Beauty and Sadness (16 page)

“Does that make you angry? You’d rather not look like him?”

“You’ve been trying to deceive me ever since you met me at the airport, haven’t you? You don’t want me to know
what
you think.”

“I’m not trying to deceive you.”

“Then that’s the way you always talk?”

“You’re being awfully unfair.”

“You said I could walk all over you, you know.”

“And you have to do that to get me to tell the truth? I’m not lying—you simply refuse to understand me! Aren’t
you
the one who’s hiding your thoughts? That’s why I’m unhappy.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am. I don’t know whether I’m happy or not!”

“I don’t know why I’m here with you, either.”

“Isn’t it because you love me?”

“Yes, but …”

“But what?”

Taichiro did not answer.

“But what?” Keiko pressed his hand between her palms and shook it.

“You’re not eating,” he said. She had hardly touched her dinner.

“The bride doesn’t eat at the wedding reception.”

“There, that’s the kind of thing you say.”

“You’re the one who started talking about food!”

O
toko was the sort of person who lost weight in summer.

When she was a girl in Tokyo she never worried about it; only in her early twenties, after living in Kyoto for some years, had she clearly realized her tendency to become thinner during the hot weather. Her mother pointed it out to her.

“You seem to waste away in the summer too, don’t you, Otoko?” her mother had said. “Something you inherited from me—it’s finally come out. We have the same kind of weaknesses. I’ve always thought you were strong-minded, but physically you’re my own child. There’s no arguing about it.”

“I’m not at all strong-minded.”

“You have a violent disposition.”

“I’m
not
violent!”

No doubt her mother was thinking of Otoko’s love
affair with Oki when she called her strong-minded. But was that not a young girl’s ardor, a frantic intensity of feeling quite apart from weakness or strength of will?

They had come to Kyoto because Otoko’s mother wanted to distract her daughter from her sorrow, and so they both avoided mentioning Oki’s name. However, being alone together in an unfamiliar city, with only one another to turn to for consolation, they could not help glimpsing the Oki in each other’s heart. For the mother, her daughter seemed to be a mirror reflecting Oki, and for the daughter her mother was another such mirror. And each saw her own reflection in the other’s mirror.

One day while writing a letter Otoko happened to open the dictionary to the character for “think.” As she scanned its other meanings (“yearn for,” “be unable to forget,” “be sad”) she felt her chest tighten. She was afraid to touch the dictionary—Oki was even there. Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive. Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

Otoko understood very well that her mother—a lone woman with an only child—was anxious for her to forget him. But she did not want to forget. She seemed to cling to his memory as if she could not live without it. Probably she had been able to leave the barred room in the psychiatric ward because of her steadfast love for Oki.

Once when he was making love to her, Otoko moaned deliriously and begged him to stop. Oki loosed his hold, and she opened her eyes. The pupils were dilated and
glistening. “I can hardly see you, Sonny-boy. Your face looks blurred, as if it’s under a stream.” Even at such a moment she called him “Sonny-boy.”

“You know, if you died I couldn’t go on living. I simply couldn’t!” Tears glinted in the corners of Otoko’s eyes. They were not tears of sadness but of surrender.

“Then there’d be no one like you to remember me,” said Oki.

“I couldn’t bear just remembering the man I love. I’d rather die too. You’d let me, wouldn’t you?” Otoko nudged her face against his throat.

At first he did not take her seriously. Then he said: “I suppose if anyone pulled a knife on me, or threatened me with a pistol, you’d step forward to protect me.”

“I’d gladly give my life for yours, anytime.”

“That’s not what I meant. But if some danger loomed up before me you’d throw yourself forward to shield me, without even thinking, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“No man would do that for me. Only this little girl—–”

“I’m not little!” said Otoko.

“Are you really so grown-up?” he asked, fondling her breasts.

Oki was also thinking of the unborn child that she was carrying, and of what might become of it if he were suddenly to die. That was something Otoko learned later, when she read his novel.

