Can Xue - Five Spice Street

The strange thing was that the widow didn’t seem to enjoy the writer’s speech. The more stimulated he was, the cloudier her face grew. Finally, she paid almost no attention to what he was saying. She rudely interrupted him, asking if bugs were biting him under the quilt. When he finished, the widow looked somber and said, ‘‘Doesn’t it feel too warm for two of us to be under the quilt? I was really surprised just now when you crawled in.’’

Then, turning her back on him, she murmured, ‘‘If I’d known it would be like this, it would have been better… Where did the crow crawl out from? I can’t take its cawing anymore!’’

At the height of his success, the writer felt doused with cold water and chilled from head to toe. He pitifully asked the widow for guidance. He didn’t imagine she would flare up and call him a ‘‘rat’’ and order him ‘‘to get out now.’’ She kicked him hard in the back- kicked him to the floor. The writer could do nothing but leave. This was a tragic, irreversible finale.

What was Mr. Q’s completely different nighttime character? Let’s return to the observations of the iron-willed woman we mentioned above. On a certain night, she heard weeping and wailing coming from Mr. Q’s home. To find out for sure what was going on, she skillfully entered the house and listened closely for several hours. She discovered that the couple and their two sons were asleep, yet the man kept weeping. Mr. Q’s uncontrollable grief seemed to come from his dream. Though sleeping, it seemed from his appearance that he was ‘‘struggling’’ hard. The woman stayed there until daylight; she waited until Mr. Q left the house. In the daylight, she saw Mr. Q change into a thin, shriveled old man. His gaze was unfocused. His eyes were swollen to the size of garlic bulbs. He also became paranoid, always fearful that his wife would trip and fall. Whenever he saw even a small stone on the road, he rushed ahead of his wife, kicked away the stone, and then, as if taking care of an infant, helped her walk on. As always, he did this with reverence and awe.

Another night, the woman noticed Mr. Q in the woods nearby. She considered approaching, but she heard two people’s voices and shrewdly hid behind a large tree. She listened intently until she realized the conversation was between Mr. Q and himself. It seemed he had a special skill: he faked a voice completely different from his own and created, one might say, ‘‘a conversation partner.’’ Mr. Q seemed intoxicated and crazy. He struck his head against the trunk of a tree so hard that blood trickled to his feet. Clearly determined to let himself go, he hit his temples with a stone until he saw stars and then stuck his head into a narrow hole in the tree. He kept it there until dawn. Among other things, he gulped down leaves and buried himself in mud, all the while whimpering like a dying person. It was enough to make your hair stand on end.

Finally, Mr. Q became two bodies: ‘‘in the daytime, he was a person; at night, a ghost.’’ He appeared exhausted, near death. As for Madam X, who had long suspected this sort of malady, she-hard as nails-determined that they should part company. We’ll talk of this later. For the moment, we’ll listen to some comments from Madam X to gain a more thorough understanding of Mr. Q’s malady.

When her sister asked ‘‘about his future,’’ Madam X changed her usual manner. Her face clouded over, and after a long silence, two tears rolled slowly from her eyes. ‘‘He’s going to be finished,’’ she said, choking. ‘‘The scene is gradually unfolding. You have to know that during my nights of insomnia, I couldn’t find him. I ran around crazily on the rooftop and searched every corner. But I never turned anything up. At sunrise, I sometimes was surprised to see him groaning in clumps of dried weeds. He was emaciated and frail, his bones like slender grasses, his eyes unseeing, his eyeballs showing a lifeless white. I knew that in the afternoon, I would run into him at the intersection, this stud with the peculiar voice. But the things that happened at night were more and more mysterious, and I was less and less able to endure it. It made my whole body sway lightly. I couldn’t stand still.’’

In speaking of the ‘‘cause of this illness,’’ she said: ‘‘Murder is committed at night when the winds of hell break bones and muscles. When I ran around on the rooftop-Oh! Why did it turn out this way? Why couldn’t it have been the other way around?’’

In despair, she said, ‘‘He entered my dream only once, but as a person with a totally different appearance. But I knew it was he who stood at the head of my bed. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock … ‘Oh!!’ I shouted at him. ‘In the afternoon, at the intersection, in the sunshine, you showed up again in front of the window!’ I shouted like this as a substitute for courage.’’

Despite all these depraved notions, Madam X and Mr. Q’s adultery continued. How did they accomplish this in locations no one knew about? And how did they ‘‘enjoy themselves to the full’’? Also, how can she substantiate her views of men? God only knows. As for details, she revealed nothing even to her sister. She seemed too wary. Maybe what went on between them wasn’t as empty as the widow guessed. Even the widow wasn’t really convinced.

Yet, it brought about a kind of reverse psychology on Five Spice Street. No one knows when people started being enthusiastic about painting murals, but all of a sudden murals began appearing on the walls along the street. All of them depicted sexual positions. Cleareyed people knew at once that these were realistic depictions of ‘‘the adultery.’’ Those bold, bare means of expression doubtless alluded to the fallacy in the widow’s story. Everyone demonstrated a fierce appetite for invention. They didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep: they painted day and night. In his excitement, one spilled a bucket of oil paint on himself and turned into an oil-paint person. Another shouted crazily, tore a painted nude to bits, and then pasted the pieces on the wall and called it an ‘‘abstract.’’ Sighing with feeling, people said: ‘‘Art can give people such sublime happiness! Aside from rationalists like the widow, who isn’t moved by its power? Life withers if it’s separated from imagination.’’

Madam X was unaware of all of this. Immersed in the adultery, she seized the pleasures of the moment without any thought for the future. Actually, she correctly sized up her situation: she knew her fantasies could not last. Calamity already loomed overhead, but in the eyes of others, she was still like someone without a care in the world: every day, there were two things she couldn’t forget. One was the date at the intersection. She was always impatient: like a young girl, she ran until she was gasping for breath. She couldn’t see anyone else; she couldn’t hear anything. As soon as she reached the shop window, she grabbed the man with the beautiful eyes, as though clutching at a reef in the midst of surging waves, or as though burning with fiery lust. The second was the adultery which occurred in an unknown place. Although no one had any way to break this case and although this wantonness in broad daylight had become the shame of the community, Madam X and Mr. Q flaunted their adultery by holding hands in broad daylight as they crossed the street, ignoring everyone else. They grew younger and more sexually radiant by the day. The people on Five Spice Street did nothing but watch. What else could have better demonstrated our breeding? To move a step forward: Madam X and Mr. Q were sexually experienced adults (one can even say that Madam X had ‘‘abundant’’ sexual experience). Being in the prime of life, they took keen pleasure in their rapture. Is it possible that when they were in the unknown place, they did not remove their clothes right away and carry on in all kinds of ways? Is it possible that they carried on just as the widow had described- dumbstruck, bored, or reciting poetry, singing to each other, and murmuring sweet nothings to each other while sitting far apart? This was illogical. All the more so, since Mr. Q was not sexually defective (his two children are proof of that; at a glance, you can tell whose children they are). Madam X was even less sexually defective: the crowds on Five Spice Street blush for her, this woman to whom no standards could be applied. She had actually never acknowledged any of society’s restrictions.