Last Words from Montmartre

by Qiu Miaojin

  LETTER EIGHT

  MAY 4

  Since Laurence left this morning I can’t stop weeping. I don’t even know what I’m weeping for. I’ll remember this weeping for the rest of my life. I don’t think I can wait any longer for Xu to call me or send word of some sort; it’s been a week since Bunny died and I still haven’t received the slightest reply from her. My life has been propelled in an entirely new direction. After being tested for three months and thirteen days I have arrived at the present—another test. I think my vision of a future life can now begin to move beyond the vision I’ve held on to for the past two or three years, of Xu. . . .

  Last night was the third time I’d gone to one of the center’s dinners for women, and it was my second time attending an administrative committee meeting. I’d never officially paid membership dues, and so for each vote I didn’t dare raise my hand pour ou contre (“for or against”), causing the other members to treat me as an outsider, although for the most part they smiled benignly at me. I felt quite at ease with them and enjoyed the meeting. The center was another home for me in Paris. Before the cocktail party, they invited Geneviève to say a few words. Geneviève was an older lesbian who brought warmth to my heart whenever I saw her. The word “lesbian” is a term that is really only meaningful in political contexts. She was also a political figure and publisher for whom gay rights was a cause. Her press is called Geneviève Pastre and specializes in publishing works related to lesbian and women’s sexuality and is very radicale. In person she is quite soft-spoken and yet sharp and straightforward and very inspiring.

  Laurence is one of the head organizers. She spoke forcefully and animatedly; her casual short brown hair made her look so much like a young Shui Yao visiting my place for the first time, that and the green and brown military trousers she wore. She was also about the same height as Shui Yao and Xiao Yong. The cumulative effect recalled my earliest memory of Shui Yao. . . . Laurence caught my eye immediately. I had been stealing glances at her for the last two meetings, but she never met my eye. During the meeting, she disappeared a few times. She gave the impression of being a little cold and unsociable, but in fact she was very bold. At the first meeting, Laurence proposed that the university screen a certain “lesbian” movie that everyone present would attend, but when no one agreed to an action that would expose their individual identities, she breezily declared, “Fine, no problem, I’ll go by myself.” Yesterday evening as Geneviève spoke, Laurence remained standing and watched her from a distance, occasionally disappearing into the backstage washroom. Maybe she was having a quiet moment with someone else. . . . I like her style. Her personality was totally different from Shui Yao’s, but contained in Shui Yao’s physical form.

  At 9 p.m., they turned off the lights and lit candles all around the lecture hall, and some dance music drifted out from behind the stage. I hastily gathered my coat, scarf, hat, and backpack so I could escape. I didn’t know half of the French girls there and I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone to dance. Some girls had already paired off and were making out in the romantic candlelight, making me feel awkward. . . . Suddenly, Laurence approached me.

  Ne partez pas! Vous pourriez danser avec moi? (Don’t go! Will you dance with me?)

  Je suis pressée pour voir un ami chinois qui habite près d’ici. (I’ve got to run to see a Chinese friend who lives nearby.)

  Il n’y a rien de pressé. Vous avez l’impression très seule. (It can’t be so urgent. You seem so lonely.) As she was speaking, she came closer to me and lightly took my hand, leading me toward the door.

  Parce que j’ai un coeur brisé. (Because I have a broken heart.)

  I surprised myself by having the courage to trust her from the start. Perhaps it was because I had just finished writing Xu the letter about being “stained” and my inner landscape the night before. Sooner or later I’d have to say it out loud.

  Why on earth am I weeping? Is it because of what Xiao Yong said in Tokyo and Laurence last night that made me realize the most fundamental principles in life? My tears are forming fierce resistance within me. I don’t want to mail the letter to Xu anymore. The sky is already growing light over Montmartre as I hesitate, unwilling to waste a trip to the post office to drop the letter into that “outgoing mail” slot. So I’ll leave the letter unfinished, and skip directly to tomorrow’s letter.

