Soul Mountain

by Gao Xingjian

  “I can believe all that. Apart from being violent, people also have something compassionate in them,” I said. “Otherwise how would they be human?”

  “This is all external to the law,” he said, “but if according to the law having sexual urges is criminal then all human beings are guilty!”

  At this she gave a soft sigh.

  We leave the restaurant, walk halfway down the road and come to an arched stone bridge, but do not see any inns. There is only one dim light on the river-bank at one end of the bridge. After our eyes get used to the dark we discover there is a line of black canopy boats moored along the stone embankment.

  Two women come across the stone bridge and walk past close to him and me.

  “Look, those women are in that sort of work!” the lawyer’s woman friend grabs my arm and says quietly.

  I hadn’t noticed and quickly turn, but only see the back of a head of well-combed shiny hair pinned back with a plastic floral clip of one of them, and the profile of the other who seems to be wearing makeup. Both women are short and fat.

  My friend stares at them for a while and watches them slowly walking off into the distance.

  “Their customers are mainly boat workers,” he says.

  “Can you be sure?” What’s surprising is that nowadays it’s quite open, even in a small town like this. I know they hang around some railway stations and wharves in the big cities.

  “You can pick them out straightaway,” his woman friend says. Women are born with sharper instincts.

  “They’ve got a secret code, if you give the right signal there’s a deal. They’re from the nearby villages, out to make a bit of extra money at night,” he says.

  “They saw me here. If it were just the two of you they would have taken the initiative to come and chat.”

  “But they’ve got to have somewhere to go, do they go back with the women to the villages?” I ask.

  “There’s sure to be a boat nearby or they could go with the men to an inn.”

  “Do the inns openly engage in this sort of business?”

  “They have arrangements. Haven’t you come across this on your travels?”

  I then remember a woman trying to get to Beijing to file a lawsuit. She said she didn’t have the money for her train fare and I gave her one yuan, but I couldn’t say for sure if she was one of these.

  “Hey, you’re supposed to be carrying out social surveys. All sorts of things are going on today.”

  I apologize for not being much good at carrying out social surveys, I’m incompetent. I’m just a stray dog poking around everywhere. They think I’m funny and laugh.

  “Come with me, I’ll show you a good time!”

  He’s got an idea again and yells towards the river into the dark, “Hey, are there any takers?”

  He jumps off the paved embankment onto a black canopy boat.

  “What for?” a muffled voice comes from under the canopy.

  “Do you take the boat out at night?”

  “Where to?”

  “The wharf at Xiaodangyang.” He’s quick to give the name of a place.

  “How much are you offering?” A middle-aged man says, emerging from under the canopy.

  “How much do you want?”

  They bargain.

  “Twenty yuan.”

  “Ten.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Ten.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Ten.”

  “For ten yuan, this boat’s not going.” The man goes back under the canopy and we hear a woman speaking in a low voice.

  We look at one another, shake our heads, and can’t stop laughing.

  “I can go to the wharf at Xiaodangyang,” someone says from quite a few boats away.

  My friend motions the two of us to be quiet and shouts out, “We’ll go if it’s ten yuan.” He’s having a lot of fun.

  “Go over there and wait, I’ll bring the boat over.”

  He can really bargain. The outline of someone in a jacket appears, plying a punt-pole.

  “What do you think of that? We’ll also save the cost of lodgings for the night. This is called drifting on a boat in the moonlight! Unfortunately there’s no moon, but we can’t be without something to drink.”

  He gets the boatman to wait. The three of us run back to a little street in town to buy a bottle of Daqu liquor, a bag of brine-soaked broad beans and two candles, and gleefully jump onto the boat.

  The boatman is a wizened old man. We open the canopy flap, jump in, feel around in the dark and sit cross-legged on the planks. My friend goes to light the candles with his cigarette lighter.

  “You can’t light a fire on the boat,” the old man says in a wheezing voice.

  “Why?” I think maybe it’s prohibited.

  “You’ll set fire to the canopy,” the old man grumbles.

  “Why would we want to set fire to your canopy?” the lawyer says. The wind keeps blowing out the flame of his lighter so he pulls the canopy flap tighter.

  “Venerable elder, if we set fire to the canopy we’ll pay you for it.” His woman friend is even more cheerful squashed between him and me. We are all suddenly very lively.

  “Don’t light a fire!” The old man puts down his pole and comes in to stop us.

  “Do as he says, it’s even more fun going out on a boat in the dark,” I say.

  The lawyer opens the bottle, stretches out his legs, and puts the big bag of beans on the bamboo mat on the floor of the boat. I am sitting opposite him, feet to feet, and the bottle passes back and forth. She is leaning on him and from time to time takes the bottle from him to have a sip. In the calm bay of the river only the creaking of the punt-pole and the sound of the splashing water can be heard.

  “That guy was at it for sure.”

