Aprovechando que iba a estar unos días por China, investigué las obras de Gao Xinjiang y en el momento que me crucé con este título me cautivó. Poco me hizo falta para decidirme; una novela que transcurría en los valles de Sichuan, zona a la que me dirigía, y que emanaba un aroma cargado de existencialismo… ya me sobraban razones.
Al inicio del libro encontramos una introducción de Mabel Lee (traductora de la novela en la edición inglesa) que a la postre se vuelve imprescindible para seguir la obra. Sitúa el contexto del autor (a día de hoy esta novela sigue censurada en China), nos descarta que sea una novela autobiográfica pero más importante, nos explica las herramientas del autor con las que aborda la novela, en particular cómo usa los pronombres personales. Esta novela es una novela absolutamente existencialista, tanto, que el autor no se basta sólo con el pronombre ‘Yo’, sino que recurre también a ‘tú’, ‘ella’ y ‘él’ para referirse de distintas formas a sí mismo. Caóticamente como puede parecer, tiene su sentido lógico que iremos descubriendo según avancemos en la novela. El autor, nos explicará estas distinciones en el capítulo 52 (de 81):
- <i>You know that I am just talking to myself to alleviate my loneliness. You know that this loneliness of mine is incurable, that no-one can save me and that I can only talk with myself as the partner of my conversation. In this lengthy soliloquy you are the object of what I relate, a myself who listens intently to me — you are simply my shadow. As I listen to myself and you, I let you create a she, because you are like me and also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation. So you talk with her, just like I talk with you. She was born of you, yet is an affirmation of myself. [...] I who am engrossed in my journey or you who are on your spiritual journey. [...] At this point there is a need to step back and to create space. That space is he. He is the back of you after you have turned around and left me.</i>
Que nos lo adelante Mabel Lee no es una pérdida en mi opinión, y permite encajar mejor la narrativa.
La novela se estructura principalmente en dos hilos paralelos que ocupan capítulos independientes que se van intercalando. En uno de los hilos tenemos lo que emula ser la parte autobiográfica de la novela, donde el autor usa el pronombre ‘Yo’ y nos cuenta pasajes independientes de su retiro temporal en los valles de Sichuan. Es en capítulos avanzados del libro donde el autor nos confirma que no tomemos sus experiencias como ciertas en una reflexión sobre la imaginación y la memoria que me parece maravillosa, tal vez porque ya le he dado muchas vueltas a esta idea:
- <i>Even I can’t distinguish how much is experience and how much is dream within my memories and impressions, so how can you distinguish between what I have experienced and what are figments of my imagination? And in the end is it necessary to make such distinctions? In any case, they aren’t of any significance whatsoever.</i>
En el otro hilo, tenemos la parte más existencialista, donde el autor navega por marcos imaginarios, más abstractos y oníricos, anclándolo a veces a lugar más específicos y otros directamente dejándolos en una nebulosa inefable. En este hilo, el autor usa el pronombre ‘Tú’ para referirse a su yo imaginario y el pronombre ‘Ella’ para referirse a una mujer inexistente que utiliza para desarrollar toda una intriga de ilusiones, dependencias y destrucciones emocionales en una búsqueda de la parte más pura del yo (self). La mejor definición de esta tensión discursiva nos la proporciona de nuevo Mabel Lee en la introducción:
- <i>Soul Mountain is a literary response to the devastation of the self of the individual by the primitive human urge for the warmth and security of an other, or others, in other words by socialized life. The existence of an other resolves the problem of loneliness but brings with it anxieties for the individual, for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some form of power struggle.</i>
El primer hilo de la novela es una aventura que podríamos clasificar como antropológica, donde el autor recorre distintos pueblos remotos y entabla conversaciones con la gente local que nos introducen a sus tradiciones, leyendas y costumbres. Aunque considero esta trama imprescindible y que de una forma muy interesante consigue articular la segunda trama, es esta otra sin duda la que me interesa. El título de la novela hace precisamente ilusión a este segundo hilo narrativo, donde el autor ‘Tú’ parte en búsqueda de esta misteriosa Montaña del Alma (Soul Mountain, Lingshan 灵山) que el protagonista conoce en una conversación casual con un tercero:
- <i>The two of you laughed at the same instant, put the cups well apart, and started a conversation. You asked him where he was going. “Lingshan.” “What?” “Lingshan, ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain.” You’d been to lots of places, visited lots of famous mountains, but had never heard of this place.</i>
Es en esa búsqueda de la Montaña del Alma donde el autor se encontrará con esta mujer misteriosa ‘She’ a la que invitará en su búsqueda:
- <i>You ask if she will go across the river with you. Over there on the other shore is Lingshan where wonderful things can be seen, where suffering and pain can be forgotten, and where one can find freedom</i>.
