The Unmade Charles Morgan

It's said that Charles Morgan returned to the little sun bleached adobe town of San Matus one day in late autumn just as the pink mountain range was casting long black shadows that came up to the village gate and its bleached walls. He rode a gray horse with a bedroll and a rifle tied behind the saddle and was wearing two flashy new pistols in his frayed leather belt and a sheepskin jacket and a felt wide-brimmed hat. He was not dressed like himself yet all the townspeople recognized him instantly as he rode clip-clopping up the dusty, narrow little main street to the square, where he dismounted and let his horse slurp water from the public trough and drew a bucket of water up swaying and splashing from the well in order to douse himself to rinse off all the road sweat and dust, which he did with a gasp at the shock of the cold water. They all kept their distance but spread the word quickly that he had returned after all, he wasn't dead, he was just outlandishly dressed and strange of manner, as if he recognized nothing, as if he'd made no friends in San Matus, had not married a woman or been appointed mayor or ridden off into the great desert one morning three years ago for no clear reason. Although the woman, Consuela Carmen de la Cruz, was dead and had died months before he left, Charles Morgan had made many other friends in the town who were greatly surprised that he offered no goodbye but simply rode off over the edge of the world. Perhaps it was grief that had done this thing to him, driven him mad, and many had presumed him dead himself, and a few others always claimed that he would one day return.

After dousing his head with cold water from the well in the town square Charles Morgan led his horse to a stable where he, seeming not to acknowledge the greeting of the stableboy, with whom he had once been so familiar as to take him pheasant hunting on autumn days like this one in the now-distant past, gave curt orders for feeding and combing his horse and storing the saddle, then brusquely took his rifle and saddlebags and bedroll down and without an additional wordwalked carrying the saddlebags on one shoulder and the bedroll by its rope one the other and the rifle in his right hand across the square to the town's bar, which he entered just as the sun set over the mountain range but before the lamps had been lit, his spurs clinking.


Inside, in the dimness, the men drinking there all went silent and gazed at him with a surprise that might have been mistaken for antipathy, or even terror. He ignored the sudden silence and the men's avid wide-eyed gazes. He walked over to the bar and asked for a whisky, which he drank in one gulp standing up. Then asked for a bottle of the stuff and when it was put into his hand he threw his saddlebags down on a table and dropped the bedroll beside it, leaned his rifle against a wall and sat down. He uncorked the bottle with his teeth, spat out the cork onto the sawdust strewn floor and drank deeply.

The bartender, a half breed who had been one of his friends, brought over a glass for the whisky as well as a lamp, which he set on the table and lit. His hands were shaking as he struck the match. So far, no speeches had been made, nor any greetings or pleasantries offered, but one man had gotten up, tossed down the dregs of his wine and left the bar in a hurry.

Charles Morgan, if that was still his name, and if it was indeed him and not some twin, slouched at the table drinking his rye. He condescended to pour his whisky into the glass, not without first examining it rudely and at length for smudges or dirt. The bartender, that half-breed cripple, hobbled over back behind the bar looking heartbroken, his shoulders bowed and his pitted face in deep shadow. The only sound was the clink of Charles Morgan's glass and the glug glug of the cloudy and sordid looking amber rye whiskey as he poured it.

He had the time to drink down five glasses or so before the doors opened and a young woman wrapped in a black shawl rushed in. She stopped short, staring at Charles Morgan, and her nostrils quivered. He looked at her without apparent recognition nor any trace of emotion. This was, of course, Consuela's little sister, Esperanza.

Weeping and smiling, she sat down with him, bent across the table, put her soft white hand on his hard brown one, and said: "Charles? It is you?"

For the first time since he'd ridden into town, he looked uncomfortable. Maybe he was just bewildered. He said slowly: "It's me, but I had forgotten that name. Charles Morgan. I seem to remember it now, but it's strange to hear it. Still, I can't think of any other name for myself. So it must be me. And you are?"

Esperanza lowered her head, and her shoulders shook with a sob. She cried in a broken voice, as the other men in the bar shifted uneasily in their chairs

"You do not recognize me? You do not know your home? Do you not remember my sister?"

He looked at her and slumped down a little, as if to make himself smaller. He shook his head.

"No, girl. I apologize, since you seem to know me. The simple truth is, I don't remember anything that happened before oh about six months ago. And even that I didn't realize until just now. Who is it that you think I am?"

"You are the town mayor, Charles Morgan. You were married to my sister, Consuela Carmen de la Cruz, who died in childbirth. Your son died also on the same day. You have been gone for over three years now. All of us know you, and you were loved here. It was you who saved us from the bandits when they came down from the mountains, killing half of them and driving the rest away with threats. I -- I am, Esperanze de la Cruz, the one you said you loved just before you left. You even asked me that night, when you said you loved me, to marry you, and I agreed. You gave me this ring to seal your promise."

She showed him the gold ring. Charles Morgan looked at it long and hard, as if trying to remember it and repeatedly failing. At last he raised his voice to be heard throughout the big room:

"Is what this girl, Esperanza, says one hundred percent true?"

All the men chimed in. Yes, yes, it is true.

"Am I this man who was your mayor?"

Yes, yes, you are him, there can be no mistake unless you are his twin.

"Then," said Charles Morgan, "all of you will have a drink with me." He raised his hand to the bartender who, nodding and smiling profusely, took bottles from beneath the bar and began to open them and to pour drinks.

Quickly, almost furtively, the bar began filling up with more men and even a few silent women.

The men began cheering together, and raised their glasses as one to toast Charles Morgan, so he stood up bowing shyly, cheered again, and then some began to beat the tables with the flats of their palms and to sing a lively song in Spanish.

He asked Esperanza, who was blushing prettily, "What's the song?"

"It is about marriage," she said. "About the wedding night."

She blushed more.

Charles Morgan sat down and took another long drink. He studied the glass in his hand for a long time, then risked another glance at Esperanza. It was a long, deep glance, and it brought out more blushing on her cheeks, and a shine in her eyes that caused his lean, sunburnt body to quiver.

"So -- Esperanza de la Cruz, you will still have me?"

She nodded, parted her beautiful lips, and said a bell-clear, "Yes."

"You, men of this town, will you have me again for mayor?"

A roar went up.

Yes, yes, yes.

"Then," he said into the silence after the roar ended, "I will stay. I am hers, and I am also yours. Let us drink on it."

*

I've written this story so far in the voice of someone of San Matus, talking about the unexpected return of Charles Morgan, but in truth I am Charles Morgan. This was just how I thought to frame the story. I will continue it now as myself -- though the reader will soon see that this expression "myself" raises more questions than it answers. I remember Esperanza lighting the lamp the night of our wedding. She turned to me smiling, and I stepped forward and slipped the lace nightdress from her shoulders; only then did I see how she was trembling. I kissed her naked breasts, which also seemed to be smiling -- they had the splendor I'd always associated with the lover's breasts in the Song of Songs. I could remember the cover of the King James Bible, even the blocks and columns of print, and the silky feeling of the pages as I turned them between thumb and forefinger, and reading those lyrics for the first time, so I must have once been a boy, but I do not remember what my or his name was. I know that Charles Morgan is invented. I hasten to explain.

