Imagine there was a city that was, in many ways, Melbourne, Australia, but that, in equally as many ways, was Mexico City, Mexico. Imagine you’re walking along Bourke Street Mall but, simultaneously to looking around and seeing Bourke Street Mall, you look around and you’re seeing Paseo de la Reforma. That city, and the lands around it, is the city in which this story takes place.
The protagonist of this story, the main character, if you like, is a young man, much like yourself, and a young poet, again, much like yourself. He walks the streets of this double city, this Mexico in Australia, this Australia in Mexico, or he walks in the way that only a protagonist or main character of a story can walk in a story, he walks the streets of this duplicitous city like a dog afraid of the water, he walks Calle de Durango or he walks Elizabeth Street like a small god unable to write commandments, he passes under the statue of Burke and Wills or he passes under the Estela de Luz like a silly thought in the mind of a banker, and he turns his attention to looking. It’s the early hours of the morning, and the sun is rising quite quickly or quite slowly, and the sky is striped like the photo negative of the side of a painted zebra, and he walks along Avenida de los Insurgentes or he walks along Royal Parade and he sees his friend’s car driving along on the right side of the road, or the left side of the road, and he waves him down. The main character, or the protagonist, is visiting Mexico from Australia, or he’s visiting Australia from Mexico, and his friend is a national, or a native, of the country they’re in. The friend pulls over on the empty road and rolls down the driver’s side window and says Hello Benito, in the appropriate accent, and says Where are you going, or maybe he says ¿adónde vas?, but in any case he asks him where he’s going, and he responds that he’s going nowhere really, he’s just out for a walk, or maybe he works nights and he’s just got off, or perhaps he lives close by and woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, but in any case he’s walking with no particular destination in mind and nowhere in particular to be, and his friend says if he’s got nowhere in particular to be for the next few days then he should come with him, that he was going out to Guanajuato or to Daylesford and was going to stay the night at his grandfather’s house, his grandfather not being there as he had died about a year ago, but the house remained in the family’s possession and was used occasionally for family holidays or for stopovers on the way further north (happily it’s true both of Daylesford and of Guanajuato that they’re roughly north of Melbourne or Mexico City respectively, and so there’s no need for extra words to be wasted on doubly specifying directions) or, as it later turned out, for romantic (and sexual) rendezvous the friend’s mother had been having with the mutual friend of both Benito and the friend in the car, which mutual friend was a fellow and also rival poet, both being aligned with the same group of close-knit writers who held readings together in pubs or bars that would put up with the noise as long as there was 10-15 more people than usual buying drinks all night and both frequently one after the other praising the other’s work and secretly trying to one-up it, and as the friend looked out the window of the car and into the eyes of Benito his own eyes glinted like twin oases of oil.
The journey would take many hours. As they sped along the long highway out of the city the car rumbled and jumped like it was driving over the ground of a graveyard. Or a cemetery. As the friend sat in the driver’s seat, hands clenched around the wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, leaning maniacally forward trying to see out the windshield of the headlightless car diving like a metal swan forward into the near-dark of the morning, Benito sat beside him leafing through a largish yellowing book, a kind of biography or monograph-length critical essay or even travel memoir by a French academic named Jean-Paul Sazerat who visited China and America in turn, attempting to track down the elusive author of a collection of poetry. The collection had appeared in the West in the 1970s, and presented itself as a group of what are sometimes called poems of witness by a writer who had been a young man during and had participated in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The academic, who had been loosely associated with the Situationist International during the May ‘68 riots, had afterward briefly joined the PCF, and by the late 70s was a fervent anti-Communist, had picked up the collection from a Left Bank bookseller in 1980 and been deeply struck by the vivid language and denunciatory tone of the poems, the images of a rabid student population, which the poet compared to dogs, weasels, coyotes, black bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, moose, elk, wolves, prairie dogs, squirrels, racoons, skunks, and numerous other animals of low or dangerous repute, set contrastingly against visions of a natural order restored, a world in harmony, the softly flowing Yangtze, the branches of a Ginkgo tree swaying in the north wind, or the east or south wind, the child of a villager picking and eating gooseberries, and decided to attempt a revitalisation of the author. He had sent numerous emails to the book’s French publisher but all the information they could give him was the address of the Chinese publisher in Shanghai. Benito had never been to Shanghai, or indeed to China, and he tried to picture the city in his head, but he conjured only a lackadaisical darkness, a void trimmed with neon.
