Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  He clambers onto a pile of timber to get the piece of little-leaf box airing on a cross beam. This wood has a very fine grain and won’t warp or crack, he has kept this piece for some years because he didn’t want to use it on something ordinary. After reaching for the wood, he slips and the whole pile of timber collapses. He is frightened out of his wits but his mind is lucid and, clutching the wood, he sits on the gnarled maple root he uses for chopping hay in the shed. For a small job like this usually he only needs to think a little, then he’d be ready to start. Shavings would start curling up the blade and when he blew it off the face would appear, it was easy. However he hasn’t ever carved the Goddess Tianluo and clutching the piece of wood, he sits there in a daze shivering and feeling chilly spasms shooting through his body. Finally, he puts down the piece of wood, goes into the house, and sits by the fire on the round stump which is black with grease and smoke and shiny from being sat upon. He fears it’s really the end for him and that he won’t get through to the end of the year. On the twenty-seventh of the twelfth month, not waiting until the fifteenth of the first month, he stops breathing. It had been decided that he should not be permitted to pass through the New Year.

  He had committed too many wrongdoings, she says.

  Did the Goddess Tianluo say so?

  Yes, she said he wasn’t a good old man, he was an old man who wasn’t content with his lot.

  Maybe.

  He knew in his heart how many wrongdoings he had committed.

  Did he seduce the woman who came to pray for a son?

  The woman was a slut, she was quite willing.

  Then it doesn’t count as a wrongdoing, does it?

  It can be left out of the count.

  Then his wrongdoing was–

  He raped a mute girl.

  In his shed?

  He didn’t dare do that, it was while he was away working. These itinerant craftsmen are out on their own all year round and earn quite a bit of money through their trade. It’s not hard for them to find a woman to sleep with as there are plenty of wanton women about who want money. But he shouldn’t have taken advantage of a mute girl. He raped her, played with her, and then discarded her.

  When the Goddess Tianluo came to take his life, was it this mute girl who came into his mind?

  Of course. She appeared before his eyes and he couldn’t get rid of her.

  Was it retribution?

  Yes. Any woman who has been taken advantage of will hunger for revenge! While she lives, and if she can track down the person, she will gouge out his eyes and curse him violently, invoking demons to banish him to the eighteenth level of Hell so that he can be horribly tortured! But this girl was a mute and couldn’t talk. She was pregnant, driven from home, and reduced to being a prostitute and beggar, rotten flesh despised by everyone. Before that she was quite pretty and could have married an honest farmer, had a normal married life, a home to keep out the wind and rain, given birth to sons and daughters, and at death a coffin.

  He wouldn’t have been thinking all this, he would only have been thinking of himself.

  But her eyes stare unrelentlingly at him.

  The eyes of the Goddess Tianluo.

  The eyes of the mute girl who couldn’t talk.

  Her eyes full of terror as he raped her?

  Eyes full of revenge!

  Eyes full of pleading.

  She couldn’t plead, she wept and tore at her own hair.

  She was stupefied, dazed . . .

  No, she called out–

  But no-one could understand her yi-yi ya-ya, they all laughed at her. He mingled with the crowd and also laughed.

  Of course!

  Of course at the time he knew no fear and he was even quite proud of himself, he didn’t think he could be tracked down.

  Fate would avenge her!

  She will be here soon, the Goddess Tianluo. He pokes at the coals and she appears in the sparks and smoke.

  His eyes close tightly and old tears flow.

  Don’t beautify him!

  Smoke brings tears to anyone’s eyes. He uses his hand, which is as rough as dry firewood, to wipe off a gob of snot, then shuffles into the shed. He takes the piece of little-leaf box and his axe and, squatting on the gnarled maple root, whittles away until dark. Then taking the piece of wood into the house he sits down on the round stump next to the fire. He clamps it between his legs and feels it with his calloused hands: he knows this will be his last carving and he is terrified he will not finish in time. He must finish before daybreak, and he knows that as soon as it is light the picture in his mind will vanish and that his fingers will lose their feeling. Her eyes, her lips, her upper lip is taut as she shakes her head. Her ear lobes are soft and fleshy and should be wearing big earrings, her flesh is tense but it is rich and supple, her face is smooth and elegant, her nose is straight and not snubbed. He thrusts his hand down under her tightly buttoned collar . . .

  In the early morning, villagers on their way to shop for the New Year at the Luofengpo markets passed by his house and called out to him but there was no reply. The front door was wide open and there was the smell of something burning. They went in and saw him slumped in front of the fire, dead. Some said he had a stroke and others said he had burnt to death. At his feet was the head of the Goddess Tianluo he had carved. She is wearing a crown of twigs from the chaste tree. From each of the four small holes on the crown protrudes a tortoise’s head which also looks like an animal crouched in the hole with its head poking out. Her eyelids droop as if in sleep, the bridge of her delicate nose joins with the elegant bones of her brow and there is a slight wrinkling between the brows. The thin lips of her small mouth are tightly pursed as if scornful of human existence and the eyes which can barely be seen emit cold indifference. Her eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, cheeks, lower jaw and even her long delicate neck all reveal a young girl’s fragile beauty. Only the ear lobes, from which hang copper earrings in the shape of spears, are big, voluptuous and sensual. Her neck however is tightly wrapped in the matching sides of her high collar. The Goddess Tianluo was later installed in the shaman’s altar at Tianmenguan.