  “He would have gone for an extra five yuan, it isn’t very much.”

  “Just the price of a bowl of hot soup noodles!”

  We are becoming mean.

  “These rivers and lakes have been infested with opium and prostitution since ancient times, can they be effectively prohibited?” he says in the darkness. “The men and women here are all dissolute, can you slaughter them all? This is how the people spend their lives.”

  The dark night sky opens fleetingly to expose the brilliance of the stars, then darkens again. At the tail end of the boat is the continual creaking of the punt-pole and, from time to time, the soft lapping of the river. The cold wind seeps in through the tightly closed canopy flap at the front and even the used chemical fertilizer plastic bags which serve as curtains to keep out the wind and rain.

  Weariness assails us and the three of us curl up in the middle of the narrow cabin of the boat. The lawyer and I, one at each end, push ourselves to the sides and she squeezes in between the two of us. Women are like this, they always need warmth.

  I vaguely know there are cultivated fields up from the embankments on both sides and that in places where there are no embankments there are reed marshes. After passing a series of inlets the boat enters a waterway with such a dense growth of reeds that a person could be killed and the corpse disposed of without leaving a trace. Anyway it is three to one, even if one is a woman, and the other party is an old man. It is all right to completely relax and fall asleep. She has already turned to her side. My heels are touching her spine and her buttocks are pressed against my thighs but I am past caring.

  October on the rivers and lakes is the season when things ripen. Everywhere, heaving breasts and bright flashing eyes are to be seen. Her body has an unaffected feminine sensuousness which seductively draws you to her and to want to caress her. Cuddled in his arms she must have sensed the warmth of my body and she puts an arm on my thigh as if to comfort me, though I can’t tell if it is out of playfulness or kindness. Then I hear growling but on listening carefully it turns out to be a sort of groaning which is coming from the back of the boat. At first I want to complain but something compels me to listen. It is a mournful wail wafting on the ch
illy wind over the river into the still night air. It is the old man plying the punt-pole singing, he is totally engrossed and totally uninhibited. The sound isn’t coming from his mouth but from deep down in his throat and chest, it is a wail of accumulated sadness being released. At first it is a jumble but afterwards I gradually make out some of the words, but they are fragmented, his Wu dialect has a strong village accent. What I hear seems to be saying, your seventeenth younger sister and eighteenth paternal aunt . . . went away with a maternal uncle and had wretched existences . . . drifting . . . wandering . . . with nothing . . . became nuns . . . good scenery . . . I lose the thread and understand even less.

  I pat them and ask softly, “Can you hear? What’s he singing?”

  Both move, they weren’t asleep.

  “Hey, old man, what are you singing?” The lawyer pulls up his legs to sit up and loudly directs his question outside the canopy.

  There is the flapping of wings as a startled bird flies with a screech over the top of the canopy. I open the canopy a little and see the boat is travelling close to shore and the grey tangles growing along the ridges of the furrows on the embankment are probably bristle-pod beans. The old man has stopped singing and a chilly wind is blowing. I am fully awake and ask very politely, “Venerable elder, were you singing a folk song just now?”

  The old man doesn’t respond and just plies the punt-pole, and the boat moves ahead at an even speed.

  “Take a break, come in to have a drink with us and sing something for all of us!” The lawyer also tries to win him over.

  The old man remains silent and continues to punt.

  “Relax, come on in for a drink and get warm. How about singing something for us and I’ll give you another two yuan?” The lawyer’s words, like rocks cast into water, fail to produce echoes. The old man may be embarrassed or cross, but the boat glides in the water to the accompaniment of the gurgling eddies as the pole enters the water and the lapping of the waves on the boat.

  “Let’s go to sleep,” the lawyer’s woman friend says gently.

  We are all disappointed but all we can do is lie down. This time the three of us all sleep on our backs and the cabin seems even narrower. Our bodies are pressed closer together and I feel the warmth of her body. Either from lust or kindness, she grasps my hand. This is all that happens, there is a reluctance to further spoil the disturbed and mystical pulsations of this night. No sounds come from her or the lawyer. I sense a quiet tenseness building up in the soft body transmitting the warmth, and as the stifled excitement heightens the night resumes its mystical pulsations.

  After a long while I vaguely hear the wailing again, the groans of a distorted soul, unrealizable desires, weary and laboured, in ashes fanned by the wind is a sudden spark then darkness again. There is only the warmth of her body and the rich reverberating sensations, her fingers and mine grip one another tightly at the same instant. Neither of us makes a sound, neither dares to further provoke the other, and with bated breath we listen to the howling tempest raging in our blood. Fragments of that hoary old voice sings of a woman’s sweet-smelling breasts and the wonderful feel of a woman’s legs but there isn’t a complete sentence I can properly hear so I can’t grasp the full meaning of the song. The singing is indistinct but it has life and texture, sentence is piled upon sentence, none exactly the same . . . stamens of flowers and a blushing face . . . don’t fondle the stem of the lotus . . . dazzling white skirt on a slender waist . . . taste of the persimmon is a bitter taste . . . waves with a thousand eyes . . . roaming dragonflies skimming the water . . . don’t, oh don’t entrust yourself to . . .

