Last Words from Montmartre

by Qiu Miaojin

  Qing Jin asked me what kind of woman I was looking for, and I said one whom I can really love, and one who equally loves me through whatever adversities. All others need not apply. . . . She smiled. She acted so humbly toward me, not because she was self-conscious about her body and age but because she admired my spiritual concerns and creative gifts. I was really touched by her admiration and her appreciation of these things that must have grown out of her own rich life experiences with other people, her values a sum of all her experiences. But she doesn’t realize that she doesn’t have to act with such humility. I could only tell her in a letter: I want you to be proud of yourself and to thrive, chin up and chest out! What I didn’t tell her, however, was that if I could eventually love her, my love could let her more fully experience her own self-worth and ignite within her an unknown part of herself. I would make her understand that nobody who loves her would fail to love her body or abandon her because of her age! Just thinking about it pains me: that a woman like her could be branded and bound by such a profound sense of inferiority. She doesn’t believe that real love will have any effect on these things. But I do—I’ve already had a love that purifies everything. Real love isn’t something directed at a particular individual. It’s a kind of inner capacity, it’s something that must already dwell within oneself!

  I told Qing Jin that I planned to visit Greece alone after my thesis was finished. She wanted me to write more slowly so that she could come with me when she returned from Taiwan. She had always wanted to travel around Europe with me. I said okay. We also agreed to visit Deauville-Trouville one weekend in July. It was a place where she and her French husband used to spend most weekends; I’d been to the beach there twice. She had bought a 250,000 franc sailboat for her husband and had a sailing license herself. She said that she would teach me how to sail, that we’d walk on the beach all night, and that she was the ultimate tour guide. . . . But she couldn’t know that I was biding my time, waiting for the coming two months, preparing for her, preparing to reincarnate into my new identity as Zoë. In July I want to present her with a Zoë who smokes cigarettes, who has long hair, who rides a bicycle, who is immersed in learning the violin, who has returned to the novel and who is writing poetry regularly, who stays locked in the office to finish the thesis, whose French is catching up with hers, whose social life is busy, who has a light, easygoing personality, a Zoë who is handsome and beautiful. . . . She couldn’t know that I was yearning to learn from her, a teacher and a leader in work as in life. . . . She couldn’t know that once I gave her my soul, I would love her body passionately too, which was precisely my greatest secret I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. . . . And on the beach at night in Deauville-Trouville, if my reincarnation was a success, she wouldn’t see my kiss coming. . . . She wouldn’t know any of this.

  LETTER SEVEN

  MAY 2

  Xu,

  I just watched the second round of presidential debates between Chirac and Jospin on TV with my roommates. I interpreted for the whole group because my French was the most proficient among us, though there were still details I missed about the second economy and unemployment problems. It was enough to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about the content of the debate. At this point my listening skills give me tremendous pleasure in watching the news—my reward for surviving three years here in France. After Bunny died, I confided in Ying a little more, which slightly eased the tension between us. Now Ying and I have a lot to talk about, like cooking, gardening, animals, or shopping and art. We even have plans to make little gifts together and set up a stand at the market. She’s also been cooking meals for me, so living here has felt more family-like. Last week, I bought a cat-shaped bronze candleholder that I’d been eyeing for Ying’s birthday. The flower shop gave me a beige candle for it. I also bought a card with a cat on the front and wrote a few sweet lines inside it and got a cake. She was thrilled, and so was I. I feel like I’m slowly getting better at expressing my love for other people, and in turn my capacity to love is also greater. It’s as if my life in Paris is entering a blooming thicket. I could really grow to adore Parisian life, its inspiration, as well as the work I’m doing here, the friends I’m meeting, this incredible banquet the city offers. I feel like I’m ready to become an adult here, someone worthy of my own respect.

  Xu, I’m an artist, and what I really want is to excel in my art (to feel as confident as the expression in Chirac’s eyes on TV—his charisma can only be the product of long-term self-cultivation; he must have been driven from a very young age). My goal is to experience the depths of life, to understand people and how they live, and to express this through my art. All my other accomplishments mean nothing to me. If I can only create a masterpiece that achieves the goal I’ve fixed my inward gaze upon during my creative journey, my life will not have been wasted.

  Xu, perhaps you vaguely or sporadically understood and even helped me a little with my choice to be an artist, but to be honest, art and culture in general aren’t that important to you. You could say that the social environment you were raised in has absolutely nothing to do with what I hold most dear. And yet paradoxically, the social class you belong to devours art as a way to dispel the ennui of life, turning it into an ornament of prestige. As I said, maybe to you I’m just another ornament in your collection. Maybe at this very moment you are analyzing me with the detached discernment of a collector. But your family, your friends will never understand me and what I have sacrificed for you; to them I have little value. We belong to two totally different worlds. So please don’t let them intercept and read my letters. And please ask them to stop lying to me on the phone and acting like nothing’s going on (even though I no longer need to call you anymore). And please stop saying that all of this behavior is just “kidding around.”

