"HOW WANG-FO WAS SAVED" "I met Wang-Fo one night in a tavern" "The old painter had been drinking and the alcohol loosened an otherwise taciturn tongue" "Wang-Fo talked as if silence were a wall and words were shapes designed to cover it" "Thanks to him I saw colors a harmonious construction in people's faces which I had previously found uninteresting or repulsive" "He taught me how to see beauty in things" "He gave me a new spirit, a new way of looking at things" "I was shy and had grown up in a family... where we were cocooned by wealth" "When I was fifteen, my father found me a wife" "He chose a beautiful woman" "I took Wang-Fo to our home to meet her" "Wang-Fo taught me to appreciate the representation of reality rather than reality itself" "My wife came to realize I liked Wang-Fo's portraits of her better than herself and her face lost its bloom like the flower exposed to the heat of the summer wind and rain" "My master painted my wife one last time" "He liked the green tinge of a dead person's skin" "To buy purple ink for my master, rolls of silk and paintbrushes" "I sold all I owned and we left for the kingdom of Han" "We travelled light because my master liked the images of things and not the things themselves" "We were poor and exchanged paintings for a little food but in my bag were snow-covered mountains, rivers in springtime and the face of the summer moon" "Wang-Fo was no doubt trying to remember if he had painted an unflattering portrait of the emperor which would earn him the death sentence" "He told the Celestial Master that he was old, poor and weak and that he did not know what he had done" "You ask me what you have done, Wang-Fo" "As others' poison finds its way into us through our nine openings to confront you with the wrongs you have done" "I have to tell you my life story" "My father had put together a collection of your paintings in the palace's most secret rooms" "He thought the subjects in the pictures should be shielded from the eyes of the uninitiated and I was brought up in these rooms" "Of course, needing to rebel, I denied the reality of your pictures" "I tried to escape them by losing myself in play" "My father, the Emperor, reacted severely" "I grew up in enforced solitude" "I was removed from the tumult of my future subjects" "The hours ticked by" "The colors of your paintings became more brilliant at daybreak and paler at dusk" "At night when I couldn't sleep I used to look at them" "I looked at them every night for nearly ten years" "I imagined the world with the kingdom of Han at its centre as if nestling in the palm of my hand furrowed by the fatal lines of the Five Rivers" "Around it, the sea, the birthplace of monsters and further away the mountains which support the sky" "I used your paintings to help myself imagine all this" "You made me think the sea was like the sheet of water in your paintings that women open and closed like flowers and that the young warriors were arrows that could pierce your heart" "At sixteen the doors that had kept me apart from the world, opened again" "I went out onto the terrace of the palace to look at the clouds" "But they were not as beautiful as those in your paintings of dusk" "I walked along roads not expecting to find stones or mud" "I searched the empire to find gardens full of women like fireflies" "Pebbles on the seashore marred the ocean for me" "Vermin in villages prevented me from seeing the beauty of the rice fields" "The blood of victims isn't as red as the pomegranate in your paintings" "Women's flesh repulses me like meat on a butcher's hook and my soldiers' throaty laugh turns my stomach" "You lied to me, Wang-Fo, you hoary impostor" "The world is just a mass of confused blotches thrown at a blank canvas by an insane painter and constantly obliterated by our tears" "The kingdom of Han is not the most beautiful kingdom and I am not the Emperor" "The only empire that is worth ruling is the one that you enter by the Path Of A Thousand Curves And A Thousand Colors" "That is why I had to think what your punishment should be" "You, whose magic made me abhor what I have and makes me want what I cannot have" "And to imprison you in the only place from which you can't escape I've decided that we will burn your eyes" "And as your hands are the conduits to the ten routes which take you to the heart of your empire" "I've decided that your hands will be cut off" "Do you understand?" "I hate you, Wang-Fo, because you knew how to make people love you" "Kill this dog" "Dry your tears." "Now is not the time to cry" "Your eyes must stay clear" "It's not simply to get my revenge that I want you to die" "It's not simply out of cruelty that I want to see you suffer" "I have other plans" "In my collection of your early works" "I have a wonderful painting, perhaps your greatest masterpiece which is sadly unfinished" "I want you to spend the hours of light you have left to finish this painting" "Don't worry, Master." "They'll soon be on dry land again" "They won't even remember that their sleeves were wet" "Maybe just the Emperor will keep some bitter memory of the sea" "They're not the sort of people to lose themselves in a painting" "Based on a short story by Marguerite Yourcenar from the collection "Oriental Tales""