Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (65 page)

One evening the ancient woman, creeping toward me, with a cane in each hand and a garbage bag tied to her back, lifted up her head with effort, composed herself and inquired: Excuse me, but what do you pray for nowadays?

Although her question surprised me, I lacked any reason not to answer it, so I said: I prefer not to give up my hopes and desires completely. I hope not to freeze to death before spring. I always desire a little
more sake than I have, but perhaps such wishes are permissible in my situation.

Do you expect your wishes to be fulfilled?

Well, I've left my expectations. Anyhow, I have my paper ghosts.

That's right. You're getting famous in Shinjuku. Even the Yakuza
*
are talking about you!

We seated ourselves on a piece of cardboard. My paper ghosts began to play, and so the Genji lady Tomoe, blackhaired and lovely, decapitated Muroshige of Musashi at full gallop, and his corpse took on the many delicious blues and violets in the kimonos and sky of an old
ukiyo-e
print of Kabuki actors. Yoritomo hanged Yokihi from a flowering cherry whose silhouetted branches writhed into brushstroked Japanese characters. One and all, they watched me serenely, as glad as I that they were dead to me.

A rich lady approached, carrying a shopping bag in each hand. Her hair reminded me of the wet sparkle of Nakano's spangled handbag and silver raincoat, so I smiled at her. She glanced at us in horrified sorrow, then hurried on without giving anything.

The old woman sat smiling down into the earth. I asked her: You're a goddess, aren't you? Did you give life to my paper ghosts?

Never mind. Would you like to be with Etsuko and her mother again?

Thank you, but I would rather not be selfish.

Commendable! said the old woman. You may come to me.

When she removed her mask, she became a young girl. She had long black hair like the Pale Lady, and when she smiled at me, I seemed to remember an ancient moon rising over reeds.— I bowed until my forehead touched the sidewalk.

Then she removed her young girl's mask, and showed herself as an ancient skull. I was afraid for a moment, but I bowed again.

She said: Are you disappointed?

No, goddess—

Just as in a blast of sunlight cherry blossoms may grow so distinct as to resemble paper representations of themselves, so this divinity became
ever truer or more false with each unmasking of herself, but in any case no more known; therefore, I supposed that some further aspect of her, no matter whether I ever saw it, might lie beneath the skull, which anyhow grinned at me as easily as did every significant entity in my life—and, after all, who can hope to rob the grave of its mask?

Come to Mirror Mountain now, she said. I felt free because my heart did not follow after her. Her bent spine was as erotic as the back of a
maiko
's neck. So I entered her house, where the summer gardens and winter gardens of richness walled themselves around us both—but only for a moment, to remind me of the paper world I forsook. Our paper ghosts danced for us one more time, although they had all become skeletons. They sang a song about returning to the capital. Yoritomo raised his ribbed paper lance, which was more narrow and three times longer than a chopstick, and then the Pale Lady chanted: Now I sink beneath this mound of grass; now I will fly for awhile.— Then the magic went out of them. I had no complaints; the old woman and I were fond of each other. We earned hundred-yen coins and entertained our friends by acting out the old Kyogen skit about the man who sings best while drunk and in his wife's lap.

Mrs. Wenuke Lei McLeod was an elegant widow of about forty-five. I met her through her younger sister Rileene, a former lover of mine who happened to be one of my wife's best friends. While we were intimate, Rileene had led me to believe that she and Wenuke must be estranged, so it was half a surprise when she invited me to meet her at Wenuke's place; but only half, because when love ends, many impossible things become possible.

Rileene had been a dark brown slender girl with curly black hair; I especially used to prize the sparkle of ocean spray on her bare brown breasts. She had wanted to marry me; I never trusted the stability of her inclinations. Indeed, less than two weeks after my wife's death Rileene was unfaithful to me with a Cuban woman named Carmen, who knew how to cook so well that Rileene now went around in maternity dresses. Once her waist had begun to spread, I took equal delight in watching how her fat buttocks swung apart whenever she squatted down. As for the perilous transmutation of love into mere friendship, that Rileene and I had accomplished with small graceful sadnesses and scarcely any resentments. Over time we grew proud of one another. Strange to say, Carmen disliked me. I certainly bore her no grudge.

