UNIT 6
Telling Lives: Tales of Gender and Sexuality
The Blank Page
Isak Dinesen
By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories.
She said:
"You want a tale, sweet lady and gentleman? Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes. It was my mother's mother, the black-eyed dancer, the often-embraced, who in the end -- wrinkled like a winter apple and crouching beneath the mercy of the veil -- took upon herself to teach me the art of story-telling. Her own mother's mother had taught it to her, and both were better storytellers than I am. But that, by now, is of no consequence, since to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honoured because I have told stories for two hundred years."
Now if she is well paid and in good spirits, she will go on.
"With my grandmother," she said, "I went through a hard school. 'Be loyal to the story,' the old hag would say to me. 'Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.' 'Why must I be that, Grandmother?' I asked her. 'Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?' she cried. 'And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you my reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.'
"Who then," she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all -- where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page."
The old beldame for a while says nothing, only giggles a little and munches with her toothless mouth.
"We," she says at last, "the old women who tell stories, we know the story of the blank page. But we are somewhat averse to telling it, for it might well, among the uninitiated, weaken our own credit. All the same, I am going to make an exception with you, my sweet and pretty lady and gentleman of the generous hearts. I shall tell it to you."
High up in the blue mountains of Portugal there stands an old convent for sisters of the Carmelite order, which is an illustrious and austere order. In ancient times the convent was rich, the sisters were all noble ladies, and miracles took place there. But during the centuries highborn ladies grew less keen on fasting and prayer, the great dowries flowed into the treasury of the convent, and today the few portionless and humble sisters live in but one wing of the vast crumbling structure, which looks as if it longed to become one with the gray rock itself. Yet they are still a blithe and active sisterhood. They take much pleasure in their holy meditations, and will busy themselves joyfully with that one particular task which did once, long, long ago, obtain for the convent a unique and strange privilege: they grow the finest flax and manufacture the most exquisite linen of Portugal.
The long field below the convent is plowed with gentle-eyed, milk-white bullocks, and the seed is skillfully sown out by labour-hardened virginal hands with mold under the nails. At the time when the flax field flowers, the whole valley becomes air-blue, the very colour of the apron which the blessed virgin put on to go out and collect eggs within St. Anne's poultry yard, the moment before the Archangel Gabriel in mighty wing-strokes lowered himself onto the threshold of the house, and while high, high up a dove, neck-feathers raised and wings vibrating, stood like a small clear silver star in the sky. During this month the villagers many miles round raise their eyes to the flax field and ask one another: "Has the convent been lifted into heaven? Or have our good little sisters succeeded in pulling down heaven to them?"
Later in due course the flax is pulled, scutched and hackled; thereafter the delicate thread is spun, and the linen woven, and at the very end the fabric is laid out on the grass to bleach, and is watered time after time, until one may believe that snow has fallen round the convent walls. All this work is gone through with precision and piety and with such sprinklings and litanies as are the secret of the convent. For these reasons the linen, baled high on the backs of small gray donkeys and sent out through the convent gate, downwards and ever downwards to the towns, is as flower-white, smooth and dainty as was my own little foot when fourteen years old, I had washed it in the brook to go to a dance in the village.
Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good thing, but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself. Thus does the linen of the Convento Velho draw its true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land itself by a crusader.
In the Bible, people who can read may learn about the lands of Lecha and Maresha, where flax is grown. I myself cannot read, and have never seen this book of which so much is spoken. But my grandmother's grandmother as a little girl was the pet of an old Jewish rabbi and the learning she received from him has been kept and passed on in our family. So you will read, in the book of Joshua, of how Achsah the daughter of Caleb lighted from her ass and cried unto her father: "Give me a blessing! For thou hast now given me land; give me also the blessing of springs of water!" And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And in the fields of Lecha and Maresha lived, later on, the families of them that wrought the finest linen of all. Our Portuguese crusader, whose own ancestors had once been great linen weavers of Tomar, as he rode through these same fields was struck by the quality of the flax and so tied a bag of seeds to the pommel of his saddle.
