Lighthouse in Taiwan part 2

Christmas 2018

The following day, she took him eastwards to Keelung City which was knotted at the end of a long bay as an entrance to Taiwan's second largest port.

The "rainy city" confirmed its reputation before they continued driving further north to Yeliu Geopark where he was dropped into a kind of abstract historical stable of Bethlehem, modelled by thousands of years of erosion from a sandstone island tongue, and covered with Chinese tourists.

They renounced the queue for a selfie near mother Mary who appeared to be called Nefertiti. Yaolo was more fascinated by the silhouettes of a lighthouse that did its very best to crawl out of the clouds.

Afterwards, it went southwards again to the Shifen Waterfall which had  -vainly- appropriated the name "Little Niagara".

From here, she took him to the mountain village of Jiufen, whose name referred to 9 families who lived here around 1890, as the local tradition insisted, but more probable it had to do with the supplies, divided in 9 parts, for transport high up into the hills.

In the mid-thirties, it transformed spectacularly to the -equally arrogant- "Little Shanghai" during 10 years of gold rush, to fall back again into an insignificant village.

In 1990 it was rediscovered by the Taiwanese as a unique heritage with small picturesque streets and antique little houses, especially after the film shot in 1989 by Hou Hsiao Hsien about the tragic February 28 incident.

Nowadays, it is jam packed with souvenir shops, tea houses and food stalls.

In the narrow streets of Jiufen, he was able to tighten a little bit more the endless hole in his knowledge of Chinese delicacies in a kind of permanent Christmas market without Jesus.

Xi-Yue stuck again as a magnet to the calligraphy shop and initiated Yaolo in the materials and technic of the Chinese calligraphic writing.

It was already dusky dark when they were deposited around a railroad where "sky lanterns" were for sale, blown into the air in droves.

The top calligrapher placed a small work of art in Chinese letters on one side, on the back he wished in Spanish to speed up the arrival of Chinese bamboo. 

He fully covered another side with a message for his children and together they kept a small "love and peace" quote for the fourth side, before sending the wishing lantern as a Zeppelin in the air.

Two hours later, the wishing continued in the Xingtian temple in Taipé as a prayer, the expelling of bad spirits and some block throwing as medium for questioning the gods.

As each district worshipped its own divinity, this one was dedicated to the red-skinned, black bearded Guangong, the God of War and patron saint of the merchants who came to pray for "good fortune."

The temple was built in 1960 and would be unique because it took distance from the burning of money and from donations.

Due to the Cultural Revolution in China at the end of the sixties/early seventies, many religious temples on the Chinese mainland were devastated and religious practices were banned; that's why Taiwan has the largest collection of Chinese temples in the world.

Chinese religion, so Xi-Yue told, was a mixture of Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and the worshipping of ancestors.

Referring to the latter, it was believed that humans had 2 souls, one at the conception and one at the birth.

After death, these souls would wander as evil spirits, only to be prevented by bringing

sacrifices to the ancestors.

The evening ended in an orgasm of light around the town hall of New Taipé City, making the moon turn pale.

It was close to her apartment where the light spectacle turned into another dazzling festivity.

26^th December 2018

The next day, they were shipped from Taipé to Hualien by a kind of TGV with which had occured a fatal accident just some months earlier.

Xi-Yue had chosen another society, but she had not been able to avoid a derailment between the two of them.

This took place on the train, at the location of the seats of Yaolo and Xi-Yue.

 "When did you see Monica for the last time?", the Chinese asked when the train had just departed.

"More than 2 weeks ago."

"And have you made a new appointment?"

"Yes, a few days after this trip", Yaolo replied.

"You keep seeing her in order to be able to start again with her", it sounded reproaching.

"I don't know.”

"You do know."

"Listen, I've been together with Monica for 10 years and when, after more than a year of radio silence, she is contacting me again, it doesn’t leave me indifferent."

You know that after the break I did finally go my own way, but you also know that the fire of our relationship has been smoldering deep within me.

Both conversations we had, have restored to a great extend the meaning and respect for each other and we also want to figure out whether there is yet another opportunity to pick up the thread again."

