Mandarins (20 page)

This was the first son that his wife had borne to him.

He stood in the doorway of the room and watched some grimy Chinese playing mahjong in the light of the moon, the pomegranates in bloom. Stepping inside again, he sat down at a low-hanging lamp and read Strindberg's
Confessions of a Fool
. Two pages were enough to bring a wry smile to his lips . . . The lies Strindberg was telling in writing letters to the countess, his lover, were hardly different from those he himself was writing.

The faded Buddhas, the gods, the horses, the lotus flowers . . . The weight they bore down on him was all but crushing. He looked up at them and forgot everything, even his own happiness at having shaken free of the lunatic's daughter.

He was walking the backstreets with a friend. A canopied rickshaw came racing directly toward them. To his amazement, the passenger was the woman he had seen the previous evening. Even in the full light of day, her face seemed bathed in moonlight. In the presence of his friend, needless to say, they did not exchange greetings . . .

“What a beautiful woman!” his friend exclaimed.

He responded without hesitation, even as he stared straight ahead to the verdant hill at the end of the road.

“Yes, quite a beauty indeed!”

The odor of cow dung drifted across the sunlit countryside. He walked up the slope, wiping away perspiration. The fields on both sides of the road were wafting forth the rich smell of ripened barley.

“Kill! Kill!” He was mumbling the words again and again. Whom should he kill? He knew only too well, as he remembered an utterly contemptible man with short-cropped hair. Suddenly beyond the fields of golden barley the dome of a Roman Catholic church came into view . . .

It was an iron sake flask. The fine lines engraved in it had at some point impressed upon him the beauty of
form
.

On the large bed he talked with her about this and that. Beyond the windows of the room it was raining. The crinum blossoms, it appeared, had begun to rot. Just as before, her face seemed to be
bathed in the light of the moon, and yet he could not help finding their conversation tedious. Lying on his stomach, he quietly lit a cigarette. It occurred to him that he had been living with her for seven years. He asked himself:
Do I still love her?
For all his habitual self-reflection, he was surprised at the answer:
Yes, I do
.

It resembled the odor of overripe apricots. He vaguely sensed it as he walked about the burned-out ruins. It occurred to him that the smell of corpses rotting under a burning sun is not as unpleasant as one might think. Yet as he stood in front of a pond heaped with bodies, he discovered that
gruesome
²
is not too strong a word. He was particularly moved by the remains of a young girl of twelve or thirteen. He gazed at her and felt something close to envy, as he remembered:
Those whom the gods love die young
. His elder sister and younger half brother had lost their homes to fire. But his sister's husband had been found guilty of false testimony and given a suspended sentence.

Death to one and all!
he could not help ruminating to himself, as he stood amidst the ashes.

He scuffled with his younger half brother. While the latter doubtlessly felt constrained by his presence, it was equally true he had lost his freedom because of that brother. Their relatives constantly urged the younger: “Learn from the example of your elder brother!” Yet the very advice only served to bind that same elder brother hand and foot. In their struggle, they rolled out onto the veranda. He still remembered that in the garden, under the rain-threatening sky, stood a crape myrtle, its bright-red blossoms in full bloom.

In the house of Voltaire, he was gazing out from a window at the high mountains. Above the glaciers there was not so much as the shadow of a vulture. A short Russian nonetheless continued persistently up the mountain path.

When night had fallen on the house of Voltaire, he wrote a tendentious poem as he remembered the figure of the Russian on the sloping trail:

At the age of thirty he discovered that he had a great fondness for an empty plot of land. Scattered about on the moss-covered ground were numerous bricks and tile shards. Yet in his eyes it was a veritable C
é
zanne.

He happened to remember his passion of seven or eight years before. At the same time, he realized that at the time he had not known a thing about color.

He intended to live with such intensity that he would have no regrets at his death. He nonetheless continued to spend his days in diffident deference to his foster parents and his aunt, thereby creating for himself a life divided between light and darkness. One day he saw standing in an Occidental clothing shop a Pierrot puppet and wondered how much like one he was himself. But his unconscious, that is, his second self, had long since included this intuition in a short story.

He was walking with a university student through a field of pampas grass.

“You and your classmates must still possess a lust for life.”

“Yes, but surely you do as well . . .”

“As a matter of fact, I do not. All I have is my desire to produce.”

That was his honest feeling. Somewhere along the way he had lost interest in life.

“But the creative urge is really the same thing, is it not?”

He gave no reply. Now taking distinct shape over the red spikes of the pampas grass was an active volcano, for which he experienced a feeling close to envy, though he himself did not know why . . .

He met a woman who even in sheer mental prowess was his match. By composing lyrical poems such as
Koshibito
,
³
he narrowly escaped danger. The twinge of regret he felt was as when one removes dazzling snow frozen to a tree trunk.

He sat on the balcony of a hotel surrounded by trees in bud, drawing pictures to amuse a young boy, the only son of the lunatic's daughter, with whom he had broken all ties seven years earlier.

