Soul Mountain (45 page)

She says she longs for him and that with him she was uninhibited. She needs the security of a home, she wants to be a housewife, he said he wants to marry her and she believes him, but you have never mentioned these words. When he is making love to her, it doesn’t matter if he talks about other women, it’s only to arouse her passion, but everything you say makes her more and more cold. She realizes she really loves him, that it was because of her love for him that she suffered from anxiety and nervous imbalance. She ran away to make him suffer but now she’s had enough of it. She’s had her revenge and has taken it too far. If he finds out he’ll definitely go mad, but he’ll still want her and will forgive her.

She says she also misses her family, even her stepmother. Her father must be frantic and is certain to be looking for her everywhere. He’s getting old and if he’s not careful anxiety will affect his health.

She also misses her workmates in the laboratory. They’re petty, narrow-minded and jealous, but if anyone buys a fashionable dress they always take it off so everyone can try it on.

She also misses those troublesome dance parties but wearing new shoes and putting on perfume, the music and the lights still tug at her heart.

So what if the smell of antiseptic in the operating theatre was even stronger, still it is clean and orderly, and each medicine has a specified pigeonhole so that you can just reach out for it – all these are familiar and dear to her. She has to get away from this hellish place, all this talk about Lingshan is just to trick her!

She says it was you who said love is an illusion which people conjure up to delude themselves. You don’t believe in the existence of something called love – it’s either the man possessing the woman or else the woman possessing the man. And you just go on making up all sorts of beautiful children’s stories to provide a refuge for her weak and fragile soul. You say all this then straightaway forget that you’ve said it! You can deny you said any of this but the shadow you have left on her heart is indelible. She shouts out that she can’t go any further with you! The water at the bend looks calm but it’s bottomless, she can’t go any further with you towards that deep abyss. If you make a move she’ll cling onto you and drag you down with her so that you will go together to visit the King of Hell!

She says she can’t cling onto anything, it’s best that you give her a way to go on living. She won’t implicate you so you won’t be culpable, you’ll be able to travel comfortably, whether it’s to Lingshan or to Hell. There’s no need to push her, she’ll go away, far away from you, never see you again and never want to see you again. There’s no need for you to worry about her, it is she who is leaving so you will not have wronged her, there’ll be no remorse, no responsibility. Just treat it as if she hadn’t ever existed and your conscience won’t trouble you. You notice that you can’t utter a single sentence, this is because she has spoken about your sore spot, spoken about how you think. She has said for you exactly what you don’t dare say yourself.

She says she’ll go back, go back to him, back to that small room, back to her operating theatre, and back to her own home to restore her relationship with her stepmother. She was born an ordinary person and will return to being ordinary, and like an ordinary person marry an ordinary man. In any case she can’t go a step further with you, you monster, on your way down to Hell!

She says she’s afraid of you, you torment her, then of course she has also tormented you. Don’t say anything more, she doesn’t want to know anything, she knows everything, she already knows too much. It’s better to know nothing, she wants to completely forget all this, sooner or later she’ll have to forget it all. If finally there’s something she should say it would be that she’s grateful to you, grateful to you for the part of the journey you have taken her on and grateful for saving her from loneliness. However, she is even more lonely and it keeps getting worse and she can’t cope.

Eventually, she turns and walks off. You deliberately don’t look, you know she is waiting for you to turn your head. If you turn to look, she won’t leave, she will look at you, holding back her tears until they begin streaming down her cheeks. You will give in, beg her to stay. Then there will be embraces and kisses, she will again go limp in your arms, tearfully utter a jumble of endearing words, passionate and full of sadness. And with her arms like willow branches, her body will encircle you and drag you back down the same old road.

You resolutely refuse to look at her and go off on your own, straight along the precipitous river-bank. When you get to a bend you can’t help looking back, but she has vanished. Your heart is suddenly desolate, it’s as if you’ve lost something yet at the same time it’s as if you’ve attained some sort of release.

You sit on a rock as if waiting for her to come yet knowing she will not come back to you.

It is you who are cruel and not she and you simply think of her curses to convince yourself she is mean like this, so that she will totally vanish from your heart, so that you will not be left with any lingering remorse.

You drifted together like floating waterweeds, in that place Wuyizhen, because you were lonely and because she was depressed.

You don’t really know her at all, whether what she told you was truth or only half truth. Her inventions and your fabrications merge and are indistinguishable.

She also knows nothing about you. It was because she was a woman and you a man, because in the flickering light of the solitary lamp the dark upstairs room had the clean fragrance of paddy-rice straw, because it was a dream-like night in a strange place, because in the early chill of the autumn night she stirred your memories and your fantasies, your fantasies about her and your lust.

For her you were exactly the same.

Yes, you seduced her but she also seduced you. Is there need to attribute proportions of responsibility to a woman’s intrigue and a man’s lust?

But where will I find this Lingshan? There’s only that dumb rock where the mountain women go to pray for a son. Was she a
zhuhuapo
? Or was she the young girl those boys took swimming at night? Anyway, she is not a young girl and you are certainly not a youth. While recalling your relationship with her you suddenly discover you can’t say what she looks like or how her voice sounded. It seems to be something you have experienced but even more so it seems to be wishful thinking. But where is the boundary between memory and wishful thinking? How can the two be separated? Which of the two is more real and how can this be determined?

Wasn’t it in some small town, a bus stop, a ferry crossing, a crossroad, on a roadside, that you encountered a young woman who aroused in you many daydreams? But by the time you return how will you be able to find any traces of her in that town, that bus stop, that ferry crossing, that crossroad or that roadside?