  He is clearly absorbed in his memories and is using all sorts of phrases to give them linguistic expression. The words don’t necessarily have specific meanings but transmit direct perceptions to arouse sexual feelings which flow into the song, it seems both like wailing and lamenting. A long piece finally ends and she pinches my hand, then lets go. No-one moves.

  The old man is coughing and the boat is heaving. I sit up and open the canopy a fraction. The surface of the river is infused with pale lights, the boat is passing a small town. On the shore the houses are huddled close to one another and under the streetlights the doors are all shut, there are no lights in the windows. The old man is coughing continuously and the boat is rocking badly. I can hear him urinating into the river.

  You go on climbing mountains. As you near the peak and are feeling exhausted you always think it is the last time but when the exhilaration of reaching the peak subsides you feel the urge again. This feeling grows as your weariness vanishes and looking at the rising and falling lines of the peaks in the hazy distance your desire to climb mountains resurges. But once you climb a mountain you lose interest in it and invariably think the mountain beyond will have things you haven’t encountered. When you eventually get to that peak the wonders you hoped for aren’t there, and once again there is just the lonely mountain wind.

  After some time you get used to this loneliness and climbing peaks becomes an obsession. You know you will find nothing but are driven by this blind thought and keep on climbing. However, while doing this you need to have some distraction and as you fabricate stories for yourself, images are born.

  You say you see a cave at the bottom of the limestone cliffs. The entrance is almost completely sealed off by a pile of stone slabs. You think it is the home of Grandpa Stone and that living inside is the legendary figure talked about by the Qiang mountain folk.

  You say he is sitting on a plank bed, the wood is rotted and crumbles at your touch and the rotten bits of wood in your hands are soggy. It is very damp inside and there is even water running by the plank bed set on rocks. There is also moss growing everwhere you put your feet.

  He is leaning on the rock wall and when you enter he is looking right at you. His eyes have sunken deep into their sockets and he is emaciated like a piece of firewood. His rifle hangs above his head on a branch wedged into a crack and is within his reach. Oiled with bear fat which has turned to black grease, there is no rust on it.

  “Why have you come here?” he asks.

  “To see you, venerable elder.” You assume a respectful demeanour, look frightened even. He doesn’t have the childish petulance of senility and it seems that being respectful works. You know that if he were to get upset he could very well grab the rifle and shoot you, so it is important to show that you are afraid of him. Confronted by his cavernous eyes you do not dare to look up even a little lest you give the impression of coveting his rifle.

  “Why have you come to visit me?”

  You can’t say why nor can you say what you want to do.

  “No-one has visited me for a very long time,” he drones, his voice seeming to come out of the emptiness. “Hasn’t the plank road rotted away?”

  You say you climbed up from the River of Death down in the gully.

  “You’ve all forgotten me, I suppose.”

  “Not at all,” you hasten to say, “the mountain folk all know about you, Grandpa Stone. They all talk about you when they’ve had something to drink but they don’t have the courage to come and visit you.”

  It is not courage but curiosity that has brought you here. You came because you had heard about him but it is of course not appropriate to say this. Now that the legend has been verified and you have seen him, you still have to think of something else to say.

  “How much further is it to Kunlun Mountain?”

  Why do you ask about Kunlun Mountain? Kunlun Mountain is the mountain of our ancestors, the Queen Mother of the West lived there. Bricks with carved pictures of her with a tiger’s face, human body, and leopard tail have been excavated from Han Dynasty tombs.

  “Oh, go straight ahead and you’ll come to Kunlun Mountain.” He says this like someone saying go straight ahead and you’ll come to the lavatory or to the movie theatre.

  “How much further ahead?” You pluck up the courage to ask.

  “Go straight ahead–”

  While
waiting for him to continue, you furtively look into his cavernous eyes. His sunken lips move a couple of times and then close again, but you can’t decide whether he has spoken or is about to speak.

  You want to flee but are afraid he will suddenly get angry, so you just look at him reverently, as if waiting to receive his instructions. But he gives no instructions or maybe there are no instructions to give. In this predicament you feel that the muscles on your face are very tense so you quietly draw in the corners of your lips, allow your cheeks to relax, then put on a smiling face. He doesn’t react, so you move a leg and shift your weight. Your body lurches forward and you see close up into his sunken eye sockets: the eyeballs are blank, as if they are fake. Maybe he’s a mummy. You have seen such undecomposed ancient corpses excavated from the Chu tombs at Jiangling and the Western Han tombs at Mawangdui. He must have died in a sitting position.