Reader, I tupped her. I cannot remember tupping her sister, though it must have been an experience equally as touching, immense, murmuring, divine -- I've seen the photographs in the old family album. Consuela was a vivid beauty, even while pregnant, maybe especially then. I saw my own face there, too, the somewhat rigid pose -- I wasn't used to having my picture taken, so I turn my eyes from the lens and I never even once smile.

It occurred to me that night that there is no meaning in life except for "the ___." That is the crude term for it, of course. One should spend one's whole life doing homage to and adoring and devoting one's thoughts to it and to it only, never anything else. When I entered Esperanza's  and felt it softly grip me and felt her naked body shiver in my arms I was God. And when her spine arched from the bed and her fingers and toes cracked with the effort of her pleasure and she shrieked into an ink- darkness that still smelled of the lamp's smoking wick -- I was more than God, I was a whole universe, cities and forests, bays and rivers, great oceans, a sky full of white clouds, the silvering moon and the setting sun over the wind-raked mesas.

I re-opened the dusty mayor's office. I wore a black frock coat and a dandy's cap, and walked with a silver tipped cane. I had a gold watch and fob, which I opened and shut under the stormy sky as I strode down San Matus' dusty main street, nodding my quiet hellos to the passersby . . . I see Esperanza now, swinging her hips as she walks in the market, touching the brilliant disorder of the fruit. She has a baby in a basket tied to her back, and the baby is sleeping soundly, his mouth puckered as if from tasting a sour lemon.

One day three men of the mountains rode down that dusty main street at a slow clip-clop. They horses were shaggy and powerful. These men of the mountains all wore thick beards, and improbable items of clothing under their serapes and broad-brimmed straw hats, and carried old rifles in well-worn buckskin scabbards. All the townspeople vanished indoors. You could hear shutters closing up and down the street . . . These three men tied up their horses in the square, by the same well I'd doused myself from when I rode in twelve months prior . . . But they didn't draw up a bucket from the well. Instead, they waited in the hot sunlight for me to come out of my office, which opened onto the square. They all took their hats off as I approached them. I realized from their eyes that they knew me. One even uttered the word, "Jeffe."

I learned their names again, I say again because I had certainly known them before. They stared at me, blinking a little, as I repeated the names they'd uttered in such hushed, chastened, unbelieving tones. I asked them who they thought I was. They said I was their jeffe, and I'd told them that my given name was Sean, and my Christian one Martin. They told me I'd been missing for thirteen months, that I'd ridden out of the mountain fortress without saying a word to any of them, and some had believed I'd deserted them due to a long-cherished plan, and some that I'd gone mad, or lost my wits due to fever, and many thought I had long since died out in the desert. However, whatever the case may be, they still had all my gold and my horses. Everything had been kept safely in the crazed expectation or at least foolish hope of my eventual return to that cloud-fogged high mountain fastness.

*

I went to the washbasin. I poured water from the glass pitcher -- the round-bellied one that stood on a lace cloth Esperanza had sewn. The light moved scintillating inside the water as I poured it into the basin. I saw that there was a scalloped rim of small blue roses around the  basin's edge. I rolled up my sleeves. I stirred the water with my hands, the sun light flashing in it brighter than any light in the room. Then I splashed my face with the water in my cupped hands and dropped my arms. I looked at my face in the mirror, wet, red, the water dripping from it. It might have been the face of an animal. I saw no person there, no self.

*

I rode with these men up into the mountain range. It was cold further up and the tawny slopes were often dusted with a light snow. Every evening we built a bonfire and sat near it eating our beans and tortillas. Once I saw a jaguar eyeing us in the rose light of sunset. I went for my rifle but hesitated and he slipped away over a table-shaped rock.

In the bandit fortress, my old home when I was Sean Martin, I was given a feast befitting my exploits, my legend, my rank -- and above all, my return. A man strummed his guitar and sang a bandit song in his high, quavering voice. A goat roasted, turning and charring on a spit over the flames. A woman in a dark shawl came out of one of the caves. She had brilliant red hair, and wore a gold anklet. She sat at my feet and I stroked and petted her. I didn't recall any of these people, not even the gaudy woman, who had obviously been my woman, but I felt at home with them all nonetheless.

In the night, more snow fell. There were three creaking inches of it on the ground when I went outside in the blueness of dawn to urinate. I could hear wolves howling, and the horses snorting and shifting in their pens.

The red haired woman was a skilled lover. She had made me spurt three times in just a few hours of panting and rolling about in the thick, pinon-smoke-sweet darkness of the cave, and she had climaxed in a drawn-out agony of joy at least twice herself. I lay down with her under the blanket and looked at her sleeping profile, and I felt a generous, half-pitying tenderness.

That day the woman told me that I had told her stories of the north, that I had come down from San Ignacio, where I had a wife and son. She didn't know why I had left San Ignacio for the blinding empty vastness of the deserts to the south, nor why I had thrown in my lot with the bandits. She had been captured in a raid on a village in the desert, her husband killed; she cooked for and slept with the former bandit leader for a few years before he died in a running battle with the federal police. The others left her alone, barely looked at her. Then one day I'd appeared out of the blue on a fine black horse, wearing a serape and a straw hat, and a pair of silver spurs on my leather boots. As she told it, I'd ridden boldly into the fortress in the middle of the day, dismounted, and asked for water. After drinking from the gourd and pouring water into my hat for the horse to drink, I'd tossed it rudely on the bare ground, thunk. Then I'd made a quick speech -- she herself didn't hear any of it, she was too far away, but realized from the tone that I was declaring myself the bandits' new jeffe. At the conclusion of my words I asked loud and clear, my voice resounding wolfishly in the still mountain air, if there were any nay-sayers -- oh yes, she'd heard that part. Nobody at all spoke up, maybe because of the big knife I was wearing.

And so that was that.

*

The snow was melting on the mountains as I made my way north.

I'd taken nothing with me but my horse, a rifle in its leather scabbard, my pistols, and the clothing I wore, such as it was.

I slept with my saddle for a pillow under the stars, wrapped in my serape with a saddle blanket on top of it, stinking of horse sweat.

In San Ignacio I inquired about my wife and son. I was told they'd gone to Venezuela.

Nobody recognized me. When I said that I was Sean Martin, I received only disbelieving or incredulous looks.

I didn't recognize any buildings or other landmarks. I went to what had been my house -- I didn't recognize anything about it, not the blue shutters or the lime tree arbor in the broad garden.

I bought myself a new suit of clothes and stayed in a swank hotel downtown.

And every afternoon, I visited the same brothel: the Moulin Rouge, where the young whores lounged in lace pantaloons and nothing more except cheap baubles and heavy make up, and a bald Negro piano player who saw and heard and spoke no evil bashed out tinny old turn of the century tunes on the upright.

I longed for Esperanza. Yet I wasn't even Charlie Morgan. Who was I, then?

