sleep a while longer than usual.”

I weigh her words a moment, looking for some drawback in them, and I don’t find any.

Because, truth be told, it doesn’t seem a bad idea to me at all. Last night, between the heat of the street, the duel of gazes with my dear brother Sun Rui and the play itself, I ended up more exhausted than I was willing to admit, and a bit of extra sleep is just the kind of small luxury I can allow myself, so I decide to say nothing about it and limit myself to considering the matter settled.

“Then it will be better for us to prepare to go have breakfast”, I tell her as I sit up leaning on my elbows.

Lianhua inclines her head, and from there the two of us know exactly what comes next, because we have repeated this same choreography so many mornings that it no longer needs words.

I direct my gaze upward, toward the thick wooden beams that cross the ceiling of the room and I choose the same one as always. I concentrate on it, use the Myriad of Hands and begin to pull, slowly, with that balance that cost me so much to learn at the beginning. The beam, of course, does not yield even a millimeter, because not even with all the hands in the world could I tear from the ceiling a piece that holds up half the Pavilion. And that is precisely what I am counting on, because upon being unable to move the target, the feedback of the technique inverts the direction of the force, and the one who begins to be dragged upward is me.

I notice how my body detaches from the bed, suddenly light, and I rise into the air until I remain suspended a little more than half a meter above the bed. The first time I tried this it was a disaster worth remembering, a house of cards that came crashing down at the least thing, but now keeping the force constant, neither an excess that would shoot me against the ceiling like an arrow, nor a deficit that would let me fall, has become something as automatic as breathing.

And suspended like that, floating in the middle of the room with my legs hanging inert and the rest of my body manageable at will, I make life much easier for Lianhua, who approaches and begins to dress me. She goes passing the straps to me, adjusting the folds of the outfit around my body, tying bows and smoothing silks, while I let myself be handled and limit myself to turning a bit here or lifting an arm there when she indicates it to me with a touch. It is a system that at this point works like clockwork, and I cannot help thinking, not for the first time, that of all the unforeseen applications I have found for this technique, this one of acting as a living clothes rack for my own handmaiden is, without a doubt, one of the most useful and, of course, the most domestic.

When Lianhua is satisfied with the result, she takes me in her arms and I stop using the technique, after which she seats me in the chair and places my legs in their spot, gives one last review to the fall of the short skirt to ensure that everything is in order, positions herself behind the grips and begins to push me.

We thus cross the corridors of the Pavilion, still submerged in that suffocating calm of the early hours, until reaching the breakfast hall. And the moment I cross the threshold, I discover that I am not the first to arrive, because there are already my mother and, a step behind her as is her unbreakable custom, Lingxi, who holds in silence a small teapot.

My mother has before her a half-finished plate, a sign that she has already been enjoying breakfast for a while, and the moment she hears the sound of my chair she lifts her gaze and composes one of those smiles of hers that she reserves for when we are alone as family and doesn’t bother to feign.

“Good morning, Wen”, she greets me.

“Good morning, Mother”, I return the greeting as Lianhua brings me closer to the table and, without anyone having to indicate it to her, begins to serve me breakfast with the efficiency of one who knows my tastes better than I do myself.

For a while there is nothing but the discreet tinkling of the crockery and the comfortable silence of two people who don’t need to fill every gap with words. But my mother, who rarely lets much time pass without satisfying her curiosity, is not slow to break it.

“Tell me, Wen”, she lets drop between one bite and another. “What did you think in the end of the performance you went to see last night?”

I chew slowly, ordering my ideas, because it is a question about which I have opinions to spare and I want to give her a fair answer.

“In general terms, it wasn’t bad at all”, I tell her at last. “The masks and the wardrobe the actors wore were truly well made, with a care for detail I did not expect. And the songs they adapted from the dialogues weren’t bad either, there was even some quite well achieved.”

I make a small pause, because up to here comes the clean praise, and what comes after has nuances.

“It is true that I would have made other decisions in some of the concessions they made for the adaptation”, I continue. “There are scenes they cut or changed in a way that doesn’t quite convince me, and moments I would have resolved differently. But, being honest, that is now more a matter of taste than of their being badly done. That I would have done it differently does not mean that they did it badly.”

My mother listens to me with attention, waiting for me to finish entirely before replying, and when I do a little smile peeks at the corners of her lips.

“By what you tell me, I get the impression that, deep down, you liked it”, she observes.

And upon hearing it I cannot help smiling, because she is completely right.

“Yes, the truth is that I liked it quite a bit”, I admit. “And, above all, I can think of far worse ways to have staged that play.”

And while I pronounce those words, my memory turns for an instant toward my other life, toward the long and painful catalog of abominable adaptations that that same story came to suffer in my world of origin. Versions of miserable budget, with cardboard sets that wobbled the moment an actor brushed against them and special effects that seemed hand-painted in a hurry. Versions that twisted the plot until making it unrecognizable, that turned an entire epic into a cloying melodrama or, worse still, into an excuse to string together fights without rhyme or reason. Compared to those crimes against good taste, what I saw last night at the Imperial Theater was little less than a masterpiece, and just from remembering them I reaffirm myself in my verdict with a shiver of gratitude.

