Monkey Hunting (14 page)

“Your brother is watching her,” Lorenzo murmured.

“She’ll die!” Meng whined.

Chen Pan knew that Meng was right. His older brother would most likely forget to replenish the water and seed. Meng sullenly pulled a thread on his sleeve, partly unraveling the cuff. Then he yawned so wide his pink throat was visible.

“When will we get there?”

“By lunchtime,” Lorenzo said. “Now go back to sleep.”

Behind the morning clouds, the sun hesitantly stirred. The Cuban dandy was talking in his sleep. Chen Pan couldn’t make out his mumbling except for the phrase “these damn centipedes,” which he angrily repeated. The Belgians were also asleep. Chen Pan studied their faces and wondered if they’d ever been in love, stayed up whole nights in restless passion.

Before Lucrecia had gotten sick, they’d often made love twice a day—early in the morning before the children woke up and again at night, after they went to bed. Chen Pan would have preferred spending more time romancing his wife’s body, but she hadn’t encouraged his lingering. Sometimes when they’d slowed down enough, he’d felt Lucrecia’s pleasure ringing from her body to his.

Since her death he hadn’t so much as visited a brothel. How could he have betrayed her? Besides, Lorenzo reported that the whorehouses had gotten dangerous in recent years. He spoke of their ruinous effects on his clients: carbuncled testicles, penile lesions, pustules, and malodorous discharges that took an arsenal of ointments to treat. Certainly, Chen Pan had heard enough to keep his own temptations in check.

Still, he fantasized about bedding one last woman— a true tigress, someone who would dance for him in the scantiest of silks, make love to him for hours, collapse with him in happy, erotic exhaustion. But how could he face Lucrecia on the other side after an escapade like that?

For Chen Pan’s seventieth birthday, Benito Sook had sent him a saucy whore recently arrived from Hong Kong. A moth-browed girl, she had flawless skin and a plum-ripe mouth. She looked like that Fire Swan, the trapeze artist from Amoy long ago. But the Hong Kong girl’s eyes were ruined, Chen Pan noticed, raw as two wounds. He shooed her away with a fistful of bills so she would reveal nothing of what hadn’t transpired.

The train approached the Santa Clara station, its paint badly blistered from the sun. Chen Pan had been to the station earlier in the year. It was here that he and Lorenzo had changed trains for the Cienfuegos Line to visit Lorenzo’s patients in Santa Isabel de las Lajas, Cruces, and Cienfuegos. In the opposite direction was Sagua la Grande, with its lively Chinatown. It was Chen Pan’s favorite city after Havana.

In a distant field, Chen Pan spotted a dozen men chained together and marching at gunpoint. They were bareheaded, in rags, without the machetes they would normally be carrying. For what abominations had they been blamed? More to the point, how many of them would be alive by week’s end? Chen Pan wanted to wake up his grandson and tell him something more:
Few things are as certain as hatred, mi
amor.

The Belgian couple woke up to the early morning chaos of the station. Soon the steward came by, offering them a breakfast of sweet rolls and coffee. Meng ate voraciously, smearing his bread with all the butter on his plate. Lorenzo wasn’t hungry. He complained that his back was sore from sleeping all night on the torturous seats. Chen Pan accompanied his grandson to the rest room. They squeezed past the passengers in the corridor, glimpsing others behind the thick partitions of glass. He was astonished at the endless layers of crinoline the criollas wore in the dead heat of summer.

In the toilet, Chen Pan noticed that Meng’s penis was practically the size of a man’s. Chen Pan hoped that the boy would grow into it. Overly large
pingas
were as problematic as too small ones, he’d learned from the seductive Delmira years ago. She’d complained about a certain
guajiro
who’d been built like a lead pipe and had damaged her inside. Later, Delmira had announced with no small satisfaction that the man had died from an equine disease he’d gotten while copulating with a mare.

A new passenger was in their compartment when Chen Pan and his grandson returned. The man introduced himself as Rodolfo Cañizares and said he was on his way to Havana to assume a post with the Ministry of the Interior. His jaw was clean-shaven and strikingly capacious, the size of a small pumpkin. He was talking to the Belgians in a painfully loud Spanish.

“How are things in Paris? Do you still eat snails there?” He pulled some snuff from a leather pouch and offered it all around.