From this circumstance originated the first privilege of the convent, which was to procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house.
I will inform you, dear lady and gentleman, that in the country of Portugal in very old and noble families a venerable custom has been observed. On the morning after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night and would solemnly proclaim: Virginem eam tenemus -- "we declare her to have been a virgin." Such a sheet was never afterwards washed or again lain on.
This time-honoured custom was nowhere more strictly upheld than within the royal house itself, and it has there subsisted till within living memory.
Now for many hundred years the convent in the mountains, in appreciation of the excellent quality of the linen delivered, has held its second high privilege: that of receiving back that central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honour of a royal bride.
In the tall main wing of the convent, which overlooks an immense landscape of hills and valleys, there is a long gallery with a black-and-white marble floor. On the walls of the gallery, side by side, hangs a long row of heavy, gilt frames, each of them adorned with a coroneted plate of pure gold, on which is engraved the name of a princess: Donna Christina, Donna Ines, Donna Jacintha Lenora, Donna Maria. And each of these frames encloses a square cut from a royal wedding sheet.
Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword -- or even a heart pierced through with a sword.
In days of old it would occur that a long, stately, richly coloured procession wound its way through the stone-gray mountain scenery, upwards to the convent. Princesses of Portugal, who were now queens or queen dowagers of foreign countries, Archduchesses, or Electresses, with their splendid retinue, proceeded here on a pilgrimage which was by nature. both sacred and secretly gay. From the flax field upwards the road rises steeply; the royal lady would have to descend from her coach to be carried this last bit of the way in a palanquin presented to the convent for the very same purpose.
Later on, up to our own day, it has come to pass -- as it to pass when a sheet of paper is being burnt, that after all other sparks have run along the edge and died away, one last clear little spark will appear and hurry along after them -- that a very old highborn spinster undertakes the journey to Convento Velho. She has once, a long long time ago, been playmate, friend and maid-of-honour to a young princess of Portugal. As she makes her way to the convent she looks round to see the view widen to all sides. Within the building a sister conducts her to the gallery and to the plate bearing the name of the princess she has once served, and there takes leave of her, aware of her wish to be alone.
Slowly, slowly a row of recollections passes through the small, venerable, skull-like head under its mantilla of black lace, and it nods to them in amicable recognition. The loyal friend and confidante looks back upon the young bride's elevated married life with the elected royal consort. She takes stock of happy events and disappointments -- coronations and jubilees, court intrigues and wars, the birth of heirs to the throne, the alliances of younger generations of princes and princesses, the rise or decline of dynasties. The old lady will remember how once, from the markings on the canvas, omens were drawn; now she will be able to compare the fulfillment to the omen, sighing a little and smiling a little. Each separate canvas with its coroneted name-plate has a story to tell, and each has been set up in loyalty to the story.
But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to comer, a blank page.
I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page, and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
For with what eternal and unswerving loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row! The story-tellers themselves before it draw their veils over their faces and are dumb. Because the royal papa and mama who owned this canvas to be framed and hung up, had they not had the tradition of loyalty in their blood, might have left it out.
It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old princesses of Portugal -- worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers -- and their noble old playmates, bridesmaids and maids-of-honour have most often stood still.
It is in front of the blank page that old and young nuns, with the Mother Abbess herself, sink into deepest thought.
Michael's Dream--Mark Doty
Michael writes to tell me his dream:
I was helping Randy out of bed,
supporting him on one side
with another friend on the other,
and as we stood him up, he stepped out
of the body I was holding and became
a shining body, brilliant light
held in the form I first knew him in.
This is what I imagine will happen,
The spirit’s release. Michael,
When we support our friends,
One of us on either side, our arms
under the man or woman’s arms,
what is it we’re holding? Vessel,
shadow, hurrying light? All those years
I made love to a man without thinking
how little his body had to do with me;
now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly
himself – remote and unguarded,
an otherness I can’t know
the first thing about. I said,
You need to drink more water
or you’re going to turn into
an old dry leaf. And he said,
Maybe I want to be an old leaf.
