Monkey Hunting (4 page)

The women took more notice of Chen Pan after he’d killed El Bigote. A skinny slave named Rita started coming around to his end of the
barracón.
Her skin was smooth and mauve-looking, her legs stick-straight. When she walked toward him, her narrow hips shifting rhythmically, Chen Pan felt his whole body grow taut with ardor. Rita confessed to Chen Pan that he tempted her curiosity.

“Chinito lindo, chinito lindo,”
she chimed, running her fingers down his arms.

The other men hooted and teased Chen Pan. He began dreaming of Rita, of her voice sifting through his loosened hair, of her lips hungrily parting to receive his kiss. In the mornings, he awoke with Rita simmering under his skin.

Chen Pan thought of his wife waiting for him on their wheat farm, her thin hair tied in a topknot. She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d cooked for him, mended his clothes, lain with him when he’d asked her to, even in the high heat of noon. Chen Pan hadn’t loved her. He knew this now. When they’d separated beneath the willow tree wreathed with a rotten vine, he’d felt nothing.

A few days later, Chen Pan presented Rita with a pocket mirror he’d bought from the criollo trader. “Now you will have to admit how beautiful you are and forgive me the passion I feel for you.” Chen Pan had practiced saying this to himself in his halting Spanish. Rita angled the mirror to catch the sunlight and examined herself full in the face. She seemed pleased by her reflection.

“Do you love me?” Rita asked in her singsong voice.

“Sí,” Chen Pan said, lowering his head.

The same day, Chen Pan noticed the master eyeing Rita. Don Urbano lingered by her patch of sugarcane. He had her machete specially sharpened and sent an indoor slave to serve her fresh mamey juice in the shade. After dinner he ordered Rita’s steady lover, Narciso, to be switched to the night shift at the mill. Then the master summoned Rita to his bed.

When Narciso returned from work the next morning, the
mayoral,
without a word of warning, shot him dead. Nobody was allowed to bury him. Instead he was fed to the bloodhounds before the entire
barracón
, piece by bloody piece. Poor Mandingo spirit, the slaves chanted, lost and forever wandering. How the old hags clucked:
Gallina negra va pone’ huevo
blanco.
Black hen gonna lay a white egg.

As Rita’s belly swelled, the rest of her grew leaner, as if by a transference of flesh. She forgot Chen Pan and her friends in the
barracón,
forgot her own name and the gift of the little mirror, forgot that she was a slave. Every night Chen Pan knelt by her hammock, whispering in her ear. He told her the story of the herd boy and the weaving maid, who were turned into stars by the girl’s celestial mother and placed on opposite sides of the Milky Way. Only one night a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, could they meet.

The other Chinese said Chen Pan was crazy, in love with a dead girl. The Africans also believed this, but they were too tender-mouthed to say it aloud.

It became clear to the new overseer that Rita was of no more use in the fields. Within a few weeks, she was sold to a coffee plantation in the mountains of Oriente. Everyone said that to pick coffee in the rain would finish off a slave in half the time of sugarcane. La Gorda, the Bantu witch, threw her divining cowries and predicted that Rita would not work in the fields again:
She will die upon reaching her destination,choking the boy-ghost in her womb.

After the cane was cut and ground, the days were taken with lesser tasks—repairing tools, weeding the dormant fields, reseeding them in the intervals between the rains. A few Chinese adopted Spanish names, cut off their queues, adapted their palates to the local food. They took the names of wealthy Cubans, hoping for their same prosperity. Yü Minghsing became Estéban Sariñana. Li Chao-ch’un renamed himself Perfecto Díaz and slicked his hair back with perfumed grease. Thickheaded Kuo Chan insisted on being called Juan-Juan Capote.

“Why Juan-Juan?” Chen Pan asked him.

“Twice as much luck,” he replied.

Kuo Chan learned to dance as well as the Africans, learned to move his hips to the drums. He forgot he was a
chino
at all.