The Belgians stared at him blankly. Chen Pan laughed in spite of his instant distaste for the stranger. His oiled hair and studied manner reminded Chen Pan of his eldest son. Desiderio was a year older than Lorenzo and despised everything Chinese. It grieved Chen Pan that his own son was ashamed of him, of his accent and the Chinese “pajamas” he wore. On Christmas Day, Desiderio sent a creaky
quitrín
to pick him up at the Lucky Find. For one strictly supervised hour, Chen Pan got to visit his other grandchildren.

Chen Pan opened the window and let the wind blow against his face. The Zapata Swamp claimed a shoe-shaped peninsula of saw grass and cow-lily leaves to the south. Lorenzo was convinced that he could find herbs there for his curing potions. It had become impossible for him to obtain ingredients from China. Last summer, he’d contacted two herbal importers in San Francisco, but their products had proved inferior.

The number of Lorenzo’s clients was dwindling. Few Chinese were immigrating to Cuba, preferring instead to go to the United States. Chen Pan knew that most of the old former coolies, like himself, had died or gone back home for good. These days, there were more funerals than births in Chinatown. The younger generations hardly considered themselves Chinese. And they preferred more modern medical methods, too, demanding overnight results even if it ended up killing them.

The land of Matanzas province was unremarkable and flat. Here and there, Chen Pan spotted a cluster of
bohíos
or a dilapidated general store (invariably run by an irascible
gallego
). Only an occasional flushing poinciana enlivened the view. In China, so many people believed that Cuba was a land of lush jungles that Lorenzo said he’d ended up believing it himself. Upon his return, he’d had to reacquaint himself with the island, with its lusterless plains and dull acres of sugarcane. Sometimes Chen Pan forgot that the sea was never more than thirty miles away.

Meng looked quietly out the window. It seemed to Chen Pan that his grandson was happiest in silence, that the very sound of words caused him discomfort. Why, the boy hadn’t uttered a word until he was three. His older brother had spoken for him.
Little
Brother wants more rice.
Or
Meng says there are
thirty-two sparrows in the laurel tree.
What Meng finally said when he’d opened his mouth was: “I want pistachio ice cream with extra chocolate sauce.”

Lorenzo feared that his son was unintelligent, but Chen Pan insisted that this wasn’t true. Little Meng, he said, was a born mathematician, multiplying and dividing long before he attended school. He’d proved adept with Chen Pan’s abacus and frequently helped Lorenzo barter his services. When a patient had no money to pay him, it was Meng who suggested that a tin of kerosene might do instead.

Chen Pan couldn’t get used to his son’s way of doing business. On any given day Lorenzo might receive as payment chickens, guava paste, tallow candles, salt cod, rum, hatchets, hammocks, yams, or a basket of freshly caught crabs. Four years ago, Lorenzo had gotten Jade Peach after eliminating a baseball-size goiter on a shipwright’s neck.

It wasn’t easy being
el médico chino.
Everywhere Lorenzo turned, he saw disease and debility. Chen Pan, too, had learned to detect the sickness in people’s eyes, in the texture of their skin and their faltering movements. On a stroll through the plaza or in a passing donkey cart, he spotted diabetes, hepatitis, cancers, tumors, so many failing hearts.

And, of course, there were the people whom his son’s herbs and ointments couldn’t cure. The notary in Cárdenas who wore a fur coat every day of the summer. Or the blue-eyed laundress who fancied herself the Queen of the Geese and ate grain from a gilded dish. What medicaments did he have for them?

Near Güines, a wedding procession snaked along a dirt road toward a whitewashed church. The horses were bedecked with a profusion of ribbons, and Chen Pan imagined that he could hear the jingling of their harness bells. At the end of the line was the bride’s carriage, entwined with a thousand camellias. Chen Pan’s heart rose an inch, swelling with good wishes for the unseen couple. How young they would probably seem to him, how naïve.

The Cuban dandy awoke with a gargling sound and examined Cañizares sideways, like a bird of prey. He began his morning ablutions, which included anointing every exposed inch of his skin with gardenia oil. Then he excavated a bag of walnuts from his suitcase and began cracking them so loudly it sounded like pistol shots. The noise alarmed the occupants of the neighboring compartments, who began shouting again that the train was under siege.