In the dream Randy’s leaping into
the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him
and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s
holding Jerry, though he’s already gone,
Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding
her John, gone, Carlos and Darren
holding another Michael, gone,
and I’m holding Wally, who’s going.
Where isn’t the question,
though we think it is;
we don’t even know where the living are,
in this raddled and unraveling ‘here.”
What is the body? Rain on a window,
a clear movement over whose gaze?
Husk, leaf, little boat of paper
and wood to mark the speed of the stream?
Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally
And John: lucky we don’t have to know
what something is in order to hold it.
Fish Bones, From Salt Fish
Larisa Lai
After my supposed murder by the salt fish merchant, my mother grew morose and melancholy. I was her favourite daughter. She had never much cared for my brother, in spite of the fact that he was her only son. For, you see, he was not a child of her womb, but of a concubine whom my father took ten years after I was born, just as my mother’s eyes were beginning to show their first dark shadows, her hair, its first pale strands.
It was a good time for silk, and my father’s business, like that of many of his neighbours, was booming. At ten years of age, I already played a big part in the family business. My small, nimble hands were of the type deemed perfect for the work of unraveling cocoons. We were not so well off that we could easily afford a concubine, but my father was something of a braggart, always wanting more than his neighbours, always wanting to prove himself superior. He also often made a fool of himself. In drinking games, he would often drink to excess trying to prove how well he could hold his liquor. In gambling games, he took risks beyond the call of common sense, because he never wanted to seem to be losing. Had he been any other man, he would have landed us in the poor house before we even had a chance, but my father was blessed with incredible reserves of luck, and as a result, never came to any serious harm, regardless of the extent of his foolhardiness.
But this is a fairy tale, and of course, he was a kind man, my father, and generous. I only want you to understand what his flaws were so that you will understand later why things turned out as they did.
So at the end of particularly good season, having sold reels and reels of well-spun silk to the foreigners at a good price, he had enough money in his pockets to buy a concubine. A wiser man would have put the money away for harder times to come, but my father was not a wise man.
He took the money and asked my mother to buy him a concubine. He looked her right in the eye. Perhaps he noticed the wrinkles beginning to form around it, perhaps he noticed the dark melancholy shadow beneath, perhaps he did not. He asked her and she did not flinch or weep or accuse. She took the money and went to the city. She came back with a beautiful young girl, fourteen years old, fair as the full moon and so slender her body seemed to sway in the wind like the bamboo that made a green living fence around the perimeter of the village.
She also came back with a story about how people in the city were coming down with a terrible coughing disease where pieces of lung were known to have sometimes come up in the phlegm. “Bad city air,” said my mother, “nothing to worry about.”
The girl’s name was Heavenly Peace, but she was so lovely we just called her Heavenly for short. My mother was always gracious and kind to her. If she felt the weight of her own years or the slightest twinge of jealousy, she never said so, but treated Heavenly with the kind of benevolent indifference that tradition required of a well-mannered First Wife.
When Heavenly became pregnant, my mother graciously congratulated her. If she felt a little tightening around her heart, she mentioned it to no one, although she did switch to a more expensive face powder that came all the way from the barbaric lands of the foreign devils who had set up shop in the city. Her mother, retired from her professional life as a village midwife and living with her son, sent it to her at her request. And if, in the meantime, Heavenly started to look a little more pale than normal, if her constitution seemed a little weaker than it had been when she arrived, my mother was not going to be so ungracious as to mention it.
My father, being a foolish man, spent more time than ever with Heavenly. Perhaps he did pay my mother less attention than he had before. I still believe he loved her deeply, but she would not have been amiss to doubt it.