The youngest whore in the Moulin Rouge was named Lucette. She had auburn hair and a slim body, and she was eighteen years old.

One afternoon as I was buttoning my trousers I told Lucette I'd like to take her away from whoring, help her live properly and take care of her, just like a real daddy.

I don't know what made me say that. She let out a harsh, discordant, almost jeering laugh.

I decided then to go to Venezuela to search for my wife and son. Despite Lucette's beautful skinny chest and laughing green eyes.

It was Lucette, the little whore, who discovered the tattoo at the nape of my neck, on the hairline.

It was a series of numbers. She wrote them down for me. A bank account, I thought.

I went to every bank in San Isadoro -- all five of them. The last bank I visited confirmed that I'd kept a safety deposit box there, numbered as on the slip of paper my hand now held.

My signature was accepted in lieu of identity papers. I opened the box with shaking fingers.

It was full of papers. I turned them out onto the table. There were some passports in different names -- one was German, another Greek. Others were from Norway, Ireland, Belize.

The photos were all of the same man, who might be mistaken for me.

There were some small notebooks. And so, I discovered that I had kept a journal.

Three Greek Fragments

Fragment on a papyrus strip burial wrapping [dated ca. 490 BC, Ionic]

Our group met in a cave on Naxos to hear the speech of Paralethes the Sophist: “Here before you I have placed two jars. One contains strips of paper on which are words copied from scrolls I gathered in my travels throughout the entire world. Some forty years ago I had the idea that if language has a beginning there must have been a word first uttered by man.  This thought struck me like lightning and I have devoted my life to tracking down this Logos like a fox to its hiding hole. As a result, my fortune is gone, my eyesight dimmed, and my body is ravaged. I learned many barbarian languages, I studied the texts of every city, on the theory that this word must still exist somewhere in the desert of writing, like a cool spring gushing out of the sands of endless time. It must have been a word of such solidity and vividness that no one would ever think to discard, alter or contrive a substitute for it. No scribe would ever strike it out of his text. So after collecting many hundreds of thousands of words, a task that cost me years of bitter tedium, I began to sift through my silt for a glimmer of gold. My rule was as follows: I discarded those clearly of recent invention. Also those that were once in fashion, then disappeared. Also those that appeared only in a few texts, and not in others. I discarded words made of prefixes and suffixes. Also words that have only abstract meaning, and ordinary words such as you, me, it, there, up, down which give us directions in space. Here, in this jar, are all the words that remain. I have reached the foot of a wall I cannot break. Each of you will now reach into the jar and draw out a slip of paper. We will then draw pebbles from the other jar, in which there is only one white pebble to signify the verdict of Apollo as to which of these words is the first uttered by a human being.” According to Simonides, the words were: TONGUE, MOUTH, EYE, LIGHT, DARK, HAND, SUN, HOUSE, FIRE, SWEET, WATER, VULVA, GIRL, WIND, URN, BELLY, FOOT, NAVEL, BLOOD, CUT, HORSE, TRACK, PHALLUS, WELCOME, FEAR, LAUGH, BITTER, THROAT, BONE, MARROW, DEAD, DREAM, FATHER, SKY, EARTH, GOD, ENEMY, LIFE, BURY, BEYOND . . . .


The Slave Messenger

Mageras stood up and said that men are all like the illiterate slave-messenger of the fable, whose death-sentence was tattooed on the scalp while he slept off a drunken orgy. We do not know where to find the inscription that would give us the true measure of our lives, nor would we be able to grasp an iota of its sense if we were to discover it by accident, for example while hunting for lice. We think the message we understand and memorize is the true one. But the real meaning of our lives is destined for the eyes of another – a barbarian King who will read it and, with a brusque wave of the hand, order his eunuch to cut off our heads. Naxlides, smiling, replied that Mageras must believe that the gods write in signs. But how can that which does not exist know how to read and write? Besides, he added, why would a barbarian King need permission of a sign in order to cut off a slave’s head?

The Enigma of Desire

A Sophist walked into the marketplace and, throwing the purple robe over his shoulder, spoke as follows: -All men dream. Those confused by the gossip of slaves and women believe that dreams contain signs from the gods showing how to avert catastrophes or foretelling blessed events. But this is rank falsehood. I alone have found the law of dreams. The listless crowd that had gathered before the Sophist exclaimed as if with one voice: - Tell us! - A dream is a wish the dreamer did not know he had, which the dream portrays as having been satisfied. Dreams are the royal gate into the city of things that men desire all unawares. - Go on! - After listening to hundreds of your dreams, O citizens, I have found that all of you wish to sleep with your mothers and sisters (truly, you want to ravish all women, beautiful or ugly, except for your wives), kill your fathers, eat and drink at sumptuous banquets, and fly above the earth like birds. Thessalides, an actor in satyr plays, suddenly spoke above the booing of the crowd: - What about nightmares that wake me up in a panic? According to you, all men also want to appear naked before a theater audience not knowing their lines, fail in their school examinations, be unable to bend a bow or lift a shield in battle, drift aimlessly in a boat at sea dying of thirst, and wander lost and hungry through the streets and squares of great Thebes! The Sophist smiled, and when the applause and jeers of the crowd had died down he asked: – Tell me, Thessalides, was it or was it not you that I saw dancing before the Phallus in last years’ procession to the god [Dionysos], slashing your arms and legs with a knife and whipping your body with vine branches until it was besmirched with blood and dirt? Thessalides lowered his eyes. Then another jeering voice shouted from the back of the crowd: - Tell us, O Sophist. What do the slaves and women want?

Crow Black Hair

The girl rattled into Epitaph on the back of an open buckboard, riding on a pile of bear pelts with her hair tucked up under a man’s felt hat. Gaunt and unsmiling on the pine wood bench and looking sick from the jostling sat her twin brothers both in dark suits, white shirts without collars, and shiny black boots, and one of them was holding a double bore Lee Enfield shotgun and they both had pistols stuck in their belts. Their English was stammering and imperfect. They had to point for what they wanted at the Dry Goods store and they garbled a bit between themselves over each purchase. Meantime the horses slurped from the communal trough and the girl stood by the buckboard brushing dust from her black skirts and all the men came out of the saloon to look, some still holding their whisky glasses. Young Henry Clay had been smoking a cigarette on a chair by the saloon door and when he saw her he tilted the chair back down onto its four legs, stood slowly as a man in a trance and came forward into the hot sunlight. She took off the hat and shook her hair out looking up at him with a wide smile. Her teeth were white and perfect and her skin was olive and all of her seemed to blaze with virgin beauty. Henry Clay dropped his burning cigarette and crushed it out with his boot heel but he did not speak; nor could he. He was twitching like a ridden out horse.

When the twin brothers came out they said nothing to any of the silent gawkers but solemnly loaded their purchased goods in the trap and climbed onto the bench as the girl retook her seat on the pelts and the one with the reins shook them and the horses dragged the trap off, bouncing on ruts so the girl had to cling onto the sides.