  MEMORANDUM

  At 6:30 in the morning I boiled myself a bowl of instant rice noodles. I added a small piece of French cabbage (the last of three heads of cabbage that Bunny had eaten, and possibly the cause of death), a third of a can of tuna, half a can of mushrooms, an egg, and the leftovers from last night’s sweet-and-sour fish at Yongyao’s restaurant. I stood in the kitchen, washed the pot I’d used to heat the fish, peeled a large cantaloupe, and ate it while leafing through the books that my roommate planned to sell and had left outside the kitchen. Ever since returning from Tokyo, I would often go to Camira’s place for dinner. She’s a close friend and can lift me out of any depression. When she cooked she would often put on an air of authority and say, Cuisiner c’est l’invention! Then she’d mix together whatever random things were left in her refrigerator. I smile when I think how cute she is. Now I’ve begun cooking more too, using her method, blindly mixing together ingredients while murmuring to myself, Cuisiner c’est l’invention! What’s contagious in a friendship is truly frightening.

  After I ate my “inventive” rice noodles and cleaned up, I put on my baseball cap and went downstairs to call Yong. It was almost two in the afternoon over there, a seven-hour time difference. I left Tokyo three weeks ago. I had mailed her a letter each week and had been using a fifty-unit phone card to call her every Wednesday or Thursday. At the same time I used a phone card to call my family every Saturday night. Establishing these two sets of “military reinforcements” has made me feel grateful again. I think I really must be changing. . . . For three years I had stopped corresponding with Yong because we were so far away from each other and had drifted apart. Since moving to France I had rarely called my family as well and instead have spent time and money calling one person only, writing one person only and sending her gifts of all kinds. . . .

  After calling Yong I felt a little dazed and walked along rue du Mont Cenis away from Mairie toward Place Albert Kahn. Then I continued down to the flea markets in Porte de Clignancourt in the north of Paris. After a week spent writing a bundle (perhaps the last bundle) of letters to Xu, I was finally able to enjoy the fresh, soft beauty of Montmartre in the morning. Usually I walked straight to the post office in the early morning and then took a shortcut home. . . . From the square, I turned down rue Duhesme and stopped before the window of a small café to observe my reflection. I took off my cap and glasses so I could appreciate my own expression as I sang an old song. . . . Only when you grow more gray hairs, and only when your laugh brings more wrinkles to the corners of your mouth. . . . Am I beautiful? Am I beautiful enough? . . . After White Whale saw The Suspended Step of the Stork early last April, she told me the scene that left the deepest impression on her. It was the moment when the two great actors Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau meet again. Many years after the politician has vanished, a television journalist discovers him quietly hiding out in a small village on the Greek- Albanian border. Refugees from Albania, Turkey, and Kurdistan populate the village. The journalist brings the politician’s wife to confirm if he is the missing politician or not. With the television cameras fixed on the couple’s reunion, the wife turns to the camera and says: C’est pas lui!

  The politician’s wife had told her husband that if there ever came a time when she could no longer see what he was thinking by looking into his eyes, then she could no longer make love to him. After not seeing each other for so long, in the instant they met again on that strange bridge, the woman could no longer look into her husband’s eyes and know what was in his heart. And so, White Whale said to me, C’est pas lui! How terrifying. Many years from now, who will be able to look into my
eyes and know that I am myself?

  C’est pas lui!

  Will this be Xu’s cry of astonishment one day?

  LETTER NINE

  MAY 7

  CLICHY

  Clichy is a pure whiteness like Bunny. It is my home, as well as Xu’s and Bunny’s. Clichy is the first stop on line 13 of the Métro. It is where we built our ideal love. Though I failed, failed miserably. I lost 100 percent of my dreams of marriage and love. I lost the woman of my dreams, and I lost little Bunny, the symbol and extension of my love that we brought back from Pont Neuf.

  How I cared for little Bunny.

  I’ve never and will never again care for someone the way I cared for our rabbit. This is clear to me. Bunny was one of the happiest things in my life, a riddle revealed.

