MY GRANDMOTHER Rebeca Fuertes returned to Mituco fifteen years to the day after her departure. She arrived on the Ceres from Shanghai with a Chinese wardrobe and a Chinese maid and a Chinese child who she said was the maid’s but who was really my uncle Nicolas. She took a suite at the company Guest House on the Plaza Cortada, the main square of Mituco Marítimo, and could be seen each morning mincing along the board sidewalk in her tightly-twisted, high-slit Chinese dress, first to the Church of San Roque for mass, then to the theater, where she would sit in meditation for a quarter of an hour. In fact, she was soon the chief attraction of the town, not just because she was a gorgeous woman, but because she had long since been enshrined in the mythology of Mituco as Rebeca la fatal, so that as soon as her identity and schedule were known, men took to congregating in the square, sitting on the wooden benches beneath the almond trees or lounging against the pedestal of the statue of Javier Cortada, to observe her comings and goings.
It was Don Onofre Salvatierra who spoke to her first, tipping his straw fedora to her as she sallied from the theater and inquiring after her health, which, she replied, was excellent. His wife scolded him so cruelly for this boldness that he never spoke to Rebeca again, but the next day Don Policarpo Madera, who managed the Mituco Company Food Commissary, sent her a Fortnum & Mason assortment of fine teas, and that afternoon she permitted him a cup of Ceylon with her on the screened terrace of the Guest House.
Within the hour all Mituco knew that she was lately widowed of a wealthy merchant of the French concession and was taking a last look at the scenes of her youth before proceeding to the splendors of Paris.
The facts were that she had never been a wife, much less a widow, that she had not the fare to Panama, much less Paris, and that had she somehow managed to arrive at the City of Light, she could have expected no more splendor than the lampglow on a comer in Clichy. She’d ditched the easy life for good fifteen years earlier, along with her Peruvian mare and her pink parasol and her doting Don Patricio. Some are expelled from Eden, others desert; none return, except in dreams.
The morning after the Pluto cleared Mituco harbor, Sukasin had Rebeca up on deck learning a version of Salome’s dance in which she finale’d barebreasted and G-stringed with a papier-mâché head of John the Baptist nuzzled between her thighs. He sold this act to a cabaret in Panama while they were waiting for a ship to Europe, and kept her working from then on. She went to Covent Garden right enough, but never to a box in the grand tier. She joined the opera company and soon became a soloist, but Sukasin enraged the director, jewed him to raise her salary, sought leverage by seducing his first dancer. The director fired Rebeca, vowing that though she danced like an angel, she would dance no more in England while she was managed by “that Russian pimp.” She visited the Paris salons—or such of them whose hostesses might, as a special treat, hire a young danseuse to interpret M. Ravel’s Pavane or Maître Saint-Saëns’s Cygne—and showed herself off well enough to win a place in a French troupe. They lived well for a while—or Sukasin did, patronizing the best tailors and playing high-stake baccarat—, but in the end it was the same: he ran up debts, dunned the impresario for money, tried blackmail, and, his bluff called, kept Rebeca from a performance for which she’d been announced. So she was sacked again, and they fled France and a leash of yelping creditors. It was the same, too, in Bavaria, though here the end came when Rebeca was at the point of being chosen prima, and when it came Sukasin pawned everything, even a gold medal Prince Rupprecht had had struck for her, and left the bundle on the tables at Baden-Baden. So they were brought to dancing adagios around the cabarets of Middle Europe, Sukasin puffing like a tugboat but upstaging her every four measures and peacocking obscenely at the calls, and, of course, playing their pay away at gambling tables when he didn’t waft it up the bums of hotel boys. And withal, Rebeca stayed with him, though she might have soloed with any company in Europe, and/or been kept in stylish ease by Graf von This or Generaldirektor That; out of stubbornness, for she had left Don Patricio for him and had to justify the choice; and as self-punishment, since she had learned of Don Patricio’s suicide while yet in England; and through gratitude, since Sukasin had been an earnest, if self-interested, instructor; and from pity, for though he beat her like a dray horse when he drank, he could, hangover mornings, weep pitchers of repentant tears and whine and grovel marvelously; and by addiction, since he was always able, with a few caresses, to wilt her to a whimpering heap of mingled shame and pleasure: in short, from all the frayed and greasy motives which serve to bind worthy and worthless people.12 She was sustained by the radiant toughness gened to her by her forebears, the knowledge (Don Patricio’s gift) of her own metal, which base earth could not tarnish, and by her art, which opened little forest glades of order in the wilderness of passion where she lived. Then one night in Vienna Sukasin dropped her off a lift and smashed her talent.
