Chapter 140
I wouldn’t be able to say who brings it up first, whether it is my mother who asks delicately about the order of the visits or whether it is the Fei Zhi herself who slips it in to see the reaction, but the fact is that the name falls upon the table, and the Fei Zhi’s answer arrives wrapped in the same light tone with which one speaks of the weather.
“Ah, the Fei Lan”, she says, leaving the chopsticks carefully on the edge of the plate. “Fortunately, we won’t have to put up with her for much longer.”
She says it in passing, without underlining it, like someone mentioning a detail of no importance, and keeps eating as if she had just commented that the afternoon promises to cool down. But I catch perfectly what lies beneath that sentence, and the certainty with which she has pronounced it does not escape me, that assurance of one who is not expressing a wish but anticipating a fact.
My mother says nothing, she limits herself to serving herself a bit more tea with that impenetrable serenity she masters like no one, and I decide to imitate her, because this is exactly the kind of conversation in which the most intelligent thing I can do is not participate. So I nod vaguely, with a polite and perfectly hollow smile, and let the comment dissolve into the air without taking it up.
I could ask many things about that sentence, but I prefer not to.
The luncheon continues a while longer along the same calm channels, and I am already beginning to think that I am going to come out of this meeting without further scares when the Fei Zhi addresses me again, and this time she changes the subject toward a terrain that, in principle, should be one of the most comfortable for me.
“By the way, Zhāohuán Wen”, she says, and in her voice peeks something that sounds like genuine approval. “I must congratulate you on your book, that Journey to the West of yours. Even in Jìnyáng echoes of it reached us, and now that I have been able to read it I understand the commotion. It is a remarkable work, and more so coming from someone of your age.”
“You are very kind, Fei Zhi”, I reply, and I incline my head slightly. “I am glad to know that you enjoyed the reading.”
And then she ruins everything.
“Although there is one thing that has me intrigued”, she continues, tilting her head barely. “At a certain moment of the book a certain Buddha is mentioned, and there is a reference to a Buddhist. I confess I did not know what to understand by it. What exactly do those words refer to?”
And my mind goes blank.
For an second I am incapable of articulating a single coherent thought, because those two words, Buddha and Buddhist, should not exist in my book.
I was supposed to have erased down to the last Buddhist reference from the text, to have rewritten each monk as a cultivator, each sacred scripture as a compendium of techniques, each demon as a spirit beast, to have dedicated whole weeks to purging the work of every trace of a religion that in this world does not exist.
And now someone tells me, so calmly, that remnants remained.
A flash of pure panic runs through me inside. Did an erratum escape me? How many more will there be? And how is it possible that no one has told me until now, with the amount of people who have had that book in their hands, starting with my own mother?
But just when that last thought crosses my head, I see it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see how my mother averts her gaze. It is a minimal gesture, barely a second, the kind of detail that would have escaped me completely if I did not know her so well. But I know it, and with it I understand everything all at once. It is not that no one noticed, it is that they did notice and no one told me.
No one told me out of pure kindness, to spare me precisely this bad moment, taking for granted that if those words had come out of my pen it would be for some reason it was not their place to question.
And that comprehension, curiously, returns my calm to me.
I breathe deeply, let the air order the disorder I have inside, and compose my answer with all the naturalness I manage to gather.
“Ah, that”, I say, playing it down with a small gesture of my hand. “Those are the remnants of an idea I came to consider while writing the work, but that I discarded in the end since it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the story. But I thought I had erased it completely, though now I see that I failed to clean up some remnants of that idea.”
The Fei Zhi observes me an instant, weighing the answer, and finally nods with a gesture that considers the matter settled.
“I understand”, she says, and returns to her plate. “Things that happen when a work grows more than anticipated, I suppose.”
“Exactly that”, I confirm, and inside I let out all the air I had been holding.
Save for those two moments, the one of the comment about the Fei Lan and the one of the question that almost turned my stomach, the rest of the meeting unfolds without further scares, placid and courteous until the end. We talk a bit more, we finish the luncheon without haste, and after a while the Fei Zhi decides that she has now fulfilled the appropriate duration for a first visit and announces her departure. We take our leave with the customary inclinations and formulas, and I watch her move away through the garden with her Fei Yi a step behind, with that erect bearing of one who has returned disposed to recover everything she lost and something more.
The moment she disappears from view, and after exchanging with my mother a brief look that neither of the two of us needs to translate into words, I decide that I have had enough sociability for today.
“Lianhua”, I say turning my head slightly back. “Take me to my room.”
“Yes, Zhāohuán Wen”, she replies, and takes me out of the garden.
The moment I cross the threshold of my room and Lianhua positions me beside the desk, I set aside everything else and throw myself at the only thing that has been going around my head since the Fei Zhi pronounced those two cursed words.
