Beauty Looks Down on Me Read online

  “Oh, why didn’t you eat? It’s all cold now.” The same woman returned and brought me a fresh bowl of soup even though I told her it was okay. Judging from the way relatives were addressing her, she must have been a sister of the deceased. A young man sitting next to me offered me a drink. “Excuse me, but I’m not sure who you are . . .” Instead of giving an answer, I quickly emptied the shot glass and returned it to him, thinking it was time to get out of there. The man didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, he pointed to the steaming hot bowl of rice soup. “It’s okay. Please, go ahead and eat.” He was probably pressing me to eat, I realized, because the sight of some unknown person drinking alone at a funeral, where friends and family come together, suggests some kind of problem. Besides, to anyone looking, I was drinking too fast. I didn’t have the heart to continue refusing food or his kindness—he even went so far as to put a spoon in my hand—so I gave in and began eating.

  I chewed a mouthful of rice and felt it slide down my throat. My body started cheering like crazy. My stomach danced, and my insides grew warm with pleasure. Here are those carbohydrates you’ve been wanting so badly. The spoon moved faster and faster. While gulping down the soup, I got a strange feeling. I felt like a father feeding his starving children, or even, a messiah saving a suffering body. I felt disembodied. Despair and an impulsive, self-destructive spite accelerated my movements. Like a true party crasher, I emptied the bowl in a flash, soup dribbling down the sides of my mouth. As soon as I swallowed the last drop and set the bowl down, the woman in the white mourning dress approached me and asked, as if she’d been watching the entire time: “Would you like another bowl? You had so much to drink.” She was probably being nice to me because she didn’t want some unknown drunk causing problems at the funeral, but I nodded happily, like a child eager for praise. I wolfed down the second bowl even faster than the first, slurping with exaggeration.

  Back in the Stone Age, people were always hungry. So they diligently stored fat whenever they got the chance. The human body has not yet adjusted to modern life with its surplus of nutrients. But we will eventually evolve. After all, isn’t it only human to keep pushing a rock up a hill even though we know it’s bound to roll back down again the moment we reach the top? That’s right. There’s no hurry. It took us tens of thousands of years to figure out how to sharpen stone. Or we can look at it this way: You could find yourself shipwrecked, there could be a citywide power outage, you could be cut off from civilization by a blizzard and facing starvation—how will you survive if you have no fat stored in your body? In other words, our programming is still effective. There is no machine as honest and obedient as the body. I nodded deeply. I’d just lost twelve kilograms by not consuming any carbohydrates for an entire month. My body had kicked and struggled, determined not to submit to my will, but in the end it yielded the results I wanted. My body really was my own. All right, then. And now the Primitive Man in me was partying because word got out that rice was on the way. If I kept eating rice soup like this, my body would immediately start storing fat. And my mother and I would sit together again at a peaceful, loving meal table.

  As I raised my head from the bowl of soup that I was devouring, someone called out loudly in my direction, “Hey, you must be the third son!” He had begun rising to his feet, while I sat bewildered. “When did you get back from the States? You’re starting to look more and more like Uncle.”

  I denied it, and with soup still dribbling from my mouth, I dropped the spoon and staggered to my feet. At that moment the thought suddenly hit me that everyone there knew who I was. Feeling queasy and red in the face, I pushed my way through the crowd, came out into the hallway, and collapsed onto one of the plastic chairs neatly lined up along the wall. Through an open door, I glimpsed the room where the portrait of the deceased was enshrined; it was completely empty. Everyone must have gone to eat, because the family members were nowhere to be seen. I could just make out my father’s photo inside. Staggering slightly, I went in to see what he had looked like as an old man.

  Perhaps I’d kept looking at Botticelli’s Venus that day to avoid seeing something else. Whenever things I didn’t want to see rose again and again before my eyes, Venus intercepted them and took me to a door leading to someplace else. There, she told me the story of her birth. The youngest son of Uranus, the god of the sky, hid in his mother’s genitals to cut his father’s penis in half when it entered her, and then threw it into the sea. White froth gathered around it as it drifted in the current, and soon afterward a beautiful maiden was born in the foam, a goddess who would bring abundance and beauty to the world. But she couldn’t free me from everything. In the end, the image remained: my younger self standing in front of a door that was always closed. In front of the door shut tightly against him, the fat boy took down his clumpy parka, which looked even shabbier for being the only one left on the coat stand, while outside the snow fluttered down.

  At some point in my adolescence, another figure had begun to appear and disappear behind that picture. It was a naked women standing firmly on elephantine legs, her entire body wrapped in fat like a pelt. She was another goddess: the Venus of the Ice Age. Anthropologists say a woman that fat couldn’t have actually existed at that time. Such a woman lived only in the imagination of the artist who created her. The artist of the Ice Age had imagined the most beautiful and voluptuous woman in the world, and she was the very picture of divine sustenance.

