Yanzao silently accepted the criticism.

"When she wants to make a fuss, just let her make a fuss. Her spirit's up, too much yang in there, making a fuss'U release her energy, give her back her balance, make her sleep better at night."

A true man of learning, he was, who spoke with so much erudition he barely made sense.

Still no sound from Yanzao.

"I know she gets you down. There's nothing to be done. The more you argue, the more she gets you down, there's still no way out, she's still a person, isn't she? Even if she were just a dog, you couldn't just kill her like that, could you? How could you lay a finger on her?"

He was referring to the time, not long ago, when Yanzao had lashed out at his grandmother's hand-the hand that, at that moment in time, had been stuffing a ball of chicken shit into her mouth. After the event, Yanzao didn't know himself why he'd exploded like that, why his hand had fallen so heavily-after only two blows the old woman's hand had swelled up very badly and a few days later shed a layer of skin. People said Yanzao'd had too much contact with pesticide, that he was poisonous all over, that one blow from him would burn anyone's skin off.

"Her quilt needs washing, it reeks of urine. D'you hear me?" The man of learning said his piece and left. It was like this every time he came home: he'd have a meal, wipe his mouth, dictate a few instructions, then leave. Of course, he'd leave as much money as he could. Money-he had money.

I can't say that Yanwu's chiding and his money weren't a kind of generosity-even if he was reacting from outside and after the fact, generosity was still generosity. But the prerequisite for this generosity was precisely that he'd spent very little time at home, that he'd suffered very little torture at his grandmother's hands. Neither can I say that Yanzao's use of violence wasn't a kind of callousness-even though he was confronted with a masochist who refused to listen to reason, callousness was still callousness. This callousness was the desperation that resulted from the failure of all other methods, from the failure of love. In a situation like this, love and hate swapped places, just as when a negative is developed the black is filtered into white, and the white filtered into black. When confronted with this old poison woman of Maqiao, one person's generosity was filtered into callousness, and one person's callousness was filtered into generosity.

Maqiao people had a special word, yuantou, meaning "resentment," also a little like "grievance," which carried the double implication of love and hate. "Resentment" generally developed thus: after one party has lost all lovable qualities, a torpid feeling of love for them is drained of all emotion, becomes no more than an intellectual test of endurance. Imagine what it's like: when love is totally exhausted, burned out, withered away, when one party has squandered it and stamped it flat into the ground, when only the bones and dregs of love are left, full of bitterness, full of day-after-day of torture. This is "resentment." He who loves receives some reward, gets to keep the touching, personal memories that remain after giving out love. But he who resents gets no reward, is left with nothing, he's given out and given out until he's lost everything, including anything that implies or is reminiscent of love. By this stage, he who resents has lost his right to a clear conscience before the judges of morality and ethics.

Yanzao resented his grandmother.

In the end, his grandmother died. When they buried her, Yanwu rushed back home to weep in the most heartbroken way, kneeling in front of the coffin, refusing to let other people pull him away. Anyone could see from his crystalline tears that his grief was genuine. But Yanzao was just wooden: if someone wanted him to do something, then he'd do it, his gaze remaining cavernously blank. Perhaps what with all his bathing the old woman, dressing her in her longevity clothes, and buying her coffin over the last few days, he'd just been too busy to have time to cry, and now he had no tears left.

Because of the class status of Yanzao's family, not many people attended the old poison woman's funeral, and no one was asked to sing filial songs. The whole business was desperately bleak. The few relatives on her mother's side who came couldn't stop themselves venting their grievances toward Yanzao: at least Yanwu had some filial piety, they said, at least his eyes were red from crying, he could bring himself to kneel, but that Yanzao had no sense of decency, had treated the old woman badly, so they said, fighting with her every other day; he didn't have a word to say even now, his eyes were dry as a bone. You'd be more upset if a dog had died, wouldn't you? Should be struck by lightning, that rotten old curmudgeon, shouldn't he?

Yanzao remained silent before this sea of voices.

: There were a lot of snakes in the mountains.

Particularly on the evenings of hot days, snakes would burrow out of clumps of grass to enjoy the cool, length after length stretched out across the road, their exquisitely patterned bodies shimmering, presenting a vision of lush greenness to passers-by, their forked tongues shooting out, quivering, glimmering, fresh and bright. At such moments, they weren't in fact necessarily dangerous. Once, as I sleepily returned home late at night, staggering dazedly to the left, then to the right, one momentary lapse of concentration led to me treading barefoot on something fresh, cool, and soft, that had suddenly come to life; before I'd had time to work out what it was, my instincts had me leaping around like a madman, trying to kick both feet above my head. Without pausing for breath, I ran ten or twenty meters, with only one word squeezing its way out of my brain: Snaaaaaake! Mustering all the courage I could, I took a look at my feet but found no wound. When I turned to look, I could see no snake's tail in pursuit.

Around here, the mountain people said, there were "Chessboard snakes": their bodies, when coiled up, happened to look just like a chessboard. There was the "Bellows-wind" too, also known as the Spectacles snake, which moved faster than the wind; when its hiss rang out, even the mountain pigs were frozen in their tracks.

The mountain people also believed that snakes were lecherous. For this reason, snake-catchers always drew the image of a woman on a piece of wood and smeared on rouge-if a woman could be made to spit on it, better still-then stuck it at the side of the road or on the mountainside for a night; when they went back to look, a snake would very likely be found coiled up, stock-still on the wood, as if dead drunk. The snakecatcher could then at his own leisure entrap his prey in a snake basket. By the same logic, they said, people walking at night who were nervous around snakes were best off carrying a stick or a piece of bamboo. It was said that bamboo was lover to the snake, and snakes, generally speaking, wouldn't dare do anything rash to someone with bamboo in hand.

If they met a venomous snake on the road, poised to attack, the mountain people still had one escape route: shouting "scarlet woman." Shouting this, apparently, confused snakes and gave you enough time to make your getaway. What history lay behind these words, that they had to be spoken and no others? No one had a convincing explanation.

Once, while spreading pesticide on the northern slope, Yanzao was bitten by a snake and ran back, howling. His number was up, he thought, but after running a while he discovered that his feet were neither swollen nor painful, that he was suffering neither cramps nor shivers. He sat down for a while, and managed to stay alive quite successfully, could still drink water, still see the sky, still pick his nose. Puzzled and perplexed, he turned back to look for the sprayer, but gaped, dumbstruck, when he reached the place where he'd left it: a clay-skin snake, a good three feet long, the very one that had just bitten him, lay stiff and dead on the cotton-flower field.