The Bathing Women (23 page)

“Yes, it’s very important. I want to work in your manufacturing plant.”

Master Qi became quiet, surprised by Fei’s request. He felt he couldn’t help her. He had just discussed things with the principal and the two positions had been pretty much assigned. Besides, their factory didn’t want to hire women this time. Uncertain of what to say, he kept silent.

By then, though hardly noticing, they had reached the riverbank. It was dusk in early winter. The wind from the river was very harsh and there was no one around. It was not clear that such a quiet and out-of-the-way route had been his unconscious choice or under her conscious direction. She broke the silence. “Actually, I was quite unreasonable to make such a request of you. You don’t even know my name. What right do I have to make such a request?”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Tang Fei.”

“Maybe you’ll have a chance later,” he said.

“Later? How much later?” Fei pressed without giving him a break.

“Maybe next year. Maybe—”

“Next year won’t do. It’ll be too late,” Fei interrupted Master Qi. “As soon as I graduate in spring, I’ll definitely have to go to the countryside.” Now her tone became impatient, as if she were talking to an old acquaintance.

“Fei.” He said her name sharply. “Can’t your family—your parents—help you out?”

It was a blunt but sensible question, and Fei didn’t mind Master Qi asking. Actually, his question provided her the opportunity to open her heart to him, so she said both of her parents, who had been high-ranking journalists for the central government, had lost their lives in an aeroplane crash while on a mission abroad. She had no choice but to come to live with her uncle in Fuan, who was a blind man working as a masseur at a hospital for traditional medicine and couldn’t even take care of himself. Her aunt took out her anger on her, treating her to curses, if not actual beatings, every day.
Ai,
she, the orphan of the martyrs, couldn’t bear such a life under someone else’s roof, but she had no other relatives in this city, and to whom could she turn? Then she heard about the recruiting and saw Master Qi, whom she felt was her only hope. How she wanted to be able to make Master Qi family. She really wanted to call him “big brother.” Without siblings, orphaned, how she’d hoped to have an older brother. Now it looked like there was no hope for her—she was utterly unwanted in the world, and would rather throw herself into the river and drown than continue living.

Tearfully, she spoke these words into the harsh, chilly northern wind, running down to the riverbank as she spoke. It didn’t seem false when she said those false words and shed those false tears; it was self-mockery, delivered in a weary burst. Running down the slope, she heard him pursue her. He was touched by her words, by her tender, pitiful expression. When he dropped his bicycle, ran down the bank after her, and grabbed her waist from behind, she preferred to believe that he had no other thoughts, that he was intent only on saving a girl’s life. She knew she was securely in his grasp but still pretended to struggle. Naturally, he pulled her more tightly to his chest, so their bodies swayed and they stumbled, holding each other as they fell to the ground on the dark riverbank.

They lay on their sides on the slope. He felt her turn around to face him and burrow into his chest, melting her body into his. Woodenly, not daring to breathe, he held her, unsure how all this had happened. Never had he experienced anything like it, and never had he been less inclined to take advantage of a situation. But why had she pressed herself so tightly into him? He felt the heat of her breath in the dark, and smelled the faintly sour scent. Thinking about her full soft lips, he closed his eyes; he desperately wanted to kiss her, and that was all he wanted. He turned his head searching for her mouth, but she did all she could to avoid his kiss. This made him think that it wouldn’t work, that nothing was going to happen with her. Her melting into him was not seduction but … a subconscious desire for protection. As he considered this, he stopped trying for her lips and calmed down a little. What he ought to do now was pull her to her feet, climb up the bank, and send her home. He let go of her and stood, but she pulled him back down by her, so they rolled together again. Eagerly, almost sobbing, she said to him, “Let me take off my clothes for you. I’ll take them off now, now …”

