by Qiu Miaojin
If you want to know the Paris that Parisians love, for me, it’s the Marais, she concluded in a professional-sounding tone after a moment of consideration, her pointy chin slightly raised.
Were you born in Paris? I asked her.
No, I was born in Lyon. My father owns a castle there; he’s a renowned entomologist and philanthropist. The place is practically empty save a constant stream of vagrants and a cellar filled with insect specimens. The castle is in the suburbs of Lyon. There are no other houses within a hundred-meter radius.
So you don’t like Lyon? Why did you come to Paris?
Because coming to Paris was a given. She gave me a teasing glance.
Why, what was so important about Paris?
What wasn’t so important? Everything about me is a given.
Paris, women, politics—these are all a given?
Yes. Paris, women, politics—these are all just a given! She brushed aside her brown bangs and studied me seriously. That was when I noticed her blue-green eyes, blue inlaid with floating flecks of sea green. Really, she added emphatically, ever since I was little I was always especially drawn to politics. For me, politics is not about Marxism or left and right wing. It’s much simpler than that, but also more complicated. Politics is about pushing what is clearly wrong in relations between people in the direction of what is right, and trying to follow through on implementing this so-called “rightness.” So I’m particularly focused on those things that are “wrong.” I enjoy putting my energy toward changing those things that are fundamentally wrong. Everyone enjoys something different. For me, I enjoy politics—for me politics is not a choice. Can you picture a five- or six-year-old child cutting out pictures of politicians from Le Monde or Figaro? Before she can even read the articles. . . .
It’s possible! But you still haven’t said why you came to Paris.
For a three-year best-friend relationship, and a five-year love relationship.
Your lover lived in Paris?
She lived in Lyon, too, and when we were young we were both Socialists. We worked together for three years at the Socialist headquarters in Lyon and were best friends. You have no idea how fulfilling it was. At the time I was still studying political science, but she was already a special assistant in the Socialist Party. I dropped by HQ practically every day to find out what the news was and to see if there was anything I could help with, and so I saw Catherine nearly every day too. Apart from sleeping with the occasional boy from school, I wasn’t involved with anyone seriously—politics was pretty much my life. Catherine and I shared and discussed all our opinions, great and small, our hopes and ideals. Both of us insisted that we wanted to stay in the Socialist Party so we could keep watch over traditional leftist ideals. . . . Oh Zoë, how exquisite it is to share an ideal! From the time I was eighteen until I was twenty-one, I didn’t realize that the relationship I shared with this woman who was five years my senior was a true best-friend relationship. But that’s how it was, really was, and I’ve never had another relationship like that.
It’s true—sometimes a best friend is better even than a lover, I said.
We worked for the Socialist Party during its heyday, and we watched it slowly fall apart. Now the left wing is losing the presidency to Chirac and the right wing, ending fourteen years of Socialist Party control. . . . Catherine was lucky in a way to not see this day. . . . In January 1981, Mitterand won the presidency for the Socialists for the first time. I was twenty-one, and when the results of the election were announced, Catherine and I embraced, screaming, jumping, laughing until we couldn’t stop crying. Oh, those were the days. . . . People in the Party went crazy, champagne flowed everywhere and hundreds and hundreds of bouquets were delivered to the Party’s front door. The front lobby was so crowded you couldn’t get through. Catherine and I were pressed together tightly in the crowd and she shouted into my ear, “Laurence, I have a secret to tell you: I sleep with a different woman every night.” I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “What kind of a secret is that?” She shouted even louder: “For three years now, I’ve wanted you, so I sleep with other women as if my life depended on it. But the person I’ve wanted all along is you!” “Why didn’t you tell me?” “I was afraid of losing you!” Then Catherine started to cry. How could she hide it so well? How could she be so beautiful?
We’d been walking for a while when we turned a corner on rue des Rosiers and found an Israeli restaurant that was still open. She went in and bought a falafel and the two of us shared it as we walked along.
After that we escaped to Paris and lived in the Marais for five years.
Why “escape”?
Catherine’s father was the head of the Republican Alliance in Lyon. This was also something I only learned about later. You could say that her political views were the exact opposite of her father’s. Father and daughter reached an agreement that Catherine could help out with the Socialist Party, but after the presidential election she must return to the ranks of the RPR. Her father was a powerful figure—a banker in Lyon and a revered political leader in Lyon. So every move his daughter made was closely monitored: He couldn’t condone his daughter living with me, nor could she stay in the ranks of the Lyon Socialists, so we had no choice but to escape.
We crossed the bridge to Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, then set out on the road across the island until we reached the westernmost section, where we sat down and dipped our feet into the waters of the Seine.
A tourist boat without tourists aboard approached. To our right was Conforama, and just beyond was the magnificent Louvre; to our left was the National Institute of Art and the French Academy. Sitting there, sitting at this destination, it felt like the fulcrum of Paris, the nestling heart of Paris, so steady yet so animated. . . .
Laurence, you love Paris, don’t you? You love Catherine, don’t you? You love politics, don’t you?
