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本帖最后由 洋八路 于 2014-5-23 20:18 编辑
Chapter 40
He woke up to realise she had already gone. It was getting dark, and the air in the bedroom was musty. And feeling a pulsating pain in his lips, he touched them with his fingertips, at the same time remembering her fierce kiss as well as her words. ‘I kiss you and bite you until your lips bleed so that you won’t easily forget me.’
Won’t easily forget her! Oh, what a woman! She was leaving him, and had given him no chance until the last minute, yet she wanted him to remember her! Remembered what, during his rest of life? For what? Ah…
His lips were swollen, though he failed to see blood streaks on his fingertips as he dabbed frequently to find out. True he saw her lips sexy, but how could he have known she could instead use her teeth to hurt him like this? Wasn’t she a nice and kind and respectable doctor? How could a woman turn so wicked on those moments?
But, wait a minute, wasn’t he also half mad in his intoxication? Wasn’t he also biting her lips?
He drew a long sigh, relapsing into his indolence on his single bed. After a while of napping, Vivian, the dashing woman in the crowded and cloudy city crept to his mind. Yes, she had done a similar thing, giving him a watch when she thought she was leaving him, parting from him forever, when she was sure she was deserting him, touching him no more before she died, and even after she had died ...
And to reckon he still kept her watch in his case, in the same corner he had stored it since the day he came back from Shanghai! As he had never touched it ever since, it certainly had stopped ticking. For a moment, he thought he should get up and take it out to inspect it, or wind it so that it began ticking again. But then he cancelled the idea, regarding it as pathetic and pointless.
Lying on the bed, with his hands under his head, a sort of general resentment against women began to circle in his mind. What kind of indulgence could they retrieve by simply bearing a notion of being still remembered by him, by a man from their past, by a fairly used and wasted man? He didn’t want to remember them, instead, he wanted to be with them physically, to be kissed by them, to be well 不雅ed by them, not just remembering!
From outside the window, through the thin curtain made of cheap cloth, some voices, some giggling of little girls, some shouting of little boys forced into the room. He rolled off the bed, went to the switch and turned on the light. All bare and naked, he was looking for his clothes. But where was his underwear? Where were his short pants? They aren’t on the desk, not on the floor, not anywhere. A light was flashing in his mind, would it be possible she had stolen them for a remembrance? He was amused with himself for a short second, thinking it absurd, when he found his underwear squashed badly but safely under the quilt in the bed.
He bent a little, stretched his underwear wide, lifted one foot and put it into the hole. He saw his ugly and coiling thing, the guilty soul after tasting something good and evil. The clutch of hair there was ridiculous, in its pretending that it was able to cover and protect the spiritless crown. Everywhere else on his body was white and tidy and graceful, but this place and the little thing, were inexpressibly vile and hypocritical.
But…well…he was pulling a long sigh: he is not the only one. He once saw a guy in the shared bathhouse of the university, whose bush was all the more tremendous. A giant eagle’s nest, he would say, and massively disgusting.
The strangest thing is that the woman, the beautiful creature also has this filthy type of thing; hers, Vivian’s and Fang’s, all had the piece of dark adornment to their creamy body. But they didn’t seem to be as unsightly as his and other men’s, or, did they?
The question here is, why man and woman have to do this sort of act, why do they have to madden each other on this very ugly spot. Where is the point of attraction? Crotch to crotch? Or heart to heart? Or face to face? Or mind to mind if people do have a mind?
But…well…without this and that, there is no life!
At last, he had himself clothed as a man, as a teacher. He thought he should have gone for a shower first, but it was cold, it was winter, it was not convenient going to the shared smelly bathhouse. People do not always have to wash, at least the villagers in his hometown don’t have the habit of washing themselves often. Yeah, civilization, that is the word, that is the decency and delicacy. How wonderful should it be if all the dirt could be civilized and removed from one’s body, leaving no ass, no nest, no intestines, and everything is as good as a woman’s breast!
He went out.
Hungry, he had to find a place to sit and eat, then a road to wander, to see other people so that he wouldn’t have to talk to himself about the rubbish usually produced from his brain when he was alone.
