My beloved readers! Friends! Having read to this point, you’ve certainly guessed the truth, haven’t you? Flexible and with small intelligence, Madam X chose our Five Spice Street to fulfill her childhood dreams. She had investigated Five Spice Street and learned that the people were nice, warm, honest, and magnanimous. She concluded that no matter what kind of disturbance she made, she would incur no punishment. And so, not long after settling down here, she bought those evil props-mirrors and a microscope. She smiled slightly when she played with those things, and her motions were terribly exaggerated. She ‘‘celebrated’’ the beginning of this ‘‘work’’ with her husband and son and then closed the door and ignored others. It’s said that one day, holding her precious son on her lap, she taught him how to look through the microscope with one eye, and he did this for more than half an hour. Then the two of them rolled happily around on the bed. They said they’d seen ‘‘the most interesting stuff in the world.’’ She also said that she would ‘‘give’’ her son all she had lost when she was a child.
The situation immediately became unmanageable. The woman spent every day inside, leading her ‘‘double life.’’ In the daytime, she spent the whole day with her head buried in her small trade. When the people of Five Spice Street passed by her shop, they would be blinded, absorbed in observing her eyesight, her neck, and so forth. No one sensed that, when they turned around and left, she stared fiercely with hawk-like eyes at their receding backs. (One time, the writer suddenly turned back and met her eyes. The writer grew dizzy as a result and had to lie down for three days. He is still suffering from the effects.) So you see the sacrifice artistic work requires. It’s not something those hooligans can understand. In the public toilet, they labeled the writer a ‘‘fame-fisher.’’ The murderous scene flashed from her innermost being. We had never seen that kind of murder without lethal weapon or blood. People became aware of it only through the writer’s analysis, which explained profound things in a simple manner. Maybe instead of being actually ‘‘aware,’’ they could only ‘‘understand it in a general way.’’
There was no so-called ‘‘double life’’ at alclass="underline" it was a smoke bomb she had set off herself. Everything she did-running a small business (that was her device for staring at people’s backs), closing the door (that was her device for analyzing the terrain and choosing her battlefield), looking in the mirrors at night, and engaging in adultery with Mr. Q (to reinforce her plot by adding a conspirator)-in fact, all of these were one thing. Even her sleeping at night was a ploy to conserve strength and store up energy. Otherwise, how could she behave with such spirit in her murderous activity? No one took better care of herself than she did. Someone might object: so what about those teenagers? Was it possible that they, too, were taking part in her murderous activity? At one point, they raced to her house every night and sat there seriously without moving. Not all of them longed to be killed by her or thought it would be a great pleasure. The writer once more must stretch the threads out very far-to the time before Madam X and her family came to Five Spice Street.
Back then, no one knew of Madam X’s existence, and her murderous plan was still hidden in her mind; she hadn’t yet taken any action. After entering Five Spice Street in disguise and implementing a lot of on-the-spot reconnaissance, she framed her plan. Then she embarked on carrying it out. The teenagers were her first targets. After consideration she decided to employ means whose effects would resemble smoking dope. The fad-loving teenagers were very happy. They went every night in high spirits. Some even proclaimed that they could ‘‘adopt this method to become well known.’’ How could they prevent Madam X from injecting them with poisons? Although sometimes they hated her and stole her shoes, and so forth, in general they were innocent, infantile children wholly in X’s clutches.
Did Madam X’s unusual powers and murderous activity create a great tragedy? Excuse me, here the writer must speak only of the facts and real situation. The real situation was: except for her colleague’s son, who had indeed been affected, she hadn’t harmed anyone else’s physical or mental health at all. Because of the climate on our Five Spice Street, people who were already living here possessed a kind of immunity. Madam X overlooked this in her reconnaissance. With this immunity, we could be marinated in poisonous juices for years and still retain good health. As for the colleague’s son, he was poisoned because of a serious childhood disease that destroyed his immunity. Madam X jumped for joy because of this one success. Her precious husband’s foolish chatter made people laugh their heads off. He told everyone about her ‘‘great power,’’ ‘‘mighty as an A- bomb.’’ Madam X called this success ‘‘an unexpected harvest’’ (she didn’t intend to affect anyone; as she claimed, she had long since completely ‘‘forgotten’’ everyone around her). ‘‘It didn’t occur to me that there would still be one left for me!’’ She was enraptured. ‘‘This is really a nice, nervy child! Maybe he too will create miracles.’’
We will get ‘‘more of a general idea’’ if we examine the incident of the colleague’s son more carefully. This son was the colleague’s own flesh and blood. And from the day he was born, he had the same immunity as other children on our Five Spice Street. Later, he unfortunately contracted a serious disease and lost this protection. But this isn’t the same as affirming that he must necessarily have become the person he is now. Ahead of him a bright broad road was rolling out. With the guidance of elders, he could have averted disaster and disease and grown up to be one in a thousand. One summer at dusk, he was mesmerized by a strange shout, and following it, he walked into Madam X’s home. There, he stayed woodenly for two hours and went crazy. Suddenly all his mother’s painstaking efforts in bringing him up turned to nothing. Madam X’s plot was an ‘‘acetabulum’’ that sucked him in so tightly he couldn’t get away. When his mother asked about this frightening ‘‘acetabulum’’ and tried to help him detach himself, he flew into a rage. He denounced his mother’s good intentions as ‘‘murder’’ and said he would ‘‘rather die’’ than change back! Terrible! Was Madam X really not aware of the havoc she caused? Did she think only of her own inner tranquility when she did her damnable work at night? Who would buy this bullshit?
If a person wanted to remain aloof from worldly affairs in order to cultivate herself, she wouldn’t do such things. Madam X flaunted her dynamism; she expressed fake inhospitality; her activity achieved impersonal effects (although very small); and she was utterly determined: everything substantiated our established view. Could a person who had secretly cultivated murderous intentions since childhood become detached, expunge those intentions, and blindly start attending to her inner tranquility so as to become a saint? Is it possible that she simply ignored the youthful, tender bodies of those teenagers swaying before her eyes instead of pouncing and biting them? If she had really ignored them and become detached, she should have sat on the roof of a thatched cottage or on a mountaintop and communed with the gods. On the contrary, she was surrounded by crowds all day, and only at night did she fuss with broken mirrors or create dubious miracles. Yet she dared talk of detachment!