Chen Pan’s grief over Rita made him lucky in gambling. His opponents said that Chen Pan won time and again because he didn’t care if he lost. Distraction, they said, was what he sought. The Chinese and Africans played their games heatedly—
botón,
fanfän, chiffa.
Chen Pan was lucky but not greedy. He stopped playing after winning five or six pesos. No use winning more and losing all, he decided. Dead men—yellow, black, or white—had no friends.

On New Year’s Day, twelve Chinese escaped La Amada plantation. Chen Pan was angry that he hadn’t been included in their plans until all but one of the men were hunted down and stock-shackled for ten days. As a warning, Chen Pan and the other
chinos
were forced to watch as the fugitives had fingers chopped off from their weaker hands. Then they were thrown back into the fields to cut more sugarcane.

For months afterward, all anyone talked about was the
chino
who got away: Tiao Mu, the fisherman from F——. It was said that Tiao Mu had jumped into the river with the bloodhounds upon him and disappeared. Vanishing Smoke, everyone called him. The first Chinese
cimarrón.

The Africans claimed that Ochún had protected Tiao Mu, that the river goddess had turned him to mist before sweeping him off to the safety of her sister, Yemayá, who ruled the blue seas. Tiao Mu, they said, must offer Ochún honey and gold for the rest of his days to stay well protected. Would he know, the slaves debated, what to do?

Nobody ever heard from Tiao Mu again, but no one doubted that he was alive and free. Everyone on the plantation thought more highly of the Chinese on account of Tiao Mu. After he escaped,
los chinos
were treated with more respect.

In May, Chen Pan slipped away from the other slaves during a march to weed a distant field. He held his breath and sank to his knees in the tall grasses. The crickets screeched his fear, but nobody noticed that he was missing. Crows squawked and taunted from a nearby ceiba tree. Chen Pan remembered what Cabeza had told him: the tree was their mother; her sap, blood; her touch, a tender caress.

There were mounds of dirt beneath the ceiba, talismans buried amid the roots. Chen Pan crawled to the tree and rubbed its sacred earth on his face and throat, on his temples to clear his thinking. It was moist and acrid and cooled him, steadied his jumping blood. Immense sulfur-colored butterflies hovered in the tree’s lowest branches. A contrary wind stirred its leaves.

Chen Pan stood up and walked away. Too easy, he suspected. How could elation eclipse despair in one fell swoop? In the woods, every rustle and hiss frayed his nerves. How had this happened? He’d come to Cuba to seek his fortune and now he would end up peeling bark for his supper. But what time was there for lamenting? To survive, Chen Pan decided, he would first need to steal a knife.

By midnight, alone in the forest, Chen Pan sat high in another ceiba tree, willing himself invisible. Bloodhounds barked madly in the distance, searching for him, devil ghosts in their throats. The wind carried their news like ten thousand swollen tongues. The Africans had spoken of the restless demons that roamed the island’s woods, disguised in animal furs. High in the ceiba tree, his guts grinding, Chen Pan prepared for the worst.

There was no moon that first night and for many nights afterward, only the mimicking birds, scattering spirits, the trogons hiccuping in the canopy of trees. The owls were the worst, shrieking at him in Chinese. One owl—tattered and brown and without markings—followed him for nine months.

“Unfilial son!” it scolded again and again.

Chen Pan concluded that his mother had died and her ghost had come to haunt him—for running away from China, for not sending her money or producing a grandson. He tried to explain to her why he’d left Amoy, that he’d planned to return to their village and make them all rich. But she wouldn’t listen.

He stole eggs from a tenant farmer to appease his mother’s spirit. He offered her tender meat he’d smoked over a fire—an unborn
almiquí
he’d torn from its mother’s slit belly, the bones delicate as flower stems. He made her a wreath from palm fronds and jungle orchids, more beautiful than any in China, gave her wild pineapples and pomegranates oozing a ruby juice.