  Please stop. Stop being so unfair and unjust. No human being deserves this kind of treatment! Maybe you’ve resigned yourself to living in a comfortable, peaceful, idyllic family paradise, but a deep-seated hypocrisy is concealed in your life, apparent only to an outsider like me. Still you reply with such ease: There’s nothing unfair or unjust going on. I hardly ever spoke to anyone in your family, and I don’t need to now. I have nothing to say to them and do not deserve their rude treatment. You have dragged me into this trap, giving me no choice but to deal with them, which in turn gives them the chance to treat me badly. You’ve always been too much of a coward to fight on my behalf, and in this case won’t speak up for me to your friends and family. You even abetted them brilliantly this month, offering me up naked to be ripped to shreds. While you’re incapable of keeping our relationship between you and me, how can you also act like such a coward, leaving me to fend for myself? How can you bury your hypocritical head in the sand and pretend that nothing’s wrong, or say that it’s all my fault? I have always protected you. You’ve never experienced this kind of cruelty and injustice. So you can remain calm and composed and say that all this is happening because I am too “extreme.” Holy shit, this statement is the worst injustice of all!

  The truth is, I really couldn’t care less about the mistreatment your family and friends have unwittingly inflicted on me. I can brush off their words and smile again, because I don’t need anything from them. Nor do I want them to agonize over my very existence. I have no prejudices against them. My criticism of these people close to you is only due to their wretched behavior. What I’ve said is the truth and isn’t intended to be malicious. I have tried to treat these people around you with respect. I have little choice otherwise, as you have pulled them into our relationship, I must be in touch with them and hope for their acceptance. The conflict I had anticipated with them has only given you even more cause, in your cowardice, to abandon me. But I finally realize that I don’t need to silently tolerate your cowardice anymore, for someone as cowardly as you isn’t worth the effort. And this is certainly not the part of you I love.

  This month what truly “broke my heart” wasn’t their cruelty (the savageness of human
nature isn’t foreign to me after all) but that you stood aside, without intervening, and just let them act this way. It was your tacit agreement, your secret consensus to shut me out! If not for your permission, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been so extremely hostile toward me. By allowing your family to shut me out like this you’ve caused me nightmares every night where I wake up crying and screaming. My self-esteem is totally crushed, trampled by your faux naïveté and innocence. If it didn’t take all my strength to control my loathing for you and my desire to kill myself, if it didn’t drain me so much to “suppress” this, I wouldn’t even bother saying any of this to the “real” you. It’s not that I can’t bear any more pain. On the contrary: Even if you further betray me, even if your family continues to be nasty to me and keeps intercepting my letters to you, even if you all decide to throw my letters in the trash and keep lying and lying to me, nothing more can hurt me. I will just smile and smile and smile, because I can’t feel a deeper pain. I no longer want a “real” connection with you, and I have nothing else to ask of you . . . I am sending a letter to the soul that I love, sending it to the soul who is connected to mine and whom I promised to love forever, to be by her side forever. (If you and your family want to ruthlessly destroy my pathetic letters, I cannot stop you. I’ll stop writing you, go on with my life, and toss away you and your family.) All I want to know is that your soul has received my messages and knows that my heart has been constant all along. That would be good enough for me. I don’t need any other gesture or physical act.

  So go on and do what you please. There are only two last things I ask of you, two things I refuse to endure anymore. First, please stop letting others intercept my letters. S-T-O-P! Even if you don’t have the courage to directly stop them yourself. They have no right to intrude upon my inner world. If your soul was not the recipient my letters were intended for, then you, too, would have no right to spy on my innermost self, no right at all. I appeal to your most visceral sense of righteousness that you stop this from ever happening again. If you don’t want to receive my letters anymore, please just return them to me. No need to explain. If you don’t want my phone calls, just tell me. Be direct. There is absolutely no need to act out this indirect, deceptive, ridiculous farce. You only need to say it explicitly, rather than exhaust yourself and others. Why drag your family and friends through the mud of our drama, which only inspires disgust and fatigue. It really doesn’t have to be like this. Yes, it takes courage to be straightforward and risk facing emotional pain, but evasion, pretense, and subterfuge are even more harmful to the essence of human nature; no one can bear it. It’s an elemental truth. There’s nothing complicated about it, no profound principle, so there’s no reason for “I don’t know,” “I can’t help it,” “Everything’s in chaos,” or “I need some time to figure it out.”

  The second thing I ask is that you stop revealing the details of your “betrayal” to others—there’s really no need for it. I don’t believe there is or was or will be anyone who can know your innermost desires better than I do. I say there is no need not because I’m unwilling to understand you or communicate with you anymore. (In fact, communication and understanding between us is exactly what I desire.) And it’s certainly not because I’m afraid that these revelations will hurt me even more. (They won’t. I already made that clear in my first letter to you.) Yet in heaven’s name you simply have no right to stain my body again, you have no right to stain me again! If you want to stain yourself along with the clean white jade of love that I gave you, if you want to stain the crystal-pure, angelic image of you impressed in my memory, you are free to do so. You’ve already left an “indelible” stain on me; you don’t have the right to spread stories that further tarnish my name. If you persist, I’ll stop berating you, I swear (I’ve already been stained and have lost the “purity” that makes me want to berate you). I’ll simply endure you.