"You knew this well before, that’s why you bought a refundable ticket."

"But anyhow, I did come, and I had no contact with her since 2 weeks now, out of respect for you and this fantastic trip organized by you".

"What do I mean for you : a spare wheel? You don't love me. "

"I love you very much."

"Then say that you desire me as a woman above all women."

"I had sex with you."

"Say that I am your true dearest one, and not Monica."

“This is as difficult to answer as asking what the real China is: the People's Republic of China or the Democratic Republic China of Taiwan."

She paused for a while, just while the train stood still.

Then, in a raging drive the reproaches came again in the direction of Yaolo.

He understood her anger, or rather her disappointment and sadness hidden behind it.

"Tell me about your earlier loves" he tried to give the conversation a different turn.

With some reluctance, she ran into the love chapels where she had been on pilgrimage, and with even more reluctance, she admitted that she recently had lunched with one of her saints without saying anything about it to Yaolo.

Suddenly he felt fooled and naive because he had been transparent to her about the contact with Monica.

Now, a longer train stop and silence between them followed.

She cried.

Eventually, it all came back in motion when she said: "What now? What are you going to do?"

"You know, honey, I had already told you in New Zealand that we’d better enjoy every moment together, because a long-term relationship was not possible.

In essence, Monica's rapprochement has nothing to do with this, but it seems to speed up the process of taking distance."

"Taking distance? What do you mean? How do you see this?"

“How would you see it?”, the Spaniard tried cautiously.

"I have to think about it", Xi-Yue said after some hesitation.

" Good answer”, Yaolo replicated, relieved that she finally took the contemplative way.

Just when, close to their destiny, they crossed a river, he began to read to her from "The Aleph" by Paolo Coelho.

"Look at the river, here in front of us.

In the living room of my apartment hangs a painting of a rose.

Once, It was laying in a river like this one here.

The paint layers are affected by water and weather, the edges are frayed; yet I can see part of the red rose, painted on a golden background.

I know the artist.

In 2003 we went together to a forest in the Pyrenees.

There we discovered a river that was dry at that time.

The bedding consisted of stones, underneath we laid the canvas.

This artist is my wife.

At this moment she is physically thousands of miles from here, and she is sleeping because in her town the day has not yet started while here it’s four o'clock in the afternoon.

We have been together for over twenty-five years.

When I met her, I was convinced that our relationship would not be long-lived.
The first two years, I was always prepared that one of us should leave.
The five years that followed, I kept thinking that each of us would go his way as soon as we experienced the habituation -which simply was there- as disturbing.

I imagined that every more serious obligation would deprive me of my "freedom", thus not being able to experience all I wanted.”

I notice that the little girl next to me is starting to feel uncomfortable.

"And what does that have to do with the river and the rose?"

“It was the summer of 2002, I was already a well-known writer, had money and thought that the values that I saw as fundamental for my life, were still the same.

But how could I know? By taking the test to the sum.

We rented a room in a two-star hotel in France where we were going to spend five months every year, from then onwards.

The wardrobe was not so big, so we kept our clothes limited to the most necessary. We made trips through the forests and the mountains, ate outside, we had hours of conversation  and every day we went to the movies.

By living so, it became clear to us that things that are most exquisite in the world are precisely those things that lay within everyone's reach.

For both of us, it goes that what we do is also our passion.

A laptop is all I need for my work.

It happens that my wife is a painter. And painters need large workshops to be able to make their paintings and store them.

Under no condition, I’d wanted her to sacrifice her vocation because of me, so she suggested me to rent a space.

But when she looked around and saw the mountains, the valleys, the rivers, the lakes and the forests, she thought : why should I not store them outside in nature? And why am I not going to cooperate with nature?”

Hilal continues to look straight to the river.

"From all this, the idea arose to store the paintings in the open air".

I took my laptop with me to write.

She knelt in the grass and painted.

A year later we picked up the first canvases, the result was fantastic and very original.

The very first painting she took out was the rose.

And even though we now have a house of our own in the Pyrenees, she still buries her paintings and digs them up again, and she does so all over the world.

