The Ballad of a Small Player (16 page)

FIFTEEN

T
he following day I decided not to gamble for a few hours. After moving to the suite with the gold taps, I assembled my winnings in my room and counted them out note by note, with a relish bordering on miserly precision. I then packed it all in a single Adidas bag bought for the purpose and put it under my bed. Why I did this I was not sure, but I was convinced that the attitude of the Lisboa toward me had now changed as a result of my brief run of luck and the reputation it had generated for me. Sure, they had moved me to a suite with gold taps, but good luck for me was bad luck for them, and I was certain that management had instructed the staff to be a little less friendly and helpful to me than they had been before.

When I went to the Galera for lunch there was a frost in the air. The waiters eyed me coldly and their politeness was formulaic. In the lobby the staff gave me a similar treatment, though I daresay it was preferable to being hunted like a rat in debt. Of course, one can too easily
become paranoid, and I was perhaps too sensitive after the strange events of the preceding night, which could be chalked up to the fluctuations of chance and nothing more. But the Chinese, I knew, wouldn’t see it that way.

I walked that afternoon after lunch to the Se Cathedral. Around the little square, the wet palms, the yellow bishop’s villa with its green shutters, and the mosaic pavements with a monochrome solar disk. There was usually no one in the church but a few elderly Chinese ladies kneeling in the pews, and it was no different now. I sat there with my dripping umbrella trying to clear my head between the pale green apse and the blue glass windows, and I knew that I needed to be in a Christian place like the churches of my childhood, and to listen to the voice that always emerged inside me whenever I was before an altar. I was developing the somber idea that I was not in command of events in the normal way, and that this flow that I have already described was something I could not steer in any particular direction. What attracted me to this idea was that it relieved me of any responsibility for defying the laws of mathematics. Any explanation for my winning streak was
magical
and therefore oppressive. Either it had to be explained rationally at some point, and could not be, or it could never be explained at all, in which case I was stepping into an unknown land inhabited by centaurs, hunchbacks, and drooling elves.

That’s how it is. You enter the dreamland of nutters
and you get to like it and you find it convincing and soon enough you stay. You become magical, which is a terrible thing to be. All of Western civ is against you. You give Western civ the middle finger and before you know it you’ve become an oriental faun. You’ve grown a tail and snout and you pray to goddesses. You smell like a box of camphor.

Fragmentation, slow and silent. The old women kneeling before their Portuguese god who is no longer there. I sat in the aisles to the left side of the nave and looking up I saw a bas-relief panel showing Christ Falling for the Second Time.
Jesus Cai Pela Secunda Vez
. I lit a candle and prayed for a tenth nine, a coup de grâce. I swore I would stake everything on it.

For dinner I went to the Clube Militar near the Lisboa. It’s the former Portuguese officers’ mess now converted into one of the few genuinely European restaurants on the territory. Around its pale pink walls lies a garden of terraces and palms and fountains, where I often used to pass my empty afternoons. To one side rises the Calcada Dos Quarteis, at the top of which is a square surrounded by more of the pink military buildings. Giant ficus trees burst through the walls of the Jardim de S. Francisco. Inside, the Clube’s wainscoting and fans and dusty bottles of Quinta dos Roques were what I wanted. The staff put a screen around me while I ate their dim sum with clams and their
baccalau asada
, and among those white columns and faded mirrors I felt as alone as I had always aspired to
be but had never managed to be. It was the solitude of the leper, the
success
.

As I sat there with all the pomp and circumstance of a coffee plantation owner, I was changing hour by hour into something I had always wanted to be but never had been. I could see it when I looked down at my own fingers grasping the edge of a napkin or the stem of a glass. My fingers looked white and elongated, smooth and refined, and the little hairs on their backs seemed to have vanished as if they had been waxed. I was growing more sensitive to my surroundings, my senses becoming more acute. I was sure of it. The wine tasted like the best wine I had ever drunk. The rolls were the best rolls. Everyone smiled at me. The doll-like waiters in their aprons, the girls wheeling the dessert trolleys, the government officials eating urchins with their mistresses. I had been turned inside out, from failure to Lucky Man, and the conversion made me supernatural, especially to myself.

