Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  She knows what she is wearing is more striking than the colourful embroideries of other women and the abundance of silver indicates her high status. Her bare feet are also beautiful and the two silver bracelets on her ankle clink like crystal as she dances to the pipes.

  She is from the Black Miao mountain stockade, a beautiful white orchid produced there. Her bright red lips are like the camellias of early spring and her teeth are like small pearls. Her flat childlike nose and round face make her eyes look far apart, always smiling, and the flashing black pupils of her eyes add to her extraordinary radiance.

  She doesn’t need to go to the river-bank to seek a lover. The toughest young men of every stockade come to bow to her, shouldering reed pipes twice their height tied with flowing ribbons. They puff out their cheeks, sway, step back and forth stamping their feet to get the women in their multi-pleat skirts swaying with them, but she has only to lightly lift a graceful foot to get all of them bowing, and blowing so hard that they wreck their pipes and develop blood blisters on their lips! It is the vitality she exudes that gives her this arrogance.

  She doesn’t understand what it is to be jealous, doesn’t understand the malice of other women, doesn’t understand why they make a potion of centipedes, wasps, venomous snakes, ants and cuttings of their hair mixed in menstrual blood and spittle, put it into an urn with their husband’s shirt and a pair of his trousers cut into shreds, seal it and then bury the urn in a hole three feet in the ground.

  She only knows that there is a man on the other side of the river and a woman on this side, that in their spring years they become restless, meet on the reed pipe clearing, are attracted to one another, and seeds of passion take root.

  She only knows that at night after the fire is covered, the old ones are snoring and the young ones are talking in their sleep, she will get up, open the back door and go barefoot into the garden. The young man wearing a hat with silver horns who had followed her will come across from the fence, whistling softly. Her father will be up early and call her many times. Her mother, cross from calling, will open the door to use the stick on her but the bed will be empty.

  In the middle of the night, on the river-bank, I am lying on floorboards under overhanging eaves. I don’t know when the lights on the river disappeared and there is no starlight. The river and the mountain shadows of the opposite bank stretch into a single expanse. The night breeze has a chill edge and the howling of a wolf can be heard. I wake from a dream startled and listening carefully hear that it is a forlorn call for a mate, something like singing, intermittent, and miserable.

  She says she doesn’t know what happiness is and that she already has everything she should have – a husband, a son, what people think is a perfect little family. Her husband is a computer engineer and you know how highly regarded that profession is at the moment. He is young and capable and people say he’ll make lots of money as soon as he patents something. But she isn’t happy. She has been married for three years and the thrill of love and marriage has gone. The son, at times, is a hindrance. When she first thought this it gave her a rude shock but she slowly got used to it. However, she loves her son, and it is only this little creature who gives her some consolation. To preserve her figure, she didn’t breast feed so when she takes off her white gown to shower at her research institute, the women colleagues who have had babies are filled with envy.

  Another white gown, you say.

  It’s a woman friend of hers, she says, she always comes to tell her about her problems. She says she can’t be like those women who talk all day about their children and knit clothes for them and their husbands whenever there is spare time at work. A woman isn’t the slave of her husband and child. She has, of course, knitted for her child and it all started with this, she says, her troubles all started from having knitted this pullover.

  So what’s with this pullover?

  She wants you to listen to her, don’t interrupt, she also asks what was she saying just now.

  You were talking about the pullover and the troubles it started.

  No, she says she only feels at peace listening to the organ and singing Mass at church. Sometimes on Sundays she goes to Mass and lets her husband look after the child for a while. He should also do something for the child, it shouldn’t all be left to her. She’s not a Christian but once she walked past a church and now that churches are open to the public and you can go in and out freely, she went inside to listen. Since then she goes when she has time. She’s fond of Bach, yes, and listens to Bach’s requiems. She can’t stand popular music, it upsets her, she can’t even cope with her own anxieties. She asks if she’s making any sense.

  She says she started taking medications and takes sleeping tablets regularly. She saw a doctor who told her she had some form of neurasthenia. She feels tired and can never get enough sleep but can’t sleep unless she takes sleeping tablets. She isn’t sexually frustrated, make no mistake, and she does have orgasms with her husband. It’s not that he doesn’t satisfy her, don’t think along those lines, he’s a lot younger than you. However, he has his work, he’s very career-oriented and ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with a man being ambitious but he shuts himself up in the laboratory and often works overtime because he thinks the child is too noisy at home. She shouldn’t have had a child so soon but he wanted it, he loved her and wanted her to have a child for him. Problems arose because of the child.

