Butterfly's Shadow (3 page)

‘She asks what religion you observe.’

‘Oh! Right.’ This was way beyond what he had been expecting. ‘My family . . . we’re Methodist. Not relevant here, I guess.’

Sharpless passed on as much information as he felt was helpful. She nodded. Another pause. More murmured words. Sharpless translated as the girl turned expectantly towards the lieutenant.

‘She asks when you wish the ceremony to take place.’

‘What ceremony?’

‘The wedding.’

Pinkerton frowned and Sharpless added, ‘I explained earlier—’

‘Oh, sure, right. It’s a marriage.’ A note of impatience. ‘I didn’t think we needed an actual ceremony . . .’ Unspoken: to hire a hooker.

‘In her eyes she will be your wife, lieutenant.’

To Pinkerton’s growing irritation Sharpless went over the situation again: there would be formalities; the girl was not a prostitute.

‘She expects a ceremony.’

Pinkerton was short of time, already due back on board for a duty watch. He reached into his back pocket and brought out a flask of bourbon. On a low side table were two tiny porcelain cups, and unscrewing the bottle he poured a measure into each. He handed one cup to Cho-Cho, and raised his own, encouragingly, in a toast.

She waited, the cup held lightly in her fingertips, eyes flicking from one man to the other, seeking guidance. Pinkerton’s cheerfully expectant mood had sagged. He raised his porcelain cup again, attempting to revive the festive spirit.

‘Bottoms up!’

She watched as he drained the cup.

‘I now pronounce us man and wife.’

Pinkerton nodded at Sharpless. ‘Can you tell her we just had the ceremony? Tell her it’s the American way.’

He liked the phrase, he felt justified: you could say it was the American way under present circumstances. Sharpless kept repeating she wasn’t a hooker, but what other kind of girl would
sign up to a ‘marriage’ with a visiting sailor? She must know the ropes. If it was a case of keeping up appearances, he was prepared to go along with the game, though it wasn’t cheap: the licence cost $4, the lease of the house $30, and there would be running expenses, food and so on. He had noticed a dumpy servant girl hovering outside the door; she’d probably need to be paid. Still: the place looked clean, and he could end up spending three or four weeks here. It was definitely preferable to a dubious Madam establishment in some backstreet in town.

‘You will need to put your signature to the marriage contract,’ Sharpless said, ‘to observe the correct procedure—’

Pinkerton found his fellow countryman a bore, a real pen-pusher.

‘Right. Just fix it.’

He felt the consul’s eyes on him; cold yet fierce, the look a senior officer might hand out. Pinkerton found himself straightening up to attention. He adjusted his tone:

‘Sir? Thanks for your help.’

To his dismay, the girl was now kneeling, her forehead touching the woven mat that covered the floor. What was he supposed to do here? Uncertain, he reached out and took her hands; raised her to her feet. For the first time they were close, touching, her face lifted to his. He was aware of the texture of her skin: smooth, not rosy like the girls back home, but pale, a sort of ivory, with a sheen like a peeled almond. And her eyes were almond shaped, as he had heard them described, but shining, with the glow of an uncut gem. She was smiling up at him. Even though she stood very straight the top of her head was way below his shoulder. For a moment he was caught up, sensed an odd churning in his chest, and held on to her hands, the smooth fingertips cool against his palms. Did she guide his hand? He was momentarily confused, and to his surprise found himself raising her fingers briefly to his lips. He was relieved to see that Sharpless, glancing out of the window, had missed the embarrassing moment.

‘Tell her I’ll be back with my stuff.’

Pinkerton glanced around the bare room. No closets, no chests that he could see. What did these people do with their belongings? The houses were flimsy affairs made of wood and what looked like paper screens. And as for home comfort, forget it.

Sharpless had told him the word for goodbye:

‘
Sayonara
.’

He pronounced it awkwardly in his flat American drawl. Then more awkwardness, as he put on his shoes and slid open the flimsy door too forcefully, so that wood banged against wood.