On the outskirts of the city — Melbourne or Mexico, as it may be — they pulled into a service station to get some breakfast. The morning had broken, and the heat was already starting its ascent. They sat in the car for a moment, bracing themselves, before heading out into the sun. Benito was surprised at how far they’d made it already. The skyline of the city rose and fell on the distant horizon, and high above he saw an eagle or a hawk, floating seemingly motionlessly on the updrafts that exploded from the earth. As they walked across the parking lot towards the structure Benito imagined himself and his friend were a pair of French soldiers in Egypt under Napoleon, the sun crawling across the sky like a kicked dog.
They ordered eggs and toast and sat down at one of the low unpleasant tables. Benito’s friend got up and said he was going to look around. Outside, the sun hung in the sky, the Mexican sun or the Australian sun, the same sun in any case, but under different conditions, facing different obstacles on its trip to earth, perhaps a sun that thought of itself as being under a different aspect, depending on its location relative to the Earth, over Mexico I am soft, bright, fluid, over Australia I am strong, sharp, unforgiving, or perhaps a sun that thought nothing in relation to the Earth in particular, preoccupied as it must be with all the other planets in its sky, or perhaps a sun that thought nothing at all, a lifeless, unthinking, unfeeling corpse on a funeral pyre that surely must burn out soon.
Benito’s friend started talking to a man at the table opposite them, asking him if he knew this area well. The man and Benito’s friend talked for a long time. The man told him he’d grown up in this area, that his family had lived there for generations, that he was a man of the land of this area. That if there was anything Benito’s friend wanted to know about the area he was the one to come to and ask. Benito’s friend laughed and said well damn that answered his question he supposed. They started to talk about the football (either Australian Rules or soccer) and Benito started flicking through his book again, though after a few minutes he realised it was too hot to read, and put it in his bag.
Rising, Benito announced he was going for a walk, to which his friend and the man barely responded. He walked around the back of the service station. From there he could see off across and road and into a large, bare field, with a figure moving through the middle of it. It was about the size and shape of a dog, but he couldn’t make it out with any certainty. The figure was dragging what he assumed was one of its back legs, which seemed to be damaged enough that it was useless. Benito lit a cigarette.
When he was done he walked back around to the store. His friend was still sitting there, but the man had gone. Benito asked what they had talked about. He told me about his wife, said the friend. She was killed a few years ago, shot while she was trying to stop a man from stealing something from the bottle shop. Did she work there? Benito asked. No, she just intervened. What does he do now then? Just works on his farm, he says. Him and his three sons. They own a bunch of farms around here—a lot of land. What crop? Benito said. Not a crop, he said. Sheep.
When they pulled into Guanajuato (or Daylesford, if you like), it was still early in the afternoon. They parked the car in the driveway of the friend’s family’s house and went inside to drop their things off. It was a large, white-walled building, one storey, separated on all sides from the houses around it, keeping at least a five-metre distance from them. Inside large windows let light recline on the furniture. Benito could hear a bird playing a sound over and over, a falling stutter with a peculiarly electronic sound, like a futuristic gun in a science-fiction movie powering down, or an aluminium tube falling down a cliff face and repeatedly striking the rock . It was sounds like those of the bird, or of a cicada screaming, or of the hundred other anonymous issues of the countryside, that would keep him awake at night when he stayed out of the city, as it was the sounds of the city itself, the roar or low hum of cars and trucks passing by, the metallic crunch of an excavator like a great metal monster spraying black blood in the night, the inverse noise of the lack of birdsong, that kept his country-raised friends awake at night, the problem not noise but its very absence, the painful quiet, a quiet maybe filled by alien sound, of a world not your own, the menacing, threatening world unable to be folded back into your consciousness, the great tapestry woven out of a thousand childhood nights the thread your own body erect and lateral in your infinite bed with gargantuan sheets swallowing your form, a thousand psychic frequencies stretched across the evening’s loom extending from window to dream to memory, internalising all objects sprung from their perceptual gaol, the crooked shadow of a jacaranda, the phosphorescent constellations adhered to the roof by your well-meaning parent, the grim armchair occupying your corner like an enemy, this brilliant tapestry folded and placed in your psychic attic, gathering dust and chewn by temporal moths and in its place a black web in the centre of which squats the manifold spider of the new.
