The Samurai's Daughter Read online

  He told her he was a samurai from Japan and he explained what that meant. He told her he was born out of wedlock and raised by his mother and her brother, Date Masamune, the most powerful daimyo of the north. How from a young age he had been curious about the outside world, how he learned English and Spanish, and how, when the shogun and Date Masamune organized an expedition to sail to Mexico and Spain, he was put on board to spy for them in order to ensure that, upon the delegation’s return, its leader, Hasekura Tsunenaga, spoke the truth.

  He told her about his year at sea, about Mexico and Cuba and his arrival in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and how he caught the fancy of the elderly Duke of Medina-Sidonia because they shared an obsession with swords. He told her how he fell in love with my mother, the duke’s niece, who was sixteen and already married to a nobleman who was mean and unfaithful to her. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia introduced Father to the king, Philip the Third, and he was well received. Of all the samurai he was the only one to embrace the Spanish culture. He told her how he defended my mother’s honor and, with the king’s approval, killed her husband in a sword fight, and how when the delegation from Japan left Spain to return home he stayed behind, disobeying his uncle’s instructions because he wished to be with my mother. He spoke of how she died a year later when I was born, and how, in the end, he decided to return to Japan and bring me with him. He explained how my great-aunt, who was on in years, was so distraught at our leaving he felt obliged to promise her that when I reached the age of reason, he would do all he could to bring me to Spain again so that I might choose which of my two cultures to live in. He told her all of this in bits and pieces, and only because Caitríona was insistent in her questions.

  We adapted to life on the island. The summer and early autumn were good to us. The days and nights blended into each other. Father taught me Japanese and Spanish, Caitríona taught me English. We slept next to each other in the shepherd’s hut. One night, Caitríona changed places with me and clung to Father in the darkness. Moonlight streamed in through an opening in the roof and I could see them kissing and touching each other.

  Once I saw her naked on top of him near the beach, when they thought I was napping, and she was crying out, and I was angry with him for hurting her and ran to help her. That was when they told me they were happy together and that Caitríona was my new mother.

  Looking back on the months we spent there I see it was an Eden. It was like the story in the Christian bible—Father, the first man; Caitríona, the first woman. There was no one else to chastise or censor them. His courtship of my mother had known long periods of frustration. It was riddled with delays and obstacles before they were allowed the peace of an embrace. Father and Caitríona had no courtship at all. They lay with each other whenever they wished. They were the world itself for a time, observed and mediated by no one but me.

  She learned to respect the guilt that sometimes took hold of him. Recollections of my mother made him feel he was betraying her memory, and they reawakened his devotion to what had been their short-lived life together, a life that breathed on within my body. Caitríona made room for it, and he was aware of her graciousness and touched by it. I suspect that some of the passion he knew with my mother was fueled by difficulty and the force of sin. But with Caitríona, their passion rose up from the earth and the sea.

  And it was there on that island, the very same one where Circe had captivated Ulysses, that I finally had the beginnings of a childhood. The loss we suffered in Spain, the violence of the pirates, the forced and cosseted luxuries of Venice, all of that faded under the cleansing sun in the transparent waters of Paxos. We drank from clean streams. We ate fish and goat. We dressed as we wished, if at all. We rose with the sun and slept when night fell. I counted pebbles and shells, fruit bats and shooting stars. It was only when the rains came late in autumn that Father decided it was time to leave.

  Caitríona suspected she was with child by then. Villagers on the northern end of the island took us to the mainland. From there we reached Piraeus and from Piraeus we boarded another ship bound for Alexandria. These voyages were calm and uneventful, and by the time we reached the ancient city of learning, its library long squandered, its lighthouse a ruin of stones, its populace pulverized by plague and decades of decline, our island idyll was behind us.

  ***

  From Alexandria, we traveled to Cairo by mule. After a few days there, astonished by the pyramids, we found a way to push east. Caitríona’s pregnancy was beginning to show by then. The journey by caravan across the desert to reach the port of Ain Al-Sukhna was wondrous. The blinding hot days, the cold nights, the acrid smell of the camels, their nasty tempers, the wise eyes of our Bedouin companions. We felt cleansed and calmed. We thrived on dates and figs. I learned to appreciate and measure the preciousness of water.

  In Ain Al-Sukhna, we boarded a large dhow with bright white sails and made our way south on the Red Sea. Father was content. And being content made him nervous, for though he wished to believe the worst was behind us, he knew he must never let down his guard. There was a placid steadiness to our days aboard the dhow that mirrored the surrounding landscape and its inhabitants. The Nubian people living on the shore looked like a race of gods. The kindness and reserve of the Arabs who held the tiller and worked the rigging of the dhow were nothing like the noisy, rambunctious Venetians. Father looked at Caitríona and me. He smiled at us. He took my hand. It was as if he had regained a kingdom lost to him since my mother died.

  I suppose such feelings of peace and redemption are necessary at times, even for a samurai warrior. Even though, for a price, the men sailing the dhow might have slit our throats. Even though sharp-toothed sea creatures pursued the hull, searching for prey. Even though life’s squalid side would soon come roaring at us yet again.