The girl watched him go as he swung off down the hill back to the ship, saw his slouching ease, the way his body moved, the confident stride. In the sunlight he glittered white and gold. He glanced back and sketched a brief, good-humoured salute. She caught his smile: found herself smiling back. He looked younger when he smiled, almost a boy. She folded her hands into her kimono sleeves and squeezed her elbows nervously. Everything was different: what she had undertaken as an unpleasant duty, an obedient acceptance of fate, had changed its aspect. She continued to watch the American as he dwindled into the distance, then out of sight. She recalled his eyes that echoed the sea in the harbour; his hair that blazed like fresh wheat, his strong hands gripping hers, the shock of his lips on her fingertips. The way he towered over Sharpless-san, his head almost touching the ceiling. His smile. She saw that Lieutenant Pinkerton was beautiful.

The transaction was precarious; she was aware that the marriage was not intended to be permanent, but she could try and make it so. She could become useful, valuable, even. She could, perhaps, be taken back to America.

She said, diffidently, ‘Would you say, Sharpless-san, that Lieutenant Pinkerton is a fine-looking man?’

She could not express the opinion herself; that would be
noroke
, quite inappropriate, but to seek his view was an acceptable way to suggest it.

He frowned. ‘Many Americans have that appearance.’

He kept his voice deliberately neutral. When she had asked about the wedding ceremony, and received Pinkerton’s curt response, Sharpless had observed her small, woebegone face.

What ceremony else?
He felt there was indeed something Ophelia-like about Cho-Cho; a commodity to be traded by her family, an object to be desired by a man, and in due time discarded.

When he was promoted from vice-consul he found himself saddled with the only aspect of the job he had found unwelcome – a task he felt was hardly part of the diplomatic process.

The departing consul had shrugged. ‘You can refuse, it’s unofficial of course, and doesn’t come up often – most of them go for the tea-house option. But when the ship’s in port for a while . . . You have to ask yourself; would you want one of our boys to sail home with an unmentionable disease? It’s a convenient system and it works. Everyone wins.’ And so it had seemed, until it came to Pinkerton and Cho-Cho. But the girl wanted him here: he had known her father and she trusted him. He remained uneasy.

He had seen the way she watched Pinkerton. He wanted to say to her: leave now. Run away. Find work in a respectable tea-house, learn to sing and play an instrument; you don’t have to do this. But of course she did have to do this. The marriage broker had made it plain: with both parents dead – worse, a father ruined by debt, disgraced, redeemed only by his honourable suicide – the girl belonged to her uncle, and the uncle had entered into the contract on her behalf. She was a negotiable property.

The consul had listened to the story with dismay. ‘And her own wishes?’

‘She has no wishes,’ the broker shrugged. ‘She has no voice.’

Sharpless’s mournful countenance and long muzzle did not easily crease into laughter, but the habitual grimness deepened as he glanced at Cho-Cho. She was still gazing out of the window, studying the now empty bend in the road as though it held an after-image of the man no longer visible. He found the sailor crude, ill-mannered. Luckily this liaison would be relatively brief; but he feared the girl would be bruised by it, her first such experience. He hoped that Pinkerton would be kind.

From across the room Cho-Cho was murmuring that she knew only a few words of this foreign tongue, gleaned from travellers calling on her father. She glanced again at the view from the window. She would like to acquire some American words; to speak, and to understand. She was known to be quick to learn. Could Sharpless-san do her the honour of giving her some help; perhaps there was a book she could study . . .?

‘I’m sure we have some books in the consulate library,’ he said, and found himself adding, ‘I could give you a lesson or two. It is not a difficult language.’

‘Not like Japanese, you mean?’ He saw that the girl had a feeling for humour.

‘In return,’ he suggested, ‘you can correct my mistakes.’

‘Oh! Your Japanese is perfect, Sharpless-san.’ She hesitated, and added, barely audibly, ‘Almost.’

He watched her mouth curve into a smile, the bright glance she threw his way, and felt a pang, sweet yet painful. A paternal feeling? Or something less admissible? He bowed and moved briskly to the door. He reminded himself she was just a child.

The first night, after dinner, rising with aching knees from the floor cushion, Pinkerton made a mental note to bring in a couple of chairs and maybe a proper table. How uncomfortable did life have to be to qualify as ‘traditional’? He had once visited an Amish family back home and had come to the conclusion then that anyone who refused the advantages of the modern world needed his head examining. His mother had had the good sense to get herself one of Mr Hoover’s vacuum cleaners and declared herself tickled pink.