When her mother had remarked that Otoko seemed to waste away in the summer, perhaps she was also thinking
that by now her daughter was surely not losing weight because of memories of Oki.

Although Otoko was delicately built, with fine bones and sloping shoulders, she had never been seriously ill. Of course she became worn and thin, with a strange look in her eye, after all the troubles caused by her love affair. But she soon recovered physically. The youthful resilience of her body made her still wounded feelings seem incongruous. Except for her melancholy look when she thought of Oki, no one would have been aware of her sadness. Even that occasional shadow, the expression of a young girl’s yearning, only enhanced her beauty.

Otoko had known since childhood that her mother lost weight in summer. She often wiped the perspiration from her mother’s back and chest, and knew very well, though she did not mention it, that her thinness came from susceptibility to the heat. But Otoko was too young to worry about having inherited that weakness, until she heard it from her mother. She must have had a tendency to it for years.

From her mid-twenties Otoko always wore a kimono, and so her slenderness was not as obvious as it would have been in skirts or slacks. Still, there was no denying how thin she became every summer. In later years it reminded her of her dead mother.

Summer by summer, Otoko’s weakness and loss of weight seemed more severe.

“What kind of tonic is good for this?” she once asked her mother. “There are lots of medicines advertised in the papers—have you tried any of them?”

“Well, they must do some good,” her mother answered vaguely. After a pause, she went on in a different tone: “Otoko, the best medicine for a woman is getting married.”

Otoko was silent.

“A man is the kind of medicine that gives a woman life! All women have to take it.”

“Even if it’s poison?”

“Even then. You took poison once, and you still don’t realize it, do you? But I know you can find a good antidote. Sometimes you need a poison to counteract a poison. Maybe the medicine is bitter, but you have to shut your eyes and swallow it. You may even gag, and think it won’t go down your throat.”

Otoko’s mother died without having seen her daughter follow her advice. No doubt that was her last regret. It was true that Otoko had never thought of Oki as a poison. Even in the room with the barred windows she felt no resentment or hatred toward him. It was only that she was half-crazed with love. The powerful drug she took to kill herself was soon completely purged from her body; Oki and his baby were gone from her too, and the scars they left might have been expected to fade. Yet her love for Oki remained undiminished.

Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every
human being flows through time in a different way.

As Otoko approached forty she wondered if the fact that Oki remained within her meant that this stream of time was stagnant, rather than flowing. Or had her image of him flowed along with her through time, like a flower drifting down a river? How she drifted along in his stream of time she did not know. Although he could not have forgotten her, time would at least have flowed differently for him. Even if two people were lovers, their streams of time would never be the same.…

Today too, as she had been doing every morning when she awakened, Otoko massaged her forehead with her fingertips, and then ran her hands over the back of her neck and under her arms. Her skin was damp. She felt as if the dampness oozing from her pores had soaked into her night kimono.

Keiko seemed to be attracted by the odor and the sleekness of Otoko’s damp skin, and sometimes wanted to peel off whatever she wore next to her body. Otoko hated intensely to smell of perspiration.

Last night, though, Keiko had come home after twelve-thirty, and had sat down uneasily, avoiding Otoko’s eyes.

Otoko was lying in bed, shielding her face from the ceiling light with a round fan and gazing at the half dozen sketches of a baby’s face that were tacked on the wall. She seemed absorbed in them, and merely glanced over at Keiko. “Late, aren’t you?”

Otoko had not been allowed to see her premature
baby, but was told that it had had jet-black hair. When she wanted to know more about the baby her mother had said: “She was a sweet little thing, and looked just like you.” That was only to console her, Otoko felt. In recent years she had seen photographs of newborn babies, but they all seemed ugly. There was even an occasional photograph of a baby being delivered, or still attached to its mother by the umbilical cord, but these she found quite repulsive.