She lit a cigarette and watched them. Despite his despondency, he went on drawing trains and airplanes. Fortunately, the child was not his, though it pained him terribly to be addressed as Ojisan.

When the boy had momentarily left them, she continued to smoke her cigarette, asking him coquettishly:

“Don't you think he resembles you?”

“Not at all. In the first place . . .”

“Well, there is such a thing as ‘prenatal influence,' is there not?”

He turned his eyes without replying. Yet in the depths of his heart he could not help feeling a cruel urge to strangle the woman.

In the corner of a caf
é
he was conversing with a friend. The friend was talking about the recent cold, while munching on a baked apple. He suddenly sensed a contradiction in what was being said.

“You're still single, aren't you?”

“Well, actually, I'm to be married next month.”

He fell silent despite himself. Coldly, somehow menacingly, the mirrors attached to the walls reflected multiple images of his face.

Why do you attack the present social system?

Because I see the evils born of capitalism.

The evils? I thought you did not distinguish between Good and Evil? Then what about
your
life?

He was engaged in dialogue with an angel—an angel who, incidentally, was wearing a silk hat and would have blushed before no one.

He began to suffer from insomnia and from a loss of stamina as well. Each of various physicians offered multiple diagnoses, all of these including: gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue . . .

But he knew the source of the malady: his shame of himself and his fear of
them
—the society he despised.

One afternoon, the sky darkened with snow clouds, he sat in the corner of a caf
é
, a lighted cigar in his mouth, his ear inclined to music coming from a gramophone on the other side of the room. It worked an uncanny effect on his spirits. When the record had come to a stop, he walked over and looked at the label:
The Magic Flute
—Mozart.

Suddenly he understood. Mozart, who had violated the Ten Commandments, had surely suffered—yet perhaps not as
he
had . . . Bowing his head, he quietly returned to his table.

He was thirty-five years old. Walking through a pine forest, spring sunlight falling on the trees, he recalled the words he had written two
or three years before: much to their misfortune, the gods, unlike us mortals, cannot kill themselves . . .

Once more dusk was falling. The storming sea relentlessly threw its spray against the twilight shore. Under such a sky he celebrated with his wife a second marriage. In this they felt both joy and sorrow. Together with their three children, they gazed at the lightning flashes in the offing. His wife was holding one of them in her arms, apparently holding back her tears.

“I think I see a ship out there.”

“Yes.”

“A ship whose mast is split in two.”

Taking advantage of being alone in his room, he set about to hang himself with a sash tied to the bars of the window. Yet when he put his head in the noose, he was suddenly struck by the fear of death, though he was not afraid of the momentary pain that such would entail. He took out his pocket watch the second time and by way of experiment measured how long it might take for him to be strangled. After a few uncomfortable moments, all became quite muddled. Once beyond that stage, he would surely enter the realm of death. He consulted his watch and saw that his distress had lasted one minute and some twenty seconds. Beyond the window all was pitch-black, but in that darkness could be heard the raucous crowing of a rooster.

A rereading of the
Divan
was giving his spirits a new vitality. This “Oriental Goethe” had previously been unknown to him. Seeing
Goethe standing serenely in the realm of enlightenment, beyond all good and evil, he felt an envy bordering on despair. In his eyes, the poet Goethe was greater than the poet Christ; in his heart bloomed the roses not only of the Acropolis and of Golgotha but also of Arabia. If only he had possessed the strength to follow in his footsteps . . . Even when he had completed his reading of the
Divan
and stilled his terrifying emotion, he could not help feeling all the more keenly his self-loathing at having allowed his life to become that of a Chinese imperial eunuch.

He was suddenly felled face downward by the suicide of his elder sister's husband. He was now further obliged to take care of her and her family. At least to him, his own future seemed as dark as impending nightfall. He viewed his mental ruin with a feeling close to derision, being thoroughly aware of all his vices and weaknesses, even as he continued to read volume after volume. Yet even Rousseau's
Confessions
were filled with heroic falsehoods. And as for
Shinsei
, he had never encountered as wily an old hypocrite as the protagonist of that particular work. Only François Villon was able to touch the depths of his soul. In some of his poems, he discovered “a beautiful male.”

The figure of Villon awaiting the gallows haunted him even in his dreams. Numerous times he had attempted to fall to the utter depths of human life, as had Villon, but neither his social circumstances nor his limited physical energy would permit it. He steadily grew weaker, much like the tree that Swift saw long ago—withering at the top.
⁴

She had a radiant face. It was quite as though one were seeing the light of dawn reflected in a thin sheet of ice. He felt affection for her but not love; not one finger of his had ever touched her body.

“You have said that you wish to die, have you not?” she asked.

“Hmm . . . It is not so much that I wish to die as that I am weary of living.”

After this exchange, they joined in a suicide pact.