Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  You tell barbaric and terrifying tales and I don’t want to hear them, she says.

  Then what would you like to hear about?

  Talk about nice people and nice happenings.

  Shall I talk about the zhuhuapo?

  I don’t want to hear about shamans.

  A zhuhuapo isn’t the same as a shaman, shamans are wicked old women. A zhuhuapo is a beautiful young woman.

  Like Second Master’s bandit wife. I don’t want to hear cruel stories like that.

  A zhuhuapo is charming and kind hearted.

  She’s walking in leather shoes on moss-covered rocks and you say she doesn’t have a hope of getting very far, so she lets you hold her hand. You’ve warned her but she slips. You grab her and draw her into your arms, saying you didn’t do this on purpose. She says you’re bad and frowns but there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her tightly pursed lips. You can’t restrain yourself and you kiss her, her lips relax and surprise you with their tenderness. You enjoy her warmth and fragrance and say that this often happens in the mountains. She entices you and you succumb and she nestles in your arms, closes her eyes.

  All right, tell me then.

  Tell you what?

  Tell me about the zhuhuapo.

  They specialize in enticing men where the road suddenly bends on the dark side of mountains, often in pavilions on mountain tops . . .

  Have you ever seen one?

  Of course. She was sitting sedately on the stone bench of a pavilion built on a mountain road so that the road ran between the two stone benches of the pavilion. To go through you had to pass her. She was a young mountain woman wearing a pale blue fine-weave cotton jacket with knot-buttons running down the ribs to the waist and white binding on the collar and sleeves. A wax-dyed cloth was wound intricately into a turban on her head. You involuntarily slowed down and sat yourself on the stone bench opposite. Without turning, she casually looked you over. Her black eyebrows had been drawn with a charred willow twig and her thin lips pouted. She knew quite well that she was alluring and didn’t try to hide it. When eyes flash so provocatively it is inevitably the man who feels awkward. Anyway it was you who felt uncomfortable first and you got up to leave. But on this mountain road on the dark side of the mountain with no-one is sight, she immediately cast a spell over you. Of course you know that you must show more respect than love to this seductive and beautiful zhuhuapo and that while you can want her you mustn’t dare be rash. You say that you heard this from stone masons who were on the mountain gathering rocks. You spent a whole night drinking and talking about women with them in their work shed. You say that you couldn’t take her to such a place to stay overnight, if a woman went it would be certain disaster, only a zhuhuapo could keep those stone masons in check. They said that zhuhuapo know the meridian points of the body, an art handed down over many generations and that their delicate hands can cure complicated illnesses which men can’t, from infantile convulsions to paralysis. People also rely on their clever tongues to arrange and explain matters about marriage, death, birth and sex. When these wild flowers are encountered in the mountains they may be admired but not plucked. They said once there were three blood brothers who scoffed at this. They came upon a zhuhuapo on a mountain road and had a wicked idea. Couldn’t we three brothers deal with one woman? They talked it over, then with a shout rushed up and dragged the zhuhuapo off to a cave. She was a woman after all and couldn’t get away from these three big fellows. After the two older ones had finished, it came to the youngest brother’s turn. The zhuhuapo pleaded with him – good and evil bring good and evil retribution, you’re young, don’t copy their wicked behaviour. If you listen to me and let me escape I’ll tell you a secret recipe which you will find useful later on. When you’ve made enough money you will be able to marry a young woman and enjoy a happy life. The lad wasn’t sure if he believed her or not but he was young and, distressed at seeing the woman in such a wretched state, he let her go.

  Did you rape her or did you also let her go? she asks.

  You say you got up and started to walk away but couldn’t resist taking another look and saw the other side of her face. She had a red camellia in her hair. Light flashed from the tips of her eyebrows and the corners of her lips, and suddenly it was as if a bolt of lightning had lit up the dark mountain and valley. Your heart was on fire and started to pound, and you immediately realized you had run into a zhuhuapo. She was sitting adroitly there right in front of you, her firm breasts protruding under her light blue fine-weave cotton jacket. She had in the crook of her arm a bamboo basket covered with a new floral hand towel and the paper flowers pasted on her new blue cotton shoes stood out as clearly as papercut silhouettes on a window.

  Come here! She beckons.

  She is sitting on a rock holding her high-heel shoes in her hands and carefully testing the round pebbles with a bare foot. Her white toes wriggling in the clear stream are like plump little grubs. You don’t know how it began but suddenly you are pressing her head against the green undergrowth on the bank. She sits up and you find the hook to her bra at the back and her perfect round white breasts glow in the noon sun. You see her stiff pink nipples and the fine blue veins below them. She calls out softly as her feet slide into the water. A black coloured bird with white toes, a shrike, is standing in the middle of the stream on a grey-brown rock. The rock is perfectly round just like a woman’s breast. The sides of the rock reflect the rippling light of the water. Both of you slide into the water. She’s upset about her skirt getting wet, not about herself, and her moist eyes sparkle like the sun’s rays reflected in the stream. You have finally captured her, a stubborn struggling wild animal, and she suddenly turns docile in your arms and begins to silently weep.