Apparently Carmen did not care for Wenuke, either. I was led to believe that Rileene found herself easily bored in her sister's company; so, since her best companion could not be bothered to join her, Rileene picked up her little mobile phone, which was studded with miniature cowrie shells, and dialled me up.

The McLeod property had been in the Captain's family since the very end of the nineteenth century; and at one time it must have resembled the residence of a Yankee sea-trader right down to the widow's walk on the roof, but since the death of Wenuke's husband, if not before, the jungle had nourished itself on the place. Creepers grew up the shuttered windows, and the front porch was rotten enough that Rileene, who knew it so well that she must bring guests here frequently, had to show me
where not to walk. The roof was sagging with greenery. Orchids grew down from the knocker of the front door.

As for Wenuke, she wore green and seemed exceedingly quiet. Her youthfulness surprised me. The instant I saw her, I had to have her.

Watching me, she smiled, her slit skirts half revealing her thighs, in the fashion of banana leaves in the wind. Rileene soon departed. Wenuke awarded her a fluttery little wave.

As I sat with her beneath a grand old banana tree, whose broken dark leaf-sails shook in the wind, spewing lovely drops of rainwater into our faces, we rocked in a rickety lovers' swing. Other men might have wondered how many had sat there with her, and whatever became of them. As for me, I was content with adoring the crescent-shaped shadows beneath her eyes. The Captain drowned in a tidal wave, Rileene had said. Fortunately, I have never been attracted to lucky women. Whenever a raindrop fell on her cheek, Wenuke licked it up with her surprisingly long tongue. My heart pounded. Presently she took my hand and led me inside the mildewed old house. I glimpsed vines growing up from the kitchen sink, a bathroom which was now a black hole in the rotten floor, bookcases screened by descending stalks of greenery. Wenuke took me up the black, rotten stairs, pointing to the places that were unsafe. Her bedroom was gloriously overgrown with ferns whose sweet scent masked the putrescence in the walls. The Captain's photograph still hung from a rusty nail which I could have pulled out with two fingers. He wore a worried look, and mold freckled his bearded face. I cannot believe he would have liked me. But Wenuke, seeing me study the portrait, insinuated herself and turned it against the wall. When the nail slipped out, the picture shattered on the floor, releasing a fat old beetle, perhaps the Captain's incarnation, that twiddled its feelers indecisively for a moment, then marched into a hole in the wall. Wenuke shrugged. I have never been attracted to sentimental women.

The bed was a stout mahogany four-poster whose canopy had rotted into something like a spiderweb; impatiently, Wenuke pulled it away by the handful, and once I saw what she was doing I helped her. We ripped away the sodden sheets. The mattress had long since reverted to moss of an almost shockingly emerald brightness. Wenuke was already
unbuttoning her dress, which fastened from the back; I undid the last button for her.

I had guessed what she was, but that only increased my relish; for I knew myself to be a man of experience. Before I was entirely naked, she was already swarming all over me. Even her hair seemed to be twining itself around my throat. Her breath and body were deliciously humid, so that when I lay in her arms I felt all at once refreshed, intoxicated and suffocated. In any event, I could not get enough of her. The coffee-like odor of her armpits, her breasts like a cluster of green papayas around a white trunk, the perfect softness of her legs, her cool ginger-ginseng scent, these were like various desserts set before me on a porcelain plate at a fancy restaurant.

When she climaxed, she gave off a sudden medicinal smell.

