Drunken Love by Que Son (to read list TXT) 📖

and happiness, with all the sincerity, without a second thought. Because she was standing on the edge of the abyss and ready to fall at the slightest touch of his fingers--but that was not what she really wanted because she would lose her virginity and she was not a married woman and that was not good for her. And besides, fear: his brother and sister-in-law might come home at any moment. So Adam, trying not to look at her, said "Please go" even though his heart yelled out don't. After some hesitation, Eve tore herself from him. The sound of her footsteps faded away, then silence returned to the darkness.

 

One night Adam did not come home until 2. The next morning when he woke up and saw the sunlight streaming through the window he said to himself he wished he were dead. The pain was splitting his head. And when he came into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he saw a face disfigured by desperation and hopelessness, and as the breaths hit the mirror and bounced back into his face he smelled liquor, all the liquor in the world that he had drunk last night, and he felt his stomach churning as if wanting to vomit. He felt sick in every fiber of his being, a sickness that was both physical and spiritual. He thought, again, that death was preferable to life, this life, the life he was living. He thought about the day in front of him and was terrified of having to live through it--again. But there wasn't only today, there was also tomorrow, another day and another day and another day and another day. If there was a bottom to spiritual desperation, he was standing on it. He walked back into his room and sat at the table, holding his head in his hands. It was a Sunday morning. It was the day of the week that all of his friends would put on their best clothes and sit in the smoked filled café to listen to music and talk--and half of them would be high on marijuana and heroin. A few of his friends would probably drop by later to pick him up, but at this moment, Adam was in no mood for company, he just wanted to go back to bed and close his eyes and never wake up again. Then suddenly Eve came into the room and sat facing him and she was shocked to see the look in his eyes. But she was unable to say a word. She just fixed her worried eyes on him, waiting for him to say something perhaps, something to assure her that he acknowledged her presence--and his own. But this morning, seeing his lover, Adam did not feel any joy anymore, she had suddenly become something extra, something he could do without, even a nuisance, an object among all the other objects in the environment and in the life that made him sick. He stared through her as if she was not there, then he shifted his death gaze outside the window to the bright and almost blinding sunlight. He saw a piece of blue sky and a thin strand of white cloud and heard the birds singing. At last, unable to bear the unusual silence any longer, Eve said "What's happening to you?" Her words carried with them a profound sadness--she had the feeling that she had lost him, that he had become another person, not the Adam she knew anymore, all because of the unexplained pain that he was experiencing--she could feel it. She took his hands and wrapped them with her bony fingers and caressed them as if trying to suck the sadness out of him and bring him back to her. But he was mute, immobilized, had no reaction--gone. Minutes passed, and Adam finally opened his mouth after gathering all of his strength, "Go. Leave me alone." And Eve looked at him as if she did not believe what she was hearing and her eyes were asking him why why why. She too became frozen. Then he said again, "Why don't you leave me alone? I am sick of it all. I am sick of you, too." Eve wanted to deny she was hearing what she though she was hearing, but the words repeated themselves in her ears and they cut her like a thousand knives. Then all of a sudden she broke down and cried, her long black hair covered her face. She felt that something had suddenly collapsed between them when he finished saying those words, he had rejected her and the love--and she could not understand why. But he had said the words, and she had heard the words. She sobbed, and her small shoulders shook, but she tried not to lose herself. It was a controlled outpouring of grief, which perhaps made it even more painful. Adam stood up, leave her at the table, and walked into the living room. He lied on the couch--for a long time--and then heard Eve stepping out of his room and down the stairs. She was gone.

 

The days after that morning he heard from his sister-in-law that Eve had gone back to the new economic zone in Ca Mau province, thousands of kilometers from Da Nang. But he thought she would return after the pain subsided and they would make up and be loving to each other again--and how wrong he was. That tearful morning was the last time they saw each other. He never saw her again. He was taken away a couple months after that and put in a labor camp for six months then he escaped and took to the sea and became an exile.

 

Now, 2004--when Adam remembered all of this, the separation had been twenty seven years--and counting. And they had lost their youth.

