Fernanda still wasn't back by the time we left the study, so I worriedly sent Biao to find her and bring her straight home. It was late, and the girl had been out all day. Besides, she'd been angry and sad when she left, and I didn't want her to do anything silly. Biao ran off in search of his Young Mistress, and I was left on my own on the covered porch, listening to the hammering rain and watching as it soaked the plants and flowers. Suddenly my heart leaped in my chest and my palpitations went wild. It had been so long since I'd had any cardiac trouble that I was terribly afraid. I began to pace back and forth like a madwoman, fighting the notion that I was going to die that very instant, struck down by a massive heart attack. I tried telling myself it was just one of my spells, but I already knew that, and knowing didn't help a bit. The healthy effects of our journey certainly hadn't lasted long! No sooner had I set myself up in a house than my hypochondria took hold once again. Silenced by the distractions of the last few months, my old enemy rose up full force at the first opportunity. Luckily, Biao and Fernanda soon came through the door, causing a commotion and distracting me from my dark thoughts.
“It was wonderful, Auntie!” Fernanda exclaimed, shaking off water like a dog. The girl was absolutely drenched, and her cheeks and ears were flushed. Little Tiger was looking at her enviously. “I spent the whole day in a huge patio with all the other novices, doing exercises quite similar to tai chi!”
Lao Jiang leaned over the second-floor balcony, a sour look on his face. “What exactly is going on?”
“Fernanda was thrilled with her first day as a novice at Wudang,” I commented jokingly, still looking at my niece. It was good to see her so happy; this certainly wasn't the norm.
The antiquarian, suddenly quite pleased, came down to join us. “That's marvelous,” he said, smiling.
“It will be marvelous,” I interjected quite seriously, speaking to my niece, “but right now you'll go dry off and change before you catch pneumonia.”
A shadow fell over Fernanda's face. “Now?”
“Right now,” I ordered, pointing to our room.
The rain was quite loud so we moved into Biao's room, where visitors were received, and sat on beautifully embroidered satin cushions to wait for Fernanda. Lao Jiang was smiling at me.
“I think you and your niece will find this journey quite enriching,” he said.
“Do you know what I learned today?” I replied. “I learned about the theory of yin and yang, and the Five Elements.”
He smiled from ear to ear, obviously proud. “You're both learning many important aspects of Chinese culture, the main ideas that gave rise to our major philosophies and served as the basis for our medicine, music, mathematics—”
Fernanda burst through the door like a whirlwind, drying her hair with a fine cotton cloth.
“So,” she said as she came in and took a seat, “I obviously wasn't going to understand a thing, right? All of them were Chinese and spoke Chinese, and I thought the whole thing was stupid. Plus, it was pouring rain, and I just wanted to come back here. But then the teacher, the shifu, came over and patiently repeated the names and the movements until I could copy them quite well. The rest of the novices followed along, laughing at me at first, but they got down to work when the shifu ignored them and only paid attention to me.”
She threw the long towel on a little tea table and jumped up to stand in the middle of the room.
“You're not going to give us a demonstration, are you?” I asked, horrified. A look of fury crossed her face, but the antiquarian's presence kept her in check.
“I want to go with Young Mistress tomorrow,” Biao then remarked.
“What did you say?” Lao Jiang asked, staring harshly at the boy.
“I said I want to go with Young Mistress tomorrow. Why can't I learn the martial arts, too?”
He might have been tall, but the boy was only thirteen years old, and he'd been terribly bored on our outing that day.
“Absolutely not. Your job is to interpret for your Mistress Elvira.”
“But I want to learn to fight,” Little Tiger protested, so angrily that I was taken aback.
“Well?” the antiquarian bellowed as he stared at me. “Are you going to let a servant take such liberties?”
“No, of course not,” I stuttered, not quite sure what I should do. Lao Jiang stood up and walked over to a lovely vase on the floor in a corner and pulled out a long stick of bamboo.
