Five Spice Street

‘‘Now you can understand what a difficult responsibility his friend had given him, what an enormous test it was for him. It was a miracle he had survived up to now and hadn’t broken down either physically or mentally. He reckoned it up: to this point, thirty-six people had urged him to give this business up, spend time with his wife, and go home and enjoy his family. They said it wouldn’t get him anywhere. He ‘wouldn’t have a chance to taste the sugarplum.’ He would just ‘hopelessly look forward to something, like a fool.’ (What was he looking forward to? Money from heaven? Golden melons growing from the earth?) If things had gone on like this, he would have become impotent. You have to know that people can’t for a minute be without the ‘spare-time recreation.’ Even in the face of all kinds of public pressure, he persevered. He dared to say that no one could be found who understood that lady’s inner life as he did. No one knew her as well as he did, nor could anyone else truly guess her purpose (this prevented many frightening occurrences!). As he was absorbed in high-minded feelings about his friend and carrying out this very difficult work, a crisis befell his family. His wife was a loving person, but very hard-headed and monomaniacal about everything. She could not, nor did she want to, understand her husband’s high- minded sentiments. She felt that she had been unreasonably deprived of the rights she should have had. Hadn’t she enjoyed this continual ‘spare-time recreation’ for twenty years? Hadn’t it all been beautiful and satisfying? It was the way she’d held on to her husband and her whole family. Now, suddenly, a witch had shown herself and taken control of her husband, and left her with an empty house and sleepless nights. How could she resign herself to this? She understood everything in the world with her narrow mind and denounced her husband’s elaborate, lofty work as ‘indecent behavior.’ If her husband was a little late getting home, she said he was ‘engaged in shameful activity.’ If her husband didn’t have the energy for sex, she said her family ‘had become a nonentity’! ‘A demon has taken my place.’ She wrote posters all day long at home and pasted up words all over the place castigating her husband. This was a big joke in the neighborhood. Her husband became frightened and backed off, but when he reluctantly tried to have sex with her, she dodged away and cursed him: ‘You’re shameless,’ you just want ‘more women.’ You ‘want to screw every woman in the world.’ Anyhow, it was bad language, not the least bit reasonable, and it became more and more contemptible, ominous, and crazy. Recently, their conjugal relationship had deteriorated to the point that it couldn’t be remedied. For no reason, she concluded that she ‘had found the value of her life.’ This was to make things incessantly difficult for her husband-erect obstacles and set traps-and plot murder at an opportune time. She did all of these horrifying things. She was addicted to this. Her interest in sex, which had gradually dried up, now bloomed again and was revealed through a metamorphosis: she was as greedy as a wolf; it never stopped. There wasn’t even a shadow left of the formerly gentle woman.

‘‘After a period of antagonism between my wife and me, suddenly the worm turned and she had no more interest in me. For days on end, I was secretly happy and thought that the trouble- making demon had vanished and that everything would return to normal. When I went out in the morning, she patted my shoulder affectionately a few times and told me to ‘just go on my way without worrying.’ These good times didn’t last long: an even greater blow landed on my head. My neighbor told me (as he talked, he stomped on my foot; he must have thought I was a moron) that my wife had had an affair with Old Meng the fortune-teller. They had openly gotten it on together upstairs in the pharmacy: everyone on the street knew this. My wife had also asserted: her husband had sanctioned her behavior. She and I each ‘had found his and her own intimate friend.’ This was like a bolt of lightning. I lost consciousness all at once. Later, I rushed to the second floor of the pharmacy and kicked open the door. I saw the two of them still rolling around in bed. Old Meng grabbed his glasses with his hook-like fingers, propped them on his nose, and looked all around. He didn’t realize what had happened-he couldn’t see me with his near-sighted eyes, which were almost blind.

‘‘ ‘What has charged in here? Is it a dog or something?’ he asked my wife as he hid behind her in fright.

‘‘Seething, my wife slowly put her pants on, glanced at me with eyes like swords, and then said slowly, ‘It’s only a monkey. What else could it be?’