Can Xue - The Last Lover

The bus arrived on a Wednesday. The whole fishing village, men and woman, old and young, stood by the road to watch him leave. The women held their children and looked into the bus with slightly open mouths. What were they searching for? The driver nodded coldly, signaling for Vincent to board the bus. Then, without turning his head:

“Are you ready?”

Vincent’s heart was in a confused state. He waved his hand to the driver in despair and shouted:

“Go! Go!”

Once the bus started moving, the days and nights in the fishing village came back to life, playing like a movie in his mind. The month hadn’t passed as drearily as he thought. He remembered going out roaming with the old man late at night. They saw will-o’-the-wisps at the grave of a villager who’d met with an accident. There were explorations of the coral island, where he and the old man discovered people sleeping inside a deep cave. They lit pine torches and sat talking with these people for a long, long time. These dreamers knew the answers to nearly all questions; they understood the language of every nation; and their thinking was extraordinarily dynamic. The two of them also visited a fisherman’s home — the family had caught an unmentionable disease. Although each of their lifespans was only forty-one years, they hadn’t turned into gamblers or drug addicts. Their method of coping with the menace of death was to abolish sleep. And so Vincent saw that the family had no beds. The brothers and sisters went about their own work late at night, while their parents sat at the table next to a tiny soybean oil lamp and kept accounts. Vincent and the old man also attended a celebration in the village. Everyone went to the beach and began to dance in the moonlight, to intense drumbeats, until no one could dance any more, until they all fainted on the ground. . There were many other events, Vincent remembered them all. But when he was at the fishing village he’d forgotten all about these things. Why? Probably because they took place in the middle of the night. After passing through sleep and reaching the next day, he forgot them entirely. Now recalling these events Vincent suddenly understood. The old man had entered another kind of existence which he’d desired to attain — an existence he’d desired for several decades. Many years earlier, when he felled trees in the tall mountains and ancient forests, when he heard the long sighing sounds the trees made as they fell before him, he’d planned for that existence countless times. The mysterious uncle had helped him realize his aspiration. But the uncle? Was there such a person? Why had the old man never mentioned him later on? They had gone together to see the village cemetery, and there were no graves of any outsiders. Yet according to his previous narration, the old man’s uncle was buried there. It seemed quite possible that his uncle was inside the deep cave on the coral island. Along the route many travelers boarded the long-distance bus. These people resembled one another. Their expressions were both weary and active. Vincent felt that they all must have come from the same place. In his mind he called that place the village of dreams. It was his firm but ungrounded belief that the village of dreams was the destination of his own journey. Perhaps the old man by the sea had promised him this?

“Are we there, Dad? Why is the view along the way so sad?”

“There are happy ducklings swimming in that lake, child. You need to look harder.”

Vincent listened harder, and to his surprise he understood their language.

When Vincent left the work shed the sky was already bright. He once again came to the Five Dragon Tower.

Joe was also there. His eyes were suffused with threads of blood. It looked like he hadn’t slept all night. Walking into the tower, both men felt a chill wind spinning inside, causing them simultaneously to look up. There was a patch of white light on the roof. They couldn’t pick out the round holes any more. At the midway point of the tower of stone someone was climbing, someone elderly with fluttering white hair.

“He came from the banks of the Ganges. He had raised a lion in the village,” Joe said to Vincent. “Afterward he went mad. It was a very beautiful village. Standing at the riverside, you could hear the ancestors speaking in the starry sky.”

“Was that place really the Ganges?” Vincent asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve been to too many places, they’re all muddled together. But I want to think so. Such a wide river, where elephants stood towering on boats. The Ganges, the Ganges.”

“But it’s really cold here.” Vincent sneezed a few times in succession.

The old man had already climbed to the roof and disappeared into the patch of white light.

“He worked during his lifetime as a cooper. Raising the lion was his secret occupation. He did this using pheasants he’d captured. The lion hid in the forest, only appearing in the village in the middle of the night. The relationship between the lion and the man was unknown to others. He left riding the lion’s back. That day, the woods were full of noise and the water of the Ganges overflowed both banks. The elephants, the elephants. .”

He couldn’t continue speaking, because he heard a loud violent sound, like a rock smashing to the floor. Could a stair have fallen down? But there were no traces of it on the ground.

“Are you speaking of this old man?”

“Yes, I know him.”

“But he just fell down. Think of how heavy a man’s soul is.”

That day they did not climb up. They stood underneath in the tower’s shadow, watching the patch of light at its crown and discussing those irrelevant things that don’t touch on reality. In the afternoon they went to eat at a small restaurant, then returned to the Five Dragon Tower and continued talking. Time silently slipped away and night fell again. Joe sensed that Vincent seemed to be waiting for something. He went up to the doorway, over and over, to look around outside. Finally, a woman appeared. As every step brought her nearer Joe saw clearly that she was the bookshop owner’s aged, beautiful former wife. But in Vincent’s eyes, she was that weightless woman from the twenty-four-story high-rise in City B. Vincent had remembered agreeing to meet her at this spot.

The woman walked in, nodding familiarly to the two men. She said, “At dusk there was so much fog I could hardly make out the road.”

Vincent and Joe opened their mouths at almost the same time and said to each other, “So, you two arranged to meet here.”

At this they were both embarrassed. But the woman wasn’t. She walked over and clasped both their hands, shaking them forcefully a few times. Joe saw a figure beyond the wavy white hair of her elegant head. It was a rare breed of white tiger. In the dim light the tiger’s eyes were two lamps.

Soon the three of them couldn’t see one another’s faces.

Joe pressed the woman’s hand. Her hand didn’t give him the slightest feeling of reality. He thought of something.

“You’d said we wouldn’t meet again, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I said something like that. This is like fate. . If Ito were here. .”

Her voice was so ethereal Joe felt she must be floating overhead. But her slender hand was still held in his own, although it grew icy cold. Joe tried to warm it with one hand, while he clasped it with the other.

“Joe, why can’t I see the things I want to see?” Vincent’s dejected voice came from the dark. “I look harder, but on the beach there is only a boot the sea has pushed onto the shore.”

Vincent seemed to be crying. Joe thought that his tears probably fell on the palm of the woman’s other hand, because the hand Joe held in his was regaining its warmth little by little. The woman took back her hand and walked out through the door with quick steps. Joe heard her voice still inside the tower.