  Deep inside you I know that you understand what I mean by “staining,” this is one of the most difficult issues for you to face. I suffered the first real breakdown of my life, the first real “staining” of my “pure” self, a violation of a most brutal and violent and lots more grotesque kind, like the violation of a virgin. . . . So I had a total breakdown. Perhaps my body and soul can be healed through the love of other people and so I can try to come from a place of purity in my conduct toward others and the world, still I know that my “purity” that has been violated and stained, that I am still a girl who’s been violated. . . . This is my indelible sorrow!

  When I lashed out at you in the past, I was filled with fear and a fierce resistance from deep within my heart—an unwillingness to be stained by you! But now it’s too late, now that you’ve already cheerfully violated me, I’ve calmed down. I won’t resist, I won’t struggle, I won’t scream out or curse with rage or cry for help . . . I won’t cry anymore. I will stop hoping for death in that very instance of violence; I will no longer imagine killing myself far more viciously than you ever could. I wish you no further harm. Like the little girl in Landscape in the Mist who is snatched into a truck and raped, and later awakens from a coma in silence—and slowly begins to grow up and learn how to be a whore for survival, knowing that she’s been forcibly violated though isn’t really impure, only deeply sad . . . I truly don’t need to lash out at you again. I simply have to endure and endure your existence in the world, and find a way not to be stained by you again.

  At a time when I was rather naïve and inexperienced, I wrote a story called “The Red Scorpion” that described a more minor aspect of this grander theme. It never occurred to me that it was actually a prophetic obituary for my own “purity.” . . . Perhaps what I have been describing is actually the inner world of “The Red Scorpion,” but only now is it possible to really let the boy cry out in pain and lend him his voice. How mysterious is the creation of art. Four years later I experienced the same theme of phenomenon and voice (le phenomène et la voix). As for the theme of being “stained” that I experienced through my breakdown, I want to explore it fully by writing a highly symbolic novel like Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another. It would exist as the apex of love you gave to me. Now I understand that my “purity” isn’t only of the flesh (perhaps no one can stain my body) but of something much deeper. My “purity” is comprised of my physical body, my soul, and my whole life, and I’ve never given this “purity”—as unblemished as a piece of white jade—to anyone but you. So you are really the only one who can stain me, which you did, thus driving me toward insanity and death! (I’m trembling now, thinking about it.)

  (By now, of course, I realize that I chose the wrong person in this journey called life. And I mistakenly loved you, the woman I chose, too much.) I said I wouldn’t blame you anymore, but if I can’t blame you and I can’t take all the blame myself, I can only blame fate for what’s been prearranged for me. I’ve hardly had a “choice” as from the moment I met you my fate was already sealed. In that split second there was no time for me to “choose.” Such is the recurring theme of fate: When it is sealed, it is sealed, and there’s nothing one can do to escape it (even right now I’m still dealing with this theme, I’m still writing about it, still wrestling with it). But I feel hurt by this “arrangement” . . . I’ve been hurt ever since I resolved to assume responsibility for the horrendous crime I committed that year against Xuan Xuan; I’m hurt as well by the physical and psychic pain that Xuan Xuan was forced to endure. And then you appeared and without a thought cheerfully stained me (the student outshines the master). I wholly offered you my two pure halves, only for you to trample them! I gave the very essence of these two pure halves to the one for whom I ultimately lost all respect as you turned away and crushed them using some trashy young object as your excuse! In this vicious circle of driving others to despair, I can see no hint of humanity in you. Nor can I see any sign of real resolve in your relations with anyone. I’ve never seen you take any real responsibility for your actions and have only witnessed this lengthy performance of you
with your head in the sand and goose bumps on your legs, along with all the chaotic and confused evasion. The crimes I’ve been punished for and the price I’ve paid with body and soul has been in vain, an utterly meaningless sacrifice! How can I not blame fate for arranging this for me?

  I have no intention of “judging” you or of accusing you of a crime. No one in such a situation can accuse anyone of a crime, just as Xuan Xuan never accused me of a crime. At best, the only way she can deal with me is by maintaining her silence and distance toward me forever, and likewise, at best, the only way I can deal with you is by making you fully comprehend the kind of “landscape” you have carved into my heart during this time.

  Yes: It’s an enormous landscape painting. Each person must take responsibility for their actions. This can only happen within oneself; it has nothing to do with anyone else. That’s what I’ve learned from all this agony. I want to confidently say that from beginning to end I have paid in full for my love for you, and I’ve also assumed full responsibility for my crime of betraying someone else in choosing to love you. As for you, how you take responsibility for my scars is a concern for your innermost self alone. By loving you I will never be able to “judge” you; only you can “judge” yourself.

  Concerning the theme of “guilt,” this is all I can tell you.