Can Xue - The Last Lover

“Father, do you know who led the wasps here?” In the sun, the freckles on his nose were conspicuous.

“Who?”

“It was that driver. The moment he stood in the rose garden the wasps swarmed in, in a black mass. Such beautiful little things! The driver is admirable. Maybe he’s in love with Mother. Will you be jealous, Father?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will be.” Joe spoke without confidence. “Do you think your mother hopes I will leave?”

“Mother loves you,” Daniel said earnestly. “Although that has nothing to do with your leaving.”

Joe saw the wasps sting Daniel’s head and face over and over. His face swelled rapidly, so that even his eyes were swollen into a single seam. Joe was afraid, but the wasps didn’t sting him. Only one kept at his ear, menacing, making its weng weng buzzing. Daniel sat calmly on the stone bench, as if he had not felt the wasps attack him, and was indifferent to the red swelling.

“Daniel, where should I go?”

His manner was helpless. He knew Daniel couldn’t answer questions like this, Daniel, who was bending down to investigate the roses, half his face swollen. He told Joe that the roses gave him evil thoughts.

Joe heard the loom start up again in the house. At the same instant, raindrops fell on his cheeks. How strange, when the sun was shining brightly!

“Daniel, did you notice it was raining?”

“I was just thinking about the problem of the soil quality, and I had a few thoughts about a tropical rainforest. What luck, Father, you seem to be able to feel my thoughts. Mother said there is a square inside of you, and a broad road shaded with trees extending all the way to the foot of snowy mountains. But why can’t I feel it there?”

Surrounded by such an atmosphere, Joe felt suffocated.

Daniel pulled up a rosebush and said something to its roots that Joe couldn’t hear. His hands were shaking. This boy, who as a child had shed tears at seeing a fish on a hook, had grown so violent. When Daniel was a year and a half old he fussed at night, and Joe held him in his arms, swinging in a circle outdoors, Daniel’s cries reverberating through the whole street. But once he learned to speak he became a silent, prissy child. Maria wasn’t willing to have Daniel grow up at her side and she sent him to a boarding school on her own initiative. For this, Joe had resented her. But now he felt grateful to her.

Joe needed to break something, to struggle. This boy, his face swollen, speaking to rosebush roots, and the headache-inducing tapestries in the workroom. . he couldn’t breathe. Also, there were the electricity-carrying cats. He must find a pure land to hide away in. Who could tell him where such a place was? Maybe the former wife of the bookshop owner could tell him?

A large clump of wasps circled Daniel. His face was swollen out of shape. He hadn’t realized it. He pulled up another rosebush and studied it in his hand. He seemed to have forgotten Joe still at his side. The sun burned the sweat from his youthful body, its odor filling the air. Joe heard an ominous implication in the loom’s shuttling sound. He had borne all he could.

He went inside and picked up his briefcase, telling Maria he was going to the office.

From her loom Maria fixed her eyes on him for several minutes, nodding her head. Joe sensed that her eyes were filled with expectation. Joe quickly walked into the yard before hearing Maria stick her head out and yell, “Joe, dear, walk to the corner and don’t look back.”

Joe, moving as if a generation had passed on, proceeded through the narrow streets. His own face reflected in the glass doors and windows was a stranger’s, a long face, a somber man, with a head of white curling hair. If the change in himself was so great, what had Maria, and Daniel, and other people, too, known him by? The street cleaner stood at the corner. Even this beautiful black woman seemed a little weary. She leaned toward Joe to greet him, with an imploring look. Joe stopped in his steps, and at the same time remembered Maria’s words.

“Can I help you?”

“The night is vast, I will fall into the tiger’s mouth. No one can help me.” The beautiful woman showed her teeth savagely.

“Oh! Oh!” Joe groaned as he walked, cold sweat running down his back.

“Don’t come back again!” the beautiful woman screamed.

When Joe entered his office he saw the wasps. An enormous wasps’ nest was tied to the air conditioner, where they massed into squeezed, black piles. But these little insects didn’t make any sound at all, which was unusual. Joe opened a drawer, took out a Tibetan travel book, which he hadn’t seen for ages, and turned to the middle. He couldn’t read a single one of the Tibetan words, nor did the book have any pictures, but over a long period of time he had turned its pages one by one. What was inside this book? He didn’t know. He only knew that perhaps inside there was a world, an unfathomed place. As he fixed his eyes on the Tibetan script, a wasp dropped onto the surface of the page. The Tibetan words suddenly leapt up like flames burning the little insect. It struggled for a few minutes and then didn’t move.

“Joe, are you making an experiment?”

Lisa entered. She was still dressed gaudily. Her skirt even showed a stretch of thigh.

Even though Joe turned his face to the wasps’ nest in embarrassment, Lisa walked over indifferently, lifting Joe’s book, spreading its pages with a few shakes. Joe saw a layer of dead wasps lying on the floor.

“My old home was called the village of wasps. Every person’s blood is permeated with their toxin. Vincent doesn’t believe this, and so he suffered enormous hurt.”

“Then what is inside my book? Do you know?”

“It’s a place where you haven’t been.”

Lisa stepped underneath the air conditioner and put a hand in among the wasps. Joe saw her slender hand rapidly swelling. She laughed naughtily. Then she pulled back her hand, her fingers swollen like carrots. Walking away from Joe with a smile, she left.

He had just put the book back into the drawer when a customer entered. He was unannounced. Joe, furious, glared at him without saying a word. He was a skinny fellow with scars on his face. He said that when he came into the room he felt like he was returning home. Who still raised wasps in their offices today? Such a lovely idea. He praised this idea with his teeth bared while pulling a glass bottle from his pocket. It was full of dead wasps.

“Joe, I am a worker from Reagan’s farm.” As he spoke he wiped away tears with the back of his hand, because his left eye always ran. “The work clothes your company manufactures brought about the deaths of two more people yesterday.”

“That has nothing to do with our company.” Joe spoke coldly.

“Really?” He stepped closer, staring at Joe. “Really?” He also swung the bottle in his hand.

Joe discovered that the wasps inside the bottle were moving.

“I will make a business trip to your farm, to investigate the deaths of these workers.”

The thin man looked at Joe curiously, rubbing his eye, and asked him whether he sincerely wanted to understand this matter. Would he be paralyzed with fear by the reality of the situation? He also said that if Joe wanted to go, he didn’t need to go to the farm. He should go to Country C instead. Why should he go to Country C? Joe asked. The thin man became immediately active, walking back and forth across the office and jumping to pluck at the nest so that the wasps flew around, filling the room.

“Country C is the place where you should go. The boys we lost came from there. Two beautiful boys. Your clothing wrapped around them like snakes. But I must leave. Go there yourself, but don’t go to the wrong place. If you see grapevines, you should stop and wait.”