Thus she had no idea of the face and form of her baby, only a vision in her heart. She knew very well that the child in her
Ascension of an Infant
would not look like her dead baby, and she had no wish to paint a realistic portrait. What she wanted was to express her sense of loss, her grief and affection for someone she had never seen. She had cherished that desire so long that the image of the dead infant had become a symbol of yearning to her. She thought of it whenever she felt sad. Also the picture was to symbolize herself surviving all these years, as well as the beauty and sadness of her love for Oki.

Otoko had not yet succeeded in painting an infant’s face that satisfied her. The holy faces of cherubs and of the Christ child were usually firmly outlined, either artificial-looking or like miniature adults. Rather than such a strong, clear-cut face, she wanted to portray a faint, dreamlike one, a haloed spirit neither of this world nor of the world beyond. It should convey a gentle, soothing feeling, and yet also suggest a brimming pool of sorrow. Still, she did not want it to be too abstract.

And how was she to paint the wizened body of a premature baby? How should she treat the background, the minor motifs? Again Otoko looked through her albums of Redon and Chagall, but these delicate fantasies were too alien to stimulate her own imagination.

Once more the old Japanese portraits of a saintly child came before her eyes: portraits based on the legend of the youthful Saint Kobo dreaming that he sat on an eight-petaled lotus talking with the Buddha. In the oldest of them the figure seemed pure and austere, but later it softened and took on a voluptuous charm, until there were even “boys” that could be mistaken for beautiful little girls.

On the night before the Festival of the Full Moon, when Keiko asked to have her portrait painted, Otoko had suspected that it was her own deep concern for the
Ascension of an Infant
that made her think of doing a classical
Holy Virgin
in the manner of the portraits of the boy saint. But afterward she began to wonder if her attraction to the portraits of Saint Kobo might not have an element of self-love, of infatuation with herself. Perhaps in both cases she had a hidden desire for a self-portrait. Might not these sacred visions be nothing other than a vision of a saintly Otoko? The doubt stabbed like a sword, plunged by herself against her will into her own breast. She had to draw it out. But the scar remained, and at times it hurt.

Of course Otoko had no intention of copying the portraits of the boy saint. Yet obviously that image was lurking in the depths of her heart. Even the titles
Ascension of
an Infant
and
Holy Virgin
suggested that through these pictures she wanted to purify, indeed to sanctify, her love for her dead baby and for Keiko.

Keiko had taken the youthful portrait of Otoko’s mother for a self-portrait when she first saw it. After that the picture always reminded Otoko that Keiko, besides mistaking the woman in the picture for her had said how lovely she looked. It was out of longing that Otoko had painted her mother as young and beautiful, but perhaps there was an element of self-love there as well. Their natural resemblance could hardly account for it. Perhaps she was actually portraying herself.

Otoko still loved Oki, her baby, and her mother, but could these loves have gone unchanged from the time when they were a tangible reality to her? Could not something of these very loves have been subtly transformed into self-love? Of course she would not be aware of it. She had been parted from her baby and her mother by death, and from Oki by a final separation, and these three still lived within her. Yet Otoko alone gave them this life. Her image of Oki flowed along with her through time, and perhaps her memories of their love affair had been dyed by the color of her love for herself, had even been transformed. It had never occurred to her that bygone memories are merely phantoms and apparitions. Perhaps it was to be expected that a woman who had lived alone for two decades without love or marriage should indulge herself in memories of a sad love, and that her indulgence should take on the color of self-love.

Even if she had been led into her infatuation with her
pupil Keiko, so much younger and of her own sex, was that not another form of infatuation with herself? Otherwise, she would surely never dream of portraying a girl like Keiko—a girl who seemed to be turning predatory, and who had asked to pose in the nude for her—as a Buddhist Holy Virgin sitting on a lotus flower. Had Otoko not wanted to create a pure, lovely image of herself? Apparently the girl of sixteen who loved Oki would always exist within her, never to grow up. Yet she had been unaware of it.…