The noisy kids were already gone from the yard. All the teachers and their wives or husbands and one or two kids must be at this time eating their steaming supper around a table. Any soul still prowling the dusky alleys must be a near ghost in this hour of evening, at the bleak foot of Emei Mountain.
He placed his steps one by one onto the steep stone steps, turned right and turned left a number of times until he landed safely at the very bottom, feeling his body many metres closer to the heart of Earth. What was the road called? He didn’t know, there was no sign. It was very long, from the eastern entrance, where the university name written by Chairman Mao was edged on an arched door. Unlike the name of Shangwai, which had confused him a little with Mao’s writing, the name of Jiaoda was undoubtedly a work of his. The strokes of Chairman Mao were, if looked at independently, too sharp and slanting as if they were going to fall apart. But combining all together, it came up with a unique, identifiable style that even Bing, who had only a little knowledge of calligraphy, was capable of appreciating.
He entered a small restaurant at the side of the road. He seated himself and ordered Mapo Tofu, or hot spicy bean curd, and rice. He waited listlessly. Then he noticed a couple of students at a corner desk looking at him. They waved to him and called him respectfully Mr. Wang and smiled at him. He smiled back at them, becoming suddenly conscious of his status as a teacher, a teacher of Chinese people, a dear ‘Gardner’ of the Motherland’s future ‘Flowers and Plants’. Indeed, he was doing a job of high respect and goodness and virtue and morality.
It didn’t take long for him to finish his food. The rice and the spicy tofu in his stomach were warm and substantial, giving him a sense of existence, a sense of satisfaction that, for the moment, more tangible and agreeable than the sex had done to him some hours before.
The bridge he later ambled to was known as the Maple Wood Bridge. Beautiful name, but there was no maple in the place, he wondered how the person who had named it had such a romantic and fancy idea. Every day he passed it at least twice, and it was indeed his favourite part of the campus.
He leant against the stony rail, his hands holding its rough square head, as he had done at the bridge in Shangwai on his first day there, as he had done at the Great Wall when he visited Beijing some years back. He was listening, absorbed, to the water flowing under the bridge. He saw, in the faint lamp light, some shadowy specks flitting across above the stream. They must be birds, or more likely bats. And the willows along the water, which at daytime were always moving and swirling like the tresses of girls, were just tranquil silhouettes. Then he thought he heard a sound, not that of crickets but some frogs. He strained his ears, waiting for it once more, but it didn’t come.
He moved on. Then teasing his attention, the sound came up again. He was sure it was uttered by some little frogs, like the ones in his home village.
Well, he was not alone. Students came and went frequently across the bridge, but none of them ever stopped to enjoy it like him. They were like restless bees, their eyes glittering as if their future was all bright and sunny, as if heaps of love and fortune were waiting for them to seize and enjoy. The little bridge was nothing but an aged body they had all the right to trespass on but they bore no gratitude nor attitude for appreciation.
He then came to a cross road, where he ought to make a decision. To the left was a broad way, bordered on both sides by beautiful bamboo groves, sloping up to the university’s sport arena. It was the main path between the student’s residence and the classrooms. Taking it, he might run into someone he knew, such as the dean of his department, such as his peer teachers, such as his students, who might see through his dark soul and detect his symptoms of obscenity. To the right was the famous 157 Steps he had climbed numerous times. It threaded its way to the Medical Centre as well as the Baoguo Temple of Emei Mountain. It was very steep. If he climbed it in this dusk, and in his current ghostly state of mind, he would very likely stumble and tumble from the middle of the stairs, say at 78th steps, and his head would be banged 78 times before it hit the bottom and rolled over to the bridge.
In the end, he didn’t make a decision, he let the decision be made for him. Like litter washed aside by the rain, he simply drifted to the left. The bamboo stalks, vague but fancy under the moonlike lamplight, were high and thick and respectably upright, prompting him to hold it, particularly to caress its edgy rings. No doubt it must be a better, more potent feeling than his own penis. In the daytime he couldn’t do it, because he was wary of people’s eyes; at this time, he still couldn’t do it, because he was still wary of people’s eyes. In either dark or light, the eyes, hundreds of them, were always watching him, eyeing and penetrating the wall of his flesh and mind. And worse, the bamboos were a little high up the hill or low down the hill, he would have to climb or slide like a thief if he dare touch their pleasant skins and bones. Therefore, he couldn’t do what he desired, therefore, he was unhappy.
