I thought back to my two encounters with Chen Bi since my return.
The first was on a snowy evening last year. Little Lion hadn’t yet started work at the bullfrog farm, and we were strolling through the snow, watching snowflakes dance in the glare of golden yellow lights around the square. Firecrackers popped somewhere in the distance; it was getting to feel very much like New Year’s. We were talking to our daughter, who was off in Spain. She said she and her husband were strolling the streets of Cervantes’ hometown. I told her that by chance Little Lion and I were walking into the Don Quixote café, which evoked crisp laughter on the other end of the cell phone.
It’s a small world, Papa.
Culture is everywhere, Sensei.
At the time we didn’t know that Li Shou was the owner, but we sensed that whoever it was, he was no ordinary man. We liked the place as soon as we walked in. The simple, unadorned tables and chairs particularly impressed me. Covering the tables with clean, white, neatly starched tablecloths would have made it very European. But I agreed with Li Shou, whose later research showed that rural Spanish restaurants in Don Quixote’s day did not use tablecloths. He added the gossipy comment that women back then did not wear bras either.
Sensei, I confess that when I saw that sculpture of the naked woman whose breasts were shiny from being rubbed, I reached out in spite of myself, which shows how sordid and yet open and candid I am. Little Lion shushed to stop me. What’s that for? I asked. This is art. That’s what all cultural degenerates say, she replied. The fake Sancho walked up with a smile, gave the impression of bowing without actually doing so, and said, Welcome, sir, madam.
He took our coats, scarves, and hats, and then led us to a table in the centre on which white candles floated in a dish filled with water. We said we preferred another table by the window, where we could enjoy the sight of fluttering snow outside and observe the restaurant’s décor at the same time. There at a table in the corner — the one that would later become my favourite spot — sat a man smoking. I knew who he was by the missing ring finger on his right hand. That and the big red nose. It was the once handsome Chen Bi, now bald on top, with hair hanging around his neck at the back, the way Cervantes had worn his. His face was gaunt, the cheeks sunken, probably a sign of missing molars. That seemed to magnify the size of his nose. He held the butt end of a lit cigarette to his lips with the thumb and two fingers of his right hand. The air filled with the strange odour of a burned cigarette filter. Two streams of smoke emerged from his wide nostrils. He had a glazed look, the typical sign of dejection. I wanted not to look at him, but couldn’t help myself. My thoughts went to the sculpture of Cervantes on the Peking University campus, and I knew why Chen Bi was here. He was strangely dressed: a nondescript long coat and a white knitted, seersucker-like scarf around his neck; the only thing missing was a sword on his hip. Then I spotted one leaning against the wall, which led my eyes to chain-mail gloves, a shield, and a spear standing in the corner. I expected to see a dirty, scrawny dog at his feet, and there was one — dirty, but not scrawny. Cervantes was believed to be missing the ring finger of his right hand, but he did not go around carrying a spear and a shield — that would be Don Quixote — and yet the man had Cervantes’ face. But then, none of us had ever actually seen Cervantes or, obviously, the fictional Don Quixote, so whether Chen Bi was made up to look like Cervantes or his fictional creation was an open question. My old friend’s current situation saddened me. I’d heard of the tragedy that had befallen his two beautiful daughters, Chen Er and Chen Mei, once Northeast Gaomi Township’s loveliest sisters. Chen Bi’s ancestral background was a mystery, but it definitely included foreign blood, and they were thus spared the flat features of most Chinese. The classical description of beauty did not fit those two, who were camels in a herd of sheep, cranes in a flock of chickens. Had they been born into a rich family or in a more prosperous land, or even if they had been born into a poor family in some distant place, but had been fortunate enough to encounter a rich man, they might well have taken the world by storm. They left home and went south together, perhaps to seek such an encounter. I heard they both took jobs at the Dongli Stuffed Animal Factory, where the manager was a foreigner — whether or not he was a real foreigner was hard to say. If two beautiful, intelligent girls in an environment of luxury and dissipation had wanted to make a great deal of money and enjoy life, their bodies could have made that happen. Instead, they toiled in a factory workshop, enduring the life of common labourers, a life of brutal exploitation, and in the end, a fire that shocked the nation turned one of them to ashes and horribly disfigured the other. The younger girl survived only through the sacrifice of her sister. How sad, how tragic, how pitiful. This proved that they had not fallen into degeneracy, but had remained as pure as jade and as unspoiled as ice, a pair of good girls — I’m sorry, Sensei, I got carried away again.
