The Colour the Chinese Left on the Wall

You come in from the sea, and for a while the sea is all there is — the blue everyone is sold, the white boats, the light off the water that lets you think of nothing. Then the road turns a few streets back from the shore and the town gives up a second face, older and quieter, and the sea is suddenly behind you like a thing you have finished with. The walls here have lost a layer. The paint has gone the colour of old tea, and under the arcades the noon light drops away entirely, so that a man walking is in shade before he knows he has left the sun.

They came over the water in the nineteenth century, the Chinese, in numbers, and settled to the tin — the mines worked inland, the port that shipped the ore out to the world. They laboured, they traded, they raised temples to their crossing, and they left the shape of themselves in the streets: the Sino-Portuguese arcades, the shuttered window-frames, a way of building against the heat that is still standing after everything else has gone. What the sea forgets, brick keeps. You can read the whole passage over in a single doorway if you stand there long enough — the ledger of it, the loss — though no one asks you to, and the shopkeepers pass without looking, having read it every day of their lives until it stopped being anything to read.

It is the frames that hold the eye — the old shutters, the paint worn back to the grain, the low afternoon light lying along a wall that has stopped being new. In the morning the same light had been out on the water, pressing flat on the sea; by afternoon it has come inland and lies down along the brick instead, and the day has quietly changed its subject. A joss stick burns down outside a temple and the smoke goes straight up in the still air. There is nothing being performed. A shop sits at the corner and does its slow trade; a stall lets its steam into the lane; the salt comes up off the harbour, and the incense drifts down toward the water, and under both there is the old smell of the place — dried fish, sandalwood, damp plaster — that no season has managed to clear. The two currents cross somewhere in the middle of the town, and no one marks it.

By afternoon the sea-light that filled the lane at dawn has crept up onto the wall, and the deepest shade collects under the arcade. A man lifts noodles from the pot into a bowl and pours the broth over; a thread of warmth rises and meets the tea-coloured stain coming down off the window-frame, and the two hang there a moment together. The dish is set on the table, still smoking. The men who crossed the water are gone now into the wall — a layer of colour, a thread of smoke in the censer. The bowl is warm and the wall is old, and between them the afternoon holds, and lets nothing go, and asks for nothing back.