Maybe the stories that Madam X’s sister spread can explain this even better. She reported that Mr. Q had told her that he’d added five more colors to his eyes and now has ten. This occurred because he ‘‘was addicted’’ to dribbling the ball, which let him ‘‘defy aging and become young again.’’ He immersed himself in all kinds of child’s play and ‘‘liked it too much to stop.’’ Indirectly, he also told the sister that Madam X was ‘‘too wonderful for words,’’ and he himself now had to look in mirrors ‘‘forty or fifty times a day.’’ He had already ‘‘quite unconsciously hidden a mirror in his pocket.’’ At this point, he asked the sister time after time, ‘‘Don’t you think I’m now a real stud?’’ After the sister reassured him, he happily ran off to dribble the ball.
This isn’t all. He made up stories about his past, claiming that he had no father or mother, that he’d been born from a leather skin hanging on a tree. The day he was born, he had seen lots of silkworms spinning golden-yellow cocoons. ‘‘They spun back and forth, back and forth.’’ A silly smile hung on his face. ‘‘Everyone jumps down from cocoons on the tree. Just look at their feet and you’ll know. Ahead was a dark wood that people would fall into, just like ants that had lost their sense of smell. What’s that sound?’’ The sister told him it was the footsteps of people on their street: they were tailing her sister and her family. ‘‘They were scattered in the dense woods, those bugs.’’ He nodded, and his ears pricked up like a cat’s.
Our widow, who hadn’t participated in the crowd’s activity either, expressed another opinion of Mr. Q’s daytime character. This derived from personal experience for which she had paid a high price. She had concentrated a long time on her research and had long ago stopped thinking of Mr. Q. She could hardly even remember what he looked like. One day, the widow and Mr. Q ran into each other at a fence. Mr. Q ‘‘leered at her with a dirty smile hanging from his fleshy lips’’ and stared at her urgently with ‘‘erotic eyes.’’ He was evidently scheming ‘‘something evil.’’ The widow screamed and ran off. After almost a mile, she was still so afraid that ‘‘her face had turned pale.’’ ‘‘He clearly wanted to rob me of my virtue,’’ she said furiously. You have to realize that in the widow’s eyes, Mr. Q had been no more than androgynous, ‘‘a eunuch.’’ Whenever Mr. Q was mentioned, she’d held her head high and laughed and then asked, ‘‘Is it the guy picking up chicken bones to eat?’’ No one could imagine how she had dreamed up this description. A hypocrite or a horse thief or something of the sort would have made sense, but a guy picking up chicken bones to eat! How wonderful the widow was! Now, when everyone had forgotten him, and thought he was insignificant and unimportant, he suddenly appeared like a jackal- an incredibly oversexed and aggressive jackal.
‘‘I was scared half to death.’’ Her hand on her chest, the widow asked, ‘‘Under what circumstances can a sexless man-one who picks up chicken bones to eat-change into a sex maniac? Isn’t this fascinating? What I said about what he did to me wasn’t at all exaggerated: it was the absolute embodiment of libido. We can easily conclude that in their relationship, Madam X hasn’t inspired any sexual consciousness in Mr. Q. Their infantile friendship could never reach the point of sexual contact. Why? Because after meeting a real woman, with that crazed, violent expression, in a split second he became a real man.’’
Since the encounter at the fence, the widow felt low and despondent all day long. Before bed, she saw rats and bare feet. She started using language from the meetings in the dark room to hint of a certain thing deep in her heart. She couldn’t talk about that thing out loud, for if she did, it would no longer exist. She made comparisons and suggestions. If she hadn’t been the one Mr. Q ran into at the fence, but had been, for example, the old woman with the felt hat, she could say for sure that Mr. Q would have had a much different expression. There was no need to test this. She had figured it out intuitively. And if Mr. Q had been playing with a puppet and hadn’t seen this woman who was every inch a woman, she could just imagine the ‘‘sex appeal’’ Mr. Q’s mouth and eyes would have had.