There’s solace in the thought that God was punishing Rebeca for her disloyalty or making an example of her for other girls, but the likelier hypothesis is that He has a vulgar streak. So much of His work is, after all, suitable only for serialization on daytime TV. Hence the next few months, which Rebeca spent in the dingiest of Bahnhofplatz hotels, naked (since Sukasin sold her clothes) save for her cast and a blue peignoir, anticipating Adolf by aquarelling little Tyrolean views for selling to the tourists. Sukasin would sneer at these in contempt, then snatch them up and disappear for days, leaving her without food or attention, and on returning, whine and beg forgiveness, then scold her for a meager earner, then ask her pardon once again and tempt her with his leechy love and, once he had her wiggling, plaster-bandaged leg and all, spattle her over like a flapjack and pretend she was one of the poofs he had no money left to buy or charm to con. Then, sated, he would towel off with his second shirt, step back well out of fingernail range, and remind her how he meant, soon as her bones were knit, to bring her sufficient gentlemen in rut to give him a good living. So it went until Rebeca’s cast was chipped away and God, weary at last of putting out the sort of naturalistic drivel any hackl3 can write, regained his sometimes wandering sense of humor and the marvelous. As Rebeca Fuertes awoke the next morning from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a man.
She, or rather he—since such a metamorphosis extends even to one’s pronoun—was lying on his night side and, rolling onto his stomach, stubbed a fine, early-morning hard-on against the thin and lumpy mattress. Sharp, unfamiliar pain brought him awake. Or half awake, since at once he found that by hunching his hip and realigning he could melt the ache to pleasure. He began to rock gently. The silk peignoir purveyed a pleasant friction, which would have soon brought frisson, had not the strangeness of it pierced his drowsy mind and sent him scuttling around, bedclothes flying, into a cross-legged sit. He yanked up the peignoir and found not petals but a sprouting stalk. The grossly-lidded, polyphemic eye winked at him gravely.
The room remained unchanged. There was the sway-backed table with oxidizing apple core and set of paints. There, leaned against the wall, was last night’s work: a short-pants’d yodeler and his flax-braided liebchen framed between two point-peaked, piny Alps. There was the soot-streaked window with its smattered pane and frayed chintz curtains, and beside it the familiar jaundiced stain shaped like a map of France with Alsace triumphantly reannexed. There was Sukasin’s much-soiled second shirt balled in a corner; there was the pewter basin at which he had sprinkled himself briefly the night before. Why not goes back to sleep and forget this foolishness? But it couldn’t be done, for now Rebeca felt a painful heaviness in his bladder. Everything seemed about to gush out of the strange spigot stuck on in front of him. Ah, well, he thought, I’ll just have to let it be my master. Thank God Sukasin isn’t here. He’d want to look at it and do heaven knows what else, and I’d never make it to the chamber pot in time.
He got to the floor, his new parts swinging awkwardly like spread wings on a grounded albatross. Turning, he caught his reflection in the mirror on the door of the wardrobe. The peignoir, tented at his loins, hung loosely above, Oh, God, my lovely breasts! Sliced away clean, oh, God! He clapped hands to his cheeks and felt the prickle of new beard. Oh, God!
Some six or seven hundred yards away, sheltered by mounds of longhand notes and stacks of open volumes, Dr. Sigmund Freud sat spasmed in conception. Tumescent pride throbbed in his mind’s cervix and planted an idea which seemed to organize the hysterical confessions that echoed from the walls of his consulting room. He swept the litter from the center of his desk, took up his pen, and on a virgin sheet of foolscap scribed a phrase’ destined to gestate more than thirty years before it was delivered to the World: “In woman, penis envy14—a positive aspiration to possess a masculine genital organ.” He put the pen down and reached absently toward his crotch. Humming softly, he read what he had written. Penis envy. He squeezed reassuringly. Yes. Yes. It needed thought, of course, more checking with the data, but surely that was what was wrong with them. Poor things, how could one blame them? They each one craved a Schwanz!
Rebeca would have argued. Rebeca might even have induced the great man to wastebasket his page and thereby deny the world one of his most charming fantasies. Quite true, Rebeca had from time to time wished for the sort of organ Dr. Freud was just then clutching fondly, but only as owned and operated by someone else. He was acutely distressed to find one grafted on him. In the first place, he had no notion how to use it, Witness his pitiful attempts to aim it (rigid as it was) at the chamber pot. Observe him (after some painful efforts to depress its elevation below the horizontal) kneeling before the pot, wetting his belly with ricocheting spray. Then, too, it was dangerous to have such stuff bangling there unprotected. Watch him flop to the wooden chair, jouncing his ballocks against the edge, mashing them between his left thigh and the seat. And worst of all, the new equipment seemed inadequate replacement for the old, with which he had always been perfectly content and even, oftentimes, deliriously happy. His was not a morning of gratifled envy. Given the chance, he would have changed right back.