  I saw the oldest son of the deceased walk into the room, preceded by two children dressed in black. When our eyes met, he bowed his head slightly in greeting as if he’d been waiting for me. With his hands on the shoulders of his two fat sons, he looked at me for a moment with a dignified air about him, not unlike my father had when he was younger. Our father’s portrait hung behind him. Scowling at him, I walked resolutely towards the portrait. Just as I’d seen a world that differed from my own at that Italian restaurant, my father should also have seen a son who differed from what he knew. But he left with the memory of a fat kid. When I first saw Venus, I’d thought that everything beautiful in the world looked down me me. I bowed slowly before Father’s portrait, rose, and turned my head to spit out an unchewed grain of rice. The queasiness rose up in my throat once more. Just then, the eldest son took a large picture frame that had been leaning against the wall hidden behind the funeral wreaths and handed it to me. The frame was meticulously covered in newspaper as if prepared with care in advance. It had been a long time, but the dimensions of the frame looked familiar. I didn’t ask what it was.

  Translated by Sora Kim-Russell

  DISCOVERY OF SOLITUDE

  1

  WHEN I WAS little, I read a story once about a boy whose nose would grow longer with every lie he told. It’s not like I believed every word of it, but afterwards, I couldn’t bring myself to lie anymore. Lately I’ve begun to wonder: What if in that story, the boy would float into the air when he told a lie? Wouldn’t I be a much better liar by now? And wouldn’t I be living a much lighter existence? All that floating around might have given me a chance to see much more of the world.

  It’s possible that someone out there has already written that story. There are countless stories in this world, and nobody can actually read them all. I’d managed to turn thirty-eight without hearing most of the stories out there.

  There was nothing special about my birthday. I was hanging around by myself in some secluded teahouse for hours on end. I must have refilled my cup of chamomile with hot water five, six times. I got myself real comfy on the couch and didn’t budge except for trips to the bathroom. The book on the table remained face up, the pages unturned. I had nobody to see, nothing to do. More than that, I felt the distinct comfort of knowing there was nobody in the world who was thinking of me at that moment.

  The last time I went home, Father had made a real effort to greet me warmly. He didn’t nag me about choosing a different path for my life before it was too late. Father used to shower me with praise: I’d gotten ho
nors for academic excllence and perfect attendance and was admitted into a prestigious university. In the end, though, studying was the only thing I knew how to do. This meant were I to fail at my studies, everything would be over for me. Father seemed to have more or less accepted this reality.

  It wasn’t anyone’s fault. But something had gone wrong at some point. S used to get frustrated about how little I knew about the real world. Maybe this is the real world she was talking about.

  I returned to my test prep dormitory a few days later, but I didn’t resume my studies. When I caught myself compulsively checking my cell phone, I cancelled my service. It had rarely rung since S left me, and the only reason I’d kept it was probably so I could tell Father I was at the dorm if he called me to check. Even when I was out, I’d often hurry back to the dorm just so that I could give him that answer. The idea of lying hadn’t even occurred to me.

  The teahouse interior was cozy and quiet. As the February sun fell obliquely across the hardwood floor, the shadows from the blinds etched thin partitions of light across its planks. I was the sole customer. Behind the coffee machine on the counter, two waitresses in green aprons were making occasional small talk in a low whisper. I closed my eyes for a moment. A familiar tune drifted to my ears. It had been a long time since I’d listened to music. No one remembers your name. When you’re strange, when you’re strange, when you’re strange . . . The dreamlike voice repeating these words tickled my ears like the sound of someone calling my name from a distance. Basking in the listless afternoon sun, I ended up dozing off.

  I opened my eyes again at the sound of a small bell that rang whenever the door opened. I caught a glimpse of a tall man wearing a black coat who had just entered. The man was walking slowly toward where I was sitting. His movement seemed natural, as if he was supposed to meet me there, but I had no idea who he was.

  The man was standing over me before I knew it. “You’re K, aren’t you?”

  I nodded, signaling that I was indeed K. “Thanks,” the man said and sat down across from me. It was as though he’d asked whether he could sit down and I had nodded yes. I looked blankly at the man as he took out a cigarette from his pocket and lit it silently. After taking a deep drag and exhaling smoke, he began to talk about the person I’d been fifteen years ago.

  “Among the seven boys, K was definitely the model boarder. His fingernails and hair were always neatly trimmed, and not once was he late with the rent. Every semester, of course, he’d be awarded a scholarship.

  “K never got mixed up in drinking sprees or late night rounds of hwatu1 and he never had girls over to spend the night. He did laundry every Sunday so he always had clean underwear and socks in the drawers, and his was the only room in the entire house that didn’t need to be tidied up in a hurry when parents showed up for a surprise visit. Furthermore, he spent most of his time at the boarding house at his desk studying. The housemother always placed the special dishes she prepared right in front of him, but each time, K would move the plate to the center of the table. Anyone could see after taking one look at him that he was a polite and wholesome young man. One with a bright and secure future ahead of him.”

  Until this man showed up, I had barely thought about this period of my life. I couldn’t recall much of it either. But the more the man went on, the more certain I became that I was indeed the K in this story. I’d been living the same unchanged life, and tediously so; the only differences were that the boarding house fifteen years ago was now a test prep dorm. Back then, everyone had believed in me, even the housemother, but eventually my whole family grew sick of me.

