Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  She says she is old, she means her heart is old and nothing can excite her. Before, she would weep copious tears straight from her heart over nothing, it was effortless and soothing.

  She says she had a girlfriend called Lingling and that they were good friends from childhood days. She was always so sweet, she would only have to look at you, and a dimple would appear on her face. Now she is a mother and she has become lethargic, talks in a monotone, and slurs her speech like she’s half asleep. But when she was a girl she used to chatter like a sparrow and together they would talk nonsense all day without stopping. She says Lingling wanted to be outside playing all the time. But, she says, whenever it started raining she would become morose and say I want to strangle you: she would press hard on my neck and it really hurt.

  One summer night, sitting by the lake, looking at the sky, she told Lingling she wanted to snuggle and Lingling said she wanted to be a little mother. They giggled and jostled one another, it was before the moon came out. She asks if you know the night sky is grey-blue when the moon is about to come out, oh, the moon gliding out of its corona, she asks if you have ever seen it, surging and billowing then spreading flat like a rolling mist. She says they even heard the sound of the moon flowing over the tops of the trees which looked like rippling waterweeds in a flowing stream, and they both wept. Their tears welled up like the waters of a spring, like the flowing of the moonlight, and their hearts felt sublime. Lingling’s hair, she can feel it even now, brushed lightly against her face, their cheeks were pressed together and they were both flushed. There is a type of lotus, she says, not the water lily or the common lotus, it’s smaller than a lotus and bigger than a water lily. It opens at night and its gold and red stamens glow in the dark. The pink petals are fleshy, like Lingling’s ears when she was young but without the fine hairs, and they are shiny like the nails of her small hands, ah, at that time her trimmed long nails were like sea shells. However, the pink petals are not bright, they are thick like ears and tremble as they slowly open.

  You say you see it, you see the petals trembling as they slowly open, the velvety gold stamens at the centre, also trembling. Yes, she says. You hold her hands. No, don’t, she says, she wants you to listen to her. She says she feels solemn, it’s something you wouldn’t understand. But this doesn’t mean you’re not willing to understand, nor that you’re not willing to understand her. She says this solemn feeling has a sacred and pure music. She adores the Holy Mother, the way the Holy Mother holds the Child, her eyes looking down, the delicate fingers of her gentle hands. She says she too wants to be a mother, to nurse her baby, a pure, warm, plump life, sucking her milk. It is a pure feeling, do you understand? You say you are trying to understand. That means you don’t, you are so dense, she says.

  She says a thick layer of curtain hangs there, then layer upon layer, and walking inside is like gliding, as one lightly pushes apart the silk velvety black-green curtains and passes through, not necessarily seeing anyone, threading one’s way between rippling curtains. There are no sounds, all sound is absorbed by the curtains. Only a single note, a pure note, slowly wafts through, filtered by the curtains so that there are no impurities. In the darkness there is a source emitting a gentle light which gives a subtle glow to places it flows over.

  She says she had a beautiful paternal aunt who often used to walk about the house in front of her wearing just a bra and a pair of scanty briefs. She always wanted to go up and touch her bare thighs but didn’t ever dare. She says at the time she was just a skinny child and thought she’d never grow up beautiful like her aunt. Her aunt was surrounded by boyfriends and regularly received a number of love letters all at the one time. She was a performer and had quite a lot of men courting her, she always said they bored her but she actually liked them. Afterwards she married an officer in the army who kept a strict watch over her – if she got home a bit late he’d interrogate her, and he even struck her. She says at the time she really couldn’t understand why her aunt didn’t leave him and put an end to that sort of abuse.

  She also says she once was in love with a teacher, he taught her class mathematics, yes, it was purely childish infatuation. She adored listening to the sound of his voice when he was teaching. Mathematics was dry and boring but because she loved his deep voice she was very conscientious in her work. Once she got a mark of eighty-nine for an exam and started crying. When the marked papers were handed back she broke into tears when she got hers. The teacher took it back and said he’d have another look at it. He re-marked it and gave her a few more marks but she said she didn’t want them, she didn’t want them, threw the exam paper on the floor and couldn’t stop bawling in front of the whole class. This was quite disgraceful and after that she ignored him, refusing even to say hello. After the summer vacation, he no longer took this class of hers but she still thought of him, she liked his deep voice, that deep rich voice.

  A red streamer stretches across the road on the Shiqian to Jiangkou highway. The bus I am on is intercepted by a small van and boarded by a man and a woman, each with red armbands: wearing a red armband gives people a special status and they can become intimidating. I thought they were chasing or arresting someone but luckily it turns out that they are only checking if people have tickets – they are inspectors from the Highways Management Department.

  Soon after the bus started, at the first stop, the driver had checked the tickets. A peasant tried to slip away but the driver shut the door on his hemp sack, forcing him to pay ten yuan for a ticket before the sack was thrown off the bus. Then, ignoring the peasant’s swearing and cursing, the driver put his foot on the accelerator. The bus started moving and the peasant had to quickly jump out of the way. As there are not many buses in mountain districts, sitting at the steering wheel confers supreme authority and the passengers can’t conceal their hostility.