The downpour came from nowhere. One moment the sky was as blue and enameled as French china and the next, a herd of clouds raced across it, goaded by the wind. The birds flew about in a frenzy, seeking dry places to wait out the rain. A sapodilla tree shivered, lamenting its still-unripe fruit. Tiny bud, kernel of boy awaiting them in Havana! In just a few hours more, Chen Pan thought, the train would arrive and he would meet his new grandson.

Incense

SAIGON 1970

For the first few months of her pregnancy, Tham Thanh Lan ate only bitter foods. Pickled melons. Quail eggs in salted vinegar. Dirt-encrusted roots she collected on the outskirts of town and boiled to make soups. She spread fish sauce on everything, including the Neapolitan ice cream Domingo brought her from the PX. He offered her American treats— peanut butter and saltines, Oreo cookies, hamburger meat. But all these foods nauseated her.

Now Tham Thanh Lan kissed Domingo only if he smeared nuo’c măm on his lips first. To make love, he had to spread the fish sauce everywhere.

Domingo tried to teach Tham Thanh Lan Spanish, another language of the body.
Mi reina. Mi adoración.
Eres mi sueño.
She said that they were having a boy and Domingo didn’t doubt her. He taught her how to say
mi hijo,
my son. But she wasn’t interested in learning new words.

He wanted to show Tham Thanh Lan how to dance, but her hips resisted.

“I’m too tired,” she said, and settled down for another nap.

Domingo went on a shopping spree, bought Tham Thanh Lan things she didn’t need: hair curlers and a waffle iron, lemon cake mix, and a brand-new sewing machine that she sold for a fortune to a tailor who fitted uniforms for the Vietnamese navy. He bought Tham Thanh Lan a radio, but she made him return it.

“No more sound,” she insisted. Even turned down to a crackle, music made her unbearably sad.

Domingo couldn’t get used to the silence, to the monotony of her sleeping. Soon he was hearing music everywhere—in the ping and hiss of the new teapot; in the percussive rumble of his stomach.
Tintintintin
patá patí.
Who was he without a little rhythm?

His Tío Eutemio had told him that during slavery days, drumming had been forbidden altogether. The sugar mill owners hadn’t wanted their “property” getting overly excited and sending messages to slaves on other plantations. In those times, to own a drum, to play a drum, were acts of rebellion punishable by death. And so the drums and the drummers learned to whisper instead.

The day Domingo brought Tham Thanh Lan an electric fan, she told him that he would leave her, ride horses in a place with blazing rocks and no trees, a landscape Domingo had trouble imagining. Then she turned on the fan and lay down in front of the artificial breeze. Behind her, the sticky curtains stirred.

She dreamed of crabs, dead and rotting on river-banks, their casings picked clean by seagulls and sand fleas. Tham Thanh Lan recalled the summer the Mekong River died, how the fishermen’s nets pulled only dead fish from its depths. Sometimes she woke up frightened, thinking a crab had replaced the baby in her womb. “It moved like a crab! It ran sideways!” she cried until Domingo soothed her with fish sauce kisses, placed his hands on her belly, and said, “
Mi
amor,
crabs don’t kick like that.”

His mother had blamed the
yanquis
for every deformed baby she’d delivered in Guantánamo—the infant born with an eye in his umbilicus; the hairdresser’s triplets attached like paper dolls by their hands and feet. The Americans, she said, had dumped poisons into the Río Guaso, contaminating the sugarcane fields, making the coffee trees redden with blight. One Easter Mamá had delivered a Haitian boy whose heart had steamed furiously outside his chest. A moment later, his tiny heart had exploded in her face like a grenade.

Domingo took Tham Thanh Lan for walks in the flame tree garden behind the Buddhist temple. He entertained her with stories about the general he drove around all day. General Arnold F. Bishop had an artificial leg that replaced the one he’d lost in Korea. The leg kept coming loose at inopportune moments. Last week they’d hit a bump on a country road and his leg flew out of the jeep, knocking a startled peasant off his water buffalo.

In March, Domingo was away for ten days driving the general in an armored convoy to inspect the troops in the South. General Bishop was a big Bob Hope fan and looked forward to the Christmas shows every year. He claimed he’d fucked one of those Gold Digger showgirls, a kinky one from Kansas City who’d gotten off sucking the stump of his leg. “Damn, it gives you something to kill for!” General Bishop exclaimed.

