Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  Only then do people start clamouring. “Sing a bawdy song!”

  “Old Uncle sing us ‘The Sky at the Fifth Watch’!”

  “Sing us ‘The Eighteen Strokes’!”

  It is mostly young men shouting.

  After a break the old man takes off his Daoist robe, gets up from the bench and begins to chase off the young singer and the children sitting on the doorsill. “All the children go home to sleep! Go home to sleep, there’s no more singing, there’s no more singing.”

  No-one wants to leave. The middle-aged woman standing outside the door calls the children by their names one by one, and chases them off.

  The old man stamps his feet, pretends to lose his temper and shouts loudly, “Everyone get out! Shut the door, shut the door, I want to go to sleep!”

  The middle-aged woman comes through the door, drags out the girls and shouts to the youths, “All of you get out as well!”

  The youths grumble and make rude noises.

  “Ye–”

  Finally two older girls catch on, and leave. Then with everyone pushing and yelling at them, the other girls and children are all chased out. The woman goes to close the door and the adults who were outside take the opportunity to squeeze inside. The door is bolted and the inside of the house is hot and filled with the smell of sweat. The old man clears his throat, spits, and winks at the crowd. He has transformed again and looks crafty, rakish and wicked. He slinks around to look over the crowd and then starts singing in a rasping voice.

  Men cultivate, what do they cultivate?

  They cultivate a rod.

  Women cultivate, what do they cultivate?

  They cultivate a ditch.

  There is a round of cheers and the old man wipes his mouth with his hand.

  When the rod is thrown into the ditch,

  It becomes a leaping, lively eel – Ah!

  The crowd roars with laughter, some doubling over and others stamping their feet.

  Someone calls out, “Let’s have ‘The Old Idiot Takes a Wife’!”

  The young men all cheer.

  The old man is invigorated and drags the table back to make a space in the middle of the hall. He gets down on his haunches but at that very moment there is pounding on the door. He balefully yells, “Who is it?”

  “Me,” the person on the other side of the door replies. The door is immediately opened and a young man with a coat over his shoulders and wearing a part in his hair, enters.

  “The village head is here, the village head is here, the village head is here, the village head is here,” the crowd murmurs.

  The old man gets up. The person who arrives is smiling but as his eyes fall upon the tape recorder on the table and he scans the audience and sees me, his smile instantly retracts.

  “My guest,” says the old man. He turns to me and makes an introduction. “This is my eldest son.”

  I stretch out my hand to him. He tugs the coat draped over his shoulders but doesn’t shake my hand. Instead, he asks,“Where are you from?”

  The old man hastens to explain. “He’s a teacher from Beijing.”

  His son frowns and asks, “Do you have an official letter?”

  “I have identification,” I say, taking out my Writers’ Association membership card.

  He looks it over back and front several times before returning it to me, saying, “It’s no good without an official letter.”

  “What sort of official letter do you want?”

  “One with the official seal of the village or county authorities.”

  “There’s an embossed seal on my membership card!” I say.

  He half believes me and takes it back, scrutinizes it under the light, but again returns it to me, saying, “It’s not clear.”

  “I’ve come especially from Beijing to collect folk songs!” I won’t give in, and I am not worried about being polite. Seeing that I am inflexible, he turns to his father and severely rebukes him, “Father, you know quite well this is against regulations!”

  “He’s a friend I’ve just made,” the old man argues but in front of his son who is village head he is clearly deflated.

  “Everyone go home to bed! This is against regulations.” Some have already slipped away and his younger brothers have quietly put away all the gongs, drums and other props. I am not the only one who is disappointed, the old man is even more so. It is as if a bucket of cold water has been poured on his head and he is devastated. His eyes have lost their sparkle and he is so miserable that I feel quite bad on his behalf. I feel I have to explain, and say, “Your father is a unique folk artist, I’ve come especially to learn from him. There’s nothing wrong with your regulations but there are other things governing these regulations, even greater regulations–” However I flounder in clarifying these even greater regulations on the spot.

  “Go to the village authorities tomorrow morning, if they approve get them to stamp their seal before coming back.” The tone of his voice moderates and he takes his father aside, quietly says something to him, then pulls his coat up onto his shoulders and leaves.

  Everyone has left, the old man bolts the main door and goes off to the kitchen. Before long his tiny, thin wife brings in a big bowl of braised salted meat with bean curd and a variety of pickled vegetables. I say that I can’t eat but the old man insists that I have a little. There is nothing to say at the table. Afterwards he arranges for me to sleep with him in a room next to the kitchen which opens onto the pig pen. It is after one o’clock in the morning.

