Last Words from Montmartre

by Qiu Miaojin

  P.S. I found the envelope I had prepared for my fifth letter, which I had thought I’d already mailed by accident, so I put my tenth letter here in the fifth letter’s envelope.

  LETTER ELEVEN

  MAY 20

  Xu,

  My soul is lonely, lonely in a lonely way that I’m unwilling to express to you. How can I describe the depth of my loneliness to someone who cast away my soul, cast away my life, brought me to the brink of death without a care in the world, someone who caused me such catastrophic suffering with hardly a care, and cruelly condemned me to live alone, in another country far from home. I hate you a little less now, but there is still this profound loneliness.

  I’ve tried to reconcile the paradoxical forces of love and hate, so razor-sharp, that you’ve driven into my heart, and I have struggled silently, alone. While your hurting me, your cheating on me—your acting out in those ways—have lessened, understanding you, let alone trusting you, is still beyond me. You’re used to being passive, comfortable hiding in silence. Even the effort of uttering a single word or really the effort of any action to ease my pain is too much for you, so that for you the most natural, the most “peaceful” solution is to let me waste away. I’ll never understand how you became so cold and so cruel, as if you’ve convinced yourself that coldness and cruelty are part of your true nature. As if you’re so self-righteous that you won’t even allow me to return to my own country, so as to keep me from interfering with your life or “hurting you.” Forgive me for being so open.

  I often ask myself: Do I have the courage to let “tragedy” happen again? Qing Jin once said that life is full of rupture and that it is what it is. But does it really have to be this way? Everyone I’ve ever loved has treated me poorly. And when I was younger I treated others poorly too. Why? Why do people have to act so mean and stupid toward the ones they love? Can’t we be a little more introspective and reach a level of self-awareness to stop hurting the ones we love? It must be possible. Mutual meanness and stupidity cause human tragedy and rupture to keep recurring. But I suspect this wouldn’t work in my life anyway: Someone should just insert a caesura into the score of my life. So that there’ll be no more tragedy or rupture, or at least it would be contained to a lesser degree and lighten my burden.

  Xu, my beloved Xu, I now understand how to treat the people closest to me, in relationships both past and present. I understand now, but it’s been a slow process, taking ten years of work. Now when I meet people I can place them quite clearly into this framework. After three years I’ve finally balanced my accounts. I understand my mistakes, my character flaws, and how to treat you well. I hope the results of this accounting can be woven into the fabric of our future. . . . Does this realization mean I will die young? That I have suddenly come to grasp all this reasoning, does it mean I will die young?

  I long to return to our former “intimacy.” I constantly ask myself where in this whole process did we lose our “intimacy.” . . .

  I’d say our problems started when I moved to the Foyer International. We wouldn’t share such a profound mutual understanding again. I was living my utter failure of a life in Paris. I had lost faith in life and in our relationship. (Glancing over at the goodbye letters I wrote you from the Foyer . . . oh pathetic, pathetic love.) I wavered between two extremes: I wanted so much to live with you, but I also wanted you to be far away so I could stop obsessing about you. This frustrated you and you didn’t know how to deal with me in my confusion, while I felt hurt that you didn’t understand the position I was in, and helpless because you couldn’t make up your mind. I was so vulnerable back then that I actually believed I couldn’t survive the stasis between desire and loneliness. . . . I remember visiting you in April and being so utterly disappointed with you. I thought you didn’t love me, and that you prioritized your job, your family, and everything everything everything in the world over me. You weren’t even willing to spend your vacations in Paris. You said that you were just humoring me when you talked about coming to Paris (granted, this was a long-standing tradition of yours); I was right all along about the thoughts behind your feelings. Back then, at least, you were willing to say you’d come see me. Not anymore—now you can’t wait for me to disappear and leave you alone. Back then, I had limited resources in Paris; I didn’t have as many friends as I do now, and my French wasn’t good enough to ameliorate my loneliness, my frustration. I had “used up all my arrows and was out of provisions,” and couldn’t endure a life of solitude, of waiting and longing for you. The only choice I had was to cut you off, but in reality it was just an attempt to escape my desperate longing for you.

