The Red Thread Read online

  “I’ve just changed, that’s all. I’m not the same person I was in high school.” I could detect a note of self-hatred in the viciousness of her tone.

  Hearing those words, “I’ve changed,” made me truly sad. The traffic had illuminated Xinsheng South Road in an opulent yellow. We followed the red brick wall that enclosed the school grounds, pausing to lean against a railing. To our left were the city streets, whose bright lights seemed to be calling. To our right was the dimly lit campus, teeming with the splendors of solitude. There’s nothing that won’t change, do you understand? I said in my heart. “Can you count the number of lights that are on in that building over there?” I pointed to a brand-new high-rise at the intersection.

  “Uh, I see lights in five windows, so maybe, like, five?” she said brightly.

  Just wait and see how many there are later on. Will you still remember? I asked myself, answering with a nod.

  • • •

  The first semester she was my lifeline. It was a clandestine form of dating—the kind where the person you’re going out with doesn’t know it’s a date. I denied myself, and I denied the fact that she was part of my life, so much so that I denied the dotted line that connected the two of us and our entire relationship to a crime. But the eye of suspicion had been cast upon me from the very beginning, and this extraordinary eye reached all the way back to my adolescence. My hair started to go gray early. Life ahead was soon supplanted by a miserable prison sentence. It was as if I never really had a youth. Nonetheless, I was determined at all costs to become a person who would love without boundaries. And so I locked myself and that eye together in a dark closet.

  Every Sunday night, however, I was forced to think about her. It was like a chore I dreaded. I’d resolve not to go to Intro to Chinese Lit, and every Monday I would sleep in until almost three, waking up just in time to rush to class on my bike. Every Monday after class, Shui Ling would follow me matter-of-factly back to Wenzhou Street, as if she were merely passing by on her way home. Afterward, I’d wait with her for the number 74 bus. There was a bench in front of the French bakery. Our secret little rendezvous were tidy and simple. They were executed with the casual deftness of a high-class burglary: bribing the guards with one hand, feeding a criminal appetite with the other.

  The rest of the week, we barely spoke. She was an apparition seen only on Mondays. On Mondays, she would appear like the answer to a dying man’s prayers—roses in hand, draped in white muslin, barefoot and floating, come to grant me a reprieve. In a primal mating dance, eyes closed in rapture, she scattered rose petals into the wilderness. Roses every week and she didn’t even know it, and it was amid roses that it seemed I might live after all. I reached for those roses, and for a new life, only to discover a glass wall. When I extended my hand, so did my reflection. When Monday ended, the glass that stood between me and my reflection thickened.

  The room on Wenzhou Street. Elegant maroon wallpaper and yellow curtains. What did I even talk to her about in there? She sat on the floor, in the gap between the foot of the wooden bed frame and the wardrobe, with her back to me, almost silent. I talked nonstop. Most of the time it was just me talking. Talking about whatever. Talking about my horrible, painful life experiences. Talking about every person I’d ever gotten entangled with and couldn’t let go of. Talking about my own complexities, my own eccentricities. She was always playing with something in her hands. She would look up at me in disbelief and ask what was so hard to understand about this or what was so strange about that. She accepted me, which amounted to negating my negation of myself. Those sincere eyes, like a mirror, hurt me. But she accepted me. In my anguish, about every third sentence out of my mouth was: You don’t understand. Her eyes were suffused with a profound and translucent light, like the ocean gazing at me in silence, as if it were not necessary to speak at all. You don’t understand. She thought she understood. And she accepted me. Years later, I realized that had been the whole point.

  Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.

  • • •

  I am a woman who loves women. The tears I cry, they spring from a river and drain across my face like yolk.

  My time was gradually consumed by tears. The whole world loves me, but what does it matter since I hate myself? Humanity stabs a bayonet into a baby’s chest, fathers produce daughters that they pull into the bathroom to rape, handicapped midgets drag themselves onto highway overpasses to announce that they’re about to end it all just to collect a little spare change, and mental patients have irrepressible hallucinations and suicidal urges. How can the world be this cruel? A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence. And the world keeps turning as if nothing had happened. The forced smiles on the faces of the lucky ones say it all: It’s either this, or getting stabbed in the chest with a bayonet, getting raped, dragging yourself onto the highway overpass, or checking into a mental institution. No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago. All that you know is that you’ve been crucified for something, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life feeling like no one and nothing will help you, that you’re in it alone. Your individual circumstances, which separate you from everyone else, will keep you behind bars for life. On top of it all, humanity tells me I’m lucky. Privilege after privilege has been conferred upon me, and if I don’t seem content with my lot, they’ll be devastated.

  Shui Ling, please don’t knock on my door anymore. You don’t know how dark it is here in my heart. I don’t know who I am at all. What’s ahead of me is unclear, yet I must move forward. I don’t want to become myself. I know the answer to the riddle, but I can’t stand to have it revealed. The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and instead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide. As flesh and blood, I was not distinct. You turned me into my own key, and when you did, my fears seized me in a flood of tears that soon abated. I stopped hating myself and discovered the corporeal me.