  The black shrike with white toes looks from one side to the other, sticking up its tail as its waxy red beak moves up and down. As soon as you approach, it flies off, skimming the water’s surface and settling on a rock ahead. It turns to look back defiantly at you, nodding its head and wagging its tail. It challenges you to approach and then flies off, but not far, and is again waiting there for you, chirping in a quiet, shrill voice. This black spirit, it’s her.

  Who?

  Her ghost.

  Who is she?

  You say she’s dead. Those bastards took her out at night for a swim in the river. When they got back they said she was missing. It was all lies but this was their story. They even said there could be an autopsy and if we didn’t believe them, a forensic expert could be called in. Her parents wouldn’t agree to an autopsy, they couldn’t take it. When their daughter died she was just sixteen. At the time you were younger than her but you knew this had all been planned. You knew they had got her to go out with them at night before, baled her up under the bridge pylons, took turns on her then later met to swap stories about their experiences. They laughed at you for being stupid and not having a go at tasting and feeling her. They had planned to get her. More than once you heard them talking dirty and mentioning her by name. You told her on the quiet she should be careful about going out with them at night, and she told you she was terrified of them. But she didn’t dare refuse and went with them. She was frightened but weren’t you also afraid? You coward! Those bastards harmed her but didn’t dare own up to it. But you didn’t dare expose them and for many years she has remained in your heart like a nightmare. Her wronged ghost will give you no peace, and appears in various manifestations, but how she looked as she emerged from under the bridge pylons that time remains unchanged. She is always in front of you, this chirping black spirit, this shrike with white toes and a red beak. You pull on chaste fronds and grab at willow roots in the cracks of the rocks to clamber ashore.

  She calls out.

  What’s up?

  I’ve sprained my ankle.

  You can’t go climbing mountains in high heels.

  I hadn’t planned on climbing mountains.

  But now that you’re in the mountains, be ready to suffer.

 
; Outside the upstairs widow of the old house in a twisting narrow lane are rooftops sloping at all angles, running in all directions, all adjoining and stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see. Shoes are airing in the sun on the roof-tiles below the window of a little apartment poking up between two roof ridges. The room has a carved timber bed with a mosquito net and a red wooden wardrobe with a round mirror; a cane chair is next to the window and there is a bench by the door. She gets me to sit on the narrow bench. There is nowhere to move in the small room. I met her a couple of nights ago at the home of a journalist friend and we were all smoking, drinking and chatting. She wasn’t put off when it came to crude jokes and in this small mountain town, she seemed to be quite up to date. When we later discussed my request, my friend said, you’ll need a woman to take you there. She agreed straightaway and has now brought me here.

  She whispers into my ear in the local dialect, quickly alerting me. “When she arrives you must ask for incense. You must ask for incense and also kneel and prostrate yourself three times. This ritual must be observed.” Her voice and movements have reverted completely to that of the local women. Squashed next to her on this narrow bench, I suddenly feel quite uncomfortable. In this small county town where everyone knows everyone else couples come to places like this for illicit sex if they’re having an affair. I detect the acrid smell of preserved vegetables. Yet the room is immaculate, the floorboards in the middle of the room have been scrubbed so clean that the original colour of the timber can be seen and the wallpaper behind the door is spotless. There isn’t the space here for an urn to preserve vegetables.

  Her hair brushes against my face, as she says in my ear, “She’s here.”

  A fat, barely middle-aged woman comes in, followed by an old woman. The fat woman takes off her apron and straightens her dress which has faded from washing but is clean. She has just finished cooking downstairs. The slight and gaunt old woman who follows her into the room nods to me.

  My friend immediately reminds me, “Go with her.”

  I get to my feet and follow her to the side of the stairs where she opens an inconspicuous little door and goes in. It is a tiny room where there is a table with an incense altar dedicated to the two Daoist deities, the Venerable Lord Superior and the Great Emperor of Light, and to the bodhisattva Guanyin. Below the incense altar are offerings of cakes, fruit, water and liquor. On the wooden walls hang red banners with black borders and jagged yellow pennants, all bearing words to invoke good fortune and to dispel misfortune. Sunlight streams in through a transparent roof-tile and smoke from a single stick of incense slowly rises in the ray of light, creating an atmosphere which prohibits speech. Only then do I realize why my friend has been whispering since we came in. From a slot under the incense altar, the old woman takes out a bundle of thin incense sticks wrapped in yellow paper. As instructed earlier by my friend, I immediately put one yuan into the woman’s hand, take the incense sticks, light them from the burning paper she has put a match to in the censer, and holding them in both hands kneel on the rush cushion in front of the altar to reverently perform three prostrations. The old woman smacks her sunken lips to show her approval of my devoutness, takes the incense sticks from me and puts them into the incense altar in three lots.

