Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond & China

The Tyrian Corridor

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Kunming, Yunnan Province, Ancient China (1986)

Rolling in his soft white bed on the seventeenth floor of The Kunming Hotel, Baldric didn't think it strange to see a middle-aged rat snooping through the backpack of a fellow traveler. For Baldric had just returned from Dali, a small rodent-friendly town 200 miles west of Kunming, and a further 200 miles to the Burmese border. In Dali he stayed at the only hotel in town, which for some reason was called Hotel Number Two. Later, he found out that Hotel Number One was in the nearby town of Xiguan, which will suggest to the perceptive reader that Timbuktu is by comparison a well-known tourist resort. 

The rat reminded him of the backstreets of Dali, but also of something else. What was it, now?  Ah, yes, he remembered — with a shudder! It was during his childhood in his father's mansion. Baldric had a vague recollection of going down a Tyrian corridor beneath Antonio’s study. Along the walls of the corridor were antlers, scorpion busts, and vampire bats in ultraviolet cages. At the end of this dark purple corridor was a heavy wooden door, which had on its lintel a fresco of a rat and a serpent:

His father was right behind him, explaining that while rodents and snakes were reviled by everyone, this was because they were powerful, adaptable, and feared by all.

Antonio opened the door, and Baldric entered a little purple room with two shrines: one to Great King Rat and another to Great White Snake. Antonio told his son that if he did naga-puja (snake-worship) and musika-puja (rat-worship), and if he chanted the words We are of one blood! all sorts of magical powers would come to him. Using an old Icelandic image of the giant snake Jörmungandr, Lorenzo instructed his son to fish for the Snake in the depths of his soul. He told Baldric to draw the Snake up to him, using the head of an ox as bait.

Antonio told him that if he succeeded in drawing the snake up from the water, he’d better be prepared to finish it off, since it was unlikely to appreciate being teased with the tasty head of an ox. Antonio gave him very specific instructions for how to do this, modelled on Thor’s success.

Antonio offered all sorts of other advice on how to out-connive and charm royal cobras, and on how to corner, convince, and otherwise outmanoeuvre the elusive black-footed tree rat. “Master these,” his father said, “and you’ll be like Mowgli, who rode a buffalo naked and threw a javelin at a snarling tiger!”

But Baldric had read The Jungle Book and knew that it wasn’t easy to get the best of a snake. He knew the slippery and insidious character of Kaa, with his eyes like glittering baubles and his voice sibilant and dread. He’d also read Kipling’s tale “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” and understood that snakes weren’t to be trusted with babies or open doors.

Royal purple corridor, indeed! Tyrian shades! For it was in that dank little room three floors beneath his father’s study that Baldric first realized his father believed a bunch of flaky lies. Did he really expect Baldric to become friends with a giant glistening venomous Satan?

This wasn’t the only revelation Baldric had at the end of Antonio’s Tyrian corridor. In the middle of his father’s paean to celestial serpents and sultan rats, Baldric saw a little mouse, an ordinary everyday little mouse, peek his bristling nose out from behind the Great Altar of the Cosmic Python. The mouse seemed to blink at Baldric, as if to confirm that Baldric was right to ignore Antonio’s insane cult, which seemed to have more in common with Kaa’s nonsense than with Kipling’s world of espionage, Great Games, and colonial firing squads.

I have seen all the dead seasons," Kaa said at last, "and the great trees and the old elephants, and the rocks that were bare and sharp-pointed ere the moss grew.”

What nonsense, Baldric thought. Even his friend the mouse knew it.

But in thinking this Baldric showed that he was also deluded about the world. For the mouse felt no solidarity with Baldric whatsoever. How could he, he was just a mouse. He certainly wasn’t blinking some Morse code of amitié. He was blinking because he was afraid of the snake altar. He was terrified by the size of Kaa’s jaw. He was thinking how he could avoid being swallowed like a one-course meal, his body becoming an adam’s apple in the throat of the Eternal Serpent, his little legs still scampering to escape while his tail twirled its last waltz goodbye. But Baldric took his blink as a sign of solidarity against the Powers of Darkness.

To be clear, Baldric didn’t feel that these Powers were to be resisted because they were evil, since Antonio’s nonsense had stripped that word of meaning. Rather, the Powers were to be resisted because they were constantly trying to tell him what to do. Some people are badgered by priests, others are badgered by practitioners of the Dark Arts.

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As he lay in his soft bed in the Kunming Hotel, Baldric felt himself getting into the communist spirit: Down with the Capitalist Oppressors! It was in this spirit that Baldric hailed the dopey mouse in a gesture of camaraderie. Yet the mouse hadn’t read The Communist Manifesto and instead just scampered into a nearby backpack, which was covered with a large blue rectangular flag.

So Baldric went back to dreaming about the week he had just spent in Hotel Number Two, back in the sleepy town of Dali. There, to reach his room, he had to cross a labyrinth of open-air stone corridors which he called Rodentland. Even in the middle of the day the inhabitants of this air-conditioned maze weren’t afraid to show their sharp little faces in the bright Yunnan air. This wasn’t surprising: he read that there were four rats to every person in China. With such powerful numbers, they no longer felt reluctant to come out of the closets and into the open-air sewers. Yet as soon as they asserted their basic animal rights there was a backlash of misunderstanding and discrimination among the powerful Chinese minority. In self-defence, the government announced its Take a Rat to Dinner policy. Citizens were encouraged to make rat puddings, slice them up like turnips or green peppers, and otherwise indulge their fancies for exotic cuisine. 

To Baldric this was the last straw: rodenticide in the name of haute cuisine! This was something only the French would do! The treacherous, sinister French! What had the rats done to deserve this persecution? They were allies, not hors d’oeuvres!  If the People slaughtered them like so many capitalist fellow-travellers, who would teach them to survive? It was better to think of rats as part of an extended human family, including dogs and cats, monkeys and bonobos, and all the other creatures scurrying to and fro over the face of the earth. 

But only Jains and vegetarians followed this philosophy. The Chinese were proud of the fact that they would eat anything that swims, slithers, crawls, slinks, hops, pulses, runs, cycles, canters, hydroplanes, or flies. This was confirmed to Baldric at Pangolin Gardens, a popular restaurant only a stone’s throw from Hotel Number Two. There, three grey-haired ladies in splattered smocks stalked the cement floor with bright steely eyes, searching between the tables with big sharp cleavers in their tough peasant hands. Chickens that squawked and nibbled at Baldric’s ankles were snatched, throttled, bled, plucked, chopped, and fried before he could change his order to a plate of vegetables. Fish in tanks were harpooned, scaled alive, and fried before his sizzling ears. Even the bean sprouts were nipped in the bud and pan-fried still thrashing and screaming. In a moment of weakness and sentimentality, Baldric tried to hide under his legs a dog that was scouring the greasy floor in search of scraps.

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Next: 🧚 At the Pangolin Gardens

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