That day I meant to write of something else, something beautiful. Does this mean that I find the leprous faces unbeautiful? The ones stripped of their hoods unbeautiful?—why would I even use this word and the categories it implies? I did mean to write of something else that day, it’s true: the frescoes at Issogne. They’re in a castle not far from here, one I visited as a boy in the days before my illness.
I wonder why they mean so much to me. Maybe even then I felt they possessed a clarity I lacked, a sense of the daily as uncluttered, unconfusing As if the painter were speaking plainly through his brush. On the lunettes of arches in the entrance hall you can see a series of scenes from daily life: a tailor’s workshop, a butcher, a pharmacy, a guardroom, a fruit and vegetable market, a baker’s shop, a spice seller, a cheese-monger. My mind moves close to them but not to the saints with their miracles and wonders, never to those.
So often I feel a wounding or confusing silence (you know now how I myself can wound, or try to).
I don’t know who the painter was.
I wonder how you are. Do you wear Chinese silks or rough peasant clothes? What language do you think in now? Have you read the great classics?
Your Friend,
Today Clerval holds sheets of paper much smaller and thinner than the manuscript pages, but the characters are in the same careful hand. He seems to stare at them for hours, his mouth softening, his fingers vaguely stroking the worn paper.
Cao Xueqin, I can hardly believe what I’ve found—mixed in among your manuscript, these loose, scattered notes in your hand, remnants and hints of who you were. Even as I read, I can’t find my way into you, will never find my way into you. I know this.
Your words the heat spreading through the smoke trees on the hill. You must have lived in this house after all, looked out of this window after all.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 1st NOTE:
Reading List: MARCH 1st through APRIL 3r
The Doctrine of the Mean (Confucius) The Great Learning
(Confucius) The Hairpin and the Bracelet (by “Master of the
Moon Pavilion”—but what’s his true name?) The Book of Songs
Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Medicine
Mencius (“to have no fixed estate and yet to remain steadfast”)
think about Palace of Cold Void think about Baoyu’s dream of his double
seven red embroidery needles scented beads fan-sheaths
powder ink-stones
ask Red Inkstone to comment on Chapter 18. I think I’ll call it Feast of Lanterns.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 2nd note:
Baoyu, Daiyu, Baochai, that sad servant girl Qingwen, the nun Miaoyu, and all the many bond-slaves of the house are turning into mist in front of my eyes. I see their backs growing smaller as they leave, each one coarsely disintegrating. They walk and walk and I can’t stop them. Baoyu’s walking along some shore I don’t recognize, he’s near a boat and I call out, ask him to come back— can’t he see the Rong Mansion’s in ruins?—but the fog only grows whiter, thicker over the rocks, my bowl of noodles grows cold my eyes are sore but he doesn’t stop to hear me. Nu Wa melted down the stones to repair the Heavens but I think they’re not repaired can never be repaired I see the prow of a boat a shaven head bare feet the corner of a red felt cape but other than this only their backs growing smaller and smaller, all of my characters deaf to me their ears closed, eyes turned away, there are sea-birds, waves, but mostly this white mist, the contours of rocks completely hidden, the faint sound of waves in my ear-drums but no footprints in the sand at all
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 3rd note:
Hui Tzu said to Zhuangzi, “Your teachings are of no practical use at all.”
Zhuangzi replied: “Only those who know the value of the useless can be talked to about the useful. You describe a big tree that’s useless. But maybe it’s you who are at a loss to know how to use it. Why don’t you plant it in the Realm of Nothing Whatever and aimlessly tread the path of inaction beside it, or lie beneath it dreaming?
You tell me you have a gourd so huge it’s useless. Why don’t you tie it around your waist and use it to buoy yourself aloft on the waters where you can float to your heart’s content amid the streams and inland seas?”
So why do I work so hard on this book? And why did Zhuangzi work on his?
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 4th note:
I’ve given Baoyu a beautiful, moon-shaped face. But my own is ugly, too large, asymmetrical. My father often commented on this, I could tell I annoyed and disappointed him. In Nanking we lived in such luxury. Even then there was a terrible vulnerability I sensed underneath it all, so seemingly out of place amid the silks and delicacies, the many goods, the jewels, the servants. I know now we were still technically the Emperor’s slaves, descended from bond servants of the Plain White Banner. We could be broken by him at any moment and lived well completely at his whim. But at the time I knew nothing of this.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 5th note:
These are the sounds from the street this afternoon: bells on the animals’ necks, singing from carved wooden whistles attached to the feet of airborne pigeons, sharp splashes of street-watering, high-pitched crickets and larks inside their bamboo cages. When I first came to Peking, before I moved to this village, I spent weeks learning the many street names: Happy Sparrow Street, Picture Street (where they sold hand-painted scrolls), Monkey Street, Stone Tiger Street. I remember the sounds there, can still hear them to this day—blind beggars wailing and singing, sighted beggars also wailing, lined up on the beggar’s bridge, crowded together like tossed, discarded rags. It was so different from the garden where I’d lived. The city was surrounded by walls.