“Eat,” Chen Pan begged her. “These are better than our peaches, juicier than the Emperor’s plums.”

“Unfilial son!” she screeched back.

He brewed teas from sweet leaves to ease her misery, prepared a bed of guinea grass and reeds by a clear stream for her to rest, roasted doves with wild taro and honey he’d scooped from hidden hives. When it rained so hard the forest seemed a swamp and it was impossible to start a fire, Chen Pan built his mother a shelter of lopped branches and palm-tree leaves and bound it with
majagua,
a natural twine.

“Unfilial son!”

Mostly, Chen Pan walked and walked until his feet bled, following streams and the slow rotation of stars. He grew tired, careless, twisted his ankle in a clump of vines. When his mouth got infected, he packed moss on his gums to keep them pink. He lost one tooth anyway, a molar so black and angry with pain that he had to yank it out with a liana vine.

His own shadow grew unfamiliar to him, thin and strangely angled. He suspected that his great-aunt had died, too. Now only his wife and his brother were left on the farm. In China it was said that owl chicks ate their mothers as soon as they were big enough to fly. Perhaps he could hunt this tormenting bird, cook it, devour it once and for all. How else to get rid of it? At the thought, Chen Pan began to tremble.

That night the owl’s maternal scourge stopped without warning. The forest turned cemetery-quiet. Moonlight unsettled the trees. Birds flew overhead soundlessly. This was much worse than his mother’s scoldings, Chen Pan thought. At dawn he slept a little, dreamed of lotuses and speeding geese.

Chen Pan trudged through the woods, his heart knocking hollow-loud. His footsteps echoed in the leaves before they fell, shivering, from the trees. He ate only wild guavas. Shit a pink stream. His skin turned as red-brown as the island earth. Chen Pan saw smoke rising from behind a cluster of palm trees. He heard the sound of coughing. Were there other
cimarrones
in the forest, hiding like him? Should he turn himself in? Go back to cutting sugarcane? Of what use was his freedom now?

He remembered something his father had told him.
It is in death alone that we return home.
So Chen Pan arranged a bed of cobwebs and silvery leaves on the bat guano that cushioned the floor of a limestone cave, smeared pollen on his face and hands. He would die there, leave his bones to crumble. He would die there in that nowhere cave, and then his ghost would fly home to China.

The next morning Chen Pan awoke feeling rested. The air was damp and the sky clear. Above him, lumbering high along a branch of a cedar tree, was a fat
jutía.
If he succeeded in killing it, Chen Pan decided, he would remain in Cuba. He picked up a speckled stone and threw it with all his strength. The rodent seemed to hover in midair before collapsing to the ground. It would make an excellent breakfast.

North

NEW YORK CITY (1968)

Domingo Chen was startled again by the fat D floating egg of the moon. Nobody at work mentioned how it stayed elliptically full all summer, not even Félix Puleo, who kept an extra mattress on the rooftop of his building for his secondary girls and had, one might say, a fine view of heaven. So how could the moon stay full all summer long and nobody notice?

There’d been nothing in the news about celestial aberrations. Domingo would’ve heard about it because there was always a radio pumping, around the clock. At the Havana Dragon, the music rumba-plenamerengued all night, ricocheted off the moon and bounced back to fry cutlets. And when the music wasn’t playing, the bad news was blaring—subway decapitations and hijackings to Cuba and all the tragic static of Vietnam.

Domingo stuck his head out of the kitchen’s back door for relief from the steaming dishes. Tonight Venus was in her usual yellow nest, and Mars still reigned as god of war. Even with the freakish moon and the miserable ration of stars, the view of the sky comforted him. His mother used to compare the planets to the
santos.
Venus was Ochún. Mars was Changó. And Saturn with all its rings of knowledge was the serene Obatalá.

