Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (51 page)

I lifted her up until she was nearly out of the water. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “We pigs are born swimmers. The key is not to panic. I’ve decided to stay off the roads and travel by water. That way we won’t leave a trail for those disgusting humans. Can you hold out?”

“Yes . . .” She was gasping slightly.

“Good. Here, why don’t you climb onto my back?” She refused, preferring to tough it out. So I dove underwater, and when I floated up to the surface I had her perched on my back. “Hold tight,” I said. “Don’t let go no matter what.”

With Little Flower on my back, I floated down the canal past the Apricot Garden Pig Farm and on to the grand canal, heading east amid billowing waves. A fiery sunset put on a beautiful show in the western sky with mutating cloud formations — a green dragon, a white tiger, a lion, a wild dog — with rays of sunlight filling the gaps between clouds and lighting up the surface of the water.

Waves chased us; we chased waves; waves chased one another. Great canal, where did you get such power? You carry with you mud, corn, sorghum, potato vines, even uprooted trees, on your eastward journey You also deposit dead pigs in your tree-lined shallows, where they swell up, rot, and give off foul odors. When I saw them I was more convinced than ever that by drifting downstream with Little Flower I’d transcended the life of pigs, transcended the Red Death, even transcended the now-ended Mao Zedong era.

I know that in his “Tales of Pig-Raising,” Mo Yan had this to say about the pig carcasses that had been thrown into the river: “A thousand dead pigs from the Apricot Garden Pig Farm formed a corps of floating dead. Their carcasses swelled up, began to rot, exploded, were eaten by maggots, were torn apart by fish, all the while drifting downstream until they disappeared into the roiling waters of the Eastern Sea, where what was left of them was swallowed up, dismembered, and turned into all sorts of materials to join the transforming cycle of material objects.” I’m not going to say the guy can’t write, only that he missed a wonderful opportunity, for if he’d seen me, Pig Sixteen, with Little Flower on my back, riding waves in the golden waters of the river, instead of writing about death, he’d have praised life, praised us, praised me! I am the power of life, I am passion, freedom, and love, the most beautiful spectacle the world has to offer.

We drifted with the flow toward that moon of the lunar eighth month, sixteenth day, a much different moon than the one under which you were married. The moon that night had fallen from the sky, but this night it rose out of the river, just as big and round as the other one, red at first, like an innocent child sent to earth from some hidden spot in the universe, bawling and bleeding and turning the water red. Your moon, sweet and melancholic, came down for your wedding. My moon, solemn and bleak, rose up for Mao Zedong. We saw him sitting on the moon — his bulk pressing down and altering its shape into an oval. He wore a red flag like a cape, held a cigarette in his fingers, and raised his heavy head slightly. A pensive look was frozen on his face.

With Little Flower on my back, I drifted eastward, chasing the moon and chasing Mao Zedong. We wanted to get closer to the moon so we could see Mao Zedong’s face with even greater clarity. But the moon moved with us, the distance remaining constant no matter how hard I paddled, even as I moved through the water like a torpedo. Little Flower dug her hooves into my ribs and shouted “Faster! Faster!” as if I were her horse.

Where Northeast Gaomi Township and Pingdu County met, a sandbar called the Wu Family Sandy Mouth divided the river, sending one stream northeast, the other southeast; the two streams merging again near Two County Hamlet. Now picture this scene. A fast-moving river suddenly divides into two, and at this juncture, schools of red carp, white eels, black-capped soft-shelled turtles, fly up to the moon, an expression of romanticism; but before they reach their goal, the pull of gravity brings them back in a bright and lovely, but ultimately tragic arc, for when most of them land on the surface of the water, scales fly, fins snap off, and gills shatter, turning the returned water creatures into meals for waiting foxes and wild boars. A small number manage to return to the safety of the water by virtue of their strength or by pure luck, and continue swimming to the southeast or the northeast.

Now, given my body weight and the fact that I was carrying Little Flower on my back, although I too went skyward at that juncture, I started falling back before I was ten feet out of the water, and it was only the springy nature of the scrub brush that kept either of us from injury. We were, of course, too large for the foxes to consider eating; and to the wild boars, with their well-developed front halves and tapered rear ends, we had to be considered relatives; they would never eat their own kin. We landed safely on the sandbar.