  But there was no escape. I felt like a gorilla shackled in leg-irons, struggling to break out with all my might, head wounded, streaming blood, but to no avail. The pain erupted like molten lava, scorching and melting away all our “intimacy.” You didn’t make up your mind in time. You couldn’t figure out how to be with me. So my furious fucking anger obliterated any childlike “faith” you had in me, and your uncompromising coldness toward me deepened. I believe you hated me, too, and this hatred was expressed as coldness. And here I’ve arrived at the crux of the matter. It was at this point your eros started to split into bits of love and desire. You still gave me some pieces of this “love” by taking care of me physically, but soon your hatred began to manifest itself as indifference, rejection, a shutting down. So my desire became unhinged and my pain excruciating. When you stop wanting me—withdrawing your eros—I go insane, truly insane. I’ve reached an apex of insanity (ha ha). Why am I laughing? Because I have a fatal, mortal, terminal passion for you. Ultimately I have no choice but death: an unconditional allegiance, an eternal bond to you. (The ultimate rule of desire/eros is this: At their peak, “sexual desire” [erotic desire], “desire for love” [romantic longing], and “desire for death” [the death wish] are the same.) I’m a passionate person, and as you’re someone I would die for, death seems inevitable, though it’s still painful thinking about it. Just the words “not having your ‘desire for love’” crushes my heart, really crushes it (not a mere injury). . . . I welcomed the care you showed me but whenever I sensed that deep down you didn’t love me, I lost it. That’s why my “desire for love” could grow even stronger while I also became suspicious of you, lashed out at you, and developed a neurosis and deteriorated. . . . As this happens, the hostile side of you that you’ve kept hidden began to be cruel, selfish, unfaithful, and declared relentlessly that you were leaving me and, most chilling words of all, that you didn’t love me. I turned into a sniper, as we both became so entrenched in our adversarial relationship that the most negative qualities of our personalities were pushed to their extremes. The sad thing is that neither of us could stop the momentum of careening toward the abyss, though ironically we still yearned to treat (or “love”) each other with kindness. . . .

  Having been through so much, and though my body is wracked with pain, I must point out two things of profound significance. These are the most painful and difficult realizations to articulate. First: I knew I had lost you the first time I hit you. I sobbed hard inside, silently aware that I had pushed you past the point of no return. I spent my days tortured by terrors and nightmares: terror of losing you, terror of being dumped, nightmares of your infidelity. Controlling the urge to hit you was so excruciating that I had to hurt myself in terrible ways. I still have dreams where I wake up crying. Second: Sexually, you completely rejected me in Paris. You didn’t have the slightest sexual desire for me, the slightest wish to make love to me. This went on for nearly a month before I could admit it, and when I think about it I still weep. I can’t believe we fucked up our relationship up to this extreme. It hurts so much I can barely speak. It hurts so much that whenever I’m about to remember Clichy I feel a shock like I’ve just touched a live electric wire. It hurts. It hurts.

  Then I decided to forget you, to transform myself into someone entirely different from my old self: a vital personality. Suddenly it seemed so e
asy, so entirely possible to imagine. It would be so easy to cast off the defining features of my old self that I couldn’t rid myself of before. . . .

