Can Xue - The Last Lover

Lisa stood as before, distracted. She watched a red light filling the sky and something awoke in her heart. “Vincent, that old fox.” It was with a slight smile that she spoke to herself. This immediately led her to the thought: “Vincent is done for. He’s happy to be done for. I can enjoy my life.” She passed through the rubber trees and walked to the shore of the lake, where she stripped herself bare. She admired her own not-too-old nakedness before springing into the water. The water was extremely buoyant, and for a while it was as though the little waves were pushing her body to the surface. She was excited to the point of madness, so she started to swim with a butterfly stroke, which is the method of swimming that expends the most strength. When she was young she had often swum like this. She burst from the water and flapped ahead, quickly fluttering to the center of the lake. She turned back to look at the shore, where she saw three workers standing beside the lake smoking. The place where they stood was precisely where the pile of her brightly colored clothing lay. But evidently, these men didn’t care about her nakedness, since they weren’t turned toward her to look.

As she was swimming back, she felt little uneasy. Would these men confront her?

When she reached the shore she raised a loud racket. This surprised the three men, and they turned their heads toward her. Lisa provokingly set her hands on her waist and turned her body up toward the sun. But they didn’t approach her — they merely made ze ze tongue-clicking sounds of admiration. Lisa shot a glance at them, discovering that the three men were all handsome young fellows. Even through the coarse cloth of their work clothes she could see the rising and falling of their muscles, like bodybuilders’. Standing for a moment, Lisa found this hard to bear, and she bent to gather up her clothes. By the time she’d put them on, the three men had already walked a distance away. Lisa felt this must be the greatest humiliation of her whole life. She also felt deeply aggrieved to think that perhaps she was old. Hadn’t they been admiring her?

Lisa couldn’t find an answer to this question. The reason she stayed on at the farm was in order to find out the answer. She burned with desire, walking back and forth under the sun like a beast. This was when she ran into Ida. She wanted to draw nearer to the girl, but Ida pushed her away.

Ali stood on the stairs looking outside. Between yesterday and today, she’d already seen Lisa pass in and out of that patch of banana trees three times. It was her driver who told Ali who she was. This woman with fire-red hair appeared to be in dire straits. Her brightly colored clothing was already covered in dust, and her face was filthy.

“She’s staying behind, and her husband’s left,” Reagan said dryly.

“The fire in their hearts must be painful for both of them, to leave all their work at home and rush off to this kind of place chasing their dreams,” Ali replied.

“They didn’t just rush here on a sudden whim, of course.”

Ali looked back over her shoulder, but Reagan had already gone inside. He was tinkering with his fishing gear. Ali saw sparks flickering in the depths of his icy eyes, and from this she knew in her heart that he was already awoken. A fifty-year-old man must have all sorts of desires, and Reagan always perfected his schemes in the lethargy of sleep.

“Are you going fishing?”

“Yes. Last night I fished for the entire night. I sat on the window-sill and stretched my fishing rod out from there. Working high above the ground is really frightening.”

“Being suspended in the air always is. But how is the problem of transport resolved?”

“I don’t bother with that anymore. Let things start getting out of order. In the beginning wasn’t the farm in chaos?”

Reagan stood and hung his red fishing rod on a hook high up on the wall. Ali wondered why he would have painted his rod red. Perhaps he intended to frighten away the fish. Ali’s sight was a little dim; she saw the fishing rod on the wall turn into a dripping skein of blood. She left in a worried fluster. As she entered the living room she saw the driver, Martin, just leaving Reagan’s bedroom, with Reagan’s hunting clothes draped over his body. He was always stealing Reagan’s clothes to wear. This had become an open secret.

Martin ran with a thumping dong dong dong down the stairs, warding off Ali’s obstructing arm, and rushed outside. Ali heard a dog bark ferociously. Maybe it had taken Martin for a thief or a murderer. Ali couldn’t comprehend this habit of Martin’s. She’d seen him wearing Reagan’s black coat and trousers to a lawn picnic, where he stood around unsociably. Not only did he lack Reagan’s grave demeanor, he’d even lost his own customary clever liveliness. At the picnic he looked like a marionette swaying back and forth, cracking lewd jokes and making himself distasteful to every person there. Did he think that by wearing Reagan’s clothing he’d changed into a different Reagan?

One time he unexpectedly said, “Mr. Reagan’s intentions are obscene.”

“You work for him. How can you talk nonsense like this about your employer’s character?”

Ali said this with her mouth, although in her heart she hoped he would furnish a bit more information. But Martin stopped speaking. He wrinkled his brow seriously, and put on the appearance of thinking over some problem.

When Ali warned Reagan that someone was taking his clothes, Reagan said he’d known for a long time.

“Actually, I want to watch how other people play my role. Otherwise I have no means with which to arrange my life. Mr. Vincent is quite capable of arranging his life: look at the remarkable performance of his wife!”

Reagan made a few trips to the lake in succession, each time sitting there for the whole night. A forest keeper always came by at two in the morning, before dawn, to chat. In the past this forest keeper had not been a forest keeper. He was the region’s “wild man,” who lived by the lake in a thatched hut he’d built himself. At that time there had been no farm. His hair was white as snow, and when he spoke it was indistinctly, through missing teeth. Once he sat down he’d say a few world-weary things, speaking of how he’d already had enough of living. Also, strangely, at the weng weng droning of his speech, small fish would come up to the hook, usually enough to fill a whole bucket. Reagan’s gaze crossed his red fishing rod and fell on the opposite side of the lake, on those jet-black clumps of reeds, but Ida didn’t emerge even once. She’d gone into hiding.

“Before, around here, if you wanted something you could have it. The girls, they were all mixed up with the sika deer and you couldn’t tell them apart. They ran down from the side of that mountain in one big pack after another. Was it even girls or was it deer who carried on the war of the century with me in that shack?”

Reagan sensed that this old man had already seen through him. He hoped he would keep speaking, that he would bring up Ida, but he persisted in only speaking of the past century’s business.

Ida stepped on the body of the small snake intentionally; last week she had also been bitten once. Previously she had witnessed with her own eyes the death of a youth, not a local one, from a snakebite. What fear she’d been in then! Little by little she discovered that the farm people weren’t afraid of the snakes. Her next door neighbor Mina had a series of scars on her calves and arms but didn’t take a day of rest because of them. After a snakebite, there was a burst of red, a burst of swelling, and after that nothing at all.

Once she had left the dirty woman who was wearing a long, gaudy skirt, the soreness in her ankle lightened. As she passed through the banana groves, the forest keeper called out a greeting from his small wood hut. Ida was familiar with this old man, and she followed him inside.