“Shall I proceed on your behalf?” he asked when he saw the apprehensive look on my face.
“You're going to cane him?” I asked, shocked. “Most certainly not! Put that bamboo down!”
“You are not Chinese, Elvira, and do not know how things work here. Even the highest officers in the imperial court admit there's nothing wrong with a few lashes when deserved. It's an honorable punishment that is to be accepted with dignity. I beg you not to intervene.”
It goes without saying that Fernanda and I cried our eyes out as we listened to the whistle of bamboo as it sliced the air out in the patio before smacking Little Tiger's behind. Every crack pained us through and through. The boy certainly deserved to be punished, but sending him to bed without any supper would have been sufficient. In China, however, it was a long-established tradition for servants who overstepped their bounds to receive a good thrashing. Fortunately, the consequences of that calamity were simply that Biao had trouble sitting for a few days. As for the rest, he came into our room the next morning to open the windows and air out the k'angs as if nothing had happened.
The rain continued to pour down, and it was impossible not to feel just a little melancholic in such unpleasant weather. Things only got worse when Fernanda wasn't able to get up for breakfast and I found she had a raging fever. Lao Jiang immediately sent Biao for one of the monastery doctors, who quickly came with all his strange Chinese instruments. Fernanda was shivering under the mountain of blankets we had piled on her, and my worry went through the roof when I saw the monk crush some (not terribly clean) herbs that he dissolved in water and had her drink. I was about to shriek and rail against the witch who was trying to kill my niece with his poisonous, alchemical concoctions, but Lao Jiang held me back, gripping my arms mercilessly as he whispered that the doctors in Wudang were the best in China and that the most respected physicians purchased their herbs from here on the Mysterious Mountain. I still wasn't convinced. I was overcome with guilt that I hadn't thought to bring Western medicine. I'd never be able to forgive myself if anything happened to Fernanda. She had no one else in the world but me, and now that Rémy had died, she was all I had. At my age and with my heart condition, losing the two most important people in my life in less than a year would undoubtedly be the end of me. I simply wouldn't be able to stand it.
I spent the whole morning sitting by Fernanda's side, watching her sleep and listening to her moan as she tossed restlessly. Lao Jiang and Biao had to take care of both of us. They brought me cup after cup of steaming hot tea—I didn't want anything to eat—and gave Fernanda the herbal infusion the doctor from Wudang had prescribed for her. Once, when I couldn't stop the tears streaming down my face, the antiquarian pulled a cushion over and sat next to me.
“Your niece will be fine,” he declared.
“But what if she caught that pulmonary bug that's killing millions of your countrymen?” I objected desperately. I was finding it hard to talk, because I could barely breathe.
“Remember the abbot's words from the Tao Te Ching?”
“No. No, I don't,” I blurted out angrily.
“‘Because one is moderate, one may be said to follow the way from the start. / Following the way from the start, one may be said to accumulate an abundance of virtue. / Accumulating an abundance of virtue, there is nothing one cannot overcome. / When there is nothing one cannot overcome, no one knows his own limits.’ ”
“So?”
“You, Elvira, need to work on moderation. The Tao Te Ching insists that the mind must always be still and at peace, emot
ions contained and controlled by our will, the body rested, and the feelings calm. Anything else is harmful to our health. A mind that is agitated by heightened emotions only leads to unhappiness and illness. Your objective should always be moderation, a happy medium. Fernandina isn't going to die. She simply has a cold. I don't deny that it could become serious if not treated properly, but she's in very good hands. She'll soon be back in class with the other novices.”
“She will not; you can be sure of that! I will not allow her to go to another class!”
“Moderation, madame, please: moderation to face your niece's illness, moderation to confront your financial difficulties, and moderation to stand up to your own fears.”
I received the blow he had just dealt with dignity and looked at him out of the corner of my eye, somewhat offended. “What are you talking about?”