Domingo had seen the Christmas show his first winter in Vietnam. The women were skinny and flatassed, no breasts to speak of, their legs all horse-bone and sinew. Plus he didn’t get the jokes. Not a single one. He missed the girls of Guantánamo—their stretch shorts and the tight-fitting military uniforms that showed off every curve. The year he left, they were wearing a Polish perfume that smelled like a mixture of wisteria and gasoline.

What would General Bishop know about any of this? Still, when the general offered Domingo his regular girl in My Tho, he didn’t refuse.

When he returned to Saigon, Tham Thanh Lan had barely eaten or slept. Her dark, swollen eyes accused him. How had she known that he’d slept with another woman?

“You’ll marry me, right?” Tham Thanh Lan demanded each time they made love. Domingo was always weak and grateful then. And always he said yes.

He knew from experience that pregnant women didn’t act normally. He’d seen the butcher’s wife, Leoncia Agudín, a religious woman, assault her husband with sailor-mouthed insults in Parque Martí. His crime: buying a
cucurucho
from the comely peanut vendor. Of course, she was five months’ pregnant at the time. Women who had baby after baby were nicknamed
barrigonas
(there were many
barrigonas
in Guantánamo) and forgiven for a different standard of behavior altogether.

Domingo had grown up around these crazy pregnant women. They’d sat in his mother’s kitchen, splashing rum into their morning coffee, hunched together over the latest scandal, laughing raucously over men, whom they’d ridiculed or lamented with such ferocity that it made Domingo ashamed to be a boy. His mother would see him blushing and say, “Don’t worry,
mi cielo.
This has nothing to do with you.”

The women had played Radio Mil Diez at top volume and danced with each other, colossal belly to belly, or pulled Domingo close and taught him how to cha-cha-chá. “
Así,
little Papi. Don’t grind too much or the nice girls will refuse to dance with you.” In this manner, he’d learned the secrets of women.

Domingo heard of GIs taking their Vietnamese fiancées or wives home after their tour of duty. The army frowned upon this, did everything possible to keep the couples apart, more so if children were involved. A few men had killed themselves for the love of these whores. Everyone said they’d been
gook
hoodooed.
No cure for it except death itself.

Stories drifted back to Vietnam of former bar girls waking up in Georgia, bleaching their hair, wearing blue jeans and cowboy hats, renaming themselves Delilah. Other stories were sadder still. Of underaged girls dressed up like China dolls at their husbands’ insistence, paraded around small towns in Texas or Mississippi, shopping for trinkets at Woolworth’s. Saddest of all were the suicides—the poisonings, the slit wrists. Anything to set their souls free to fly home.

Domingo wondered about these migrations, these cross-cultural lusts. Were people meant to travel such distances? Mix with others so different from themselves? His great-grandfather had left China more than a hundred years ago, penniless and alone. Then he’d fallen in love with a slave girl and created a whole new race—brown children with Chinese eyes who spoke Spanish and a smattering of Abakuá. His first family never saw him again.

Domingo was permitted into the officers’ club because he worked for General Bishop, but he wasn’t welcomed there. His skin was too dark, his features not immediately identifiable as one of them. The bartender refused to make him a
mojito—
rum, club soda, lime juice, a sprig of mint. Domingo got a warm beer instead. In the hospital, wounded and with a couple of medals to his name, he hadn’t been treated right either. The nurses had been as tight with him as one of their overtucked sheets.

The problem wasn’t exclusive to the U.S. Army. Four years ago, he’d been arrested by a policeman in Guantánamo for practicing “negritude”—all because he’d let his hair grow into an Afro.
Por favor.
His mother had taken one look at the precinct captain, whom she’d happened to have delivered, exceedingly jaundiced, thirty-four years earlier, and he’d released Domingo without a word. Now here he was fighting for the Americans nine thousand miles away and mistrusted by them, too.

Another driver, an Indian, also complained about the unfair treatment. Emory Plate said his father had been a famous stargazer back in New Mexico, that he’d known when sickness would claim a child or a ewe would lose her litter, that people had come from everywhere to see him. Emory said he wished that he’d paid more attention when his father had talked about starlight. Now his old man was dead a year and who understood anything about their lives?

