Can Xue - The Last Lover

“What have you seen?”

“On a scorching night like this, any strange thing can happen. Your wife is a passionate woman.”

“Did she leave right away?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she went into the rubber tree groves. She’s not afraid of the heat.”

“I feel a little cold, in fact.”

In fact he was shivering.

“What should I do, Mother?”

“You came here, didn’t you? Just don’t be afraid, and everything will be all right. Try to be like Lisa.”

Vincent wanted to speak to Ali but she stood up, tottering, and said her employer was calling her from upstairs. Oddly enough, it was quiet on all sides and there was nothing to hear, yet she heard her employer’s summons. It would seem that Ali had the hearing of an animal.

He returned to his room and lay down again. He was still in an overstimulated state from waiting for those snakes to come out. He didn’t know when exactly it was, as he lay half-awake, half-asleep, that he heard someone arguing outside the window. Among the voices was Reagan’s. He sounded irritated and dispirited. Vincent heard him say repeatedly, in a voice that was almost crying, “It will kill someone.” Without knowing how, Vincent realized that Reagan was talking to a woman.

But when he got up, Ali told him that Reagan was still asleep. Vincent told her he’d heard Reagan talking in the night. Ali nodded several times: “Yes, he doesn’t know his own limits. He’s always wandering all over the place.”

“Why did he say someone would die?” Vincent asked, uncomprehending.

“It’s a premonition he’s always had. Don’t you realize that this farm sprang up out of his heart? Everything here is the opposite of what it should be.”

Vincent realized only that her words made him feel strange. He finished eating the breakfast Ali had prepared for him and walked to the stairs leading to the house. Lowering his head, he suspected his eyes of playing tricks on him. In the thick grass close by the marble stairs, six or seven striped snakes were hiding. One look and he knew they were those poisonous little snakes.

“Reagan’s pets.” Ali spoke from behind him.

Vincent’s legs buckled and he sat down on the steps. His gaze couldn’t leave the snakes, and a bizarre desire rose up inside him. The sound of Reagan’s voice in the night echoed in his ears: “It will kill someone.” After a little while the snakes concealed themselves in the grass. Vincent knew they hadn’t gone far. Couldn’t anything happen here on this tropical farm? Concealed behind Mr. Reagan’s stern outer appearance was a frightening landscape like this one. He hadn’t expected it. Originally he’d thought he was tracking down the Arab woman, but now he had entered Reagan’s demon-possessed realm. He’d often heard people speak of intersecting dreamworlds. At his own company Joe was involved in this shady kind of business and he was making experiments through reading.

The sun was beating down on the roof of the jeep when Vincent left, and he dozed off in the back seat. Drowsily he saw himself passing naked through a dark region where every single thing lost its form as his vision suddenly worsened.

At the same time, fat Ali and Reagan stood together on the stairs of the building. Each held a short stick with which they conducted the striped snakes in a dance on the grass. Ali was wearing a brightly colored, tropical-pattern robe and Reagan was wearing black, a suit for mourning.

“He left, damn him.” Ali set down her stick then sat on the stairs gasping for breath.

“He and I are like twin brothers.” Reagan wrinkled his brow as he spoke.

“Are you thinking of leaving?”

“Naturally. Although I made every brick and tile in this place.”

Ali stood up with great effort and returned to the kitchen. After a while the smell of meat pies floated out. Reagan’s appetite suddenly revived. He felt his whole body trembling.

In the rubber tree forest Lisa saw the black-clad Arab woman. She saw a tall, black image drifting among the trees like a spurned woman, but none of the workers noticed her. Perhaps they didn’t even see her. An idea sprang to Lisa’s mind: “Vincent is done for.”

The primitive power of the rubber tree plantation left Lisa fearful, and she lost all certainty about herself. She made up her mind to return home at once. On the road back she came across olive-skinned Ida. Ida had been bitten by a poisonous snake and was groaning, holding a calf that was swelling gradually. The girl’s face grew red, as if she were about to faint. Lisa reached out a hand to prop her up, but was warded off. The strength in Ida’s hands was extraordinary. She almost pushed Lisa down to the hot muddy ground. She managed to struggle to her feet and then walked off, limping at every other step. Lisa felt deeply that her action had violated some principle of this place. What principle? She stared after the girl’s solitary receding figure, and failed to think of what that principle, after all, might be.

From a distance she saw Vincent walking toward a jeep on the road. Vincent’s elderly bearing caught her by surprise. She almost called out to him. But the jeep started up, and in a moment it had disappeared in a burst of hot air. The events of last night were similarly strange, even unbelievable, and besides she remembered only a few fragmentary, incomplete interludes. Those events seemed to have something to do with Vincent, but then again they also seemed to have nothing to do with him and were instead merely her personal secrets. The sky was quickly growing dark as her driver, Booker, rushed over from the banana groves, wanting to take her to a nearby restaurant. He said the restaurants and hotels around here closed up early, so they shouldn’t lose time. By the time they’d reached the thatch-roofed rural family restaurant, sure enough, it had already closed. Booker pounded on the door until a middle-aged woman, her eyes heavy with sleep, slowly opened it. She had to be told three times before she understood what Booker was asking and finally brought them into the hall. Lisa had just sat down when she felt something bite her ankle. After a while, she grew faint. In the dim lamplight she seemed to see Booker flirting with the middle-aged woman. Later on the two of them put a few small plates of food in front of her. She ate a large amount, but couldn’t say what she was eating. She thought it might be leg of mutton or something like that. She drank a few glasses of the local wine, a kind of sweet liquor. Booker and the woman didn’t eat. They merely stared at her without moving their eyes until she felt layer on layer of suspicion in her heart. She thought to look in her handbag for her purse, but her purse wasn’t there. She lowered her head to look under the dining table and saw a snake coiled around its leg. At this she screamed in fear. Booker and the woman kept on talking as if nothing had happened and then asked her, more or less without interest, if she wanted to go outside to enjoy the night view. She grumbled out a few sentences about how she’d been bitten by a snake, but mechanically stood up and stepped outside. She even forgot to bring her handbag, but the woman followed and gave it to her. Booker was definitely fooling around with that woman. Just now they’d looked too eager to wait any longer. The banana grove was as painfully hot as before. The mosquitoes made surprise raids under her long skirt. She walked on for a while and then thought it was no good. She worried that the mosquitoes would suck all the blood out of her body. Fortuitously, at this moment she raised her head and saw what had long been in her dreams: the green sky. Even the moonlight and Milky Way were green. She wondered whether the snake’s venom inside her was causing her vision to change. Then she heard someone calling her pet name from when she was a young girl. It was a woman whose voice seemed to be coming down from the tops of the tall coconut trees. Afterward she discovered that she had lost the road, and for the entire night she walked and then stopped, stopped and then walked. She made a circle around the lake, passing a low small hill; she circled the coconut groves for a long time; finally, she returned to the rubber tree forest. Although her head was heavy, she didn’t feel the least bit tired. She was woken by the workers who tapped rubber. She opened her eyes, and the first thing she saw was the black-clad woman’s skirt. Her cotton skirt seemed to have just swept past Lisa’s face. As she leaned on a rubber tree to pull herself up, her head cleared. But the woman walked too fast, and in a moment she was at the edge of the forest.