Loading ...One of the things that fascinates me a lot about this land is not being able to understand most of what people say. It is sort of an esoteric comfort. Elastic, if I may say, as the creeps running around the alienation in my mind. Indulging it. Through all my nerves. And, nevertheless, it’s a daily show for which no ticket is required. A constant joy in all the chanting, in all the listening. Words getting entangled inside ones mouth, shot between teeth or abruptly spit out, point blank, back and forth, like some animal’s hissing. A bird’s perhaps. Sometimes a mouse. Or a snake escaping from a sword. Everybody speak with those messy characters that are hard to keep in one’s ear, dripping all their sound, full of notes, if one’s lucky. A mixture of music and city loudness. Veritable serenades, songs that climb the space in a sudden and get lost in mid air. Like love. It doesn’t matter what kind of Chinese it is, what dialect, how many tones it has, how many ways of saying it there may be.
It’s Chinese and therefore impossible to make out.
It‘s the language of the living souls that live all over. The language of heads of state who meet in vast age-old rooms. Walls carpeted in green mould. It is the parlance of state departments, markets, prison corridors where laws are made. It is a weapon under embargo inside a bed. Oh dear! Shameless. It’s as much rudimentary as it is modern. As much a thing of old timers as a thing of the vanguard. It is always up-to-date anywhere on the planet. Anywhere now.
Chinese is special because it’s what’s left of the caveman’s comfort, the remnant of mankind’s first mode of expression. From the first attempt to communicate to the knowledge or the ability to do so. The imitation of the sounds of nature. The reproduction of every whispering broadcasted on the name of the environment. The stuttering of a duck, the barking of a four-legged beast, the phonetics of a feline. It is about listening. Closing the eyes. And imagining the symphony of the whole world. Of the web that squeeze such ancient civilization. Us. Them!
I wanted to learn it once and for all. Learn Chinese. Yes, whatever kind. Crawling if necessary. To shut up in a deep silence and in the whole to enjoy my destiny slipping away from beneath my feet. Absorb. The irony of not saying, not feeling, a formless garden between the night and the day. And then, in a magical hour, little by little, it would come, to embrace me, making itself understood from end to end, without escaping. Comprehensible. The chant. The howling. Running in that river of wisdom that shuns any explanation. To be able to go along the market and deal with the fishmonger with the bills in hand. No more need for hand signs, no need for drawings, just his gums, sharp and clear. Without the need to go naked and strip off to say that today there is nothing. There is none. It won’t come. And me, fairly able to understand what goes on in this people’s soul, guessing its flow of knowledge. Through all the senses. Understanding that in fact everything is so simple. Everything is calm. That the scream of the word is there only because the outside doesn’t exist. Because what is out needs to be silenced. To draw the whole landscape of the Great Word of China.
Alright. Enough babbling. Let’s move on to lesson number one: The Numbers.
Once in a while I recall the way people talk to me, how certain they make up their words towards my awareness. And when they talk I can only remember numbers. Seconds go by. Minutes then. Hours finally. The day I met them. The months we’ve spent together. The years that were lost. The dates we were so happy. Then, suddenly, they stop making sense. Become rude. Little attention demanding monsters, almost. Their lives shattering. Crumbling down in digits where the pronoun ‘you’ is a number. Zero or One. Holes appear around them. The figures. Steps vanish, cease to exist on the ladder that climbs steeply on. Heading nowhere. On the depths of your unsafe self.
Iat is number one. It’s the day and also the sun. The comfortable day that hides itself spitting sunshine. This sentence alone has five ones. Iats. Long haul ships. Thus the Chinese speaks when he wishes to be a poet. Iat iat iat iat iat. Ascending or descending. The tone. Your nose. Your eyes. The sound coming out, pasted to the roof of the mouth, or straight from the vocal chords, out of the lips, touching nothing. An arrow. With the mouth fully open almost letting out laughter. A laugh. When you’re dreaming. Dimples on a reminiscence of a face. A memory of another recollection, that went past the alley full of ideas. That one that we call mind. Your wandering mind.