In Cuba, Domingo had learned that the white settlers in North America had murdered most of the Indians, that they’d killed off their buffalo, millions of them roaming the Great Plains, that the Indians were partitioned off on reservations, aimless and mad-eyed. Domingo’s teachers had taught him this, teachers who’d spat when they said
yanquis,
teachers who’d made him do the same.

He remembered the time those same teachers had asked everyone in school to pray to God for ice cream. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday they’d prayed. Then on Friday, the teachers had encouraged them: “Now pray to El Comandante and his great humanitarian revolution for ice cream.” A half hour later, the assistant principal arrived carrying two huge buckets of vanilla.

One night over drinks, Domingo told Emory how he felt trapped between obligation and pleasure. How Tham Thanh Lan would threaten him one minute, then go down on him the next. How the force of his need pulled him down. Domingo was on his seventh beer. His eyes were watery, his hands unsteady. Back home, his uncles could polish off quarts of a fermented pineapple brew that unhinged even the most stalwart drinkers. They’d called it
el crocodilo
because when you least expected it, the liquor snapped you in two.

The next day Domingo went to the army library with a lingering hangover. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he longed for a cheap distraction. The first book he checked out was
So
You’re Pregnant!
Domingo learned that human fetuses reached the size of a rosebud by three months, that fat deposits settled under their skin by six. He tried to picture his child’s still-blind eyes, its ear buds and fingers with their little whorled tips. By seven months it’d be covered in vernix caseosa, a cheesy wax that would protect its skin the way grease protected ocean swimmers. Domingo had trouble imagining the baby any bigger than this.

That night, as he studied Tham Thanh Lan’s enlarged body, Domingo grew frightened. How could he become a father? He hadn’t been able to protect his own father, much less finish being a son. Tham Thanh Lan was in the kitchen boiling water for tea. She sat at the table, lost in thought, stirring her tea until it got cold. Now and then, she looked over at Domingo and smiled.

Coño,
what did he really know about this woman?

If only everything could stop, remain fixed and knowable for an hour. Instead everything raced forward, unrelentingly, like a river, never settled or certain. Sometimes the same Vietnamese phrase stomped inside Domingo’s head: Chêt rôì. Dead already. A hook in his mouth like one of his river fish. Maybe what he needed was a rip cord out of his whole damn life.

Domingo started checking out other books from the library—cowboy stories, a volume on tropical diseases, a history of the American Civil War—the more remote from his life, the better. He turned down poker games, stopped throwing dice, put his money away in an army savings account. At the Vietnamese water-points, where the other drivers went for a quick wash-and-service and two-dollar lays in the refreshment shed, Domingo kept reading.

He read
A Child’s Book of Saints
nine times. Domingo admired the way Saint John had refused King Wenceslaus when he’d demanded to hear his wife’s confession. Prison, torture, Saint John kept his mouth shut.

At times he wondered what the men from his first platoon were doing back home in Brooklyn and Omaha, St. Louis and Tuscaloosa. Was Lester Gentry still running numbers for his father? Had Joey Szczurak gone back to college, or was he shooting heroin instead? Were they watching the war on the evening news now like everyone else? What did it matter, anyway? They’d all die sooner or later, slowly or mercifully, emptied of light.

On the last day of August, Domingo showed up at Tham Thanh Lan’s apartment with a ten-dollar box of chocolates. He didn’t find her there. It was hot and humid, and the mosquitoes were pitiless. After a while, Domingo ate the chocolates, but he had difficulty swallowing them. His throat felt stripped and raw. He feared that he was forgetting something important, something that could change everything. His ears ached from listening so hard to nothing.

There was an orange on the kitchen table. He sat down and peeled it with his pocketknife. The thick rind scented his fingers. He remembered that his father had told him that in 1857, the year Chen Pan had arrived in Cuba, the price for a Chinese coolie was 150 pesos. One hundred fifty pesos for eight years of a man’s life—that is, if the
chino
lasted that long. In twice that time, Domingo figured, his own son would be grown.

His legs grew numb from sitting. He stood up and jumped in place, felt a prickly sensation return to his feet. He began pacing the apartment. Suddenly everything seemed small to him, cramped like a little cage—the toy bed and coverlet, the kitchen table no bigger than a drum. Domingo felt huge in contrast, a giant, especially his hands.