Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  When the Long Hairs – the Taipings – revolted, did they come across from Wuyizhen and torch all of this? she asks.

  You say the fire came later. First it was when Second Master of the main branch of the family became a court official. He was promoted to minister for punishments then suddenly was implicated in a salt smuggling case. In fact, rather than corruption and breaking the law, it was a case of the emperor being addle-headed and stupidly believing the eunuchs that he was plotting with the empress dowager’s family to usurp power. The outcome was that the whole family was hauled out and beheaded. In this big household of three hundred, some of the women were allocated to officials as servants and the rest, even babies were slaughtered. This was really to be without progeny, so how could this compound avoid being razed?

  Or the story could go like this. If the stone tortoise half-buried far away over there counts as part of the same group of buildings as the stone gate, drums and lions, this area wouldn’t have been living quarters but would have been graves. Of course this tomb with a passage stretching for one li would have been quite splendid. However this is hard to verify as the stone epitaph on the back of the tortoise was taken away by a peasant family and smashed up for a millstone during the time of the land reforms. The stone base was left buried in the fields: it was solid and too heavy to be put to good use because it would have been too hard to shift. Now this tomb obviously wouldn’t have been for burying ordinary folk, and village gentry with even larger estates wouldn’t have dared to make such a display of extravagance unless they were nobles or high officials.

  It must have been a person who played a meritorious role in the founding of the Ming Dynasty, someone who had joined Zhu Yuanzhang’s rebellion to drive off the Tartars. However most of the meritorious officials who helped to establish the dynasty failed to die a peaceful death. To be able to die of old age and be put to rest with a lavish funeral required exceptional talent. The owner of this tomb saw loyal generals of the emperor murdered one by one and spent his days in fear. He plucked up the courage to present the emperor with a petition for retirement, saying: Peace and prosperity have been achieved in the empire, the Imperial Grace reigns supreme and civil officials and generals fill the court. This insignificant subject lacks talent and is past half of a hundred years of age. His aged mother has spent her life all alone and years of hard work have resulted in illness. As not many years remain, he hangs up his cap of office to return to the village to fulfil his filial duties. By the time the petition had been conveyed to the emperor, he had already left the capital. The emperor was moved and of course handsomely rewarded him and on the man’s death gave personal instructions for the building of this enormous tomb to commend him to later generations.

  There could also be another version of the story. It varies significantly from the historical records, and is closer to biji fiction. According to this version, when the owner of the tomb saw the emperor purging the old guard purportedly to rectify court policies, he used the pretext of hastening to his father’s funeral to relinquish his powers and flee to his village. Afterwards he feigned madness and refused to see outsiders. The emperor couldn’t allay his suspicions and despatched an officer of the palace guards who after crossing many mountains to get there, found the gates bolted. He announced that he had come to convey instructions from the emperor and forthwith charged in. Suddenly, the man crawled out on all fours from an inner room and came barking like a dog at him. The investigator looked on in disbelief and ordered him to get dressed and present himself at the capital. However, the man promptly went off, sniffed at a heap of dog shit by the wall and put down his head to eat it up. The palace guard could do nothing but report back to the emperor. It was only then that the emperor’s suspicions were allayed and when the man died, he presented him with a lavish burial. In fact the heap of dog shit was ground sesame seeds mixed with molasses made by his favourite maidservant, but how could the emperor have known this?

  The county produced a village scholar who was determined to make a name for himself. After spending half his life in the civil service examination halls, finally at the age of fifty-two he managed to get his name on the list of successful candidates, albeit amongst the names at the bottom of the list. After that he spent all his days waiting for an appointment, or even half of an appointment, in the bureaucracy. Unknown to him his unmarried daughter was embroiled in a romance with one of her young maternal uncles and was pregnant. The silly girl thought that by taking bezoar she could induce an abortion and instead had diarrhoea for two months. She got thinner while her belly got bigger. Eventually her parents found out and there was utter chaos. To salvage the family reputation the old man bestowed death upon her in the same manner as emperors would deal with corrupt officials and rebels – he had his unchaste daughter nailed alive into a coffin. This news spread far and wide and reached the county town where the magistrate, who was worried by the lack of morality in the locality and lived in constant fear of losing his black satin cap of office, seized upon the incident as being typical. He reported it to the provincial government which in turn reported it to the court.

