The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

pants were perfectly pressed. The student uniform, on the other hand, was as modest as that of the masses that populate the streets.

      Another Sunday, the same Professor Chen invited me to visit the Summer Palace, accompanied on that occasion by his wife and son, and after touring the gardens and strolling together to the lakes that surrounded the graceful pavilions, they invited me to eat in the palace restaurant. It was open to the public, the professor told me, but to an extremely reduced public, of six or seven tables. Mrs. Chen informed me that it was the best restaurant in the capital, and perhaps in all China. “The chef here enjoys tremendous prestige,” she said, “he was the head chef of the last empress,” and added with a certain snobbishness: “Yes, sir, the soup that you are eating at this very moment comes from the recipe book of an imperial kitchen, perhaps the one preferred by the dowager empress herself.” It seemed on that day it fell to her to do all the talking; she spoke enthusiastically about the theater—that may have been her profession, I don’t recall—and about their major authors, all important since before the advent of communism: Kuo Mo-jo, Lao She, Ts’ao Yu, whom I read shortly thereafter in English or French translations, and at the end she paid a passionate tribute to the Peking Opera. She grew visibly disillusioned when I told her that I had not seen a single performance during their triumphal tours throughout Europe. She added shortly after leaving the restaurant that the three wonders of China, its most refined achievements, were: the architecture of the Temple of Heaven, to which her husband had accompanied me, the Peking Opera of specific periods—the Ming, the Tang, namely!—which I could still see and hear on stage because they continued to be part of the current repertory. And the third: the delicious cuisine of Szechuan, which we had just eaten. Her son, smiling, said that his mother had been born in Szechuan, and therefore was unable to be objective. We laughed and as we got up from the table the four of us began to applaud.

      To end our encounter, we went to have coffee at the home of a married couple who were friends of the Chens and fond of that drink. The host was an architect and, like Professor Chen, had lived a long period of his childhood in France, and his wife, also an architect, was actually French. For this reason, they enjoyed coffee. I was received cordially. The architects were younger than the Chens, and perhaps for that reason the solemn expressions of protocol were tempered in them. And that night I began to realize some things: during Stalinism, the Party ideologues did not follow Soviet methods in an orthodox way; at least in the world of culture, there existed certain oases protected from the venomous darts of the ultra-sectarian members of the party. The two couples with whom I was taking coffee were partisans of, or at least were close to, a political movement similar to European social democracy, whose leader was Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, creator and first president of the Republic of China, shortly before the First World War, and also vice president of the Republic during the communist period, very likely an honorary title, but one that allowed her to protect a number of vulnerable people and to find them respectable jobs. The vice president belonged to China’s richest family of financiers, which were not banned, since some Chinese political and cultural personages, like Chu Teh, the minister of Defense, the hero of the Long March, Chou En-lai, the most powerful vice-president of the republic, came from Mandarin families, the Chinese aristocracy, as did several respected writers of the period: Kuo Mo-yo, Pa-kin, and many others. They all had the opportunity to leave for Taiwan or Hong Kong when the old regime collapsed, or to return to Europe or to the United States, as others did; however, they remained in China and entered into an agreement, perhaps tacit, to be accepted in the country as long as they complied with certain conditions. Moreover, during the year 1962, there existed a group of private industrialists who ran their companies. The condition for enjoying certain guarantees depended, above all, on not having collaborated with the Japanese during their occupation of the country in the Second World War nor having been informers for the government of Chiang Kaishek, nor having betrayed opponents of that regime. Among the efforts of the widow of Sun Yat-sen, which were many, a minor one was the publication abroad in various languages of a propaganda magazine: China Reconstructs, where many non-communist intellectuals were welcomed, as well as some foreigners who had married Chinese citizens, such as the architects in whose home I went to take coffee with Professor Chen and his wife.