Can Xue - The Last Lover

Now, in the dim lamplight, with the sound of many whispering voices in her ears, the times she had made love with Reagan often floated up in her mind. The place was sometimes in the thick grass next to the lake, sometimes among the rubber trees, and once, to her surprise, in the middle of the main road. The time, however, was always the middle of the night, without exception. She was unwilling to go to Mr. Reagan’s bedroom because she worried she might faint in a place like that. More than once she thought of how funny it was. What if people on the plantation knew that their boss turned into a beast at night? What would they think? A young woman, nearly drunk, greeted her. She was an old customer of Ida’s. “I saw your old sweetheart,” she leaned close and said in a low voice. “He’s whiling away time in the city, too.” The young woman applied purple lipstick. Ida felt fish scales growing all over her body. The owner busied himself behind the counter. When Ida first arrived, she had talked with him about the mudslide in her hometown. The man appeared calm, but in his memory the event was quite clear. His whole family had died. The owner’s wife was a Western woman, and their daughter also looked entirely like someone from the West, but the closeness among the members of this family was of a kind that’s quite rare. If they were apart even for a short time, they would call out, summoning each other. Perhaps because of this closeness, the daughter didn’t go to school and served customers in the restaurant instead. This beautiful girl had a calm nature. Ida had never seen her go out on dates with boys. The decor of the bar was unusual, and imbued with a decadent air. The walls were hung all over with the bones of strange animals. Solemn classical music played on a record player. It wasn’t very clean in the dining room, the dust seemed to get on everything. People coming in sneezed repeatedly at first. Yet this gray, fog-covered, dark environment had a special atmosphere, so over many years the family had kept up a good volume of business.

Starting yesterday, Ida was staying next door to the owner’s daughter’s room. Her room was on the second floor, down a long corridor crammed with ancient, dusty furniture. Little white mice scampered in and out of the furniture. It was said that the owner’s wife raised them there. Every time Ida went upstairs the mice scurried in front of her feet, so she always took great care where she stepped. Each morning, when she was still in her room sleeping, slight sounds from the room next door would awaken her. It sounded like someone jumping from a high place, a moment would pass, then tong , coming down with a thump. One day Ida truly could not stand it. She got up, rubbing her eyes, and went next door to see. The young girl’s door was wide open. The room was filled with mice, at least a hundred of them. She was sitting on a table.

“I jump down from the table, to train them in how to quickly flee for their lives,” the girl said.

She stood on the tabletop again. The mice waiting on the ground had a look of alert terror. Ida saw they were all shaking with fear. The girl jumped like a diver, then dropped down. In a blink of an eye the mice scurried to the foot of the wall, quivering at the loud sound.

“My father hasn’t told you my name yet. I’m Jade.”

Her face reddened, and she knelt on the floor to kiss the frightened mice. Ida turned her head and saw Jade’s mother, full of smiles for her daughter, holding a mouse in each of her hands.

“My husband talks on and on every day about returning to his hometown. My daughter and I can only make preparations. It’s so strange that Ida really comes from that place we long for from dawn to dusk. Do you still remember things from when you were a child?”

When she spoke her eyes opened wide. Ida saw in them an infinite loneliness.

“When I was small, and thought every day about fleeing from the mudslides when they came, it was the same as with these mice. A moment ago I saw Jade’s demonstration and felt as if I was returning to my hometown.”

Mother and daughter hurried downstairs because the owner was calling them from below. Ida returned to her room, thinking she would go back to sleep. But once she shut her eyes she saw the mudslide, her body suspended in the air the whole time. So she sat up, and looking out the window she saw the tranquil, empty street. Ida reflected on how, even when staying in this dead corner of the city, she often felt an impulse to slink around the neighborhood like a snake. Especially at night, when those whispering customers arrived in twos and threes. There was a customer who was the owner’s friend. He very seldom drank, but when his girlfriend drank beside him, he watched her admiringly, urging her to drink a little more. The girlfriend’s face was often flushed. She would point into her glass, to make him look inside. At this, he would lean forward and earnestly look back and forth and all over the glass. This man was very much like a man from her hometown who grew vegetables and lived beside the rainforest. Perhaps it really was that vegetable farmer, although he appeared to be too young.

Ida thought, sentimentally, that she had finally escaped Mr. Reagan’s clutches. If she were back on the plantation now, she would be busy at work among the rubber trees. For a long time she’d watched as Mr. Reagan enlarged his territory before her eyes, and for no reason she’d grown indignant. She thought he was a tyrant who would make everything disappear into nothingness. At night, among the mists, when the feeble moonlight did its best to struggle through the layers of cloud, Ida felt a desire for Mr. Reagan, perhaps even love. They were tangled together, and she was willing to disappear into nothingness, to disappear into nothingness together with him.

But now she hid in the bar. She thought that Mr. Reagan couldn’t find this place. Making her way through the whispering customers, Ida would hallucinate just as if it were the plantation’s unsteady land under her feet. “Ida!” the owner was calling her, because a group of people was coming in the door.

This crowd of customers held straw hats in their hands. Their bodies smelled of seawater and the sun. None of them spoke. One after another they silently sat down at the bar, then began to drink glass after glass. Ida was greatly surprised to see that one of the women was a neighbor from her lodging on the plantation.

“Can it be? Can he find any place?” Ida said to this customer.

“Yes, it is fate.”

She saw Jade standing opposite, her face pale and expressionless. She might have been listening to the music. Her mother was a little farther away, with her face also turned in this direction. Mother and daughter were both wearing white jackets that were not at all in keeping with the old, dust-covered, decadent ambiance. Did they notice these “hunters”? Or grow uneasy at their arrival? Why did the mother have such a joyous expression on her face? For the first time in many days, Ida smelled the flavor of sunshine. Unable to control her emotion, she took a few deep breaths. As she inhaled deeply, she caught sight of that woman, her neighbor, smiling. Ida’s face instantly reddened.

Jade and her mother both walked off, but they didn’t go very far. At the end of the hall, at the stairwell, they glanced in Ida’s direction.

Ida walked through the back door and stood in the small courtyard. A single raindrop fell on her forehead. Lowering her head, she saw the cobblestones also leaping with mice. The bar was set near the outskirts of the city, so the customers must have walked a long way to get here. Ida, imagining them hurrying along the road at night, imagining them harboring a thirst in their hearts, could not help being touched. She suddenly thought that if there had been a bar like this when the mudslides came, maybe people wouldn’t have fled. Her hometown had teemed with mud frogs, and the walls of this bar were hung full of mud frog specimens. In the bar surely people wouldn’t hear the rumbling of the mudslide outside, since they were only accustomed to listening to things inside. When the mudslides came, they would be chatting wisely in twos and threes at separate tables.