When he came outside the friend was sitting by the edge of the pool watching a bird run across the grass. The bird was silky black with blue running through its wings. It had a kind of loping way of moving across the ground, hopping from foot to foot and stopping frequently, as if searching for something. He felt he could see its hollow bones through its skin. The friend picked up a fist-sized stone and lobbed it at the bird. He took off and flew in the direction of the sun. What are we going to do now? Benito asked. Anything you want, he answered. I’m going to sit here and throw rocks at the birds. Benito stared at him. They eat the flowers. My mother hates them. We’re trying to teach them to stay away. What kind of birds are they? I don’t know. The kind that eats flowers.
Fifteen minutes later Benito was walking up the main street of the town. The buildings, though low, two floors at most, seemed to loom over him with a small-town viciousness. As though they were leaning over to each other and whispering, looking through the shades of larger houses that they themselves lived in. He felt watched by inhuman persons. He opened the glass-plated door of a pub. Inside it was brightly, evenly lit, far too brightly for Benito. When you go to a pub, or to a bar, he thought, you want it just bright enough to see, but dark enough that your eyes can pass over the other patrons without drawing attention to their passing over, and dark enough that if you sit in a corner you can sink back into it, closing a shadowy curtain around yourself and creating an area both public and private where you can be alone amongst the mass. The bartender, a middle-aged woman, and the three other customers, three men under thirty years of age, turned their heads in unison to look at him. He bought a pint and sat down. As he sipped his mezcal he opened the book in front of him. In Shanghai, Jean-Paul Sazerat found no answers. The office of the Chinese publisher was small, dark, and cramped, and he compared it, and the experience of attempting to extract information from the agent there, who spoke as little French as Sazerat spoke Mandarin (or Cantonese for that matter), to Kafka’s novels and stories repeatedly throughout the short chapter. Benito didn’t think it much resembled them. Sazerat asked the agent where they had received the manuscripts from. Mail, replied the tall Shanghainese man. From out of town then? So he wasn’t from Shanghai? The agent shrugged. Sazerat seemed put out by how little the man cared. What was the return address? The agent, with an apparently ‘unhelpful’ air, disappeared into a back room and emerged after several minutes with a box, on the front of which was printed ‘Yang Weiming’- the name of the author. Sazerat rifled through the box until he found the envelope printed, on the reverse, with the address of a publishing company in Melbourne, Australia. Here, Sazerat wrote lengthily about his shock, his astonishment, his disappointment, his confusion, his ennui, his fatigue, his excitement, his general disarray, and so on. When the chapter closed out, Sazerat was buying another plane ticket.
Benito looked up. Across the room was sitting the man from the service station. He was talking with a young blonde woman, and both had a beer in front of them. Benito watched as the man laughed at something the woman had said, the lines on his face sharpening into crevasses. He kept watching. The woman narrowed her eyes flirtatiously, leaning forward onto her forearms pressed into the table. The man smiled strangely, and for a moment his eyes seemed to wander. Benito looked out the window, and in the distance he saw again that dog-like figure. Its back leg dragged behind it as it moved between two crumpled, abandoned houses. Looking for food, maybe. When Benito looked back, the other two were at the door, the man holding the door for the woman, who walked through it without looking back.
