“Mildew?”
“Well, some kind of green mold that grows in empty old millet bins. That treatment would have restored me to health, they say, with no ugly side effect. I need never have shriveled my pendenti! Is it not nice to hear this now? Mildew! Porco Dio!”
“No, it cannot be very pleasant to hear.”
“Need the the damned scataroni have told me at all? Now that it is too late? Mona Merda!”
“It was not very tactful of them.”
“The damned saputeli simply wanted me to know that they are superior to the backwoods charlatan who castrated me! Aborto de natura!”
“There is an old saying, Mafio. This world is like a pair of shoes that—”
“Bruto barabao!
Looking pained, my father withdrew into the other room. I could hear him picking up and straightening things in there. Uncle Mafio sat and simmered and fizzed like a kettle on slow boil. But finally he looked up, caught my eye, and said more calmly:
“I am sorry, Marco, for the display of temper. I know I said once that I would regard my predicament with resignation. But now to learn that the predicament was unnecessary …” He ground his teeth. “I hope I may rot if I can decide which is worse, being a eunuch or knowing I need not have been.”
“Well …”
“If you tell me a proverb, I will break your neck.”
So I sat silent for a while, wondering how best to express my sympathy and at the same time suggest that his diminishment might not be totally deplorable. Here among the manly Mongols, his formerly perverse tendencies would not be so tolerantly accepted as they had been, for example, in the Muslim countries. If he were still subject to the urge to fondle some man or boy, he might well find himself being caressed by the Fondler. But how was I to say so? Prepared to dodge a blow of his still-knotted fist, I cleared my throat and tried:
“It seems to me, Uncle Mafio, that almost every time I have strayed into serious trouble or embarrassment, it was my candeloto that lit the way. I would not, on that account, willingly forfeit the candeloto and the pleasures it more often affords me. But I think, if I were deprived of it, I could more easily be a good man.”
“You think that, do you?” he said sourly.
“Well, of all the priests and monks I have known, the most admirable were those who took seriously their vow of celibacy. I believe it was because they had closed their senses to the distractions of the flesh that they could concentrate on being good.”
“0 merda o beretta rossa. You believe that, do you?”
“Yes. Look at San Agostino. In his youth he prayed, ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet.’ He knew very well where evil lay lurking. So he was anything but a saint, until finally he did renounce the temptations of—”
After a moment, when no thunderbolt had sizzled down at us, he said in a more temperate but still grim voice:
“Marco, I will tell you what I believe. I believe that your beliefs, if not puling hypocrisy, are exactly backward. There is no difficulty in being good. Every man and woman of mankind is as evil as he or she is capable of being and dares to be. It is the less capable, more timorous persons who are called good, and then only by default. The least capable, most fainthearted of all are called saints, and then usually first by themselves. It is easier to proclaim, ‘Look at me, I am a saint, for I have fastidiously withdrawn from striving with bolder men and women!’ than to say honestly, ‘I am incapable of prevailing in this wicked world and I fear even to try.’ Remember that, Marco, and be bold.”
I sat and tried to think of an adequate riposte that would not sound simply sanctimonious. But, seeing that he had subsided into muttering to himself again, I rose and quietly took my leave.
Poor Uncle Mafio. He seemed to be arguing, first, that his abnormal nature had been no infirmity, but a superiority merely unrecognized in a mediocre world and, second, that he might have made the purblind world acknowledge that superiority, if only he had not been untimely cheated of it. Well, I have known many people, unable to hide some gross deficiency or imperfection, try instead to flaunt it as a blessing. I have known the parents of a deformed or witless child to drop its baptismal name and call it “Christian,” in the pathetic pretense that the Lord predestined it for Heaven and so deliberately made it ill-equipped for life. I could be sorry for cripples, but I would never believe that giving a blemish a noble name made it either an ornament or a noble blemish.
I went to my own chambers, and found the Wang Chingkim already waiting, and he and I went together to the distant palace building where was the studio of the Court Goldsmith.
“Marco Polo—the Master Pierre Boucher,” said Chingkim, introducing us, and the Goldsmith smiled cordially and said, “Bon jour, Messire Paule,” and I do not recall what I said, for I was much surprised. The young man, no older than myself, was the first real Ferenghi I had met since leaving home—I mean to say, a genuine Frank, a Frenchman.
“Actually, I was born in Karakoren, the old Mongol capital,” he told me, speaking an amalgam of Mongol and half-forgotten French, as he showed me about the workshop. “My parents were Parisians, but my father Guillaume was Court Goldsmith to King Bela of Hungary, so he and my mother were taken prisoner by the Mongols when the Ilkhan Batu conquered Bela’s city of Buda. They were brought captive to the Khakhan Kuyuk at Karakoren. But when the Khakhan recognized my father’s talent, alors, he entitled him Maitre Guillaume and raised him to the court, and he and my mother lived happily in these lands for all the rest of their lives. So have I, having been born here, during the reign of the Khakhan Mangu.”
“If you are so well regarded, Pierre,” I said, “and a freeman, could you not resign from the court and go back to the West?”
“Ah, oui. But I doubt that I could live as well there as here, for my talent is somewhat inferior to my late father’s. I am competent enough in the arts of gold and silver work and the cutting of gemstones and the fabrication of jewelry, mais voila tout. It was my father who made most of the ingenious contrivances you will see around the palace here. When I am not making jewelry, my chief responsibility is to keep those engines in good repair. So the Khakhan Kubilai, like his predecessor, favors me with privilege and largesse, and I am comfortably situated, and I am about to marry an estimable Mongol lady of the court, and I am quite content to abide.”
At my request, Pierre explained the workings of the earthquake engine in the Khakhan’s chambers—which, as I have told, enabled me later to impress Kubilai. However, Pierre refused, with good humor but with firmness, to satisfy my curiosity about the banquet hall’s drink-dispensing serpent tree and animated gold peacocks.
“Like the earthquake urn, they were invented by my father, but they are considerably more complex. If you will forgive my obstinacy, Marco—and Prince Chingkim”—he made a little French bow to each of us—“I will keep secret the workings of the banquet engines. I like being the Court Goldsmith, and there are many other artisans who would like to take my place. Since I am only an outlander, vous savez, I must guard what advantage I possess. As long as there are at least a few contrivances which only I can keep in operation, I am safe against usurpers.”
The Prince smiled understandingly and said, “Of course, Master Boucher.”
So did I, and then I added, “Speaking of the banquet hall, I wondered at another thing there. Though the hall was crowded, the air never got stale, but stayed cool and fresh. Is that done by some other apparatus of yours, Pierre?”
“Non,” he said. “That is a very simple affair, devised long ago by the Han, and presently in the charge of the Palace Engineer.”
“Come, Marco,” said Chingkim. “We can pay him a visit. His workshop is very near.”
So we said au revoir to the Court Goldsmith, and went on our way, and I was next introduced to one Master Wei. He spoke only Han, so Chingkim repeated my query about the banquet hall’s ventilation, and translated to me the Engineer’s explanation.
“A very simple affair,” he said also. “It is well-known that cool air from below will always displace warm air above. There are cellars beneath all the palace buildings, and passages connecting them. Under each building is a cellar room used only as a repository for ice. We are continuously supplied with ice blocks cut by slaves in the ever cold northern mountains, wrapped in straw and brought here by swift-traveling trains. At any time, by the judicious opening of doors and passages here and there, I can make breezes waft the ice stores’ coolness wherever it is
