Pain is not the whole story of life

Handbook for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin, translated by Wang Aiyan, Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House, December 2021 edition, 69.00 yuan.

□ Gu Lili

I'm afraid very few people write like Lucia Berlin. In her collection of short stories, The Handbook for The Cleaner, she describes her former lovers as a junkyard in Berkeley, and likens the human body to the viewing window of a washing machine. According to novelist Lydia Davis, such stories are "charged." This means that as long as we open the book and let our eyes pause between sentences, we can hear the crackling sound of the two electrodes of yin and yang touching each other - this is the collision of story and story, and the collision of story and life.

Berlin should be thankful for the gift of life. It is with this god-given care that her writing career and life experience can be seamlessly linked and integrated. In 68 years of life, Berlin never really stopped her steps. Born in Alaska, she grew up in a mining camp in the western United States, grew up with her mother all the way south, and eventually lived a peaceful life in Chile. At the same time, throughout her life, she constantly changed her role in life, and it seems that there is no profession that can keep her hurried footsteps and satisfy her cognition of life: middle school teacher, operator, doctor assistant, housewife, cleaning woman...

Such a life is like a rich mine, which supports Berlin's writing. In the short story of the same name, "Handbook for Cleaning Women", there is a sentence that speaks to her heart: "Cleaning women know everything". Indeed, the cleaning lady knows everything, and from life to writing, she will tell you all the secrets. In the story, the narrator "I" is a cleaning woman, often traveling back and forth between the two sides of the city, witnessing different people and things, and dealing with too many employers with different personalities. So, like watching a never-ending street reality show, she lists the taboos of cleaning women, warns novices not to make friends with cats, let alone go to the psychologist's house; she counts the cigarette butts in the ashtray, the wine glass on the table, the bowling trophy that has been removed, and thirty enigmatic empty wine bottles; she likes to browse the street through the window of the bus, and she does not forget to talk about the driver's car skills.

This time, readers who are accustomed to sitting on the number finally guessed correctly. This omniscient cleaning lady (and every narrator "I" who appears in the book) is the embodiment of Berlin. This means that without solid life experience and keen visual nerves, there will be no birth of the Handbook for Cleaning Women. So, what kind of writing is this? Take a look at Berlin's story. Perhaps, the story will tell you everything. In Dr. H. A. Moynihan, the narrator "I" is a dentist who is best at making dentures. "His dentures are neither slippery nor leaky, and they look exactly like real teeth. He invented a secret recipe that would make dentures the right color, sometimes even a little nicked or yellowed, with fill marks and crowns."

This passage can be used to describe Berlin's writing. She should have ignored all the pain and portrayed the flowing life in front of her as a splendid poem. But she knew very well that life was never a sweetener. Where there is happiness, there is sadness; where there is new life, there is parting. Specific to writing, if the novel is a copy of life, should the writer use a beauty camera to modify it, or should she write it truthfully and keep her life as it is, even if her story is full of ugly scratches, cracks, spots, and folds? The answer is self-evident. At the very least, Berlin didn't need to deliberately hide his wounds and avoid death. On the contrary, as long as you write all the way according to the way life is, and take all the flaws one by one, you will have her writing.

In "Phantom Pain", an amputee patient often feels pain from phantom limbs. At this point, the nurse told him, "All the pain is real." This sentence has a deeper meaning in Berlin's context: all pain is real, all pain is the gift of life, but pain is far from the whole of life. In the novel, the narrator "I" stands by the sickbed, taking care of his father, whose memory has deteriorated, while watching him immerse himself in the past, in a trance, not knowing what night or night it is. In his father's consciousness, he was young and healthy, having traveled to too many places, seen too many characters, and done too many absurd things.

He even stubbornly thought that "I" was still the little girl of that year. And "I"? "I'm not going to pretend, or just coax him—I'll really accompany him back in time," back to the Arizona mines where "I" lived when I was 8 years old, where "deer and antelopes, and occasionally cougars would approach, not afraid of a few of our dogs." Nighthawks flew swiftly in front of the cliffs high above, and were reflected in a deeper red by the setting sun." Obviously, only by experiencing it firsthand can you write such a vivid and flexible sentence. Going back in time is precisely the enduring theme of Berlin's writing. This is not to say that in the face of current pain, deliberately avoid, pretend that everything has never happened, but stand in the present, look back at the past, and re-look at the beauty that once existed in life.

After all, there was never a good or bad past, even if it seemed so far away, even if it had stung her deeply. On the contrary, if the survival of reality has given her too much unbearable weight, it is better to simply indulge in the past and feel the lightness that has never been felt before. Thus, there are those similar scenes in the novel. In different stories, "I" am at different ages, in different professions, with different perspectives, and the only thing that is the same is memory. When "I" face the rejection of my classmates, when "I" rub shoulders with aging, when "I" witness unexpected death, when "I" walk through the street market, when "I" stay alone in the laundromat, emergency room, cleaning room, bus, the past bits and pieces are always uninvited, full of "me" mind.

In "The Lost Years", the narrator "I" is a ward administrator, and whenever the night is quiet, I always can't help but think of my former lover. "I quickly finished the prescription so that I could go back in time, smell the pine cones, taste the smoked beef slices on his white bread... He can bake pancakes in the shape of Texas, Idaho and California. After eating licorice juice on Saturday, his teeth were black until next Wednesday, and his mouth was blueberry-colored all summer. Similarly, in Angel Laundromat, the narrator "I" meets a tall Indian old man at the laundromat. Although they did not talk to each other, "I" still wondered what kind of life he had, and what kind of story this life gave him.

So, when the somewhat discouraged old man looked at "me" from a distance through the dirty mirror, "I" lowered my head and "saw the children, the men, and the garden in my own hands." Perhaps, this is life, this is the story. To paraphrase Berlin, such a look, like "living a life in front of your eyes", does not need too many words, two people who have never known each other will naturally come together and reach an inner consensus. The Handbook for Cleaning Women is such a "life marquee". On the surface, Berlin wrote 43 stories, but in reality, she wrote about the life of the same woman: an underappreciated childhood, a wandering youth, an adult who frequently changed careers, and a sick old age. They were broken up and reassembled and placed in 43 story boxes. It's like a jukebox that jumps out as soon as you turn on the power gently. So repeating, repeating and repeating, singing a song of life with one chant and three sighs.