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A Portrait
by Epiphany
"While he was being created, the Creator must have been in a very good mood," I mused the first time I met him at a coffee shop in Shanghai.
A mutual friend of ours had supplied me with his contact information, and I made the initial move to write him. He replied, and a tentative friendship was struck up between us before an appointment to meet was fixed.
I was struck, however, by his sheer beauty when we shook hands and greeted and introduced each other. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Duino Elegies, "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." Terrified as I was, I still managed to collect myself and make some general remarks on the weather, which at this time of the year sat on the peak of summer and refused to go downhill.
Inside it was spring. He had on a pleated, light blue shirt, with sleeves turned up; his abundant hair was unruly, one lock or two falling over his forehead on the right brow; the eyelashes were so long and delicate I doubted they were genuine, but they were and enhanced his looks when he lowered his eyes; the lips curved with an elegance that only met its equal in the chin's. The whole features of his were extraordinary.
He did not let me dwell on his appearance for long. After coffee was served and the waiter retreated, he smiled, put his left hand, palm down, on the table, and asked right off: "Are you a reader of books?"
Am I? I asked myself inwardly. As a matter of fact, I loved reading, but in the present-day China the book-reading public constituted such a tiny republic that claiming the citizenship was liable to the charge of being elitist and arrogant. I blushed, I sweat, I hemmed and hawed.
He let it go, and proceeded to tell me some anecdotes from his young life, those anecdotes that ought to have been stored with care and savored in solitude. I marveled at his candor, and was tempted to do likewise, but thought better of it and changed my mind.
Yet our friendship's mind was not to change. Before we shook hands again and wished to see each other soon, he asked me to promise that I should write him as often as I could. I promised, but I was not able to mass-produce letters that were flat and cliched and half-hearted. Therefore, at that time I wrote to him about once a week. In consequence, he sent me the following threat:
"一天没收到你的信，失眠；两天没收到你的信，绝食；三天没收到你的信，报警。"
This was alarming. For the sake of his health, and not wishing to trouble the already jittery officers, I sprang to action and began our daily communication. The correspondence flourished and endured.
To write him was for me a liberal education: I read new books and reread old ones to render me at least adequately knowledgeable before his sharp intelligence; concerts, museums, fairs, exhibitions I haunted to record for his delight my findings and impressions; with a mathematical imagination and poetical precision I described to him everything I saw, be it a dog in ecstasy, a cat in heat, a couple in despair, a flower about to bloom, the frightened trees in a wood that was full of police, a tremulous old woman who slipped and took a pratfall into a puddle at noon on the sidewalk of a main street and sobbed and wailed there undisturbed, a full moon which shed its silver light upon golden, untouched mooncakes, or an autumn that waited in vain for another Keats to be born; to surprise him I invented word games, composed stories, discovered epigrams, and even made myself pregnant with a body of ideas painfully alive and promising.
His letters were verbal sunshowers, and a silent demand that I write back with like splendor. This was a tall order, and I barely made it. Every time I opened my mailbox I clicked on his mail with a certain apprehension that it might turn out to be a masterpiece; after reading one paragraph or two I sighed with relief that it was not.
To my great pleasure, he told me that he had at last found in me a person he could relate to and share his privacy with, a person who could behold his ardor with wonder and return it with equal fervor. During the four years of his college, he had tried a number of times to find some like-minded fellows so that they could form a reading group. It never came into being, as the powers that be at the university warned him that such a group would endanger state security and engender his dismissal from the school. "Why don't you go singing in a KTV?!" they thundered.
His major was business administration, but his secret passion was art and literature. The major was chosen by his parents, who believed that a liberal education in China, if not utterly impossible, spelled danger and that a money-related field would be safe and sound in the future. The passion was a flame he had kept alive since he was a little boy, and he hoped he could use it one night to build a huge bonfire that, before the arrival of Aurora, would have roared and roared, mixing sparks with stars.
Last summer he got his bachelor degree, and he said he intended to keep it, if not for life, then at least for ages and ages hence. So, among all the paths to Eden, he decided he would choose the longest.
Let me record here the name of one artist he particularly adored: Tennessee Williams. One day I pressed him to say why the American playwright was his favorite. It was a chain, never broken, of his own love affairs with the English language, said he. His heart was first stirred by the Sweet Bird of Youth, presently the Eccentricities of a Nightingale amazed him, then the Glass Menagerie was gathered and a Streetcar Named Desire pulled in: a love feast was begun.
"Have you ever seen the skeletons of birds?" he once quoted Williams to me in a letter. "If you have, you will know how completely they are still flying."
We saw each other often. One evening I leafed through his photo albums, exclaiming that the pictures did not do him justice. Perhaps, I thought to myself, in front of such beauty, the camera lens was too astounded or indignant to capture his looks, and gave only a distortion or caricature of them. When Narcissus gazed into a pool of water at another equally beautiful youth, a gust of jealous wind came to ruffle the limpid surface and caused the youth underwater to disappear. Narcissus was distraught and wasted away and was no more.
A Narcissus he was not, this I could affirm with confidence, because he did not agonize over those photographs which failed to represent him faithfully. Let me faithfully represent you in words, I boldly proposed. With some reluctance, he agreed.
And the title of this representation is, simply, "A Portrait." |
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发表于 2012-2-6 19:33
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