  She didn’t understand. Didn’t understand she could love me, maybe that she already did love me. Didn’t understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds. Didn’t understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn’t understand that she caused me suffering. Didn’t understand that love was like that.

  She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.

  Translated from the Chinese by Bonnie Huie

  CHORAL ODE FROM HIPPOLYTOS

  Euripides

  CHORUS (first stasimon)

  Eros, Eros, deep down the eyes

  you distill longing,

  sliding

  sweet pleasure

  into the soul where you make war:

  I pray you never come at me with evil,

  break my measure.

  No weapon,

  not fire,

  not stars,

  has more power

  than Aphrodite’s

  shot from the hands

  of Eros, child of Zeus.

  In vain, in vain, beside Apollo’s river

  and his shrine

  do Greeks

  slaughter oxen.

  Yet that tyrant god who has the key

  to Aphrodite’s chambers of love,

  that god Eros

  we do not worship,

  though he
plunders

  mortal men

  and sends them

  through all

  manner of misfortune

  when he comes.

  Wild little horse of Oichalia

  unbroken in bed,

  never yoked to a man,

  never yoked to marriage,

  from her father’s house,

  like a running naiad,

  like a girl gone mad,

  in blood,

  in smoke,

  in a wedding of murder,

  to Herakles

  Aphrodite yoked her,

  Aphrodite gave her,

  O

  bride of sorrow!

  O holy wall of Thebes,

  O river mouth of Dirke,

  you too could bear witness

  how Aphrodite comes on.

  To flaming thunder

  she gave Semele

  as a bride

  and laid

  the girl to bed

  in bloody death.

  Aphrodite’s breath is felt

  on everything there is.

  Then like a bee

  she

  flicks away.

  Translated from the Ancient Greek by Anne Carson

  CHARLOTTE

  François-René de Chateaubriand

  london, april to september 1822

  ABOUT four leagues from Beccles, in a small village called Bungay, there lived an English clergyman, the reverend Mr. Ives, a great Hellenist and mathematician. He had a still young wife, charming in her person, her mind, and her manner, and an only daughter, who was fifteen.* Having been introduced into this household, I was more warmly welcomed there than anywhere else. We drank together in the old English fashion, Mr. Ives and I, staying at table for two hours after the women had withdrawn. This man, who had seen America, loved telling tales of his travels, hearing the story of mine, and talking about Newton and Homer. His daughter, who had studied hard to please him, was an excellent musician, and she sang as well as Madame Pasta sings today.† She would reappear at teatime and charm away the old parson’s infectious drowsiness. Leaning on the end of the piano, I would listen to Miss Ives in silence.

  When the music was over, the young lady questioned me about France and literature; she asked me to draw up courses of study. She especially wanted to acquaint herself with the Italian authors, and begged me to give her some notes on the Divina Commedia and the Gerusalemme. Little by little, I began to feel the timid charm of an affection that springs from the soul. I had bedecked the Floridians with flowers, but I would not have dared to pick up Miss Ives’s glove. I felt embarrassed when I tried to translate a few passages of Tasso: I was more at ease when I turned my hand to Dante, a genius more masculine and chaste.

  Charlotte Ives’s age and mine were in concord. Something melancholy enters into relationships not formed until the middle of our lives. If two people do not meet in the prime of youth, the memories of the beloved are not mixed in the portion of days when we breathed without knowing her, and these days, which belong to other companions, are painful to recall and, as it were, severed from our present existence. Is there a disproportion of age? Then the drawbacks increase. The older one began his life before the younger one was born, and the younger one, in turn, is destined to live on alone; the one walked in solitude on the far side of the cradle, and the other shall walk in solitude on the near side of the grave. The past was a desert for the first, and the future shall be a desert for the second. It is difficult to love with all the conditions of happiness, youth, beauty, and opportunity, and with a harmony of heart, taste, character, graces, and years.

  Having taken a fall from my horse, I stayed some time in Mr. Ives’s house. It was winter, and the dreams of my life began to flee in the face of reality. Miss Ives became more reserved. She stopped bringing me flowers, and she no longer wanted to sing.

  If someone had told me that I would spend the rest of my life in obscurity at the hearth of this isolated family, I would have died of joy. Love needs nothing but continuance to be at once Eden before the Fall and a Hosanna without end. Make beauty stay, youth last, and the heart never grow weary, and you shall re-create heaven on earth. Love is so much the supreme happiness, it is haunted always by the illusion of infinitude. It wishes to make only irrevocable promises. In the absence of its joys, it attempts to eternalize its sorrows. A fallen angel, it still speaks the language it spoke in the incorruptible abode, and its hope is never to die. In its double nature and its double illusion here below, it aspires to perpetuate itself by immortal thoughts and unending generations.

