Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

True, what you say is correct. In the past, indeed, I had never met a woman with enough sexual vitality to lead the latent power in my body toward Dionysus. Andonis, what you say is true, but it’s still not a matter of masculinity.

Laurence’s body was too free, too sexual, far more so than my own body, and it was a body of such sensual beauty that it was as if every detail of her body had been designed for my approval and praise. No matter who she was, my body would actively desire her body, desire to enter that overtly free, overtly sexual interior, desire for her to free my own sexual energy, desire for our two bodies to take flight and engage in symmetry….

From then on I was clear: Passion was not an expression of sexual desire, nor was it an intense and fleeting emotional desire. Passion was a personality type, it was the powerful expression of one’s personality as influenced by life. Laurence’s total freedom and sexual power flowed forth from her passion, and the shape of her passion fit with the shape of my passion, though hers was stronger than mine — and left me in such a state that a single touch from her caused my entire body to break out in a nervous sweat, as if I had physically matured in an instant and brimmed over with desire….

Yes, in terms of the active (yang) and the passive (yin), the shape of Laurence’s passion was more active than mine. Her passion was fuller and more robust than mine, so that when my body came into contact with hers every cell would activate in a way that never happened before. In the past, when a man’s body entered mine, or when I was most ardently in love with a woman, certain cells didn’t activate or come alive. Yet these cells were the very source of strife that caused my passion for life to erupt violently!

Passion. It’s not a male body’s, and it’s not a female body’s. It’s not the penetration or reception of sex organs, and it’s not how powerful a body is or the amount of its sexual secretions. It’s not how a person expresses their strengths or weaknesses to other people. Passion is a quality, a quality that is an energy resource that someone can tap into within themselves. The type of passion I’ve been searching for in people is similar to my own. It’s not necessarily in the body of a man and it’s not necessarily in the body of a woman. Before I met Laurence, I assumed it would have to be in the body of a woman. When Laurence triggered my body to sexually activate, I discovered that this person didn’t have to be a woman. It was my collision with the quality of her passion that released my stored potential for passion and not that she was a woman.

Laurence knew I was writing a novel, and every two or three days she would come by my place to keep me company. In March she was busy preparing the gay film festival at the center, looking for a scriptwriter and preparing for the AIDS fund-raiser; in May she helped organize the Run for AIDS marathon. I figured the gay pride events at the end of June would keep her even busier. Not only did she volunteer at the Gay and Lesbian Center, which had been established less than a year ago; she was also an administrative assistant at the Paris headquarters of the Socialist Party. In May she was so busy working on Lionel Jospin’s presidential campaign that her stomach problems inflamed and she had to hide out at my place for a number of days. The night that the election results were announced, May 14, when she heard that the right-wing candidate Chirac had beaten Jospin, she leaped up from the bed and turned off both the television and the radio.

It’s over. It’s all over. I can’t devote another seventeen years to the Socialist Party.

She walked over to my desk, flipped some pages of my novel, and asked me to read it to her in Chinese. I said that I had already sent out ten chapters and that I only had copies of the fifth and eleventh chapters and was in the middle of writing the sixteenth. She said no problem, that when I was dead I could read it to her in hell. She sat on my black office chair and I sat on the carpet. I spread my manuscript out on her lap and then read aloud, one page at a time, and understanding absolutely no Chinese she listened quietly, almost not daring to breathe, just scratching her head from time to time.

When your novel’s finished, I’ll take you to Greece, okay? she said almost immediately after I finished reading the last line.

We tiptoed into the bathroom. Water drenched our naked bodies and she kissed me all over, my ears, the roots of my hair, my belly, my breasts, my navel, my abdomen, my pubic hair, my vulva, my back…. She liked me to sit first on a chair and would lick my whole body with her hot tongue until my body was standing on edge and then she’d lightly take my hand and lead me to the bed…. Her arms were long and powerful. When she held my body it was as if that power might squeeze out my soul. She murmured sweet things in French into my ear. Her tongue was the only one I’d ever encountered that possessed an electric charge, and when it coiled around me my soul simply took flight. In Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice , an old man goes one night to beg for help from Maria, and Maria uses her body to console the old man, and the two of them float up and hover in the air over the bed….

She knew the right time to push her cunt against mine, making me come in a heartbeat…. When her own body reached a certain degree of arousal she’d bore into me like a small snake and slide swiftly into the mouth of my groin…. She knew what rhythm to follow and when to enter my cunt, to brush against all those obscure curves, the creased cliffs, the canals, climbing the steep slope of arousal and suddenly planting a crimson flag there. The Virgin Mother of burgeoning flowers reproducing asexually and gushing forth in clusters from the slender internal palace….

Catherine used an antique dagger I gave her to slit her own throat.

On June 6, 1987, at 2 p.m. she died in a hospital bed in Lyon. She was thirty-two. She’d just given birth to her first son. She was in her second week of recovery there.

One day during our fifth year in Paris I came home from work to discover her and another woman, my co-worker, naked in bed. It turned out they had been having an affair for more than a year. That evening I didn’t say a word, no matter how much she kneeled and cried and begged. I gathered my things and called a cab, and moved away from Paris the same night, north to the city of Lille, and cut off contact with her. Later I heard from a friend that she had moved back home to Lyon, accepted a political marriage arranged by her father to a son of someone in their circle who was also a childhood friend as well as the heir of her father’s co-worker in the Republican Alliance. That year in Lille I lived a life of total seclusion. Every day I would sit on the patio watching the sunrise and sunset. Twice I contemplated suicide but was saved by my landlord. At the time I didn’t believe that I could ever reconcile myself with the world. I didn’t believe I had the power to save myself and go on living …. I knew too well my own naked self and the world seemed too stupid and ugly and I was virtually powerless in such a conflict ….

More than a year later, when Catherine had given birth, she secretly asked my family to send a message to me, inviting me to come see her. On the afternoon of June 5 I walked into her hospital room with an armful of her favorite champagne roses and put the roses in a vase. I didn’t say a word, just sat down in silence. When I got up to leave and leaned over to give her a farewell kiss on both cheeks, the only thing I softly said was “ Je t’emmerde beaucoup! ” You disgust me!