  The emperor, in the embrace of his favourite concubines, had for a long time not bothered with trifling court matters. However, one day when he was feeling bored he thought to ask about the common people. The court officials reported this interesting news item and when the emperor heard he gave an involuntary sigh: This is indeed a family of moral virtue. The words of the imperial sigh, of great import and immediacy, were conveyed to the provincial government. The governor immediately wrote instructions: There can be no delay with what the emperor has decreed. Erect a tablet and hang it high up to inform villagers far and wide. A fast horse took the despatch to the county yamen. The magistrate quickly sounded the gongs and got into his sedan chair, preceded by an official runner shouting to clear people off the road. How could this venal old Confucian scholar not be moved to tears as he knelt to hear the emperor’s decree. The magistrate then sternly declared: Each of the Emperor’s words, “Family of Moral Virtue”, is precious, now hasten to set up a memorial arch so that they will be recorded in perpetuity and never forgotten! His virtuous action had moved heaven and earth and brought honour and glory to his ancestors and the whole clan. The old man purchased on credit tens of baskets of grain to hire workers to prepare slabs of stone, and day and night he supervised the meticulous carving of the words. He laboured for half of the year and before the winter solstice, when the work was completed, he laid out a feast for his neighbours to show his gratitude. At the end of the year when the accounts were finalized, needless to say, the whole year’s income had been used to pay off debts, but he was still short by forty ounces of stamped silver ingots and seventeen strings of cash for the interest. He then caught a chill, became bedridden, barely managed to hang on through the first month of the New Year and died just before the planting of the new grain seedlings.

  This memorial arch still stands at the east entrance to the village and lazy herd boys always hitch the ropes of the cows on them when they sneak off. However, when the director of the revolutionary committee came to inspect the countryside he found the wording on the horizontal tablet between the pillars quite inappropriate and had the secretary inform the local village secretary. It was changed to: “In Agriculture Learn From Dazhai”, and the couplet on the stone pillars: “Loyalty and Filial Piety Long Transmitted in the Family” and “Poetry and History Long Continuing for Many Generations” was changed to the slogans “Plant Fields for the Revolution” and “For the Greater Community not the Individual”. Who could have imagined that the Dazhai model would later be called bogus, that the fields would be returned to peasant ownership, that those who worked more would get more, and that nobody would pay any attention to the writing on the memorial arch? The more clever of the descendants of the family have gone into business and become rich, how could they spare the time to think about changing it all back?

  At the back of the arch, at the door of
the first house, an old woman sits pounding in a wooden bucket with a stick. A sandy coloured dog comes and hangs around, sniffing here and there. The old woman holds up the stick and savagely berates it: “I’ll burn you to death with the chilli if you don’t get lost!”

  Anyway, you are not a sandy coloured dog, so you keep walking up, and address her.

  “Venerable elder, are you making chilli sauce?”

  The old woman neither says yes or no, just looks up at you then puts down her head and goes on pounding the fresh chilli in the bucket.

  “Could you please tell me if there’s a place called Lingyan here?” You know that to ask her about a far away place like Lingshan would be a waste of time. You say you’ve come from a village called Mengjia down below, and people there say there’s a place called Lingyan up this way.

  It is only then that she stops pounding to look the two of you over, especially scrutinizing her and then turning to you.

  “Are the two of you wishing for a son?” she asks in an odd way.

  She gives you a tug on the quiet. You’ve made a stupid blunder, so you go on to ask, “What’s Lingyan got to do with wishing for a son?”

  “What’s it got to do with it?” The old woman raises her voice. “It’s a place women go to. They only go there to burn incense when they haven’t given birth to a son!” The old woman can’t stop cackling, it’s as if someone is tickling her. “So the young woman here is wishing for a son?” The old woman turns to caustically confront her.

  “We’re sightseeing. We want to have a look everywhere,” you are obliged to explain.

  “What’s there to see in this village? It was just the same a few days ago. Several couples from the city tormented the whole village with the havoc they created!”

  “What did they do?” you can’t help asking.

  “They brought along this electric box and made the mountains ring with the wailing of ghosts and the howling of wolves. They had their arms around one another right on the threshing square and they were all wriggling their bottoms. It was really wicked!”

  “Oh, were they looking for Lingyan too?” You are becoming interested.

  “Why do you keep asking about that demon-infested place Lingyan? Didn’t I tell you just now? That’s where women go to burn incense when they want to have a son.”

  “Why can’t men go there?”

  “If you’re not afraid of evil vapours then go. Who’s stopping you?”

  She gives you a tug, but you say you still can’t understand.

  “Then get yourself splashed with blood!” You can’t tell if the old woman is warning you or cursing you.

  “She’s saying it’s taboo for men,” she explains to you.

  You say there are no taboos.

  “She’s talking about menstrual blood,” she whispers in your ear, warning you to leave right away.

  “What’s so special about menstrual blood?” You say even dog’s blood doesn’t worry you. “Let’s go and see what this Lingyan really is.”

  She says forget it and says she doesn’t want to go. You ask why she’s afraid, she says she’s afraid of what the old woman is saying.

  “There aren’t all these regulations, let’s go!” you say to her, and then ask the old woman how to get there.