What was born out of a kind of necessity, developed into a way of creating.

I look at the river, remember that rose and feel an almost tangible, physical love, as if my wife is here with me."

The wind has diminished in strength, so the sun manages to provide a little warmth. The light around us could not be more beautiful.

I understand and respect it," she says, "but when you were talking in the restaurant about the past, you said something like : love is stronger, love is greater than man.”

"Yes. Though love is made up from choices."

"In Novosibirsk, you wanted me to forgive you, and I did. Now I ask you: say that you love me.”

I grab her hand. Together we look at the river.

"No answer is also an answer," she says.

I put my arms around her and lay her head against my shoulder.

"I love you. I love you because all the loves in the world are like different rivers that flow to the same lake, come together and turn into a unique love that changes into rain and blesses the earth.

I love you like a river that makes plants, flowers and trees grow in the places where it flows.

I love you like a river that offers to drink to those who are thirsty and that brings people to where they want to go.

I love you like a river that understands that it has to flow in a different way in a waterfall and that it must learn to rest in the lowland.

I love you because we are all born in the same place, created from the same source that always goes on feeding us with water.

As a result, if we are a weak little stream, we only have to wait a little while.

Then spring returns, the snow melts and fills us again with new energy.

I love you like a river that starts weak and lonely on a mountain, swells slowly and flows together with other rivers until, from a given moment, it can avoid every obstacle in order to get where it wants to come.

Therefore, I receive your love and I give you my love. Not the love of a man for a woman, not the love of a father for a daughter, not the love of God for his creatures.

But a love without a name and without any explanation, a river alike, unable to explain why it flows as it does, but just goes on flowing. A love that doesn’t ask, and doesn’t return anything but only expresses itself.

I will never be yours, you will never be mine, but still I will be able to say: I love you, I love you, I love you."

Maybe because it was noon, maybe it was the light, but at that time it seemed as if the Universe finally became harmonic.

We stayed sitting there and didn't have the slightest wish of returning to the hotel, where Yao was certainly waiting for me already.

  

Pew,

Why is Babel Dark not married to Molly?

He doubted her. You should never doubt the one you love.

But maybe they don't tell you the truth?

That doesn't matter. You must tell them the truth.

What do you mean?

You cannot be someone else's honesty, my child, but only your own.

So, what should I say?

When?

When I love someone.

Then you should say so.

The train slowed down and entered Hualien station.

To make him happy she had rented a car, because she had not been driving for years, attached as she was to subway and train, unlocking for her, as a humble servant, Taipé and the rest of the island.

Hualien was a quiet provincial town which, being located on the east coast and in the proximity of Taroko Gorge, was focused for an important part on tourism.

It housed the largest concentration of aboriginals, especially the Ami of which 9000 (of the 200.000) were living in Hualien.

The Spaniard and the Chinese were marching in the wind along a kind of boulders trail near the sea where their flaring emotions seemed to start laying down just as gradually as the waves were reconciling with a flatter beach on the south side of the city.

Yaolo was welcomed to an aesthetic orgasm when he entered the hotel room that Xi-Yue had arranged for him.

A room with a view

Lighthouse is waiting

Guiding his ships

Releasing his stories

She listens in silence

While he moves slowly

Under her skin

Spraying his fire

And so she receives

His love and his care

Multiple returning

When she plays the piano.

27^th December 2018

Eventually she decided not to accompany him to Taroko Gorge, because she thought it was too dangerous.

Yaolo wondered why Chinese were so afraid of a falling stone or a narrow tunnel but he understood that in the present circumstances he did not have a case to make it a dispute.

Maybe she was just scared of her own feelings, so he thought later, in recent 24 hours as a yin-yang tossed to and fro between passion and anger for the rejection.

Taroko Gorge was embedded like a marble snake alongside the 19 km long road from Xinchang on the coast to the recreational Tianxiang and was mainly inhabited by Taroko, Ami and Atayal tribes.

200 million years ago, coral reefs were formed, layer upon layer, squeezed into limestone and transformed into solid marble by the intense heat of geological movements.

