Can Xue - The Last Lover

She wasn’t willing to renew these old dreams: she knew old dreams couldn’t fulfill her. From the moment the mountain torrent engulfed her small house she’d known this, so she had no way to make sense of what happened that night. Only if she built up a new dreamscape again, like the poisonous snakes doing tricks and striking attack poses outside the door. The first day she arrived on the farm, as she unfolded her young body under its tallest coconut palm, she saw those flickering snakes among the clumps of grass, and her intuition told her: this is your homeland and also your burial ground. At the time she still didn’t know who dominated this land, but she thought it would all make itself clear. Ali asked her, “How were you able to escape that place? It’s hard to imagine.” At first Ida hadn’t consciously observed Reagan, with his insidious green eyes. She thought of him as a depressing old bachelor. Until the time she discovered him fishing by the lakeside, when the evening mist mottled the image of his unmoving back, when she suddenly comprehended: in fact, all of this belonged to that somber fellow. This was the reason for that charade in the pub. Reagan erred in thinking their meeting there was by chance. It was directed with deep and considered care. Watching the man in flight, Ida knew her plot had already succeeded. Even so, the nearness of her target did not bring her the joy of victory. Those unsleeping nights, those lascivious voices deep in the earth, and the violent imprecations coming from the lake at times almost drove Ida to complete collapse. She’d dreamt of that business with the diamond ring, and after the dream she started searching for it outside. She had found many small jewels, sometimes in the gutters, sometimes beside the coconut shells people had thrown out, sometimes among the gladiolus petals, and sometimes inlaid into the scars on the tree trunks. The sky lightened, and placing them in the sunlight to look them over Ida made out that these were manmade jewels. Who was patiently going around in circles to toy with her? Regardless, Ida couldn’t shake off the seduction of discovering rare things. Besides, perhaps these jewels changed into real diamonds at night. On this farm, nothing was too strange.

Reagan really was in the dining room, but at the same time he was upstairs in the bedroom. He was with the black-clad Middle Eastern woman (here she is Middle Eastern) standing in front of the window and observing the movements in the thick grass below. As the woman walked about, her clothing made a sha sha rustle, like the falling of a rain shower. They didn’t speak. For Reagan, it was because he could hear all along the woman’s unceasing speech. He heard all of it, but didn’t understand what he heard.

As Reagan sat down to a meal at the table, he saw them. They’d heard a summoning call and slipped into the dining room, five of them altogether. One was especially impudent, and went so far as to latch onto Reagan’s throat. The black grain on its body matched the pattern on that woman’s skirt. No wonder that when the woman summoned the snake, it came. The egg in Reagan’s mouth proved hard to swallow because the snake had locked on tight. Heavy footsteps upstairs could be heard downstairs. Someone seemed to be taking off into the air. Reagan stood up from the table, then tumbled down. As he tumbled with a muffled peng , the snake wound around his neck released him, and it flew toward the foot of the wall. In a moment it disappeared.

The sound of irregular footsteps came down the stairwell.

“Mr. Reagan fell down.” Martin craned his neck to see inside the dining room.

“Don’t worry about him.” Ali spoke one word at a time.

She was watching the shadow of the black-clad woman in the distance, and she lowered her head as if lost in thought.

“Do you recognize this woman?”

“Why should I recognize her? She isn’t from the farm.”

The two of them watched the snakes gnawing at each other in the thick grass. Martin murmured, “A mess, a mess.” What he thought to himself was, “How can Ali let her employer lie there on the ground? She’s cold-blooded. She could be a poisoner.”

That was when Ali and Martin heard, at the same moment, a voice calling for help. They learned only afterward that two female workers drowned in the bay. One died right away. The thick heavy waterlogged work clothes cost her her life. There was a froth of blood in the nostrils of the dead woman.

Lying on the floor of the dining room, Reagan heard the news of the worker’s death in his dream. He stood in a dark, gloomy attic. Someone entered to report this event to him. He heard the man with a head like a mushroom say that the dead one was Ida, the girl from an island in Southeast Asia. At this Reagan heard thunder outside, then rain struck the leaves of the Chinese banana trees. He wondered: On this farm where there were no high mountains, could there be a sudden, torrential mountain flood? The mushroom-headed man went downstairs. Oddly, though, Reagan didn’t hear the sound of footsteps. There were a few old books in the attic. Reagan casually caught up a small volume with a colorful cover and opened it to its first page, which was printed with an engraving of the owner of the attic — a small portrait of the proprietor. The man’s deep-set gray eyes revealed a deep world-weariness, and his arms were covered with long, thick hair like an animal’s. The owner of the attic had signed an agreement with Reagan so he could stay on Reagan’s farm and build a house there. Reagan remembered that this deal was also struck in a dream. At the time he’d had a vague notion that this man’s building might become his own refuge, and for this reason he agreed to allow him to build a small house on the low hill next to the bay.

When Reagan woke up, Ali had already tidied up the dining room. Reagan asked her about this business with Ida. Ali raised her eyebrows in astonishment, saying, “Ida just came by to borrow a sickle from me.”

“Did someone from the farm fall into the water?”

“The message was a mistake. Rumors are flying everywhere these days.”

The image of Ida carrying a sickle in her hand floated into Reagan’s brain, and his heart palpitated nervously.

“Ali, have I signed a sort of agreement with someone, I mean, an agreement to let a man build a house on the farm? I’m concerned about this.”

“Yes, you have. Do you regret it?”

“Oh, not at all. Doesn’t this kind of life need a force from outside to break through it?”

He glanced toward the window, and saw outside that the sun was still shining brightly. There were several hawks wheeling in the sky. Was it because they’d discovered a corpse? For the first time in his life, he felt that his farm was too large. To oversee it from every angle would be simply impossible. A few years ago he’d bought the bordering farm, connecting it with his own rubber tree plantation to form a single piece of land. It was originally a farm for many kinds of industrial crops, and as soon as he bought it he’d regretted it. From then on, he hadn’t gone once to inspect it. He had handed the entire place over to a manager for supervision. He felt he was already aging. He couldn’t manage as many things. Why did he go on buying land? It seemed as though this decision to purchase would be his lifelong riddle. The hawks flew over from that farm, so they must have heard, too, the news of their new master. Before this they had never flown into his airspace. He knew that at the same time he expanded his territory a kind of expansion was progressing underground. It wasn’t something people knew about. He could sense this expansion that couldn’t be seen; however, it was hard to describe. When he went to the city on business, the feeling of expansion became incredibly intense. On its dark and narrow streets, he walked into a different world. For example, that African woman, the street cleaner, belonged to a different world. Reagan at any rate was unable to understand her kinds of desire and her disdain for him.