My mind swarms “with soft mud and supple reeds, cattle walking on roofs, harsh winters of Gloskar—everything you’ve written me. Though I mean never to leave here, and know I’ll never see you again.
My days are simple. I translate the Dream of the Red Chamber. In the evenings I write letters that I’ll never send. To you, and a couple to my father. Sometimes I travel.
You write of the clear path in your garden. In the Dream of the Red Chamber there are often many petals on the ground: “strewn with balsam and pomegranate petals” reads one passage, and elsewhere there are peach and plum blossoms, fallen rose and azalea petals. One day, near Seeping Fragrance Lock, Baoyu comes upon Daiyu gathering up whole handfuls of petals, burying them in the ground. “I’ve a grave for flowers in that corner over there,” she says. Another time, walking in the rain, he hears crying and peers through a trellis to see a girl kneeling among fallen rose petals, digging with her hairpin in the dirt. “Can this be another absurd maid come to bury flowers like Daiyu?” he wonders. “She must have some secret preying on her mind. She looks too delicate to be out in this rain.” Often in this novel people do small ceremonial things in secret: bury flowers, burn minute scraps of red paper, write words in the dirt, cry while handling delicate keepsakes wrapped in silk.
I’ve been thinking about one passage I just translated. It’s from Zhuangzi, whose book, in chapter 21, Baoyu has been reading It’s called “The House Breaker.” I’ll write some of it out for you below:
“Confuse the musical scales, break harps and lutes, stop the ears of good musicians, and all men under heaven will learn to hear for themselves. Dispense with ornaments and colored patterns, glue up the eyes of the keen-sighted, and all men under heaven will learn to see for themselves. Destroy quadrants and yard-measures, throw away compasses and squares, cut off the fingers of old deft artisans, and all men under heaven will learn skill for themselves. Burn tallies and seals and the people will revert to their natural simplicity. Break measures and scales and they will no longer quarrel. Abolish all the sacred laws of the world and the people will discuss things freely.”
So you see, my friend, I wonder what Zhuangzi would think about your cloak, your hood, your clapper, the sound it makes inside your mind.
It’s dry as dust here. Each day I wipe from my pillow a fine layer of grime.
Your Friend, as always,
Clerval
When I think of the way Clerval and his friend hold and comfort each other in their minds (even though they never speak, and Clerval won’t even send his letters) I wonder how it feels to be welcome within the mind of another, to believe another’s mind will take you in. What if Locke was mistaken and words aren’t a covering, a cloth made of wrongness?
Sometimes lying awake, I feel a pair of small hands beside me, lingering, waiting. How can I explain this? Yours were large and harsh. But these are more like the hands of the sad servant girl in Cao Xueqin’s book, or the girl who was kidnapped and can no longer remember her name. They’re waiting, but for what? I think they want something to lift up to the eyes of the body they belong to, something I can give them, but I don’t know what it is. And those eyes—would they be partly trusting and willing, partly not, like Clerval’s friend? Then my chest tenses, my eyesight goes wavy, the night’s suddenly cold again and vacant.
Aosta, June 23
My Friend,
I confess I think, much about my left hand these days.
Do I speak to you as from behind a hood, a cloak, and in my hand a warning bell, a clapper?
Do you listen to me as from behind a wall where the air is safe, your breathing safe?
If you’d stayed here would you have come to fear me? Would I have recoiled from you, preferring the petty study of this festering burn on my left hand that troubles me because I cant feel it at all or figure out when or how I even got it?
When I first wrote to you my pen didn’t hesitate along the page; I didn’t worry over what I was saying or how. I don’t know why or how that happened. But now something else has come into me, a feeling of recoil. I picture your face. Then I picture your face turned away. As if I need for you to turn away. Why would I do this?
I think of my garden wall, of all the earth’s many, many walls. Walls with leper’s windows, the Great Wall of China. I search for them in my Atlas at night. Walls for protecting towns, for fortresses, for farms, for fields, for keeping back the sea.
This morning I read the Purgatorio again. That passage where the Envious sit with eyes wired shut, “eyelids pierced and sewn with iron wires, as men sew new-caught falcons, sealing their eyes to make them settle down.” I think I was an envious person once. And yet, when I think now of the people outside these walls, the ones I often envied as a boy and for years after, I don’t really envy them anymore. But shouldn’t my envy have grown greater, not less, given what’s befallen me? Shouldn’t I want to be like them, want to take from them what’s theirs, resent them for what they still have? Yet I watch as from a great distance, a place I’ll never return from, a gap composed of space and time. A tenderness, a certain feeling of protectiveness even, comes over me—for the ones I think of and the small, vulnerable dailiness of their lives. I once saw a woman with terribly skinny arms; the sharp, elongated bones seeming almost to poke through, and I think of each and every one of them like those arms—so easily breakable, so fragile.