Blood rushed to his head, and his body felt uncomfortable because of the pressure. The behaviour of this teenage high school girl was incomprehensible to him—why she didn’t want his kisses but was willing to … willing to … The vision of her as she stood in front of the bike shop came to him, such a contradiction to what she appeared to be now. Innocence and conspiracy, naïveté and debauchery, seemed to coexist in her. He really couldn’t think anymore, or control the overwhelming desire she had forced on him, and he didn’t want to lose this opportunity that seemed to arrive from outer space. He took off his coat and spread it on the slope, and then he picked Fei up and set her on the still-warm coat …

Two weeks later, Master Qi managed to get Fei a recruiting form. During the political background check, her story about her family turned out to be so much hot air. Master Qi didn’t despise her for this, but on the contrary felt more sympathetic towards her. Even though she’d lied to him about some matters, he still felt guilty about her. He often thought if what they had done on the river slope hadn’t happened, his helping her would have been innocent and simple, and therefore beautiful. Unfortunately, he hadn’t controlled himself. It wasn’t something that he regretted; he just felt a little sad when he thought about it. He did his best to help her, getting her, a girl with virtually no hope of staying in the city, a job at the famous state-run factory as a foundry worker. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good job. His influence could only reach so far, and Fei was assigned to the dirtiest, most tiring workshop in the factory.

Foundry apprentice Fei bought Dr. Tang a pair of fashionable nylon gloves with her first paycheck. She also gave Tiao and Youyou a factory tour, and got them some treats at her bachelor’s dormitory. She got them fried sugar dough, and two
jin
of them were polished off in a blink of the eye. “No big deal,” she bragged, “I’ll get some more in a minute. I have money. I’m a person with a salary.” She took out a small purse, woven out of light purple glass strands. As she flourished the purse, Tiao saw the tears that stood in her beautiful eyes.

5

It was in Chen Zai’s study that Tiao got to know Balthus. When Tiao discovered an album of paintings by Balthus, she and Chen Zai had already been close friends for a long time. She could see that Balthus was an important painter to Chen Zai, but it was just like Chen Zai never to impose his opinions on Tiao. He was usually modest, even shy, when he spoke about the things that meant a lot to him. This was one way he expressed his respect for his beloved.

Tiao happened on the album of Balthus’s paintings and opened it. Immediately she was taken by him. His subjects were actually very mundane: several groups of passersby walking an old commercial street in Paris; some children playing cards and strategizing in a living room, and girls reading books or in a sound sleep; a band of hikers with blank expressions and dull eyes, who’d originally come to savour the boundless vista from the mountain peak, but after the ascent became lethargic, swaying and unable to stand, none of them appreciating the scenery, and one even collapsing into sleep. He especially liked to paint young girls. The girls in his paintings—he seemed very particular about their age—are all around fourteen. Balthus rendered their skin with luster and remarkable softness. They are innocent and clean, their bodies blossoming with a mixture of some desire, a bit of fantasy, a little portion of serenity, along with a small measure of unpredictability.

Tiao had never seen work by a painter like him: his characters seemed completely three-dimensional, but the backgrounds—sofa, street, bed, and desk—were often flat. It was through this combination that he created paintings as thick as a wall. In a painting that seemed solid and stable, those images—either flat and straight or slanted, curled, or stretched—created different rhythms and moods, which echoed the painter’s internal rhythms. There was risk in the stability, restraint in the flow, closure in the openness, strangeness and the eternal in the dailiness, and a stillness that also harboured anxiety. The viewer felt both at peace and uneasy, a vague tenderness along with panic, even when faced with the girls asleep on the sofa—because Balthus made people feel there was conspiracy lurking around the girls. And there was indeed always the hint of it—a tiny skinny black cat, or a midget twisting his neck and pulling open the window curtain—but viewers were spared panic by Balthus’s graceful sense of restraint, which eventually helped the audience find a true balance—a lovely balance—between art and the zeitgeist and a strangeness that was completely convincing.

