“yes, this is true, in daily life she loved to wear old clothes”
“I remember these past events as well, so sad and bleak, almost unbearable to hear”
“she was the flower-burying girl in the pavilion of the flower grave”
Who was Red Inkstone? Did you visit in this house, drink wine at this table? What made you able to trust him? Why did he choose that name to sign your pages? (How little of your book must be pure memory even as he says he remembers.) Why do I think of Red Inkstone as a man and not a woman? Couldn’t Red Inkstone be a woman? So many silences inside your silence, so many words—
Clerval looks out his window at the smoke trees turning red in the distance. Does he think about the silences inside each silence? The silence of Cao Xueqin, the silence of his friend in Aosta. I hear a silence too: each word I think to say to you too loud with a wrongness I can’t name, yet underneath it, silence, and inside it, silence. And inside that silence, pathways I can’t find.
(And my voice long fled. And the way I used to read out loud.)
Now he turns from the window, walks over to the table, unbinds the twine for the first time in weeks, takes another letter from the stack.
(I didn’t want to leave you) (I couldn’t tell which face was yours and which was mine)
Aosta, July 15
My Friend,
In my last letter, when I asked you to think, of the leprous patients being painted (so exposed to the gaze and scrutiny of another, displayed for the use and interest of others) or the ones burning in the hospital fire, I wonder what violence was I trying to inflict on you, what scarring? My pain, like anyone’s, inhabits me blindly. My pain, such as it is, knows nothing of me or my particularities. It feels only itself, is an engine purely of itself. I say it’s “mine” but really it belongs to no one. Why would I try to fling it from myself onto you? Why would I try to hurt you in that way?
I warned you there’s a violence in me different from what you saw in the garden. It allows no tenderness toward anything, is vivid as the numbness in my hands, or the rocky peaks I look out on each day: geological, persistent, cold. Yet I wanted you to think of those faces, I still want you to think of them.
That day I meant to write of something else, something beautiful. Does this mean that I find the leprous faces unbeautiful? The ones stripped of their hoods unbeautiful?—why would I even use this word and the categories it implies? I did mean to write of something else that day, it’s true: the frescoes at Issogne. They’re in a castle not far from here, one I visited as a boy in the days before my illness.
I wonder why they mean so much to me. Maybe even then I felt they possessed a clarity I lacked, a sense of the daily as uncluttered, unconfusing As if the painter were speaking plainly through his brush. On the lunettes of arches in the entrance hall you can see a series of scenes from daily life: a tailor’s workshop, a butcher, a pharmacy, a guardroom, a fruit and vegetable market, a baker’s shop, a spice seller, a cheese-monger. My mind moves close to them but not to the saints with their miracles and wonders, never to those.
So often I feel a wounding or confusing silence (you know now how I myself can wound, or try to).
I don’t know who the painter was.
I wonder how you are. Do you wear Chinese silks or rough peasant clothes? What language do you think in now? Have you read the great classics?
Your Friend,
Today Clerval holds sheets of paper much smaller and thinner than the manuscript pages, but the characters are in the same careful hand. He seems to stare at them for hours, his mouth softening, his fingers vaguely stroking the worn paper.
Cao Xueqin, I can hardly believe what I’ve found—mixed in among your manuscript, these loose, scattered notes in your hand, remnants and hints of who you were. Even as I read, I can’t find my way into you, will never find my way into you. I know this.
Your words the heat spreading through the smoke trees on the hill. You must have lived in this house after all, looked