Henry Clay walked out into the dirt street to watch the girl rattle off. The next morning he took his brother’s horse and rode out of Epitaph.

He came home on the train by baggage car, jammed into a pinewood box that was too short for his stature, so they’d had to break the knees. His face was gray and half his skull was missing and when William Clay saw it he fell down and rolled on the street, his mouth foaming, and some men carried him up to the brothel and put him into the tender care of Ming Lee, the Chinese whore.

The next day William Clay purchased a new pistol and a suit of clothes at the Dry Goods store and boarded the evening train. He was gone a month. When he came back his hair was long and he looked ten years older, and he was riding his horse that he’d claimed from the stable in Washo. He went to the saloon and stood at the bar drinking, the pistol stuck in his belt. Somebody asked him if he’d taken care of the Sicilians. He nodded and drank. They poured his glass full again hoping for the story. After a few glasses he told it. He said he’d trailed them to Abilene and there he had found the pair drinking wine in a tavern and without a word he’d taken out his pistol and shot them dead. He asked some others present where the sister was and heard that she was at a hotel. So he went down to the hotel followed by a crowd and climbed the stairs to a dingy room and found her lying naked in bed. He cut off her hair with his knife and left her there all balled up with fear and weeping into a pillow.

William Clay now took a package wrapped in oiled paper from his coat pocket and opened it on the bar and there it lay, the virgin’s crow-black hair, gleaming and scented womanly. Then he re-wrapped it and put it back in his coat. He took another drink and excused himself from finishing the bottle saying he had to go to the cemetery now and lay the parcel on young Henry's grave. They watched him go out and past the windows, his spurs clinking, nobody saying a god damned thing.

(2004)

The Wagons

The wagon caravan route passed through the fearsome dune-sand desert in Chihuahua, and no water was to be had, except what they carried, for fifteen days. And on the ninth day the oxen began to die and two days after, the horses. The boy walked alongside the wagon with his mother, she trudging in her leather lace up boots and dark blue skirt and white blouse, both of them gasping in the heat, while the father sat on the wagon box with an unlit pipe clamped in his teeth, glaring at the heat-waving horizon and the immovable blue sky, shaking the reins whenever the oxen slowed to a crawl. The oxen plodded dully, sinking into the sand. Every few hours the caravan had to stop and the men pitch in to rock a wagon's wheels out of a sink hole. There were few words and many grunts, curses and other profane outcries, while the woman stood helpless, grim and attentive with their kerchiefs tented over their heads to protect their already parched faces from the dazzling sun. The boy tried to help the men but was waved brusquely off, so he squatted on his heels, watching through slitted eyes. Nothing lived in this desert, not even ants or scorpions. Only rarely was a bird seen in the sky for the circling carrion birds who would pick clean the hulking ox and horse corpses left behind.

Dolphin Shadows

He sat in the prow as it sliced aside the waves, watching the blue horizon rock up and down with the creaking of the oars, hearing the crudely thudding drum behind him. Each solid cracking thump of the drum went right through his body, so if he shut his eyes he felt the drumbeat in his breastbone, even in his thumbs and fingertips.

The drummer who gave the rhythm to the oarsmen sat crosslegged on a platform in the middle of the ship. He was shirtless, his wiry brown torso sweating profusely as he thumped the drum with his oak stick. Sweat flew from his hair when he shook his head, as he did sometimes to free his frowning face of sweat. He wore a linen headband but it was soaked through and sweat ran into his eyes in the fiery sun-dazzle.

The Captain in his blue cloak paced up and down along the rows of oarsmen seated on their benches and straining so that their shoulder and back and stomach and chest muscles stood out taut as ropes with each pull. Sometimes he spoke a few soft words. Behind him, bare feet slapping on the planks, dashed the boy who carried the leather bag full of wine diluted with cold water, and when an oarsman nodded at him he would stand on the tips of his toes and squirt a long, arcing, brilliant stream of wine-water into the oarsman's open mouth.

There were no shadows on the ship but for the shadows that the oars made on its sides and on the dark blue water. Under those shadows flowed the smoothly undulating deeper shadows made by dolphins swimming alongside the ship under the rippling gleam and scattered foam of the waves pouring from the prow.

Roped-Together Horses

She got her tongue cut out by Comancheros. That was when she was fifteen. Bent over a wine barrel with her pale ass bared to the searing sun she screamed too little, insulted and profaned too much. The big man with the red ribbons in his beard took offense to being called a son of a whore, a putrid piece of donkey filth, and other such epithets as he was vigorously raping her. It was after they had just killed her whole family, crucifying her Mexican pa on a wagon wheel and putting a hatchet into her ma's scalp, on which silver hairs vied for notice with dark ones. The big man finished his exertions, sweating and frothing -- as she told him in clear Spanish -- like a "pig" and took out his Bowie knife. Two others held her down, and another forced her jaws open and he reached in and pulled out her tongue and cut it off. He tossed the bloody scrap to a dog, all its fur raised, teeth bared in a growl. The dog snapped it down. Dust was blowing across the yard.

They rode off, left her choking and coughing on her own blood. It's said that two months later she managed to kill the baby growing in her womb. She tossed it down the well, to poison the brackish water for any other men who might ride past, before digging up her pa's hidden money and his antiquated pistol, shooting the cur, and riding off on the little burro that the Comancheros had overlooked when they stole the horses and the other livestock.

She rode up to San Remo where she waited, knowing they must sometime pass there, sitting all day long outside the wine shop in her dark skirts and blue shirt and black shawl, alert and mournful, humming near-silent tunes. Sometimes she went to the well and drew up water to splash on her face and soak a rag to cover her head from the sun and keep the black flies off. The sun that summer was so intense it parched everything, killed all the flowers and green shoots, made the bare ground crack. And there were more flies than anybody had ever seen. Wind blew in dust from the desert so that whenever she moved dust trickled from the folds of her clothes and from her hair and sometimes even from her little dusky ears and wide nostrils.

For money to feed herself and the burro she sometimes went with men out behind the wine shop; she stood braced against a hitching post by the jakes and let them lift up her dark skirts and hammer themselves deep and hard into that moon-pale body, just like the man with the red ribbons in his beard had. She turned her face away when they tried to kiss her. Nobody in San Remo knew that she'd had her tongue cut out -- they just thought she was a mute.


And lo and behold, as our Holy Book says, one day towards the start of autumn the five Comancheros did ride into San Remo, their hair and beards white with dust from tarrying in those desert wastes, strings of fresh Indian scalps dangling from their horses' withers. They'd come into town to redeem Yaqui and Apache scalps for the dollar a scalp bounty money so as to get drunk and go a-whoring and raise hell. But they were ignorant of the true hell that awaited them. For the tongueless girl had seen these men coming up from far off and quickly hidden herself behind the wine-shop, where she loaded her pa's pistol with trembling fingers.

