Five Spice Street

‘‘Hallucinatory drugs’’ also suggests another of X’s strange hobbies. Anyone who looks for X knows that X hides in the bedroom to engage in some kind of activity involving the sounds of jumping and other noises whose cause is unknown. At such times, through a crack in the door, she sometimes tells people, ‘‘Please wait a moment.’’ The wait might be long or short, sometimes ten minutes and sometimes more than half an hour. While she engaged in this secret activity, it didn’t matter who it was; no one-not even her husband or her darling son-could go in. Because of the curtains, no one knew what she was doing. It’s to the widow’s credit that Five Spice Street’s residents aren’t still fretting over this. It was a rainy night when the much-admired widow obtained first-hand information. (She announced that her method was a secret.) It was dark outside the window. Listening to the rain, the widow reported to several residents that what X was concealing inside the room was ‘‘downright dull’’ and she ‘‘couldn’t figure out what possible pleasure lay in it.’’ Her activity was nothing more than skipping naked back and forth in front of the mirror like a little child (she had a large full-length mirror, bought second-hand; the image was unusually clear and true). Then she kicked, bent over, and turned around and around to appraise her waist, her breasts, her rear end, her legs, and other spots. ‘‘She struck a flirtatious pose’’ and ‘‘was unbearably vulgar.’’ In fact, you couldn’t say her breasts were the least bit full; at most, they weren’t any better than a teenage girl’s. A mature woman naturally ought to have mature beauty-a lingering, winning charm in order to bewitch men. What did such childish breasts and a tiny wasp-like waist count for? Could this world be upside down? Why was Madam X so happy with herself, going so far as to look at her reflection for an hour or two every day? Did she behold a non-existent phantom? It’s said that this is a symptom of hysteria. After finishing her report, the widow told the residents: Madam X’s inner world is arrogant, narcissistic, and selfish. She attaches so much importance to her body: every day, she closes the door and looks at it, and yet to the people all around, she claims ‘‘not to use her eyes to see them,’’ her eyes were ‘‘retired,’’ she ‘‘didn’t have any feelings’’ because she had ‘‘grown a plate of steel on her body.’’ After hearing the widow’s report, Five Spice Street’s residents felt a load had been lifted from their shoulders.

The people of Five Spice Street had bitterly despised and feared X’s behavior behind closed doors, and they’d come up with a lot of strange ideas: one said that X was manufacturing dynamite in the house and getting ready to set it off in the public toilet; one said she was raising scorpions and planning to retaliate against the people who had talked about her; one said she was practicing certain ‘‘arts’’ and could force a person into the grave using only her idiodynamics; and still another, who thought himself clever, said that X was working on ways to make herself invisible, because he had once peeped inside, and no one was there, yet he had heard scuffling and kicking. Of course, the widow later refuted this. After learning what Madam X was doing inside, some gossips thought that people would want to drill holes in the wall of Madam X’s home and wait to feast their eyes. What would they wait for? What would they get from it? Nothing. Not only did crowds of people not drill holes but they never brought this matter up again.

2. MADAM X'S OCCUPATIONS