Chương 168: Chapter 165

It is hot as a thousand devils, the same thick swelter that has been installed over the Empire for more than a year because of the fire Qi surge, that heat that sticks to the skin, that turns silk into a punishment and that makes the handmaidens of the Pavilion move at half the speed at which they would move under normal circumstances. And, nevertheless, I am out here, in the garden where my mother paints, and I have not the least intention of moving because today, at last, the world has stopped screaming at me.

I lift the cup, bring it to my lips and drink a long sip to enjoy it. Because I do enjoy it, not like the first weeks after opening the Yin Gate, in which each sip of tea was little less than a personal aggression, with the bitterness multiplied to the unbearable, with the aroma getting into my nose as if someone had uncorked a flask of cologne right underneath and with that so-disagreeable capacity unfiltered senses have of assaulting your brain.

During those days I ate because one has to eat, swallowing without chewing more than strictly necessary and always choosing the blandest thing there was on the tray, and I came to miss, with an almost offensive nostalgia, the glorious mediocrity of a normal meal. But now I can attenuate all those sensations voluntarily, and the result is that tea tastes like tea to me again, so after half a month with the alternative it strikes me as an obscene luxury.

I leave the cup on the table and take a moment to look at the garden, which is the other thing I can now do without undue discomfort. The water of the little channel my mother had installed along the edge sounds with an agreeable regularity, there is an insect buzzing at some point among the peonies, the leaves move when one of those gusts of hot wind passes that refresh nothing, and the entire ensemble, which three weeks ago had struck me as a torture chamber, is now simply a garden again.

I am enjoying that sensation, with that vaguely presumptuous satisfaction of one who has resolved a difficult problem, when I hear footsteps on the other side of the garden door. Several pairs, and one of them with a rhythm I would recognize in the middle of a market square, so I am not surprised when an instant later the door opens and my mother enters.

She stops in the threshold upon seeing me, and during that half second I ask myself whether I have unintentionally occupied the exact spot where she was thinking of setting herself to work. But right away she smiles, turns around and says something to the four handmaidens accompanying her.

I don't manage to hear what she tells them, although I could if I set my mind to it, and I decide not to because one of the things I have learned these days is that having good hearing and using it are two completely distinct decisions, and that the second is the one that turns a person into someone unbearable with whom no one wants to be in the same room.

The handmaidens bow, withdraw and the door closes again, after which my mother enters the garden accompanied only by Lingxi, a step behind her, discreet and attentive as always.

"Mother", I greet her.

"Wen", she answers me as she approaches. She goes around the table and sits across from me while I watch how she gives a quick review to the courtyard. And I know perfectly what she is looking for, because it is exactly the same thing I would look for.

"Lingxi", she says upon not finding it.

"Go fetch some refreshments." Lingxi inclines her head and heads toward the door, and I take advantage before she reaches it.

"Lingxi", I call her.

"Since you are going to the kitchens, would you do me a favor?" She stops and turns toward me.

"Of course, Zhāohuán Wen", she answers me.

"Ask Xia to give me a bit more ice for the tea", I tell her while I point with my chin at the bowl I have beside me, in which there no longer remains anything that deserves that name.

"The one I have is almost melted." Lingxi looks at the bowl, then looks at my cup and nods.

"I will ask her", she tells me. Afterward she finishes crossing the garden, opens the door and leaves, and the leaf closes again at her back. And the moment it does, my mother turns toward me.

"Where is Lianhua?" she asks me.

"I have sent her to run some errands", I answer her shrugging my shoulders.

"She had spent half a month planted at my side doing nothing but watching me in case I got dizzy, and now that I am almost well having her seated here is simply wasting her, so I have given her a list and sent her to be useful." My mother arches an eyebrow half a millimeter.

"So you are well now?" she asks me.

"Yes", I tell her.

"My illness has now subsided almost entirely and I don't expect any relapse in the near future." And I say it like that, with those exact words and with that face of circumstance, knowing perfectly that we both know there is no illness. Because the illness is an excuse. It is a comfortable label we have placed on top of the matter to explain why the Zhāohuán has spent half a month without leaving the Pavilion except to sit in this same garden with the face of one about to vomit.

A label that suffices for the court, that gives the functionaries something with which to fill their tea circles and that, above all, does not contain at any point the words Yin Gate, which are precisely the two words that it suits no one to have pronounced aloud with my name in front of them. My mother holds my gaze a second longer than necessary, with that expression of hers that says absolutely nothing to whoever has not spent years learning to read it, and then she nods.