  – V –

  Dear Paolo,

  I hope this finds you well, and living in the manner I now wish to emulate after too many years of wandering and exploration. What drives people like myself to eschew the comforts of home by roaming so afar astray is a mystery. I have come to believe your way of life, dedicated to scholarship and contemplation, is far superior.

  The tragic tale I am about to set down will serve to explain my knowledge of your whereabouts.

  After much traveling and study of the cultures found in Persia, I took it upon myself to make a visit to the great Indian subcontinent before returning home. About two months ago my party and I arrived at the port of Aden, where all of the British East India Company ships stop for provisions to and from Surat. It was there I made the acquaintance of your friends—the most elegant and fierce gentleman from Japan known as Shiro, his small child, and a lovely Irish lass now in her fifth month of pregnancy. The Asian warrior recalled your having mentioned me to him and I was soon apprised of the adventures they survived in Venice thanks to your admirable intervention. How I wish I could report that what happened soon afterward had an outcome equally felicitous, but alas, I cannot.

  The first ship to come along heading east was unusually small, the HMS Attendant, of some one hundred tonnes. Its captain assured us that in exchange for bearing up with what would be close quarters during the estimated three-week journey, we would arrive in Surat infinitely sooner than if we were to wait for the next, much larger vessel that was not due to arrive for at least another month. This being the case, and what with the engaging spirit of the captain and the youth of my new acquaintances, we agreed to book passage that day. I believe that as trade has grown and coffers swelled, more and more ships sail the route to and fro, and as the number of embarkations increase, the quality of the hired seamen diminishes proportionately.

  Almost from the outset the captain’s lack of authority and his crew’s unhealthy disposition were apparent. The seamen were driven by envy and lust, and they displayed an astonishing aversion to cleanliness. They viewed the samurai with undiluted suspicion and made fun at his expense without any regard for rank, gallantry, or propriety. The only woman on board
was the Irish lass, whom all of these lowly men began to covet in a most malevolent manner, allowing many vulgar comments to escape their lips, while miming obscene acts of lascivious aggression that left little to one’s imagination.

  It made all of us uncomfortable in the extreme, most especially the captain. One obstreperous individual was singled out for a flogging by the First Mate, in the hope it might persuade the brute’s comrades to cease in their salacious behavior. But the punishment had quite the opposite effect, and begot a mutiny. A gang of them bludgeoned the First Mate to death. The captain, grabbing his charts, locked the gunroom and threw the key overboard. The crew, enraged and inflamed with a murderous fever, began to pull at the pregnant young woman’s garments. A long boat was lowered and the captain and my party managed to get into it. The samurai, wielding two gleaming weapons, a long and a short sword, fought off the mob as best he could while insisting that the lass with child join us in the long boat. But he was unable to pass his little girl to us.

  The Irish lass, mad with grief, attempted to swim back to the ship. When we succeeded in apprehending her, she tried to drown herself. The captain was forced to tie her down. As we rowed away all we could see were the mob of ruffians, cutlasses and clubs in hand, closing in on the lone samurai and his child. You could not imagine a more horrific sight.

  As the captain knew, and as we, to our great relief, soon discovered, the coast lay just over the horizon. We reached it safely and were taken in for the night by a family of fishermen. We then spent six weeks making our way to the coast of Syria from whence we sailed, arriving yesterday evening here in Trieste. The Irish lass has not spoken since our escape. I was entrusted by the samurai to bring her to you, an obligation I will gladly fulfill upon receiving your reply. She carries a letter from the Samurai and within her womb the samurai’s child, now his only living survivor.

  Your devoted friend,

  Pietro Della Valle

  – VI –

  Caitríona later told me that all she could think about on the journey from the Orient to Sicily was that the nuns and the priests of her Galway childhood had been proven right. The magnitude of her sins, and the extravagance of the pleasure she derived from them, had not gone unnoticed, and they were being paid for in full. The horror of human life had been laid out for her. Hell had been revealed to her as something well attainable here on Earth. It suddenly made sense to her that the devil had once been a favored angel of God. For only a spirit so familiar with God’s grace would know how to wreak the cruelest sort of pain and havoc upon a reckless sinner as inconsiderate of scripture as she.

  Once Pietro Della Valle left Caitríona in Sicily, Paolo Sarpi devoted himself to her. He told her it was a fitting way for him to conclude his exile. He removed her from the bustle of Palermo and found them a villa in the hills near Carini that commanded a view to the sea, down past the ruins of the ancient Hyccara. It was at this property one autumn morning, seated on a terrace under a pergola adjacent to an olive grove, that he finally got her to speak.

  In the midst of making conversation for the both of them, a methodology he had been using for some time, she—most unexpectedly—uttered a response. He closed his eyes as if to give thanks to the gods, but otherwise he made no special cause of it, so as not to risk herding her back to silence.

  Wasps feeding on grapes dangling above them inspired a vacuous observation. “I hope they leave some for us,” he had said, “for the grapes are at their ripest now and have a luscious look to them.”

  “That one’s being eaten alive,” was what she responded, with her head cast down, peering over the fullness of her abdomen.

