Read Online Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie - Free Book Online Page A

Peking to attend a huge performance laid on by troupes of singing eunuchs in the Pavilion of Pure Sound within the Forbidden City and lasting from morning till night for three whole days. Two pretexts [the book’s author comments] to demonstrate her power. Manifestly, she wanted it—this power—to be noticed, and for people to know that she was Her Majesty the New Master of China, Her Majesty the War Leader, a patriot and a nationalist—a very popular image two years after the fire in the Yuanmingyuan Palace. (This event was collectively perceived as bringing shame on a China defeated by eighteen thousand English and French troops who had marched into Peking and burnt the palace: “The smoke spread through the whole city,” wrote one English officer in his diary, “and the Yuanmingyuan Palace was so vast that flakes of black soot fell from the sky onto the city’s inhabitants for three whole weeks.”) That is how Seventy-one, so favoured by his great-aunt, the supreme regent, embarked on a fatal involvement with the anti-Western struggle from as early as his hundredth day. Unfortunately for him, this was the only time in his life his name was associated with a victory.”
    The following day Tumchooq and I went to the Pavilion of Pure Sound. The sky was overcast, with low clouds drifting over the frozen sea of the Forbidden City’s golden roofs in the middle of which four buildings surrounded by red columns form an enormous square around the famous Pavilion of Pure Sound, its three stages set one above the other, rising several dozen metres into the air and thus, according to the museum brochure sold on site, allowing performances to take place in three different spaces simultaneously: Hell, the earthly world and Paradise. This same brochure indicates that the imperial palace actually has two theatres, a small one kept for romantic dramas and more intimate plays, and a large one, the Pavilion of Pure Sound, which, during Cixi’s fifty-year reign, was almost exclusively devoted to performances of her favourite production: Mulian Saves His Mother .
    For the first performance, the scene was set and the audience watched the protagonists plural lives simultaneously on the triple stage: past, present and future, each occupying one level of the building and establishing its independence by ignoring the existence of the other two. The viewer was offered three different theatrical styles: tragic, comic and poetic. (On the first day, Tumchooq told me, the audience displayed general indifference to these tales they had known by heart since childhood; only visual pleasure triumphed, a pleasure due not to the magnificent sets or sumptuous costumes, but to the physical beauty of the performers, young eunuchs aged between fifteen and eighteen, dressed as men or women and some of whom had that gift beyond human perfection, beyond categories of male and female: the ravishing voice of a castrato.)
    The next day the performance still took place on three separate stages: on the top level, seen from far below, the protagonist Mulian stood at the gates of Paradise, but his thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, were expressed by the sublime voice which guided the viewers gaze towards the earthly world where one could see his mother abandoning him as a child, then towards the infernal world where the mother was quite unrecognisable, transformed into a demon consumed by perpetual hunger and condemned to suffering cruel torture for all eternity. The mother’s and son’s voices seemed to answer each other, letting fly mutual accusations of sometimes extraordinary violence, from Heaven to Hell. Then came the reconciliation and their two voices crossed the earthly world to find each other, embrace and be united.
    It was not until the third day that a vertical staging was laid on, celebrating the triumph of filial love, which lies at the heart of the Chinese moral code. The protagonist progressed from top to bottom using ladders and ropes