TRANSLATION OF CAO Xueqin’s 6th note:
Red Inkstone came today I gave him another chapter. He said I’m putting too many dreams in the book. But that’s part of how Baoyu comes to know the world and his own mind. These dreams often make him ill but also heal him. I don’t know that I want to give them up.
Aosta, July 31
My Friend,
A hot rain today, all day. The leaves in my garden have turned a dark, green-black, wet and weighted down.
My mind moves once again to the frescoes at Issogne. This time to the fruit and vegetable market where large woven baskets brim with enormous green leaves and yellow squashes (strange to think of such abundance as my own body grows more severe, pared down, erratic).
I’ve often wondered about the curious pairs of shoes in the background, two dark, two light, that hang on a wooden rack behind the vegetable seller. Why would they be there? Unlike the rest of the market, they give me an odd feeling of heaviness. Maybe because they’re unused and empty. Probably they’re newly fixed or for sale, yet what I feel is a sense, somehow, of lack, something forlorn. So much abundance—piles of plums, grapes, long strings of garlic—and then those empty, hanging shoes.
I wonder what vegetables and fruits you’re tasting in China? Certainly ones I’ve never heard of. I should look at Polo’s book again, see what he described.
As a boy, when I first spotted lesions on my body they looked mild, innocuous, just bits of skin slightly darkened from the sun, my own modest and broken constellations. Over the years they slowly roughened and enlarged. Why do I even put this in a letter? And why now? I want to speak of the frescoes at Issogne, of the beauty of Issogne, to dwell only on that—a beauty I wish you’d seen, or that we’d seen together, though I wish you never to come near.
I wonder what you’re seeing in China—how many kinds of azaleas and what colors, what ancient walls, and the rooftops of Peking, are they really a bright yellow?
This rain will be good for the garden. Some leaves will have fallen in lively and surprising patterns on the path. I look forward to seeing those tomorrow.
Know that I think, of you with fondness.
Your Friend,
What if Clerval hadn’t found Cao Xueqin’s few stray notes? What if everything Cao
Xueqin wrote, even his book, remained forever lost or hidden? What if the paper collectors had plucked it all from the street, brought it to be burned and strewn as ashes?
And these notes I keep, should I give them to the flames?
Mencius wrote: “To have no fixed estate and yet to remain steadfast.” But Clerval’s friend stays alone in his tower, that fixed and steadfast place, remembering the tailor shop, the market, the disturbing pairs of shoes. He writes to his friend, “I wish that we’d seen them together, though I wish you never to come near.” I wonder if he wants to destroy his tower’s walls or build them even higher, or both? And I, would I burn my walls if I could? Are these notes walls of paper I should burn?
Did Cao Xueqin burn most of his notes, and only these few survive? There’s no way I can know.
What does it mean to have a home in the world?
________village
My Friend,
After reading your account of the Atlas of Leprosy, for several weeks I didn’t touch your letters. This isn’t something I’m proud of but it’s so. For weeks I had many bad dreams. As if words could be a form of contagion, and they are. Words lesions, thoughts lesions, images lesions. Still you come back to me, always you come back.
My fingers undo the rough twine. I look for you in the lines and markings of each page. Can you forgive the way I
I’m glad you wrote of the frescoes, how they speak to you of the daily life you miss. Yet I sit here and see Danielssen dragging his bad leg. I see the patients’ ashamed faces as they’re painted, the hospital in flames. I can’t tell you I don’t know how to tell you XXXXXX
It seems I translate all the time. It tires me though I want to do it. I should be more alert when I write. Or am I writing to myself since I know you’ll never see this? Yet it’s you I hold inside my mind.
In the chapter I’m translating Baoyu limps like your Danielssen. He’s suffered a terrible beating at the hands of his father. Though just a boy, he walks for months with a cane. His face is also badly injured, burned by the son of his father’s concubine who knows that if Baoyu’s out of the way his own status will improve.
So you see the crumbling world in which I live, this world I put down on paper every day. A world in which Daiyu’s phlegm is streaked with blood, where servants don’t own their own lives, where Miaoyu, The One Outside the Threshold, will surely come to harm. Where the rich live at the expense of the poor, but isn’t this just the history of the world?
Baoyu learns these lines:
Naked I go without impediment.
My sole wish now is to roam alone
In coir cape and bamboo hat,
And in straw sandals with a broken alms bowl
To wander where I will.