  Since returning from Tokyo, I can feel the nature of my sexuality changing, gradually changing, a tectonic change so mysterious and private that I initially wasn’t sure what was happening or what triggered it. I could feel myself “becoming a woman” (according to some basic biological definition of “woman,” anyway) or perhaps just becoming a Woman. My period became extremely regular. One morning I was dreaming about you and I suddenly woke up. I thought I had gotten my period, and in fact I had, precisely at the same time. It felt like a mysterious connection. I also dreamed I had long “feminine” hair, and in the dream I was aware that I was enjoying my appearance and that my face was becoming more beautiful (a “feminine” sort of beauty). Once, Qing Jin looked intently at my face and told me I was very beautiful in a way that could be attractive to both men and women. In the dream I could actually sense that my facial features and my behavior were becoming more feminine. My sexuality also began to take on a more “receptive” quality. I still fantasized about you, but the way I had loved you and made love to you now seemed more of a desire for you to love me and make love to me. . . . And I felt a sexual relationship with a man was possible (just the sex). Or perhaps I should say, I was starting to mis/understand that a perfect sexual relationship could be possible with a warm, sincere man (someone with a quality of “pure” masculinity, like Eric from the doctoral program). The possibilities multiplied so fast in such a short time that I couldn’t grasp it. I frightened myself with the thought that an intellectual and spiritual man like Eric might materialize and find me attractive and then I’d really “become a woman.” It was entirely possible; I had changed into another person. I was scared to death as it was a way, the perfect way, to escape from my erotic and romantic desires for you. What frightened me wasn’t the lure of lust or of betraying you but of leaving you. The lure of silently, with hardly a breath, taking leave of your life and disappearing forever in a kind of eternal self-cancellation, so that you could never find me again (I always seem to be looking for some sort of “absolute” way of loving you or being loved by you).

  I think this question of escaping the unique despair and frustration of erotic desire is terrifying for you. I think it will be the cause of my death. Sooner or later I will die, and die again, because of this. I am frightened by this unresolved despair and frustration, I am frightened that I’ll die, and die again, from it, this vague and ambiguous pain that is difficult for me to describe. Yong was right. When I was in Tokyo, she said that our relationship could kill me. I suspect that when I showed her your photograph in Taipei, she could tell what you meant to me and maybe she understood this sooner than I did. In Tokyo she just said that you still couldn’t understand my passion for you, and that I would be lured to my death. I think she hoped I’d leave you and live in peace.

  Sexual desire is both a perplexing and a critical part of love. In my prior relationships with Yong and Xiao Yao, the greatest obstacle was that I was under the mistaken impression that they didn’t desire me. I thought that sexual desire would eventually drive the deeper desire for love upon which a relationship depended. Unsurprisingly, Xiao Yao broke up with me and I felt hurt. Yong accepted me, but she always gave the impression that she wanted to be with a man, though she would never say it. Until this year, when she wrote me a letter saying she now knew what it meant to have a “male” inside her. I cried the whole day. Her letter was proof that I had been right about her. I had suppressed any sexual desire due to the “male versus female bodies” problem.

  But actually I was mistaken. In fact it was the opposite. Yong later clarified for me what she had meant by “male.” In the end it wasn’t a physical trait so much as a personality trait, a matter of will, a sort of spiritual “masculinity.” What she meant by “male” was me. It was precisely the strength of “maleness” in me and the others she loved that enabled her sexual desire, while simultaneously negating her desire for others. Her love for me had to mature for three years before she could fully understand it. Then we became in tune with each other, our love and our sex reciprocal, symmetrical. The depth of her passion was what I had been needing for so long. I’m sure it was her love and our fucking that sustained me.

  It was different with Xiao Yao, who finally told me “the most important thing for me to know” after I demanded she tell me why she didn’t want to be with me. The reason was sex. She said the summer I ran away, she could sense that I was afraid of my sexuality, and then she became convinced of it and thought about me every day until one night blood unexpectedly leaked from her vagina. After that night she started to hate me, and in hating me, renounced me. When she told me about this significant experience, I thought it was related to her first sexual sin and feeling unclean. Our story was a cliché of the guilt a woman feels after losing her virginity to her first love. I was the sacrificial lamb of Xiao Yao’s lost “virginity.” Seeing her later, I could tell that she and her new lover had a good sex life, but I also knew, without a doubt, Xiao Yao had loved me more and sincerely, and that she wanted me now. But it was too late—we had lost all intimacy and I knew I couldn’t love her enough. She was a better fit for someone else; we could remain distant friends.

