Lost in Translation Page 0,15

hand. "Very well. I, Adam Spencer, swear—"

"Okay, okay." She let her mouth curve up again. "Enough."

They moved over to Dongsi Beidajie, walked on, and found the Jesuit House up a terraced set of broad, shallow steps, cobbles overgrown with tufted grass. Formerly Ladder Lane. Now—Alice checked the book, and then her map: there, People’s Northeast Small Lane Eight. She smiled. A lucky number in Chinese. Eight, ba. It sounded like fa, which meant "to get rich." Enormous good luck to get an address with an eight in it. "Look," she said, and stopped by a wall with a round gate, "the house is still here."

Through a crack in the gate they could see a stone courtyard with rooms opening onto it, peonies and locust trees in ceramic urns, bright cloth fluttering behind open windows, a single bicycle leaning. A breeze ruffled their hair and the tendril leaves of the trees above their heads, a soft wind, the longed-for kiss of the Beijing summer.

She knocked.

They stood in silence a minute. No one came out. Nothing but the moon gate of thick, ancient red wood, the stone walls, the eaves with their swooping Chinese tiles.

"This was the Jesuit residence?" she asked.

"Yes," he said while he wrote. "I’ve researched his life here. You wanna know? Okay. He got up every day; they said mass. He went to work at the Peking Union Medical College, where the China Geological Survey was housed—that’s because both the college and the survey were run on Rockefeller money. At five o’clock every day he left the survey and went to Lucile’s house. They talked, and dined, and spent the evening together."

Alice peeked through the closed gate. "You know where she lived?"

"No. In his letters to her he refers to her place as Da Tian Shui Qing, but I don’t know if that’s the name of the street or just what he called her house."

"Without seeing the characters I can’t be sure, but it sounds like it might mean ’Great Heaven and Clear Water’— probably an old hutong name." She searched through her guidebook’s index, frowned. "No. Not in here. So—they spent the evenings together?"

"Right. Talking, studying, reading. Weekends, they would go with other foreigners on excursions. Picnics in the Western Hills. Visits to temples. To the seaside."

"Then she was always with him." Alice’s eyes softened.

"Yes." He was staring through the hole at the inside of the compound. "She was his muse. She listened to his ideas, retyped his manuscripts, translated things from French to English and back again."

"But weren’t most of his books published much later?"

"True." He grinned, pleased with her intelligence. "The Jesuits didn’t permit him to publish much during his lifetime— essays mostly—almost all his books came out after his death. Think how he felt."

"God, you’re right. Like a failure."

"But at least he had her."

"And she accepted him."

"Right, she stuck by him. Even though she never got the thing she always wanted from him," Spencer added.

Of course, Alice thought, but she didn’t say it: the total commitment of his heart, his mind, his body. Pierre could love Lucile, could care about her and be close to her—as long as he never became her lover. Whereas she, Alice, entered the sexual heart of China all the time—but only the sexual heart. Which way mattered more?

She looked hard into the courtyard, into the rooms which boxed around it, each presenting a wall which was half windows. Small panes, old-fashioned wood trim. In one of those rooms he wrote The Phenomenon of Man. Connected the scientific and the divine.

She had reread the book late the night before. Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfil them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily experience. Your daily experience, Pierre, she thought, gazing into his house. Did you really love her? Did you enter her heart and mind? Or did the two of you always remain outside each other? She pounded on the gate again.

"Come on," Spencer sighed. "Nobody’s here. Let’s go."

Alice took the steaming teacup and extended it to Mrs. Meng with two hands, the old way. The aged lady’s face creased with pleasure. She liked the old customs.

"Eh, Six Tranquillities Black! Where did you find it?"

"Hong Kong." Alice poured her own cup. "It’s nothing, a trifle, but I know how you like it." She glanced at the large brick of tea wrapped in a torn page of