Five Spice Street

People were too optimistic: this situation didn’t last long. Suddenly one day, the husband’s second good friend (the one who said he’d been in love with Madam X as a teenager) saw him walking on the street in high spirits with a large cardboard box clutched to his chest. Curious, he went up to him and, despite resistance, brazenly opened the box: inside was a microscope. That night Madam X’s room was brightly lit, as if it were a holiday. The widow goaded her good friend to go in and look around; she saw that she had ‘‘polished all the mirrors and placed them in a conspicuous spot.’’ Her face was glowing ‘‘orange,’’ her hair was ‘‘as black as lacquer,’’ the husband was even more ‘‘jubilant,’’ and ‘‘every other minute, he jumped up uneasily and hugged her around the shoulders,’’ as if afraid that she was about to lose her human shape and change into something unfathomable, but also as if ‘‘giddy with good fortune.’’ His sickening sweetness was enough to ‘‘make a person throw up.’’ Once again, the demonic mirrors issued a summons, and at night teenage boys and girls tossed and turned anew and grew moody. For reasons yet unknown, a few stood naked at the side of the street, and each was fined five yuan by the police. The next day at dusk, one after another, they made their way into Madam X’s small room and sat there for two hours like imbeciles. Then, as before, they cursed Madam X as ‘‘boring’’ and ‘‘dull’’ and taunted her mercilessly. One even vowed that the next time he would steal her shoes. (But the next time, as soon as he went in, despite himself, he calmed down and became just like a porcelain doll. Then, after he left, he once more vowed that the next time he would steal her shoes for sure.)

Apparently only one person knew what Madam X did at night: her husband. Under his first good friend’s close questioning, he divulged a little. From what he said, you could tell that Madam X must have explained everything she was doing, but this stud-be- cause of his perpetual innocence-always perceived his wife’s deeds with a child’s mind, even its imagination and logic, and added some sweet images and obfuscations. When asked about Madam X’s nighttime activities, he answered, ‘‘Observing the stars.’’ Blushing, he added, ‘‘Just imagine: all the mirrors fly out the window, huhuhu, and enter outer space, and then with another huhuhu they fly back — isn’t this work absolutely noble? It’s precisely because this work draws away all her energy that the microscope is her lifeblood.’’

Along with his own peculiar way of thinking, each person develops a few small hobbies. For example, the husband was really interested in hopscotch: indeed, he could hopscotch any time of the day or night. His wife’s hobby was no different, and nobody should make a big fuss about it. His good friend was listening patiently to his drivel and thinking: this guy has gone mad. Then he reflected that everyone close to Madam X acted a little like a lunatic; even their son, Little Bao, had shown symptoms of ‘‘being addicted to looking in the mirror.’’ Although he tried hard to pull father and son back to reality in order to restrain Madam X’s extreme inclinations, it was always futile. The husband finally summed up his views: ‘‘My wife is a most ordinary person.’’ His friend shook his head. He could do nothing about the husband’s infantile feelings. He could only watch the developments and await a turn for the better. Was Madam X really involved in astronomy? Was everything as simple as this? The handsome husband’s intellect was highly questionable. There was proof that his eyes were deceived, that he could never distinguish right from wrong. Imagine turning a blind eye to the widow’s bewitching figure and missing his chance without knowing it! A good-for-nothing like this: could he figure out what those demonic mirrors were for? Could he see the things in the mirrors at a glance? By all appearances, his talk was nothing more than an attempt to muddle along. To gloss over everything laughable about him, he posed as a stalwart husband, fooling even himself, while remaining smugly ignorant of reality.