Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

It’s true — sometimes a best friend is better even than a lover , I said.

We worked for the Socialist Party during its heyday, and we watched it slowly fall apart. Now the left wing is losing the presidency to Chirac and the right wing, ending fourteen years of Socialist Party control …. Catherine was lucky in a way to not see this day …. In January 1981, Mitterand won the presidency for the Socialists for the first time. I was twenty-one, and when the results of the election were announced, Catherine and I embraced, screaming, jumping, laughing until we couldn’t stop crying. Oh, those were the days …. People in the Party went crazy, champagne flowed everywhere and hundreds and hundreds of bouquets were delivered to the Party’s front door. The front lobby was so crowded you couldn’t get through. Catherine and I were pressed together tightly in the crowd and she shouted into my ear, “Laurence, I have a secret to tell you: I sleep with a different woman every night.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “What kind of a secret is that?” She shouted even louder: “For three years now, I’ve wanted you, so I sleep with other women as if my life depended on it. But the person I’ve wanted all along is you!” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I was afraid of losing you!” Then Catherine started to cry. How could she hide it so well? How could she be so beautiful?

We’d been walking for a while when we turned a corner on rue des Rosiers and found an Israeli restaurant that was still open. She went in and bought a falafel and the two of us shared it as we walked along.

After that we escaped to Paris and lived in the Marais for five years.

Why “escape”?

Catherine’s father was the head of the Republican Alliance in Lyon. This was also something I only learned about later. You could say that her political views were the exact opposite of her father’s. Father and daughter reached an agreement that Catherine could help out with the Socialist Party, but after the presidential election she must return to the ranks of the RPR. Her father was a powerful figure — a banker in Lyon and a revered political leader in Lyon. So every move his daughter made was closely monitored: He couldn’t condone his daughter living with me, nor could she stay in the ranks of the Lyon Socialists, so we had no choice but to escape.

We crossed the bridge to Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, then set out on the road across the island until we reached the westernmost section, where we sat down and dipped our feet into the waters of the Seine.

A tourist boat without tourists aboard approached. To our right was Conforama, and just beyond was the magnificent Louvre; to our left was the National Institute of Art and the French Academy. Sitting there, sitting at this destination, it felt like the fulcrum of Paris, the nestling heart of Paris, so steady yet so animated….

Laurence, you love Paris, don’t you? You love Catherine, don’t you? You love politics, don’t you?

She slipped lightly out of her clothes, and before I realized what she was doing she dived into the Seine and an instant later her naked body emerged, facing me. I was wet. My heart began to pound. It began to pulse, to throb between my legs…. Pure carnal desire washed over my body, and for the first time it was a woman’s body that had caused it. Far from wanting to escape, I wanted to face whatever desire this was; I wanted see what experiencing this pure carnal desire would bring me….

Long before then, before I’d met Xu, Yuan Yan often made fun of my desire for women, after I told him that I had loved women since I was fifteen, and that when I was eighteen I began to be attracted to women’s bodies. He asked whether or not I could be physically attracted to a woman I didn’t know, and I said that I couldn’t, that I could only be attracted to a woman’s body (perhaps very quickly) after falling in love. So Yuan Yan teased me that my sexual desire for women was the result of consciousness, that the conscious love and conscious aesthetics of my sexual desire predominated, leading me to fixate my desire on the essence of femininity, while at the same time the dominance of this consciousness led me to suppress any carnal desire and to abandon any attraction to an energetically masculine aesthetic. Yuan Yan didn’t believe that I was having sex with him merely to make him happy; and even while we were fucking I think I loved women’s bodies. He felt that I was biased against male bodies, prejudiced against them. He repeatedly tried to indoctrinate me into the delirious carnal passion of a man and a woman, but he never succeeded. I only replied, “It’s a secret belonging to the soul, not the body!”

The first few months I was in Paris, a strong, handsome Greek classmate of mine named Andonis didn’t mince words: He wanted me. I told him up front that I only liked women, and he scoffed, saying there’s no such thing. He then scolded me for being too conservative — a “body” is just a “body”; it was only a matter of attraction, and whether or not the “body” could inspire desire; there was no such thing as a distinction between a male body and a female body. For him, sex and love were two different things. Sex was impulse, the pleasures of the flesh (he pointed downward), while love was emotional, the pleasures of the soul (he pointed to his heart). The two things were basically channels that opened independently, but when they connected were all the more sublime. He still liked me but felt frustrated. “Is it that I’m not handsome enough for you?”

I shook my head.

Zoë, maybe you don’t understand the pure beauty of carnal desire. You’ve never experienced the rapture of Dionysus. I don’t think any of the women you’ve loved have had the power to bring you to Dionysus. He sat in the corner, sulking: Zoë, the word “Zoë” means “life” in Greek, doesn’t it? Do you really understand Zoë?

Yuan Yan and Andonis were both right, though only partly. The one to bring me to Dionysus was a woman.

At dusk I watched Laurence twirl her hair in the Seine as she does when she’s saying something exciting, her bangs smoothed to one side. Whether in the water or on land, she punctuates herself with a comma. Her skin was tan, an even, light coffee-brown, lighter and silkier than the chestnut color of her hair. Amid the glossy dark green trees of spring, the extravagantly bewitching dance of the leaves on both shores, illuminated by the glow of Parisian culture, Laurence was like a fish leaping gracefully toward a million shimmering leaves, swimming against the current toward the light…. When she dives into the water to swim she reveals the impossible curve of her ass and the river water runs and runs off her back…. I want to touch the curve with both hands; I want to suck the curve with my lips; I want to use the scorching heat between my legs to melt to the curve of her spine, no matter who she is…. Swimming the backstroke, the shape of her breasts silently break the water and I think she must be turned on, the tips of her nipples catching the light, the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting along with her breath, the wind rippling like the sound of fish shuttling, weaving back and forth, as if weaving the water with the beautiful contours of Laurence….

Yuan Yan: Are men’s bodies not beautiful? Can it be that you really don’t understand the beauty of an erect penis, its pulse and its ejaculation? Can it be that the beauty of a male body does not captivate your soul?

I appreciate male beauty, Yuan Yan, but perhaps I’m only aroused by the details of female beauty.

Andonis: Because you are such a courageous, such a powerful woman, only the sexual energy produced by the erect male muscle can move your body!