Heavenly went into labour in the middle of a typhoon. The bamboo growing around the perimeter of the village swayed wildly in the wind, whistling the whole time. The chickens clucked and fussed in the henhouse. Our roof shook. Heavenly and my mother began setting out buckets in the front yard to catch the rain and that was when the cramps started. There would be no fetching the village mid-wife that night. Fortunately, mother had assisted her mother enough as a child that she knew what to do. She chased everyone but me out of Heavenly’s room and sent my sister to boil water. Heavenly shrieked and screamed and coughed. She was not yet fifteen years old and her thin body was less suited to this purpose that it might have been later. I, personally, was terrified. I had never seen so much blood in my life. My mother remained calm and cool throughout the whole thing. She instructed Heavenly to breathe deeply and eased a screaming red thing from between Heavenly’s legs. The moment my brother had fully emerged, Heavenly closed her eyes and fell back. My mother’s nose twitched as though with a suppressed sneeze. “It’s a girl!” she shouted, uncertainly at first, and then again, clearly, “It’s a girl!”
What brought my mother to utter such a lie, I can only imagine. My mother was not an unkind or vindictive person. It must have been an impulse, perhaps one that she regretted later, who is to say if she won’t?
When Heavenly woke and asked to hold the baby, my mother passed him over. But the moment Heavenly received him in her arms, she began to cough. At first, my mother thought it was nothing, but then Heavenly coughed louder and more deeply. She coughed and she couldn’t stop coughing. Up from the very bottom of her lungs she horked the thickest, greenest, foulest-smelling phlegm. My mother snatched the baby back. “You’re tubercular,” she said. “Safer to bring baby up on formula.”
Heavenly died the following spring, two weeks after her fifteenth birthday.
_______
My father figured out my mother’s charade soon enough. He did nothing to put an end to it, but rather humoured her, and the child too, who saw nothing amiss. But I knew that he was a brother and not a sister. I had seen the little knob he had where I had none, and I knew what that meant, at least in the reductive way that children understand what gender is. I knew also that I was not to speak about it, and so I didn’t.
That’s why I say my father must have really loved my mother. Her charade clearly went against his personal interests. All men in those days wanted at least one son, and it didn’t matter who gave it to him. If he wanted her son and was willing to wait, and willing to take the chance that there would be none, he must have really loved her.
They got along much better after Heavenly died. My father gambled and drank less, according to my mother’s wishes. Our silk business prospered, and my brother, in his frilly dresses, grew into a sweet little girl.
After a time, my father came down with the terrible lung disease that was decimating children and old people and the occasional able-bodied man or woman with a ferocity that defied reason. When the day of my supposed murder by the salt fish merchant arrived, it was more than his weakened system could take.
_____
My brother was still a young child the year of my self-orchestrated murder. He had a slight build and wonderfully fair, pale skin like his mother. I remember people pinching his cheeks and commenting on it when we went to the market together. It always made me furious, being of the dark-skinned persuasion myself. If they didn’t think he was a girl, I might not have felt the nip of competition keenly as I did, but my knowing he was a fake made their compliments all the more maddening.
After I was gone, my brother took over many of my chores. Not the marketing – he was still too young for that. But he began to feed the chickens and chop vegetables and carry water.
One day shortly after his thirteenth birthday, he went to the river for water. He dipped his buckets in, one after the other. As he was hooking them to his pole, he saw flash of red out of the corner of his eye. When he looked more closely he saw a little fish with red fins and golden eyes not more than two inches long staring up at him from the bottom of one of the buckets. He took it home and dropped it into the fish pond by the entrance to his alleyway, and took the water into the house where our middle sister stood beside the stove chopping vegetables. She gave him a bowl of rice and told him to eat quickly and then go cute firewood. He ate half the bowl and stuffed the rest into his pockets. On his way to the woodpile, he stopped by the pond and sprinkled the rice on the spot where he had left the fish.
And so the days passed. My brother shared all of his meagre meals with the pretty fish and worked harder and grew thinner and paler than ever. In contrast, the fish got bigger and bigger. Its fins grew longer and redder. Its eyes grew more golden and bright. When my brother was sad, he would go to the side of the pond and call to the fish, and the fish would come to the bank and gaze at him from just beneath the water with its brilliant golden eyes.