 

 

 

Chapter Four

 

Shakespeare looks at the clock. It is near midnight, just a few minutes before the hands hit 12, and on the silent TV screen people's faces show wilder and wilder excitement as the ball slowly drops. Shakespeare feels he is losing control of his consciousness. The blackout seems imminent. But there is no stopping now. He takes another drink from the pitcher and throws more peanuts into his mouth. The other patron stands up and staggers toward the door, slowly and clumsily opens it, then steps out. He looks very drunk. Only Shakespeare and the bartender remain in the tavern. He looks at the bartender and says what time do you close and she says two.

 

In his drunken mind up Shakespeare has laid out the story to the point when Adam left Viet Nam. Adam left behind all he had, he left his past which included Eve. He had put her in a far corner of his mind and was going into an unknown future--and he was excited. Things that awaited him in the world outside the country were more alluring, and he had to live it. Shakespeare feels that Adam was only doing what circumstances were compelling him to do and thus did not think much about what he was doing, he only knew that he must escape from the country because he was a fugitive. So off he went, thinking about Eve a little bit, but thoughts about her quickly slid from his young and restless mind. But at this point, the more Shakespeare thinks about the story and how it is going to develop, the more desperate he becomes. He is suddenly bothered by the thought that there may not be a happy ending to the story of these two lovers. And if he cannot bring the lovers together and make them happy in the end, their fate would be no different from Romeo and Juliet and that would be the end of Shakespeare the playwright, so to speak. He would rather die a thousand deaths than see such thing happens to Adam and Eve, and not just these two, but all lovers. Shakespeare wants his mission on earth this time to succeed, but he now sees more and more clearly the difficulties his characters were facing: adverse circumstances and inner obstacles, problems that were even as formidable as those that has killed Romeo and Juliet.

 

At the beginning of the mission (to rewrite the story), Shakespeare felt that he might have some difficulties giving it a happy ending. But as the evening progresses and as he thinks deeper about the events surrounding Adam and Eve, Shakespeare realizes that he is confronting an impossibility. He very much wants the two lovers to reunite after twenty seven years of separation and live together happily like a fairy tale. But life is not a fairy tale. Shakespeare is using materials and people from real life for the story, and life is much pain and suffering, and very little happiness--if there is happiness at all. Fairy tales are stuffs of the suffering imagination, of wishful thinking, of a desire to transform the mundane, even if only in the mind, into something it is not. At this thought, Shakespeare feels hopeless, and the pain in his heart intensifies. Unbearable. He takes another drink. His head spins faster and the alcoholic wall between him and things gets thicker and foggier. He is losing consciousness, but with a little sanity left, Shakespeare says to himself, before I pass out, I must finish the story, I must see it to a satisfactory conclusion before the night is out.

 

The door of the tavern opens and in steps a man in a long trench coat and with him a strong gust of wind and blowing snow, and the sudden rush of cold air hits Shakespeare in the face and shakes him out of his delirium, even if for a few short moments. The man appears drunk. He walks unevenly to the counter, climbs onto a stool and mumbles something to the bartender who puts a glass in front of him and pours liquor in it. The man immediately throws the liquid into his mouth and as he puts the glass down, the bartender pours another shot and this time it looks like a double and she takes money from the man and returns the bottle to the shelf and sits looking out the window again. At the sudden sobriety, Shakespeare's thoughts returns to Eve:

 

While Adam was living his new life in America, Eve was in the new economic zone with her family in Ca Mau province at the southern tip of the country. In addition to farm work she was making dresses for the women in the collective for extra income, a skill she had learned in Sai Gon. Her parents knew about her love for Adam. The mother approved the relationship and was ready to give him her hands if he asked. And Eve, in her simple way of thinking, was waiting for just that. She loved him, wanted a life with him, and would wait to become his wife. That was all she was thinking about. Nothing else. But her father hated it. He was having a problem with Eve falling in love with a boy from that family: Adam was the brother of his first son-in-law, and things had not been all peaceful between the two families. Eve's father did not like Adam's parents even though they were related by their children’s marriage. The father thought that he was humbled when he married off one of his daughters to Adam’s family. Eve’s family was then in very bad economic situation and was going to the new economic zone, and the less mouths in the family to feed, the better, and that was why he had agreed to give his beloved daughter away to Adam’s brother. So one of Eve's sisters became the wife of Adam’s older brother and the marriage allowed this sister to stay in the city instead of going to the new economic zone in a faraway region where hardship was guaranteed, if