The Temple of the White Emperor, on a sheer cliff of the Yangtze River, is bathed in the rays of the setting sun. Whirlpools in the river below can be heard in the distance, and right ahead loom the two cliff walls of Kuimen, as straight as if chopped with a cleaver. Looking down from the iron railing the rippling crystal clear water of the smaller river divides the swift flowing muddy waters of the Yangtze.

On the far side of a little stream a woman with a mauve parasol is making her way through the shrubs and bushes on the mountain slope. She is on a track leading to the barren top of the rocky cliff, but it is hidden from view, and after a while she disappears.

I watch the brilliant gold of the setting sun disappear along the cliff tops and both sides of the gorge are suddenly plunged into darkness. Red navigation lights set on rocks close to the sides of the river appear, one after the other. An upstream steamboat heading east is crammed with passengers on all three decks as it enters the gorge, and the dull blast of its whistle reverberates long after it has gone.

It is said that at the fork in the river beyond Kuimen, Zhuge Liang heaped rocks for his Eight Trigram battle strategy. I have travelled by boat several times past Kuimen and people on board always eagerly point out the spot for me, but even now that I am in this ancient city of the White Emperor, I am still not sure of the location. It was in this ancient city that Liu Bei entrusted to Zhuge Liang his soon-to-be orphaned son who had been brought up to inherit the throne. But who can attest to the truth of storytellers’ tales?

In the Temple of the White Emperor, the smashed altars have been replaced with brightly painted clay figures modelled on new versions of the historical opera so that the place looks like an opera, theatre instead of a temple.

I go around the front of this ancient temple and discover a fairly new hostel. The landscape here is rough and barren with just a few bushes, but halfway up the mountain are the ruins of a large semi-circular Han Dynasty city wall. It can only be seen here and there but it stretches for several kilometres. The director of the local cultural office points it out to me, he’s an archaeologist and is passionate about his work. He tells me he submitted a report asking the relevant government department to allocate funds for preserving the wall. I think it’s better in its present state – if funds are allocated, they’re sure to put up a gaudy building, then a restaurant, and the scenic beauty of the place will be utterly destroyed.

He shows me a four-thousand-year-old stone dagger, ground and polished to a jade-like sheen, which was unearthed in the area. The hole drilled through the handle suggests it probably hung from a belt. Along both banks of the Yangtze they have excavated many beautifully crafted stone implements as well as red pottery from the latter period of the Neolithic Age. In a cave at one site on the bank, a cache of bronze weapons has been found. He tells me that straight ahead, just a little way into Kuimen, in the cliff caves where legend says that Zhuge Liang had hidden his books on military strategy, the last hanging coffin was pulled down on ropes and smashed up by a deaf-mute and a hunchback a few months ago. They sold the wind-dried bones as dragon bones to a Chinese medicine shop and when the shop owner was asked for authentication, the matter was reported to the public security office. The police tracked down the deaf-mute but after spending a long time interrogating him, they were none the wiser. It was only after they slapped him a few times that he took them there. He rowed out in a small boat to the bottom of the cliff and demonstrated his skill in scaling cliffs. Wind-dried slivers of wood were found at the site which was ascertained to be a tomb of the Warring States period. The coffin must also have contained bronze relics which hadn’t been smashed but it was impossible to find out from the deaf-mute what had happened to these.

There are a large number of earthenware spinning wheels in the display room of the cultural office. They are painted with red and black swirling patterns and are probably from the same period as the four-thousand-year-old earthenware spinning wheels unearthed at Qujialing in the lower reaches of the Yangtze in Hubei province. In both cases there is a close resemblance to the Yin-Yang fish design. When the wheel turns emptiness and fullness diminish and grow in the one rotation then return to the beginning again. It has the same source as the Daoist Taiji Chart. My guess is that these are the earliest origins of the Taiji Chart, and also the origins of the complementarity of the Yin and the Yang, the alternation of good fortune and bad fortune, and the concepts of natural philosophy dating from the
The Book of Changes
to the Daoists. Mankind’s earliest concepts are derived from totems, afterwards these came to be linked with sounds to form speech and meanings.

Initially, the kiln stokers firing the spinning wheels had inadvertently added some extraneous material to the clay, but it was the women using the spindles who discovered that after one rotation there was a return to the beginning. The man who gave this meaning was called Fuxi. However the bestowal of life and intelligence to Fuxi must be attributed to a woman. The general name for the woman who created man’s intelligence is Nüwa. The first named woman, Nüwa, and the first named man, Fuxi, constitute the collective consciousness of men and women.

The depiction on Han Dynasty tiles of the mythical union of Fuxi and Nüwa, both with the bodies of snakes but human heads, is derived from the sexual impulses of primitive humans. The animals subsequently became spiritual beings, and then ancestral divinities. Surely these all embody the basic instincts to sexual lust and lust for life?

At that time the individual did not exist. There was not an awareness of a distinction between “I” and “you”. The birth of I derived from fear of death, and only afterwards an entity which was not I came to constitute you. At that time people did not have an awareness of fearing oneself, knowledge of the self came from an other and was affirmed by possessing and being possessed, and by conquering and being conquered. He, the third person who is not directly relevant to I and you, was gradually differentiated. After this the I also discovered that he was to be found in large numbers everywhere and was a separate existence from oneself, and it was only then that the consciousness of you and I became secondary. In the individual’s struggle for survival amongst others, the self was gradually forgotten and gradually churned like a grain of sand into the chaos of the boundless universe.