  I’ve long heard many stories about the renowned and deadly Qichun snake. The villagers commonly call it the “five-steps dragon” and say that if bitten by it man or animal will drop dead before taking five steps, or that if one goes within five steps of where it is one will have trouble escaping with one’s life. This must be the derivation of the saying, “The powerful dragon cannot overcome the snake on the ground.” People say it’s not like other venomous snakes. Even the deadly cobra can easily be detected – when it’s about to strike, it will rear its head, stiffen its body and hiss to frighten its adversary. So, if encountered, a person can defend himself by throwing to its side whatever one happens to be holding or if empty-handed one can throw the hat from one’s head or a shoe one is wearing. When it attacks what has been thrown, one can slip away. However eight to nine out of ten encountering a Qichun snake will have been attacked before detecting it.

  In southern Anhui province I hear many myths and legends about the Qichun snake. They know battle strategy and spin a web, finer than a spider’s, over the plants in their territory, and as soon as this is bumped by some living animal, the snake strikes like a flash of lightning. It’s therefore not surprising that in areas where the Qichun snake is found there are all sorts of incantations which they say will give protection when silently intoned. However, the mountain people do not tell these to outsiders. When mountain people go into the mountains for firewood they always strap on leggings or else put on long canvas socks. People from the county town who seldom go into the mountains make the stories sound even more harrowing. They warn that if I encounter a Qichun snake, even if I am wearing leather shoes it will bite right through them; I will need to carry snake antidote, though ordinary snake antidotes won’t work with Qichun snakes.

  On the highway from Tunqi to Anqing, I pass through Shitai. At the food stall by the bus stop, I e
ncounter a peasant who had lost a hand. He says he chopped it off himself after it had been bitten by a Qichun snake. He is one of the rare cases of someone surviving an attack. The soft straw hat he is wearing is woven from the pith of the rice-paper plant, it is a dress hat with a narrow rim. This type of hat is normally worn only by peasants who work the wharves, and peasants who wear these hats generally have seen a lot and know a lot. I order a bowl of soup noodles at the stall under the white cotton awning by the highway. The peasant is sitting opposite and holding his chopsticks in his left hand. The stump of his right arm keeps swaying in front of me and makes eating difficult. I correctly guess he might like to chat.

  “Older brother,” I ask him, “I’ve paid for your bowl of noodles along with mine. If you wouldn’t mind, could you tell me how you injured your arm?”

  He then starts to tell me about what had happened. He says he had gone into the mountains to look for Qi wood.

  “Look for what?”

  “Qi wood – eating it prevents jealousy. That wife of mine really drives me crazy, if another woman so much as says one sentence to me she starts throwing bowls about. I went to get Qi wood to brew a soup for her.”

  “Is this Qi wood a folk prescription?” I ask.

  “No.” Beneath the dress hat woven from the pith of the rice-paper plant, his big mouth opens wide, showing one gold tooth as he chuckles. It is then that I realize he is having me on.

  He says a few of them had gone to chop trees to burn charcoal, at that time it was not like it is nowadays when doing business is all the fashion. If mountain people wanted to get an extra bit of spending money most of them went in for burning charcoal. You could steal timber and sell it for a profit but the timber was under the surveillance of the people in the production brigade and if you were caught it was a criminal offence. He didn’t go in for doing things that were illegal. But even with burning charcoal, you had to know how to make it. He only went after white oak: the charcoal burns with a silver flame and it produces a metallic ring when you strike it. If you can produce it, a basket of this metallic charcoal will fetch double the price. I let him talk on, in any case it was the price of a bowl of noodles.

  He says he was holding an axe and walking on ahead while his friends were still smoking and chatting down below. He had just bent down when he felt a cold chill rise from the soles of his feet and he knew instantly something was wrong. He says men are the same as dogs. If a dog out on its own sniffs a leopard it will stop in its tracks so scared that it will whimper like a kitten. He says at the time his legs just went soft: no matter how tough a man is, if he encounters a Qichun snake, that’s the end of him. And right there, he saw this thing coiled on a rock under the branches of a chaste tree, it was mostly grey and drawn almost into a ball, in the middle of which was this head sticking up. Faster than it would take to say it, he chopped at it but instantly his hand turned ice cold and a jarring spasm went right through his body as if he’d had an electric shock. Everything went black before his eyes, even the sun became dark, it was eerie. The sound of the wind, birds and insects vanished, the colour of the gloomy sky darkened and the sun and the trees glowed with a chilly light. Maybe it was because his brain was still working, or that he was fast, or that he wasn’t meant to die or that he was lucky that he took the axe in his left hand and chopped off his right hand. Then holding his back rigid in a qigong stance, he went down on his haunches and pressed his left thumb onto the artery of his right arm above the elbow. He says the blood which gushed out sizzled on the stones, immediately lost its redness, and turned into a pale yellow froth! Afterwards, his friends carried him back to the village. They also brought back the hand he’d chopped off. It had turned black: the fingernails, skin and flesh were black and streaked with purple. What remained of his arm also started turning black and it was only by using every sort of snake antidote that the poison was arrested.

