The Noodle Maker(45)
I was foolish. Even when I found out what this so-called ‘love’ amounted to, I failed to put a stop to it. On the contrary, I was happy to satisfy his every craving, and we became stuck to each other like glue. We would expend our energies, collapse in exhaustion, then have a meal and fall asleep. This was the pattern of our days, it was called ‘normal married life’. Then you came along. The one good thing about your birth was that it destroyed our sex life. Today you are the age that I was when I first met him. If you listen to what your mother has to say, perhaps you will choose a better path for yourself.
My first piece of advice is: never believe anything a man tells you. Above all, never trust a writer – they trap you in a web of words from which there is no escape. They earn their living making things up, they are professional liars. They tell you stories about things that never happen in the real world. At least, I’ve never witnessed any love story like the ones they write about in their books.
I presume that you and the writer have commenced a sexual relationship, because if he has already spoken to you of love, he has no doubt been simultaneously making moves on your body. If this is the case, perhaps you have discovered that love is a word of little consequence that men spew from their mouths without thinking. Or perhaps your curiosity about sex has blinded you to love’s true nature. We are both women. We are fully acquainted with the various mounds and dips of our bodies, and know they are not nearly as sublime as men imagine. You must fend men off for as long as possible, because as soon as they have squeezed and probed every part of your flesh, you become worthless to them, no better than a lump of meat on a chopping board. Don’t wait for your wedding day before you start knocking some sense into him. Tell him at once that he must stop dragging you off to bed, or to deserted sheds and grassy verges. Ensure that you remain standing or seated at all times. Never give him an opportunity to press you down onto the floor.
You convince yourself that his search of your body is a search for love. But love cannot be groped or fondled …
He had based the ten-page letter on the information the old woman gave during their conversation. She said she had tried to write the letter herself, but her hands shook so much she was unable to hold a pen. The street writer was stunned by her candour and her cynical attitude to love.
When he remembered the cold expression on her face, his skin crawled. He blushed when he thought of the sentimental love letters he had written in the past. He knew that the women who had received them were now waddling contentedly down the street, clutching their pregnant bellies, while the men who had sent them were returning to him on the sly, asking him to pen letters to their new mistresses.
‘Love is a waste of time,’ the old woman told him. ‘If that writer wants to marry my daughter, he should come and take a look at me first. I’m the image of who she will be nine thousand days from now. When he sees me, his love-sickness will vanish like a puff of smoke.’
The old woman mumbled on to him about how young people today confuse heartache with suffering. She said they are two different things: real suffering courses through the body like blood, but heartache is a fleeting reaction to a petty lovers’ tiff. She said if one feels elated with the joys of love, then it means one has not delved fully enough into one’s partner’s soul. Finally, after she told him that the daughter who ignored all her letters was planning to perform a public suicide, she cried: ‘She really is my reincarnation! Nobody can stand in her way. She’s planning to hire a tiger from the zoo and feed herself to it. If she returns to this world, we’ll form an unbeatable team.’
After the old woman walked away, the street writer had to tap his head before he could think clearly again. That evening, he returned to his shed in the entrance passage of an apartment block in the centre of town, and tried to sort out the old woman’s muddled thoughts. (Apparently the shed’s previous owners – a mother and son who ran a private crematorium business – had taken a trip to the suburbs one day, and hadn’t been seen again since.) He focused his mind; the light bulb hanging above him shone on his balding head. Although he lacked the old woman’s sharp eyes that could see through the vanity of this world, the grey matter inside his skull had been taxed so hard over the years that wiry hairs jutted from his nostrils.
He had a face that indicated he was not suited to manual labour. It was heart-shaped, and as white as the moon. His lips were as moist and red as those of a young girl – although this was probably an early sign of tuberculosis. The whites of his eyes were yellow. He often smiled for no reason. When he was listening to the old woman’s story, and later writing the letter for her, the smile had never once left his face.