Soul Mountain. Gao Xingjian
the water’s surface and settling on a rock ahead. It turns to look back defiantly at you, nodding its head and wagging its tail. It challenges you to approach and then flies off, but not far, and is again waiting there for you, chirping in a quiet, shrill voice. This black spirit, it’s her.
Who?
Her ghost.
Who is she?
You say she’s dead. Those bastards took her out at night for a swim in the river. When they got back they said she was missing. It was all lies but this was their story. They even said there could be an autopsy and if we didn’t believe them, a forensic expert could be called in. Her parents wouldn’t agree to an autopsy, they couldn’t take it. When their daughter died she was just sixteen. At the time you were younger than her but you knew this had all been planned. You knew they had got her to go out with them at night before, baled her up under the bridge pylons, took turns on her then later met to swap stories about their experiences. They laughed at you for being stupid and not having a go at tasting and feeling her. They had planned to get her. More than once you heard them talking dirty and mentioning her by name. You told her on the quiet she should be careful about going out with them at night, and she told you she was terrified of them. But she didn’t dare refuse and went with them. She was frightened but weren’t you also afraid? You coward! Those bastards harmed her but didn’t dare own up to it. But you didn’t dare expose them and for many years she has remained in your heart like a nightmare. Her wronged ghost will give you no peace, and appears in various manifestations, but how she looked as she emerged from under the bridge pylons that time remains unchanged. She is always in front of you, this chirping black spirit, this shrike with white toes and a red beak. You pull on chaste fronds and grab at willow roots in the cracks of the rocks to clamber ashore.
She calls out.
What’s up?
I’ve sprained my ankle.
You can’t go climbing mountains in high heels.
I hadn’t planned on climbing mountains.
But now that you’re in the mountains, be ready to suffer.
Outside the upstairs widow of the old house in a twisting narrow lane are rooftops sloping at all angles, running in all directions, all adjoining and stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see. Shoes are airing in the sun on the roof-tiles below the window of a little apartment poking up between two roof ridges. The room has a carved timber bed with a mosquito net and a red wooden wardrobe with a round mirror; a cane chair is next to the window and there is a bench by the door. She gets me to sit on the narrow bench. There is nowhere to move in the small room. I met her a couple of nights ago at the home of a journalist friend and we were all smoking, drinking and chatting. She wasn’t put off when it came to crude jokes and in this small mountain town, she seemed to be quite up to date. When we later discussed my request, my friend said, you’ll need a woman to take you there. She agreed straightaway and has now brought me here.
She whispers into my ear in the local dialect, quickly alerting me. “When she arrives you must ask for incense. You must ask for incense and also kneel and prostrate yourself three times. This ritual must be observed.” Her voice and movements have reverted completely to that of the local women. Squashed next to her on this narrow bench, I suddenly feel quite uncomfortable. In this small county town where everyone knows everyone else couples come to places like this for illicit sex if they’re having an affair. I detect the acrid smell of preserved vegetables. Yet the room is immaculate, the floorboards in the middle of the room have been scrubbed so clean that the original colour of the timber can be seen and the wallpaper behind the door is spotless. There isn’t the space here for an urn to preserve vegetables.
Her hair brushes against my face, as she says in my ear, “She’s here.”
A fat, barely middle-aged woman comes in, followed by an old woman. The fat woman takes off her apron and straightens her dress which has faded from washing but is clean. She has just finished cooking downstairs. The slight and gaunt old woman who follows her into the room nods to me.
My friend immediately reminds me, “Go with her.”
I get to my feet and follow her to the side of the stairs where she opens an inconspicuous little door and goes in. It is a tiny room where there is a table with an incense altar dedicated to the two Daoist deities, the Venerable Lord Superior and the Great Emperor of Light, and to the bodhisattva Guanyin. Below the incense altar are offerings of cakes, fruit, water and liquor. On the wooden walls hang red banners with black borders and jagged yellow pennants, all bearing words to invoke good fortune and to dispel misfortune. Sunlight streams in through a transparent roof-tile and smoke from a single stick of incense slowly rises in the ray of light, creating an atmosphere which prohibits speech. Only then do I realize why my friend has been whispering since we came in. From a slot under the incense altar, the old woman takes out a bundle of thin incense sticks wrapped in yellow paper. As instructed earlier by my friend, I immediately put one yuan into the woman’s hand, take the incense sticks, light them from the burning paper she has put a match to in the censer, and holding them in both hands kneel on the rush cushion in front of the altar to reverently perform three prostrations. The old woman smacks her sunken lips to show her approval of my devoutness, takes the incense sticks from me and puts them into the incense altar in three lots.
When I return to the room, the fat woman has prepared herself and is sitting sedately in the cane chair, her eyes closed. She is apparently the spirit medium. The old woman sits down on the far side of the bed to say something to her in a low voice, then turns to ask my friend the zodiac sign of my birth. I tell her my birthday according to the solar calendar. I can’t remember the exact date according to the lunar calendar, although I can work it out. The old woman also asks the hour of my birth and I say both of my parents are dead and there is no way of finding out. The old woman is obviously worried and has a quiet discussion with the medium. The medium says something which I understand to mean it doesn’t matter, then puts her hands on her knees, closes her eyes, and begins to meditate. On the roof-tiles outside the window where she is sitting, a pigeon settles and starts cooing. The band of shining purple feathers around its neck puff out and I realize it is a male pigeon performing his mating ritual. The medium however suddenly inhales and the bird flies off.
I always feel sad when I see roof-tiles, the fish-scale overlapping shapes always conjure up childhood memories. I recall rainy weather, rainy weather when, drops of transparent water clinging to it, the spider web in the corner of the room trembles in the wind. This sets me thinking about why I have come into the world. Roof-tiles have the power of making me weak and making me succumb to inertia. I want to cry but I have already lost the ability to cry.
The medium burps a couple of times: the spirit must be attaching itself to her. She keeps burping, she has so much gas that I can’t repress the urge to burp as well, however I don’t dare and keep it bottled inside — I don’t want to break our rapport and give her the idea that I’ve come to cause trouble and make fun of her. I am sincere in mind and heart although I don’t really believe it all. She can’t stop burping, and more and more frequently. Her whole body starts to convulse and she doesn’t seem to be faking it. She is convulsing, I think, probably as a result of qigong during meditation. Her body is shaking and her fingers suddenly start jabbing into the air, that is to say, at me. She has her eyes still tightly closed and the fingers of both hands all stretching out, but the two index fingers are clearly pointing at me. My back is against the timber wall and there is no place to retreat, I can only brace myself. I don’t dare look at my friend who would certainly be more reverent than me, even if she has brought me to have my fortune told. The cane chair creaks noisily with the shaking of the woman’s fat body. She is barely comprehensible as she intones incantations. She is saying something like: Within the Lingtong Chamber of Efficacy of the Queen Mother of the West and the Lords of Heaven and Earth, grows a pine tree with the power to turn the wheels of Heaven and Earth and to entirely slaughter bovine demons and snake spirits. She speaks faster and