  It happened like this, she says, she knitted a pullover with an appliqué which she had designed herself and it looked better than the children’s pullovers entered in competitions, at least that’s what she thought. She had gone to an export fashion exhibition with a colleague who had just been transferred to the institute. Their testing equipment had broken down and they had been waiting several days for repairs. There was no work so they went to the exhibition during work time to see if there was anything worth buying. He went with her, saying maybe he could buy his wife something. They ended up buying nothing. However, he said the pullover she had knitted for her son was better than the children’s clothing on display and that she’d do well at designing clothes. After that she began thinking about it and bought a fashion pattern book, then, using a length of textured dark blue cotton she’d bought but hadn’t got around to making up and a scarf she didn’t really wear, she made a sleeveless dress to wear into work. He saw her before she changed to go into the machine room and, after praising it, said she should only wear clothes she had designed herself. A couple of days later he got two tickets for a fashion show and invited her to go with him.

  The affair started with the fashion show models.

  She wants you to listen to her, no, she says he said if she went onto the catwalk wearing the dark blue cotton dress she’d outdo these models. She said she knew she wasn’t voluptuous. However he said models didn’t need to have big breasts, only long legs and curves, and that she had a slender figure, especially when she was wearing that dark blue dress. She says she really liked wearing the dress to work as she had made it herself, but whenever she wore it he would always eye her up and down. One day when she came out after changing, he looked at her in that way and invited her to have dinner with him.

  So she went.

  No, she says, she declined, she had to go to the nursery to pick up her child and she couldn’t leave the child unattended at night. He asked her if her husband minded if she went out alone at night. She said no, but if she went out she usually took the child with her and she couldn’t stay out late as the child had to go to bed early. Of course she’d been out at night and had got her husband to look after the child, but she couldn’t go out with him for dinner. One day during the midday break he invited her to his place the following day for lunch to try his four delights meat balls which he said were his specialty.

  She declined again.

  No, she agreed at first but then he said he wanted her to wear her dark blue dress.

  She agreed?

  No, she didn’t agree and said she pro
bably wouldn’t go. But the next day she wore the dark blue dress to work and during the midday break went to his place with him. She didn’t know what was so special about the dark blue dress. She had simply added two pieces of silk. The floral silk scarf itself was quite ordinary, she cut out whole flowers from it and sewed them onto the bodice and waist, perhaps that was a bit special. She didn’t think her figure was particularly good and her husband had laughed at her for being too flat and not sexy enough. Did she really look that good when she was wearing this dress?

  You say it’s not the dress.

  Then what is it? She says she knows what you’re going to say.

  You say you haven’t said anything but it’s not the dress.

  It’s because her husband doesn’t care what she wears, it’s his attitude of not caring! She says she hadn’t wanted to seduce anyone.

  You hasten to deny that you’ve said anything.

  She says she’s not going to say anything more.

  You say didn’t she want someone to talk to? To talk about what was troubling her? You ask her to go on talking about what was worrying this woman friend of hers.

  She doesn’t know what to go on talking about.

  Talk about his specialty, the four delights meat balls.

  She says he had it all planned, his wife was away on a job.

  You remind her she wasn’t there to see his wife but to have lunch. She should have guessed his wife wouldn’t have been there and she shouldn’t have been defensive.

  She concedes that was how it was, and the more defensive she was the greater the pressure.

  The harder it was to control herself?

  She couldn’t resist.

  When he was looking at her dress?

  She shut her eyes.

  Not wanting to see herself acting irrationally like this?

  Yes.

  Not wanting to see that she was just as wild?

  She says she was confused and hadn’t thought it would come to this, at the time she knew she didn’t love him, in any way at all. Her husband was better than him.

  You say actually she doesn’t love anyone.

  She says she only loves her son.

  You say she only loves herself.

  Maybe, maybe not. She says afterwards she left and wouldn’t see him on her own again.

  But she still did?

  Yes.

  And again at his place?

  She says she wanted to talk to him to clarify things–

  You say it’s hard clarifying this by talking about it.

  Yes, no. She says she hated him and hated herself.

  And once again there was a bout of wantonness?

  Stop talking! She was angry, she didn’t know why she wanted to talk about it, she just wanted it all to end quickly.

  You ask how could it end?

  She says she doesn’t know.

  His death takes place two years before I come here. At the time he is the last surviving Master of Sacrifice among the hundred Miao stockades, but for several decades there has not been an ancestor sacrifice on such a grand scale. He knows it will not be long before he will return to Heaven and his living to this venerable age is because he has carried out the ancestor sacrifices and the demon multitudes do not dare to harm him. He is afraid he will not be able to get up one morning and that he will not make it through the winter.