I walked down the Patio do Gil with banknotes crushed in my pockets. Down Felicidade, or Happiness, where the whorehouses used to be but which is now filled with tea shops and windows of sticky buns. Misted banyans with dripping trailers, faces like disappointed dough, the dim sum plates salty with clams as small as keyholes. I resolved to get myself some new suits made, dandy affairs with waistcoats and satin linings that matched the stripes—more lordly if you like—and some Church’s shoes in Hong
Kong. The prospect of money about to materialize in the very near future has this effect upon the mind, making it soft and dreamy and forward-looking, and this was what happened as I went down Felicidade. I walked forward into the future, where I felt I belonged, and indeed I stepped quietly into it in my slippers.

I walked around the city for an hour, and an hour takes you a long way in Old Macau. The sidewalks with their monochrome mosaics, like those of a Roman villa, and covered with black signs—shells, sea horses, lobsters, galleons, and stars. The dead leaves drifting across them like shoals of tiny fish. The center was emptied because of the weather and the Fujian temples were as solitary as the churches, the incense burners dampened and giving off an odor of flowers and earth. Down long Repubblica, which is like a boulevard in Lisbon or Madrid, and which has always seemed as rich in mysterious signs to me as any astrologer’s den. I always pause for a moment under the wonderfully named Banco Ultramarino, for example, or those wall signs that warn of the dangers of high tension cables with the grave words
Perigo de Morte
. These things seem to mean more to me than they should. Even on those hot summer days when I have lingered at the bottom of the grand staircase of the Colegio de Santa Rosa de Lima and watched as two lines of schoolgirls in white uniforms came pouring down them under a mass of matching white parasols—it seemed to me magical in some way, a portent of
something to come that I could not yet divine. I would find out one day perhaps. On, then, to the Hong Kung temple, set behind a tiny square, with its boxed trees and dark red altars, and then to the Yeng Kee Bakery on Cinco de Outubro, where I used to eat for a few
patacas
a day. I remember living on the beef jerky of Pastelaria Koi Kei, on egg custard tarts and little else, and I certainly recalled those grim and grimy days as I walked on to the far side, where the ferries and cruise ships dock, and to the tail end of Felicidade and endless side streets arranged like a jigsaw puzzle that has no master plan to unlock it. Sometimes one needs to walk while eating biscuits and counting one’s own steps. I lingered by those strange small hotels where girls can be seen lounging on the lobby seats waiting for secretive clients. Places like the Pension Forson. You look through the window and you see an old Chinese man standing there with his waterproof coat and his briefcase inspecting the goods, impassive and matter-of-fact, while the goddesses fawn all over him. I would go in and be told politely that I was the wrong race.
No ghosts here, thank you
. But I could catch the girls’ eyes all the same, and sometimes I would be let in and I would spend an hour drinking jasmine tea from little bowls and a delicate pot painted with dragons and making love to a sly one from Guangdong, with that skin like compacted wax. How many down and out nights had I spent in those fleapits, the Hotel Hong Thai and the Man Va, whose sign still hung ominously above the street, and the
Vila Universal and the East Asia Hotel, with its desolate fish tanks visible from the street, at the bottom of which lay dying perch in their gloom. The East Asia was on the Rua da Madeira, and the restaurant on its ground floor was alive with shabby and satanic red lanterns. Many nights were lost there. A sign on the window read W
ELCOME TO STAY WITH US, WE ALWAYS NIS YOU
. And all the time I was thinking of the number nine.

I thought about it as I trudged down Marques looking at the waters of the Inner Harbor. Eight is the lucky number in Chinese, not nine (though a natural can be an eight as well), and I could not think why nine had come to be my number. Was there something buried in my own mind that had risen to claim it? Or was it something that had come
from
me?

O
n my way back along the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro I wondered what would happen if I stopped at one of the large casinos and made a single bet with $1,000 HK. I had not considered doing this because I had resolved to have the day off. But the more I thought about it, the more I found the idea irresistible. Yes, I thought, I could leave off for twenty hours, but then again I could just go in right now and get my fix, and what of it? Just one bet. Just one bet before bed, for after all, life is short and much shorter than you think. To think it over I stopped in Senado
Square, where the dampened teenagers milled around the stores, and went into an
establiemento de bebidas
for a quick oolong. It was about eleven o’clock by then and the lights were looking spectral, the balls of white glass burning with bright futility in that drizzle and social emptiness, and I sat by the window with my tea and saw that my hand was still emblazoned with Dao-Ming’s number, which had still not worn off. I suppose an abnormal amount of time had gone by without my thinking about this anomaly, but now that I considered it again I was stumped by the ink’s intransigence inside my skin. I looked at it more closely and rubbed at it with a dampened napkin, which made no effect upon it. It was like a tattoo.