I want them to go to the market and be all right, to laugh with each other and talk, over dinner and play with their children and go to their jobs and have celebrations and longings and dreams and plans and be all right. I don’t envy them or hate them. I cant say if they just seem unreal to me now, part of something I can never touch or be part of again. I don’t know. But I think of their fragility, always of their fragility, even the obnoxious and the rich ones, the ones I can’t stand, the ones who eat too much and wear too many rings.
I shouldn’t have written you about my hand. I wonder if you found that poem you spoke of when you were here, the one you felt you could wander in forever. The one the woman wove for her husband.
My garden is doing well.
Your Friend,
My Friend, each time I translate a prescription from the Dream of the Red Chamber I think of you. These prescriptions that mostly sound crazy but seduce me all the same with their promises of improvement or cure (I think of your hand now and wonder how you are).
But Zhuangzi didn’t speak of cures. He said destroy, said throw away, said dispense with, break, cut off the finger of the deft, glue up the eyes, destroy and throw away. He didn’t say mend or heal or repair or build or straighten. He didn’t say make orderly or clean or
I can’t write this to you. Can’t write anything to you.
“Destroy quadrants and yard-measures, throw away compasses and squares.”
Destroy and throw away. Glue up the eyes. (but beneath my shut eyes your scarred face) (your scarred face still with me even if you need to turn away)
and destroy and destroy
TRANSLATION NOTES FOR THE PRESCRIPTION EXPLAINED BY BAOCHAI TO MRS. ZHOU IN CHAPTER 7
“You must take 12 drams (?) of rain gathered only on the day called Rain Begins.” (I think this is February 20th, must check)
“But what if it doesn’t rain on that day?” Mrs. Zhou asked.
“Then you just have to wait. You must try the next year or the next.”
My Friend, the day’s over and I haven’t written to you. I don’t even know if you’re alive. You write of tenderness, of fragility, of sewn eyelids, blinded eyes. Of the Mass of Separation, and of walls. I, too, sometimes dream of a clapper and a hood. I haven’t told you of all the hands on Beggar’s Bridge. You write of Virgil’s tender gesture. Of Dante and Virgil walking together. I imagine us walking like they did. Where would we go? Would we speak or walk in silence, or both? I’m used to my straw bed now. I remember the narrow winding lane that leads to your house with its tower and garden. I remember how you said you never touched the fl
owers you’d sometimes leave for the man who delivered your packages, fearing you might contaminate him, but held them only between scissors, then dropped them onto paper laid out on the stone steps.
I think of you—
Your Friend,
Clerval
I’m thinking about how Clerval’s friend in Aosta dreamed he didn’t want to be healed, didn’t stay on his knees but got up and walked away. And for a moment—but why?—your face loses its power in my mind.
Each day I wait for Clerval, fear what I would be without this watching, my eyes emptied of his tired face, his hands, fingers gently smoothing his friend’s letters.
He picks up another letter. It’s late, he’s worked all day turning characters into words. Shan is mountain, the surname bao means “to carry in the arms.” There are so many nuances, complex histories, allusions—how can he ever get them right? Qiao means happy coincidence. Ge is boy. “Doesn’t grass turn into glow-worms?” Daiyu asks, and he notes that she’s referring to the Book of Rites which says, “Rotting grass turns into glow-worms.” And what is this thing called The Beauty in the Snow?—it’s a painting by Qiu Ying. So much to know and he knows so very little. I can see from his notes that often he considers giving up. But what would his days be without Baoyu and Daiyu, their pavilions, flowers, glowing lanterns, the many secret dramas, the servants who don’t own their own lives, the meddling Lady Dowager, the decline of families and empire, scandals, thwarted loves, the prescriptions that make him think of his friend in Aosta? He knows he won’t stop, that tomorrow he’ll get up and look at the black and red characters in vertical lines down the page, and his hand will move slowly, horizontally, until his own page is filled, and then he’ll move on to the next. All day until nightfall, and all the days he can envision after that.
Aosta, June 26
My Friend,
Do I write to you because you’re at a safe remove from me? Because I know I’ll never hear from you or see you? I’ve lived for decades with the daily knowledge of bodily contagion, but what of the contagion of the mind?—the danger of one voice answering another, contaminating, altering, needing another. Still, the recoil in oneself is inconstant, isn’t it?—it surges forth, then slackens, gains force again then goes etc.
Now that you know about my hand, that my condition is worsening, I don’t feel I need to hide things from you (though part of me still wants to) and I find that, at least at the moment, I don’t resent that you know. Maybe because you’re far away. Maybe because I know you can’t tell me what you think. I don’t need to live in fear of what you’d say. Nor can I be made uncomfortable by your possible desire to comfort me (which I would find painful and would very much dislike) if that were your impulse. Whatever your impulses are I cant know them. I comfort myself with this knowledge. So you see, my leper’s hood, my leper’s cloak, it’s not that I’ve taken them off, it’s not that I trust you or myself.