After delivering their bloody scalps to the sheriff's office and receiving cash payments in clanking silver coin, the men rode over and tied up their horses by the well. Inside, they sat at a big table in the dimness and ordered jugs of red wine and a bottle of tequila and four skewers of roast squab, along with a platter of squash and beans and tortillas. Drunk, they pounded the black oak table with the flats of their hands and roared out songs they'd learned in Mexico, and soon they began to howl for women, of which there were none to be had --  all San Remo's housewives, daughters, and its two full-time whores had gone straight into hiding as soon as the Comancheros rode in. You would have had to tear up floorboards find them now.

The man with the red ribbons in his beard was the first to step out back to relieve an urge. As he stood wobbling, pissing on a wall, he heard the fresh, distinct click of a pistol cocking. He turned without putting himself back into his dusty trousers. There she was -- the tongueless girl, her dark hair wild, legs spread wide in a shooting stance, both hands on the pistol to steady it. He grinned. "You!" he cried.


Inside, the clanging pistol shot brought the other four men to their feet. At the second heart-freezing report, they all pulled out their guns. And now the man with the red ribbons in his beard walked slowly back into the place, his eyes bulging -- he was gushing dark blood from between the legs. Then he staggered and fell flat on his nose, and it could be seen that the rear of his skull was blown off.

His four brothers rushed out through the jakes door. Outside, nothing -- except the empty, stinking jakes and a golden full moon rising over the jagged mountains and the howls and yips of starving coyotes.

But the first bewildered man to turn back into the wine shop got blasted right back out the door, a bullet through the sweating chest. For the tongueless girl had dashed around to the front to come in that way, and now she stepped out into the desert night gripping a pistol in each hand -- her pa's and the one she'd just taken off the dead man with the red ribbons in his beard -- and blazed away at point blank rage, like a real pistolero.

The three remaining Comancheros returned fire with their own guns in the chaos of flashes and noise, the thick smoke-haze and stink of the black powder, but they were blind-drunk and rattled besides by the suddenness of the wrath descending upon them, and so they missed every shot, their bullets only lodging deep in the adobe wall to be dug out later by San Remo's shouting little boys.

She, by contrast, kept a cool head and put them down quick -- one slug each in the chest to knock them flat, one in the head to finish the story.  Then she gave the coup de grace to the other man lying in the dirt, went inside and fired the rest of her rounds into the big, sprawled red-ribboned corpse. And so they all died like dogs.

That night she slept on the moonlit bare ground by the well. And in the fresh, pale light of dawn she rode her burro out of San Remo, taking along the dead men's coins, guns and roped-together horses.

The Willow Broom Hero

from Legends of the Taoist Swordsmen

The first true swordsman on record, meaning the first adept (not the first man to swing a sword, obviously, but only the first to reveal himself as invulnerable in battle) was a drunkard reeling from cheap wineshop to sordid wineshop. His drunkenness had relieved him of the burden of thinking, and also suppressed most other forms of consciousness, leaving only a crazed thirst for wine, therefore (says Zuhangzi) he could become, an did become, a perfect vessel for the dark De of the mysterious Dao. One day as he staggered from the door of a particularly unpleasant little wine shop he was set upon by ten brigands, intent on beating him to a pulp and taking his purse. Already senseless with drink though it was still early in the day, he snatched up a willow broom that was standing beside the door and knocked down the first brigand with a single crude blow that split open his skull. The others drew swords and rushed at him. Having no conception of danger, of what he was doing, or even of himself or "others," this man effortlessly overcame and beat down every furious attack, like a blind temple prostitute putting out fires in the middle of the night with her own sleeping robe. Sensing a blow coming at him, the drunkard reacted to it instantly, without thinking or conceiving any idea or plan. In this way he knocked down every one of the sword-weilding brigands, just like a child armed with a stick knocking puppets off of a shelf. Then, still weaving back and forth a little in the effort to stay on his feet, he set the broom upright again beside the door and staggered home to his hut, where he fell into a drunken, snorting sleep that lasted well into the next day. By the time he woke, his fame had spread to all the nearby villages, and he was being celebrated in songs as The Willow Broom Hero.

The Mountain Range

At the boy's birth, the doctor noticed that he had a strange birthmark, like the slash of a knife, across the upper ribs over the heart. After the cord had been snipped and the baby washed and placed in the arms of his dozing mother, the doctor pointed it out to the father, whose brow furrowed. Later, in private, the father mentioned it to the mother, who examined the mark, frowning deeply, then kissed it and drew the baby's mouth to her full breast. The father sat watching them for a few minutes in his cane-bottomed chair, then went outside to smoke his pipe. The mother could smell the pipe smoke in the dim room, its shutters closed against hot August sunlight. It was dry and hot that year and all the shrubs withered in the scorching sun. The mother dozed off. When she woke, her son was asleep, also, resting calmly on her breasts. She heard the man, her husband, the father of her son, pumping water out in the yard.

It was not until the boy was one and a half that he began behaving oddly and saying some strange things. He could be found thrusting his fist at the wheeling shadows over his crib. As soon as he could walk, he picked up sticks and slashed and thrust at the air with them, his face calm but showing a strange intensity. One day a man rode by on a silver-colored horse singing a milonga, a song about whores, knives, violence and sudden death. The boy walked outside to hear the song and remained standing there, rapt, long after the horseman had passed by. His father walked up unannounced, silent on his bare feet, and swept a hand over the boy's hair. The boy crouched down and let out a strange, quavering scream . . .

Another day, the mother found the boy walking around the house with the father's knife stuck in his belt. She took it away. He sobbed and wailed almost soundlessly at first, then sat facing a wall with his eyes shut until supper.

His father, still cool from washing at the pump, the sleeves rolled up over his bare arms and his dark hair wet, came into the room laughing at some joke he'd heard, but stopped still when he saw the boy in the chair facing the wall.

The man's son turned his head and murmured: "He killed me."

"Who?"

"Juan Zamorra"

"What?"

"Outside the wine shop in Jarilla. That's where I fell. He cut me here."

And the boy swept two fingers like a knife over his ribs.

"You're dreaming, son. Wake up."

The father tapped his son's head a few times with his fingers, and the boy came out of his trance and began wailing again. The mother stood in the doorway, her hands covering her face but her wide dark eyes staring through the spread fingers. She didn't make a sound.

After putting his son to bed that evening, the father pulled back the sheet and studied the birthmark. The little boy was already asleep, his eyelids trembling. The father picked up the lantern and walked out of the room. He sat at the kitchen table, sighed.

"In the morning, first thing, I'll take the horse and ride over to Jarilla."

"Will you take him along?" asked his wife.

"No," he said, after thinking a little. He breathed out a long stream of air through his nostrils and shook his head and repeated himself: "No."

She placed both her hands on his arms, folded on the table. They sat like that for a while. Then he leaned forward and blew out the lantern. The smoke rose, its bitter and pungent odor filling the kitchen.

In the morning he rode to Jarilla as promised. He arrived shortly past noon, covered in dust. He beat the dust out of his hat standing outside the wine-shop. Then he went in and sat at one of the long tables and asked for a jar of wine. There were three other men in the wine shop, speaking in subdued voices. He raised his voice slightly to ask, as if asking no one, if anyone knew of a Juan Zamorra.