On closer inspection I learned that the hair in her armpits was actually delicate green vines with leaves like miniature pearls. Her pubic hair was coarse and reddish-brown, like coconut fibers. Her saliva tasted like rainwater. There was a faintly sour-salty smell about her crotch after she had urinated, which she did only rarely and then in transparent brownish-green gushes.

She had a way of wrapping herself around me and drinking my sweat with her entire body; I could feel the trillion little mouths of her skin.

Just as influenza sometimes announces herself with a sweetly feverish lassitude—one wants nothing more than to remain on one's back, enjoying the ceiling through drooping eyelids; and it's only upon attempting to sit up that the discomforts of sickness become apparent—so what Wenuke was doing to me seemed but part of the sexual act itself, when she let down her long hair-vines and wrapped us both in cool green leaves. Sometimes I would dig my face into the crook of her arm, just to catch my breath, and afterward I would never be sure whether I had slept. In those years I often experienced dizzy spells, as do many men my age; and this sweet greenskinned woman of mine made me a trifle dizzier, but
only when I sat up. But there came the time when I finally rose to dress, and she pulled me back down on top of her. Letting her win that contest, I entered her in a frenzy while she twined her legs around me, pulsating, biting me and sucking me. We slept. Then I truly needed to go; I had an appointment. I tried to sit up, but she would not disengage her arms. When I said her name, she opened her evil eyes with the sudden threatening boom of a wave against a lava-cliff.

Having enjoyed several experiences with supernatural lovers in the past, I was not in the least alarmed. The beautiful Chinese fox-spirits who suck semen out of a man until he dies can be beaten at their own game: sustained, repeated, remorseless penetration will kill
them
first, so that suddenly, in the middle of the act, the lovely longhaired lady squirming on the bed becomes a sad little fox-corpse with its tongue hanging out. As for the elf-ladies of Central Europe, I've found them innocuous, since all they truly desire is a man's happy surrender for twenty or a hundred years, which in any case spend themselves ecstatically, like a single night. What he-man would pass that up? Everyone you used to know will be gone, of course, but one can't be miserly in the game of love.

That is how life is for those of us who can be caught by the sudden, astonishing dearness of a strange woman's back.

If you want to know, I was in love with femininity. That was why I hazarded myself with supernatural bedmates. In my quest for the most womanly woman of all, I sought out her who was not half derived from man, which is to say her who had never had a father.

Regarding the fox-women I do admit that in each case I felt bad for doing it, but then I thought: It was her, me or abstinence; and neither of us had wanted the last! She would have murdered me if she could.

I remember the first, who tried her feeble best to be good to me, but dared not cease even momentarily from being good to herself as she saw it, which meant protecting herself from what she was doing to me by
draining my semen; once I began to show signs of anemia she cut herself off from my neediness. Unfortunately, it is impossible to divorce a fox and live; these beings do not accept abandonment, perhaps because once they have attached themselves to a given host, severance would cause them great suffering. At any rate, she had a lovely voice and long brown hair—but what is the use of remembering her? When she died, I remember how the white waterfall of urine gushing between her dark thighs turned into a snowy tail.

Departing the room forever, I emerged into the Chinese beauty parlor whose beautiful hairdresser, in a polka-dotted miniskirt, was rapping the shoulderblades of a happy man.— I think you have very good time? she demanded, continuing her business as rapidly as a chicken-and-rice vendeuse can slice with her cleaver.

And I remember the latest, who kept striding and kicking, prancing and flashing various shades of leg and breast while her lies alone smiled in the friendly darkness. She possessed the small unwinking eyes of a splay-legged turtle. Unlike the first, she not only preyed on men, but camouflaged herself as a prostitute. Light puckered up on the floor. My semen trickled down her black bikini, as slimy as a worm. Pretending to be happy and desirous, she dragged me into the back room.

At her funeral an old Chinese lady raised an incense stick above her head, clasped her hands at mouth level, silently praying before the shrine, her eyes tightly shut, her lips clenched; I suppose she must have been the procuress.