The origins of Taroko Gorge go back 4 million years, when the Eurasian plate started pressing against the Philippine sea plate, thus forming the Central Mountain Range.

Because of this pressure, marble was pushed to the surface while the Liwu River eroded the rock, thus forming the current gap.

The combination of heavy rainfall in Taiwan and the fact that the island is gently pressed upward makes the gorge deepen by 5 mm a year.

The creation of the motorway throughout the gorge was started in 1956, initially intended as a military road to enable rapid troop movements in case China would have closed the coastal routes.

The road was cut out manually and in 4 years, more than 450 workers died.

Tell me the story Pew.

Which story my child?

The story of Babel Darks’ secret.

It was a woman.

You always say so.

Somewhere, there always is a woman, my child: a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a good fairy, or one that is as vicious as beautiful, or as beautiful as good.

Is that the full list?

Then there's also the woman you love.

Who is she?

That's another story.

From Xincheng he drove inland, away from the sea, until a hole in a rock gave him access to the Taroko Gorge.

A little bit later, when he entered the first tunnel, it seemed to take the form of a ring of light that began to turn around his car, ever faster and wider.

From the Aleph of Paulo Coelho:

I look at the light, to a sacred spot, and a wave comes to me.

I am in the Aleph, the point where everything coincides in space and time.

I am standing in a window, looking at the world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words forgotten in space.

Feelings that are exciting and at the same time suffocating.

I am standing in front of doors that open a fraction of a second and immediately close again, but making it possible to reveal what is hidden behind it – treasures, pitfalls, roads that have remained untrodden and travels that never have been dreamed.

It was as if his mind was pulled out of his body that, as a well-programmed robot, kept the car on the right track

A silhouette of a brasserie arose, a table at the end of the counter and a woman who looked at him gloomily when he moved to her: "I want us to stop."

He moved away again and fell into a deep gap that brought his mind back to his body when he drove out of the tunnel.

During the ride through a long dark yellow tube, he was overcome by regret when a small woman with a handsome but sad face entered the kitchen and asked him why all this had not been negotiable.

She seemed to want to beat him with a tennis rocket, but the ball came like a jocari back in her face.

There was no end to the sealed tube until the daylight showed him the debris of what had become of them.

Fortunately, his car was also carried by a bridge that reminded him of the most beautiful terrace in the world where she was able to listen to him for hours until she stepped back, understanding that she was not the true one.

There were small winding tunnels with a handsome young woman who, in a curved garden seat, listened fascinated to his stories.

And once back in the group she did as if he didn't exist.

Or with a married woman who brought him chocolates and did not understand that he did not want to taste it.

A long piece of tunnel seemed to take the shape of a smartphone screen where he waited for her answer but every car that passed wasn't hers.

And then, a winding river filled with charming white marble blocks, told him a story about a pair of pigeons sent to heaven by a wedding-couple. 

A boulders party brought him to the coast of Maroc and a couple with each their sunglasses hoisted on their foreheads when they looked one another in the eyes.

The long wires of a suspended bridge seemed to move gently in the wind until he felt the vibrations of every woman's body he had danced with.

Not once during his meandering dangerous journey he had recognized the face of Xi-Yue.

Apparently, he had experienced it all with other women and yet he had experienced almost all these beautiful and difficult adventures with her.

It was clear to him how it felt to reject and to be rejected, to comfort and to be comforted, to wait and to be expected, to dance and to fall, to find and to lose each other again.

It was as if all these events took place at the same time in the same place, that all these women were an appearance of the same woman, that he had known a thousand loves and yet only one, and that everything repeated itself endlessly.

He had entered the Aleph of Borges and Coelho.

In the evening, on the hotel roof terrace, a native sang the universal story of love in an incomprehensible language.

When he drove back from Taroko the next day, the tunnels and the rocks and bridges had lost their magic.

They were constructs of nature and of people's hands, absorbed in silence tens to millions of years, showing this time no intention to reveal even the smallest fraction of their secrets.

The quicker Yaolo raged over the road, the more their stubbornness seemed to stop time.

