Soul Mountain (44 page)

I can’t decide whether or not he believes his own techniques but he dances and waves his arms and legs about, walks with a swagger, and looks very pleased with himself. Arranging a Daoist ritual in the hall of his own house with the help of his six sons wins him the respect of the villagers and, in addition, with such an appreciative outsider as his guest, he can’t contain his delight.

Next he makes a string of incantations to invoke the spirits of Heaven and Earth. His words become incomprehensible and his movements wilder as he circles the table and demonstrates a whole range of martial arts sword techniques. Following the pitch of his singing and the movements of his dance the six sons beat the gongs and drums with increasing gusto and produce endless variations. This is especially so with the young man on the drums. He throws off his jacket, exposing his dark skin and the rippling muscles on his shoulders and ribs. The crowd of onlookers outside the door grows so that the people at the front are pushed over the threshold and then along the walls, some even sit down on the floor. As each piece finishes everyone claps and cheers with me which pleases the old man even more and he doesn’t hesitate in performing every movement he knows to summon forth, one after the other, every spirit and demon in his heart. He starts to go into an intoxicated, crazed state. It is only when my tape gets to the end and I stop the recorder to change the tape that, panting, that he too comes to a stop. The men and women inside and outside the house are all excited and are chatting, laughing and joking. The village meetings are definitely never this much fun.

As he wipes the sweat off himself with a towel, the old man points to a group of girls close by and says, “Now how about all of you sing a song for this teacher.”

The girls start to giggle and after pushing and shoving one another for a while they shove Maomei forward. This wisp of a girl is only fourteen or fifteen but she doesn’t lack confidence, and flashing her big round eyes asks, “What shall I sing?”

“Sing a mountain love song.”

“Sing ‘Two Sisters Marry’.”

“Sing ‘Flowers of the Four Seasons’.”

“Sing about the two sisters weeping as they go off to marry.”

“This song is really good,” a middle-aged woman by the door says, recommending it to me.

The girl glances at me, turns away, and a very high pitched soprano voice cuts through the noise of the crowd and spirals upwards, instantly transporting me from the shadows into the mountain wilds. The sadness of a murmuring stream and the mountain wind are remote but clear. I recall the pine torch of night travellers flickering in the dark mountain shadows and that picture floats before my eyes again: an old man holding a pine torch and a girl, about the singer’s age, who is emaciated and wearing trousers and a floral jacket. They are going past the front of the house of the primary school teacher in a mountain village. At the time I was sitting idly in the main hall of the house and didn’t know where they’d come from nor where they were going, but I did know that up ahead was a big black mountain. They looked inside the main hall at me but didn’t stop and headed straight toward the black mountain shadows, leaving behind bright sparks in front of the house which glowed for quite a while. My gaze returned to follow the torch. When it re-emerged from behind the shadows of the trees and cliffs it had become a small unsteady flickering flame moving in the black mountain shadows, leaving intermittent sparks to mark their trail. Afterwards there was nothing, the sparks and dark red embers vanished, like a song, a song of loud and pure grief flickering in a flame the size of a bean seed on a candle in the shadows of a room. In those years I was just like them and worked barefoot in the paddy fields. As soon as it was dark there was nowhere to go, and the house of the primary school teacher was the only place I could go for a chat, to drink tea, and just sit, to idle away the loneliness.

The grief moves everyone inside and outside the house and no-one is talking. Some time after she stops singing, a girl a little older than her, probably a girl waiting to be married, heaves a sigh as she leans on the doorway, “It’s so sad!”

Only then do people start clamouring. “Sing a bawdy song!”

“Old Uncle sing us ‘The Sky at the Fifth Watch’!”

“Sing us ‘The Eighteen Strokes’!”

It is mostly young men shouting.

After a break the old man takes off his Daoist robe, gets up from the bench and begins to chase off the young singer and the children sitting on the doorsill. “All the children go home to sleep! Go home to sleep, there’s no more singing, there’s no more singing.”

No-one wants to leave. The middle-aged woman standing outside the door calls the children by their names one by one, and chases them off.

The old man stamps his feet, pretends to lose his temper and shouts loudly, “Everyone get out! Shut the door, shut the door, I want to go to sleep!”

The middle-aged woman comes through the door, drags out the girls and shouts to the youths, “All of you get out as well!”

The youths grumble and make rude noises.

“Ye–”

Finally two older girls catch on, and leave. Then with everyone pushing and yelling at them, the other girls and children are all chased out. The woman goes to close the door and the adults who were outside take the opportunity to squeeze inside. The door is bolted and the inside of the house is hot and filled with the smell of sweat. The old man clears his throat, spits, and winks at the crowd. He has transformed again and looks crafty, rakish and wicked. He slinks around to look over the crowd and then starts singing in a rasping voice.

Men cultivate, what do they cultivate?

They cultivate a rod.

Women cultivate, what do they cultivate?

They cultivate a ditch.

There is a round of cheers and the old man wipes his mouth with his hand.

When the rod is thrown into the ditch,

It becomes a leaping, lively eel – Ah!

The crowd roars with laughter, some doubling over and others stamping their feet.

Someone calls out, “Let’s have ‘The Old Idiot Takes a Wife’!”

The young men all cheer.

The old man is invigorated and drags the table back to make a space in the middle of the hall. He gets down on his haunches but at that very moment there is pounding on the door. He balefully yells, “Who is it?”

