Can Xue - The Last Lover

“Yes, hopeless. She has to wait on her father-and mother-in-law to the grave. She is an ill-fated person. Who let her see what happened way back then?”

Wula began to sigh. Maria could hear that her sighs were rough and heavy, like a man’s, and wondered how Wula could suffer so much over other people’s problems. She thought again of Lila, of her appearance lying on the cot and her appearance outside. It seemed the faces of the people of North Island were not at all like those of people outside. They could change into something unrecognizable in a single day. You couldn’t tell whether a person was twenty or forty years old — the age seemed to change depending on the situation. Take Grandma: at the moment her voice was just like a middle-aged woman’s, but Wula had said she was almost a hundred. Grandma reached out her hand in the dark, and the hand was smooth, without any protruding veins on the back. But earlier, beside the stream, she had appeared extremely old. Was it that when one reached this “house,” time flowed backward?

Now Grandma lit another match. The face that shone in the flame made Maria jump with fright. It was the face of a brown bear, behind which was the circle of a halo, and, finally, in this halo, Grandma’s face. That is to say: the bear’s face was real, the human face false. She tried to see which it actually was, but the flame went out.

“Grandma, which side of your face did the squirrel bite?” Maria asked.

“The right side. It doesn’t matter, their bites do no harm because my face has so much hair on it.”

“Maria, let’s go.” Wula walked over and gripped Maria’s hand, saying to her in a low voice, “Grandma wants to talk with a little hedgehog, and she doesn’t want us next to her listening. Be careful. Here’s the small stream, we lean to the right side and walk along, all along keeping to the right, and we’ll reach the outside of the building.”

When she said “lean to the right,” Maria felt Wula push her to the right. She asked Wula whether Grandma was one of those people who live inside stories, who have two lives at the same time. She was thinking of Joe’s double life. Wula said no, that Grandma actually had only one life, the life in this house. People from outside enter the building, talk with her, and have the illusion that they are influencing her life. Her life in fact cannot be influenced. Maria went along with Wula, lifting one foot, then the other. She wanted to talk with this woman about Joe, but didn’t know how to put things clearly. She believed Wula and Grandma already had a deep understanding of Joe. If Maria questioned Wula, she would be ashamed of her own ignorance.

They walked a long way but still had not walked out of that “room.” Maria asked how this was possible. Wula told her they’d already reached the hotel.

“There is a door at your right hand, it’s the main door of the hotel.”

Maria felt only empty air to her right. But all at once she came to her senses, turned and walked to the left. On the left was an opened door, with light shining through.

Qing sat smoking next to the large table. Maria faced the right side of his face. This time she discovered that the right side was not only expressionless like a corpse, but also showing signs of decomposition. The earlobe on the right side seemed to have rotted into a hole and swollen into a lump. And so Maria thought, What a poor woman, this Wula. Her life surely was as dark as if there were no sun or sky.

“You thought it was false, but actually it is real,” Qing said.

Wula embraced his neck from behind, with an intoxicated look. Maria saw what she believed at this moment to be the left side of a man’s face.

“The tortoises were so noisy it was hard to stand, so I changed all the water in the vats. Listen, they’ve calmed down.”

“You’re such a dear,” Wula said, kissing his left cheek.

“I’ve been thinking about it but I can’t understand,” Maria raised her voice to speak, to avoid showing her uneasiness. “Is Grandma’s house next door to yours? Is it just beyond this door?” She indicated with her hand the door through which she had just entered.

“Yes. Push open the door and take a look.” The two stood up and spoke in unison.

Maria walked over and pushed the door open. Before her were the bamboo groves of North Island. A chill wind blew past and she promptly shut the door again.

The two of them, staring at her, loosed a sigh and sat back down. Wula whispered to Maria: “Actually, even a painstaking search won’t locate her home. Most of the people in this village have never met Grandma. Can you believe that? Everyone knows she lives behind a few weeping willows in the bamboo groves, but the building can only be found from time to time. When I took you there, I had no plan in mind. I was only walking at random, because I can’t recognize the place. Even if I’d been there hundreds of times it wouldn’t be possible.”

“You think of something in your mind, and afterward that thing becomes real? Like in a dream?”

“When I get quite near Grandma’s house I might feel a foreboding, but this kind of foreboding has no certainty. If you don’t notice, it’s the same as if there were none. When you reach her house, all the questions you ask are answered.”

While saying these things, Wula again sat in Qing’s embrace. With a change in position, Maria now saw the left side of Qing’s face. She felt that this pair of lovers, fooling around together, was full of life. In their movements they seemed to want to swallow each other. Qing stretched out his long, long tongue and licked Wula’s face and neck; Wula circled her strong arms tightly around him, her fingernails embedded in his flesh. It seemed that people here had no sense of shame. Now the two of them cast Maria wholly to the side. Moaning loudly in unison, they began to make love. Maria promptly rushed out, her face burning.

She walked in the bamboo grove for a while, and her heart finally calmed. No one from the village was to be seen. It was mealtime, but there was no cooking smoke. If it weren’t for an earthen house dimly visible here and there among the trees, it wouldn’t have seemed like a village at all. Thinking back to the scene she’d just seen, Maria found it incomprehensible. In this deathly still place, a corner of the world gone to waste and forgotten by the outside, how could desire continue?

“You’re distracting me with your walking back and forth.”

It was Lila speaking. The girl watched her with bitterness in her large brown eyes.

“How many years have you been here?” Maria asked her.

“I can’t remember. Can you tell me about the lame man?”

“No, I can’t. Only my son has been in contact with him. Lila, do you love your father?”

“I hate him. Auntie Maria, I suffer too much. Do you think I should go back to my hometown?”

Like a blind person Lila stretched out a hand into the air in front of her, scratching back and forth, bawling: “Go to hell! Go to hell!”

“What are you doing?”

“I need to claw these things, then it will be all right. They surround me day and night. I don’t know what they are: sometimes they look like a spider’s thread, like a gray tassel, something like that; sometimes there is nothing, only a terrifying black. Ah, there is something hiding in that bamboo tree.”

Lila put her arms around the trunk of a bamboo, held it closely, and put her ear to it. Then she shook her head with all her strength. It appeared that not hearing anything made her agitated. Watching her frantic movements, Maria recalled Lila’s father the locksmith. That man, back then, stuffed dynamite into the walls of his workshop and blew off his own leg. Maria was stroking Lila’s back, thinking to comfort her, when she saw an old man and an old woman emerging from the bamboo. It was Lila’s father-and mother-in-law. They looked lively and agile, the opposite of their former sickliness. The two separated, flanking Lila on the right and left, then suddenly pounced and caught her. They were seizing her to drag her back home. Lila struggled at first, but soon became obedient. When passing by Maria, she said in a loud voice: “Auntie Maria, I’m such a fool! If I go back with you, I might as well be dead!”