A little bit later, while along the coastal road, he saw the Pacific Ocean dashing against the brutal cliff gates of the mainland, he understood how the love of the river had found its way between its shores and along the stones of the bedding, eventually was absorbed into the sea and yet returned to the land to be crashed against the high cliffs of time.

It made him sad until he saw that algae and fish and all life beneath the water surface colored the first or the last stretch of sea, as a palette of blue-green hues.

He found solace in the thought that most of the water could choose the open sea until it evaporated to descend as rain over bamboo and other trees.

When he almost had arrived in Hualien, his gaze was struck by the lighthouse which, at the end of a long strip, had taken its position a few hundred yards from their hotel.

"Come, I want to show you something", Xi-Yue walked half an hour later with him in the direction of the small land tongue.

Inside the lighthouse, a somewhat older Chinese man was sitting behind a table taking notes.

"Who are you?", Yaolo asked.

Xi-Yue knitted the English and Chinese of both men together.

"I am Dew, for 45 years the lighthouse keeper of Hualien."

"Is a lighthouse keeper still needed here?", Yaolo asked with some disapproval.

"Wherever there are ships, you will find lighthouses, and where lighthouses are, you will find keepers, and where keepers are, you are going to hear stories", the man replied : "I am a distant descendant of Josiah Dark, a famous merchant from Bristol who built the lighthouse of Cape Wrath in 1828.

His son, my great-great-great-grandfather, was born in the same year, which earned him the somewhat bizarre name of Babel.

In Bristol he fell in love with the beautiful Molly O'Rourke, but when unexpectedly she turned out to be pregnant, he convinced himself that she had another lover.

He left her, married someone else "to get rid of it all", and in the meantime he had become a pastor in Salts where the lighthouse was, built by his father.

Coincidentally, he met Molly again a few years later in 1851 at the World Exhibition in Hyde Park in London.

In secret, he started a relationship with her again and disappeared twice a year in April and November from Salts to live with Molly in Bristol.

He accomplished this "penance” for seven years and then he would go abroad with Molly and their blue eyed, blind daughter.

His wife and their son in Salts would be well cared for.

When Molly -against all agreements- visited him unexpectedly in Salts, she discovered his double life, and both met in the lighthouse where Molly forgivingly suggested to start together a new life in France.”

"And?"

"You will certainly learn the progress of the story later", The Chinese man replied mysteriously.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"What did you learn from your journey through the Taroko mountains?"

Yaolo was dismayed that he was aware of this. Or maybe Xi-Yue had told him but he hadn’t noticed.

"That the Chinese should not be afraid of falling rocks," he answered, mocking his girlfriend.

"But perhaps of Babel Darks", it came back unpleasantly: "Don't get excited, my good friend, in each of us there is a Molly and a Babel Dark and an unhappy partner.

And even Dark had 2 shapes: the moralist and the adulterer, just like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

You have encountered yourself a few times along the walls of the tunnels and those rock formations, I may presume."

For a while, Yaolo kept silent.

"Understanding and mildness towards yourself can help you to forgive others", Dew continued: "For all this, you did read so in the Aleph of Coelho?”

"And you, how do you get here?”

“About 1950, a Chinese skipper passed along Cape Wrath, and again one year later, and then he left with Pew’s daughter (all my ancestor- lighthouse keepers had the same name) for Taiwan, together with a little lighthouse boy.

When there was a vacancy for a lighthouse watchman in Hualien, I came forward, changed my name to Dew since this sounded better to Chinese ears, and besides the stories of my mother, my father had fed me with astrology since I was a young child.”

“So, what is your daily activity? ", Yaolo asked through his feminine translation medium.

"I tell stories to the people, I give explanations about their zodiac sign and I sway the light of my tower to guide skippers in the dark and by heavy weather."

"Are you a writer, a consultant or a manager?"

"Actually, that all 3 is the same, it's about giving people direction, maybe they call this in your country a psychiatrist."

“Writing stories is my profession", Yaolo said : "Boats are not my cup of tea, but could you explain my zodiac sign?"