Imagine Baoyu wandering off on his own, not limping, no longer needing his cane. You asked me to think of the burned faces. I think of them and of the broken alms bowl, and the frescoes you “wrote of with their small, clear moments of fruit, white cloth, measurement, and light.
I think of Baoyu’s and Daiyu’s love for each other. Of Daiyu’s love of books. Of Cao Xueqin, and his friend, Red Inkstone, who wrote in red ink between his words. Imagine if we could do that, you and I… write in between each other’s words …
Part of me still fears you. (All those weeks I stayed away from your letters.) In the lines Baoyu memorized the desire is not to be revealed, but to go off alone. (“In coir cape and bamboo hat.”) And the alms bowl is broken. I wonder what you think of that?
Your Friend,
Clerval
Clerval translates all day, the sentences accumulating like lines on a map, rough pathways into his mind, or Cao Xueqin’s. I follow Baoyu and Daiyu, the yellow roofs of Peking, Miaoyu leaving secret messages in the woods. But when his hand stops it’s as if a fog rolls over the land wrapping them in silence.
I go out and walk, imagine I carry an alms bowl in my hands. To be alone and the alms bowl broken … if I could feel the freedom in that, understand there’s a freedom in that…
Yesterday I came across a kepper. I wonder if you ever saw one? It’s a rough wooden rectangle lodged inside a pony’s mouth to prevent it from eating while hauling fresh-bound sheaves. It must pain the pony to have it in its mouth.
I kept picturing the pony’s eyes. Then the eyes were Claire’s, then Clerval’s. The kepper pressed into their gums until they bled.
Everything was very quiet.
Later when I slept I had this dream, at least this is the part I remember:
(But why would I even tell you my dream? Why would I want to?)
Like Baoyu, I was limping, walking with a cane. Then I was bedridden. I thought if you could see me you’d realize I was weak, pathetic, couldn’t hurt anyone, didn’t want to. Then I wondered if this was true. Every part of me was sore, even my mouth, and I heard—from where?—the word: kepper. When I looked up you were at my bedside, and for the first time I had a name, you called me Black Jade. Then suddenly you were Claire. She was writing the word destroy over and over in her notebook. I told her that’s the word Zhuangzi used, “Destroy quadrants and measures.” Yes, she said, everyone uses it.
Then I woke.
Aosta, Sept 30
My Friend,
It’s been nearly two months since I last wrote. The impairment of sensation now extends to my eyes. Not feeling is a strange form of pain, of difficulty. I’m told the ophthalmic portion of the Vth facial nerve has been affected. This is not uncommon. I no longer blink, normally. Often I can’t blink, at all. Many nights when I sleep I no longer close my eyes. The cornea lies exposed and unprotected. So you see, I can’t keep out the dust, or whatever else it is that moves through the air and towards us.
I’ve not forgotten about the frescoes at Issogne. I’m ashamed that I
But let me tell you about something else today.
I saw something once that’s come back to me vividly. I have no other guide no and in the mind’s roughness and not in tranquility
It’s a simple piece of Attic pottery: a white-ground lekythos from around 450 B. C. Unlike the more common black and red ones (those you’ve probably seen), this one depicts no satyrs or maenads, no epic heroes involved in all manner of dramatic action. Instead, it holds a simple grave offering. In her cupped hand a young woman carries a small vessel like the one on which she’s painted. With the other she holds a woven basket. She’s bringing offerings to the dead soul who stands on the other side of the vase where she can’t see him; he grasps his spear and shield. Her back is straight but not rigid, her elongated neck gently curved. She’s wholly focused on one thing only, that the olive oil in the vase be brought to the one who waits but can’t see her. Neither is able to glimpse, for one second, the other. As if all knowing were quiet, sealed off, all attachment quiet.
I suspect in writing to you now of this graceful vase, I’m swerving away from some violence in myself (think of the clapper, the hood, the ruins of the Roman road). I write of my eyes but then don’t want to think about my eyes. Yet the scene on the vase is mournful, so maybe I’m circling what I feel, trying out what I might feel…
The olive oil would be unmixed, maybe scented with perfume from irises.
Should I rip up this page or should I let your hand touch this page? I wonder which way will win out?
When I sleep I don’t see, I don’t know my eyes are open.
Your Friend,
It’s not even the end of his workday, but already Clerval opens a new letter, leaves the rough twine untied in its snake-curve on the table. This letter’s different from the others—there’s writing on both sides, and on one a slash mark through all of it. He starts reading the slashed words, then turns the page over, touches the words “Aosta” and “My Friend.” Did his friend forget he’d written on the other side? Or did he want to send what he’d slashed but couldn’t bear to say, the way I wrote my dream for you, though I wouldn’t claim I wanted you to see it.
Laurie Sheck Page 20