The road, named Middle Hills Cool Road, was not a short one. He thought he must have taken a long hour in his drifting mental time before reaching the sports arena. The arena was very big. Now that it was empty of running people, it was presenting itself even more grandly. He ambled along the oval-shaped, 400-meter running track, feeling himself to be a speck in its vast expanse. The cascading spectators’ seats were empty, or, not empty, for, he was unsure if some couples of students or young teachers were not there making love.
However, the longer he sauntered about the space, the surer he felt the couples, quite a number actually, must have hidden somewhere among the distant seats. He was even suspecting he had heard some noise of man or woman in certain directions. Then, immediately he was a little scared, fearful lest the lovers be alarmed and even panicked by his unwelcome intrusion at this late hour.
So he escaped quickly back to the lamp-lit roads, strolling the spaces between the bright classrooms. The students inside, most of whom sitting alone, did not appear at all forlorn. Some imagination and complex mathematics and fluent language seemed to actively affect their minds. A lot of activities were performed by their hands and eyes and heads. They skilfully spun a pen between their fingers like performing a sort of acrobatics; they scratched their heads seriously as if they were all young Newtons; they turned the pages of a thick book back and forth as if they were thoughtful historians; they wrote swiftly and lengthily at the desk as if they were all gifted writers; but from time to time they didn’t forget to peep at the neighbours not of their gender.
A number of years earlier, he had been one of them, except for pen-spinning; he didn’t have that sort of skill. His fingers were then employed to twist the guitar strings or to sense the life and secrets of a couple of young blooming girls.
He came back to his bedroom late in the night.
He got up from his bed early in the morning.
He continued to teach New Concept English in his class with a reasonable enthusiasm, and was fairly honoured by the keen eyes and innocent admiration of his students.
His life was an arrow, already issued by a force out of his control, but where exactly to hit, he didn’t know.
One Saturday he climbed Emei Mountain to watch the gleefully running water in the streams, the variety of strangely named plants, the dull, half-dead, forever-murmuring monks, the tourists who had to show off their glee and happiness on their faces, and the wild, mischievous and human-eyed, man-testicled monkeys. The shapes and roofs and doors and inscriptions of all those temples were, in his uncritical eyes, universally the same.
He stayed for the night on the Top of Gold, said to be 3099 meters above the level of sea, and got up early in the morning hoping to catch the Buddha Light. However, in the rented, clumsy army-coat that was exactly the same type of overcoat he used to wear in Shanghai, he saw nothing but the mist and dim cloud and the feeble light from rows and rows candles cascading around the temple foundation. And the dawn light was even paler and fainter and bleaker than any he had ever seen. He heard a bird, yes, only a bird, a baby bird, hidden somewhere in the bush near the sinuous fenced track, peeping feebly for its life as if it had lost its shelter and its mother at the same time. And the moon, only fleeting glimpses really, was rushing behind the shattered clouds. In his eyes, her face was but scarred by a smear of lonely tears.
Then another weekend he went to the Leshan - Happy Mountain, to see the world renowned Great Buddha statue.
It was very big; even scaling to one hundred thousand times the proportion of a typical Buddha gift statue wouldn’t match its size. But it wasn’t the size that impressed him so much, rather the dirt and the stains that smudged her forehead, his nose, his cheeks, his giant lap and hands.
Oh, he was not happy. The sadness in his eyes was second to none. There he had suffered by sitting still for hundreds if not thousands of years, battered and hurt in all weathers. Around his foot, the tiny people, who had marched down by a winding track, were just a swarm of ants crawling in every direction, as if they had the desire and greed and audacity to carry his body with their meagre limbs, and then consume him raw and alive.
--End of Chapter 40-- |
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园艺 -- -- 玫瑰（中） (2009-4-1) ham 
不周山 (2013-4-30) bosstong 
发表于 2014-5-19 12:24