  After the lamp is blown out the mosquitos take turns to make air raid attacks. My hands don’t stop slapping my face, head and ears. The room is hot and stuffy and there is a terrible stench. The family dog is excited because there is a stranger and paces about, disturbing the pigs so they grunt endlessly, rubbing their snouts in the dirt. Under the bed the few chickens which they’d forgotten to lock into the chicken yard can’t get to sleep because of the dog and from time to time flap their wings. Although I am wretchedly tired it is impossible for me to fall asleep. Before long the rooster under the bed is crowing while the old man is producing heaven-shaking snores. I wonder if it’s because the mosquitos don’t bite him and only suck the blood of strangers or whether once he’s asleep he loses consciousness. Utterly exhausted, I get up, open the door of the hall, and sit down on the doorstep.

  A cool wind starts up and I stop sweating. The hazy, starless, grey sky appears between the dim outlines of the trees of the forest. Before dawn the people under the overlapping grey-black tiles of the houses of this small mountain village are still fast asleep. I hadn’t imagined I would come here, nor that in this small mountain village of only ten or so households that I would have such an exciting night. Gusts of cool air dispel my feelings of regret that it was interrupted. This is usually called the ineffability of life.

  She says she’s had enough, stop talking!

  You are walking with her along a precipice, and the turbulent waters of the river below are churning into whirlpools. Up ahead is a bend in the river, and there it swirls into a dark green abyss where the surface is so smooth the ripples vanish. The road becomes more and more narrow. She refuses to go any further with you, says she wants to go back, that she’s afraid you will push her into the river.

  You can’t stop yourself, lose your temper and ask if she’s gone mad.

  She says being with a monster like you has turned her into a void, her heart is totally desolate and she can’t stop herself going mad. She says you brought her to this river-bank in order to push her in, so that she would drown without a trace.

  Go to Hell!

  She says, you see, you see, that’s exactly what you have in mind, that’s how wicked you are. You are incapable of love, so be it if you can’t love, but why did you seduce her? Why did you trick her into coming to this deep abyss?

  You see the terror in her eyes and want to reassure her.

  No! She won’t let you come a step closer. She begs you to go away and allow her
to go on living. She says when she looks at the bottomless abyss she is gripped with terror. She must hurry back, back to her old life. It was because she had wrongly blamed him that she let a monster like you bring her to this desolate wilderness. She wants to go back to him, back to his little room, it doesn’t matter that he was impatient and rough with her, she can forgive him. She says only now does she realize it was because he loved her that he was so driven by passion. His naked lust was somehow exciting, but she can’t endure your cold indifference any longer. He is a hundred times more sincere than you. You are a hundred times more hypocritical than he, you tired of her long ago, only you didn’t say so. You have tormented her soul more cruelly than he had ravaged her body.

  She says she longs for him and that with him she was uninhibited. She needs the security of a home, she wants to be a housewife, he said he wants to marry her and she believes him, but you have never mentioned these words. When he is making love to her, it doesn’t matter if he talks about other women, it’s only to arouse her passion, but everything you say makes her more and more cold. She realizes she really loves him, that it was because of her love for him that she suffered from anxiety and nervous imbalance. She ran away to make him suffer but now she’s had enough of it. She’s had her revenge and has taken it too far. If he finds out he’ll definitely go mad, but he’ll still want her and will forgive her.

  She says she also misses her family, even her stepmother. Her father must be frantic and is certain to be looking for her everywhere. He’s getting old and if he’s not careful anxiety will affect his health.

  She also misses her workmates in the laboratory. They’re petty, narrow-minded and jealous, but if anyone buys a fashionable dress they always take it off so everyone can try it on.

  She also misses those troublesome dance parties but wearing new shoes and putting on perfume, the music and the lights still tug at her heart.

  So what if the smell of antiseptic in the operating theatre was even stronger, still it is clean and orderly, and each medicine has a specified pigeonhole so that you can just reach out for it – all these are familiar and dear to her. She has to get away from this hellish place, all this talk about Lingshan is just to trick her!

  She says it was you who said love is an illusion which people conjure up to delude themselves. You don’t believe in the existence of something called love – it’s either the man possessing the woman or else the woman possessing the man. And you just go on making up all sorts of beautiful children’s stories to provide a refuge for her weak and fragile soul. You say all this then straightaway forget that you’ve said it! You can deny you said any of this but the shadow you have left on her heart is indelible. She shouts out that she can’t go any further with you! The water at the bend looks calm but it’s bottomless, she can’t go any further with you towards that deep abyss. If you make a move she’ll cling onto you and drag you down with her so that you will go together to visit the King of Hell!

  She says she can’t cling onto anything, it’s best that you give her a way to go on living. She won’t implicate you so you won’t be culpable, you’ll be able to travel comfortably, whether it’s to Lingshan or to Hell. There’s no need to push her, she’ll go away, far away from you, never see you again and never want to see you again. There’s no need for you to worry about her, it is she who is leaving so you will not have wronged her, there’ll be no remorse, no responsibility. Just treat it as if she hadn’t ever existed and your conscience won’t trouble you. You notice that you can’t utter a single sentence, this is because she has spoken about your sore spot, spoken about how you think. She has said for you exactly what you don’t dare say yourself.

