Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [229]
While Tanzaemon slowly stirred the gruel to keep it from scorching, he turned reflective. “I myself am receiving my punishment and atoning for my sins, but what has happened to Jōtarō? … The child did nothing blameworthy. Oh, Blessed Kannon, I beg you to punish the parent for his sins, but cast the eye of generous compassion on the son—”
A scream suddenly punctuated his prayer. “You beast!” Her eyes still closed in sleep, her face pressed hard against the wooden pillow, Akemi was weeping bitterly. She ranted on until the sound of her own voice woke her.
“Was I talking in my sleep?” she asked.
“Yes; you startled me,” said Tanzaemon, coming to her bedside and wiping her forehead with a cool rag. “You’re sweating terribly. Must be the fever.” “What … what did I say?”
“Oh, a lot of things.”
“What sort of things?” Akemi’s feverish face grew redder from embarrassment. She pulled the cover up over it.
Without answering directly, Tanzaemon said, “Akemi, there’s a man you’d like to put a curse on, isn’t there?”
“Did I say that?”
“Mm. What happened? Did he desert you?”
“No.”
“I see,” he said, jumping to his own conclusion.
Akemi, pushing herself up into a half-sitting position, said, “Oh, what should I do now? Tell me, what?” She had vowed she would reveal her secret shame to no one, but the anger and sadness, the sense of loss pent up inside her, were too much to bear alone. She sprawled on Tanzaemon’s knee and blurted out the whole story, sobbing and moaning throughout.
“Oh,” she wailed finally, “I want to die, die! Let me die!”
Tanzaemon’s breath grew hot. It had been a long time since he had been this close to a woman; her odor burned his nostrils, his eyes. Desires of the flesh, which he thought he had overcome, began to swell as from an influx of warm blood, and his body, until now no more vibrant than a barren withered tree, took on new life. He was reminded, for a change, that there were lungs and a heart underneath his ribs.
“Mm,” he muttered, “so that’s the kind of man Yoshioka Seijūrō is.” Bitter hatred for Seijūrō welled up in him. Nor was it only indignation; a kind of jealousy moved him to tighten his shoulders, as though it were a daughter of his own who had been violated. As Akemi writhed in tears on his knee, he experienced a feeling of intimacy, and a look of perplexity crept into his face.
“Now there, don’t cry. Your heart is still chaste. It’s not as if you’d permitted this man to make love to you, nor did you return his love. What’s important to a woman is not her body but her heart, and chastity itself is a matter of the inner being. Even when a woman doesn’t give herself to a man, if she regards him with lust, she becomes, at least as long as the feeling lasts, unchaste and unclean.”
Akemi was not comforted by these abstract words. Hot tears seeped through the priest’s kimono, and she went on repeating that she wanted to die.
“Now, now, stop crying,” said Tanzaemon again, patting her on the back. But the trembling of her white neck did not move him to genuine sympathy. This soft skin, so sweet to the smell, had already been stolen from him by another man.
Noticing that the monkey had sneaked up to the pot and was eating something, he unceremoniously removed Akemi’s head from his knee, shook his fist and cursed the animal roundly. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, food was more important than a woman’s suffering.
The next morning Tanzaemon announced he was going to town with his beggar’s bowl. “You stay here while I’m gone,” he said. “I have to get some money to buy you medicine, and then we need some rice and oil so we can have something hot to eat.”
His hat was not a deep one woven of reeds, like those of most itinerant priests, but an ordinary bamboo affair, and his straw sandals, worn and split at the heels, scraped against the ground as he shuffled along.