Below, in the creamy brown river, floating shacks on logs like old houseboats gone to decay reminded me of other lives that she and I could have lived; and I remember a hill of flower trees, coconut trees, papaya trees; a railing whose tiles were hot to the touch; and a street on which headscarfed women slowly strolled. The ones who were fox-spirits in that town frequented either the Tong Chong Chinese Club or the Lai Zhu Unisex Hair Salon.

And regarding the elf-ladies, I truly have no regrets at all. Thanks to them, I have already lived a thousand years.

Once an elf-lady married me, and then left me largely alone while she went out to enchant other flies into her spiderweb. I spent most of that century chopping wood for her. Grey hairs grew from my chin as slowly as the stained glass windows of ancient cathedrals ooze from rectangles into trapezoids. Brown creeks unhurriedly undercut the leaning trees of my solitude and occasionally some long narrow weasel-like animal clattered from stone to stone, chasing a fish. When she returned at last, with a hypnotized knight clinging to the tail of her white horse, she set the knight to breaking stones, dismounted and with a laughing kiss set me free. It had all been a game. I felt joyous and strong as I wandered back into the world, and found a fairy hoard of gold upon the way.

Ultimately, the play of light through banana leaves leads one to heaven, which I now inhabited with my naked Wenuke, who seated herself on a river rock, laving her drawn-up thighs, her desire to devour me as sweetly naked as a baby's toes wiggling in its mother's lap.

Whenever I left, even for a moment, I was attacked by her sadness at my back. Moreover, each time I tried to get up from beneath her, I felt weaker and she clung to me with greater determination. I had no illusions.

Once upon a time, a certain carnivorous woman sought to do to me as she had done to my nine hundred predecessors. Just as a smiling Thai mother dabbles her child's face with sacred water while he grimaces, so this fiendish lover of mine began to baptize me with a silver poison drawn from between her legs; fortunately, I confounded her with my bezoar stone, and she perished in a single shriek. How and when would Wenuke make her attempt to murder me?

We sat alone together in her rotting house, and in the rocking chair which would have caved in beneath a child's weight she knitted me a green pullover, the threads blossoming one by one as her needle drew them up toward the light, her face calmly poised over the growing garment that resembled a swatch of turf; sometimes she smiled, and sometimes peeped at me as if she might be plotting something; but what if it was only that she loved me? I had hollowed out the handle of my keychain
and filled it with a military herbicide. Do you consider me a scheming betrayer? But I never killed any lady except in self-defense.

I was in love with every one of them, for they eschewed the tiresome unpredictability of human women, who might start an argument at any moment, or decide to leave me. At least the supernaturals always knew what they wanted.

The carnivorous woman I mentioned had murdered my best friend five hundred years before; and when I encountered her in that alien city I suddenly heard the ghost of my friend laughing his happy sniggering laugh, watching me from overhead in the night, knowing my misdeeds, and a pet phrase of his came into my head; he said it and laughed, said it and laughed, but in the laugh there was only bitterness; he was saying his pet name for the woman who had now become my lover. Well, who was he angry at? She had destroyed him, not I. Her kiss was as lovely as the sea's salty spittle squirting up against the walls of my heart.

And then I saved myself from her and she died in that long scream.

Wenuke was certainly as tender as sautéed snowpea shoots in a careful Chinese restaurant.

She sucked the semen out of me with her mouth, and kept sucking, until finally, when she raised her face and looked at me, I saw it trickling from the corner of her mouth, and there were threads of blood in it. I felt so dizzy that I could hardly think. If I didn't get away right now, I would die. I stood up, clung to the bedpost for a moment and staggered naked down those rotten stairs, expecting her to pursue me with her whipping tendrils, but she lay as if uprooted; and presently, just before I fled the house, I heard from upstairs the beginning of a keening like the sobbing of a child left alone at night with a cruel mother, a sobbing that continues hour after hour while the child tries to do what the mother demands, always failing to please her.