In any case, since I know you can picture my garden, let me tell you a little about my house. Though seeming completely isolated, it stands not too far from the Hospital of SS Maurice and Lazare and La Charité. I don’t know if you realized this. It was purchased by order of the king and turned into a sanctuary before I ever arrived. I know little of the people who lived here before me as it’s the custom to conceal their names, as my name is concealed. Some say they were a family by the name of Guasco, from the district of Nice. All of them afflicted with the same illness as mine. After the mother and youngest son died in Moncaliere, near Turin, the others were sent here. Soon there were only two survivors, a brother and sister. It’s said they barely saw each other. They couldn’t stand the sight of each other’s loathsome affliction. Do you remember the part of my garden where a trellis is covered with climbing vines? It’s said they met there from time to time, each on either side, to talk. The trellis kept them hidden from each other. Mostly the brother worked in the garden and walked on the terrace from which he could see distant glaciers, laborers in the fields. The sister mostly stayed in her room, or sat under the shade of the walnut tree when she believed her brother was indoors. It’s said she died first, that he lived on alone for many years. I don’t know if any of this is true.
In Aosta my tower is known as The Leper’s Tower. But this you probably know. The whole house was constructed from remnants of the old Roman wall.
Often I watch the distant glaciers. When I look up from the proper angle, I can see Mount Emilius and Mont Blanc. I wonder what you’re seeing now? Sometimes I imagine you hunched over your table, translating, in a house where you live all alone, and a feeling of tenderness comes over me, a feeling I don’t really want to feel. And yet I think of you with fondness. Of those hours we sat in my garden. Of the way you asked me to write to you, though you knew I would need, at least at first, to refuse.
Your Friend,
My Friend,
You write to me of your home and I wish that I could write to you of mine. But I’m not sure what my home is. Is it this mud-brick house in a dusty village half the world away from the place of my birth? Or is it, as I often think it is, this book, the Dream of the Red Chamber, which I live in day and night or so it seems. I move among its gardens, its pathways, intrigues, its many words and seasons. I listen to Baoyu and Daiyu, and to their relatives and servants as they go on with their lives. But really it’s all strange to me—I am, and will always remain, an outsider.
There’s a character in the book, Miaoyu, a young nun who calls herself “The One Outside the Threshold.” I find it very beautiful that she calls herself this. She lives in poverty in Green Lattice Nunnery and refuses to shave her head, though this is the required practice among nuns. She learns to read and write, teaches characters to the poor, but lives mostly in silence. Her tea is made with rain-water and snow gathered from plum branches she keeps buried in a jar. If a valuable bowl comes into her possession she gives it away. Everyone calls her “eccentric.” By the end of several thousand pages she comes to great sorrow … but I’m getting ahead of myself…
“The One Outside the Threshold”—could this be your name? You speak of your leper’s hood, your cloak, of the contagion of body and mind. You speak of the brother and sister who walked in the garden, never seeing each other’s face. Of the ones in town who you watch as from an unbridgeable gap, a separateness as strong as the Great Wall. You who’ll never enter their world … who won’t cross … The opening’s closed to you. And yet to be “Outside the Threshold”—surely there’s a kind of opening in that. Miaoyu felt this. She walked the woods alone, wrote greetings on secret pieces of paper she tucked into walls. Combed her long hair. Didn’t want to be like the others, to have what they had, to think the way they thought. Would you think I leave out too much pain and conflict in my account of her? Or that she chose and you didn’t choose? I wish you could tell me, that your face were here before me (though I know this is something you don’t want).
I think of you, and of the garden we talked in, the garden you tend—
Your Friend, as ever,
Clerval
What if what’s distorted isn’t so much my body as the space between us, the silence between us?
Watching the movement of Clerval’s pen across the page (isn’t this how he talks to himself, and to another far away?) a harsh wind suddenly stops—something pained and pliant unfolds in an air that won’t kill it.
Clerval lies down on his narrow mat. And Claire—does she stand at her window in the snow? The young nun who calls herself “The One Outside the Threshold,” is she writing secret notes in the woods?
Last night I dreamed I tended plants behind a garden wall. I was watering, clipping. Then I looked up and Clerval was standing before me extending his gloved hand. But I couldn’t bear to take it. How many hours had I watched that slender hand, loved the angular bones of his face?—and still I couldn’t touch him. When I looked down, the plants had burned red lesions into my hand.
His cloak’s on fire, the fire must be spreading
to his hood, he must feel it on his face, how can he not feel it on his face?
He won’t talk to me at all.
I can’t understand why it’s not spreading. But it looks like it’s not spreading. Still, the fire—it’s so close to his face, leaping near his face—
Laurie Sheck Page 18