At her last words, the writer shivered uncontrollably and felt ashamed. Glancing at the writer for two seconds, she lost interest. She swallowed, and closed her eyes.
‘‘Do you think I’ve finished talking?’’ She abruptly opened her eyes. ‘‘Hunh.’’
The writer had wanted to leave, but now he was too startled to move. He just stood there. He waited, but she didn’t go on. When the writer was again on the point of leaving, she once more said abruptly, ‘‘Do you think I’ve finished talking? Don’t get any ideas!’’ This was repeated four or five times. A thread of a sneer hung from her face.
Madam X had now become a full-figured woman, although her tear ducts were a little overdeveloped, so she often looked as if she had a cold. Though small, this flaw disgusted people. There are now fresh opinions of her looks. Here are some we’ve collected:
‘‘Even if she’s icy cold toward me, with a severe expression that has nothing to do with sex, I still maintain that she is now more sexually attractive than before, with more lasting appeal, too. ‘She gives off the scent of a mature female.’ A full-bodied woman is more attractive than a skinny chick, especially at about age thirty. She certainly shouldn’t be so cold to me. Don’t I understand life?’’
‘‘I still think she looked much prettier before. Her appearance now hints at danger. She can’t stand still. Whenever I run into her, I feel dizzy. A thin woman gives an impression of purity; my mother, for example, is that kind of woman. We always take her as the standard. She wears a white apron the year round.’’
‘‘Formerly, although X scorned others, we could still see her pupils, and so we felt we knew her fairly well. Her image today is simply too dreadful. Even if you look straight at her, you can’t see her pupils. There are just two flashes of turbid liquid that make you uneasy. It’s as though you’re going to do something evil. As if you’ve committed a certain crime. You feel disgraced. It’s diabolical.’’
‘‘A lewd sex life brands you. Isn’t it monstrous when a woman who’s always been sickly pale suddenly turns so seductive? There’s nothing good about this kind of flash in the pan. She must have suffered greatly at night from the turbulence of her inner secretions. You can prove this just by looking at the precipitous increase in her tears. I am not a bit impressed by the superficial changes in this person. I pity her from the bottom of my heart.’’
‘‘I had already lost the hope I had for her, and had decided to let go of her problems, but the dazzling change in her has rekindled my former feelings, and I feel stirred again in my innermost being. After all, this woman is the most troublesome woman I’ve ever known. You couldn’t break away from her. I can’t help but connect my lot with hers. Every change in her elicits a physiological echo from me. I’m going to suffer from insomnia again. My character contains a little too much of the tragic.’’
In all of this confusing chatter, Madam X’s husband’s good friend’s opinion was unique. Sticking his long, emaciated head out of his window that faced the street, he told us a story:
‘‘There’s a street where a transparently pure youth and a transparently pure woman are living. They have silently loved each other for years, but because of a certain reason they’ve been unable to take the next step in their relationship. They’ve only admired each other from a distance. They both transcend the ordinary. Today, this type is scarcer and scarcer. They communicated with each other in a way that didn’t require speaking directly. (They used various ways of expressing things: for example, talking of the weather, health, other people’s sexual problems, and so on). Each knew the other’s longing and encouraged each other in the dark. Several eventless years passed. All along, the young man took this friendship (or love) as a spiritual trust, and he lived happily. Like him, the woman was intoxicated by everything that existed between them. A thunderbolt struck the young man in the head and interrupted the fine day. Overnight, a beautiful woman became a poisonous snake, a pure and noble goddess became a depraved, demonic fox, and ideals became a ragged dishcloth! How did this happen? The young man was unable to respond. He grew so depressed and decadent that his health deteriorated. His life was destroyed. What a dreadful fate, such cruel irony. I can’t bear imagining how he endured. He felt disgusted. Nothing about her body could arouse him, and he just wanted to shake off these worldly entanglements and attain a genuine, independent selfhood. Indeed, what did the changes in certain parts of the woman’s body have to do with him? Hadn’t she played enough tricks on him? Did he want to sink into that shameful muddy hole once more? He had been wasting his life for many years; he had forfeited his self-esteem and hadn’t held fast to his ideals. Wasn’t this lesson painful enough? Being young is beautiful, but at last a person has to grow up. He can’t indulge in dreams and unreal idealism for a lifetime. He has to march on. He must acknowledge his past and become a new person. And so the young man did not join in the talk of the crowds; instead, he surveyed the world of his inner heart and forgot everything around him. In a kind of transparent state, he entered maturity.’’
Someone asked: since Mr. Q becomes a eunuch as soon as night falls, is it possible that this disease doesn’t affect his sexual function at all? During the day he is not only not impotent, but he’s even more vigorous and irresistible. The ways of the world are so strange! They truly are just this strange. Ever since the mysterious Madam X arrived on Five Spice Street, strange things have occurred one after the other, violating common practice. You must believe this, even if you don’t want to. You could see how strong Q’s sexual power was just by looking at the changes in Madam X’s body, because she- according to the young coal worker-was actually ‘‘like a flower in blossom.’’ Wherever she went, unless you were blind, you’d see desire written on her face. No man could keep from turning around and looking at her with a sweet smile, or keep from itching from head to toe. Indeed, no one had a handle on her. No one knew where and when she did it. It seemed that the whole day, she was busy with her husband at the snack shop. People merely presumed that the granary amour existed; they didn’t have any first-hand proof. Certainly they were seen rendezvousing at the intersection, and their conversation was recorded by someone hidden behind the power pole, but this isn’t the same as adultery.
And so there was a new perspective: Mr. Q’s dual personality was a rumor that Madam X had deliberately spread in order to cover up her unspeakable deeds. She deliberately said that Mr. Q was a eunuch at night, a defective, in order to distract people from paying attention to him. Then people would let up on their spying. Thus, the two could catch people off guard and go into the granary, where they could indulge their passion. Their adultery had never gone on at any time during the day but happened only at midnight, at the very moment when Madam X proclaimed that she ‘‘couldn’t find him’’ and that she could only ‘‘run crazily around on the rooftop.’’ That so-called iron woman (iron? who are you kidding?) had been ‘‘bought’’ by this couple and had become the mouthpiece for their proclamations. Her so-called surveillance was simply nonsense trumped up to confuse people. A traitor had emerged within our community. All along, we had taken sentry duty and had followed her in the daytime. The discussion also focused on the daytime. Now it appeared that we had done all this in vain; we had been taken in by Madam X’s plot. Whenever we heard her talk of such things as ‘‘bones like tender blades of grass’’ and ‘‘blindness in both eyes,’’ we immediately felt compassion and threw away both principles and common sense. As the saying has it, ‘‘Age thirty is like a wolf, age forty like a tiger.’’ At midnight, it was quiet everywhere. Nobody was around. Wasn’t it obvious yet what was going on inside the ink-black granary? We should have placed the time at midnight! How many detours we had taken! As soon as this new perspective emerged, it was supported by most of the people and became the guiding thought of the entire community.