But it could not be done, and so he made the best of things. He examined his new body—hard and haired—in the mirror and decided that were he still a woman, he might have looked with favor at such a stranger. He auditioned his new voice—dropped a full octave—and discovered a timbre of command in it. He practiced walking with his new parts, even tried strutting as he had seen the young men do on Paris boulevards and on the malls of German spas, and began to siphon pride from the bunched vulnerability beneath him. And late that afternoon he used his broadened fists and newly muscled shoulders to give Vyacheslav Sukasin the beating of his life. He dealt less enthusiastically but just as efficiently with the young Englishman who showed up afterward with a photo of arabesquing Rebeca in his jacket and some very lewd imaginings in his mind. The two were of about the same height, weight, age, strength, and agility, but the tourist never got his guard up, being altogether thunder-struck at finding not the pliant ballerina who’d been touted to him but a long-haired chap in a blue nightgown who hit like a mule’s hoof. The rendezvous cost him a tooth, a suit of clothes, and forty pounds in cash, but returned him the best wogs-begin-at-Calais story of the London season. An hour later Rebeca, dressed now from Savile Row and smartly shorn by the Bahnhof barber, decamped Vienna on the Orient Express.
My grandmother Rebeca Fuertes was a man for five years. He went out to the Far East as a journalist, “the only profession [this is Bismarck’s phrase] for which no training is required.” He took part (since after 14th May, 1904, neither he nor his dispatches could get out) in the defense of Port Arthur, was cited by the Russian staff for valor and captured by the Japanese. He escaped—disguised as a woman, logically enough—and wandered into China, where he stayed in a succession of capacities, first tutor to the children of a Tsingtao merchant, last confidential secretary to the Imperial Viceroy at Chengchow. Throughout he pressed his sexual reeducation, beginning the first evening of his manhood in the Wagon-Lit outside Budapest. A demimondaine, a resident of transcontinental trains—she later switched to trans-Atlantic steamers and went down on the Titanic—reviewed his application in the dining car, accepted him (fees and tuition waived), found him a zealous student, renewed his scholarship for the duration of the trip, and contrived to ground him firmly in the basics before they gasped into Constantinople. He took his doctorate five years later in Honan with the Viceroy’s favorite concubine. The girl was cultivated, prized, and just fifteen; despite the risk, he fled with her downriver. Till then the taste of love had been less savory than what he’d known while still a woman, but now refracted echoes of his former life stirred him to ecstasy. Unable to keep lips or fingers from the girl, he took her from the steamer at Kaifeng. That night as she mewed and gibbered beneath him (even as he had done beneath Sukasin), his mind stepped from his body into hers. He felt her pleasure and shaped his movements to it—one body that was hers, one mind that was his. Later, after the girl had fixed his pipe and come to lie exhausted and sweat-glazed beside him, he gazed into the darkness billowing above their bed and said aloud, “Mother was right; I was meant to be a man.” He woke next morning to hoarse shouts and hammering on the door and found himself changed back into a woman. The Viceroy’s torturer, sent out to eunuchize the trespasser, saw that Rebeca had been miracled beyond his razor’s reach and sold her across the province boundary to a brothel in the Treaty Port Tsinan.
Rebeca’s memory of the next few years is hazed in opium fumes. The functionary’s after-pleasure pipe became the whore’s addiction. Her life was drawn in constant foreground on a scroll of dreams; it flowed like the great slow ocher river, which rose in an unseen distant hinterland and emptied into an unseen distant sea. Men drifted in the current. Rebeca says she fished them easily and pierced their souls with pleasure, that she was from the first not just that house’s prize attraction but the best whore in north China, if not the world. I have no cause to doubt this estimate. She had lived five years in a man’s body, after all, and knew the frets and flutings of that instrument and how to play fine tunes on it. She chose to see herself—and here the opium may have helped—not as a slave or worker but as an artist. She approached what may be called fier public with the artist’s blend of solicitude and scorn, interpenetrating feelings which imply an eagerness to please and a refusal to be influenced. Thus while she touched her lovers deeply and enjoyed their applause, she took no inspiration from them. Her heart and womb were sealed by a strong membrane of contempt. Her lovers were chiefly European—merchants and soldiers, no doubt a diplomat or two, from the concession—and as she was too profitable to be for sale, it oftentimes amused her to suggest one buy her for himself. “Amène-moi en Europe je te ferai heureux.” She would smile softly as he bit his cheek in longing, smile as he slunk away, smile now and melt the hours in her pipe until the next man drifted by. Two years wisped toward her lacquered ceiling, while out beyond her window an empire was stumbling toward nightmare.