Sazerat arrived in Melbourne in confusion. Why would an Australian company have published this Chinese poetry collection, at least this collection that seemed to have no connection to Australia? When he arrived at the office he told the receptionist, a surly young boy, that he had an appointment with the head publisher. The boy scowled and told him to sit down. The room was filled with overstuffed brown leather armchairs. As he waited, Sazerat examined the photos on the walls. They were almost exclusively Chinese landscapes: the Yellow River at Lanzhou, the Three Gorges Dam, a stretch of the Great Wall, the Beijing cityscape. Above his head a fan circled idly, barely moving the air. Out the window in front of him he could see a tower rising, a sheet of gold metal sitting awkwardly at its zenith. The sun reflected off it into his eyes, and he felt for a moment that he was being mocked. By the tower, by the city, by the publisher, and by Yang Weiming. He suddenly felt very tired, and for the first time in a while he noticed how hard his heart was beating in his chest.
When the boy returned, he told Sazerat that the publisher would see him now. The woman’s office was blandly modern, the walls a bad combination of various shades of off-white, a large, ergonomic office chair behind a glass desk. Once again the walls were covered in photographs, but this time not of landscapes but of people. It was the publisher in various situations: with authors, at events, accepting prizes, at book launches, journal launches, magazine launches, book tours. She sat behind her desk and watched as his eyes passed over them all. She asked how she could help him.
When Sazerat told her that he was looking for Yang Weiming, and that he was hoping that she could put him in contact, she paused for a moment, and Sazerat felt that he could see something pass behind her eyes. She told him that she was sorry, but she couldn’t give out the information of her authors like that. Have you ever met him, Sazerat asked her. Could you tell me about that? She paused again. She said that she had never met Yang in person, that all her dealings with him, all manuscripts and notes and letters, had come through a man named Gerald Land, an Australian academic. She had met him in 1989, at a conference at the University of Sydney, where he was a lecturer in Chinese literature. And what does Mr. Lang do now, asked Sazerat. She told him he was still in Sydney, lecturing and working. He asked her what kind of man Lang was, and Stein (for the publisher’s name was Stein) paused for the third time, and this time Sazerat wasn’t sure she was going to come back. When she spoke again her voice hung a touch lower, and was softer, less assured. Sazerat was almost embarrassed, and averted his eyes, swinging them slowly along the walls, until they came to rest on a undistinguished, unimpressive photograph of Stein and a man standing together at a party, each awkwardly and loosely gripping a glass of wine, heads tilting towards each other, tight grins taut across their faces. He was a good man, she said. He was a very good man.
When Benito arrived back at the house, there was a new car in the driveway. He walked up the drive and through the front door, which lay open, swinging slowly back and forth. He could hear voices coming from the back room. When he got there he found his friend sitting at the large wooden dining room table, a shot glass in front of him and a bottle of vodka on the table. At the other end of the table sat the man and the woman from the bar. They had shot glasses as well, and all three of them seemed to be in a raucous state. The man was thoroughly stuffed into a sickly brown shirt, covered at points in splashes of white paint and other, more curious stains. When Benito came in he was laughing loudly and carelessly at something, more like a bark than a laugh, a laugh with an expansive, all-encompassing looseness that filled the room like a gas, smothering everything. When the friend saw Benito he roared, his eyes lighting up as they seemed about to slide off his face. Come in, he said, sit down and have a drink. Benito sat, and his friend placed a shot glass in front of him which the man filled to the brim with vodka. They all goaded him on until he put the glass to his lips and threw it back. They cheered, and the man poured him another, which they allowed him to sip. The woman was telling others a story which they all seemed to be finding very funny. Through the translucent veil of his growing drunkenness, the world receding like a childhood home out the back window of a car, Benito tried to follow it, but could only gather that it concerned a sexual betrayal of some kind. The diminishing light floated in through the slats of the back window’s venetian blinds, bars of shadow rising along the back of Benito’s hand which lay splayed on the table in front of him, the sonorous buzz of the conversation darkening under the dull sunset. Benito blinked.