After that little chat, my mother and I continue having breakfast in silence for a while, and it is then, while I distractedly spear a piece of fruit, that the conversation from last night with my brother Sun Rui comes to my mind. The memory of his martial pose, of his shark’s smile and of that proposal he let loose like someone dropping a stone to see where it splashes brings me back all at once to the matter, and I realize that I have a pending question to ask precisely the woman I have seated across from me.

So I leave the chopsticks a moment and look at her.

“Mother”, I tell her. “When were you thinking of telling me something about the marriage proposal?”

My mother lifts her gaze from the plate, and for an instant I see something resembling surprise peek onto her face. Then she slightly furrows her brow, hesitates a moment, like one who mentally reviews a list much longer than her interlocutor imagines, and at last returns to me a question I did not expect at all.

“Which of them all are you referring to?” she tells me.

And those words leave me completely thrown, because I had come prepared for a conversation about one proposal, that of the Kang family, the one Sun Rui intended to needle me with last night. I had my arguments ready, my indignation measured and my response rehearsed. But the plural with which my mother has just replied to me has knocked the entire script down for me, and I stay a moment looking at her with a foolish face before managing to react.

“One moment”, I tell her, and I notice how bewilderment slips into my voice. “Are you telling me that there is more than one marriage proposal?”

My mother lets out a sigh, that so-particular sigh of hers that she reserves for when she is going to tell me something that for her is most evident and that for me, by the look of it, is quite a novelty.

“That is so, Wen”, she confirms to me. “As of today there are a score of marriage proposals on the table, all for when you reach the age of majority.”

The figure hits me with a force I don’t even try to disguise.

“A score?” I repeat, incapable of believing it. “Are you telling me there are twenty marriage proposals?”

“More or less that quantity, yes”, she nods, imperturbable, as if she were confirming for me the number of guests at a dinner.

I lean back a bit in the chair, trying to fit the fact in, and in the end I formulate the only question that truly matters to me.

“And how is it possible that there are so many?” I ask.

My mother looks at me, and in her expression there is that mixture of patience and fine irony I know so well.

“The reason is very clear, Wen”, she begins to explain to me. “It has been years now that we received the occasional proposal, but all were from minor families, and all were drafted with that so-particular style in which, deep down, what they came to say was that they were willing to accept the marriage with the Zhāohuán like someone doing the imperial family a favor. As if they were doing us a great honor by lowering themselves to become related to a princess who is disabled.”

The sneering tone with which she pronounces that last part draws a grimace from me, but I don’t interrupt her.

“And all that changed after you invented the mop and, above all, the printing press”, she continues. “The true turning point came when it became known that the Lǐbù had commissioned an enormous quantity of books to distribute among the schools it manages throughout the Empire. Because until then your inventions were ingenious curiosities, palace toys, but the moment an entire ministry began to make orders of that size, the matter changed in nature. Suddenly all the noble families of the Empire set about doing the math, and what they saw upon adding it up were volumes of business, and above all revenues, simply colossal.”

I don’t need my mother to keep explaining anything more to me, because at this point I already see the complete picture with a depressing clarity.

“In other words, the great families stopped seeing me as a crippled princess and began to see me as an inexhaustible source of riches”, I cut her off with all the sarcasm I am capable of at this hour of the morning.

My mother, far from being scandalized by the crudeness of my summary, smiles slightly.

“It is one way of saying it”, she concedes.

And then she takes up the thread where she had left it.

“For now, both the Emperor and I are rejecting all the proposals, one after another”, she goes on. “Because the normal thing, for someone who has finished the Body Tempering, something that, be it said in passing, we don’t doubt for a single instant that you will achieve…”

And here I don’t let her finish the sentence.

Because, while I listen to her, an idea lights up in some calculating corner of my head. We are in the breakfast hall, yes, but we are not alone. There is Lingxi, a step behind and silent, and there are the handmaidens who come and go with the trays, all of them with perfectly functional ears and, I suspect, with a fondness for gossip as healthy as that of any servants in the world. And suddenly I realize that no better loudspeaker could present itself to me, because there is no faster and more effective way for a piece of news to spread throughout the entire Imperial Palace than to let it drop, as if by accident, in front of a handful of handmaidens.

So I interrupt her.

“I have already finished the Body Tempering”, I announce with no further preamble.

My mother stops mid-sentence, and far from being bothered by the interruption, her face lights up with a warm and genuine smile. A smile that, clearly, has not a trace of surprise. But that does not subtract a bit of warmth from her gesture, because one thing is to find out and have to keep the secret, and quite another is to hear it from my own mouth, as family, and be able to congratulate me openly.

