The Last Paradise

by Ling Yaozhong

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

It began to feel more like night-time.

“Say something about your success. You know all the papers carried the news that your research had won a national award.”

He mocked her, with a mischievous smile, not wanting to answer her question.

“You really should have been a choreographer, the way you match moods.”

* * *

He had felt tremendous joy at being released from marital bondage. He wouldn’t have to take her or her female conventions again. A desire to brave danger had then heartened him to venture off away from the unclean city of Shanghai, for preference to somewhere sparsely populated and primitive, to taste another side of life. At fifty he had still felt young.

Another pressing reason had been that for a long period his surroundings had made him feel neither alive nor dead. He had been a research fellow, working all day long for crabbed professors pushing eighty, pedantic old fellows nibbling their lives away through their subjects, and he couldn’t bear what he felt was a rape of his will and talents. Why were his own projects never given any prominence? When the Southwest Tropical Research Unit had advertised for skilled persons to work down on the border, he had applied immediately. “I’m free!” he had yelled.

High latitude variety of rubber tree. Cold current. Widespread death from frost. Urgent need of research into new varieties.

The wilds, the utter wilds. Swamp gas. Noxious vapours that overtook a man. He had known a kind of aggressive, giant leech the diameter of a fountain pen, with his own eyes seen a woman out collecting firewood die, eaten away by one that had entered her vagina, fled weeping with her on his back. No river without a lurking pangolin; no virgin forest with a virgin’s gentle softness. Rugged mountains bursting ever and again into a tumult of curses and so ever a-quake: lascivious waters graceful and sweet but full of rocks that bit the feet.

He had taken two other men into the primeval forest to set up a nursery. The experiment had commenced. Hybridization had begun — from Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam, even the Amazon. He had become the leading hybridization and cross-breeding expert.

* * *

“That’s very moving. I didn’t think you’d done anything so moving.” The lady eyed the river, speaking softly. “You succeeded admirably in your work.” She gave him a smile pregnant with an amused tenderness from their marriage, openly sentimental and melancholy, which he perceived and accepted with tacit luxury, putting on a pleased expression and winking at her.

“That must be Zhang the Carpenter.” He turned around in his wicker chair and looked at the shadowy mountain forest. “I caught the scent of the Nanmu wood.”

A stout black ox hitched to a cart carrying a Nanmu log halted at Zhang the Carpenter’s call. He was a gloomy, middle-aged man of concealed vigour.

“Have a drink, Master Zhang.” The gentleman handed him a glass. “I will trouble you to start tonight. Your health.”

Zhang nodded and took a drink, saving a few drops to sprinkle on the ox’s head and then on the chill Nanmu, three metres long and thick as an oil drum, which he carefully spanned out before looking the gentleman up and down.

With steadfast composure the latter poured him another glass.

She half closed her eyes, gripped with nausea.

Zhang took the ox aside into the nearby woods and there built a campfire, where the sound of his hatchet scraping off bark gave way after a while to that of chiselling and hammering, deep, ringing and intensely beautiful. The water of the Pala was outdone. Any comparison would have been forced.

“A busy night, to be sure,” the gentleman noted and drank another glass of wine.

* * *

He sensed that things were closing in now, were less vague than they had been. The wine was good wine and wouldn’t produce hallucinations, of that he was confident.

Years before he and she had been so young and carefree. Twenty-five years earlier he had just turned thirty, and she had been just twenty-four. Even with nothing to eat or drink, they would still have had so much energy to burn. She danced beautifully, a swan mesmerizing the males. All the world’s power to bewitch men might have been gathered on stage in those slender feet.

Every time she performed, all his friends had gone to watch and cheer. Without the least inhibition, they had fawned on her and presented her with flowers and gaily decorated bouquets. Her dance troupe leader had said how well his star was looked after by all the young men in the scientific research unit.