“Me,” the person on the other side of the door replies. The door is immediately opened and a young man with a coat over his shoulders and wearing a part in his hair, enters.

“The village head is here, the village head is here, the village head is here, the village head is here,” the crowd murmurs.

The old man gets up. The person who arrives is smiling but as his eyes fall upon the tape recorder on the table and he scans the audience and sees me, his smile instantly retracts.

“My guest,” says the old man. He turns to me and makes an introduction. “This is my eldest son.”

I stretch out my hand to him. He tugs the coat draped over his shoulders but doesn’t shake my hand. Instead, he asks,“Where are you from?”

The old man hastens to explain. “He’s a teacher from Beijing.”

His son frowns and asks, “Do you have an official letter?”

“I have identification,” I say, taking out my Writers’ Association membership card.

He looks it over back and front several times before returning it to me, saying, “It’s no good without an official letter.”

“What sort of official letter do you want?”

“One with the official seal of the village or county authorities.”

“There’s an embossed seal on my membership card!” I say.

He half believes me and takes it back, scrutinizes it under the light, but again returns it to me, saying, “It’s not clear.”

“I’ve come especially from Beijing to collect folk songs!” I won’t give in, and I am not worried about being polite. Seeing that I am inflexible, he turns to his father and severely rebukes him, “Father, you know quite well this is against regulations!”

“He’s a friend I’ve just made,” the old man argues but in front of his son who is village head he is clearly deflated.

“Everyone go home to bed! This is against regulations.” Some have already slipped away and his younger brothers have quietly put away all the gongs, drums and other props. I am not the only one who is disappointed, the old man is even more so. It is as if a bucket of cold water has been poured on his head and he is devastated. His eyes have lost their sparkle and he is so miserable that I feel quite bad on his behalf. I feel I have to explain, and say, “Your father is a unique folk artist, I’ve come especially to learn from him. There’s nothing wrong with your regulations but there are other things governing these regulations, even greater regulations–” However I flounder in clarifying these even greater regulations on the spot.

“Go to the village authorities tomorrow morning, if they approve get them to stamp their seal before coming back.” The tone of his voice moderates and he takes his father aside, quietly says something to him, then pulls his coat up onto his shoulders and leaves.

Everyone has left, the old man bolts the main door and goes off to the kitchen. Before long his tiny, thin wife brings in a big bowl of braised salted meat with bean curd and a variety of pickled vegetables. I say that I can’t eat but the old man insists that I have a little. There is nothing to say at the table. Afterwards he arranges for me to sleep with him in a room next to the kitchen which opens onto the pig pen. It is after one o’clock in the morning.

After the lamp is blown out the mosquitos take turns to make air raid attacks. My hands don’t stop slapping my face, head and ears. The room is hot and stuffy and there is a terrible stench. The family dog is excited because there is a stranger and paces about, disturbing the pigs so they grunt endlessly, rubbing their snouts in the dirt. Under the bed the few chickens which they’d forgotten to lock into the chicken yard can’t get to sleep because of the dog and from time to time flap their wings. Although I am wretchedly tired it is impossible for me to fall asleep. Before long the rooster under the bed is crowing while the old man is producing heaven-shaking snores. I wonder if it’s because the mosquitos don’t bite him and only suck the blood of strangers or whether once he’s asleep he loses consciousness. Utterly exhausted, I get up, open the door of the hall, and sit down on the doorstep.

A cool wind starts up and I stop sweating. The hazy, starless, grey sky appears between the dim outlines of the trees of the forest. Before dawn the people under the overlapping grey-black tiles of the houses of this small mountain village are still fast asleep. I hadn’t imagined I would come here, nor that in this small mountain village of only ten or so households that I would have such an exciting night. Gusts of cool air dispel my feelings of regret that it was interrupted. This is usually called the ineffability of life.

She says she’s had enough, stop talking!

You are walking with her along a precipice, and the turbulent waters of the river below are churning into whirlpools. Up ahead is a bend in the river, and there it swirls into a dark green abyss where the surface is so smooth the ripples vanish. The road becomes more and more narrow. She refuses to go any further with you, says she wants to go back, that she’s afraid you will push her into the river.

You can’t stop yourself, lose your temper and ask if she’s gone mad.

She says being with a monster like you has turned her into a void, her heart is totally desolate and she can’t stop herself going mad. She says you brought her to this river-bank in order to push her in, so that she would drown without a trace.

Go to Hell!

She says, you see, you see, that’s exactly what you have in mind, that’s how wicked you are. You are incapable of love, so be it if you can’t love, but why did you seduce her? Why did you trick her into coming to this deep abyss?

You see the terror in her eyes and want to reassure her.

No! She won’t let you come a step closer. She begs you to go away and allow her to go on living. She says when she looks at the bottomless abyss she is gripped with terror. She must hurry back, back to her old life. It was because she had wrongly blamed him that she let a monster like you bring her to this desolate wilderness. She wants to go back to him, back to his little room, it doesn’t matter that he was impatient and rough with her, she can forgive him. She says only now does she realize it was because he loved her that he was so driven by passion. His naked lust was somehow exciting, but she can’t endure your cold indifference any longer. He is a hundred times more sincere than you. You are a hundred times more hypocritical than he, you tired of her long ago, only you didn’t say so. You have tormented her soul more cruelly than he had ravaged her body.