A man with Indian features said, "You can find him in the cemetary."

Silence. The jar was placed on the table before him, along with a wooden cup. The man poured some into the cup and drank. He said,

"Have some wine with me."

The three men came over with their cups and sat. He poured wine with quiet ceremony for all of them. They all drank. He asked,

"I wonder -- when did Juan Zamorra die? And how?"

The same Indian-looking man, who was wearing a shabby gray coat, said, "About three years gone now he killed another man, a good guy named Jorge in a knife fight right outside this place. They were both drunk and they were fighting over a girl they'd been talking about. As I say, Jorge was a good guy but he was never so much with a knife. He died quickly. They took the corpse off in a wagon. Juan came back in here and started drinking. He got really drunk. Then about sunset Jorge's younger brother Cesario rides up on his horse, gets off it real slow like, and walks in here holding his rifle. I was here that day and so were they [motioning to his silent friends]. Ah, gracias, my friend. [More wine has just been poured into his cup.] So Cesario just stands there looking at Juan and then levels his rifle and shoots him in the head as he's drinking. Juan was just too soused to even see him come in, too soused to be aware of anything. He falls to the floor dead and Cesario walks out and that's that. See that hole in the wall? That's where the bullet went in. Somebody dug it out a few weeks later."

"So what about this girl they were fighting over?"

The Indian-featured man gave a short, hard laugh like a hiccup.

"Cesario went ahead and married her. Maybe out of respect for his brother's taste. Her name's Teresa. She's a true beauty and she's the mayor's daughter. Jorge had a chance with her but Juan never did. Anyhow, they've just had a kid -- he'll be a year old soon. Everybody says he looks just like Jorge did at that age. They've even named him Jorge."

"I've got a son, he's three. His name's Patrick. I live over in the next town, there at the base of the mountain range."

"What are you doing out here?"

"Just riding around, seeing the sights, you know. Hearing the stories. Juan Zamorra was a distant relative, so I thought I'd look him up. It's sad that he's gone. I'll be on my way now. But for your kindness in giving me all this information, please permit me to buy you and your friends one more jar of wine."

"Fine, but only if you join us in the first drink."

The second jar of wine came. The man in the dusty travelling clothes raised his full wooden cup.

"What shall we drink to?"

"To Jorge Bellaqone. A real good guy. Hope he's enjoying his new peaceful life in heaven."

They all drank deeply. Then the stranger stood up, put his hat back on and walked out of the wine shop. The three men and the tavern-keeper watched him slowly cross the dusty yard and swing up onto his dusty horse. He turned the horse with the reins, kicked its ribs and rode off at a jog toward the sunset-reflecting mountain range.

Yurei

This is the story of how I met and fell in love with a yurei - the ghost of a samurai woman born in the fifteenth century. 

The train jolted. I opened my eyes to the sun's glare.
The sun. Setting behind Mt. Fuji, it turned the snowcap gold then dark red.
Heaven and earth blacked out. Yunmen glared at me, his eyes bulging.
I opened my book. It was a book of ancient poems. Everybody who wrote and sang them was dead.
I could hear a poet singing his poem next to a hissing kettle. He was hunched over, freezing cold. Tears flowed from his eyes down his sagging cheeks, as the ancient voice cracked.
I was going to Kyoto to sign books. I was a novelist. Some of my books were popular in Japan.
I wasn't looking forward to the trip before I left San Francisco. But now --

She emerged from the crowd after my reading and touched my elbow. That touch rang through my whole body and mind.
She was elegant looking, in the Japanese way, slim and beautiful, with thin wrists and an oddly rich and thick voice. Ink-black eyes, flashing light. She was wearing a kind of damask jacket, with a tightly woven multicolored pattern that made me think, absurdly, of India. This jacket alone marked her as what I knew she was: an artist. Maybe a musician. Maybe another writer. Maybe a conceptual artist, a ceramicist, or a Butoh dancer.
As our gazes met, I blushed.
I was aware of trembling.
I shook her hand.
We exchanged pleasantries over the hum of the crowd. People were already pushing in close around us, hands touching my sleeves and my shoulders.
She spoke excellent English.
She told me her name: Otsu Kuriyada.
I signed her copy of my book. It was a fresh new copy, as if it had never been opened, as if no pages had been turned.
As I handed the book back to her, our hands touched again. My fingers touched her white, cool fingers. I thrilled.

Luzhang Bridges (excerpt from a cell phone novel)

A stage. In

darkness.

Then the lights come up.

Dazzling.

You’re sitting on a simple red lacquered

wooden chair. Your face is uplifted.

You’re wearing a white blouse,

dark trousers,

sandals.

The lights make your silk blouse shimmer and dazzle

like sunlit water.

Your diamond earrings, too, dazzle,

shooting light.

And your smile --

that too is dazzling, that too exults,

that too,

here and now,

always,

into infinity,

 

Oh the infinite sky --

floating clouds

in the dragon sky.

China.

You are from China.

From a famous ancient town

in China

known for the beautiful

stone bridges

arcing over a shining river,

dark little canals.

The Venice of China,

some call it --

a city of canals,

tangled alleys,

parapets, towers,

rooftops, bells,

wood burning stoves,

ancient houses, temples.

A city of lute-playing poets

of the Ming Dynasty,

of snow falling in mist, clouds shimmering

in the river, rainbows in the sky,

market boats loaded with vegetables

pushing up green wakes,

passenger boats covered by blue awnings

plying the crowded waterways.

 

Tea houses,

charcoal fires in the streets,

dumplings, rice, cold air,

bright sky --

nobody and nothing.

Who cared and who knew,

who lived here once?

it was all gone, they all suffered for nothing.

They lived and died

here and in a thousand other places,

but it was here that you were born, that you grew up:

a dark eyed little girl, brilliant laugh,

singing in the narrow streets,

I see you dashing down a stone street

swinging your bookbag,

chasing other children through the narrow alleys,

riding in a sleek river boat

covered with a blue awning --

You are in movies.

Everywhere you go, recognized,

applauded,

dazzling --

your naked earlobes,

your smooth skin,

your glossy black hair,

your cheek-dimples,

your delicate hands and feet,

your agile hips,

your breasts standing out

like proud and wonderful boasts.

 

In movies, I have seen

your breasts, naked or moving inside cloth,

your legs, lithe and smooth,

your bottom, your elegant bottom,

your smile, your quicksilver smile,

your eyes, dark yet brilliant --

 

your smooth hands,

your thin panties,

your leather jacket,

your fake fur collar,

your fishnet stockings,

your red veil,

your empty night,

your dead lamplight,

your stone bridges,

your steaming breath,

your hot tears,

your gentle frown,

your endless agony,

your furious dust,

your empty flowers,

your crazed sex,

your blazing black hair,

your deranged spite,

your infinite sadness,

your cold melancholy,

your ancient suffering,

your infinite China.