The gentleman had taken part in none of the charades, for he had looked down on the largesse of his piteous companions, feeling them a group of unrefined simpletons. He had first associated with others of the troupe and learned about a tiny blemish in her perfection. A slight stagger in her grand jeté, a habitual mistake for which there was no hope of redress. Good heavens, he had succeeded. He, a layman, would never have discovered the secret if her pals had not betrayed her by pointing it out to him. He had submitted a short essay to an art publication, treating that stagger with professional sophistication and immediately afterward had looked her up with genuine adoration, showering her with pure passion and esteem. The greater the contact, the greater the passion, until at last she had become pregnant. She had given premature birth to a male child, which had died. Since then the gentleman had always suspected that his blood was diseased, destined not to engender anything whatsoever.

All things considered, there had been this son who had died early. Had he lived, he would surely now have risen above the crowd, achieved more than I. In which case, I’d now be having to prepare a will for him.

* * *

“You’ve been sleeping.” The lady went over to his chair.

“It seems so.”

“The leopard has left. It’s gone.”

“Every day at this time it goes away a while. I’m certain it’ll be back before long.”

“That carpenter’s racket is most disagreeable, quite inauspicious. Can’t you tell him to stop?”

“He hammers and chisels pervasively, like the true craftsman he is. I enjoy it.”

* * *

Zhang the Carpenter, sweating heavily, came up for some wine. He drank dismally, his whiskers sharing the drink.

“There’s a miasma drifting in from the mountain slope. Will you be retreating?”

Zhang the Carpenter felt as though their souls were leaving just then, for neither paid him any attention. He went back to the fire to carve and polish the coffin.

“What’s a miasma?” she asked him.

“Swamp gas.” He let out a long sigh. “It oozes out of the woods in the tropics. It bites you, and you contract malaria and develop a high fever. It does smell sweet, though.”

“Let’s withdraw.”

“You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter, really. At night it rises. It won’t get us. Set your mind at ease. I have experience of it.”

The night entered that phase when all that the light of day conceals sets up a commotion. Four-footed things sniffed the air, unburdening themselves of the day’s stored energy, male and female pairing off to serious discussion. Within the air is the confused vehemence of potency and virility, continually consuming. The forest, mountains, rivers, stars and moon all change places, knowing that they cannot restrain the world at that moment.

* * *

“The leopard’s returned.” She intoned this to him. She was more relaxed now. The two beady flames were fuller, brighter, matured. A fatally rich, glossy halo emanated from the leopard’s eyes.

“I told you it would.” He opened his eyes and looked at the opposite bank, silently measuring the distance between himself and the mute flames, then eyeing for a long time the shadowy, empty space between himself and them. Suddenly, he was startled to notice that at the same moment her eyes also scanned that void unceasingly.

They looked into each other’s eyes and laughed, seeing everything subtly and mysteriously.

A shooting star streaked momentarily. “It fell into the river, that star.” She sat up.

“The world has one more stubborn chunk of stone,” he said.

She turned around and went toward him gently. Caressing his shoulders, she gave him a kiss. It was her most affectionate display since arriving. “Come with me back to the city. There is still perhaps hope for a cure.”

He shook his head, sniffing back his tears.

Another shooting star streaked downward to gouge an earthen pit. Blood splashed on the edge of the nearby woods.

The lady snuggled closer to him. “It’s late. Come in. We’ll spend the night together,” she prompted him, but still he shook his head.

* * *

In the stillness Zhang the Carpenter made the only noise: the fire had little vitality and was almost dying. Zhang drank alone and carved and polished the coffin.

The Bengali on the opposite bank emerged at last, showing all its spots. It extended a paw to the water’s edge and dipped it in. Then breaking the surface of the dead water, it swam across.

Faster and faster.

*
* *

[Translator’s note] About the Author

Ling Yaozhong was born in 1954. After his graduation from college in 1981, he has been researching on the theory of dancing at the Shanghai Dance Drama Troupe. He began publishing short stories in 1980 and “The Last Paradise” appeared in Shanghai Literature no. 5, 1987.

The English translation originally appeared in: Chinese Literature, Beijing, spring 1989, ISSN 0009-4617