  Sexuality itself has never been the issue for me in my relationships with women. I’ve always been attracted to women, and I need sex with the person I love. Ever since I was very young, it’s been a 100 percent attraction to women. My desire for Xiao Yao was intense. As I’ve grown a little older I’ve only become more passionate about women. Yong was right when she said I possessed a strong “maleness.” My passion for women is so innate that it doesn’t matter if the one who falls in love with me is a lesbian or not. As long as she has no prejudices about genitals, love and sex come naturally. What matters in sexual relationships is the passionate coupling of “active,” or “yang,” with the “passive,” or “yin.” The women I long for most are always the gentlest, the most “passive” ones. I don’t think there’s a great difference between my desire for, and union with, a woman, and a “male’s” desire for a “female.”

  I believe that sex and love at the height of passion are one and the same. I was lucky to meet you after Xiao Yao because my desire for both love and sex had matured by then, and you were a woman I truly wanted. My desire overflowed. Your “passive” energy instantly attracted my “active” energy. For three years, including the seven months in Paris, my feverish passion burned on and I longed for you with every fiber of my being. This was no ephemeral passion, no night-blooming cereus that each year only blooms for a single night. For me, you meant marriage or nothing. I could only belong to you. My passion was too strong for me to pledge fidelity to anyone else. If you were not the one in my life, I would tire quickly of another and live an unfulfilled life. Yes, there is no one else who can focus my sexuality and love with such intensity.

  Another paradox: Often the one most plagued with lust is the one most capable of restraining it. The monk and the philanderer are likely to be the same person. I can remain chaste for you alone. I can give you everything you need. I love you by saving myself for you. It’s my necessity to love you so deeply and so unconditionally. I don’t know how to convince you that my longing for you means more than a wish to be loved and more than sexual gratification. What I long for is a whole life, the total convergence of body and soul. What I long for even more: “to find someone, and be theirs absolutely.” That’s something I wrote in an earlier letter, but now I see it even more clearly. This is exactly what I want.

  Here in Paris you didn’t desire my body, you took no pleasure in making love to me, maybe thinking I was too heavy for you, maybe it was even harder for you to stand me in Paris because I needed to be your lover every waking hour. Our different ideas of “passion” were the main reasons you couldn’t live with me; in retrospect I can laugh about it, for what Yong said was so perfect, essenti
ally that I had used you up and so you ran away. That more or less sums it up. Even Yong can’t stand the intensity of my passion sometimes, and she’s a naturally passionate person. She said that she could feel the desire emanating from my body even when I didn’t express it, and it was overwhelming. Ah, what she said is precisely my problem, and why you fled from me. You often said I was too serious, you said you wanted a lighthearted relationship. I hate myself when I think about this, hate my personality, hate that I’m too passionate and “active”; and I hate that I long for you and need you too much, hate that I feel so possessive of you, hate that I am too “male” (and I guess this hatred is driving me to become more “female”). I hate that my passion makes me sick and that it becomes so easy for me to injure myself, hate that I suffer so easily, hate that my excessive neediness causes you to worry causes you to suffocate causes you to feel oppressed. I hate anything about myself that makes you dislike me, unable to tolerate me, not want to come near me, causes our intimacy to die, causes you to abandon me, to betray me, and to be unable even to look at me. When you shouted “I can’t live with you!” on the phone, tears streamed down my face. Talk about hatred—I hate myself most of all.

  P.S. I’m not brave enough to face every detail of the past three years of beauty and pain (the main plot of the novel). The beauty was too blinding, the pain too cruel. Yesterday I went to see Angelopoulos’s film Landscape in the Mist again. When the little boy witnessed the death of the donkey and kneeled on the ground, weeping pathetically in the center of the screen, I cried pitifully with him. I am that little boy, an innocent child who weeps over the death of an animal. Walking with White Whale out of the movie theater into the cool Parisian night’s faint breeze, she said that the movie was so beautiful she could die right there. And I replied that with someone by my side with whom I could share the beauty of such a movie, I could die that night too. Movies are like that, life is like that, and love even more so, no?