If my mother watched him sometimes, she never let on. My brother looked so much like the dead concubine it was hard for my mother to truly love him as her own. Perhaps she felt odd about continuing to dress him in girls’ clothes, especially now that her husband was dead and there was no chance of another male heir. But she continued the charade, perhaps out of spite, perhaps out of habit. Besides, she and my brother were hardly close enough to talk freely about such intimate matters. And he looked so much like the concubine. But sometimes when she looked at my brother from a certain angle or in a certain mood, it seemed as though my father were peering out at her from behind the veil of Heavenly’s face. Then my mother would grow melancholy and reproachful, or else she would fly into a fury of frustration at having lost her husband so early, because of another woman who didn’t even want him for herself, but rather as carrion for death.
It was a strange relationship that developed between them. When he looked to her for love and affection, as a needy child will, she could not bear the sight of him. But when he was not conscious of her gaze, her eyes followed him like a greedy dog, jealously watching the concubine and waiting for my father’s ghost to show itself in the child’s mouth or eyebrows.
This was how she first noticed the fish. My brother often dawdled at the pond after finishing his day’s chores, and there he would lose himself in the fish’s golden eyes as he poured out his loneliness and confusion. It was those moments when our father’s genes seemed to manifest most fully. Through my brother’s eyes the old man seemed to gaze out with a sad kind of longing that my mother found particularly heart-wrenching. When she realized the object of that gaze was not her but some weird little fish, it was all she could do not to weep with jealousy and longing. She shook with emotion in her little hiding place in the mulberry hedge from which she had taken to spying on my brother. All those years of carefully practiced grace had finally gotten the better of her, and now jealousy and discontent leaked from her soul like a slow poison. To make matters worse, she had an ulcer.
One day when my brother was out cutting firewood, my mother went to the spot beside the pond where he usually waited for the fish. She sprinkled a little rice into the water. The fish didn’t come. She tried this on a number of occasions without and luck.
Determined to outdo the little fish, my mother went to the market. She bought yards and yards of Indian cotton, the kind of stuff of which the British were so fond. Out came the scissors, the brightly coloured threads, and needles sharp enough to poke your eye out. My mother cut and sewed, snipped and tucked, darted and hemmed until she held in her hands a perfect little Victorian maiden’s dress with all her anxiety and strange wishes sewn neatly and mercilessly into the seams.
Well! My brother was so shocked he nearly fell down when she gave it to him. “If you’re going to be a girl, you may as well be well-dressed,” said my mother. My brother, who had secret penchant for things Western, shimmied out of his pants and high-collared blouse and put the thing on. He sashayed to the well for water.
As soon as he was gone, my mother snatched up his old clothes and donned them herself. She went to the pond and called to the fish as she had seen my brother do. The fish came to the surface. It was more than three feet long and its bright scales shimmered under the water. It looked up at her with intelligent eyes. My mother drew a needle sharp lance from behind her back and speared the fish through the belly with a single thrust. She tossed it up onto the bank where I fell with a splat! The fish was dead.
She trussed it up and nonchalantly threw it over her shoulder. She took it to my sister and asked her to steam it. Such a heavenly aroma wafted out of the kitchen half an hour later. My sister was an excellent cook.
On his way back from the well, my brother stopped by the pond to show his dress to the little fish. He stood beside the pond and called to her. He called and called until his voice grew hoarse and a little deeper than usual. He called and he waited until my sister came looking for him. “Time to eat,” she said. “Fish.”
A look of horror flooded over my brother’s face.
My sister had set the table neatly, with lots of little vegetable dishes surrounding the big central platter. In the platter lay the fish, in a puddle of soy sauce and steaming juices, its eyes cooked white and its little body sprinkled decoratively with shredded ginger, green onions and dried banana flowers. My brother burst into girlish tears.
“What’s wrong?” said my mother. “You sick?”
“Where did you get the fish?” said my brother.
“Found it in the pond. Wasn’t doing us any good in there so I caught it and took it home. You like fish don’t you?”
My brother began to wail again and would not stop until long after mother and sister had devoured the fish, claimed it dense and succulent, cleaned up, and gone to bed. When the moon rose full and white, he tumbled into a troubled sleep and began to dream.