  None of us imagined that the couple wearing red armbands would be even more overbearing than the driver. The man seizes a passenger’s ticket and crooks a finger to summon the driver, “Get down, get down!”

  The driver meekly gets off the bus. The woman writes out a ticket fining him three hundred yuan, a hundred times more than the three yuan ticket he had missed tearing a corner off. One thing will overcome another: this principle isn’t restricted to the natural world, it applies also to the human world.

  At first we hear the driver outside the bus explaining that he doesn’t know the passenger and couldn’t possibly re-sell the ticket, then he starts arguing with the inspectors. Either because the driver’s income is more than theirs under the new work contract system or else to show the might of their red armbands, they are quite inflexible and stick rigidly to the rules. After ranting and raving, the driver puts on a forlorn look and desperately pleads with them. This goes on for a full hour and the bus still can’t go. The persons giving the fine and the person fined have forgotten about the passengers locked in the bus who all this time have been undergoing punishment by being cooked in the blazing sun! Their hostility towards the driver gradually transforms into a hatred for the red armbands. It is only when everyone starts knocking on the windows and shouting their protests that the woman realizes they are targeting her. She quickly tears off the ticket and thrusts it into the driver’s hand and the man signals with the little flag for the inspection van to drive over. Finally, they get in and depart, leaving behind a trail of dust in a show of might.

  However, the driver squats on his haunches and refuses to get up. The passengers poke their heads out of the windows and of course say nice things to him to make him feel better. Another half hour passes and they gradually lose patience and start yelling and shouting at him. At this, he reluctantly gets on the bus.

  Before long we come to a village. No-one is getting on or off but the bus pulls up, the front and back doors open, and the driver jumps out of the cabin and says, “All out, all out! We’re not going on, the bus has to refuel.” He then goes off on his own. At first the passengers stay on the bus complaining, but as
no-one is there to take any notice, one by one they get out.

  At the side of the highway, apart from the little restaurant, there is only a small shop for cigarettes, alcohol and odds and ends. It has an awning and also sells tea.

  The sun is already moving towards the west and it is scorching hot even under the awning. I drink two bowls of cold tea one after the other but still the bus hasn’t refuelled and there is no sign of the driver. Oddly, all the passengers who were drinking tea under the awning or resting under the trees have wandered off.

  I go into the little restaurant to look for them but there are only empty square tables and wooden stools, I can’t work out where everyone has gone. I go looking in the kitchen and find the driver there with two plates of sautéed vegetables and a bottle of liquor on the table in front of him. The proprietor is sitting there with him and chatting.

  “What time will the bus be going?” I ask in a justifiably unfriendly manner.

  “Tomorrow at six in the morning,” he answers, also not in a particularly friendly manner.

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you see I’m drinking alcohol?” he asks me instead.

  “Look, I didn’t fine you. You’re upset but you shouldn’t be taking it out on the passengers, you know,” I say, restraining my temper.

  “Do you know there’s a penalty for driving after drinking alcohol?” He reeks of alcohol and looks totally irresponsible. As I look at the beady eyes under his furrowed brows as he eats, I am seized by an indefinable rage and have the urge to grab the bottle and smash it over his head. I quickly leave the restaurant.

  When I go back to the highway and see the empty bus by the road, I suddenly realize that there isn’t in fact any rationality in the human world. If I hadn’t got on the bus, wouldn’t I have avoided all this stress? There would have been no driver, no passengers, no ticket inspectors and no fine. But the problem is I still have to find somewhere to spend the night.

  I go back to the tea stall and see a fellow passenger is there.

  “The damn bus isn’t going,” I say.

  “I know,” he says.

  “Where are you spending the night?”

  “I’m trying to find somewhere.”

  “Where have all the passengers gone?” I ask.

  He says they’re locals, they always have somewhere to go and time is of little consequence for them, a day earlier or a day later doesn’t matter. However, he has to get to the county town by this evening so that he can go into the mountains early the next morning. He’s been sent by the Guiyang Zoo which had received a telegram from Yinhong county saying the peasants had caught this half-bird-half-fish creature up in the mountains. If he goes any later this creature might die.

  “So be it, if it dies,” I say. “Can they fine you?”

  “It’s not that,” he says. “You don’t understand.”

  I say it’s impossible to understand the world.

  He says he’s talking about this half-bird-half-fish creature, not about the world.

  I say there’s no great difference between this half-bird-half-fish creature and the world.

  He takes out the telegram and shows it to me. It says, “The villagers of this county have caught alive a strange creature that is half bird and half fish. Come as quickly as possible to identify it.” He also says the zoo once got a telegram saying that a forty- or fifty-catty giant salamander had been washed down a mountain stream, but by the time the person despatched arrived the fish not only had died but had been divided up and eaten by the villagers. It was impossible to reconstruct the corpse, so a specimen couldn’t be made. This time he will wait on the highway to see if he can get a lift from a passing vehicle.

