Can Xue - The Last Lover

Once they were fully familiar with each other’s bodies, after their enthusiasm for frenzied lovemaking had long since receded, the two, independent of each other, began searching in the nighttime. It was on a summer night that Lisa, waking from an apprehensive dream, turned on the light and discovered that it was exactly one in the morning. So as not to disturb Vincent sleeping beside her, she hurriedly turned off the light, and walked outside on bare feet. Sitting on the stairs was a playmate from her childhood, a dwarf nicknamed “Dummy.” Lisa was pleasantly surprised to see him.

“Dummy, where did you come from?” She grasped his hand. His palm was rough, like a file.

“I took a fork in the road that leads from here to your hometown. It only takes half an hour.” When he said this, Dummy appeared to be making a joke. Even after the passing of so many years his voice was clear and loud; his chest had a good resonance.

“Tell me about it. I want to go back, too.”

Lisa plainly knew that this was dream-talk, but she was willing to keep talking.

“I walked here from there. But if you want me to go back on the same road, that’s impossible. Everything changes after time. I’d need to search for it again. You also need to search. In your house there is a road leading to the gambling city. You cannot see the road, because it disappears in the daytime. It really only took me half an hour to get here, but what does that prove? It proves that there is a road. .” He would have kept on like a tongue-twister, but Lisa cut him off. .

Dummy said he was only passing by, and now he had to leave. He walked down the stairs mumbling something to himself. Lisa saw his small body disappear into the shadows of a cluster of peach trees.

She didn’t know when Vincent had also sat down on the steps. Vincent said, “Lisa, won’t you go out searching for a bit? I’m going to.”

He, too, walked down the stairs, disappearing into the shadows of the peach trees. At first Lisa heard bumping sounds among the branches. After, she didn’t hear anything.

He returned in the morning. Lisa asked him where he’d gone. He was unable to say, only that the more he walked the less confident he felt, so he’d had to return home.

During the daytime, Lisa went back and forth among the trees, but failed to discover anything. It was then she was most puzzled because she discovered that as Vincent’s work grew busier, he slept less at night. He would tumble out of bed, head to the closed-in un-tended garden, and not come back out. And Lisa herself walked back and forth along the periphery of the garden. This went on until she learned that her husband had appeared in a garden at a street corner at midnight. She finally had her suspicions.

“I was tired of walking, so I went to that garden to rest for a while.” He spoke vaguely. “To me, she is you, and in a place like this, nothing is too strange.”

“You’ve found a new companion.”

“Nonsense, you are who I found. Lisa, if it wasn’t for you, I could sleep at night like a corpse.”

They drank underneath the grapevines. They were both drunk, falling on the ground.

“Vincent, Vincent, did you grow up out of the grass?” Lisa asked, her eyes blurry with drink. She saw meteors falling from the sky, and her red skirt had already caught fire.

“Lisa, I saw you setting a fire in the abyss.” Vincent spread his arms and legs wide. His green eyes lost their light as his gaze settled on a clump of grapes. “It’s so hot. Is your gambling city full of stone mountains? I know you’re not afraid of fire, dear. .”

After Lisa sobered up, she saw Vincent lying in a small rivulet, the mountain spring rinsing his short hair. All his clothing was soaked. She called to him again and again, but still he slept like death. Afterward the cook came out and shouldered his unwaking employer, carrying him back to the house.

When Lisa retired to their home, weary of work, she began her life of reverie. Or, you could say, she continued her life of reverie.

When Lisa was young, no one foresaw that this scarlet-cheeked, incredibly driven young woman would be one for reverie. During her roving period she had tried every kind of work: housemaid, waitress, car washer, tour guide, office secretary, typist, department store bookkeeper, warehouse custodian, radio broadcaster, and even a short time as a weather announcer. She was multi-talented and multi-skilled, free from worry, even-tempered, with a remarkable appearance, slightly vulgar, a common woman. But there truly was a reverie belonging to her. Every day it took place at a set time in the middle of the night, a secret of which no one was aware.

Every night after midnight, at the time of utter silence, a few strange people assembled at the walls of her bedroom and discussed the long march. By raising herself slightly from the bed Lisa could see their several black shadows, and their conversation also carried to her ears. The long march was their perpetual topic. All the apprehension, difficulty, loss of hope, feelings of defeat, and life-risking resurgence that this activity contained — these were not things ordinary people could understand. In the stifling silences, Lisa often shouted into the darkness. Thereupon the tall, thin figures would scurry over and clutch at her throat, rendering her unable to move. She vividly felt the nearness of death. After this recurred a few more times, Lisa gave up in fear. She would rather suffer the oppression of that silence, that not-yet-reached limit of sorrow. In those years she passed through many places, but whenever she reached a place, at midnight discussion of the long march would be, as before, the inevitable topic. What was the long march? Observing the shades assembled at the walls, with their unchanging, conspiratorial air, listening attentively to those tedious, nervous dialogues, and imagining the army’s march through that endless hell, year after year, Lisa little by little came to understand that the long march was not another’s; it was related only to her own life, something she should do her utmost to forget, but also a deep thought destined to be inscribed on her heart. There was a tragic night when an old woman in the shadows spoke of a member of the long march army, wounded and at the point of death. This young woman lay on a crude stretcher, imploring her companions to be merciful, to lift their hands and throw her into the river. Blood spurted from her mouth and her hands danced madly in the air like chicken feet. The troops silently followed the river. Their faces little by little grew incomparably savage. The black sky seemed to press down on each person’s back. Suddenly, there was the sound of desolate crying, but it was not coming from within the army. Rather, it was coming from the sky itself. . The old woman had told the story up to this point when her voice disappeared, and the whispering of the others surged up again. In Lisa’s dream that night there was a continuous rainstorm lashing at her face like a whip. The strange thing was that this soul-corroding grief in the night did not wear down her body. It was even nourishing: she looked excessively healthy. Even the tragedy in the swamp at night when the whole army was destroyed, the cut-off cries reverberating through the air, the horror of the severed bridge, the struggle in the tiger’s jaws, could not fade the rosiness of her cheeks. She thought that perhaps she was a compound body of two people. The one suffering hardships in these reveries nourished the other, who was leading a comfortable life.

Once, when she was working as a tour guide, an old man fell in love with her. As the cruise ship headed to a small tropical island, at midnight on the deck Lisa told this fatherlike white-bearded old man about the long march, her narration baffling and hurried, as if she were trying to catch hold of something.