  But I got what I deserved. I made her unhappy in Clichy. I couldn’t stand her not loving me in Clichy. Because she repeatedly wanted to abandon us in Clichy, I turned into a raging beast and wounded her in a fit of insanity. . . . After I drove her back to Taiwan, she tuned me out with lightning speed and turned her back on me and I returned to Paris alone. She quickly found someone else. I got what I deserved.

  Because I’ve never and will never again hurt someone the way I hurt her.

  My excessive love was inevitably going to cause harm and lead to my loss. If I couldn’t temper my excessive love for her, then I really can’t bear the pain of her abandoning me. I possibly could if that was the only way to keep me from hurting her. I must accept this fate of being abandoned and betrayed; I must accept my helplessness. There’s no way for me to not lose. There’s nothing I can do for myself.

  Once, in Taiwan, I told Xiao Mei, my younger friend from college, how I wrote to five medical research facilities in Paris asking if two ova could produce life using modern technology. Standing outside the University Science Center, Xiao Mei guffawed and said that she would do her best “to develop new technology for me.” I told Yong the same thing in Tokyo, and she became both annoyed and amused, saying to me, “Have you lost your mind thinking about having a child?” Yes, I had never wanted a child and was not fantasizing about raising a daughter who looked like Xu, and only like her. I fantasized about raising a child especially when I was in Clichy and it dawned on me that Xu didn’t love me anymore.

  I long for a human life, a human life that will never leave me as long as I live and who looks just like her. I don’t know why she has to look just like her and not like anyone else. Perhaps I can only love someone who looks like her. No matter how she might change, in sickness and old age and death, I could love her and care for her, do my absolute best for her for the rest of my life. I long for a human life who looks exactly like her and who will need my love and care for the rest of her life.

  I love her like this not because she is perfect or possesses certain qualities well-suited for me; in other people’s eyes she is possibly just an ordinary girl. I love her like this because my desire matured for her. Yes, this is a milestone in my life that can never be erased.

  For a while we loved each other absolutely. We achieved the kind of union that I’ve dreamed about and longed for so deeply. We were seamlessly united, bodies moving as one toward our ideal of love. From the time I met her a few months before leaving to study in France to the middle of my stay in France, we loved each other with our whole hearts and lived fully in love’s paradise. I know that I couldn’t love anyone else in this perfect way, nor be able to create such a loving union with anyone else. Deep down I even reject this possibility: “I don’t want it.” Even though she left me here alone, broke my heart, and destroyed me, inflicting the most intense shame upon me, I still can’t see myself without being in this “union,” without ever holding on to this “union.”

  This whole tragic ordeal has forced my desire to mature. Her existence has released an enormous capacity for love within me, an enormous capacity for love that has been stamped forever as hers, an enormous capacity for desire that because of her has expanded too much and laid my soul too bare. Maybe because my soul has been bared I can offer her a kind of purge, a kind of catharsis; maybe it’s why I’m a kind of “expert” on her life. Now that I understand so clearly, I have even greater reserves of energy to tap for her!

  My life is “for” her. I know I won’t ever find another human being so beautiful to me, one whom I love for her eyes, forehead, lips, hair, hands, feet, her face, her body, her voice, her scent, her every mannerism, her expressions when she’s talking, the clothes and makeup she wears, her aesthetic sensibilities, the way she gets along so easily with other people and with animals, which is an aspect of her personality that touches me most, and her perceptions and the spiritual issues she shares with me, as well as her unique natural gift for nurturing me, listening to me, giving to me, and loving me. Even when I feel hatred toward her and scream and hit her, I am painfully aware that for me she is excessively—

  MAY 8

  I.

  What I’ve come to understand in the past thirty minutes may be the most important breakthrough in my life.

  It is central to the loaded subject of physical sexual desire. But I’m not ready to explain it to Xu yet.

  The moment Laurence entered my body I felt an enormous, almost crushing mental and physical burden. This was a kind of mental and physical double imperméabilité that I had not experienced since the hazy nightmares of my youth. Though I’ve tried to develop a sense of self-awareness, at that moment what my mind and body experienced was too intense for me to comprehend.

