Five Spice Street

The fourth person who noticed Mr. Q’s appearance was a widow so old she looked like dry bamboo. She wore a little black felt hat on her little bald head, and she nodded all day long, like a chicken pecking rice. It was quite by chance that she noticed Mr. Q. At dusk on a winter day, a deliveryman was unable to pull his load of coal to her home because of the steep grade. The old dame looked all around for assistance. Only one person came to help: Q. Afterwards, she grabbed the front of Q’s coat by the buttons to steady herself. She looked him all over and then finally exclaimed, ‘‘What a large face-broad enough to hold mountains and rivers!’’ A fleeting impulse caused her to make this remark. Before long, she forgot the incident, even Q. If someone mentioned Q, she confused Q with one of her cousins from long ago (whether this cousin actually existed was extremely doubtful) and thought of them as one and the same. She talked at length of how marvelous her cousin’s ‘‘square face’’ was. All the while, she nodded, pecking rice. She was very old and began hallucinating easily. Later, she hallucinated almost continuously. Her eyes would cross and she’d swallow saliva while she talked. Once begun, there was no end to it-gudong gudong. It was distressing. Someone raised doubts: had the old woman hallucinated what happened at twilight on that winter day? She was so old and her vision so blurry, could she have been mistaken about who it was? Suppose that the one who helped lug the coal was in fact her nephew (she insisted that this nephew hadn’t entered her house for more than twenty years), and that because of the grudge she’d felt toward him for more than twenty years, she had purposely concealed his benevolence and instead had given the credit to a certain Q, who was then being talked about: this was entirely possible and reasonable. From her wild talk about his face being ‘‘roomy enough to hold mountains and rivers,’’ you could spot the flaws in her statement. Her impression of Q’s looks boiled down to one point: he had a very broad face. But ‘‘holding mountains and rivers,’’ this shocking image-applied so impulsively-must have some other meaning.

Had the old woman been rejuvenated in a trance and hallucinated that she’d run into a sweetheart from the past, clung fast to him, and persisted in a passionate daydream? Did this have anything to do with ‘‘hallucinogens’’? Someone raised another doubt: was she pretending to be crazy in order to monopolize Q? Q dominated everyone’s conversations-everyone was interested in him- and now through chicanery this old woman had appropriated him for herself, and insisted that he was some old lover from thirty years ago, even though it was clear that Q was young. She brooked no disagreement. If this world conformed to her wishes, who knew what might happen?

The fifth who noticed Q’s appearance was a man, the husband. As the saying goes, Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But in today’s world, that isn’t quite right, because even rivals in love see the beauty in each other. Madam X’s husband is unusually handsome (the widow, the widow’s female friend, and everyone living on Five Spice Street think so). Too bad he was completely in the dark about it: even if someone told him, he’d be surprised and then immediately forget it. He was uninterested in his own appearance and cared nothing about other people’s opinions of him. Perhaps it can be said that he was ‘‘self-confident.’’ His feelings were like a baby’s-innocent and good, but a little stubborn. As a cuckold, he probably drew more attention than anyone else on Five Spice Street, but he acted just the same: letting well enough alone, calmly going about his business, as if nothing were happening. The women led by the widow had thoroughly researched his attitudes and finally produced a physiological explanation ‘‘inappropriate to explain’’ in front of others. (When she mentioned the ‘‘reason,’’ the widow poked her female friend in the waist and flushed a deep red.) The husband had only one word for Q’s appearance: handsome. Once he unintentionally mentioned this to his good friend (the one who had looked into Madam X’s age), and after his friend’s wife heard this, it spread fast. This was a great revelation for Five Spice Street residents, who had been speculating, but without much to show for it; now all their doubts vanished. They greatly admired the widow’s genius for probing, especially when they went a step further and came up with the term ‘‘eunuch’s psychology’’ to describe the husband. What joy they felt at having come up so spontaneously with this diagnosis.