It hadn’t been easy since he and his father had left Cuba last winter. Those first November weeks, Domingo could’ve sworn that someone had put the sun in cold storage, that the wind was blowing inside him—he’d never been so frozen in his life. And his father had gotten thin enough to seem to be vanishing altogether. Then both of them had come down with the flu and didn’t leave their apartment for days. They’d spent Christmas Eve collapsed on their salvaged-from-the-street sofa, wrapped in towels, a searing ache in their bones.

But now it was summer, and New York was far more hospitable. Domingo loved roaming the city on his days off—along its slate-colored rivers, beneath its granite towers, down its neon-loud avenues— watching the women. Manhattan was a glorious
jardín de mujeres.
Brown girls. Pink girls. White and yellow girls in every soft-fleshed shape and size. When the sun was out, they were everywhere in their skimpy dresses (some made of
disposable
paper!). They wore white vinyl go-go boots and armfuls of plastic bangles and frosted lipstick that reminded him of the coconut ice cream cones he’d loved in Guantánamo.

Domingo rated the fountain at Lincoln Center as his top lookout. At lunchtime, he’d settle there with a hot dog and a potato knish (just like a square croquette, he thought) and follow the high-ribbed ballerinas hurrying across the plaza. In his own neighborhood, there were dozens of women to consider. The unkempt Barnard girls with their nice teeth and unfettered breasts. The big-bottomed waitress on 108th Street who let the college boys feel her up for the price of a Sprite. The Puerto Rican
mamitas
on Amsterdam Avenue.

The dishwasher broke down in the middle of the dinner rush, and so Domingo had to wash everything by hand. He couldn’t work fast enough to please the waiters, irascible old Chinese men like his father who’d left Cuba after the Revolution.
“¡Mas platos!
¡Mas cubiertos!”
Domingo scraped and rinsed plate after plate of house specials—breaded steak with onions, fried rice, and
tostones—
until his stomach flip-flopped with disgust.

After work, he headed downtown to see Ray Barretto’s late show at the Village Gate. Domingo knew it drove his father crazy that he spent all his money on concerts and clothes. But what was he supposed to do? Save for his retirement? Of course, he’d bought one of those cool knit shirts everyone was wearing and blue-tinted sunglasses to match. When he’d put it together to show his father, Papi had just stared back at him from his chopping block.

“But Papi, it’s El Watusi Man!” Domingo had whined. How could anyone put a price on that? But his father kept chop-chopping his cabbage in silence. Papi was preparing stir-fried cabbage with dried shrimp. He’d soaked the shrimp in boiling water before dropping them into the smoking wok. They popped and sizzled when they hit the oil, filling the apartment with a sharp ocean scent.

The nightclub was jammed, but Domingo talked himself into a seat up front, next to a washed-out little nurse with a mole on her cheek. El Watusi Man was hitting the skins like a dialect freaked by thunder. Smoke-sounding
rumbero. De otro mundo.
Domingo felt the
timba
as if the Man were playing his own bones.
Ashé olu batá.
He closed his eyes and let loose, felt the groove, a deep reverie, the pulse of his own peculiar birth.

“Hey, where you from?” the nurse asked him when the music finally stopped.

Domingo wanted to answer her, to say that his blood was a mix of this and that. So how was he supposed to choose who he wanted to be?

“Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.”

Then Domingo followed the little nurse to her apartment in Chinatown and made love to her on her dead mother’s bed (doilies scattered everywhere like desiccated snowflakes). The nurse told him that she usually dated only white men but she’d make an exception in his case. Domingo knew then that he couldn’t love the little nurse, but he still felt tenderly toward her.

It was dark when Domingo left the nurse’s apartment. A faint drizzle coated the last rim of night. Already, Chinatown was coming to life with vendors and bargaining customers. The fog from the river seemed to remold everything. A mist-veiled widow became a scurrying bride. A dangling row of red-roasted chickens saluted each passerby. And everywhere he went, frantic little dogs barked messages from the dead.