  She says she’ll go back, go back to him, back to that small room, back to her operating theatre, and back to her own home to restore her relationship with her stepmother. She was born an ordinary person and will return to being ordinary, and like an ordinary person marry an ordinary man. In any case she can’t go a step further with you, you monster, on your way down to Hell!

  She says she’s afraid of you, you torment her, then of course she has also tormented you. Don’t say anything more, she doesn’t want to know anything, she knows everything, she already knows too much. It’s better to know nothing, she wants to completely forget all this, sooner or later she’ll have to forget it all. If finally there’s something she should say it would be that she’s grateful to you, grateful to you for the part of the journey you have taken her on and grateful for saving her from loneliness. However, she is even more lonely and it keeps getting worse and she can’t cope.

  Eventually, she turns and walks off. You deliberately don’t look, you know she is waiting for you to turn your head. If you turn to look, she won’t leave, she will look at you, holding back her tears until they begin streaming down her cheeks. You will give in, beg her to stay. Then there will be embraces and kisses, she will again go limp in your arms, tearfully utter a jumble of endearing words, passionate and full of sadness. And with her arms like willow branches, her body will encircle you and drag you back down the same old road.

  You resolutely refuse to look at her and go off on your own, straight along the precipitous river-bank. When you get to a bend you can’t help looking back, but she has vanished. Your heart is suddenly desolate, it’s as if you’ve lost something yet at the same time it’s as if you’ve attained some sort of release.

  You sit on a rock as if waiting for her to come yet knowing she will not come back to you.

  It is you who are cruel and not she and you simply think of her curses to convince yourself she is mean like this, so that she will totally vanish from your heart, so that you will not be left with any lingering remorse.

  You drifted together like floating waterweeds, in that place Wuyizhen, because you were lonely and because she was depressed.

  You don’t really know her at all, whether what she told you was truth or only half truth. Her inventions and your fabrications merge and are indistinguishable.

  She also knows nothing about you. It was because she was a woman and you a man, because in the flickering light of the solitary lamp the dark upstairs room had the clean fragrance of paddy-rice straw, because it was a dream-like night in a strange place, because in the early chill of the autumn night she stirred your memories and your fantasies, your fantasies about her and your lust.

  For her you were exactly the same.

  Yes, you seduced her but she also seduced you. Is there need to attribute proportions of responsibility to a woman’s intrigue and a man’s lust?

  But where will I find this Lingshan? There’s only that dumb rock where the mountain women go to pray for a son. Was she a zhuhuapo? Or was she the young girl those boys took swimming at night? Anyway, she is not a young girl and you are certainly not a youth. While recalling your relationship with her you suddenly discover you can’t say what she looks like or how her voice sounded. It seems to be something you have experienced but even more so it seems to be wishful thinking. But where is the boundary between memory and wishful thinking? How can the two be separated? Which of the two is more real and how can this be determined?

  Wasn’t it in some small town, a bus stop, a ferry crossing, a crossroad, on a roadside, that you encountered a young woman who aroused in you many daydreams? But by the time you return how will you be able to find any traces of her in that town, that bus stop, that ferry crossing, that crossroad or that roadside?

  The Temple of the White Emperor, on a sheer cliff of the Yangtze River, is bathed in the rays of the setting sun. Whirlpools in the river below can be heard in the distance, and right ahead loom the two cliff walls of Kuimen, as straight as if chopped with a cleaver. Looking down from the iron railing the rippling crystal clear water of the smaller river divides the swift flowing muddy waters of the Yangtze.

  On the far side of a little stream a woman with a mauve parasol is making her way through the shrubs and bushes on the mountain slope. She is on a track leading to the barren top
of the rocky cliff, but it is hidden from view, and after a while she disappears.

  I watch the brilliant gold of the setting sun disappear along the cliff tops and both sides of the gorge are suddenly plunged into darkness. Red navigation lights set on rocks close to the sides of the river appear, one after the other. An upstream steamboat heading east is crammed with passengers on all three decks as it enters the gorge, and the dull blast of its whistle reverberates long after it has gone.

  It is said that at the fork in the river beyond Kuimen, Zhuge Liang heaped rocks for his Eight Trigram battle strategy. I have travelled by boat several times past Kuimen and people on board always eagerly point out the spot for me, but even now that I am in this ancient city of the White Emperor, I am still not sure of the location. It was in this ancient city that Liu Bei entrusted to Zhuge Liang his soon-to-be orphaned son who had been brought up to inherit the throne. But who can attest to the truth of storytellers’ tales?