In the dream, he saw the fish again, wavering under water. “Take my bones and polish them,” said the fish, “Hide them. Whenever you want something, all you need to do is ask.”
My brother was not particularly superstitious by nature. He woke to the crow of the noisy rooster more angry than sad. In the night, his feelings toward my mother had turned from apologetic inadequacy to the fury of injustice. “No more Mr. Meek and Mild,” he swore, “From now on I must defend myself.” He polished the bones and hid them behind a loose brick in the wall. He turned his mind inward and began to plot his revenge.
Once, while he was out feeding the chickens, on the other side of the wall in which the bones were hidden, he found himself craving sweets. My brother had a sweet tooth, but his craving was seldom satisfied. My mother was frugal, and almost never brought such things into the house. And when she did, they were unlikely to be intended for my brother. After feeding the chickens, he went to the river for water. When he returned, out of breath, with buckets sloshing, he found a pot of black sesame pudding bubbling on the stove. He was sure it was the magic fishbones that had fulfilled his wish. He slopped some into a bowl, slurped it back joyously and washed the bowl clean just before his mother returned with a package of real French coffee and a box of date and nut candy. “Out of my way, mui mui,” said my mother. “Go help your sister sell eggs.”
The chickens had been laying furiously for the last week or so, as though theiry little avian gonads were spiraling out of control. Omelets, custard and egg drop soup: They couldn’t eat them fast enough, and so our sister had taken to selling them on the corner. My brother went out obediently as though to join her, but as soon as our mother had closed the door, he slipped around the side of the house and set up a few old crates by the kitchen window. From there, he clearly observed the arrival of the old go-between and the whispered deal-making between the two women. As soon as he got the gist of the conversation, my brother climbed off the boxes and ran to his sister, who still had fourteen eggs rolling shamelessly about on her red cloth. “Ma’s going to marry you to an ugly old man,” he told her. “The go-between’s in the house right now. All that’s left is for him to take a look at you in the new blue suit you’re making, and if he likes what he sees, then off you go.”
Mid-Autumn Festival arrived. People made or bought paper lanterns for their children, dress in their finest clothes and went down to the river to look at the moon and one another’s little packages of candlelight, softened and tinted by the many-coloured stuff of the lanterns. My sister and mother were planning to go down to the river. My mother told my brother to mind the house. “You’re so morose,” said my mother, “you won’t have a good time anyway. Why not stay at home and make sure we don’t get robbed?”
My brother protested, but his scene was hijacked by my sister, who claimed she couldn’t find the blue suit she had just finished making for the occasion. My mother flew into a panicked fury, and finally had to lend an old suit of her own to my sister, one that was just a little too worn, and on which the stitching and embroidery were less fine than the delicate lines and figures that had poured from my sister’s hands. They left the house late. My mother’s eyes were creased with worry and fury, her movements agitated. My sister followed meekly behind her, ashamed of her error and worried about the viewing which was to come. Let’s be gracious and just say that they left, feathers flying, looking less than their best.
As soon as they were gone, my brother retired to his room. He pulled the loose brick from the wall. The fish bones tumbled out, and after them, a little heap of blue fabric. This was a long time ago. Who knows how my sister’s blue suit got there? Perhaps, terrified of her impending fate, she had hidden the suit behind the brick with the intention of disappointing the ugly old man. Perhaps my brother, fed up with his daily persecution, had stolen the suit in revenge for all the slights he had borne at my mother’s hands. Perhaps the fish bones had something to do with it. What does it matter?
Point is, my brother had the suit. He was a sucker for good fabric. The oily softness of the silk and the fineness of our sister’s stitching sent him into raptures. He slipped out of his work clothes and into the liquid smoothness of the suit. He braided and pinned his hair. If, on account of his advanced adolescence, his skin was less clear than it had been in earlier years, what of it? He scooped up the fish bones and returned them to their place in the crevice brushing his fingers against soft as he did so. He reached into the hole and drew out a pair of the daintiest embroidered shoes. These he placed on his wondrously tiny feet, and, stopping to buy a lantern from a paper artisan selling them on the corner, made his way down to the river.