Balthus used traditionally concrete visual language, and the objects he chose to work with couldn’t have been more ordinary. He didn’t want to find his materials in the surreal, and he made use of reality in an honest, straightforward, but extraordinary way. His reality seemed superficial but was actually profound, seemed like one thing but was actually another, had the appearance of being ordinary but laid snares everywhere. He had probably long understood that there was no such thing as “right” and “wrong” in art and that an artist should never presume to become an “inventor.” In art, “invention” is fairly suspect, a nonsense word. Rodin says, “Originality—in the most positive meaning—is not about making up new words that contradict common sense; it’s about using the old words cleverly. Old words are sufficient to express everything; to a genius, the old words are more than enough.”

For an artist to add a little something new of his own to the tradition would be a very great achievement. Such deep reflection only comes from those masters who are most deeply immersed in the zeitgeist and artistic expression. They are the true sages, not the “inventors” impelled by the “irresistible urge” to make history by innovation. Art is not about invention; art is honest, quiet labour. Balthus’s modesty and his meticulous pursuit of perfection in craft, his sensitivity to the zeitgeist and the perfect form in which he responded to it—his particular inheritance of the excellent tradition of creative rendering—advanced the cause of representational art, constantly under siege in the twentieth century and always endangered, to a level that few others achieved. The intimate distance and familiar strangeness that his paintings communicated were his contribution to art.

She looked at
Cathy Dressing,
a painting inspired by
Wuthering Heights
. It’s clear at a glance that the three people in the painting are Balthus’s version of the novel’s unforgettable characters: Cathy, the blonde, nude and holding a mirror, immediately recalls Catherine; the dark-skinned, melancholy young man who sits in a chair is obviously a re-creation of Heathcliff; the solemn elderly maidservant who stands behind her and combs Cathy’s hair seems to work to separate their love from the powerful antagonism between them. Temporarily, she balances the painting as well as their hearts, which alternate between love and hate throughout their lifelong relationship. It’s a straightforward painting of three people. The brushstrokes are economical and the use of colour is the height of plainness and simplicity, but as you look at it again and again, you sense a poignancy along with a sharpness—it is uninhibited and restrained at once. Cathy’s body, nude and facing the viewers, is overpowering at first sight, the brightest, the most dazzling part of the painting; her head tilts to one side slightly, and the grey-brown eyes, directed slightly upward, and compressed lips make her look proud and domineering. Disregarding others’ advice, she seems to have made up her mind about her future and thinks herself mature enough to do so, therefore she ignores the young man beside her, who is deeply in love with her and appears on the point of collapse; or else perhaps she despises his miserable look. Her body assists her expression, with the small jutting breasts, the nonchalant stance … all brimming with a kind of empty challenge.

But this tall, slender beauty’s pubic area is not fully developed—her narrow, thin pelvis, flat belly, and the immature wisps of hair contend with the imperious head and proud breasts, which makes her look demanding and helpless, confident and desperate, indifferent and passionate, cunning and innocent all at the same time. Her inner world is chaotic. She is her own contradiction. She needs to be saved and the young man in the chair beside her is hoping to be saved by her. But she and the gloomy young man can’t save each other. He stares at her, her entire body shining, the love of his life, the girl who eventually will belong to another man, but he can’t win her back. Through him Tiao is brought to that moment in
Wuthering Heights
when Catherine returns from Linton’s home, and Heathcliff questions her desperately, out of his own sense of inferiority. “Why did you have to wear this silk dress? Why did you have to wear this silk dress?” when it’s just the stubborn memory of their childhood love that remains, and perhaps only parting forever can free them from that mad and frightening recollection. Tiao felt overwhelmed by an insight into an obsessive fantasy: how people exhaust themselves—or would, if they had the chance—to return to innocent beginnings, to a world of original joy.

A return to joy.

A return to joy.

Tiao continued by examining
Cat in the Mirror.
There were a series of three variations on the same theme, in the same setting, that spanned the sixteen years from 1977 to 1993.

The first is a nude girl, who has just awakened and leans against her bed, combing her hair, comb in one hand and mirror in the other. On finding that the cat squatting at the end of the bed is staring at her, she turns the mirror around to invite the cat to examine itself. In that moment, the girl’s expression and body both appear natural and relaxed, fresh and soft. Her invitation to the cat has an element of playfulness.