The numbers were 6890 0899. I had not even thought about calling this number, because the thief doesn’t call the person he’s abused. I’d never use it. What would I say if I did? How would I apologize? I spat on the skin and rubbed the numerals yet again, but the saliva remained uncolored. I wondered how long I had been asleep in her bed. Days perhaps.

I gulped back my tea and fought the unrest that seemed to be rushing into me, and under my tattered umbrella I walked quickly past the Metropole toward the Avenida Doutor Mario Soares, telling myself that the dumbest thing I could do was call that number. She had burned it into my skin so that I would not forget her, and I didn’t know she had done it, but it was a woman’s ideal
revenge, wasn’t it? She had used magic ink and her number was ineradicable on a vital and visible part of my body, from where it apparently could not be removed.

Halfway down Soares I came to the Grand Emperor, with a gilded replica of the British royal state carriage outside it and Beefeaters in fur hats filling a vestibule of cretinous gilt. It’s the kitschiest of the gaming palaces on the island, and there is something in its kitsch that reminds you that there is more to being alive than being alive. But what?

I
stopped and swung myself around and through the doors that were opened for me, and into a cool imitation of some Hans Christian Andersen fairy palace imagined by a small child with a high fever who has seen many a picture of Cinderella. I passed under an imposing but strangely sympathetic portrait of Queen Liz and another of the Duke of Cumberland, a bad-looking dude if I may say, and as I went I fingered the very thousand-dollar note I was going to use. The Emperor was not as crowded as the Lisboa, and there was elbow room. I calmed down. Even an alcoholic can be calm at the bar.

I took the escalators up through floor after floor decorated in a European aristocracy theme. Passing the British floor (horses and pale women), I settled for the Venetian level, with myriad images of the age of Casanova, which is to say scenes with swooning inhabitants of boudoirs,
weeping over handkerchiefs, and of candlelit gallantries around baccarat tables. A memory of another secretive gambling city, intricate and comfortable as a large salon. But here in this particular casino I knew no one at all, since I rarely came there. I passed myself in mirror after mirror, and as I checked out the distorted face that was, surprisingly, my own, I inspected the space around me to see if any ghosts were there. In that rush of overdone opulence, it would have been less surprising. I walked through rooms defined by ebony figurine lamps, silk sashes, and gold frames, where men in windowpane jackets and out-sized rings loafed about on Louis XV sofas, and soon I came to a table that looked quite active and charged, with youngsters having a ball. It looked like a party. The cards here were dispensed by a traditional shoe, and the chips were pearled and multicolored. A pall of smoke hung above the table. I sat and said in Cantonese that I’d like to play a hand, and the youth looked up with distasteful surprise at my command of their slang and the social subtexts that go with it. They appeared weary at the idea of having to accommodate me, let alone lose to me at the table.

“Okay, welcome,” the dealers said, and passed the shoe toward me for the beginning of the next hand. I didn’t have my gloves with me, and I felt a little out of place touching the backs of the cards without the usual intervening material. But it didn’t matter. I kept the ink numbers well hidden.

I was only laying down a thousand by way of an experiment, and it was really to see what would happen with the hand that I was dealt. I was brimming with this curiosity, which was more than curiosity. I was proving something to myself—namely, that I was not haunted by the spirit world. That my luck was my own and not the gift of ghosts. Because if it was the latter I would be a candidate for the psychiatric hospital. The shoe passed down the table and the players sat back for a moment and flexed their fingers and minds. The kids looked me over. I was still rain-specked and semielegant but a tad worse for wear. There must have been something about me that suggested an overeagerness. They could not, however, know the real heat rising inside me. My feet tapped. It was caused by happiness at being back at a table. I looked across the room and saw Casanova staring back at me from behind a white mask. The pallet flipped. I looked at my watch. “So,” the banker said quickly. “The gentleman has drawn a natural. Nine! Nine!”