Soul Mountain (54 page)

They start giving reports again.

What sort of language can I use so that I can chat freely with them? Should I ask what it’s like living here? They will certainly want to talk about the availability of commodities, prices and wages. But then my own financial resources are sorely deficient. However, this isn’t a venue for idle conversation and I can’t say, when the world is becoming increasingly incomprehensible, where man and mankind’s behaviour is so strange that humans don’t know how humans should behave, why are they looking for the Wild Man. So apart from the Wild Man what else is there to talk about?

They say that last year a primary school teacher saw the creature. It was in June or July, round about this time of the year, but he didn’t dare publicize it. He just mentioned it to a close friend and told him to keep it to himself. That’s right, not so long ago someone published an article called “Tragic History of the Wild Man of Shennongjia” in the
Dongting Magazine
of Hunan Province. Someone got hold of it, circulated it and everyone read it. The search for the Wild Man started here and has spread to the provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian, Sichuan, Guizhou, Anhui . . . It’s been reported everywhere (except Shanghai!). In Guangxi they actually captured a small Wild Man, it’s called a Mountain Devil there. The peasants thought it was unlucky and set it free (unfortunately). Also there have been reports of Wild Man flesh being eaten. It’s all right to talk about it. When the research team came this was investigated and confirmed and books have been published on it. It was in 1972 that Zhang Renguan, Wang Liangcan and about twenty others who were mostly workers from our reserve, ate the foot and calf of a Wild Man in the dining hall of Sunshine Bay Farm! The foot was about forty centimetres long, the big toe five centimetres in circumference and ten centimetres long. The documentation they put together has all been stamped. The calf was twenty centimetres in circumference and weighed fifteen kilograms and they all had a big bowl of it. The Wild Man was killed by a peasant in Panshui with a rifle fitted with a silencer and he sold a leg to the Sunshine Bay Farm dining hall. Also, in 1975, on the mountain road from Qiaoshang Commune to Yusai Number One Work Brigade, Zeng Xianguo was struck on the face by a two-metre-high Wild Man with red hair. He blacked out for some time and when he regained consciousness ran home but couldn’t talk for three or four days afterwards. This is all from a comparative anatomy statistical analysis carried out on a documentation of his oral account. Didn’t Zhao Kuidian see a Wild Man eating coriaria fruit when he was on the road back to his home village? What year was that? 1977 or 1978? It was a few days before the investigation team came for the second time from the Academy of Social Sciences. Of course, you can believe or not believe all this, the people of the investigation team are also divided about it. But if you listen to the peasants in the mountains talking about them it is quite sordid. The Wild Man chases women, looks for young girls to play with and for sex, some even say that the Wild Men can talk and makes different sounds when happy and sad.

“Are there any here who have seen one with his own eyes?” I ask.

They all laugh and stare at me but I can’t tell if it means they’ve seen one or not.

Afterwards, I go with a cadre guide into the cleared central section of the reserve. In 1971 an army truck convoy came and logged the main peak for two years for national defence material, or so they said, and left it denuded. At an altitude of only 2,900 metres I can see an expanse of beautiful low sub-alpine marshland, young green grassy waves undulating endlessly in the mist and rain, dotted with tangled clumps of Cold Arrow Bamboo. I stand for a long time in the icy wind, thinking to myself that this stretch of natural wilderness is probably one of the last bits of primitive ecology.

Zhuangzi, who lived more than two thousand years ago, said that useful timber dies prematurely by the axe and only useless timber enjoys good fortune. People today are greedier than the ancients and this casts doubt on Thomas Huxley’s theory of evolution.

In a mountain homestead, I come across a bear cub in the shed. It has a rope collar around its neck and looks like a little brown dog as it clambers up and down a pile of wood. It keeps growling and still doesn’t know to bite to defend itself. The owner says he picked it up in the mountains and there is no point asking if he had killed the mother, but the little dog-like bear is very cute. Seeing how much I like it, he says for twenty
yuan
, I can take it with me. I don’t have plans to learn a circus act and if I take it with me how can I go on wandering? It’s best for me to leave the cub where it is.

Outside someone’s house, I also see a wormholed piece of leopard skin bedding airing in the sun. Tigers have been extinct for more than ten years. I also see a stuffed golden monkey. I guess it’s the one they caught in the tree, the one which refused food and died. When animals are captured and refuse to be domesticated, this is all they can do. But this requires considerable resolve, and not all humans can do this.

It is also in front of the administrative office of the reserve that I see a large sign newly posted on the wall: “Congratulations on the establisment of the Old People’s Sports Committee!” I think that a new political campaign is to be launched and hasten to ask the cadre who has put up the sign. He says a telephone instruction came from higher up – they wanted it up so he put it up. It’s got nothing to do with you or me, it’s only for revolutionary cadres who are over sixty and who are receiving at least a hundred-
yuan
sports subsidy. The oldest cadre here is only fifty-five and just old enough to receive the consolation prize of a commemorative booklet. Later on I meet a young reporter who says the chairman of the Old People’s Sports Committee is the retired former district party secretary, and had insisted on the reserve contributing a hundred
yuan
towards celebrating the establishment of the committee. The reporter says he is writing an internal reference document which he wants to go direct to the Central Discipline Investigation Committee and asks if I have any connections. I sympathize with his righteous indignation but suggest that posting it would be much more reliable than giving it to me.