 

Is there no one,

is there nothing,

is the sky empty,

is the night clear

are we rowing

on a dark river

is it silent

are we awake

are you alone

is this a dream, is it reality

am I myself, am I you --

or am I someone else:

someone I can't possibly imagine?

Here, in Venice, Italy --

it's dawn.

I drink mouthfuls

of foggy, freezing air

that stinks of seaweed,

woodsmoke,

sea salt.

Sweating, I cross the stone bridges.

I stop

to lean over a railing

and look down

into dark water

where I am reflected,

in the play of ripples

left in the wake

of a clattering motorboat.

 

You.

Alone

on a dark stage,

your face uplifted

to blazing lights.

Your mouth smiles,

your eyes are glamorous;

your body, sublime:

even fully clothed

you stun us, your audience

like pure nakedness.

It's your new movie.

Long-awaited,

set in ancient china --

it's full of sword duels,

great battles,

floating clouds,

dream dragons,

cold air,

river boats,

endless rain,

soft snow,

red deserts,

tents,

camels,

songs,

houses,

rivers,

sorcery.

 

You introduce it --

the new film.

Your husband,

its illustrious director,

sits in the audience,

wearing his sunglasses as always,

clapping softly after you speak.

In the raging applause,

you smile. Bow your glossy head.

Then you go to a seat,

you sit down

calmly, next to your husband.

He clasps the nape of your neck.

I'm in the back

with other film critics,

writers,

journalists.

Sweating.

Stunned by you,

overcome by awe, by desire.

By despair.

I suffer.

Wanting you, I suffer.

There's no help for it.

I know I'm doomed.

I know I'll love you forever,

now and all my life.

 

It’s after the end

of the Venice Film Festival.

The Golden Lion has been given out

and the last banquet devoured,

its crumbs swept up and tossed away --

most of the white tuxedo-ed waiters gone

back to the mainland.

The stars,

directors,

paparazzi,

press

are all gone too,

bouncing in varnished motorboats

in the predawn chill,

across the lagoon to   Marco Polo Airport

leaving cold stones,

vacant alleys,

moored gondolas,

and the thick chilled air --

furious with shadows.

 

You’re gone in the brilliance

back to Shanghai,

or London,

or maybe Hong Kong.

That final morning

with death in my heart

I saw you walking

regally

across the Piazza,

your husband right behind you

in a dark suit

and his trademark sunglasses,

nodding to paparazzi .

You were glorious:

smiling,

a little shy

in the white flicker of flashbulbs --

pulling on your dark gloves,

swiping a strand of hair from your eyes,

pale, fresh, cool as Venice's dawn itself.

I watched you step

into the rocking motorboat.

Your husband jumped in,

lightly,

after you.

The driver gunned his engine,

boiling the cold green water,

and you were off.

Soaring above Venice,

out into the wide wide world

where how can I possibly ever find you?

Whomp whomp whomp across the lagoon

into a golden sunrise.

Vast.

Clear.

Dazzling.

I don't know what now.

Venice has emptied:

it’s a vast tomb wreathed in mist and autumn rain.

A tomb of hope,

of joy,

of the most

infuriating

delicate passion.

Nothing matters to me anymore

but how I met you that day

laughing,

striding across the glassy stones

of the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Click. Click. Click.

I remember your silk jacket

embroidered with Chinese dragons,

your Hermes scarf,

the blood-color in your soft cheeks,

the dark hair blowing about your face --

as cold rain spattered you

and the wind tried to rip us both from our feet.

Also, how you kept laughing,

a little wildly,

tilting your head back to gaze at the dark sky,

then shutting your eyes to let rainwater gleam on the lids.

I sat alone all day

at a metal table outside

the Caffe Florian

on the vast,

silent,empty Piazza San Marco,

drinking grappa

and tossing dry bread crumbs

to the hungry pigeons.

I miss you.

All the four hundred of Venice's stone bridges,

the step-echoing black walled little alleys,

are murmuring your Chinese name

muted by

fog,

time,

winter,

Italy --

sheer endlessness.

At the next day's cocktail party, you appear

on your husband's arm

in a glittering gold lame top,

your breasts unbound

and moving freely under the cloth,

your hair electric black,

your warm flesh ravishing --

turning, laughing, shaking hands,

all alert and passionate

as in a dream.

I love you. Do I say it? I don’t.

I shake your hand.

Your hand is in mine, cool. I am shaking it.

Hello.

Your dark eyes, spirit eyes,

solemn and full of life's sad brilliance,

on mine --

steady and clear.

My heart stops.

Hello.

Hello.

I give you my name. You know it.

You know it!

You say you know that name,

and repeat it softly.

I watch your beautiful mouth.

In movies, I have seen you

bite, chew, smile, frown,

weep, shout, whisper --

I have seen you kiss with that wounded mouth,

that living mouth, that mouth of total splendor.

And now it is saying

my name.

I shiver

at the knees

to hear your musical voice

saying my name.

A thrill goes up

my arms

into my hair.

 

Oh glory.

I say Hello. Hello.

I say that I love your acting, love your movies,

love your vivid spirit, love the blazing life in you.

You shake my hand,

you smile, you laugh,

your eyes creasing a little at the corners,

your body moving subtly,

never still,

just alert and wild.

How can I help but imagine kissing you?

Your voice is vibrant,

elusive,

clear as a bell.

I am stunned to silence.

I watch you,

I let you take over my mind,

sear yourself into my heart.

You say

that you read my article about you

in your last film.

It was translated into Chinese

and published

in China.

You liked it very much.

You felt that I was one of the few writers

to understand the story's meaning,

to sympathize with the emotions,

and its painful depths --

to act that part was so trying,

so difficult for you because

it was really so personal.

I say, Yes,

that's how it felt.

I saw it just like that

and I was touched.

I admired you

for your restraint,

for not forcing a performance,

but just letting the emotions develop

slowly, like layers of paint on a canvas,

out of scattered scenes

each of which, taken alone,

might seem undistinguished,

even a little dull.

In the end,

the effect was shattering.

Yes, you say,

shattering.

 

You say:

I was shattered by acting it.

I couldn't do anything else

for six months.

So I went out to our villa

to get some strength back.

All I did all that time was walk

and read books,

and that's when someone sent me

the magazine with your essay in it.

Reading what you wrote about me,

I was moved.

I mean, it made me happy

to think there was someone like you

who got it.

So. thank you.

 

I am doomed by you,

I am at your mercy, and if you want me to

I will suffer for the rest of my life.

For you.

But I don’t say any of this.

My face is burning.

But I utter not a word,

not a word

of how I feel.

Not with your husband

laughing, drinking cognac

so near us

in his dark glasses

and square dark suit.

He's twenty years older than you,

with a rough voice

and the casual manners

of an alcoholic --

beloved by all

as a genius,

a great auteur.

I, too, admire or love some of his films.

Especially those

starring you.

 

Do you like Venice? I ask.

You say:

No, I don’t like it --

I love it.

There is such intense,

such unbelievable

magic here

that it’s painful.

(Yes, I want to reply.