On Mott Street, garbage lined the streets like wildflowers. A crack in the sidewalk mimicked the curve of a maple branch. The Wall Street skyscrapers loomed arrogantly to the south. At a cutlery shop, dozens of knives were on display: pocketknives encased in red enamel, serrated ones for cutting bread, carving knives and meat cleavers and in the back row, six subtly carved daggers inlaid with bone.

In front of a seafood shop, a broom-thin woman was objecting to the inhumane treatment of amphibians. Turtles chopped and decarapaced alive. Pitiable frogs in overcrowded tanks. The protester shouted, stirring the fog with her placard. Behind her, long rows of lobsters lay dully on mounds of crushed ice, their claws held shut by rubber bands.

Around the corner Domingo found a cafeteria that served dumplings for breakfast. The waiter said that he could read the future in the pinch and tuck of the dumplings’ folds, lucky numbers for that week’s lottery. “Just fifty cents extra,” he said. But Domingo politely declined.

The hot tea burned through him. He lowered his face over the steaming cup, then watched as vaporous bits of his features beaded on the low-slung ceiling. He poured sugar directly into the pot. It dissolved easily. To work the sugarcane fields, his father had told him, was to go wooing mournful ghosts. The chain gangs of runaway souls, ankles ulcerated and iron-eaten and wrapped in rags. Or the luckier suicide ghosts who’d killed themselves dressed in their Sunday best.

Domingo poked the shrimp dumplings with his chopsticks. There were no obvious messages for him, at least none that he could see. The dumplings were hot and juicy with just enough scallions.

Outside the cafeteria, everything seemed to be falling, washed away by the morning rain. Domingo tasted the salt in the air, the pyramids of ginger and stacks of watercress, the seared flesh of the ducks in their rotisseries. He recalled how after every rainstorm, snails had appeared like jewels in their garden in Guantánamo, snails in iridescent colors and rainbow stripes. They were so beautiful they should have been toxic, but in fact they were quite delicious. He and his father had collected the snails, gently tugging them off leaves or the trunks of palm trees. Stir-fried snails with sugar peas was one of Papi’s specialties.

It was only seven o’clock, but dozens of people streamed past Domingo. He made his way to the subway station on Canal Street. A blind man was climbing the steps and counting—eighteen, nineteen, twenty—as Domingo descended. A gust of warm air swept up from the station. The platform was noisy with Chinese schoolchildren in starched blue smocks. They were on their way to the zoo, Domingo overheard one of them say.

Before the Revolution, his father had taken him to the traveling circus in Santiago de Cuba to see the foreign curiosities: the American monster horse, the incredible Gorilla Boy, the Erudite Pig from London. The pig, Domingo remembered, had held a dictionary between its hooves while solemnly nodding its head.

The light from a bare bulb was terribly bright. Domingo felt a pain in his eyes, like the times he’d stared too long at the sun as a child. He heard the electricity ticking in the thick wires of the station, doing its invisible math. Sparks flew from the wheels of the train on the opposite tracks. Then his own train pulled in.

A half hour later, Domingo got off at 110th Street and walked to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. There were scaffolds everywhere. Men in overalls were repairing the ceiling and the Gothic turrets. Domingo dipped three fingers in the marble basin of holy water and crossed himself twice. It was confusing inside, the light distorted by the vast expanses of stained glass.

Near the front of the cathedral, to the right of the altar, was an alcove for the Virgin Mary. Long-stemmed roses were wilting on a bed of ferns at her feet. Domingo sat in the third pew and brought his hands together. He wanted to pray, but he wasn’t sure what to ask. Mamá had told him once that the Virgin was partial to ascetics, outcasts, and forgotten men but that she would take on lesser cases if pressed.

Domingo stared at the Virgin and wondered whether she ever longed to join the everyday fray of the ordinary. Were transcendent beings even capable of envy? Maybe on earth she would go bad—hold up convenience stores, steal packets of sugar-powdered doughnuts for the road. Or gang up with her sisters and form a posse of murderous virgins from Guadalupe, Lourdes, Regla (La Virgen de Regla was certainly a looker in black and blue). ¿Y por qué
no?
Domingo imagined them in leather jackets and wraparound shades, boots to there, crows on their shoulders instead of the Holy Ghost.

