working on, Miaoyu, the nun I like so much, is writing on small pieces of paper, signing them “The One Outside the Threshold,” then leaving them in crooks of tree trunks, under rocks, between skinny branches, among low-lying flowers by the stream. This is what they say:
“on the moonlit bank, all that remains is the millet’s scent”
“past Red Cliff the world is crooked, nothing remains but empty names”
“one flute in the distance” “the winding path leads to a secluded retreat”
“the wild colt is muzzled”
I put down my pen, just think for a while of her face hidden among branches (Cao Xueqin you made her but I fear someone’s trapped her in the woods, is hacking off her hair. Why do I fear this?)
and I forbid you to go out without your leper’s costume and I forbid you … and your clapper your hood … and if you speakyou must turn your face from the one you are speaking to
she’s making loud sounds, animal sounds, shrieks, horrible cries
her chopped hair in zigzags all over the forest floor
and I forbid you henceforth ever to touch a child and I forbid you to go out, I forbid you to enter a marketplace or a mill
Then she’s silent. The one in Aosta spoke of different kinds of silence. Cao Xueqin, what kind is hers? (I think I know but I don’t want to know.) What kind is yours, or mine, as I try to hear you under all the many words—
“The wild colt is muzzled.” “Past Red Cliff the world is crooked, nothing remains but empty names.”
(My muzzled voice, my absent, silent name.)
I hear Miaoyu’s words as I walk. The air singed with burning paper, burning words—
not him not in Italy not in Aosta
not that garden not that Atlas of
not his face not that leper’s hood not that cloak not that
My Friend, last night in my dream I couldn’t tell which face was yours and which was mine. I had no name anymore or like yours my name was secret so how could any letters reach me? Then we were reading the Atlas of Leprosy, turning pages of one distorted limb after another, one suffering face after another… and the words: cutaneous, macrophage, neural, corium … I wanted to stop but you wouldn’t let me stop and I didn’t want to leave you—
Cao Xueqin, I think of you in a mud house much like this (or were you in this very house?) writing long hours at a wooden table. Baoyu and Daiyu are never really at ease in this world. And Miaoyu never felt she belonged. I wonder, did you also feel this? What exists of you is mostly rumor: that you painted well but preferred to make paintings of rocks, things no one wanted to buy That you died before your book was finished, though you left notes for the remaining chapters in a sketchbook that’s been lost. That when you were a boy your family fell from favor, its property confiscated. One document claims this is what was taken: “thirteen houses comprising 483 rooms, eight estates totalling 328 acres; retainers and servants of both sexes, 114 persons old and young; books, tables, chairs, a hundred odd pawn-shop receipts.” Others claim this is wrong, the document’s a fabrication. In any case, you lived in poverty by the end, your wine bought on credit.
I live with your face in my mind, and with another, hooded face in my mind. The two of you never speaking to each other, each knowing nothing of the other.
It’s said you fell in love with an orphaned girl named “Lin” you weren’t allowed to marry, as she was “penniless and helpless.” That you had a breakdown after that much like Baoyu’s and fell into a coma for four days. Afterwards you seemed distant, changed, came to live in this poor village. All this, of course, is rumor. I don’t even know the precise year of your birth or when you died.
But what I think about most is how you showed your pages to the one called Red Inkstone (unless Red Inkstone is yourself under another name—I know some claim this—and you wrote these commentaries on your manuscripts in red ink, all by yourself). But if Red Inkstone wasn’t you, this means you weren’t just alone. He wrote between the lines of your text. You must have trusted him, as Polo trusted Rustichello.
(I think of the one alone in Aosta, in his garden.)