Can Xue - The Last Lover

“We grow roses.” Joe thought of Maria’s bewitched flowers, and abruptly grew sentimental.

“Roses, good, roses are flowers tended by people who regard themselves highly. A man who came here told me that his roses went crazy. They did not stop blooming, and so in all four seasons of the year his whole courtyard was bright red.”

“You aren’t speaking of me?”

“I don’t know. Whether that person was you, you will be able to tell tonight. The fragrance of certain flowers can asphyxiate people. But they yearn for that wonderful moment.”

Kim clapped the sand clean from his hands. In the obscure light his face looked like a rock, and his body also grew rigid. He did not move.

“Whenever you grasp hold of some object, other objects all change into unreal things,” Joe said.

But Kim showed no reaction to his words, as though he really had changed into a stone. The nightclothes with gold ingots he wore fluctuated with an immeasurable light.

The door creaked with a zhi ya sound as the cook entered. She grasped Joe’s arm, bringing him out of the room. She still didn’t speak, but her movements were extremely confident. Joe indistinctly understood: she wanted Kim to stay inside alone. He remembered what Kim had said regarding confidence and comprehended it in his heart.

He walked into the living room and saw that the wasps had all fallen to the ground. They crawled on the floor in a large black mass, provoking disgust. Joe turned around and walked into the kitchen, but the cook flared up angrily and shooed him out, her face red all over. As she drove him out her mouth let out a sound like a wolf’s howl.

Joe dodged into the bedroom where he’d slept during the night. He entered through the door and saw the cats occupying the large bed, sleeping peaceably on it. Joe quietly retreated from the room and slid out of the building.

At the far end of the grassland, the same as underneath a green sea, a human shadow wearing deep red clothing was heading straight toward him. The man was alternately hidden and visible, and so perhaps riding on the back of a horse. As he came closer and closer, Joe discovered with shock that the man was actually riding a leopard. When the leopard rose into the sky, the man’s long hair flew up into the air. Joe watched until his eyes went blank. He nervously waited for the red-clad rider to climb the mountain. But when he was about to reach the mountain, Joe heard the deafening sound of a gun. The rider rolled down into the thick grass, and the leopard was nowhere to be seen. The scene from a moment ago was dissolving like a hallucination. Joe determined that the bullet was shot from near where he stood. Could it have been Kim? He turned around to look. The cook was just walking through the door, her ferocious eyes watching him.

Joe circled around to the “greenhouse” behind the building, but he saw no one there. He sat outside the building on a stone bench. A longing for his family gushed up in his heart. What was Maria doing at home? He thought Maria should come to this place. She and Kim were alike in many ways. There was someone following the stone steps up the mountain. It looked like the red-clad rider. Joe grew agitated. “Hey! Hello!” he shouted, not understanding why he shouted.

But the man wearing red was Kim. Kim’s hair was a mess, his glasses were broken, and his left leg had been injured.

He walked limping into the building, refusing Joe’s supporting hand. No one had helped him care for the wound. Blood already soaked a large patch of black onto the red trousers. Kim’s blood looked like black blood.

“Who fired the gun?”

“Who fired the gun?” Kim repeated Joe’s words. “It was me. I had the cook fire the gun.”

Kim smiled coldly, grinding his teeth and showing his blood-red gums. That stoked Joe’s horror again.

Kim sat in a reclining chair and closed his eyes to sleep, with his fists clenched tightly. Joe thought it looked like he was shivering.

“Your pastures are truly beautiful. I’d like to see your sheep.”

“Other than me, who would come live in a fearful place like this? You speak of my sheep, but they’re just a front. To make the people who listen to me misunderstand.”

“Maybe your wound should be bandaged or have medicine put on it.”

“No need. My body already has seven bullets in it. This sort of thing doesn’t count for anything. The Japanese women wearing geta sandals were frozen in the ice caves. No one will be able to see those peerless, beautiful women again.”

Now, especially, Joe wanted to start reading the horror novel he’d brought along. He abandoned Kim and went to the bedroom, pulled out his book from inside the leather briefcase hung on the clothes rack, then drew back the curtains, sat on the sofa, and began to read.

On the book’s red cover was written: This is a horror novel . But at the precise center of the cover was a picture of a young girl. She was sitting embroidering in a tranquil boudoir. In the distance beyond her window were blue skies and white clouds. The beginning of the book introduced the childhood life of this young girl named Hailin. It seems she grew up in a lonely environment. Although she had parents, they abandoned her to do business in a far-off land. It was said that they’d gone to the East. Fortunately, the girl had a peaceful, even slightly indifferent, temperament, and so she didn’t miss her parents much. She lived alone in an old house and took care of herself. After reading a few paragraphs, Joe grew interested in the book because behind its vapid writing he could again indistinctly see his familiar backdrop. He thought Hailin’s household must have layered walls, and inside the layered walls would be underground tunnels. This girl must have a secret life. Continuing on, the depiction was an account of everyday life flowing like water. Her neighbors were a few names not to be remembered, and, later on, even the name Hailin became vaguely intermingled with them, and the descriptions changed to cloudy water. Also, he didn’t know what were the intentions of the book’s author, who suddenly dropped into a vulgar tone to start praising freedom. There appeared six or seven identical sentences in succession:

“Ah! The hovering of freedom! An unreachable height!”

“Ah! The hovering of freedom! An unreachable height!”

“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ”

Reading this part of the book, Joe couldn’t refrain from laughing. His laugh woke the cats, and they began their unbridled copulating. Strange calls came from the bed, a continuous disruption, and Joe feared they would bite him, so he went to sit at the window. On the roomy windowsill, he continued reading. In the second chapter the young girl, Hailin, suddenly disappeared, in what direction it wasn’t known. The empty boudoir grew lively. Because she hadn’t locked the door, all sorts of people entered: to gossip, to do a little business; umbrella fixers; farm-bird raisers; and so on. They carried a profusion of odors with them, and the boudoir’s former ambience disappeared. But one day the young woman returned home. She had lost her right leg, and her appearance had grown unbearably coarse. There was a cruel, ruthless expression on her face. She drove away her neighbors, shut the main door of the old building, and began a life of deep meditation. At this point there appeared several vulgar and repeated sentences:

“What happened in the distant past? We will never know!”

“What happened in the distant past? We will never know!”

“. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ”

Joe could not smile now. A kind of yearning, similar to sexual desire, started to rise again inside his body. He leapt across obstacles and reached the kingdom of his stories. In its square, under the clinging roots of a banyan tree, he saw a multicolored kimono fluttering with the wind. “Hailin! Hailin!” he cried a few times in succession. He heard the book in his hand dropping to the floor with a thwack, pa .