  I foresaw with some dismay the moment when I would be obliged to leave. On the eve of my departure, dinner was a gloomy affair. To my great surprise, Mr. Ives withdrew after dessert, taking his daughter with him, and I remained alone with Mrs. Ives. She was extremely embarrassed. I suspected she was going to reproach me for an inclination that she must have long since guessed, but of which I had never spoken a word. She looked at me, lowered her eyes, and blushed. She herself was, in her discomfort, quite seductive: there was no feeling she could have failed to inspire in me. At long last, making an effort to overcome the obstacle that prevented her from speech, she said to me, in English: “Sir, you have seen my confusion: I do not know if Charlotte pleases you, but it is impossible to deceive a mother. My daughter has certainly become attached to you. Mr. Ives and I have discussed the matter. You suit us in every respect and we believe you would make our daughter happy. You no longer have a native country, you have just lost your family, and your property has been sold. What could possibly take you back to France? Until you inherit from us, you can live with us, here.”

  Of all the painful things that I had endured, this was the greatest and most wounding. I threw myself on my knees at Mrs. Ives’s feet and covered her hands with kisses and tears. She thought I was weeping with happiness and started sobbing with joy. She stretched out her arm to pull the bell-rope and called out to her husband and her daughter.

  “Stop!” I cried. “I am married!”

  Mrs. Ives fell back in a faint.

  I left and set out on foot without returning to my room. When I reached Beccles, I caught the mail coach for London, after having written a letter to Mrs. Ives. I regret I did not keep a copy.

  I have retained the sweetest, most tender, and most grateful recollection of these events. Before my name was known far and wide, Mr. Ives’s family were the only people to take an interest in me and the only ones to welcome me with sincere affection. When I was poor, unknown, outcast, without beauty or allure, they offered me a definite future, a country, an enchanting wife to draw me out of my shell, a mother almost equal to her daughter in beauty to take the place of my own aged mother, and a well-educated father who loved and cultivated literature to replace the father whom Heaven had taken from me. What did I have to offer in recompense for all that? No illusions could have entered into their choice of me; I had a right to believe myself loved. Since that time, I have met with only one attachment lofty enough to inspire me with the same confidence.‡ As for the interest which was shown in me later, I have never been able to sort out whether external causes—the fracas of fame and the prestige of parties, the glamour of high literary and political status—were not a cloak that drew such eagerness around me.

  I see now that, had I married Charlotte Ives, my role on earth would have changed. Buried in a county of Great Britain, I would have become a gentleman chasseur and not a single line would have issued from my pen. I might even have forgotten my language, for I could write in English and even the thoughts in my head were beginning to take form in English. Would my country have lost so much by my disappearance? If I could set aside what has consoled me, I would say that I might already have counted up many days of calm, instead of the many troubled days fallen to my lot. What would the Empire, the Restoration, and all the other divisions and quarrels of France have meant to me? I wouldn’t have had to palliate failings and combat errors every morning of my
life. Is it even certain that I have real talent: a talent worth all the sacrifices of my life? Will I survive my tomb? And if I do live beyond the grave, given the transformations that are even now taking place, in a world changed and occupied by entirely different things, will there be a public there to hear me? Will I not be a man of another time, unintelligible to the new generations? Will my ideas, my feelings, my very style not seem boring and old-fashioned to a sneering posterity? Will my shade be able to say, as Virgil’s did to Dante: Poeta fui e cantai? “I was a poet and I sang.”§

  Translated from the French by Alex Andriesse

  *Charlotte, born March 9, 1781, was sixteen or seventeen years old at the time.

  †Madame (Giuditta) Pasta (1797–1865) was an Italian opera singer.

  ‡Madame Récamier.

  §Dante’s Inferno, Canto 1, line 74.

  ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

  THE CHINESE LESSON

  Simon Leys

  IN THE catalogue of an individual retrospective held a year and a half ago at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, there is a striking statement by the painter to whose memory the exhibition was devoted. At a crucial turning point in his career, the artist in question sent a batch of recent paintings to a friend and explained to him: “The next lot has to be better and I just don’t feel capable of being better yet . . . I have the awful problem now of being a better person before I can paint better.”

  No, it wasn’t a Chinese scholar-painter from another century who wrote these lines. It was in fact Colin McCahon (1919–87), an important New Zealand painter of our age. The author of the catalogue, Murray Bail—a true connoisseur of Western art—in quoting this statement could not hide his puzzlement: can one imagine Michelangelo or Rubens, Ingres or Delacroix, Matisse or Picasso making such an extraordinary statement?

  For traditional Chinese aesthetes, on the other hand, such a notion goes without saying, and McCahon was doing little more than repeating a truth which, in their eyes, should be obvious to any serious artist. How the self-taught New Zealand painter, locked away in the isolation of his far-off land, had come to develop, without realising it, such a “Chinese” view remains an enigma which we will not try to elucidate here. We will simply note that he read a great deal and that since the middle of the twentieth century, numerous philosophical and aesthetic elements of Chinese and Japanese thought have been filtering into Western consciousness via countless works of vulgarisation, indeed even best-selling novels. Remember, for example, Robert Pirsig and his famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (an astonishing best-seller in the ’70s, the book, even today, retains its freshness and originality; it bears re-reading): “You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect, and then just paint naturally.”