He lowered his head guiltily, half expecting to see a cadre of outraged saints marching over to show him the door. Then he stole another glance at the Virgin. He noticed her left foot crushing the head of a hideous snake, presumably Satan. Her toes were plump and painted red. He wanted to suck them.

Domingo thought of the time his older stepsister had fondled him on a visit to Guantánamo. Mariana Quiñones still played the harp for the Municipal Orchestra of Oriente. With her plink-plinky voice and her calloused fingertips, she’d expertly coaxed Domingo’s
pinguita
from his short pants. He was only eight, but he’d sworn to Mariana that he knew how to keep a secret.

Domingo’s building was only a few blocks away. He climbed the four flights to his and his father’s apartment. The walls of the stairwell were painted a dirty internal pink. There was a stench of meat in the hallway. No doubt that vet down the hall was pan-frying his weekly supply of beef. The vet said he’d eaten nothing but hamburgers since he’d returned from Vietnam, 100 percent USDA.

There were other vets in the neighborhood. Thin howls of men who spooked anyone who looked their way. Críspulo “Crispy” Morán came back from Danang missing both legs and a chunk of his skull that he tried to hide with an old bebop hat. Domingo wondered whether Crispy still had his balls, but he didn’t have the nerve to ask him. Crispy liked to shoot pigeons in Morningside Park, then stuff them with his
mami
’s yellow rice. Sometimes he snorted cocaine off the edge of his wheelchair until his brains were fried and all he could say was,
The sky there is fuckin’
bigger than here.

Papi had left early for his job at the ice factory in the Bronx. He would be angry with Domingo for making him worry. But Domingo was tired of having to take care of his father. Papi refused to buy groceries or wash his clothes, and he needed constant reminding to take his pills.

Domingo showered with the almond soap Mamá had given him before he’d left Cuba. The hot steam concentrated its scent. He remembered the boleros she’d listened to while delivering babies, the rum she’d drunk in the same green tumbler night after night. In the mornings, Mamá would be in a sour mood and she would reach for a shoe or the stout black umbrella to teach Domingo a lesson. He’d never understood for what.

Domingo changed into his uniform for his early shift at the Havana Dragon. He liked how his name was embroidered on his shirt in red script, clean and raised as a fresh scrape (just another affectation, Papi had sniffed). Domingo combed his hair straight back, no part, and clipped his fingernails. Then he wrote his father a note and left it on the kitchen table. He double-locked the front door and raced down the stairs, taking care not to touch the grimy, swaying banister. He was ten minutes late for work.

His boss was waiting for him at the restaurant. Guiomar Liu had been in New York for thirty years, but Domingo, after nine months, spoke better English. Domingo took ESL classes at a public high school twice a week. He was particularly fond of English verbs, the way they lined up regularly as sheep. His teacher, Miss Gilbert, said Domingo gave English an unusual cadence. He’d add a brush of the guiro here, the
pa-pa-pá
of the bongos there, the happy clatter of timbales.

Languages you acquired, Domingo decided, didn’t have the same memory-packed punch as the mother tongue. But did you have to dissolve one language to accommodate another? Back home, Domingo had wanted to study marine biology. He’d known the names and habits of every fish and mollusk, crustacean and sponge for miles around. Of what use was any of it here?

Last month, Liu had begun opening the Havana Dragon for breakfast. He’d plastered the windows with hand-lettered signs: two eggs with ham and coffee, ninety-nine cents; a Spanish omelet with roasted peppers, a dollar more; pancakes and bacon with a free glass of buttermilk. But business remained slow. When Domingo was a boy, he’d chosen foods more for their texture than their taste. Slippery foods were the best: avocados, tomatoes, spaghetti with butter. Maybe one day he would open his own place and serve nothing but oysters.