  II.

  My big sister called from Taiwan to tell me she had sent the CD I wanted. She said she has to count the beads of a Buddhist rosary before bed every night or she can’t sleep well and has nightmares about someone dying. . . . The morning I phoned Yong, she told me she was just about to call when I obediently called her. She said she’d had a dream that night of my coffin being brought to her door, but I was nowhere to be found. . . . Xiao Mei also said she had a dream earlier in the year where I was crying, “It hurts, it hurts.” (That was around the time Xu was causing me such anguish in Paris.) Xiao Mei’s subconscious is unfailingly accurate and is protective of me. It’s a connection we’ve shared for six years. The person who died in my elder sister’s dream must be the one whose coffin is in Yong’s dream: me. Both of them discerned the seriousness of my distress that emanates from the deepest core of my being. It’s more or less because of these two people that my physical body still exists. One is my own flesh and blood, and the other is someone whom I could feel, from the moment I met her, really needed me to be alive. I’ve maintained this deep connection with Yong for more than five years. . . . Yes, my elder sister and Yong were right. Even Qing Jin heard my signals of distress. Three days after I returned from Tokyo, I received an inexplicable phone call from her (I had been out of touch with her for nearly three months). The evening she brought me dinner, though I couldn’t eat a bite and took a bunch of sleeping pills, I asked her why she bothered coming anywhere near me, and she laughed and said it was because she sensed something was wrong. . . .

  Calling out for help, yes, I was calling out for help! Ever since August 1994, when I learned about Xu’s cruel betrayal, I’ve been walking a long dark alley of death, and I knew that it was very possible that I’d die. And on March 13 I lived alongside death, only a thin membrane separating us, and in those ten days before I went to see Yong it seemed like it could take me at any moment. I was living in an indescribable, trembling abyss. For the first time I was forced to confront the high “probability” of death extinguishing the dual layers of my spiritual life and corporeal life. (In comparison, what I had experienced in the past was a sort of “voluntary” death, whereas, say, a serious car accident is but a chance “probability” of corporeal death.) To this day I’m still not sure if I’ve emerged from this “dark alley of death.” After I returned to Paris back in March, sometimes I would walk along the Seine around ten at night and imagine myself writing a novel called Last Words to Th
ose I Love Deeply, and envisioned concluding each individual letter with the words “Save me!”

  But in this novel there was no letter to Xu.

  I suppose my words here are a final attempt to forgive Xu. If this fails, I can’t keep living in a body that hates her so intensely. I’ll have to die, as a final act of reconciliation for being alive, a reconciliation of my deepest love and hate intertwined. And a reconciliation with her being alive. My death will remind her of the seriousness and sincerity of life itself. There will be no more problem of forgiveness; a place will remain as the foundation of our love. Otherwise, if I am fortunate enough to stay alive, I’ll have to use the cruelest methods to rid myself of this person, to completely erase this person from my life, because I love her too much, and I’m wounded too deeply by her betrayal and dishonesty.

  The issue of “forgiveness” relates to saving myself as well as Xu.

  III.

  I read something Herbert Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization: “Eros signifies a quantitative and qualitative aggrandizement of sexuality.” I’m heartbroken. . . .

  As far as what I look for in a partner, it seems my “eros” will never be satisfied. I am so heartbroken, realizing this, so terribly heartbroken. . . . My dissatisfaction caused Shui Yao to leave me and run off with someone else; and it caused Xu, who promised to satisfy me body and soul, to disregard whatever catastrophic consequences might befall me and choose the most miserable and hard-hearted way of betraying me a second time, a dual betrayal of love and eros even more ridiculous than the first. My God of Fate—it’s not that I didn’t want to love these two women, nor that these two women I loved would betray me because I felt “unfulfilled.” A sense of “unfulfillment” was glaringly obvious to them. Ha. In the end, I was abandoned for being “unfulfilled.” It wasn’t really my fault.