Con ese ‘McGuffin’ como objetivo el autor explorará, a través de sus diálogos, los vínculos emocionales entre ambos que según evolucionan se irán tiñendo de un escepticismo que se opone a los mismos y que surge de esa vertiente existencialista que trata la novela. En mi opinión son sin duda los capítulos más interesantes (a pesar de que alguno de ellos de lo abstracto se vuelve incomprensible e incluso insoportable) y los que me llevan a aquellos rincones oscuros que sólo pocas novelas me consiguen llevar. Me veo frente a un espejo, desnudo y reconozco patrones que me estremecen y que me asustan pero que también me alivian, como si me quitaran cierto peso y me ayudasen a compartir una carga.
La soledad, al amor, el sexo, el sentido de la vida. El yo. Son los temas entorno a los que
orbita la novela y que podrían resumir la narrativa en la siguiente frase de Mabel Lee:
- <i>the story of one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom.</i>
De cada uno de esos temas podemos encontrar profundas reflexiones. Muchas de ellas, tanto en boca de ‘tú’ como en boca de ‘ella’ las siento como propias. Supongo que no por nada Gao Xinjiang es premio Nobel y es esta universalidad que consigue en la descripción de sensaciones tan complejas lo que escala la novela a otro nivel.
Del yo:
- <i>[...] but whenever I observed other people I found this detestable omniscient self of mine interfering, and to this day there is not one face it hasn’t interfered with. This is a serious problem, for when I am scrutinizing someone else, I am at the same time scrutinizing myself</i>
- <i>When I am observing others I always treat the other person as a mirror for looking inwardly at myself. The observations are inevitably affected by my state of mind at a particular time [...] My understanding of others, including women, is actually superficial and arbitrary. Women I like are inevitably illusions I have created to delude myself, and this is my tragedy. As a result, my relationships with women inevitably fail.</i>
- <i>The problem is the awakened self in the inner mind, this is the monster which torments me no end. People love the self yet mutilate the self. Arrogance, pride, complacency or anxiety, jealousy and hatred, all spring from this. The self is in fact the source of mankind’s misery. So, does this unhappy conclusion mean that the awakened self should therefore be killed? Thus Buddha told the boddhisatva: the myriad phenomena are vanity, the absence of phenomena is also vanity.</i>
- <i>“For one who has renounced society all within the four seas is home, for him what is called native village does not exist.”</i>
- [Reflexión genial]: <i>At that time the individual did not exist. There was not an awareness of a distinction between “I” and “you”. The birth of I derived from fear of death, and only afterwards an entity which was not I came to constitute you. At that time people did not have an awareness of fearing oneself, knowledge of the self came from an other and was affirmed by possessing and being possessed, and by conquering and being conquered. He, the third person who is not directly relevant to I and you, was gradually differentiated. After this the I also discovered that he was to be found in large numbers everywhere and was a separate existence from oneself, and it was only then that the consciousness of you and I became secondary. In the individual’s struggle for survival amongst others, the self was gradually forgotten and gradually churned like a grain of sand into the chaos of the boundless universe.</i>
- <i>I am on a journey — life. Life, good or bad, is a journey and wallowing in my imagination I travel into my inner mind with you who are my reflection.</i>
- <i>Although you were born in the city, grew up in cities and spent the larger part of your life in some huge urban metropolis, you can’t make that huge urban metropolis the hometown of your heart. Perhaps, because it is so huge that within it at most you can only find in a particular place, in a particular corner, in a particular room, in a particular instant, some memories which belong purely to yourself, and it is only in such memories that you can preserve yourself fully. In the end, in this vast ocean of humanity you are at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile.</i>
- <i>The self within you is merely a mirror image, the reflection of flowers in water. You can neither enter the mirror nor can you scoop up anything, but looking at the image and becoming enamoured of it you no longer pity yourself.</i>
Del sentido de la vida:
- [Terrible] <i>Today, you can’t know what traumas tomorrow will bring. You’ve learnt through experience everything you need to know. What else are you looking for? When a man gets to middle age shouldn’t he look for a peaceful and stable existence, find a not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre position, become a husband and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in the bank and add to it every month so there’ll be something for old age and a little left over for the next generation?</i>