Chen Bi’s life had been one of incomparable sorrow. It seemed to me that by coming to the Don Quixote café to play the part of a famous dead man or a bizarre fictional character, his situation was much the same as that of the dwarf doorman at Beijing’s Paradise Dancehall or the giant doorman at Guangzhou’s Water Curtain Cave Bathhouse. They all sold whatever their body had to offer. The dwarf sold his pygmy stature, the giant sold his jumbo height; Chen Bi sold his nose. They were all in the same tragic circumstance.
Sensei, I recognised Chen Bi right off that night, though I hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. I’d have recognised him if it had been a hundred years and in a foreign country. Naturally, I think, when we recognised him, he also recognised us. You don’t need eyes to pick out a childhood friend; you can manage that with your ears — a sigh or a sneeze will do it.
Should I go up and say hello? Invite him to join us for dinner? Little Lion and I couldn’t make up our minds. And I could tell from his look of indifference and the way he was staring at the buck’s head on the wall, not even glancing out of the corner of his eye, that he couldn’t decide if he should come over to our table. The memory of him coming to our house that year on the night we sent off the Kitchen God — Chen Er with him, wanting to take back Chen Mei — floated into my mind. A large man back then, he was wearing a stiff pigskin jacket. He’d threatened to toss our garlic press into the pot on the stove. He was breathing heavily and seemed ready to explode from frustration, like a raging bear. That was the last time we’d seen one another till this day. I’m sure we weren’t alone in thinking about the past, that he was too. Truth be told, we never hated him; in fact, he had our deepest sympathies over his misfortunes. The main reason we did not go up and say hello to him was we couldn’t decide how. Why? Because we were making it, as the locals said, and he wasn’t. How does someone who’s making it deal with a friend who isn’t? We simply didn’t know.
Sensei, I’m a smoker. It’s a bad habit that encounters strict constraints in Europe, North America, even there in Japan, and makes us feel vulgar and ill bred. But not here, not yet. I took out a cigarette and lit it with a match. I love that brief burst of sulphur smell when striking a wooden match. Sensei, I was smoking Golden Pavilions then, a very expensive local brand. Two hundred yuan a pack, I’m told, which is ten yuan a smoke, while a jin of wheat sells for eighty fen. In other words, you’d have to sell twelve and a half jin of wheat to buy a single Golden Pavilion cigarette. Twelve and a half jin of wheat produce fifteen jin of baked bread, enough to meet a person’s needs for ten days or more. But a single cigarette’s life lasts no more than a few puffs. The resplendent cigarette packet reminded me of the Ginkakuji in your esteemed city of Kyoto, and I had to wonder if the Golden Pavilion had in fact been the model for the packet design. I knew how much my father detested the idea that I smoked this brand, but he limited his comment to: It’s degenerate! I nervously tried to explain: I didn’t buy these, they were a gift. His chilly response? That makes it obscene! I regretted telling him how much they cost, but that just shows how shallow and vain I was. How was I any different from the nouveau riche who parade their purchases of brand name products and crow about their new, young wives? But I couldn’t throw away such expensive cigarettes over a single critical comment by my father. If I did, wouldn’t that be even more degenerate? Golden Pavilions are enhanced with a special fragrance that produces intoxicating smoke. I could see that Chen Bi was getting fidgety. After sneezing loudly, over and over, he let his moody gaze move slowly from the stag’s head — hesitantly, timidly, and tremulously at first, then eagerly, greedily, even a little menacingly — to us.