Dinner itself had been tricky, an array of mostly uneatable bits and pieces, but he managed a little rice and slices of something that might or might not have been pork. The sake was okay but he couldn’t see it knocking bourbon off the market.

In fact the whole evening had hardly gone according to plan; somehow all this Japanese . . . ceremonial had sent him off course.

Now he intended to lead the girl swiftly to bed but before he could make a move she slid open the door and waved a hand at the sky. He looked up. Nodded.

‘Right. Full moon.’

He waited. The waiting was getting him down. The silence was getting him down, the famous Japanese silences that, Sharpless told him, ‘spoke between the words’.

The consul had recited an old Japanese poem to him when they first met; something about a pond and a frog that jumps
in. The last line was ‘The sound of water.’ The line, Pinkerton had commented, rang no poetical bells for him.

‘Ah,’ Sharpless said. ‘We Americans might translate that line as “Splash!” But for the Japanese there needs to be an awareness of the silence between the jump and the splash. They would wait to learn the sound from the silence. Hence, “the sound of water”. That does it. Do you see?’

No he did not. For Pinkerton, a poem should make sense, describe something properly. And rhyme. At school they read Longfellow, learned verses by heart. You didn’t need to hang around waiting for the silence to tell you what in hell Longfellow was driving at.

The girl was still looking up at the moon, he could see its light reflected in her eyes. Then she folded her hands and made a small bow, towards the sky, like a greeting. She turned her head slightly; now she seemed again to be waiting for something. He took a chance and inclined himself in a sort of bow in the general direction of the moon. She smiled.

In the bedroom he unwound her sash, lifted the kimono from her shoulders – the nape of her neck above the collar was as frail as a child’s and for a moment he wondered just how young she was, nobody had mentioned her age, but too late to worry about that now. Pinkerton was not inexperienced, but something about this light, yielding body was unexpectedly arousing. In his urgency he ripped the fragile undergarment of white cotton and as the weight of his body crushed her against the mattress she gasped. Then she cried out.

The futon was as uncomfortable as he had feared and there were one or two misunderstandings and a few tears, but she took instruction well.

Afterwards she looked into his face and enquired, ‘Nice?’

‘Oh, sure. Nice.’

‘Good.’

He was surprised. ‘You speak English!’

She shook her head, serious. ‘I learn.’

He laughed. That was cute and it was also true. She had much to learn, but she was learning fast.

Later, while Pinkerton slept, snoring gently, she explored her body, the silky folds he had pushed his way into so forcefully, still raw, so sore that even the touch of her tentative fingers caused her to cry out, softly. Her husband, stepping out of his white trousers, had revealed a startling body part, bright crimson, as thick as her wrist. Men could be rough, they had warned her in the tea-house, but no one had warned her of the pain, sharp as a knife blade, a burning flame between her legs that split her apart with each thrust. She slipped cautiously from the bed.

Among her few possessions was a doll, a
Cho-Cho
doll, dressed in a kimono and obi sash, tied in the butterfly bow that gave her the name. She had sewn clothes for the doll, a kimono from a scrap of discarded silk, tiny beads binding the stiff black hair. But she had never undressed the doll completely. Now she removed the white underclothing and examined the pale body. Between the legs was nothing. Limbs flowed smoothly up to hips and waist. The doll could not be entered. The doll could feel no pain.

She washed away his stickiness, her blood. Applied a cooling ointment made from herbs. Summoned back to the futon, she was obedient, her small body pliable.

She was learning all the time. She no longer cried out, biting her lips as she flinched. She managed to smile, and learned that she was required to move in various ways, the better to accommodate him. There was still more she could learn, and did. And though sometimes she still wept, the tears trickling into her obediently smiling mouth, always she would enquire afterwards, anxiously,

‘Nice?’

He was surprised, from the evidence of the sheet that first time, to discover she was a virgin. Or was she? These girls had ways of fooling you. All part of the game.

And she was learning fast.

‘American way?’ she would ask, nodding, when he showed her something new. She had an admiration of things American that he found appealing. These people sat on the floor to eat and had some pretty funny ideas, but she was open to instrucion, and not only in the bedroom.