  When I return to the room, the fat woman has prepared herself and is sitting sedately in the cane chair, her eyes closed. She is apparently the spirit medium. The old woman sits down on the far side of the bed to say something to her in a low voice, then turns to ask my friend the zodiac sign of my birth. I tell her my birthday according to the solar calendar. I can’t remember the exact date according to the lunar calendar, although I can work it out. The old woman also asks the hour of my birth and I say both of my parents are dead and there is no way of finding out. The old woman is obviously worried and has a quiet discussion with the medium. The medium says something which I understand to mean it doesn’t matter, then puts her hands on her knees, closes her eyes, and begins to meditate. On the roof-tiles outside the window where she is sitting, a pigeon settles and starts cooing. The band of shining purple feathers around its neck puff out and I realize it is a male pigeon performing his mating ritual. The medium however suddenly inhales and the bird flies off.

  I always feel sad when I see roof-tiles, the fish-scale overlapping shapes always conjure up childhood memories. I recall rainy weather, rainy weather when, drops of transparent water clinging to it, the spider web in the corner of the room trembles in the wind. This sets me thinking about why I have come into the world. Roof-tiles have the power of making me weak and making me succumb to inertia. I want to cry but I have already lost the ability to cry.

  The medium burps a couple of times: the spirit must be attaching itself to her. She keeps burping, she has so much gas that I can’t repress the urge to burp as well, however I don’t dare and keep it bottled inside – I don’t want to break our rapport and give her the idea that I’ve come to cause trouble and make fun of her. I am sincere in mind and heart although I don’t really believe it all. She can’t stop burping, and more and more frequently. Her whole body starts to convulse and she doesn’t seem to be faking it. She is convulsing, I think, probably as a result of qigong during meditation. Her body is shaking and her fingers suddenly start jabbing into the air, that is to say, at me. She has her eyes still tightly closed and the fingers of both hands all stretching out, but the two index fingers are clearly pointing at me. My back is against the timber wall and there is no place to retreat, I can only brace myself. I don’t dare look at my friend who would certainly be more reverent than me, even if she has brought me to have my fortune told. The cane chair creaks noisily with the shaking of the woman’s fat body. She is barely comprehensible as she intones incantations. She is saying something like: Within the Lingtong Chamber of Efficacy of the Queen Mother of the West and the Lords of Heaven and Earth, grows a pine tree with the power to turn the wheels of Heaven and Earth and to entirely slaughter bovine demons and snake spirits. She speaks faster and faster, and with greater urgency. This really takes considerable practice and I judge that she is fully qualified. The old woman puts her ear up next to her and after listening, says with a grave expression, “It is an unlucky year for you, you should be careful!”

  The medium goes on babbling but is totally incomprehensible. The old woman again explains, “She says you have encountered the White Tiger Star!”

  I’ve heard of White Tiger referring to a very sexy woman and that if you get involved with her it is difficult to extricate yourself. I’m actually quite keen to have the good fortune of getting involved with such a woman but what concerns me is whether I’ll be able to escape from my bad luck.

  The old woman shakes her head, “It will be difficult to escape from your dangerous predicament.”

  I don’t seem to be a lucky person, nothing lucky has ever happened to me. What I hope for is never realized and what I do not hope for often materializes. I’ve had countless disasters in my life, I’ve had involvements and troubles with women, that’s right, I’ve even been threatened, although not always by women. I don’t have real conflicts of interest with anyone, I don’t think I’m an obstacle to anyone and only hope no-one will be an obstacle for me.

  “Great calamities and disasters are imminent, you are surrounded by the tiny people,” the old woman adds.

  I know about the tiny people, they are described in the compendium of ancient Daoist writings called the Daozang. These naked tiny people known as “triple corpses” live as parasites in human bodies, hiding in the throat and thriving on the person’s mucous. When the person is dozing they sneak away to the Heavenly Court to report to the Heavenly Emperor on the wrongdoings of the person.

  The old woman adds that a violent person with bloody eyes wants to punish me and that even with incense and prayers I won’t be able to escape.

  The fat woman slides off the cane chair onto the floor and is rolling about on the floorboards. This must be why the floors are scrubbed
so clean. I immediately feel that my impure thoughts have invoked her curses. She keeps cursing me, saying that there are as many as nine White Tigers surrounding me.

  “Then can I be saved?” I ask, looking at her.

  She is frothing at the mouth and the whites of her eyes are turned upwards – she has a horrible expression on her face. All of this is induced by self-hypnosis and she is already in a state of hysteria. There isn’t enough space for her to roll about in the room and her body bumps into my feet. I hastily pull them back, stand up, and looking at this woman’s fat body wildly rolling about I am gripped with fear – I don’t know if it’s fear of my own destiny or fear brought upon me by her curses. I have spent money to make fun of her and will eventually be punished. People’s relationships with one another are really frightening.

  The medium is still babbling away and I turn to ask the old woman what it all means. She shakes her head but doesn’t explain. I see the fat convulsing body at my feet gradually humping its back and slowly recoiling to the foot of the cane chair like an injured animal. People in fact are animals and can be quite savage when injured. And it is madness for his wretched person to allow himself to be terrorized. When people go mad they torment themselves with their own madness, it seems.