An hour later, he rose and announced he was going to bed. They yelled in brief protest, but quickly acquiesced. In bed, fully clothed, Benito pulled out again his largish yellowing book, flipping through hazily to find his dog-eared page.
Sazerat met Land in one of the endless expensive restaurants that lined the rim of Circular Quay’s opalescent waters, around them the chattering voices of monied Sydneysiders circling like piss down a toilet, above them the flapping and squawking of the white ibis and silver gull, in front of them the small, peculiarly-fonted writing scarred across the white face of their menus, and after their preliminary niceties and a few glasses of sauvignon blanc, they started their interview. Land told him that several years ago he had met Yang at a conference on literature he had attended in Shanghai. They had quickly struck up a friendship, as they shared a love of anti-Communism and Elvis. One night, at the Shanghainese equivalent of one of the touristic restaurants at which Land and Sazerat were currently receiving large (though not so large considering the price, thought Sazerat) bowls of mussels swimming in a spicy tomato sauce, Yang had passed him a bundle of documents—loose pages, yellowed notepads, cherry-red folders—and told him he was sure he was being tracked by the Chinese government. The papers, he said, contained his complete works, none of it published officially, though unofficially circulated amongst Yang’s fellow travellers. Yang told him that he was worried that Chinese agents were going to arrest him, and suppress his writings, and that he wanted to give Land all the work he had so far created, that he trusted that Land would take it and publish it for him. As he took his last swallow of wine, Sazerat looked up at a blinking red light that perched, raven-like, on the thin white spire that mounted the tallest building he could see. When it turned off, the world disappeared around him, vanishing into a pre-Creation darkness, the darkness that God moved on the face of, before even the idea of that little red blinking light existed. When it turned back on, he asked Land if he had ever heard from Yang again.
The last time I heard from him was ten years ago, Land replied. I assume he died, but I never found out. Maybe he ended up in jail. Do you have any more of his work, anything that hasn’t been published? Land told him that all he had was the last letter Yang had sent him, a long, rambling tract, full of a seeming finality. In it, he talked about his growing interest in the literature of Australia, thanks to the influence of Land and the books he would send him. He wrote about his obsession with Ern Malley and Araki Yasusada, how they had inspired his next project: the creation of an author, a kind of Shanghai Malley. His author, he wrote, would be an old Communist, a true believer in Mao and the revolution, and he would write long poems extolling the virtues of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and harsh tracts excoriating Deng Xiaoping for his liberalising of the economy. He would invent these poems, he wrote, send them off to the more radical, underground journals, get them published. But the works, he wrote, would include hidden messages. He would encode the poems with passwords and secrets, and he would send long essays to the more conservative journals exposing the secrets hidden in these texts, and respond by sending essays to the radical journals refuting the exposition of the secrets, and so on, and so on. And that was it, said Land, looking out into the water. I never heard from him again, never found out if he did create his Shanghai Malley, never found out if he died or was arrested. So, I fulfilled my promise, I got his works published. And what else is there.
So, Sazerat wrote, that was it. The trail ran cold. I had found out all I was going to find out about Yang Weiming. I booked a flight back to France. Benito put the book down and looked out the window at the dark sky. His head was swimming from the vodka. He put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He woke to the sound of an argument, chairs banging, muffled thuds. He looked out the window and saw the sky filled with the pink and purple colours of early morning. Knocking the book onto the floor from where it had fallen on his lap, he got up and went downstairs. When he reached the dining room he stopped for a minute in shock. The chairs had been upturned, the table was on its side, the bottle of vodka had been smashed and shards of its glass scattered the room. His friend lay in the centre of all this destruction, a large bruise spreading over the right side of his face. He moaned vaguely and shifted loosely from side to side. The rising sun filtered through the slats of the blinds, casting the room in pleasant glow. Benito started as he heard the car in the driveway fire up. He ran out to the front of the house and watched as it peeled out of the driveway, reversed hard into a turn, and sped off into the crumbling dawn.
Daniel Holmes is a writer currently living in Melbourne.
minor literature[s] 