I close my eyes and direct a part of my mind toward the text of my adaptation of Journey to the West, running through it from memory page by page. And here is where I curse again, for the umpteenth time, that my Blessing does not come with a built-in search bar, because one thing is that I can remember every word I have read or heard, and quite another is to be able to jump directly to what interests me.
There are no shortcuts, so I have no choice but to go reading the text mentally from the beginning, paragraph by paragraph, searching patiently among the tens of thousands of characters for the cursed Buddhist needles hidden in the haystack.
It takes me a good while, but in the end I find them.
There they are, crouched in a couple of passages I reviewed a thousand times and in which, even so, they slipped past me. A mention of Buddha that was left loose in a paragraph I clearly rewrote halfway, and a reference to a Buddhist in a dialogue I considered corrected when in reality I had only corrected it in part. Exact remnants of the old version, the same ones the Fei Zhi was referring to, that survive among the rest of the text like a couple of bugs clinging to existence.
I let out a sigh that comes from the very depths of me.
There is nothing to be done, it is clear I have to rewrite the book to eliminate those few references that, surely, have more than one reader scratching their head and wondering, just like the Fei Zhi, what the devil a Buddha is.
And for a moment a lazy and perfectly useless thought escapes me, one that summarizes to perfection how much I feel like setting about copying the entire text again, and it is none other than that it is a shame not to be able to put the hands of the Myriad of Hands on autopilot and let them copy on their own what I already have in my head while I dedicate myself to anything else.
It is an absurd fantasy, the kind of idle complaint one allows oneself when a repetitive task weighs on them.
And nevertheless, the moment I formulate it, I stay very still, because that idea leads me to another.
I stay a moment in silence, turning that idea over with the tingling sensation of having something important right at the edge of comprehension. And suddenly, without a word, I take from a drawer a couple of sheets of paper, two brushes and an inkwell, arrange them on the desk and address Lianhua.
“Lianhua”, I tell her. “Close the door.”
She asks nothing, because she long ago learned to distinguish when I am about to do something I prefer to keep between these four walls. She limits herself to approaching the door, throwing the bolt with a firm bar and positioning herself again near me, attentive and in silence.
And then I concentrate.
I quickly use the Myriad of Hands technique, but this time I don’t limit myself to lifting objects nor to moving them from one place to another. This time I make the two brushes rise at once from the desk, each over its own sheet, and I begin to write.
But not the same page duplicated, but two different pages of my book, each brush its own, while I hold both of them in memory at the same time and guide each stroke separately.
At first it works.
The two brushes start off at once, dipping into the ink and descending onto the paper to draw characters in parallel, one the page on the left, the other the one on the right, and for a few marvelous instants I see my idea take shape before me.
Two different texts, writing themselves at once and coming out of a single mind, but unfortunately right away my head begins to hurt.
And it is not just any pain. It is a very concrete, very specific pang, a pain I had not felt again since those distant days in which, at five years old and with an enthusiastic impatience, I tried to grab several particles of Qi at once and my mind still did not stretch that far. It is the fatigue of a mind that splits into two directions by force, that of trying to follow two incompatible threads without letting go of either, and it reminds me all at once that manipulating objects with precision is much more difficult than simply lifting and moving them.
But I clench my teeth and ignore the pain while I keep writing, obliging the two brushes to continue even though each stroke costs me more than the previous one, even though my head throbs, my temples burn and a part of me screams at me to stop before my concentration breaks entirely, while I hold on a bit longer until, finally, with a sigh, I let the two brushes stop and descend onto the desk.
I take the two sheets and contemplate them.
The calligraphy is, simply, abominable. The strokes tremble, the proportions dance, some characters are so crooked that it is hard to recognize them, and I have no doubt that, if my former calligraphy teacher came to see such a disaster, she would ask my mother for permission to inflict some kind of physical punishment on me. And probably my mother, just for that once, would grant it to her after seeing the writing.
But above the frightful calligraphy, above the trembling strokes and the uneven proportions, there is something that makes me smile in spite of the headache.
And it is that the two pages are written, each with its own content, each with what I was remembering while I wrote it. Two different texts, correct in substance though disastrous in form, come out at once from my head and from my technique.
Which means the idea is viable.
With practice, a lot of practice, and probably with the help of the Yin Gate open to better distribute the attention, this could come to work for real. I could copy texts in parallel, write several things at once, multiply myself on paper in a way that no calligrapher, however skilled they were with a single hand, could ever equal.
I leave the sheets on the desk and lean back in the chair, tired but satisfied, while I ask Lianhua to prepare me a calming tea for my headache.
But my last thought, before admitting that for today I have already forced myself enough, is how very much something like this would have helped me in my other life. And how much I would have enjoyed it.
And for an instant I allow myself to imagine how the archaeologist of that other world, seated in her office at the university with the desk buried under mountains of papers, would have been able to draft several reports at once while, with a couple of computers running in parallel, four Qi hands would have flown between keyboards and mice while she formed a team with herself in a game of Counter-Strike.