I see a pretty young woman with a light sprinkling of freckles on her nose. She is dressed differently from the people on this mountain and is wearing an open-neck short-sleeved cotton-knit top. When I ask, it turns out that she comes from Zigui, on the south bank of the Yangtze, the birthplace of Qu Yuan. She has finished middle school and has come here to look for her maternal cousin and to see if she can find work on the reserve. She says the county government in Zigui has announced that the construction work of the big dam on the Three Gorges is about to start and that the county will be totally inundated. All households have filled in population evacuation registration cards and residents have been mobilized to make plans for their own livelihood. Afterwards, I travel south along the Xiang Stream which produces beautiful women, and before arriving in Yichang pass the home of the famous beauty of ancient time, Wang Zhaojun, with its black tiles and flying eaves on the mountain slope. An amateur writer tells me that the city is set to become the provincial capital of the future Three Gorges Province and that even the chair-elect of the future Writers’ Association has been internally decided. To my surprise the chair-elect is an award-winning poet of whom I’ve heard but who I can’t say I like.

I lost my poetic sensibility a long time ago and can’t write poetry. In any event I doubt that the present is an age for poetry. It seems that everything to be sung or shouted has already been sung or shouted. What remains is simply typeset, printed, and called impressions. If this is the case, then the artist’s drawings I have seen of the Wild Man with gangling arms, stooped back, thick legs and long hair, who giggles at people, and are based on scientifically-assessed eyewitness accounts appearing in Wild Man Research Association publications, are also impressions. Can, therefore, the strange sight I saw on my last night at Wooden Fish Flat in this primitive forest called Shennongjia also count as a poem?

A bright moon is in the sky. On the square in the shadow of the towering mountain, two high bamboo poles have been put up and kerosene lamps hung on them: a stage curtain stretches across the bottom section. An acrobatic troupe starts the show on the square to the sound of a battered, slightly out of tune trumpet and the muffled beat of a moisture-affected big drum. About two hundred people have turned up – grown-ups and children from the homes of this small village, including the cadres and workers of the reserve administrative office and their families and the pretty freckle-faced young woman wearing an open-neck, short-sleeved cotton-knit top who comes from the birthplace of Qu Yuan. There are three rows, packed tightly into a large semi-circle. Those in the front row are sitting on wooden stools brought from home, those in the middle row are standing, and those who come last are poking their heads in between the heads of the people in the middle row.

The program is the usual thing –
qigong
brick-chopping, one brick, two bricks, three bricks halved with a single chop of the hand; pulling in the belt and swallowing iron pellets and then spewing them up in a spray of spittle; a fat woman climbing up a bamboo pole and hanging upside down from a golden hook; and flame throwing. It’s all fake, it’s all fake. At first the women say this quietly then the young men start yelling it. The bald leader of the troupe shouts out, “All right, now for the real stuff!”

He hands a javelin to the iron pellet swallower and gets him to push the metal tip at his chest and throat until the bamboo javelin curves like a bow and the blue veins stand out on his bald head. People start to clap and it appears the audience has been won over.

The tension on the square relaxes, the trumpet reverberates through the shadows of the mountain, the drum ceases to be muffled, and everyone is in good spirits. The bright moon moves into the shadows of the clouds and the kerosene lamps become brighter. The sturdy fat woman balances a bowl of water on her head as she spins porcelain plates on bamboo sticks. At the end of the act she wriggles her rotund hips in imitation of the singers and dancers on TV as she skips and prances around to thank the audience. A few people clap. The troupe leader is glib of tongue and starts saying more and more audacious things as the skill content of the acts decreases, but everyone is in a good mood and is happy with whatever is put on.

The last item is a contortionist act. The girl dressed in red silk trousers and top, who up to this point has been picking up props, now leaps onto a square table. Two wooden benches are put onto the table, then another table put onto the benches. Her figure stands silhouetted high up against the black shape of the mountain, a brilliant red in the bright glow of the lamps, and instantly the full moon in the sky darkens and turns an orange-yellow.

First she does The Golden Pheasant Standing Alone, gently clasping her legs and lifting them right over her head. The audience loudly applauds. Then she does front-on splits, sitting perfectly still, flush on the bench. The audience cheers. Next with legs apart she bends backwards until the mound under her belly protrudes between her thin legs. The audience holds its breath. Her head slowly emerges between her legs and then, even more strangely, she puts her legs tightly together to hold in pincers this young girl’s head with long plaits. Her big black eyes look sad, as if they are staring at an alien world. Then her hands clutch this child-like face, and she is like a grotesque humanoid spider scrutinizing the audience. Some go to clap but stop. She props up her body on her hands then raises her hanging legs and proceeds to spin on one hand, her nipples showing clearly through her red silk top. The breathing of the audience is audible and the smell of hair and sweat permeates the air. A child wants to say something but the woman holding it silences it with a quiet slap. The girl in red, her teeth clenched, her abdomen gently heaving and her face shining with a rich glow in the clear pure moonlight with the black shape of the mountain behind, is contorted beyond human semblance. Only her thin lips and black eyes reveal her pain and it is this pain which inflames the human lust for cruelty.

Tonight, everyone is wildly excited, it’s as if they’ve been injected with the blood of chickens. It is deep into the night but most houses far and near are still lit up and there is talking and the clattering of things for a long time. I also find it impossible to sleep and wander back to the empty square. The kerosene lamps on the bamboo poles have been taken down and only the limpid moonlight remains. I find it hard to believe that just now, below this majestic, austere, deep mountain, people have just enacted these scenes of grossly unnatural human distortion and I wonder if it has all been a dream.