“Congratulations, Wen”, she tells me with sincere tenderness. “It is a magnificent achievement, and I am very proud of you.”

“Thank you, Mother”, I reply to her, and for a moment the conversation about marriages and accounts remains in suspense, drowned beneath something much simpler and much warmer.

But my mother, faithful to her custom of never leaving an explanation half-finished, right away takes up what she had begun to say.

“Well then, continuing with what I was going to explain to you before you interrupted me, the normal thing for someone who has finished the Body Tempering is to marry around the age of thirty or forty”, she goes on, with a spark of amusement in her eyes. “And that is, precisely, the excuse we have been using to reject all the proposals without having to give further explanations. It is difficult for a family, however important it may be, to dare to openly dispute a custom so established.”

Up to here, everything she tells me has a logic that reassures me. But then something changes in her face, her smile dims a degree and her tone becomes graver, more serious, and that is enough for me to leave the chopsticks on the table and lend her all my attention.

“But there is something you must keep very present, Wen”, she tells me. “And it is that, within a family, whoever decides the marriages and, in general, the destiny of each of its members is always the head of the family. And in the imperial family, the head of the family is always, without exception, the Emperor.”

I nod slowly, because that I already knew, even if I don’t like to remember it.

“And you must keep very much in mind one more thing”, she continues, and here her voice loads itself with a weight that does not pass unnoticed by me. “The current Emperor has a little more than ten years of reign left. And when that time is fulfilled, there will be a new Emperor. Which means there will be, also, a new head of the family.”

And there, at last, all the pieces fit together in my head, and I anticipate her conclusion with that serene bitterness I am learning to cultivate.

“So the new head of the family will be able to decide which of all those proposals suits him to accept, and that way get rid of me in the most discreet way possible”, I tell her.

My mother shakes her head, gently, correcting me.

“Don’t frame it that way, Wen”, she tells me. “It won’t be so much a matter of getting rid of you as of choosing what suits him best. The new Emperor will make the decision that brings the greatest benefit, whether to himself, to the family or to the Empire, and that may translate into a marriage or into anything else, according to what he considers most important at that moment. You, simply, will be one of the pieces he has on the board.”

“And that is something that will happen, but remember that the sect may claim you first”, she reminds me just at the end.

And upon hearing her, inside, I curse in silence.

I curse this whole framework of families, of customs and of oriental hierarchies that, however many years I may have been coexisting with it, still turns out just as asphyxiating to me. I curse a system in which my future, whatever it may be, does not belong to me but rather will be decided by whoever the head of the family is.

In my other life I complained about things that now strike me as ridiculous, and took for granted liberties that here, simply, do not exist for someone in my position. But I say nothing of all this, because I know all too well that my mother is not to blame and there is nothing I can say that is going to change it.

So I swallow the curse and limit myself to nodding.

“I will keep it in mind, Mother”, I tell her, with the greatest naturalness I am capable of.

My mother looks at me then with an expression in which affection mixes with a shadow of sadness, that specific sadness of mothers who see farther than their daughters and cannot do too much about it.

“Even so I want you to know that we are thinking of ideas for your future”, she adds in a lower voice. “We will not leave you at the mercy of the current, Wen. And soon, you and I, will have to sit down to have a long talk about all your options.”

I look at her, and although inside I still drag the bitter aftertaste of the conversation, I make an effort and compose a smile to reassure her, because I know that that shadow on her face weighs more on her than on me.

“I will be waiting for that talk, Mother”, I tell her softly.

After those words, breakfast continues, but it is no longer the same. The silence that installs itself between us has stopped being the comfortable silence of the beginning to become a denser one, loaded with all that has been said and all that still remains to be said. I keep eating more out of inertia than out of hunger, because the conversation about my future has settled in my stomach like a stone, and each bite tastes of little to me.

And after a while of feigning an appetite I don’t have, I decide that I have had enough breakfast for today.

“Lianhua”, I say, barely turning my head toward my handmaiden. “Take me to my study, please. I have some things I want to do.”

Lianhua, who has remained all this while behind my chair with her customary discretion, without missing, I am sure, a single word of the conversation, positions herself again in her place and begins to push me toward the exit of the hall. And just when we are about to cross the threshold, my mother’s voice reaches me from behind.

“Wen”, she tells me, and there is something in her tone that makes me stop the chair. “One last thing. It is good that you think about your future, it is natural for you to do so. But it is also not a good idea for you to obsess over it. Sometimes, things are seen much more clearly by simply letting time pass.”

I turn just enough to look at her over my shoulder, and on her face I find again that smile warm and sad in equal measure.

“I thank you, Mother”, I reply to her. “I will keep it in mind.”

And with those words, I let Lianhua push me at last out of the hall, bound for my study and for the deceptive promise of a busy morning, while inside I drag, whether I want to or not, the newly inaugurated weight of a score of proposals and of a future in which, it is clear, everyone has the right to decide before I do.

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