We’re in Canton. Today’s the Festival of the Consolation of the Dead. We walk among the living, stick-like, hungry, even the arms of the young ones wrinkled and knobby. Beggar-spirits walk among us—those who’ve died in wars, famines, far-off countries, at sea …
There are rows of booths selling everything the dead might need—hats and garments, boots, shoes, eyeglasses, fans. Sugarplums, furniture, gold and silver money, opium and pipes. There are pawnbrokers’ stalls and stalls for the changing of money
Why did I bring him here, what did I think I was doing, he who is so quiet in his hood, and unprotected—He walks in his coarse brown cloak among Buddhist monks in yellow robes and scarlet mantles, and Taoists in green satin brocaded with gold, tortoise-shell combs fastening their plaited, rolled-up hair.
(And I forbid you ever to go out without your leper’s dress, that you may be unrecognized by others… I forbid you to leave your house unshod … I forbid you to answer anyone who questions you unless first you turn your face the other way … I forbid you to go into a market or a mill…)
(I forbid and I forbid.)
(And it is thus mandated that the leper will be provided with 2 sets of linens for his bed, and 2 pairs of woolen stockings and woolen gloves. He will be provided each year with 90 lbs of grain, 50 of meat, 12 of butter and of salt… A watchmaker will be found to fix the watches of the unclean poor, and a coffin-maker to provide their coffins.)
Fire-boats are blazing on the river. Tall red candles line the bridges.
Why did I bring him here? What was I thinking? What could I possibly have thought I was doing?
The whole city a bonfire. His cloak, his burning cloak …
Aosta, June 30
My Friend,
Today I’ll tell you more about where I live.
It’s still possible to see remains of the old Roman road on the plain that stretches beyond my house. On that road Caecina led 30,000 men through deep snow across the Pennine Pass. In 774 Charlemagne also drove his soldiers over it. After him came the Saracens, the Normans, then pilgrims bound for Rome, Tuscan soldiers led by a man who was called, I don’t know why, the “White Hand.” So what am I to make of this benignity all around me, this mild wind through my pear trees, the careful glass cabinets in the library, Studer and Escher’s geological charts neatly arranged on the wooden table where I look up specimens-dark bluish-black striated with varied lighter veins, or those the color and sheen of agate or jasper—left by the former tenants?
But my friend, even as I write this, all of it feels wrong somehow, not in its facts, but in the question of where to start and where to go from there. As if there’s nowhere to set out from where I can speak plainly as I’ve wanted. And feelingly, as I also want. Everything tinged with a bitter, twisted distance, and I don’t know why. This air as if almost unreal. I can’t feel your presence as I usually do, or what I think of as the tender, complex texture of your absence. I feel, somehow, nothing, and yet I don’t want to stop with me coldly here and you coldly there.
So I must try to continue …
Maybe in my reference to the ruined road you’ll infer my own body, my skin, or the grotesque marring of my face which by now, as is often the case, may have become little more than one large scar. I don’t want to tell you if this is what I look like now. Here is my hood again, you see—right here in this letter. Do I ever take it off? If you came here would I even let you past the gate?
I speak of benignity, of this slight wind, my tended flowers, but when I think of that road, as I do several times each day, and of all the soldiers killed there, the calmness falls from me, the beauty of my garden falls—its quiet suddenly infiltrated, coarse, rubbed raw. Maybe it’s easier for me to feel this about the road than my own body. I walk through my garden painting whitewash onto troubled vines, trimming back others, tending to potted oleanders and asters, but even then there’s a violence inside me I cant name. Like the severe silhouettes on ancient coins, it’s all sharpness, force and will, and allows no tenderness for anything.
I didn’t speak, of this during the hours we spent together. You seemed to think me a gentle man. I believe you were moved by my suffering and the quiet way I carry it. By my interest in books and art and in my garden.
Today when I first sat down I meant to write to you of the frescoes at Issogne. I meant to write of gentle, beautiful things. I don’t know why I’ve written what I have. And on such a beautiful day. And in this light, this early warmth of summer.
I hope you’re well, and translating as you wanted to.
Your Friend,
Cao Xueqin, I spend every day translating your book. In the evenings I write to my friend in Aosta, letters that I’ll never send. Often I dream of you and this strange, elaborate world that came out of your mind and through your hands. No matter how much I translate I can never come close to you or know you. Your country will always be foreign to me even if I live here for the rest of my life. This I never doubt.