She slipped lightly out of her clothes, and before I realized what she was doing she dived into the Seine and an instant later her naked body emerged, facing me. I was wet. My heart began to pound. It began to pulse, to throb between my legs. . . . Pure carnal desire washed over my body, and for the first time it was a woman’s body that had caused it. Far from wanting to escape, I wanted to face whatever desire this was; I wanted see what experiencing this pure carnal desire would bring me. . . .
Long before then, before I’d met Xu, Yuan Yan often made fun of my desire for women, after I told him that I had loved women since I was fifteen, and that when I was eighteen I began to be attracted to women’s bodies. He asked whether or not I could be physically attracted to a woman I didn’t know, and I said that I couldn’t, that I could only be attracted to a woman’s body (perhaps very quickly) after falling in love. So Yuan Yan teased me that my sexual desire for women was the result of consciousness, that the conscious love and conscious aesthetics of my sexual desire predominated, leading me to fixate my desire on the essence of femininity, while at the same time the dominance of this consciousness led me to suppress any carnal desire and to abandon any attraction to an energetically masculine aesthetic. Yuan Yan didn’t believe that I was having sex with him merely to make him happy; and even while we were fucking I think I loved women’s bodies. He felt that I was biased against male bodies, prejudiced against them. He repeatedly tried to indoctrinate me into the delirious carnal passion of a man and a woman, but he never succeeded. I only replied, “It’s a secret belonging to the soul, not the body!”
The first few months I was in Paris, a strong, handsome Greek classmate of mine named Andonis didn’t mince words: He wanted me. I told him up front that I only liked women, and he scoffed, saying there’s no such thing. He then scolded me for being too conservative—a “body” is just a “body”; it was only a matter of attraction, and whether or not the “body” could inspire desire; there was no such thing as a distinction between a male body and a female body. For him, sex and love were two different things. Sex was impulse, the pleasures of
the flesh (he pointed downward), while love was emotional, the pleasures of the soul (he pointed to his heart). The two things were basically channels that opened independently, but when they connected were all the more sublime. He still liked me but felt frustrated. “Is it that I’m not handsome enough for you?”
I shook my head.
Zoë, maybe you don’t understand the pure beauty of carnal desire. You’ve never experienced the rapture of Dionysus. I don’t think any of the women you’ve loved have had the power to bring you to Dionysus. He sat in the corner, sulking: Zoë, the word “Zoë” means “life” in Greek, doesn’t it? Do you really understand Zoë?
Yuan Yan and Andonis were both right, though only partly. The one to bring me to Dionysus was a woman.
At dusk I watched Laurence twirl her hair in the Seine as she does when she’s saying something exciting, her bangs smoothed to one side. Whether in the water or on land, she punctuates herself with a comma. Her skin was tan, an even, light coffee-brown, lighter and silkier than the chestnut color of her hair. Amid the glossy dark green trees of spring, the extravagantly bewitching dance of the leaves on both shores, illuminated by the glow of Parisian culture, Laurence was like a fish leaping gracefully toward a million shimmering leaves, swimming against the current toward the light. . . . When she dives into the water to swim she reveals the impossible curve of her ass and the river water runs and runs off her back. . . . I want to touch the curve with both hands; I want to suck the curve with my lips; I want to use the scorching heat between my legs to melt to the curve of her spine, no matter who she is. . . . Swimming the backstroke, the shape of her breasts silently break the water and I think she must be turned on, the tips of her nipples catching the light, the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting along with her breath, the wind rippling like the sound of fish shuttling, weaving back and forth, as if weaving the water with the beautiful contours of Laurence. . . .
Yuan Yan: Are men’s bodies not beautiful? Can it be that you really don’t understand the beauty of an erect penis, its pulse and its ejaculation? Can it be that the beauty of a male body does not captivate your soul?
I appreciate male beauty, Yuan Yan, but perhaps I’m only aroused by the details of female beauty.
Andonis: Because you are such a courageous, such a powerful woman, only the sexual energy produced by the erect male muscle can move your body!
True, what you say is correct. In the past, indeed, I had never met a woman with enough sexual vitality to lead the latent power in my body toward Dionysus. Andonis, what you say is true, but it’s still not a matter of masculinity.
Laurence’s body was too free, too sexual, far more so than my own body, and it was a body of such sensual beauty that it was as if every detail of her body had been designed for my approval and praise. No matter who she was, my body would actively desire her body, desire to enter that overtly free, overtly sexual interior, desire for her to free my own sexual energy, desire for our two bodies to take flight and engage in symmetry. . . .
From then on I was clear: Passion was not an expression of sexual desire, nor was it an intense and fleeting emotional desire. Passion was a personality type, it was the powerful expression of one’s personality as influenced by life. Laurence’s total freedom and sexual power flowed forth from her passion, and the shape of her passion fit with the shape of my passion, though hers was stronger than mine—and left me in such a state that a single touch from her caused my entire body to break out in a nervous sweat, as if I had physically matured in an instant and brimmed over with desire. . . .