  “Wicked people, let the demons get the pair of you!” the old woman says to your back, this time cursing.

  She says she’s afraid, she has a premonition of something bad. You ask if she’s afraid she will meet a shaman. You tell her that in this mountain village all the old women are shamans and all the young women are seductresses.

  “Does that mean I am too?” she asks you.

  “Why not? Aren’t you a woman?”

  “Then you’re a demon!” she counters.

  “All men are demons in women’s eyes.”

  “Then am I the companion of a demon?” she asks sticking up her chin.

  “A demon with a seductress,” you say.

  She chuckles and looks happy, but she pleads with you not to go to such a place.

  “What could happen?” you stop and ask her. “Will it bring misfortune? Will it bring disaster? What’s there to be frightened about?”

  She snuggles against you and says as long as she’s with you she will be all right. But you can tell there is already a black shadow in her heart. You strive to dispel it and deliberately talk loudly.

  I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass and staring at a cloud – at first it’s like a camel, then like a woman, and when you look again it becomes an old man with a long beard, but this doesn’t last because clouds are transforming every instant.

  Suppose you use a lavatory in an old house and you happen to look at the water stains on the walls – every day you go there are changes in the stains. First you see a face, when you look again it’s a dog dragging a sausage, afterwards it turns into a tree, there is a woman under the tree and she’s sitting on a skinny horse. After a couple of weeks, or perhaps after several months, one morning, you are constipated and you suddenly find that the stain is in fact still a face.

  When you are lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, the light projected onto the white ceiling too can undergo many transformations. If you concentrate on looking at yourself, you will find that your self will gradually separate from the self you are familiar with and multiply into many startling forms. So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.

  You could wait, wait until the stain on the wall again turns into a human face, or you could hope, hope that it would one day turn out to have a particular form. But in my experience, it grows and grows but often not as you wish and moreover, mostly, contrary to what you wish. It is a monster child which you find impossible to accept, yet ultimately it was born of the self and has to be accepted.

  I once looked at the photo of me on the monthly bus ticket I had thrown on the table. At first I thought I had a charming smile, then I thought the smile at the corners of the eyes was rather of scorn, arrogance and indifference, all deriving from self-love, self-adoration, and a sense of superiority. But there was also an anxiety which betrayed acute loneliness, and fleeting snatches of terror – certainly not a winner – and a bitterness which stifled the common smile of unthinking happiness and doubted that sort of happiness. This was very scary, it was like a void, a sense of falling without somewhere to land, and I didn’t want to go on looking at the photo.

  After that I went about observing other people, but whenever I observed other people I found this detestable omniscient self of mine interfering, and to this day there is not one face it hasn’t interfered with. This is a serious problem, for when I am scrutinizing someone else, I am at the same time scrutinizing myself. I search for faces I like, or expressions I can tolerate, so I can’t get rid of myself. I can’t find people with whom I can identify, I search without success, everywhere: in railway waiting rooms, in train carriages, on boats, in food shops and parks, and even when out walking on the streets, I am always trying to capture a familiar face or a familiar build, or looking for some sign which can call up submerged memories. When I am observing others I always treat the other person as a mirror for looking inwardly at myself. The observations are inevitably affected by my state of mind at a particular time. Even when I am observing a woman, my senses react to her and my experiences and imagination are activated in making a judgement. My understanding of others, including women, is actually superficial and arbitrary. Women I like are inevitably illusions I have created to delude myself, and this is my tragedy. As a result, my relationships with women inevitably fail. On the other hand, if I were a woman and living with a man, this would also be a worry. The problem is the a
wakened self in the inner mind, this is the monster which torments me no end. People love the self yet mutilate the self. Arrogance, pride, complacency or anxiety, jealousy and hatred, all spring from this. The self is in fact the source of mankind’s misery. So, does this unhappy conclusion mean that the awakened self should therefore be killed?

  Thus Buddha told the boddhisatva: the myriad phenomena are vanity, the absence of phenomena is also vanity.

  She says she wants to return to the carefree time of her childhood, when she went to school with her hair combed and perfectly plaited by her maternal grandmother, and everyone used to say her shiny long plaits were beautiful. After her grandmother died, she didn’t wear her hair in plaits anymore but in protest cut it short so that it couldn’t even be put into two bunches which was the style in the Red Guard period. At the time a neighbour had reported her father and he was locked up in the building where he worked and not allowed to go home. Her mother took him a change of clothes every two weeks, but she was never allowed to go along. Afterwards she and her mother were forced to go to a farming village as she didn’t have the right qualifications to be a Red Guard. She says the happiest time in her life was when she had long plaits. Her maternal grandmother was like an old cat, always dozing by her side, and she felt secure.