Still, there are so many things that draw me close even as I feel this unbridgeable gap. The practice of burning paper, for instance. When I was a boy I liked nothing more than to look at words on a page, their black curves, sharp edges or lithe, narrow spines. My father hated that I did this. But here, each morning the paper-collectors walk through the streets with large bamboo baskets, gathering any stray papers they can find. It’s believed one must preserve anything that’s written-on from being trampled underfoot: scraps with quotations from Confucius, maybe, or other classic texts. Even within households such fragments are saved and given to the paper-collectors when they pass. All this is carried to the temple where it’s burned, then the ashes taken to the river, sprinkled on the water, swept out to sea. I’ve learned this is done in obedience to an edict of Emperor Kangxi who proclaimed there’s nothing more precious on earth or in heaven than written characters. No fragment’s too small to be committed to the sacred flames.
You walked with such a basket in your hands. How many years, or was it your whole life? I wish my friend in Aosta could see this world of flames and paper you collected, this world that is your book. (I save all his letters and read them one by one. Should I give them to the flames and then the river?) How weary you must have gotten. Yet you gathered each individual word, overlooked almost nothing, even as you insisted there were grave limits to what anyone could know of another person or the world.
Aosta, July 10
My Friend,
I’m told there exists in Norway an Atlas of Leprosy, or should I say it’s in the process of coming to exist? It consists of painted studies of patients at St. Jorgens Hospital in Bergen. I think, they have twenty portraits so far, and hope to have twenty-four, all in vivid color. Many are of faces, but some are of limbs and the internal organs.
I saw, long ago, some portraits of leprous patients. I won’t say how that came to be, only that what struck, me most was how old they looked, though one was a boy of thirteen, and another a young girl. I would never have guessed it, that they could be so young Was the painter exaggerating? What I saw was a rough male face with nodules all over it, and a girl in a clean white bonnet, her neck and shoulders graceful, but her eyes were rimmed with lesions, her downturned face sorrowful and worn. I saw, too, a portrait of a thirty-eight-year-old man whose lopsided mouth was frozen in a grimace.
The man, Danielssen, who’s compiling the Atlas, was himself sick and bedridden for several years with tuberculosis. I hear he still drags his leg when he walks. He’s a doctor in Norway. He’s traveled all over observing people like me—through Switzerland, Lombardy, Sardinia, Paris … And if he came to my door?—but he won’t come. I know my tower is safe in that way.
I’ve heard rumors his hospital burned down last Christmas, that eighty-four patients were killed. But there’s no way to confirm this.
Think of them without their hoods. Think of them painted or burning. Your silence is loud to me, the distance between us very loud. Still, I write to you. Is each face a hidden face, even the m
ost brutally exposed?
I haven’t written to you of the frescoes at the Castle of Issogne. I still mean to.
Can you hear the silence on this page—is it a lesion, or the smoothest, most undamaged skin?
Your Friend,
For weeks Clerval doesn’t read any letters from Aosta, just leaves them in his stack tied with twine. His table’s covered with papers—the name Cao Xueqin written alongside characters, working notes, newly translated sentences, questions. How can he forget about his friend? (I keep thinking of the way his hands held those letters with such care, and how, long ago, he wrote to you of comfort.) Then one day he leaves this on the table:
I’m reading the Atlas of Leprosy. It’s a large book, maybe 3 feet high with stiff cardboard covers. I want to put it down but can’t. The pages turn of their own will. I see them clearly in vivid color. The thirteen-year-old boy with nodules all over his face, the girl in her white bonnet. Then I see Baoyu’s bare feet. They’re horrible, ulcerated, the toes like mushrooms being absorbed back into the foot. He can’t walk anymore. Cao Xueqin is very angry with me, says I’m ruining his book. My father says this too. He says I can’t come into his library anymore, all I do is ruin things, and the paper gatherers won’t come either so all the words will just stay on the ground to be trampled underfoot.
WORKING NOTES FOR DRC:
The Goddess of Disenchantment Prince Who Shades the Sky
The Goddess of The Goddess of Leprosy
Goddess of Not Understanding Bamboo Cottage Lodge
Hall of Respectful Reproach
Smartweed Breeze Cottage Happy Red Court Goddess of
Seclusion Goddess of Muzzled Goddess of Walls and Walled
Gardens
In the chapter I’m working on, Miaoyu, the nun I like so much, is writing on small pieces of paper, signing them “The One Outside the Threshold,” then leaving them in crooks of tree trunks, under rocks, between skinny branches, among low-lying flowers by the stream. This is what they say:
“on the moonlit bank, all that remains is the millet’s scent”
“past Red Cliff the world is crooked, nothing remains but empty names”
“one flute in the distance” “the winding path leads to a secluded retreat”
“the wild colt is muzzled”
I put down my pen, just think for a while of her face hidden among branches (Cao Xueqin you made her but I fear someone’s trapped her in the woods, is hacking off her hair. Why do I fear this?)
and I forbid you to go out without your leper’s costume and I forbid you … and your clapper your hood … and if you speakyou must turn your face from the one you are speaking to
she’s making loud sounds, animal sounds, shrieks, horrible cries
her chopped hair in zigzags all over the forest floor
and I forbid you henceforth ever to touch a child and I forbid you to go out, I forbid you to enter a marketplace or a mill
Then she’s silent. The one in Aosta spoke of different kinds of silence. Cao Xueqin, what kind is hers? (I think I know but I don’t want to know.) What kind is yours, or mine, as I try to hear you under all the many words—
“The wild colt is muzzled.” “Past Red Cliff the world is crooked, nothing remains but empty names.”
