The Girl Who Played Go

88

I won’t be returning to the Square of a Thousand Winds.

I hardly eat anymore, and I subject my body to ever more demanding training, but still it resists exhaustion. There has not been a drop of rain for days and the relentless bronze sun is driving me insane. My love has been transformed into bestial desire, and in the long, sleepless nights I am like a man slaking his thirst with imaginary water; it sometimes seems that I really am touching her skin, I have imagined it so many times. I draw her face endlessly in my mind’s eye, her neck, her shoulders, her hands… and I invent her breasts, her hips, her buttocks and her open thighs. I imagine the thousand different positions in which I would clasp her to me, each more wild than the last. I touch myself, but my member taunts my aching desire, refusing to release me from my pain.

Soon this nocturnal obsession grips the daytime: I have erections while we go for a run, my voice cracks when I give orders, and the hoarse break at the back of my throat conjures the pleasure that the Chinese girl would have given me. To feel the tightness of her sex around my member would have been the most violently ecstatic form of suffering I could ever experience.

One morning, unable to find any peace, I go to the Square of a Thousand Winds. It is five o’clock and the trees are whispering in a strong breeze, as if a thousand different drafts and breezes had agreed to meet there at the break of day.

The first player appears, with a birdcage in his hand. As he cleans the table and puts down the pots of stones, another man comes over to sit down opposite him.

My heart sinks.

That evening, after getting drunk with the Captain, I knock on Orchid’s door. She has already forgotten all her resentment and slips off her dress at once. It has been a long time since I have touched a woman. Seeing in her the Chinese girl’s nakedness, I discharge into her as violently as emptying the chamber of a gun.

As I wander the streets in the hope of seeing her, this tiny town suddenly seems vast. I try a different brothel, but none of the girls parading past moves me. Still, I go up to Peony’s room with her. Her smile reveals one golden tooth. Her body is fat and very white, and she cries out exuberantly.

At four in the morning a White Russian girl agrees to be slapped as I sit astride her. My belt leaves purple streaks across her skin.

Dawn is breaking, the new day just like any other. I shake a rickshaw boy awake and he takes me to the foot of the Hill of the Seven Ruins. Up the hill the tree under which she slept is clothed in rays of purple light, and it remains true to my memory, but the rest of the scene has lost all its poetry. In the middle of the clearing the grass has grown too high and is beginning to dry out.

Back at the barracks I have forgotten how to harangue my soldiers, how to stand up, even how to sit down. My mind is somewhere else, and nowhere.

That night I am woken by piercing whistles. I open my eyes. My deliverance is at hand.

The locomotive stands by the platform billowing columns of steam. I shove my men, barking at them to hurry, then I get in and pull the door closed behind me. I suddenly realize that I have forgotten to say good-bye to Captain Nakamura.