"I am glad for you", she tells me. And after that there installs itself in the garden one of those comfortable silences there is no need whatsoever to fill. My mother gets up after a moment and approaches the low table where she keeps her materials, and I stay looking at her while she begins to order them. At first I think she is going to set about painting, so I mentally prepare myself to spend the next hour in silence, which is the unwritten rule of this garden the moment my mother picks up a brush.

But right away I realize that no, because she is not taking out paper, nor composing the ink, nor doing any of the ten or twelve things she always does before beginning. What she is doing is taking the brushes one by one, checking their points, passing a cloth over the handle, rinsing them in the bowl of water and returning them to the stand arranged in order of thickness.

And when she finishes with the brushes she moves on to the grinding stones, and afterward to the bowls, and afterward to the paperweights, and at no moment is there the least indication that she intends to use any of all that today. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. She is cleaning.

And cleaning the materials without the least intention of using them is, in my mother, the exact equivalent of what in my other life was setting about organizing the cable drawer on a Sunday afternoon, that is to say, what a person does when their head is somewhere else and they need their hands to be occupied in the meantime. I note it, say nothing and continue with my tea. After a while the garden door opens again and Lingxi returns with a tray.

On the tray there is a new teapot, a plate of appetizers and, in a corner, a small bowl full of fragments of ice, and upon seeing it I cannot help feeling something indecorously similar to triumph. Lingxi leaves the tray on the table, serves first my mother, who has sat down again, and afterward takes a clean cup, fills it, drops a couple of pieces of ice inside and holds it out to me.

"Thank you", I tell her as I take it. My mother observes the entire operation with the same expression with which she would observe someone putting salt on a cake.

"I still don't understand how you can drink your tea with ice", she tells me. I shrug my shoulders.

"It is a taste like any other, Mother", I answer her.

"There are those who like salty food and there are those who like sweet food, and as far as I know no one has ever managed to demonstrate that either of the two sides is right. Well, this exactly the same." My mother does not seem entirely convinced, but she doesn't insist either and limits herself to taking her cup, steaming and perfectly respectable, to give a sip with a dignity that evidently intends to be an answer in itself. And from there on we simply enjoy the refreshment.

My mother goes bringing me up to date on everything that has been happening at court during the time I have been shut in, which turns out to be considerably more than I expected, and I listen to her while I eat the appetizers one after another with the inelegant enthusiasm of one who has spent half a month without tasting anything. I am extending my hand toward the last one when my mother sighs.

It is a short sigh, and it comes accompanied by a gesture I know all too well, which is that of leaving the cup on the table with considerably more care than necessary, so I withdraw my hand and wait.

"I had thought of telling you later on", she tells me, and the tone no longer has anything to do with the one of a minute ago.

"But since we are alone, this is a good moment." I straighten up a bit in the chair.

"Has something happened?" I ask her.

"No", she answers me.

"Nothing has happened." She makes a pause.

"But you are thirteen years old now, Wen", she continues.

"And I want to know whether you have already thought about what you want to do when you reach the age of majority. Because it is something they are going to ask you, and they are not going to ask you out of curiosity, but to decide what tasks to assign you at court beyond your post as Zhāohuán."

And there I fall silent, because the sincere answer to that question is no, that I have not thought about it, or rather that I have thought about it in the worst possible way, which is halfway, in passing and without committing myself to absolutely anything. And I have not done it out of laziness, nor out of that custom of mine of postponing uncomfortable matters until they become urgencies.

I have done it because more than half a year ago, in a valley hidden behind a mountain, a mythological creature the size of a small house told me that very soon I was going to find myself obliged to choose between two options, and that that choice was going to affect my whole life. And I cannot tell her any of that.

Not because I don't trust her, which I do, but because no way occurs to me of explaining to my mother that the Guardian Beast of the Empire has let loose a prophecy in my face without the conversation ending in a way I don't fancy at all. Besides, and being honest with myself, I don't believe in prophecies. I have never believed.

In my other life prophecies were a matter of newspaper horoscopes, of the sealed envelopes of fairground fortune-tellers and of that kind of book that is only sold on airport shelves next to the ones that explain to you how to open your third eye, and I spent quite a few years of my career explaining to my students that a prediction written on a wall, if it is vague enough, always ends up getting something right.

But it is that the one who has pronounced it is not a market fortune-teller with some cards, but a Feng. A male Fenghuang who has been living in that valley since who knows when and who is spoken of in the history books of the Empire in the same paragraph in which the Imperial Seal is spoken of. And that, however little I may like to admit it, raises the credibility of the whole matter a full point, so I let a few seconds pass and answer the only thing I can answer.