Two. An ear on the chair of easy thought. Yi. Yes, I want. To be comfortably (iat) seated on the chair during the day (another iat) thinking with my ears in the sun. A great many yis and iats. Everything sort of haphazardly stacked, and may God help us. Tell Him that I’m going away while still staying here. Awkwardly.
Sám. The clothing of the heart in the dark hole thinking it is the auntie. Not mine, I’m sure. Three three three three three three. For real! I’m not lying. That’s how it is. Music. A ‘So’. Followed by the note ‘Mi’. Or by a ‘Do’. A lot to do. And the four? Sei. Stuff aplenty, for instance: washing the father-in-law at the West of dying: our deaths washed at dusk. At the dusk of what? Fuck, this is hard. Of a comfortable iat (hidden out). Easy (yi)? I know that you know that he knows that I know. In Chinese it doesn’t work. Dummy, if you didn’t catch it, it goes well for donkey. Or dumb-ass. Or, making it clear: a plain idiot. Please to meet you.
Ng (Hmm for those who may not know how to pronounce it). Error to resist on the awakening denial of the rival. Number five, that’s what it is. Not to resist is to wake up with the errors of the adversary. Yes, your enemy. Beware. Hmm hmm. Yes, yes. This is better than Chinese in One Minute.
Boiling a cylinder in green to descend the happiness from a camel. Lok. Six. Lok ng sei. Happiness is to wake up dead. Six five four. Second tone. ‘La Do’. To rub the otter with a cockroach to test the painting. Green (lok again)? Oh well, this is pretty rough.
It’s the number seven now. Ch’at. Mispronounced, seven means a very rude word. As everything. And what you don’t know it can mean anything. So forget it.
Pat is eight. It is also one hundred. Pat pat is eight hundred. Or eighty eight, as you like it. It is also something else I cannot remember now. Someone told me it meant turnip. That is why they use so many eights on their car plates. It gives luck. Lot’s of luck. Imagine, paying hundreds of thousands of patacas (a lot of euros times one thousand) to get four turnips in between the car’s headlights. That is why the government make such money by selling them. And this is why I live in fascination for these people. For this land.
Kao. It’s endless material. The number nine. Almost a palindrome. Almost but not quite. From another angle it’s much better. Let us see. The dog taught by the elder is enough to save the cake of the penis. No? Wait. To save the peach-tree of an old man is enough to teach a dog to eat a cake. It is an olden proverb, from the era of Emperor Ring, the Evil One. But I must confess that this nine thing here is a bit of a scam. Well, maybe it’ll go unnoticed.
To wrap it up, there’s ten. Sap. The wet dust is caught boiling. If you can imagine the view. It also means to shake off. Sap kao means something (memory fails me again) done with codfish*. Sap sap sap… listen to it. It’s what’s left of the caveman’s comfort, a language that resemble the sounds we make. Just like the animals do when woofing. The remnant of mankind’s first mode of expression. Sap kao then, a term that a colleague of mine relishes using and repeating. Imagine sap is shaking, add kao, as in ‘joystick’, the one you have between your legs, if you’re a gent, and you got it straight. It is easily mistaken for nineteen. It is also the name of a Spanish city famous for its guitars. And on. And on. And on.
I shan’t say anymore. It’s better. We just met know. And as tutor I can cross the fence just like that. This lesson ends right here. For the next class we shall dissect the characters, deconstruct them, so to speak. A much harder task, a lot more food for thought. Calling for a ruler and a compass to draw them and a hammer to smash them to pieces. So, pay attention. Repeat once again. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. A thought from the heart dies waking up in the happiness that rubs by writing on the old dust. Uh! I know. Chinese for dummies. I am one of them. Ssssh… maybe it’ll just go unnoticed.
*TN – There is a play of words here impossible to reproduce in English. The “thing done with cod fish” (bacalhau in Portuguese) is the popular expression that would literally translate as “codfish handjob”, which in fact is the name of a salad using raw dried codfish as the main ingredient. The Spanish city “known for its guitars” is Segovia, which in popular parlance also stands for ‘handjob’ or ‘masturbation’: the association being the frantic movement of the hand as it plays the instrument. Ring’s a dirty mind.
One Comment
Well… how can someone learn Chinese with this? Can you explain it to me? I’m just like a big dummy.