Food came easily to those foxes and wild boars, good, nutritious food, and they were all much rounder than they should have been. All foxes eat fish, that’s a rule of nature. But when we saw a dozen or so wild boars dining on fish, we could hardly believe our eyes. They’d grown so picky, their mouths so pampered, that they ate only the brains and the roe; the fat, rich meat held no attraction for them.

Astounded to find us there, the wild boars slowly gathered round, mean looks in their eyes, moonlight glinting off their terrifying white fangs. Little Flower wrapped her legs around me even tighter, and I could feel that she was quaking. I started backing up, backing up, not giving these brutes the chance to fan out and surround us. I counted them, there were nine altogether, male and female, all weighing at least two hundred
jin.
They had long, hard, stupid-looking snouts, pointed wolflike ears, and spiky bristles; their oily black skin showed how well-fed they all were, and the smell they emitted spoke to their raw, wild power. At the time I weighed five hundred
jin
and was as big as a rowboat. Having come from and through the human, donkey, and ox realms, I was both smart and strong, and none of them would have been a match for me, one-on-one. But in a fight with nine at the same time, I stood no chance. All I could think at the moment was back up, keep backing up, all the way to the water’s edge, where I could let Little Flower swim safely away. Then I’d turn and fight with all the wit and courage I possessed. After dining on an exclusive diet of fish brains and roe, these animals’ intelligence was nearly on a par with foxes, so they were probably not going to be fooled by my strategy. I spotted two of the boars move around behind me so they could surround me before I reached the water. I realized that retreat was a dead-end street, that it was time to go on the offensive, to feint to the east and attack to the west in order to break through the encirclement and flee to the expansive center of the river sandbar. I needed to adapt Mao Zedong’s guerrilla tactic of forcing changes in their formation and attack their weaknesses. I signaled Little Flower to let her know what I was planning.

“My king,” she said softly, “go on, don’t worry about me.” “I can’t do that,” I said. “We’re in this together, like brother and sister. Where I am is where you’ll be.”

I charged the male that was launching a frontal attack. He wobbled and started to back up, but I abruptly changed directly and headed toward a nearby female. When our heads hit, it sounded like the crash of broken pottery, and I was treated to the view of her body tumbling backward at least ten feet. Now the circle had been rent, but I could hear the snorts from their noses behind me. With a swinish yell, I ran like the wind toward the southeast. But when I realized that Little Flower was not behind me, I put on the brakes and spun around to wait for her to catch up. But poor Little Flower, dear Little Flower, the only one willing to escape with me, loyal Little Flower, had been bitten on the rump by a savage male wild boar; her screams of pain and terror blanched the moon. “Let her go!” I roared as I charged the offending boar.

“My king,” she yelled, “go on, don’t worry about me.”

You’ve listened to me this far, and I’d be surprised if you weren’t deeply moved or if you didn’t see our actions — pigs or not — as noble. Well, that boar held on and continued his savage attack. Her cries nearly drove me crazy. Nearly? Hell, I
was
crazy. But a pair of males ran up and blocked my way, keeping me from rescuing Little Flower. Abandoning all battle strategies and tactics, I charged one of them, who didn’t get out of the way fast enough to avoid getting bitten in the neck. I felt my teeth bite through his thick skin and sink all the way down to bone. He rolled over and got away, leaving me with a mouth filled with rank-tasting blood and spiky bristles. Meanwhile, the second boar ran up and bit my hind leg. I kicked out like a mule — a trick I’d learned as a donkey — and connected on his cheek. Then I spun around and went at him. He ran off screeching. My leg hurt like crazy; it was gushing blood, but I had no time to worry about that, with Little Flower being ravaged by that other bastard. I jumped up with a loud war whoop and charged. When I hit the bastard I felt his innards rip and tear, and he was dead before he hit the ground. Little Flower was still alive, but barely. As I picked her up, her innards tumbled out of the wound in her belly I didn’t know what to do about all that steamy, slippery, foul-smelling stuff. I was helpless, helpless and heartbroken.