"I have been thinking about several possibilities", I tell her.

"But I have not yet settled on any." My mother smiles, and it is not a smile of reproach.

"I imagined as much", she tells me.

"But, Wen, in its day I told you that you had to be thinking about your future, and I also told you something else, that we were considering several alternatives for you. And I think it is about time you began to know what they are." And there I forget the tea, because the words several alternatives have just fallen onto the table and in my head, without my doing anything to prevent it, they have placed themselves on their own beside two other words I have been dragging with me everywhere for half a year. A choice.

Two options. It could be a coincidence, of course. Coincidences exist, and I have spent an entire life documenting historical coincidences that seem impossible, but this resembles it too much.

"And what are those alternatives?" I ask her, and I notice that my voice has come out a bit more tremulous than I intended. My mother doesn't answer me right away, what she does is look at Lingxi and make a small gesture with her head. And Lingxi, without saying a single word, takes a talisman from her sleeve and activates it.

I notice the exact moment in which it closes, because the buzzing of the insect among the peonies and the murmur of the little channel keep sounding the same as before, but everything that came from beyond the wall, the distant voices of the handmaidens, some footsteps in a corridor and the rattling of a cart in some hallway of the Pavilion disappears all at once as if someone had closed a very thick door.

And I stay looking at that talisman with a fairly uncomfortable mixture of curiosity and alarm, because one thing is for my mother to lay out for me a range of possibilities for my future, and quite another very different one is that laying them out for me requires sealing the garden.

In this Pavilion, which is already in itself one of the most watched places in the entire Imperial Palace, privacy talismans are used for two or three very concrete things, and none of them is talking about the professional future of a thirteen-year-old girl. My mother waits for Lingxi to return to her spot, sighs and begins.

"Your father and I had been discussing this matter in secret since long before all that business with the Fei Zhi and the Fei Lan", she tells me.

"There were many conversations, and some fairly disagreeable, but in the end we arrived at several conclusions." She makes a brief pause.

"And then the two of them died, the mourning period arrived, afterward the one of ceremonies, and everything remained in suspense for half a year", she continues. I nod, because to that part I can attest.

"You must know that before you opened the Yin Gate I received a note from your father", she says then. She lets the sentence settle an instant before going on.

"In it he tells me that, now that the period of ceremonies has ended, he is going to make a round of visits to all his consorts", she explains to me.

"And that he will take advantage of the next visit he makes me to speak with you in person." And I am left with the cup halfway to my mouth.

"In person?" I repeat.

"In person", she confirms to me. And before I can ask anything more, she herself continues, because she knows perfectly where my next question was going to go.

"And that means something must have happened, Wen", she tells me.

"Because that was not the plan at all. The plan was to keep discussing the options a while longer and to present them to you calmly a couple of months before your birthday. And the plan was, besides, that it would be I who spoke with you, not he." I notice how my shoulders tense and how the hand holding the cup decides, on its own account, to rest it on the table before it occurs to it to tremble.

"And do you have any clue what can have happened for such urgency?" I ask her.

"No idea", she answers me with a sincerity that is exactly what I did not want to hear.

"But don't worry more than you should." She raises a finger before I open my mouth to protest.

"And I tell you not to worry for a very concrete reason", she continues.

"If this were truly grave, he would not have put me last in the round, he would have come directly. That he has decided to tell me in a note, and that besides he leaves me last of all, means that it is important, but that it is not urgent." She makes a pause and adds what, I suspect, is what she truly wanted to tell me from the beginning.

"What does seem probable to me is that in those options there are now included some situations that only he knows about", she says finally. With that she falls silent, and I stay looking at the surface of my cup, where the last pieces of ice have been reduced to two transparent slivers that no longer cool anything, so I decide that we have already had enough seriousness for a morning in which, at last, I can taste food, so I lift my gaze and compose my best face of innocence.

"Then, Mother", I tell her.

"For when can I expect my father to come fulfill his marital duties?" My mother looks at me for a long second with that expression of deciding whether to scold me or not, and finally a brief laugh escapes her that only shakes her shoulders a little.

"If nothing happens to delay it, in a month", she answers me when she recomposes herself. I nod slowly and bring the cup to my lips to finish what remains. A month. A month to decide what I want to do with my life or, at least, to prepare an answer convincing enough that no one chooses for me while I keep waiting for a choice that perhaps doesn't even exist. I drink, and the tea, which has been left without ice, is already lukewarm.