Xi-Yue translated his date of birth and time when Dew, the "fortune teller", began to fill up the page in front of him with Chinese characters that, while talking, arrived in pieces and chunks on Xi-Yue's notebook and finally, fully wrapped up in English, walked into Yaolo's ears.

"You are very ambitious, passionate and eloquent", the first diagnosis was ushered. You've set high targets and realized a lot, but maybe it's time now to find something that you might have lost on the way.

You often think too much, you want it all perfect but maybe you have to put the bar a little lower, do something good for the people, give some compliments...

You have a few difficult years behind you, but within just some weeks from now, the year of the pig begins, your Chinese zodiac.

If you do what I have said, the plants could be there in the next few years. "

"What plants?"

"Chinese bamboo, my friend, and don't say you've never heard of it before."

What is my destiny, what is the purpose of my life?" Yaolo tried to force Dew to make an existential statement.

"Change your name in Yew and plant a lighthouse in your garden at the Spanish sea."

On the way back from Hualien to Taipé, they passed a long tunnel carved into the rock.

Yaolo saw himself switching on the light at the top of a red and white lighthouse that guided large and small boats on their way in the dusky dark.

A beautiful silhouette came navigating in his direction.

The boat was moored, a woman stepped out and entered the lighthouse.

Just when he wanted to recognize her face, the train came out of the tunnel.

Tell me a story, Dew

What kind of story?

The story of what happened next.

That depends.

Of what?

Of how I tell it.

A ship dear to him

Moored for years

Then departed

Long not returned

A ship dear to him

Returned

In his stories

Didn’t moore again

So he remains alone

A tower In the night

Multiplying light

For who waits for him

Ships come

Ships go

Until one perhaps

Will stay with him

Pew,

Why is Babel Dark not married to Molly?

He doubted her. You should never doubt the one you love.

But maybe they don't tell you the truth?

That doesn't matter. You must tell them the truth.

What do you mean?

You cannot be someone else's honesty, my child, but only your own.

So what should I say?

When?

When I love someone.

Then you should say so.

He had sent her a photograph of a dilapidated castle, being renovated by a girlfriend.

Monica didn’t like unexpected turns as, in a conversation out of the blue, they could torpedo all previously made intentions.

For her, the spoken word was an uncontrolled waterfall while letters on paper could be neatly prepared and streamlined, to bring their reader into the right mood.

She wrote that she did not believe that people could change and hence also not their relationship ...

Why had she come back and left again?

Had it been an uncontrolled moment of nostalgia, drowned in a sea of time that had smoothly washed away the earlier life?

Had it been an impulse of regret, being alone for months, and the intention to search for the culminating points of long ago, to stiffen up suddenly again, when he took her hand to walk with him.

Or was his last rejection not yet digested, perhaps she seeked the certainty of still being attractive to him?

Or was it a bizarre mix of all three?

She no longer believed in the restoration of old castles, propping up broken roofs, the repair of a marble staircase, the redestination of lost space, or the setting up of an English garden.

She believed in the melancholy of white roses and the cello sonatas of Bach as a mourning-song about what was irreversibly lost.

From Lighthouse keeping by Jeanette Winterson:

Babel Dark took his notebook, worn and scratched, and watched the notation.

Molly returned to Bristol. I could not accept her plan for our new life in France. I kept to my point. I kept to my point. I kept to my point.

He closed the cahier, shoved it in his pocket and walked on, noticing how much the cliffs were eroded at their feet.

Tell a story, Yew.

What kind of story my child.

A story with a good ending.

There is no such thing in the whole world

A good ending?

An ending.

Tell me a story, Yew.

What kind of story, my child?

One that starts again.

That's the story of life.

But is it the story of my life.

Only when you tell it.

Acknowledgements to :

-Insight Guides Cyprus

-Jeanette Winterson, "Lighthouskeeping"

-Paolo Coelho, "Aleph"

-Karen Armstrong, "The Great Transformation"

-Sheng Ting Tsao for organising the trip, the inspiration and the pictures

-Caroline Geerts for the visit to the castle of Heers

-Lut for redaction from voice