The Heat of the Sun

my words on a whited sepulchre.
Don’t talk to me about truth! This is vengeance, the vengeance of a heart incapable of love.’
    ‘It is you who cannot love.’ The words came from the masked servant, who strode away from the wall, stretched a finger towards Kate Pinkerton, pointed, and intoned like a mantra,
‘Liar. Liar.’
    Then this servant, who was no servant at all, discarded his mask and his dark wig. Kate Pinkerton shook, almost convulsed, and I longed to comfort her as everything slipped from her, the edifice
of years crumbling like a sandcastle at the inundations of the tide.
    Yamadori’s lips curled. ‘Now, madam, you understand. Already, the crisis has come to pass.’
    ‘Why did you do it?’ Trouble said coldly. ‘Why, Mama?’
    Her voice cracked. ‘Would you be an Oriental, and a bastard? Can’t you see, I’ve saved you from shame!’
    ‘You’ve saved the senator. You’ve saved yourself.’
    I staggered, and the screen crashed to the floor.
    ‘Mr Sharpless!’ Kate Pinkerton shook her head. ‘You disappoint me gravely.’
    Her words stabbed me, killed me.
    ‘Sharpless! So now you know,’ Trouble was saying. Yamadori was upbraiding his grinning nephew. But all was not yet over. Violent hands flung back the doors and there, in a crimson
opera cloak, stood Senator Pinkerton. He was drunk. No mask concealed his flushed face, and his hair, dislodged from its customary grooves, hung dishevelled over his heavy forehead.
    ‘Pinkerton! What is the meaning of this?’ Yamadori said.
    The senator made no answer. He strode towards his son. ‘Bastard. Ungrateful bastard. What do you think you’re going to do, swan around the world with this filthy Jap?’
    Trouble’s words were icy. ‘Why not? It’ll get me away from you.’
    ‘Ben, no.’ The senator reached for him. Trouble flinched. Loathing flashed in his face, but fear too, as if his father, at a drunken touch, could drag him back to his old life.
‘You’re my son.’
    ‘Then why do you hate me?’
    ‘I love you. Don’t you know that? From the moment I first held you in my arms, I loved you.’
    ‘Enough.’ Yamadori’s great sleeve rose, glittering, as if to sweep the senator from the room.
    ‘Filthy Jap!’ Reeling, the senator pushed him in the chest. They grappled; Yamadori called for his servants, but his opponent’s attention was distracted: Trouble had rushed for
the great doors.
    ‘Ben, wait!’ The senator lumbered after him.
    It was time for the fireworks. A fanfare surged from below; lights plunged to blackness, and, through the great windows of the high palazzo, explosions in every shade of red flared around the
building. The phosphorescence, flowering and fading, plunged the scene into visionary strangeness, as the senator and Trouble faced each other at the top of the imperial stairs.
    Crowds held me back and I could not reach them; nor, over the explosions, could I hear their words. I could only watch the anguished tableau – flung arms, flung-back heads – that
seemed to be enacted not just in the silence but with the deliberation of mime, and all its inevitability: inevitable, that clutching hand, slapped away, then returning; inevitable, those words
from bared teeth, from corded neck, that denunciation that might sever everything, or, instead, in the fury that it raised, tighten every bond it sought to break; inevitable, that hand that struck
out, sending the smaller figure tumbling down the stairs.
    And there at the bottom of the stairs, crashing through the crowd, was Aunt Toolie. Her words were lost to me also, but I knew them: ‘Darling!’ – yes, first
‘Darling!’, as she fought her way towards the sprawled, inert form; then, as her gaze travelled upwards to the caped figure at the top of the stairs: ‘You’ve killed him
– you’ve killed him!’
    Sparks, the colour of blood, cascaded across the sky.

 
Between the Acts

 
    Stories are strange. Nothing is stranger than stories.
    Years passed before this one was clear to me – I pieced it together from fragments, like a shattered ancient relic, and not until after Senator Pinkerton’s death did I believe I had
it complete – but in memory it seems that everything was revealed to me on that night of the Blood Red Ball. Later I saw the story as a succession of scenes unfolding, vivid with the
passions, but not quite real, like Japanese woodblocks come weirdly to life.
    The place is Nagasaki: a house on Higashi Hill,