Quasimodo Sunday was a spiteful day. With little to dull its power from the Luzon Strait to the Canton coast, the tropical storm roared off the South China Sea and hurtled across the Praya Grande. Whooshing across the face of the sheltered harbour, it flashed silver spears of lighting from keyholes in the sky. Marl white sheets of rain, like iron wires, cracked along the ground, drawing a net over the earth. Gutters overflowed and trenches grew fat with broken timber and shards of glass. Everything smelled of dank soil and uprooted trees. At noon, the solid mass of thunderheads had crowded the mouth of the bay, bedimming the shrine of the Sea Goddess, A Ma. By the time the temple stores shut, the pracas were a wilderness.
When the sky boomed as it did during that spring day in 1928, the mail steamers from the Macao and Canton Steamboat Company remained in the typhoon shelters at the end of wharves; they bobbed their long, lean hulls to the crash of the waves with no other sound to be heard along the Avenida da Republica apart from the rain and thunder. Had it not been for the occasional hoot from a foghorn or the ringing of the storm warning bell in the Chapel of Our Lady Guia, few would have stirred from their preoccupations at all. But then, later that night, the pigs started wailing, and they kept wailing for hours. Not because the greystone walls of the Matadouro da Macao were collapsing nor because the abattoir roof was being dismembered by the wind. They squealed with terror because their pens were being overrun by invaders. Blood-eyed troops armed with sword-blade teeth. Rats. Great long files of them that broke like waves on a shoreline. They scrambled from darkened holes, out of the sewers and nullahs. The floodwaters had forced them out. There were thousands of them. And they blew through the streets like a hot firewind.
At the heart of the seafront, the restaurant in the Hotel Riviera, famous for its frescoed ceilings and spicy African Chicken, was overcome with panic. Pandemonium broke out. Voices clashed, bellboys feinted, elderly Macanese ladies shrieked with fright. Shouts of ‘‘Aiyaa!’’ and ‘‘Gow Meng!’’ reverberated from the top floor suites all the way down to the basement cellars. Some guests, gambling over a game of fan tan, raced about helter-skelter, open-mouthed with animal fear in their eyes. Others leapt onto settees, lifting their flapper dresses, baring their white thighs and tearing at their feather boas. The rats had come crashing through the verandah doors just as the coolie boys were laying strips of towelling into the shutter frames. They sprang from the brass hatstands, onto the art-deco dining tables, atop of Edwardian chiffoniers – knocking down boaters and cloche bonnets, smashing Baccarat crystal, upending plates of curried crab and bowls of brandada de bacalhau. They scuttled into the chambres privees, in and out of giant Vuitton steamer trunks, up jazz suit trouser legs and down silk jacquard curtains. They tore at the lemon enamel hairbrushes, at the sterling silver vanity bottles, at the alabaster rouge pots and dressing table jars. Then, like leaping fish, they were gone, hurling themselves off the balconies into the main street below.
Shortly before nine o’clock at night, the rats reached St Lazaris Church. By ten o’clock, the rat-pack had overrun the north of the city.
In the poorer parts of town, near the Kun Lam Temple, the rodents shot from under the shadows of the shanty huts, darting into homes, up cocklofts, hiding behind wardrobes and under workbenches. They carried the stink of rotted meat and faeces; weeks-old piss matted to the hairs on their spines. Clawed toes, brown as rust, scraped against doors; long-nailed hands dug into soft, barren walls. The vibrations of their feet passed over houses. Click, clack, click. Upon rooftops, onto drain pipes. Click, clack, click. The rats scurried up the cheekbones of buildings, pressed their snouts under shophouse floors, dangled from telegraph lines. Dogs barked, roosters crowed, women, young and old, screamed. An hour later, Macao, the tiny, dilapidated Portuguese colony, just about connected to the southern tip of the Chinese mainland, thirty-four miles west of Hong Kong, was overwhelmed; the grand old lady of the China coast had been stormed: the grey horde poured in.
By the Largo da Sien there was frantic activity on the cobbled square. It was nearing midnight and a band of wild-eyed rat catchers, covered in oilcloths, directed their dogs with calls and clicks of their tongues. ‘‘Hai! Hai!’’ they shouted as the mongrels went speeding into the darkness, yelping and growling in the distance. The men had set almost fifty baited traps in isolated places; rectangular boxes, three feet deep and about a foot wide made of wood and wire net. They’d filled them with sour bean curd. Each trap had numerous openings on the sides with the wire inverted so that when a rat entered it was impossible for it to escape. The ratters were in the process of setting down more when a bonfire roared to life in the centre of the square. A boy, no more than twelve, stood with his back to the wind, tossing the cages of squealing vermin into the dome of fire, pulling the cages out moments later with an elongated hook. Soon the air, thick with the stink of roasted meat, mingled with the dogs’ whinnying and the ratters’ shouts. Every fifteen minutes two men dragged a sled loaded with wire cages into the square – a hundred or so rats each time. The process went on through the night.
For a further seven hours the rat catchers carried out their macabre work, until daybreak came and the people of the besieged city began to emerge from their homes to acknowledge the wreckage. All along the praya they witnessed the detritus from the storm: telegraph poles bowing their heads, stripped trees with toothpick arms, their branches like broken ribs, metal roofs bent and distended, folded in on themselves, beaches strewn with graveyards of candle-white fish, the short slapping sounds of the surf regurgitating gurgling carcasses of belly-bulging cows, the thousands and thousands of sandflies, the ash-mountains of dead rodents. Everything smelled of wet, mouldy earth and burned animal hair.
Behind the city the storm sewers continued to flush surplus rainwater through 30-inch underground pipes, draining all manner of debris into the catch basin that ran through to the sea. It was here that a pale hand emerged. Creeping, sliding, it edged forward like a stiff-limbed crab through the surf. Fingertips wrinkled and waterlogged, the hand tumbled about, twisting with the violent artificial tidal flow. On occasion it recoiled as the heavy wrist-rope caught on some scrap, only to surge forward again once the tangling was freed.
A moment later a pale-elbowed arm appeared, followed by a head. The waxen, beardless face was stiffly cocked to the left shoulder. Lips, ground shut from contractions, were blue, refusing to open; the throat, swollen like a yellow marrow, was choked with a string of rosary beads. The stubble on the back of the corpse’s neck, where a razor had pruned the hair, swayed like tiny weeds, almost fluffy. There was a shard of broken glass imbedded in the flesh of the neck and the bottle-green skin of the sinewy chest was covered in cuts: dog-toothed scars where rats had gnawed through the muscled pectorals.
The water surged again, forcing the rest of the torso through the mouth of the pipe. The body tumbled. Teeth rattled as the head wrested from left shoulder to right. Eventually, the legs materialized, followed by the knees, chewed and glazed with brushstrokes of pink. A foot flopped out, white as milk; no shoe attached, no flesh, no tendons. Just stark bone.