- <i>If I’m trying to be a recluse why do I need to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I need to break away from analytical thinking, this is the cause of all my anxieties.</i>
- <i>Actually, there has never been a definite goal in your life. All your goals keep changing as time passes and as locations change, and in the end the goals no longer exist. When you think about it, life in fact doesn’t have what may be called ultimate goals.[...] At this point in your thinking, your feet become lighter, it is fine wherever your feet take you, as long as there are sights to see.</i>
- <i>“The true traveller is without goal, it is the absence of goals which creates the ultimate traveller.”</i>
- <i>She has thought about death, thought about ending it all just like that. To commit suicide requires the urge but even this urge has completely vanished. Suicide has to be for someone or for something but she no longer exists for any person or any thing, and she no longer has the energy to kill herself.</i>
- <i>I am perpetually searching for meaning, but what in fact is meaning? Can I stop people from constructing this big dam as an epitaph for the annihilation of their selves? I can only search for the self of the I who is small and insignificant like a grain of sand</i>
- <i>You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.</i>
- <i>So not having a goal is a goal, the act of searching itself turns into a sort of goal, and the object of the search is irrelevant. Moreover, life itself is without goals, and is simply travelling along like this.</i>
- <i>don’t go searching for cause and retribution, don’t go searching for meaning, all is embodied in the chaos.</i>
- [Horror] <i>However, I can only return to pass my existence in what people are accustomed to calling a normal life, there is no alternative for me, and probably this is my tragedy.</i>
- <i>once you climb a mountain you lose interest in it and invariably think the mountain beyond will have things you haven’t encountered. When you eventually get to that peak the wonders you hoped for aren’t there, and once again there is just the lonely mountain wind. After some time you get used to this loneliness and climbing peaks becomes an obsession. You know you will find nothing but are driven by this blind thought and keep on climbing. However, while doing this you need to have some distraction and as you fabricate stories for yourself, images are born.</i>
De la pasión:
- <i>This unadorned splendour and beauty in nature fills me with another sort of indescribable sadness. It is a sadness which is purely mine and not something inherent in nature.</i>
- <i>Only you are left sitting in the pavilion, like an idiot, pretending to wait for an appointment which wasn’t made, with a woman who came and vanished, just as if you’re daydreaming. Could it be that you’re bored, that you’re fed up with your monotonous life devoid of passion and excitement and that you want to live again, to experience life again?</i>
- <i>She says she wants to help you recall these memories, she wants to help you recall the people and events you have forgotten, she wants to go wandering with you through your memories, go deep into your soul, to experience with you the life you have experienced. You say she wants to possess your soul. She says, yes, not just your body. If she is going to possess you she wants to possess everything, she wants to listen to your voice as she goes into your memories, she wants to imagine with you, curl into the deepest recesses of your soul and, together with you, manipulate your imagination, she says, she also wants to become your soul. [...] she wants you to touch with her fingers, to see with her eyes, to create images with her, to climb with her up Lingshan, she wants to look down on the whole of your soul from the peak of Lingshan, including secrets of which you are ashamed, hidden in the darkest corners.</i>
- <i>But I am instantly aware that I can no longer return to those pure passions. I must face the fact that I have become old. It is not just age and various other intangible differences even if she is right here and I can just reach out and take her with me. It amounts to the fact that my heart is old and I can no longer ignore all else and fall in love, body and heart, with a young woman. My relationships with women changed long ago and lost this instinctive youthful love … only lust remains. I’m afraid of shouldering the responsibility of even pursuing momentary happiness. I’m not a wolf but I would like to be a wolf, to return to nature, to go on the prowl. However, I can’t rid myself of this human mind. I am a monster with a human mind and can find no refuge.</i>
- <i>I can’t help liking her and I know it’s not love, but then what is love? Her body is fresh and sensitive and, again and again, I am filled with lust and do everything except for the last boundary.</i>
- <i>She was born an ordinary person and will return to being ordinary, and like an ordinary person marry an ordinary man. In any case she can’t go a step further with you, you monster, on your way down to Hell!</i>