“Throughout our trip here, whenever I saw you sitting quietly, gazing into the distance, the look on your face was always anxious and worried. Your tai chi movements are rigid; they don't flow. Your muscles and tendons are stiff. Your chi is blocked at several points along the meridians in your body. That's why the abbot advised moderation. You need to know you can overcome anything in life, because your strength is boundless. Don't be so afraid. Moderation is one of the secrets to health and longevity.”
“Leave me alone!” I managed to say through my tears. There was my niece, horribly sick with heaven knows what, and the antiquarian thought he had the right to preach some bygone words written in an old book that was completely unknown in the civilized world.
“Should I go?” he asked quietly.
“Please!”
Still fuming, I fell asleep on the floor, my head resting on Fernanda's k'ang. Luckily, it wasn't long before my niece woke up (or I might have fallen ill myself from the damp and cold) and began squirming under the blankets.
“Get your head off my legs, Auntie! I'm boiling.”
I opened my eyes, drowsy and disoriented.
“How are you?” I stammered.
“Just fine. Never better.”
“Honestly?” I couldn't believe it. In the blink of an eye, she had gone from a near-delirious fever to the picture of health.
“Honestly,” she replied, pulling back the covers and hopping out of her k'ang. “Where are my clothes?”
“You're not going anywhere today, young lady,” I declared. “You have not fully recovered.”
After a long—very long—look of indignation, came a never-ending stream of protests, condemnations, promises, and laments that left me absolutely cold. Under no circumstances would I let her out of the house that day. By the end of the afternoon, however, I was deeply regretting my decision: Fernanda's wails and complaints were so loud in the silence of the monastery that a crowd of monks and nuns had gathered outside to see what was happening. Still, I was happy: better loud and crying than her usual silent and taciturn.
We'd lost a full day of work, so after a good night's sleep and a session of tai chi in which I tried hard to show Lao Jiang just how flexible my tendons and muscles were, Biao and I left the house in high spirits, determined to achieve our goal. I had gotten it firmly into my head that the old woman from the temple would be a reliable source of information and told Biao we should head straight to where we saw her two days earlier. However, the old woman's cushion sat empty. A young nun was industriously scrubbing mud off the doors and the portico; her efforts seemed somewhat pointless given that it was still raining and anywhere you stepped off the paths that ran between the buildings, you sank into muck up to your ankles. Biao asked her about the alleged centenarian.
“Ming T'ien will be here later,” she explained. “She's so old we don't let her get up until the hour of the Horse.”
“Which is the hour of the Horse?” I asked Biao.
“I'm not sure, tai-tai, but I think it's midmorning.”
A boy younger than Biao came running down the path carrying an umbrella. He was wearing the white outfit of a novice in the martial arts and not the blue cotton the servants who came to clean our house wore.
“Chang Cheng!” he shouted.
“It's so strange to see someone running!” I said to Biao as we left Ming T'ien's temple. “Everyone here walks as if they're in an Easter procession.”
“Chang Cheng!” the boy repeated, waving his hand in the air to get our attention. Was he looking for us?
“What does ‘Chang Cheng’ mean?” I asked Biao.
“It's the Chinese name for the Great Wall,” he replied. By now it was patently obvious the boy was coming for us.
“Chang Cheng!” the young runner yelled, not at all out of breath, as he stopped in front of me and bowed. “Chang Cheng, the abbot would like me to take you to Master Tzau's cave.”
I looked at Biao in surprise.
“Did he really just call me ‘Great Wall’?”
Biao nodded with a toothy grin.
I was outraged. “Ask him why he's calling me that.”
The two boys exchanged a few words, and then Little Tiger, trying to remain serious, said, “Everyone in the monastery has been calling you Great Wall since yesterday, tai-tai, ever since Young Mistress’ cries were heard all over Mount Wudang. They're calling you Chang Cheng and her Yu Hua Ping, or ‘Pot of Rain.’ ”
Those poetic yet pompous-sounding Chinese names must have been an attempt at humor.
“We'd better go with the novice, tai-tai. Master Tzau is waiting.”