“Little Flower, my darling Little Flower, I failed you . . .”

She struggled to open her eyes. A blue and white, and very bleak, gaze emerged.

“My king,” she managed to say as saliva and blood seeped from her mouth, “would it be all right... if I call you Big Brother instead?”

“Yes, of course,” I replied through my tears. “My little sister, the closest person in the world to me . . .”

“I’m so lucky . . . Big Brother ... so very lucky . . .” She stopped breathing and her legs stiffened, like four little clubs.

“Little Sister!” I was weeping as I stood up and walked straight toward the remaining boars, determined to fight them to the death — my death.

They formed up and, fearful but disciplined, began backing off. When I charged, they spread out to surround me. Abandoning tactics altogether, I butted here, bit there, and fought like a mad pig, wounding them all and getting my share of wounds in the process. When the shifting battle lines brought us to the middle of the river sandbar, to the edge of a row of abandoned military structures, with roof tiles and crumbling walls, I saw a familiar figure seated beside a stone feeding trough half buried in mud.

“Old Diao, is that you?” I shouted in amazement.

“I knew you’d come one day, my brother,” Diao Xiaosan said before turning to the approaching wild boars. “I cannot be your king. This is your true king!”

After a momentary hesitation, they fell to their knees and, with their snouts in the dirt, announced in unison:

“Long live the great king!”

I was about to say something, but with this latest development, what could I say? So, in a state of utter bewilderment, I became king of the sandbar wild boars and received their fealty. As for the human king, the one sitting on the moon, he had already flown off millions of miles from earth, and the gargantuan moon had shrunk down to the size of a silver platter, so small and far away that I could no longer have seen the human king, even with a high-powered telescope.

“Time flies.” Before I knew it, I was entering my fifth year as king of the boars on this desolate and virtually uninhabited sandbar.

At first, I’d planned to implement a system of monogamous relationships, as practiced in civilized human society, and had assumed that this reform measure would be greeted with cheers of approval. Imagine my surprise when, instead, it was met with strong opposition, not only by the females but also by the males, who grumbled their dissatisfaction, even though they would have been the primary beneficiaries. Not knowing how to resolve the issue, I took my problem to Diao Xiaosan, who was sprawled in the straw shed we’d provided to protect him from the elements.

“You can abdicate if you want,” he said coldly. “But if you plan to stay on as king, you’ll have to respect local customs.”

My hooves were tied. I had no choice but to let stand this cruel jungle practice. So I shut my eyes and fantasized images of Little Flower, of Butterfly Lover, and, less clearly, of a female donkey, even the hazy outline of some women, as I mated almost recklessly with all those female wild boars. I avoided it whenever possible and cut corners when avoidance was out of the question, but as the years passed, the sandbar population was increased by dozens of wildly colorful little bastards. Some had golden yellow bristles, others had black, and some were spotted like those dalmatians you see in TV ads. Most of them retained their wild boar physical characteristics, but they were clearly smarter than their mothers.

In 1981, during the fourth lunar month, when the apricot trees were blooming and the female wild boars were in heat, I swam over to the south bank of the river. The water was warm on the surface, but icy cold below, and at the point where the warm and cold water met, I encountered schools of fish swimming upstream against the current. I was deeply moved by their indomitable desire to return to their spawning grounds, whatever the difficulty, however great the sacrifice. Moving over to shallow water, I became lost in my own thoughts as I stood and watched them struggling heroically ahead, their fins flapping.

Suddenly I was struck by an outlandish thought — actually it was more like an urgent internal desire, to travel back to Ximen Village, as if I had an appointment made years before, one virtually impossible to reschedule.

It had already been four years since I’d paired up with Little Flower and fled from the pig farm, but I could have found the way back there blindfolded, in part because the fragrance of apricot blossoms came to me on winds from the west but mainly because it was my home. So I struck out, walking along the narrow but comfortably smooth bank of the river, heading west. Uncultivated fields stretched out south of me, nothing but scrubland to the north.