Victory City(10)
“Today is the day of the resurrection,” Domingo Nunes said without faltering. “Ele ressuscitou, we say in my language. He is risen. But I see that the one you are trying to resurrect is someone else, someone you loved who walked into a fire. You are using your sorcery to bring a whole city to life in the hope that she will return.”
“Your speech impediment,” Bukka Sangama said. “Where did that go?”
“She whispered in my ear,” Domingo Nunes said.
“Welcome to Vijayanagar,” Pampa Kampana said. She pronounced the v almost like a b, which was a thing that sometimes happened.
“Bizana…?” repeated Domingo Nunes. “I’m sorry. What did you call it?”
“First say vij-aya, victory,” Pampa Kampana said. “Then say nagar, city. It’s not so difficult. Nag-gar. Vijayanagar: Victory City.”
“My tongue can’t make those sounds,” Domingo Nunes confessed. “Not because of any speech impediment. It just won’t come out of my mouth the way you say it.”
“What does your tongue want to call it?” Pampa Kampana asked.
“Bij…Biz…so, in the first place, Bis…and in the second place…nagá,” said Domingo Nunes. “Adding up—and here I make my best effort—to Bisnaga.”
Pampa Kampana and Crown Prince Bukka both laughed. Pampa clapped her hands, and Bukka, looking hard at her, saw that she had fallen in love.
“Then Bisnaga it is,” she said, clapping her hands. “You have given us our name.”
“What are you saying?” Bukka cried. “Are you going to let this foreigner label our city with the noises of his twisted tongue?”
“Yes,” she said. “This is not an ancient city with an ancient name. The city just arrived and so has he. They are the same. I accept his name. From now on this is and will be Bisnaga.”
“The day will come,” Bukka said mutinously, “when we will no longer allow foreigners to tell us who we are.”
* * *
—
(Thanks to Pampa Kampana’s amused delight in Domingo Nunes and his garbled mispronunciation, she chose to refer to both the city and the empire as “Bisnaga” throughout her epic poem, intending, perhaps, to remind us that while her work is based on real events, there is an inevitable distance between the imagined world and the actual. “Bisnaga” belongs not to history but to her. After all, a poem is not an essay or a news report. The reality of poetry and the imagination follows its own rules. We have elected to follow Pampa Kampana’s lead, so it is her dream-city of “Bisnaga” that is so named and portrayed here. To do otherwise would be to betray the artist and her work.)
* * *
—
Even though Pampa Kampana was still deep in her whispering trance for twenty hours a day, her evident new feelings for the foreigner—her eyes searching for him during the one hour in which they were open—were the cause of much royal displeasure. News of Pampa’s infatuation reached King Hukka Raya I’s ears before Nunes was presented to him for the first time, and caused much irritation. The Portuguese, who hadn’t been informed of this, introduced himself to the king with ornate courtesy, and mentioned his gift for traveler’s tales. “If you permit,” he said, “I could entertain you with a few?”
Hukka grunted noncommittally. “It may be,” he said, “that the traveler is of greater interest to us than the tales.”
Domingo Nunes didn’t know what to make of this, so in some confusion he began to speak of his journeyings among the cannibals—the Anthropophagi—and men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. Hukka raised a hand to stop him. “Tell us instead,” he said, “of the unnaturally pale-faced peoples, the white Europeans, the pink English, of their unreliability and treacheries.” Nunes was unnerved. “Sire,” he said, “among Europeans, the savagery of the French is exceeded only by the cruelty of the Dutch. The English are at present a backward race, but it is my guess, though many of my countrymen would disagree with me, that they may end up being the worst of the whole bunch, and the map of half the world may be colored pink. We Portuguese, however, are reliable and honorable. Genoese merchants and Arab traders alike will speak to you of our fairness. But we are dreamers too. We imagine, for example, that the world is round, and we dream of circumnavigating it. We think of the cape of Africa and we suspect the existence of unknown continents to the west of the Ocean Sea. We are the earth’s prime adventurers, but unlike lesser tribes, we hold to our contracts, and we pay our bills on time.”
Like his newborn subjects, Hukka Raya I was still getting used to his new incarnation. He had already experienced several metamorphoses in his eventful life. The slow easy ways of the cowherd had given way to the regimented discipline of the soldier, and then as a captured soldier there had been the forced change of religion and therefore also of name, and after that escape, the shedding of the false skin of his conversion, and of the garb and habits of soldiering as well, and the transition back into something like his original cowherd self, or at least into a peasant in search of some new destiny. As a child his one wish had been that the world would never change, that he would always be nine years old and his mother and father would always be moving toward him with loving arms outstretched, but life had taught him its great lesson, which was mutability. Now, given a throne to sit upon, he found that the childhood dream of changelessness had returned. He wanted this scene, the throne room, the guardian women, the lavish furnishings, to be removed from the mutable world and become eternal, but before that happened he needed to marry his queen, he needed Pampa Kampana to accept him and sit garlanded by his side while the citizenry applauded their nuptials, and once that great day was over, then time could stop, Hukka himself might be able to stop it by raising his royal scepter, and Pampa Kampana could very probably stop it, because if she could bring a world into being with nothing more than a bunch of seeds and a few days of whispering then she could probably encircle it with a magic garland that was more powerful than the calendar, and then they would live happily ever after.