Why would the abbot want me to visit this master who lived in a cave? The only way to find out was to follow the boy. So, trusting that the visit would be over before the hour of the Horse, we began a long walk in the pouring rain. On our way we passed many impressive temples, climbed up and down numerous sets of stairs, and came across several patios where monks and novices were practicing complicated martial arts, toiling in the rain wearing snow white outfits that contrasted beautifully with the dark gray stone and red temples. Some were working with extremely long lances, others with swords, sabers, fans—every weapon imaginable. In one of those open areas, several feet below a long bridge the two boys and I were crossing, a figure in white waved its arms to get our attention. It was Fernanda. I wondered how she'd known that it was us under the umbrellas when so many others were walking along that labyrinth of bridges, paths, and stone staircases decorated with thousands of carved caldrons, cranes, lions, tigers, tortoises, snakes, and dragons, some of which were truly frightening.
We finally reached the entrance to a cave after climbing one of the Mysterious Mountain peaks. The novice said something to Biao and, after bowing, ran off downhill.
“He said we're to go in and find the master.”
“But it's as black as your hat in there,” I protested.
Biao didn't say a word. I think he wanted us to leave as quickly as possible. Like me, he wasn't at all happy about going into a sinister-looking cave where who knows what kinds of bugs and animals might bite or attack us. However, we had no choice but to obey the abbot, so we swallowed our fear and, closing our umbrellas, went into the cave. There was a light way in the back, and we walked very slowly toward it. The silence was absolute; the sound of the downpour at our backs became fainter the farther in we went. We wound our way through passageways and galleries dimly lit by torches and oil lamps. The path was heading down into the mountain, and an oppressive sensation began to constrict my throat, especially when it became so narrow that we had to walk sideways. The air was thick and smelled of rock and humidity. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we came to a natural cavity that suddenly opened up at the end of a tight corridor. A monk so old he could've been a hundred or a thousand sat on a wide rock protuberance rising up out of the ground like a thick trunk cut low down. He was absolutely still, his eyes closed and his hands crossed in front of his stomach. At first I was afraid he might be dead, but upon hearing us approach he half opened his eyelids and looked at us with the strangest yellow eyes. I nearly screamed in terror. Biao qui
ckly stepped back and hid behind me, so there I was, trying to be the bravest person in the world, acting as a shield between a devil and a frightened boy. The devil slowly lifted a hand tipped with nails so long they curled in on themselves and motioned for us to come closer. I wasn't sure what to do. Something inside stopped me from taking even one more tiny step toward that diabolical apparition, and it wasn't just the repugnant stench of filth and ox dung. He spoke, but Biao didn't translate. Nearly all of the old man's teeth were gone, and the few that remained were as yellow as his eyes and his fingernails.
I elbowed Biao and heard him gasp. “What did he say?” I managed to croak.
“He said he's Master Tzau and we shouldn't be afraid to come closer.”
“Oh, certainly! Why not?” I replied without moving.
From somewhere behind him, the master pulled out a worn black leather tube and opened it by removing the top part. It wasn't very long, no more than the span of a hand, and not much wider than a bracelet. When he opened it, the bunch of little wooden sticks inside made a soothing sound that reverberated off the walls of the cavern. It was then I discovered that those walls were covered in strange signs and characters that had been carved into the rock. Someone had spent many years in that faint light, patiently chiseling long and short lines, like Morse code, and Chinese ideograms.
The spirit with yellow eyes spoke again, his voice like the screeching of train wheels along the tracks. I think every hair on my body stood on end.
“He insists we come closer. He says he has a lot to teach us by order of the abbot and doesn't have time to waste,” Biao translated.
But of course! Why hadn't I thought of that? Naturally a thousandyear-old monk sitting on a rock all day inside an underground cave would have any number of things to do.
Frightened half to death, we moved toward the big rock as Master Tzau pulled the wooden sticks out of the leather cylinder as gingerly as would a woman whose nail polish has yet to dry.