  He followed her gaze and came upon a wasp that had been injured in some manner, but it was still aquiver, and surrounded by a legion of ants feasting on it.

  “I don’t think it feels anything,” he said. “I don’t think it’s in any pain.”

  “You do not know that for certain,” she said, lifting her head and looking at him.

  “No,” he said. “You’re right.”

  “They probably made it very painful for him,” she said.

  It was clear she was no longer thinking of the wasp.

  “But now it is over and done,” he said. “And he is at peace.”

  “What about the little girl?” she asked, tears forming in her eyes.

  He leaned forward and placed a hand on her knee.

  “You mustn’t think about that,” he said. “You’ll have your own child soon and you must endeavor not to burden it with your sorrow.”

  She wept for a good hour after that, as he held her hand, and when she was done she stood and crushed all the ants under the soles of her sandals. That evening she ate with appetite while he told her of his plan to accompany her to Spain once the baby was born.

  ***

  My half-brother came into the world at twilight in Caitríona’s bedroom at the villa. The local midwife and the midwife’s sister attended. She told me they were astonished to see that she seemed to enjoy the pain, the freedom it gave her to scream as loud as she wished. She knew Paolo Sarpi was listening below on the veranda overlooking the Mediterranean. She knew he would be agitated and appalled by the primitive reality of what was taking place upstairs, her agony piercing him like arrows. She said she was gripped by the thought that every person she knew, herself included, and every person she would ever know or see, came into the world in this manner. And she knew that, when combined with the primal nature of eating, defecating, copulating, and dying, the thoughts and theories, the books and paintings that Paolo Sarpi granted such importance to, fell by the wayside, unmasked as stratagems concocted to evade the fundamentals of human existence.

  With each scream she saw the world more clearly, a bloody and raw place she had been pulled into, an abattoir of frenzied hunting and killing. Art and religion’s decorative ramparts, the fine points of etiquette and clothing, were ill suited to compete with the digestive tracts and genital hungers of the creatures surrounding her.

  She thought about her mother who had gone through this for her, who had suffered the drunken lusts and violent temperament of her father, her mother who had raised two ungrateful sons, who had started life as a carefree girl from Sligo, only to be condemned to live out her days being abused as a slave in some feudal, far-off land. She screamed for her mother. She screamed at her thick, redheaded brothers whose ugliness and villainy had brought such shame and violence upon her, her wealthy brothers who still lived in blissful ignorance of what they had done.

  The Sicilian women hovered over her, touching her, placing their garlic-tinged fingers in her most intimate places, trying to assuage her, urge her on, praying for her while making comments so lewd—once they divined the sex of the emerging infant—it made her scream with laughter at times as well. She told me it was only after they had cut the cord and disposed of the afterbirth, after they had washed the child in tepid water steeped in chamomile, and cleaned her and placed the child with her, leaving her, going downstairs with their pails and bloodied linen to tell the signore—who they assumed to be the father despite the unusual shape of the baby’s eyes—it was only then she permitted herself to think of Father.

  It was not the first time he rescued her in Venice that came to mind, but rather the second time, the shipwreck off Paxos. She recalled what it had felt like to cling to him in the sea as the storm raged, holding onto me as he swam for the three of us, how he had found us food and shelter. She told me that as she held his baby boy against her breasts in that dark Sicilian villa, she went back, as she so often did, to the months they had shared together, living by the cove, where the baby had been made, where she’d known such desire, when sin had been a blessing.

  – VII –

  When mother and child were sufficiently recovered, Paolo Sarpi and Caitríona sailed from Palermo to Málaga. They arrived on a Sunday morning just after dawn. The water of the harbor was so clear she could see through it and watch the anchor biting the sand. A skiff row
ed out to retrieve them and their effects. A carriage took them to breakfast at an inn, where later they boarded a coach bound for Córdoba. Two days later another coach brought them to Sevilla.

  Both of them found southern Spain backward but charming, not unlike the Sicilian countryside they had come from. Caitríona thought that Sevilla looked to be as dirty as Palermo, but burdened with more formality, in dress and manners. The food was heavier, the wines too sweet. Plagued with fetid drainage, mosquitoes, and a large population of Catholic clergymen, Sevilla was cosmopolitan and colorful nevertheless. Once oriented, they were relieved to find the noble neighborhood, where enormous homes were built close to each other. These were the palace-like abodes that are so familiar to me now, with their well-guarded gates and tall white walls, their palm fronds and hanging bougainvillea.

  They were admitted to the grandest of them all, the Casa de Pilatos, where my great-aunt lived. They were asked to wait in the main courtyard. They sat on one of the stone benches in the shade, facing a gurgling fountain, pomegranate and grapefruit trees, and a statue of Emperor Trajan. One of Doña Soledad’s handmaidens appeared offering water.

  In those days my great-aunt was confined to a sturdy chair that a crew of manservants moved her about in. She was recovering from a fall and pain was a constant companion. Though it tested her temper, she made a great effort to transcend the discomfort. She told me her handmaiden related to her why the visitors had come, and that the news filled her heart with agitation.

  “How do they seem?” she asked the handmaiden.

  “Señora?”

  “Are they proper people? Are they properly dressed?”