  I say, “You’re really strong-minded.”

  He says if he’d baulked or that he’d been bitten an inch or so higher, he’d have been dead. “To lose a hand to save one’s life, how could I quibble over it? Even a praying mantis will shed a claw to save itself.”

  “But it’s an insect,” I say.

  “So what if it’s an insect? Humans can’t be inferior to insects. Foxes have bitten off a leg to get out of a trap, surely humans can’t be less intelligent than foxes.” He slaps a ten yuan note on the table, he doesn’t want me to pay for his noodles. He says he’s doing some buying and selling now and isn’t making less than an educated person like me.

  I keep watching out for Qichun snakes as I go on my journey, then on the road to Fanjing Mountain, in a village called Wenxiao or Shichang, I see dried Qichun snakes tied in coils in the ceiling drying area of a trading depot. They were just as the Tang Dynasty scholar Liu Zongyuan had described them: “Black body with a white pattern.” This is a valuable Chinese medicine which is highly effective for relaxing muscular tension, aiding blood circulation, getting rid of rheumatism, and getting rid of colds. It fetches a high price so there are always brave fellows willing to risk their lives for it.

  Liu Zongyuan considered this thing to be more dangerous than a tiger and went on to talk about harsh governments being more savage than tigers. He was a provincial governor whereas I am one of the common people. He was a scholar-official and in his lifetime he put worrying about the concerns of the world first, whereas I am wandering everywhere concerned only with my own life.

  Just seeing these processed coils of dried snake isn’t enough, I am keen to see a live one, to know how to identify it, so that I will know how to guard against it.

  It is not until I reach the foot of Fanjing Mountain, the kingdom of this snake, that I see two of them. They had been confiscated from poachers and were kept in a wire cage at a ranger inspection station on the reserve. I finally get a proper look at them.

  The scientific name is the beaked Pallas pit viper. Both are more than two metres long, not as thick as a small wrist but with a small tail section which is thinner. The body is a nondescript grey-brown with a grey-white triangular pattern, so it also has the common name of chessboard snake. They don’t appear dangerous, and coiled on a rock would just look like a clump of soil. But if one looks closely, the rough dull brown triangular head has a scaly upturned-hook beak and a pair of small, pitiful, and lacklustre eyes. It has a comical greedy look reminiscent of the clownish Seventh Rank Sesame Official in traditional opera. However it doesn’t rely on its eyes to attack its prey. Between the eyes and the nostrils is an indentation which is a unique temperature sensor. This is sensitive to infra-red rays and can detect temperature changes to one-twentieth of a degree within a radius of three metres. If an animal with a body temperature higher than its own approaches, it can stalk and attack it with precision. I learn all about this from a snake-bite researcher on the reserve afterwards when I go to Wuyi Mountain.

  It is also on this road, in the upper reaches of the Chen River tributary of the Yuan River, in the still unpolluted and abundant flow of the Jin River, that the water is limpid. The boy cowherders pissing in the water are swept off by the fast-flowing current and are screaming. It is several hundred metres before they are hauled up onto the river-bank: the sounds carry clearly. Below the highway, a young girl is bathing naked at the water’s edge. When she sees vehicles drive past on the highway, she stands there like a white egret, moving only her neck to stare. In the strong noon sun, the sunlight on the water is dazzling. Of course all this has nothing much to do with Qichun snakes.

  She is laughing loudly. You ask her why she’s laughing and she says she’s happy but she knows she’s not at all happy and is just trying to look happy. She doesn’t want to let on that she’s actually unhappy.

  She says once she was walking along a main street and saw a man chasing after a trolley bus which had just driven off. He was walking on the toes of one foot, half running and half hopping, and shouting at the top of his voice. It turned out that when he wa
s getting off the bus one of his shoes got caught in the door. He must have been a peasant from out of town. From the time she was a child her teachers had taught her not to make fun of peasants and when she grew up her mother warned her not to laugh stupidly in front of men. But she just couldn’t help laughing aloud. When she laughed like this people always stared at her and it was only afterwards that she learnt when she laughed like this it was inviting, and men of wicked intent thought she was flirting. Men always look differently at women, even if it’s not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.

  She says the very first time she gave herself, it was to a man she didn’t love at all. When he mounted her and took her he didn’t know she was still a virgin and asked why she was crying. She said it wasn’t because she couldn’t stand the pain but because she pitied herself. He attempted to help her wipe away her tears but these weren’t for him, so she pushed him away. She buttoned up her shirt and tried to tidy her messed-up hair in the mirror, she didn’t want his help, he would only make it worse. He had enjoyed himself on her, he had taken advantage of a moment’s weakness.