Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

like the Red Rabbit steed the Three Kingdoms hero Guan Yu rode. He loved that cat, and the cat loved him back. He never went anywhere without it. When he sang a graveside elegy, that cat would sit on the ground in front of him, listening intently, and when the sorrowful climax was reached, it joined in with a doleful howl of its own. The Patriarch’s voice stood out among his peers; the cat’s howls were themselves incomparable. Owing to the shared intimacy, people of the day took to calling him “Chang the Cat,” since the word for cat— mao —sounded the same as his name.
    “Even now, there is a popular ditty in Northeast Gaomi Township that goes——
    “Better to hear Chang Mao screech than listen to the Master teach,” Xiao Shanzi said with deep emotion.
    “Well, one day the cat died; how it died is unclear. One version ascribes it to old age. Another insists that it was poisoned by an out-of town-actor who was envious of the Patriarch’s talent. There is even a version in which the cat was strangled by a vengeful woman who was rebuffed by the Patriarch in her desire to become his wife. Whatever the truth, the cat did die, an event that so traumatized our Patriarch that he held the cat in his arms and cried for three days and nights, interspersing his wails with songs of bereavement, until blood leaked from his eyes.
    “After overcoming the worst of his grief, the Patriarch fashioned two items of cat clothing from the skins of wild animals. The smaller of the two, made from the pelt of a feral cat, he wore on his head for daily use—ears rising from each side, tail hanging down past the nape of his neck alongside his modest queue. The larger item, made from the skins of a dozen or more cats, was a ceremonial robe, trailing a long cat’s tail behind him; he wore it thereafter when he performed graveside bereavements.
    “The death of his companion initiated a major change in the Patriarch’s singing style. Before that, cheerful banter had been woven into his songs; now forlorn strains dominated from start to finish. There was also a change in his singing style, for now the desolate contents were dotted with dulcet or melancholy or bleak cat cries that changed constantly, like a series of interludes. The new style not only has survived to this day, but has become the central feature of Maoqiang opera.”
    “Meow—— Meow—” On an impulse, Xiao Shanzi interrupted my narration with a pair of cat cries pregnant with nostalgia.
    “After the death of his cat, our Patriarch adopted the walking and speaking style of a cat, as if possessed by the spirit of his dead companion. He and his cat had become one. Even his eyes underwent a change: slitted during the day, they glowed in the darkness of night. Then one day the Patriarch died, and a legend was born that he turned into a large cat on his deathbed, but with wings that grew from his shoulders and carried him through the window and onto the limb of a giant tree. From there he flew straight to the moon.
    “The vocation of bereavement singing died with the Patriarch, but his melodic, heartbreaking elegies never stopped swirling in the hearts of our people.”
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    “Later, during the nineteenth-century reigns of the Jiaqing and Daoguang emperors, small family troupes mimicked the vocal offerings of the Patriarch in performances, usually consisting of a male singer, echoed by his wife, and complemented by their child, dressed in a cat costume, who supplied the feline cries. When the opportunity arose, they sang funeral elegies for rich families—by then, ‘bereavement laments’ had become ‘bereavement songs’—but most of the time they put on public performances at open markets. Husband and wife sang and acted out their parts while their child moved cat-like, making a variety of feline sounds as he circled the crowd with his donations basket. Short performances were the order of the day, including such favorites as Lan Shuilian Sells Water, A Widow Weeps at a Gravesite , and Third Sister Wang Misses Her Husband . In reality, these performances were a form of begging. Maoqiang actors are cousins to professional beggars, and that is how you became my protégé.”
    “Shifu speaks the truth,” Xiao Shanzi said.
    “That was how things stood for several generations. Musical instruments were not used in the Maoqiang of those days, and there was no staging. It was operatic but not yet opera. Besides the small family