  On New Year’s eve, while his legs can still move, he hoists the square table from the hall onto his back, carries it down the stone steps of his pylon house, and sets it down. There is no-one else in sight on the desolate river-bank, the doors of the houses are all shut and people are eating New Year’s dinner. Nowadays, even if people do have an ancestor sacrifice it’s just like a New Year’s dinner. It’s been shortened and simplified. People simply grow weaker every generation, nothing can stop this.

  On the table he puts a bowl of watery liquor, a bowl of bean curd, a bowl of steamed glutinous rice cake and the bowl of ox intestines from his neighbour, and under the table he puts a bundle of glutinous rice stalks. He then heaps wood and charcoal in front of the table. Tired by these exertions, he stops for a while to catch his breath, goes up the stone steps back inside the house to fetch a piece of burning charcoal from the stove and, going slowly down on his hands and knees, begins to blow. The smoke stings his dry old eyes and makes them water but finally sparks leap up. He has a fit of coughing which only stops after he has a sip of the sacrificial wine.

  A ray of lingering light on the green mountain tops on the opposite bank vanishes and the night wind begins to blow over the river. Panting, he seats himself on the high stool at the table, steadying himself only when his feet tread onto the bundle of glutinous rice stalks. As he looks up at the mountain range, he is aware of the chill in the mucous in his runny nose and his tears.

  In those days when he carried out ancestral sacrifices, he had twenty-four people at his disposal – two trainee masters, two supervisors, two men to handle the props, two overseers of the ritual, two persons in charge of the swords, two persons to pour the libation, two persons to make the food offerings, two dragon girls, two messengers, and several people to make pressed rice cakes. What a splendid event it was! Three oxen were slaughtered and at times even up to nine.

  Just to show his appreciation, the head of the family making the sacrifice had to present him with glutinous rice seven times – the first time, seven pots for going into the mountains to chop trees for the drums; the second time, eight pots for carrying the drums into the cave; the third time, nine pots for inviting the drums into the stockade; the fourth time, ten pots for tying the drums; the fifth time, eleven pots for slaughtering the ox for the drums; the sixth time, twelve pots for dancing to the drums; the seventh time, thirteen pots for escorting the drums. From the time of the ancestors these were the rules.

  The last time he performed an ancestral sacrifice, the head of the family sent twenty-five people to carry the rice, liquor, and food. What a magnificent time that was! The good days are over now. He recalls those times. Before the ox was slaughtered, just to smooth out the hair whorls on its hide, a decorated pillar had first to be erected on the grounds. All members of the family changed into new clothing and there was a fanfare of pipes and the beating of gongs and drums. He wore a long purple robe and a red felt hat and the head feathers of the great roc stood up from his collar. He waved a bronze bell in his right hand and held an arrowhead fan of plantain leaves in his left hand, ahh–

  Ox oh ox,

  Born in still waters,

  Growing up on sandy banks,

  You cross rivers with your mother,

  You climb mountains with your father,

  Fight the locusts for the sacrificial drum,

  Fight the praying mantis for the sacrificial pipes,

  Go to battle at Three Slopes,

  Charge to attack at Seven Flats Bay,

  Defeat the locusts,

  Slay the praying mantis,

  Snatch the long pipe,

  Steal the big drum,

  The long pipe is a sacrifice to your mother,

  The big drum is a sacrifice to your father,

  Ox oh ox,

  Bearing on your back four platters of silver,

  Bearing on your back four platters of gold,

  You follow your mother,

  You follow your father,

  To enter the black cave,

  To tread the drum door,

  You guard mountain passes with your mother,

  You guard village gates with your father,

  To stop fierce demons harming people,

  To stop evil spirits entering ancestral tombs,

  So your mother will have peace for a thousand years,

  So your father will have warmth for a hundred generations.

  People tied a rope to the ox’s nose, wrapped its horns in bamboo wreaths and brought it out. Members of the family, all in new clothes, performed the three bows and nine prostrations to the ox. As he loudly sang this
eulogy the male head of the family took up a spear and stabbed the ox. Thereafter, all the able-bodied male relatives, midst the pounding of the drum, in turn took up the spear and stabbed the ox. Spurting blood, the beast wildly charged in circles around the decorated pillar until it collapsed and died. They then cut off its head and divided up the meat: as Master of Sacrifice the chest was his. The good days are over!