Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

Good night, Zoë. Do you have any idea how much I love you?

· · ·

In my infinite lethargy I don’t know the limits of missing you. I dreamed you were sleeping in a big bed and I was tidying up the study. Chen Sheng was playing in the background and you were saying something like “Quick, come here! If you don’t come over here I’m leaving.” I finished tidying up the study but you were nowhere to be found. I woke up in a cold sweat. Zoë, I wouldn’t insist on tidying the study. Being with you is my greatest desire. Yet now I don’t know how much more of this separation I can take. I fear that if I call, hanging up will be even more painful, but if I don’t call I’ll be in pain anyway alone in Taipei, in a perpetual state of lethargy, using lethargy to withstand a hundred years of waiting….

· · ·

As long as I can be with you I can bear anything, and am willing to bear anything, no matter how I writhe and seethe, my nose bloody and face swollen, no part of my body left unscathed. Just don’t uproot me, don’t leave me all alone in the world! I beg you.

In your journal of France, you say you want to carry me on your back and that you completely understand your place in my life, which is why you were tongue-tied with anxiety that day, right?

Zoë, please let me stay entangled with you. I simply can’t let you endure future suffering on your own.

· · ·

I miss you, I miss talking to you. I dreamed you came back; you were in tears because I hadn’t spoken to you. How comforting it would be to cast aside all practicalities and lean against you. My spirit is so weak.

· · ·

I will tend to you with my life. Please rest assured and give yourself to me. It makes no difference whether you were sincere before or not; I’ve already given myself to you, and know you are the only person who could look after my heart. You won’t let yourself go bald or get a fat belly, and you’ll always strive to expand and enrich your mind, right? You couldn’t stand yourself if you became vulgar, right? I know I can possess a pure emotional life with you.

· · ·

Every day my dreams weigh down on me until I can’t breathe — something I’ve never experienced before. I need to speak to you; I need to hear you say you love me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

· · ·

One day a fireball caused me to radiate power and vitality. The body and soul of a woman loved by someone can emanate a mild plenitude. It is the color of sapphire.

· · ·

I want to live with you — breathe together, live and sleep together, and ask you to trust me. I beg you to give me a chance, though the fact that I’m asking for this credit in advance is so contemptible.

Please don’t give up on me, on us.

· · ·

Zoë, promise me that we’ll be sweethearts who always trust each other, okay? Please believe that I’ll always trust you and support you, okay? So there will be no hesitation and no dishonesty between us, please? Even if everyone in the world betrays us, let’s both trust that when returning home one of us will be there to embrace the other, okay?

· · ·

We come from different worlds. This is fated.

No matter how madly we love, no matter how many tranquil moments of “intimacy” we enjoy, this is the fundamental nature of things.

Every time I let myself greedily need you, let myself take pleasure in the love that you offer, which satisfies me so perfectly, it’s like I’m a kamikaze jet. After the wild dive of arousal and romantic passion, only the flying cinders and smoldering ash remain.

Today I received your journals, knowing that you don’t want me to be sad.

But I’m till crying, sleeping with my clothes on. The contents are like nothing I expected. This access to your inner world leaves me anxious and terrified.

I didn’t know I could love this about you. What I have expected in our love has been a kind of sheer enthusiasm masked with a mirage of self-confidence. Sometimes we pretend to trust that I can love you, a pretense of tacit understanding, a necessary pretense even if pretending only proved that I couldn’t love you.

Sometimes I think I’m too greedy. What’s wrong with being a harbor that is slightly larger than another harbor? As for all your efforts in Paris, I am endlessly grateful — grateful that you loved me and thus let yourself be loved by me.

Is it okay to share with you these little lonely bits of mine? Paris must be lovely in the snow. Good night.

· · ·

This afternoon my colleague suddenly put on Jacqueline du Pré’s recordings of cello sonatas and the quiet office was filled with the sound of her majesty. Suddenly I felt transported back to last April and May when late at night with du Pré in the background I made three tapes (Zoë’s letters to Xu) for you as your birthday present. My heart tightened in pain. Was the heartbroken du Pré calling out to me? I can’t tell anymore. Her cello playing sounds fraught with pain. Du Pré was eventually paralyzed from an illness and her husband, the pianist Daniel Barenboim, later grew distant from her, but neither of them was to blame, don’t you think? The fundamental nature of their relationship was simply tragic. I really thought our relationship transcended such tragedy.

P.S. Perhaps the reason you were sad is because you were too busy to listen to each tape right after you received it! Though I do feel shy about them.

· · ·

I still can’t get through on the phone, I float in the vast unknown.

I suffer from loneliness. No letters for more than a week and my life is completely uprooted. To this add the abyss of your suffering in Paris and I’m losing my mind.

I dutifully called Paris twice a day and listened while it rang thirty times. My anger dissipated to calm. To keep you company on the phone in this way is fine too. Call me an Ah Q if you have to, tell me I’m like an ostrich with its head in the sand, it doesn’t matter. I’m selfish and weak and care only about my own miserable existence!

Please don’t wipe me away from your life! This week I slept deeply, not from the conviction that I would disappear without you but because the person I see reflected in the mirror is becoming more and more godless and haggard. In life there is an ineffable, restless anxiety that accompanies us, so very, very imprisoning….

Zoë, I am dumb when it comes to feelings, both in terms of my reactions and in expressing them. But please believe that I possess an enormous love for you and that my every loving gesture to you comes from my whole heart and whole mind, my whole heart and whole mind.

Or have you already left?

· · ·

Write me, please? A letter every two or three weeks would be fine. Tell me what you’re doing, who you’re hanging out with. I want to know. And I’m worried. I don’t have your new address and I’m scared that there’s some other reason you’re not giving me your new address, ahhh… I am as skittish as a bird that flaps at a mere pluck of a bowstring.

· · ·

Zoë, please, can I ask you not to forsake me in this lifetime?

· · ·

I’ve finally lost Zoë—my eyes are wide open and there’s nothing more to say.

Time after time, between my way of living and Zoë’s, I have chosen mine while carelessly abandoning Zoë. Now that I have really lost Zoë and my way wants me to claw violently and scream, I’m finally starting to see how much suffering my love caused him.

But I’ve understood this too late. I know he’s already gone. He gave me one last chance and I threw it away, deliberately, with my eyes wide open.

I didn’t have that strength. I depended on Zoë to feed and water our love, but I used up the nutrients I received for my own personal, individual needs. I failed to seize this moment in life when Zoë loved me with such purity, and ultimately I lost this devoted Zoë. The room is full of the remains of our love. Nothing can be given back. I will keep what Zoë bestowed upon me for the rest of my life, unexchangeable. Before going to Paris to find Zoë, I can only caress everything he left me.