(My muzzled voice, my absent, silent name.)
I hear Miaoyu’s words as I walk. The air singed with burning paper, burning words—
not him not in Italy not in Aosta
not that garden not that Atlas of
not his face not that leper’s hood not that cloak not that
My Friend, last night in my dream I couldn’t tell which face was yours and which was mine. I had no name anymore or like yours my name was secret so how could any letters reach me? Then we were reading the Atlas of Leprosy, turning pages of one distorted limb after another, one suffering face after another… and the words: cutaneous, macrophage, neural, corium … I wanted to stop but you wouldn’t let me stop and I didn’t want to leave you—
Cao Xueqin, I think of you in a mud house much like this (or were you in this very house?) writing long hours at a wooden table. Baoyu and Daiyu are never really at ease in this world. And Miaoyu never felt she belonged. I wonder, did you also feel this? What exists of you is mostly rumor: that you painted well but preferred to make paintings of rocks, things no one wanted to buy That you died before your book was finished, though you left notes for the remaining chapters in a sketchbook that’s been lost. That when you were a boy your family fell from favor, its property confiscated. One document claims this is what was taken: “thirteen houses comprising 483 rooms, eight estates totalling 328 acres; retainers and servants of both sexes, 114 persons old and young; books, tables, chairs, a hundred odd pawn-shop receipts.” Others claim this is wrong, the document’s a fabrication. In any case, you lived in poverty by the end, your wine bought on credit.
I live with your face in my mind, and with another, hooded face in my mind. The two of you never speaking to each other, each knowing nothing of the other.
It’s said you fell in love with an orphaned girl named “Lin” you weren’t allowed to marry, as she was “penniless and helpless.” That you had a breakdown after that much like Baoyu’s and fell into a coma for four days. Afterwards you seemed distant, changed, came to live in this poor village. All this, of course, is rumor. I don’t even know the precise year of your birth or when you died.
But what I think about most is how you showed your pages to the one called Red Inkstone (unless Red Inkstone is yourself under another name—I know some claim this—and you wrote these commentaries on your manuscripts in red ink, all by yourself). But if Red Inkstone wasn’t you, this means you weren’t just alone. He wrote between the lines of your text. You must have trusted him, as Polo trusted Rustichello.
(I think of the one alone in Aosta, in his garden.)
As I translate I see Red Inkstone’s words stitching in among your own:
“yes, this is true, in daily life she loved to wear old clothes”
“I remember these past events as well, so sad and bleak, almost unbearable to hear”
“she was the flower-burying girl in the pavilion of the flower grave”
Who was Red Inkstone? Did you visit in this house, drink wine at this table? What made you able to trust him? Why did he choose that name to sign your pages? (How little of your book must be pure memory even as he says he remembers.) Why do I think of Red Inkstone as a man and not a woman? Couldn’t Red Inkstone be a woman? So many silences inside your silence, so many words—
Clerval looks out his window at the smoke trees turning red in the distance. Does he think about the silences inside each silence? The silence of Cao Xueqin, the silence of his friend in Aosta. I hear a silence too: each word I think to say to you too loud with a wrongness I can’t name, yet underneath it, silence, and inside it, silence. And inside that silence, pathways I can’t find.
(And my voice long fled. And the way I used to read out loud.)
Now he turns from the window, walks over to the table, unbinds the twine for the first time in weeks, takes another letter from the stack.
(I didn’t want to leave you) (I couldn’t tell which face was yours and which was mine)
Aosta, July 15
My Friend,
In my last letter, when I asked you to think, of the leprous patients being painted (so exposed to the gaze and scrutiny of another, displayed for the use and interest of others) or the ones burning in the hospital fire, I wonder what violence was I trying to inflict on you, what scarring? My pain, like anyone’s, inhabits me blindly. My pain, such as it is, knows nothing of me or my particularities. It feels only itself, is an engine purely of itself. I say it’s “mine” but really it belongs to no one. Why would I try to fling it from myself onto you? Why would I try to hurt you in that way?
I warned you there’s a violence in me different from what you saw in the garden. It allows no tenderness toward anything, is vivid as the n
umbness in my hands, or the rocky peaks I look out on each day: geological, persistent, cold. Yet I wanted you to think of those faces, I still want you to think of them.
Laurie Sheck Page 19