Del dolor y el remordimiento de un amor no correspondido. Un amor que se postula como fruto de la soledad y la depresión, en un intento imposible de escapar del ‘yo’. Muchos de estos diálogos bien podrían pertenecerme:
- <i>She says it was you who said love is an illusion which people conjure up to delude themselves. You don’t believe in the existence of something called love — it’s either the man possessing the woman or else the woman possessing the man. And you just go on making up all sorts of beautiful children’s stories to provide a refuge for her weak and fragile soul.</i>
- <i>you’ll be able to travel comfortably, whether it’s to Lingshan or to Hell. There’s no need to push her, she’ll go away, far away from you, never see you again and never want to see you again. There’s no need for you to worry about her, it is she who is leaving so you will not have wronged her, there’ll be no remorse, no responsibility. Just treat it as if she hadn’t ever existed and your conscience won’t trouble you. You notice that you can’t utter a single sentence, this is because she has spoken about your sore spot, spoken about how you think. She has said for you exactly what you don’t dare say yourself.</i>
- <i>If finally there’s something she should say it would be that she’s grateful to you, grateful to you for the part of the journey you have taken her on and grateful for saving her from loneliness. However, she is even more lonely and it keeps getting worse and she can’t cope.</i>
- <i>Eventually, she turns and walks off. You deliberately don’t look, you know she is waiting for you to turn your head. If you turn to look, she won’t leave, she will look at you, holding back her tears until they begin streaming down her cheeks. You will give in, beg her to stay. Then there will be embraces and kisses, she will again go limp in your arms, tearfully utter a jumble of endearing words, passionate and full of sadness. And with her arms like willow branches, her body will encircle you and drag you back down the same old road. You resolutely refuse to look at her and go off on your own, straight along the precipitous river-bank. When you get to a bend you can’t help looking back, but she has vanished. Your heart is suddenly desolate, it’s as if you’ve lost something yet at the same time it’s as if you’ve attained some sort of release. You sit on a rock as if waiting for her to come yet knowing she will not come back to you. It is you who are cruel and not she and you simply think of her curses to convince yourself she is mean like this, so that she will totally vanish from your heart, so that you will not be left with any lingering remorse. You drifted together like floating waterweeds, in that place Wuyizhen, because you were lonely and because she was depressed. You don’t really know her at all, whether what she told you was truth or only half truth. Her inventions and your fabrications merge and are indistinguishable. She also knows nothing about you.</i>
- <i>It was because she was a woman and you a man, because in the flickering light of the solitary lamp the dark upstairs room had the clean fragrance of paddy-rice straw, because it was a dream-like night in a strange place, because in the early chill of the autumn night she stirred your memories and your fantasies, your fantasies about her and your lust. For her you were exactly the same. Yes, you seduced her but she also seduced you.</i>
- <i>Her burning anxiety lies in her longing for love and the difficulty of finding a person to whom she can entrust herself, body and soul. [...] You warn her that in life there is not a prince on a white charger and that she will be disappointed time and again. [...] You say time and again she has been deceived and that time and again she will deceive others... [...] She is destined to suffer, [...] She says she only wants to single-heartedly love one person. You acknowledge that this is what she wants but the problem is it’s impossible. [...] You say she doesn’t know what to love.</i>
- <i>What do you mean by really special? Someone who can make her fall in love so that she can give her heart to him and follow him anywhere, even to the end of the world.</i>
- <i>What she wants is excitement! After calming down it’s impossible. She says it is possible. But after calming down there will be other concerns. She says if she falls in love there will be no calming down. That means she has never been in love. You stare into her eyes, she looks away and says she really doesn’t know. She doesn’t know whether she has been in love because she loves herself too much.</i>
- <i>this is because she is too lovely and so many people love her. This is her misfortune.</i>
