“A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights wailing for me. silting on a stool, in my garden. beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm. and went away.”
—Roland Barthes, “Waiting”
On the hundredth morning she emerged from her manse, rosy-cheeked and powdered, hair bound in ribbons and feet bound in silk, wearing all of the poise and splendor that a lady of her position might possess, only to find her garden empty.
An eyebrow cracked her icy façade. “Where is my noble suitor?” she asked a passing sweeper. The sweeper simply shrugged and gestured to the city around them.
The courtesan’s carefully-applied smile melted from her face. Surely her paramour would never have intended to disrespect her, a woman regarded by dukes and peasants alike as radiant and resplendent as the setting sun. No, some terrible fate must have befallen him. Honor demanded that she seek him out and wrest him from the depths of his misfortune. She cast her gaze skyward, and thanked the heavens for the chance to prove the strength and purity of her love.
She began her search with the orphans, criers, and beggars of the neighborhood. None knew her love, but one knew of a gambler’s den where men in debt frequently gathered. Perhaps her suitor had been unable to afford an extravagant gift that he desired for her, and had taken out a loan that he could not repay?
The den was dark and dingy, and she did not find her love there. The gamblers laughed to themselves when they heard her story, scattering coins, but one of the older men was moved by the beauty of her voice. In exchange for a single ribbon from her hair, he told her of a criminal hideout beneath an antique shop several blocks away.
The guard at the door had not seen her love, and would not let her in until she gave him her jeweled bracelet. The men inside were fierce men, solid and scarred and sneering at her passing, but they were superstitious men as well, and none would lay a hand upon her. But they would not help her, not until she gave away her jade earrings, and her emerald necklace, and her silken footwraps, and her golden comb, and her stash of perfume, and her pouch of silver, and the rest of her ribbons. Then they told her of a conscription center on the outskirts of the city, a place where men who had fallen on hard times were gathered up to serve the greater good of their country.
The officer at the conscription center would not tell her anything about her love. He declined to reveal the identity of his recruits, but offered her aid in exchange for a week’s worth of farming. The mud stuck in her hair, the brambles tore at her clothes, and the gnats ate her makeup away, but eventually she was pointed to an office of political and public records.
The scribe there refused to let her in. He had a duty to his station, he said, and could not debase himself by giving assistance to a woman so clearly steeped in sin. She begged him to reconsider, pleading that her love was in danger and that only she could rescue him; that without her love, her life meant nothing; that she would trade anything, give anything, do anything if only he would help her. He stood firm. So she waited outside for him, every day and night, through rain and cold and fog and passersby, counting the seconds until the scribe would emerge and she could entreat him for his aid once more.
After a month the scribe took pity on her, and told her of a bar where he had seen the mandarin go drinking after a hard day’s work.
Flickering lanterns, lights dying in their vessels, flanked the desolate avenues. She steeled herself and entered the bar.
“You insulted me,” she said by way of greeting. “You waited ninety-nine nights on a stool beneath my window, yet you could not bring yourself to wait the hundredth. You shamed my worth and dishonored your station. You have forced me to give up everything I had in pursuit of our love, a love that you discarded as easily as you would change a pair of shoes. You have ruined me, have made a mockery of my life and of all I once held dear. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“It was not about you,” he said, gently.
She nearly fainted, so great was her disbelief. He was there to catch her, ushering her over to his table and pouring her a cup of tea.
“I am sorry for your troubles, truly. Perhaps that is not the answer you sought. But I did not leave because of you. Perhaps my waiting was never even about you.”
“You aren’t making any sense,” she said.
He laughed, not unkindly. “I did not leave because I was tired of waiting for you, just as I did not wait because you asked me to. I waited because I had painted a portrait of us, a portrait of you and I within my head. In it, you were on the highest peak, a perfect pedestal that no heaven could have matched for beauty. And I was beneath you, prostrate and helpless, surrounded by dirt and dust and vermin and soil. I was worthless before you—before your image. And so I resolved to wait, to prove my worth to the world, and to you, and to myself.”
“Then…you never truly loved me,” she said, and her heart broke a second time.
“What?” He was shocked, for a moment, and then shook his head. “Of course I did,” he said. “You are beautiful, and strong, and impossible to ignore. How could I not? But I loved your image more than I loved you. If I had waited for you on that final day, I would have spent my life waiting for that image to love me back. And no matter how much you loved me, it would never have been good enough. Because it would not have been perfect.”
“But…why did you not tell me?” she said. “Why did you abandon me without telling me the truth?”
“Because I was afraid,” he answered truthfully. “Because that was only part of the portrait. The other part was my own image, alone amidst the garden, silent and small and scared. Waiting to be noticed, for your love to make me worth noticing. And I knew then that I was not worthy of your love, because my image of myself had never been worthy. How could someone like you love me, when I did not feel deserving of that love?
“How could you have loved me, when I did not love myself?”
She was silent, gazing into her lap. Finally, she tilted her head upwards. “And have you found the answer to that question?”
He looked back at her. “No, not yet. But I am trying.” He smiled. “As, it seems, are you.”
She sat for many minutes there, watching the steam rise from their mugs.
“The baiju here is quite good. Would you permit me to order you a cup?”
“No,” she said carefully, “thank you.” She smiled. “But perhaps tomorrow night.”
And she rose from the table and left, emerging from the bar into a night alive with fireflies.