Especially during winter,

when fog fills the streets

and hovers over the canals

that stink of sewage

and frozen seaweed.

Venice stirs the passion in you,

but it is a passion cleansed of hope.

A passion of deranged melancholy --

a glimpse of the hopeless life

we’re all plunged into,

the wound life opens in us at birth

when we awake

to our first earth shattering cry.)

I nod, agreeing with my whole body.

But then I ask:

Why

do you think that is?

You laugh.

If you want, you reply,

(those dark eyes now looking at me clearly

from only an arm’s length away -- )

I’ll show you.

I can't speak.

I must look startled.

My hand even shakes a little,

the white wine sloshing

inside my glass.

You've just said you can't tell me

what the magic of Venice is --

the substance of this magic eludes words.

But if I want you to,

you can show it to me.

Do I want you to? Would I like that?

I am silent.

My heart is throbbing

like a terrible old wound.

It’s mortal.

I will suffer from it

to the end of my days.

To the last breath

of my solitary nights.

You’re laughing now.

Perhaps at the bewilderment

stamped on my face,

the ancient suffering.

Could it be that I remind you

of China?

Or maybe of fear itself?

All the anguish of your China

seems to have fallen on me in one drumbeat.

And not just the anguish,

but the secret joy.

The nights of fresh hot nudity,

under a patched quilt --

all the senses strained

to such intensity,

in the fragrance of lovemaking

that the whole world seems to collapse

into dead rubble.

Who am I now?

I am windswept dust,

a rain blurred window in a tea house

stinking of coal smoke;

a bundle of ancient paper.

In the end I stammer:

Oh, yes.

in a dream of Luzhang I watch,

quivering with awareness,

as a river boat with a blue awning

glides under an elegant stone bridge,

spreading V shaped ripples

spattered with cold rain.

The sky is cold and vast.

Clouds sink into the remote mountains.

Mist rises from the river

and spreads out into the smoky alleys and streets,

blurring the lighted windows.

At night, lanterns glow

along the river

and you hear the creak of oars.

Just like in the Ming and Qing Dynasties --

you hear a fisherman singing

in a parched voice.

Everything is worn out

and in tatters -- so much rain

so many rivers

what torrents of life,

what dust, what anguish.

After your sad and radiant exit

from the crushingly hot rooms of Ca Fonsari,

walking out ahead of your husband

to the water landing

where, at the base of algae covered steps,

a varnished motorboat was waiting

to bounce and crash you over to the Lido --

Good night goodnight, thank you,

you're all such darlings --

that glossy head turning smoothly as an otter's

as you smiled and blew rapid kisses

to the urgent paparazzi

in a white rain of camera flashes

I drink two or three more glasses of cold wine

and walk through the deserted streets to my hotel,

my footsteps ringing between high stone walls --

really more echoes than footsteps.

I strip down and get into bed,

switching off the light

by a cord that hangs over the headboard.

My mind is brilliant,

and I can’t sleep.

I seem to float up and down.

Then, falling asleep all at once,

I am in China,

on a boat

with a blue awning,

surging down a river,

between the sooty stone houses,

with deep eaves

and blue tiled roofs --

breathing in the mingled haunting odors

of woodsmoke, charcoal fire,

peanuts, soup, garlic.

Luzhang.

It reeks here

of rain,

of emptiness,

of cold.

It is eternal,

this China.

It has never left.

It was always suffered.

I see a bundle of newspapers,

an old suitcase floating in clear water,

a peony in a bamboo vase,

a muddy straw mat,

a red veil,

a sword,

an alcove,

a Taoist temple,

a green mythical lion.

This dream is a gateway

to all that is cold,

serene,

majestically empty.

Mountains sinking into mist,

cranes calling for each other

in the ragged and desolate marshes.

An old and tired woman starts a fire

with twigs and a torn political poster.

Soon, it's crackling.

A little girl sitting on her heels

puts down the book she's reading for school

shuts her eyes and rocks,

her parched lips moving silently.

A poem by Chairman Mao

in classical Chinese.

It's you.

You.

Sitting barefoot on your heels

on a little cushion

with a slightly soiled red cover

and a musty smell --

turning the pages softly

as your lips move

and you swallow saliva.

Your mother pours oil

into the tin wok, and it rattles.

Nothing matters,

but everything survives

in the mind anyway.

Here, there, everywhere, like clouds in the vast cold sky.

In a darkness beyond darkness,

Luzhang grows in layers out of nothing --

like a straw doll bobbing in a bright river,

a lonely flute in the wet mountains,

a drumbeat lost in the searing winter fog.

A boat glides under an arched stone bridge

shining upside down in greenish water.

then breaking up its own image into wild shimmers.

And now the sky, that ironlike Luzhang sky

is suddenly alive with downrushing snow.

Catch a snowflake on your pointed tongue --

it's gone before one can even taste it.

Isn't that something close to the ultimate truth in life?

If so, what do we need Zen for?

 

Lighting joss sticks in a temple

before a stone buddha,

a brass buddha --

I wonder: who are you? how far can you go in this world?

A black eyed, fast witted child --

wild and and morose,

your fingers smudged with ink,

your white teeth ravishing in a burst of laughter.

Everybody's getting old

but only the very young know what grief is.

How will I find you

in the sordid alleys of Luzhang?

Or will you be one of those girls in baggy trousers

loading vegetables into a wide market boat?

Is that grim-mouthed old man your father --

sitting crosslegged,

in faded blue trousers

and an undershirt,

smoking a porcelain pipe?

Just looking at the details of your life

gives me such heartache.

It's the cinema of the smallest things,

of desires that never saw the light,

gradually forgotten, faded away like mist.

One day a little

yellow leaf fell onto your hair.

It was an autumn afternoon,

mysteriously rich in time

and pure.

The leaf was smooth and cold

when you touched it to your lips,

and it rustled like old silk.

You taped it into your diary

and wrote above it:

Future.

I want to hold you so tight you shudder

and keep anything else from ever happening.

Anything in the world, except us.

Do you know what we are?

We're Luzhang itself,

we're the wordless aching heart of China

as it was before there were televisions

and people just listened to the rain drumming on their rooftiles

and crashing from the eaves --

your mother is sewing a shirt,

your father smoking in the corner,

while your elder brother moans with boredom.

Did you realize, growing up in Luzhang,

what a beauty you'd become?

Did you ever imagine going to Venice?

Did you daydream of loving a man

who would fall starkly,

even terribly,

in love with everything about you?

I imagine those Luzhang dawns

deep in your incredible childhood.

All sounds turning pure and distinct --

even the hoarse voices from the courtyard

ring like small bronze bells.

in darkness you wake to bitter tobacco smoke

wafting through the chilled rooms,

and your mother singing

as she steams dumplings.

It's time to wash up,

shivering at the bite of cold water

from a rusted, screeching tap --

Here, in Venice

as the dawn rises

sordid and bleak,

shivering like the mouth

of an iron bell

I walk through the narrow alleys

gulping cold air,

shocked by life,

incapable of forgetting you.