Well! My mother and sister noticed him right away, dressed as he was in my sister’s beautiful suit. But try as they might to approach and scold him, they seemed unable to push through the crowds without losing sight of him. He recognized the young man his mother had selected for my sister – not an ugly old codger at all, but the handsome son of a well-to-do merchant family; a step up in the world, some might say. My brother smiled at the man demurely and then cast his eyes quickly downward. The man looked pleased. He tried to approach more closely, but my brother eluded him as deftly as he had my mother and sister.
He couldn’t avoid both parties the whole night. There arrived an unfortunate moment just around midnight when he found himself standing between them on the path. Tall river weeds blocked his way to the water and to the village on the other side of the path. Both parties approached him, each with its own eager reasons. My brother panicked. He leapt into the river weeds in the direction, fortunately, of the village, accidentally tripping over a rock and losing a dainty shoe on his way up. He didn’t stop to retrieve it. He dashed through the reeds and bushes and hurled along the embankments between the rice paddies, using mulberry bushes for cover as much as he could. He scrambled into the house, squirmed out of my sister’s suit, stuffed it back into the chink in the wall and replaced the brick. He put on the tattered suit he had been wearing earlier that day, went down to the kitchen, settled into a chair beside the stove and pretended to sleep.
When my mother and sister came home, there he was fast asleep beside the stove, looking as though he had never left. They searched the house for the suit and found nothing. No sign of a single, dainty slipped either. Puzzled and irritated, they went to bed.
The following morning, my brother’s tired eyes and rough, pimply skin made doubt further that they had actually seen him the night before. While they could have easily fed each other’s certainty about what they had seen, this time they only reinforced each other’s doubt.
“I don’t think it was him we saw,” said one.
“I thought I did,” said the other, “but now I’m not so sure.”
_____
Later in the afternoon there was a knock on the door. Two of the merchant’s servants appeared, looking sheepishly apologetic. “Sorry to bother you, auntie,” they said. “Yours is the only house in the village we haven’t searched. The merchant’s son has fallen in love with the owner of this slipper.” One of them drew the impossibly tiny shoe from his pocket.
“Hmmph!” said my mother. “Thinks he can get out of his contract with me so easily, does he?! I didn’t bring this girl up to be humiliated so! What do you think she is, a lump of cow dung to be discarded at will?!” She pushed my sister forward.
“If the shoe fits…” one of the merchant’s servants said, and then instantly regretted the double entendre. The other held out the shoe.
My sister strained and pushed, squeezed and shoved, but to no avail. There was no way her big flat peasant foot was going to fit into that shoe!
“We know you have another daughter,” said one of the servants. “Your neighbour told us.”
“There’s no way the shoe will fit her clumsy foot,” said my mother.
But of course she was wrong. Remember, my brother was the child of a very shapely concubine. Not only did the shoe fit his foot, but he drew another out of his pocket to match it. The servants swept him up and lowered him gently into a red sedan chaired. They put a veil over his pimply face, then hoisted the chair into the air and carted him away.
What was my brother intending? Did he actually plan to marry the merchant’s son? Just how liberated you think China was in those days? I hate to say it, but my brother was a man’s man after all, or should I be more clear? A manly man, a he-man, a het-man. This might be a fairy tale, but my brother was no fairy. The minute he was presented to the merchant’s son, he dropped his silken pants and shook a prodigious prong in his admirer’s face. Then he turned, shed the rest of his clothes, wiggled his bare, pimply butt at his would-be in-laws, and took off in the direction of his mother’s house. On her doorstep he announced the arrival of his esteemed surname’s next patriarch. Buck naked and too obviously a man, he stepped over the threshold and refused to don women’s clothes ever again.
You’d think someone who had lived the greater part of their life as a woman would have more sympathy toward the gentler sex. Not a chance! “Nothing gentle about them,” said my brother. From then on he laid down the law and ruled the house with and iron fist.
The River Merchant’s Wife
Li Po
No comments:
Post a Comment