- <i>However this chance meeting leaves me with a pleasant feeling. I would not pursue such an innocent young girl, perhaps I will also never truly love a woman. Love is too burdensome, I need to live my life unburdened. I want to find happiness but I don’t want to take on responsibilities. Marriage always follows and then the tiresome anxieties and resentment. I have become too indifferent and no-one can make my blood surge with passion anymore. I suppose I’m getting old and there’s only a bit left of what can barely count as curiosity, and there is a lack of desire to bring about an outcome. The outcome isn’t hard to imagine and would end up being burdensome. I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces. There are so many people in this big wide world and so many places to visit but there is nowhere for me to put down roots, to have a small refuge, to live a simple life. I always encounter the same sort of neighbours, say the same sort of things, good morning or hello, and once again am embroiled in endless daily trivia. Even before this becomes solidly entrenched, I will already have tired of it all. I know there is no cure for me.</i>
De la soledad [añado una nota personal, ahora que al elaborar estas líneas me he ido empapando de un cariz reflexivo: escribo esta review desde el aeropuerto, lugar indeterminado - cualquier aeropuerto - al que con los años he ido cogiéndole apego, tal vez precisamente porque apesar de la ajetreada multitud es gracias a su consecuente indiferencia que me es imposible no sentirme solo, cómodamente solo y regodearme en esa soledad. Ese lugar donde uno está rodeado de perfectos desconocidos que van a repartirse en una miríada de lugares distantes, siempre bajo la tentadora idea de que una nueva vida aguarda tras cada puerta de embarque]:
- <i>aren’t you an atheist who’s not afraid of anything? you say that you are afraid, what of? loneliness?</i>
De la verdad:
- <i>What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not to exist.</i>
- <i>Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative. Reality can’t be verified and doesn’t need to be, that can be left for the “reality-of-life” experts to debate. What is important is life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can’t be related to another person.</i>
Tal vez sea la predisposición con la que cogemos un libro, tal vez como mencionaba al principio hay un libro esperando para ciertos momentos de nuestra vida, tal vez es que simplemente hay libros extraordinarios que, como la sal en el agua, diluimos en nuestro ser de forma orgánica y natural, o tal vez sea un poco de todo. La realidad es que ha sido un privilegio haber leído estas páginas al mismo tiempo que he podido estar vagando por los valles escarpados en la frontera entre Sichuan y Tibet, sumergiéndome en cuerpo y mente en una soledad y en unos sueños que siempre me acompañan. Considero que la Montaña del Alma tiene el mérito de haber conseguido transformar en palabras ciertos recovecos ocultos del individuo que aunque comunes son complejos. Ha convertido la Montaña en Espejo.
Cierro esta review con una última y magnífica frase que sin duda resume mejor que ninguna el corpus del libro, y quizá de la vida:
- <i>The fact of the matter is I comprehend nothing, I understand nothing.</i>
Una recopilación de datos sobre China:
- <i>Ziwei Constellation fortune telling, an ancient school which can predict a person’s life, death and future</i>.
- <i>The main peak of the Wuling Range, at the borders of the provinces of Guizhou, Sichuan, Hubei and Hunan, is 3200 metres above sea level.</i>
- <i>kiln stokers firing the spinning wheels had inadvertendy added some extraneous material to the clay, but it was the women using the spindles who discovered that after one rotation there was a return to the beginning. The man who gave this meaning was called Fuxi. However the bestowal of life and intelligence to Fuxi must be attributed to a woman. The general name for the woman who created man’s intelligence is Nüwa. The first named woman, Nüwa, and the first named man, Fuxi, constitute the collective consciousness of men and women.</i>
- [La historia China es maravillosa] <i>Similarly, if Li Bai had not been driven from the court of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, he would probably not have become the immortal poet and there would not be the legend of his setting out in a boat while drunk and trying to scoop up the moon from the water.</i>
- <i>It is not clear if he thinks the Red Turbans are local bandits</i>
- <i>this area was overrun by the White Lotus Sect;</i>
- <i>When Nüwa created humans she also created their sufferings.</i>
- <i>For Daoists, purity is the principle, non-action the essence and spontaneity the application; it is a life of truth and a life requiring absence of self</i>
- <i>The wooden bridge on the river overlooks the clear stream and solitary hut. You can feel the signs of human existence but also the pure isolation and serenity.</i>
- <i>Ba Da’s best works are his landscapes, his works showing his contempt and rejection of the vulgar are his minor works.</i>
- <i>Xu Wei’s couplet, “The world is a false illusion created by others, what is original and authentic is what I propose”.</i>
- <i>Yu the Great, historically, the first dynastic emperor with a documented genealogy. About the twentyfirst century BC he unified the empire.</i>
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