  I was startled by the shrill voice of a woman calling to the wait staff from her table by the entrance. This new customer must have come in while I’d been asleep. Why hadn’t the bell rung when she entered? The woman had her hand above her eyes, shielding them from the sun with a furrowed brow. Several obsequious footsteps later the blinds snapped shut, illuminating the partitions of light that had stretched across the floor. The stark shadows cast on the man’s face disappeared, and it became even harder to make out his expression.

  The man leaned toward me and spoke in a secretive voice. I imagined a bank robber just out of prison asking about a former accomplice.

  “I was wondering. Are you still carrying on with your research?”

  I looked at him, perplexed.

  He said with an unmistakably disappointed expression, “You know, the research on how to make yourself lighter?” The man went on. “We all believed that K could pull it off. He wasnt like the rest of us.”

  According to the man, the boarding house had been a two-story Western-style residence with six bedrooms. On the ground floor, there were two double rooms for boarders, in addition to the housemother’s room. One of them was shared by two brothers in medical school who were very close. The other one belonged to a law student who was always complaining and a student majoring in management, who had only one outfit for every season of the year. The three rooms on the second floor were all singles. There was the only child from a wealthy family who was pretty good with the guitar and majoring in English. And there was the handsome engineering student who spent the night out most of the time. Then there was K. With the exception of the older guy taking classes at the medical school, somehow it turned out that all of the boarders had entered university the same year. They taped signs that read “Quiet” or “Please Knock Before Entering” on their identical-looking doors, and K’s room was the second one at the top of the stairs, with a sign that read “DOORS.”

  The boarding house was in a neighborhood built on the side of a hill within the shadow of the mountains. It was always so windy, the boarders called it the “Windy Mountain.” When the boarders spotted lovers outside the window on their way up the Windy Mountain, the boys would whistle and tease them playfully. K didn’t whistle along with them, but he did enjoy looking out the window very much. The boarders often caught sight of K behind his brightly lit window while they were walking home late at night. Looking up the hill through the gusts of wind, the boarders always waved their hands in his direction, but it always took awhile before K’s silhouette responded by calmly raising one hand. “He must have been deep in thought,” the man added, “K knew everything that was going on in the boarding house.”

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the K this man was describing. As for the habit of standing by the window, that hadn’t changed. I still had a tendency to look out the window at night, and much like those days, I always felt something dark blocking my view. But it was only that I’d got tired of staring at books, not because I was searching for ways to make my body lighter than air. Moreover, it wasn’t at all like me to be standing by the window watching for the other boarders coming home, since I’d never really taken an interest in other people’s lives. His story became less and less believable. I began to lose interest.

  “On days when the winds were particularly strong, it would carry what sounded like the cries of wild animals coming from the Windy Mountain. We all thought that K was doing an experiment trying to make himself lighter.”

  The man seemed to be caught in a pleasant memory; the corners of his mouth lifted to form a smile.

  “I remember the day we all took a trip to an island. It was cold that day but fortunately the river hadn’t frozen so we were able to get there by boat. I remember there was a temple at the center of the island . . .”

  He shook his head in disappointment and said he couldn’t remember the name of the temple.

  “That night we thought K would share his research findings with us. Even when the accident happened and the boat capsized, we didn’t think that K would sink. I remember how we dried off in that minbak2 house near the temple. I even remember how we went into the temple’s main hall and lay down in a neat row. We made some wonderful memories, wouldn’t you say?”

  “The boarders must have gotten along well.”

  “Everyone liked K very much.”

  Th
e man nodded a few times and looked straight at me as though it was now my turn to speak.

  “So how’s everything these days, K?”

  I don’t know why, but it occurred me to say that I was getting ready to pile up all those stupid books and set fire to my dorm room. I actually did consider doing it once. Not setting the place on fire, but telling a lie. That day, S hadn’t acted irritable nor had she unleashed her usual tirades on me. She’d seemed calm the entire time, as though she’d given up any remaining hope or interest in getting a rise out of me. “Making the decision was hard, but actually going through with it, not really. What were we thinking, letting this thing drag on for ten years?”

  By the time we got to the bus stop, she was being particularly cynical. “So you’re just going to let me go. I knew you would be like this. You’re never going to change, so it’s completely up to me to decide whether I stay or leave, is that it? Fine, you’re right. Of course you can’t promise me anything. Because when have you ever been wrong? Good-bye.”

  During the bus ride back by myself, I thought carefully about what she’d wanted from me. It occurred to me that she might have wanted me to lie.

  I looked straight into the man’s eyes and answered him plainly.

  “I’ve been abroad all this time. My life’s been too hectic. I’m trying to figure out another way to be.”

  “I see.”

  “I might go live out in the country, where it’s quiet.”

  “Is that right?”

  The man lowered his gaze, as if deep in thought, and was silent for a while. Then he spoke again.

  “Do you remember J, by any chance?”

  Only when the man told me that J was the housemother’s only son did the image of a short middle-schooler come to mind. He’d been a frighteningly quiet boy. The man said he was still in touch with J; that he’d even met up with the kid recently. Though he was all grown up now, J was still only as tall as a middle-schooler, but could definitely hold his own when it came to drinking.