I say two years because the clearest explanation for her exit from the brothel is that the Hankow rising (10th November, 1911) convinced the keeper to liquidate his assets. All Rebeca knows is that one day she dreamed of being rocked in a sedan chair through choked and squeaking streets, and next of kneeling over a parchmented old man who giggled as she mouthed his flaccid flesh. The latter dream became recurrent. She had been purchased by a Manchu nobleman, in whose own poppied fantasies there was a role for foreign devil, female.
She lived then in a pleasure garden in the hills above the city, where miniature grottoed mountains recalled the scenes of Chinese paintings. Dwarf cypresses and willows moaned beside a pool of carp born in the time of the Ming emperors and so wise with their age they could relate the antique stories of Stone Monkey and the Flaming Dragon. And there were gilded butterflies with ruby eyes who fluttered their bright wings, and onyx tulips whose jade petals spread and folded with the light, and a shamefaced gelded tiger which the old man led about on a silken leash. It pleased him sometimes to have Rebeca stripped and spraddled and splashed with cream, to watch her writhe as the beast laved her with his rough tongue. And sometimes it was not the tiger but ten or twenty famished Siamese cats, and a servant poured cream on her from a great bowl, and the tongues lapped at her crepitating flesh until her mind capsized in a typhoon of pleasure. There was, besides, a Japanese tattooist who illuminated her in obscure, painful sites, and a succession of coolies, culled from the alleys of the city, bathed and perfumes, primed with spice, and put to mount, according to the old man’s orders and before his avid eyes, upon Rebeca. Then, on a day when he had heard his ancient carp tell stories and mused upon his gilded butterflies and walked his tiger on its silken leash, when he had marveled how the Japanese tattooist’s art took life when Rebeca’s body quivered under feline tongues and observed the energetic stabbings of a coolie boy who’d never till that moment had a woman, the old man felt his potency restored. He had his servants drag the coolie off and mounted in his place. Giggling, he spiked long, poppy-yellow nails into Rebeca’s back. Blood bubbled to his knuckles, and when his eyes rolled upward and his loins burst, Rebeca felt her contempt dissolve into self-hatred. Her womb, which had repelled the seed of near a thousand men, accepted his.
Then he was no more at the villa. One may surmise—since my uncle Nicolas was born on 12th November, 1912—that Rebeca’s owner had learned of the Empress Regent’s abdication (12th February, 1912) and, like most of the Manchus, fled north whence they had come three centuries before. At Tsinan the young servants pulled up the onyx tulips and broke away their jade petals and caught the gilded butterflies and took them off to sell. The old ones and Rebeca stayed. The silver carp were netted up and fried; the cats were skinned for the stew pot. They were dining off the tiger when a company of Kuomintang soldiers found them some months later.
No doubt their captain had stern orders to respect all foreign devils, for Rebeca came to herself in a Christian mission in the city. Racked with pain, for she had no choice but to withdraw from opium. That was well for my uncle Nicolas—it was enough to bear a dynasty of suppurating chromosomes without also being born an addict—, but it almost killed Rebeca. In pain she painted background back into her life. In pain she recomposed her shattered sense of self. And in pain she bore her first son. Pain cleansed her mind and soul.
On the night after my uncle Nicolas was born, Rebeca dreamed she slept in Don Patricio’s mansion on Mituco. Unlike so many dreams, it was not a translation into childhood. She was her full age; Don Patricio was dead. She dreamed that she slept dreamlessly. On waking from her dream, she found it good. She had had art and passion, a medal from Prince Rupprecht and a citation from the Russian staff, a viceroy’s concubine and near a thousand lovers, and a full season in the garden of despair. Now it seemed good to sleep dreamlessly in a familiar house. And so she found a Chinese girl to pose as her child’s mother, and took them both to Shanghai, where she taught language in a private school for girls,15 and earned the money for a wardrobe and their passage to Tinieblas. She planned to find a man to buy that house for her, but all those years had not been molding her for dreamless sleep. In seeking that she found something quite different, her true destiny, which was to bear a hero.