Then, the "village head" solemnly recommended the "Yinyang Grotto" to us. When Ti and I entered the room, we were immediately struck by its muted, candlelit ambience and the walls covered with paintings of Han dancing beauties and a series of romantic images of lovemaking.
Ti immediately said, "Here – we'll eat here."
And now there were only two people in the Yinyang Grotto – Mr. Ti and his student, an initiate in the world of love.
Deliriously happy, he filled the entire table with dishes and wine for her. She had never before sampled such a feast of flavors. Along with a bottle of the finest Madeira, there was bitter vegetable, fiddlehead ferns, whole scorpions in a bed of chrysanthemum petals, spiced golden cicadas, garland chrysanthemum, monkey legs, five-colored shredded squid, scallops in their own shells, gold and silver venison, lotus-flower longans in chilled soup…
When everything had been served, the waitresses withdrew, and the door to the grotto closed with a discreet click.
Their glasses filled, they toasted each other and began sampling delicacies seemingly created for the lips of the gods. Ti's eyes glowed in the soft light, and his powerful body showed a gentleness reminiscent of a stallion with his mare. All the anxiety and despair had been taken from his face, and the distress in his eyes had vanished like clouds. Without cease he told her of his love for her and his desire for her. He begged her that she never again bring up the old business of their life in school. He swore that everything he had done in those days had run against his real feelings, that it had happened because of his helplessness in the face of her total lack of response, but that now he was a single man who adored her youthful beauty and romanticism and could express his love to her because she was no longer his student.
By this time, he had moved around to sit beside her, and she listened to him with gentle and trusting attentiveness. Her sleepy eyes glittering and her usual defensiveness shed, she began to lean slowly toward him.
His breath began to quicken as he placed a hand upon her shoulder.
Her resistence melted away, and all her old feelings of hostility toward him vanished in an instant.
Her eyes closed in seeming invitation, as if awaiting the moment when his fingers would touch her, and her body felt like it was covered with mouths panting with longing.
She could hear his heavy breathing close behind her as his hands slipped around her to touch her breasts and the hot breath from his lips mingled with her hair.
"Niuniu, Niuniu," he called out softly.
Suddenly possessed by wild desire, she turned eagerly toward him, and wrapping her slender arms and legs around his body as if to become one with him, she pressed her bosom against the mysterious beating of his heart.
His arms enclosed her in a tight embrace.
They drank some more, and encouraged by the heat of the wine, he began exploring her body with his hands. He cupped her breasts in his hands like prizes won in battle. Like ripe fruits under her thin dress, sticking up perkily, their nipples erect, they pleased him far beyond her accomplishments in school. Her body seemed to melt in his hands. Pouting her wet, glistening lips as if she were going to whistle, she laid her head on his shoulder and began kissing his ear.
Turning her so that she was looking at the scenes of lovemaking on the wall, he told her that there was nothing in life more beautiful than this. He drew her to him again, her legs spread apart sitting on his lap, and again she felt the marvelous heat of that "third hand," which was working feverishly between her legs as if trying to bury itself.
Eventually he could no longer curb his lust, and begged her to let him take her there in the Yinyang Grotto. Overcome with fear and passion, she half refused, half accepted him. Without saying yes or no, she closed her eyes and waited in shame for him to undo their clothing and let their sexes come together to complete that most shining moment in a virgin's life.
The moment he had hoped and thirsted for for so many years had arrived. His dream come true, he moaned with uncontrollable ecstasy, his eyes filled with a love that glowed with the soft sheen of silk. But she was caught in a conflict of feelings. When she looked at the man before her, held in the agony of his love, her passion welled up within her, and this momentary passion made her former animosity slip away through her fingers like passing time. But she was not gripped by any feeling of love for him. All she felt was the lust that had been aroused in her body and the urge to use his body to reach that deep ecstasy she had never totally experienced before. What she delighted in was this sensual ecstasy, not this man before her. She was twined in his arms only for this feeling of close sexual intimacy. Now, her sexual desire was much more fierce than any lingering trace of her previous abhorrence of it. She was totally unprepared for her descent into this realm. Her mind and her body had distanced themselves from each other. She had become another person, controlled totally by her body's need for sexual gratification.
As she surrendered to the pleasure of her natural feelings, she felt a sudden, tearing pain.
Like a bolt of lightning, this lucid pain cast a bright glow on the skin of her entire body and throughout her innermost being. She could not help but cover her face with her hands…
This man and woman thus met each other. Their pleasure had no "past," and for this female student the hurt of her first "meeting" turned it into their "last supper."
My memories of that day are very sharp. It was like a new birth. This new world was a vast impure ocean that, without sound, called to me, and I threw myself in so deeply that when it genuinely called to me later I did not hear.
It is like someone once said – the significance of any relationship can only be understood through another relationship.
This led me to see that this world controls us through our sexual passions, and it is only after we have traveled a very long way and have already paid the price that we come to understand this.
14 One Person's Death Brings Punishment To Another…
In the end, a spirit that has suffered wrong finds its way back to punish its tormentors. Sometimes it assumes the shape of a cloud and returns to the world of the living as rain. The dead make use of its special form to continue their fight against their living enemies.
A stranger from another place, or should I say, a man in the guise of a stranger from another place, brushed past me in the stairwell. To be more precise, the first thing I noticed was a shadow abruptly appearing next to my own.
It was late at night, on the way back to my own apartment from Widow Ho's. The gloomy corridors were dead quiet, and the feeble glow from the inadequate lights, like the empty echo of a voiceless sigh, was absorbed, not reflected, by the walls.
Summer was just over, and it seemed like the fresh fall air was step by step climbing the stairs and entering our apartments.
In Ho's apartment, before I bumped into this stranger, or apparent stranger, we had dined together. The dishes she prepared were simple but delicious. There were stewed peanuts, chili cucumber sticks, fresh fried mushrooms in an oil dressing, minced dried beancurd, pickled duck stomachs, tendons marinated in oil, and a bottle of my favorite sweetened wine.
The fragrant odors wafted enticingly around our mouths, and the lamp enclosed the table in a soft rose glow. The faded floral-print cover on her sofa and her unique curios from the Qianlong period, such as twisted-neck vases, fans, and her gold clock with its book-shaped case, gave the room an ancient feel, a secluded charm. In the light from the lamp her clear skin and long, slender legs shone as her bare feet carried her back and forth across the carpet. The ceaselessly changing aspect of her exquisite figure, and her face turned always solicitously toward me, were also contained within this circle of light. The damp weather and the noise of the city outside could not possibly have interrupted the atmosphere in that room.