Yes, in terms of the active (yang) and the passive (yin), the shape of Laurence’s passion was more active than mine. Her passion was fuller and more robust than mine, so that when my body came into contact with hers every cell would activate in a way that never happened before. In the past, when a man’s body entered mine, or when I was most ardently in love with a woman, certain cells didn’t activate or come alive. Yet these cells were the very source of strife that caused my passion for life to erupt violently!
Passion. It’s not a male body’s, and it’s not a female body’s. It’s not the penetration or reception of sex organs, and it’s not how powerful a body is or the amount of its sexual secretions. It’s not how a person expresses their strengths or weaknesses to other people. Passion is a quality, a quality that is an energy resource that someone can tap into within themselves. The type of passion I’ve been searching for in people is similar to my own. It’s not necessarily in the body of a man and it’s not necessarily in the body of a woman. Before I met Laurence, I assumed it would have to be in the body of a woman. When Laurence triggered my body to sexually activate, I discovered that this person didn’t have to be a woman. It was my collision with the quality of her passion that released my stored potential for passion and not that she was a woman.
Laurence knew I was writing a novel, and every two or three days she would come by my place to keep me company. In March she was busy preparing the gay film festival at the center, looking for a scriptwriter and preparing for the AIDS fund-raiser; in May she helped organize the Run for AIDS marathon. I figured the gay pride events at the end of June would keep her even busier. Not only did she volunteer at the Gay and Lesbian Center, which had been established less than a year ago; she was also an administrative assistant at the Paris headquarters of the Socialist Party. In May she was so busy working on Lionel Jospin’s presidential campaign that her stomach problems inflamed and she had to hide out at my place for a number of days. The night that the election results were announced, May 14, when she heard that the right-wing candidate Chirac had beaten Jospin, she leaped up from the bed and turned off both the television and the radio.
It’s over. It’s all over. I can’t devote another seventeen years to the Socialist Party.
She walked over to my desk, flipped some pages of my novel, and asked me to read it to her in Chinese. I said that I had already sent out ten chapters and that I only had copies of the fifth and eleventh chapters and was in the middle of writing the sixteenth. She said no problem, that when I was dead I could read it to her in hell. She sat on my black office chair and I sat on the carpet. I spread my manuscript out on her lap and then read aloud, one page at a time, and understanding absolutely no Chinese she listened quietly, almost not daring to breathe, just scratching her head from time to time.
When your novel’s finished, I’ll take you to Greece, okay? she said almost immediately after I finished reading the last line.
We tiptoed into the bathroom. Water drenched our naked bodies and she kissed me all over, my ears, the roots of my hair, my belly, my breasts, my navel, my abdomen, my pubic hair, my vulva, my back. . . . She liked me to sit first on a chair and would lick my whole body with her hot tongue until my body was standing on edge and then she’d lightly take my hand and lead me to the bed. . . . Her arms were long and powerful. When she held my body it was as if that power might squeeze out my soul. She murmured sweet things in French into my ear. Her tongue was the only one I’d ever encountered that possessed an electric charge, and when it coiled around me my soul simply took flight. In Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, an old man goes one night to beg for help from Maria, and Maria uses her body to console the old man, and the two of them float up and hover in the air over the bed. . . .
She knew the right time to push her cunt against mine, making me come in a heartbeat. . . . When her own body reached a certain degree of arousal she’d bore into me like a small snake and slide swiftly into the mouth of my groin. . . . She knew what rhythm to follow and when to enter my cunt, to brush against all those obscure curves, the creased cliffs, the canals, climbing the steep slope of arousal and suddenly planting a crimson flag there. The Virgin Mother of burgeoning flowers reproducing asexually and gushing forth in clusters from the slender internal palace. . . .
Catherine used an antique dagger I gave her to slit her own throat.
On June 6, 1987, at 2 p.m. she died
in a hospital bed in Lyon. She was thirty-two. She’d just given birth to her first son. She was in her second week of recovery there.
One day during our fifth year in Paris I came home from work to discover her and another woman, my co-worker, naked in bed. It turned out they had been having an affair for more than a year. That evening I didn’t say a word, no matter how much she kneeled and cried and begged. I gathered my things and called a cab, and moved away from Paris the same night, north to the city of Lille, and cut off contact with her. Later I heard from a friend that she had moved back home to Lyon, accepted a political marriage arranged by her father to a son of someone in their circle who was also a childhood friend as well as the heir of her father’s co-worker in the Republican Alliance. That year in Lille I lived a life of total seclusion. Every day I would sit on the patio watching the sunrise and sunset. Twice I contemplated suicide but was saved by my landlord. At the time I didn’t believe that I could ever reconcile myself with the world. I didn’t believe I had the power to save myself and go on living. . . . I knew too well my own naked self and the world seemed too stupid and ugly and I was virtually powerless in such a conflict. . . .
More than a year later, when Catherine had given birth, she secretly asked my family to send a message to me, inviting me to come see her. On the afternoon of June 5 I walked into her hospital room with an armful of her favorite champagne roses and put the roses in a vase. I didn’t say a word, just sat down in silence. When I got up to leave and leaned over to give her a farewell kiss on both cheeks, the only thing I softly said was “Je t’emmerde beaucoup!” You disgust me!