  I stand with him for quite a while on the highway. A few trucks drive past and time after time he waves the telegram, but no-one takes any notice. It’s not my mission to save this half-bird-half-fish creature or the world, so why am I here eating dust? I may as well go into the restaurant to have something to eat.

  I ask the woman who brings out the food if I can stay the night. She seems to think I’m asking her if she’s taking customers and, glaring at me, says, “Can’t you see? This is a restaurant!”

  I swear a silent oath to myself that I will not get on that bus again, but there is at least a hundred kilometres to go and it will take at least two days on foot. I go back to the highway, the person from the zoo is no longer there. I wonder if he got a lift.

  The sun is about to set and the benches at the tea stall have been taken inside. The pounding of drums comes from below the highway – something must be happening. I look down at the bottom of the slope and before me are the tiled roofs of houses with cobblestoned spaces in between. Further on are layers of paddy fields, the early crop has been harvested and in some of the fields the black soil has been ploughed.

  I walk down the slope, following the sound of the drums. A peasant goes by along the embankment with his trouser legs rolled up, his calves covered in mud. A little further on a child is leading a water buffalo on a rope towards a pond near the village. I look at the smoke rising from the chimneys over the rooftops below and a peacefulness rises in my heart.

  I stop to listen to the sound of the drums from the village. There is no driver, no inspectors with red armbands, no infuriating bus and no telegram to go as quickly as possible to identify this half-bird-half-fish creature: everything belongs to nature. I think back to those years when I had to work as a peasant in the villages, if things hadn’t changed later on, wouldn’t I still be working in the fields just like them? I would also be up to the calves in mud, after work I wouldn’t bother to wash, and I would no doubt be without my present anxieties. Nothing could be more natural than the evening scene of smoke from chimneys, tiled rooftops, and the near and yet distant sound of drums.

  The drumbeats repeat nan-nan na-na over and over and seem to be telling a wordless legend. The colour of the water and the glow of the sky, the blackened rooftops, the pale grey cobblestones vaguely visible in the courtyards between the houses, the soil warmed by the sun, the snorting of water buffaloes, the sound of garrulous talk coming from the houses, the evening breeze, the rustling of the leaves on the trees above, the smell of the paddy hay and the cow sheds, the sound of water swilling, the creaking of a door hinge or a wooden pulley over a well, the chirping of sparrows and the cooing somewhere of a pair of pigeons nesting, the shrill voices of women or children, the feeling of sadness and the chirping of winged insects, the soil underfoot dry and hard on the surface but crumbling and loose underneath, submerged lust and the thirst for happiness, tremors in the mind induced by the sound of the drums, the desire to be barefoot and sitting on a doorsill worn black and shiny by all the people who have sat upon it, all suddenly converge.

  The shaman of Tianmenguan has sent someone to the carpenter’s yard to get the old man to make the head of the Goddess Tianluo. The shaman will come in person on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month to invite the goddess to receive offerings at his altar. The messenger has brought a live goose as a deposit and the work is to be completed on schedule. The old man will then be given a jar of rice wine and half of a pig’s head which will be plenty to see him through to the New Year. The old man is petrified and realizes that he doesn’t have many days. The Goddess Guanyin rules over the living and the Goddess Tianluo rules over the dead: the goddess is coming to hasten the end of his life.

  Over the past few years, apart from the carpentry work, he has made quite a number of carvings. For people’s homes he has made the god of wealth, the laughing arhat, the monk gatherer of vegetarian food, and the honest judge; for the exorcist performance troupe he has carved a whole set of masks: the half-man-half-god Zhang the Clearer of Mountains, the half-man-half-animal horse general, and half-man-half-demon goblins; and for people from outside the mountains he has carved the crooked mouthed Qin boy for them to amuse themselves. He has also carved the Goddess Guanyin but no-one has ever asked him to carve the malevolent Goddess Tia
nluo who controls people’s fates. The goddess has come to take his life. How could he have been so muddle-headed as to agree? He blames himself for getting too old, for being too greedy. As long as people will pay he carves anything they want. Everyone thinks his carvings are like the real thing, one can tell at a glance it’s the god of wealth, the clever official, the laughing arhat, the monk gatherer of vegetarian food, the honest judge, the impetuous general who clears mountains, the horse general, the goblins, or the Goddess Guanyin. He has never seen the Goddess Guanyin, he only knows she is the goddess who brings sons. A woman came from outside the mountains with two lengths of red cloth and a bundle of incense. She had heard that the rock where the mountain people made offerings to their ancestors was efficacious, so she came to the mountains to pray for a son. When she saw he could make figures of divinities, she asked him to make her a Guanyin and stayed the night in his house. She was up early, very happy, and took with her the Guanyin he’d spent the whole night carving for her. However, he has never made the Goddess Tianluo because no-one has ever asked him and because this malevolent spirit is only worshipped at the altars of shamans. He can’t stop shivering and breaks out in a cold sweat all over: he knows that the Goddess Tianluo has already attached herself to his body and is just waiting to take his life.