Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

I long for a human life, a human life that will never leave me as long as I live and who looks just like her. I don’t know why she has to look just like her and not like anyone else. Perhaps I can only love someone who looks like her. No matter how she might change, in sickness and old age and death, I could love her and care for her, do my absolute best for her for the rest of my life. I long for a human life who looks exactly like her and who will need my love and care for the rest of her life.

I love her like this not because she is perfect or possesses certain qualities well-suited for me; in other people’s eyes she is possibly just an ordinary girl. I love her like this because my desire matured for her. Yes, this is a milestone in my life that can never be erased.

For a while we loved each other absolutely. We achieved the kind of union that I’ve dreamed about and longed for so deeply. We were seamlessly united, bodies moving as one toward our ideal of love. From the time I met her a few months before leaving to study in France to the middle of my stay in France, we loved each other with our whole hearts and lived fully in love’s paradise. I know that I couldn’t love anyone else in this perfect way, nor be able to create such a loving union with anyone else. Deep down I even reject this possibility: “I don’t want it.” Even though she left me here alone, broke my heart, and destroyed me, inflicting the most intense shame upon me, I still can’t see myself without being in this “union,” without ever holding on to this “union.”

This whole tragic ordeal has forced my desire to mature. Her existence has released an enormous capacity for love within me, an enormous capacity for love that has been stamped forever as hers, an enormous capacity for desire that because of her has expanded too much and laid my soul too bare. Maybe because my soul has been bared I can offer her a kind of purge, a kind of catharsis; maybe it’s why I’m a kind of “expert” on her life. Now that I understand so clearly, I have even greater reserves of energy to tap for her!

My life is “for” her. I know I won’t ever find another human being so beautiful to me, one whom I love for her eyes, forehead, lips, hair, hands, feet, her face, her body, her voice, her scent, her every mannerism, her expressions when she’s talking, the clothes and makeup she wears, her aesthetic sensibilities, the way she gets along so easily with other people and with animals, which is an aspect of her personality that touches me most, and her perceptions and the spiritual issues she shares with me, as well as her unique natural gift for nurturing me, listening to me, giving to me, and loving me. Even when I feel hatred toward her and scream and hit her, I am painfully aware that for me she is excessively—

MAY 8

I.

What I’ve come to understand in the past thirty minutes may be the most important breakthrough in my life.

It is central to the loaded subject of physical sexual desire. But I’m not ready to explain it to Xu yet.

The moment Laurence entered my body I felt an enormous, almost crushing mental and physical burden. This was a kind of mental and physical double imperméabilité that I had not experienced since the hazy nightmares of my youth. Though I’ve tried to develop a sense of self-awareness, at that moment what my mind and body experienced was too intense for me to comprehend.

II.

My big sister called from Taiwan to tell me she had sent the CD I wanted. She said she has to count the beads of a Buddhist rosary before bed every night or she can’t sleep well and has nightmares about someone dying…. The morning I phoned Yong, she told me she was just about to call when I obediently called her. She said she’d had a dream that night of my coffin being brought to her door, but I was nowhere to be found…. Xiao Mei also said she had a dream earlier in the year where I was crying, “It hurts, it hurts.” (That was around the time Xu was causing me such anguish in Paris.) Xiao Mei’s subconscious is unfailingly accurate and is protective of me. It’s a connection we’ve shared for six years. The person who died in my elder sister’s dream must be the one whose coffin is in Yong’s dream: me. Both of them discerned the seriousness of my distress that emanates from the deepest core of my being. It’s more or less because of these two people that my physical body still exists. One is my own flesh and blood, and the other is someone whom I could feel, from the moment I met her, really needed me to be alive. I’ve maintained this deep connection with Yong for more than five years…. Yes, my elder sister and Yong were right. Even Qing Jin heard my signals of distress. Three days after I returned from Tokyo, I received an inexplicable phone call from her (I had been out of touch with her for nearly three months). The evening she brought me dinner, though I couldn’t eat a bite and took a bunch of sleeping pills, I asked her why she bothered coming anywhere near me, and she laughed and said it was because she sensed something was wrong….

Calling out for help, yes, I was calling out for help! Ever since August 1994, when I learned about Xu’s cruel betrayal, I’ve been walking a long dark alley of death, and I knew that it was very possible that I’d die. And on March 13 I lived alongside death, only a thin membrane separating us, and in those ten days before I went to see Yong it seemed like it could take me at any moment. I was living in an indescribable, trembling abyss. For the first time I was forced to confront the high “probability” of death extinguishing the dual layers of my spiritual life and corporeal life. (In comparison, what I had experienced in the past was a sort of “voluntary” death, whereas, say, a serious car accident is but a chance “probability” of corporeal death.) To this day I’m still not sure if I’ve emerged from this “dark alley of death.” After I returned to Paris back in March, sometimes I would walk along the Seine around ten at night and imagine myself writing a novel called Last Words to Those I Love Deeply , and envisioned concluding each individual letter with the words “Save me!”

But in this novel there was no letter to Xu.

I suppose my words here are a final attempt to forgive Xu. If this fails, I can’t keep living in a body that hates her so intensely. I’ll have to die, as a final act of reconciliation for being alive, a reconciliation of my deepest love and hate intertwined. And a reconciliation with her being alive. My death will remind her of the seriousness and sincerity of life itself. There will be no more problem of forgiveness; a place will remain as the foundation of our love. Otherwise, if I am fortunate enough to stay alive, I’ll have to use the cruelest methods to rid myself of this person, to completely erase this person from my life, because I love her too much, and I’m wounded too deeply by her betrayal and dishonesty.

The issue of “forgiveness” relates to saving myself as well as Xu.

III.

I read something Herbert Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization : “Eros signifies a quantitative and qualitative aggrandizement of sexuality.” I’m heartbroken….

As far as what I look for in a partner, it seems my “eros” will never be satisfied. I am so heartbroken, realizing this, so terribly heartbroken…. My dissatisfaction caused Shui Yao to leave me and run off with someone else; and it caused Xu, who promised to satisfy me body and soul, to disregard whatever catastrophic consequences might befall me and choose the most miserable and hard-hearted way of betraying me a second time, a dual betrayal of love and eros even more ridiculous than the first. My God of Fate — it’s not that I didn’t want to love these two women, nor that these two women I loved would betray me because I felt “unfulfilled.” A sense of “unfulfillment” was glaringly obvious to them. Ha. In the end, I was abandoned for being “unfulfilled.” It wasn’t really my fault.