Monkey Hunting (10 page)

From then on, the master made her keep her eyes open when he did it, made her watch his beastly face. He hit her if she blinked, made her repeat things she never since said aloud. For years, Lucrecia stopped dreaming. Everything inside her stayed tight and kneeling, waiting day after day, holding her breath like Mamá had taught her.

At one o’clock, Lucrecia closed the shop and climbed the stairs to their apartment. That morning she’d killed a chicken by whipping it around like a windmill until she’d broken its neck. Then she’d ground its meat into a paste for soup. Now she heated a spoonful of lard in her heaviest skillet and quickly chopped two onions. She peeled and minced several cloves of garlic, stirred them in the fat, and added yesterday’s bread crumbs.

Lucrecia remembered how Don Joaquín had refused to eat anything but steak. When he’d finally banished her to the convent, how relieved she’d been! It was cool there, not hot and sooty like in the mistress’s kitchen. It was agreed that Lucrecia would stay with the nuns until her baby came, until the master could sell them both. Unbaptized, unschooled, and cursed as she was, the sisters received her and took her to church. The priest swung a shiny gold censer that released clouds of smoke. It smelled to Lucrecia like a thousand dying flowers.

As her baby grew and fattened inside her, Lucrecia dipped hundreds of candles in the bubbling vats. Long white tapers for Sunday mass and society weddings. Thick ivory ones for the sacristy. Pastels for the various feast days. Gilded votives for La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. For Good Friday, the nuns fashioned candles darkened with tar.
To
burn away the sins of the world.

Boom-tak-tak-a-tak. Boom tak-tak-a-tak. The banging in the street was growing louder, more insistent, as if all her neighbors had taken up grieving. Lucrecia finished the chicken soup and went back downstairs to the Lucky Find.

There was a customer waiting out front with a face like one of Chen Pan’s old maps. Lucrecia let him in, but she didn’t understand a word he said. Was he trying to speak Spanish? Usually she could tell which language a foreigner spoke by his accent, but this sounded like nothing she’d heard before. She motioned for the customer to look around, pointing to the items she guessed might interest him: the gilded cuckoo clock, the rosewood vanity set, the solid silver candlesticks.

Finally, she deciphered his painstaking introduction. He was a
taxidermista
from Poland! Lucrecia laughed and shook her head. She was tempted to say that there were several of Chen Pan’s friends—rare specimens indeed—that she might recommend for immediate stuffing. Instead she informed the man that he’d come to the wrong address.

The remainder of the afternoon was quiet. Lucrecia grew restless. She needed to place an ad for her lantern candles. They were popular during the spring festival, and she liked to advertise in advance. Besides, it gave her an opportunity to go to the Chinese newspaper’s offices on Calle San Nicolás. There she watched the men pull the tiny blocks of characters from the thousands on display. Later she would stare at the headlines and coax Chen Pan to say them aloud, repeating them until she learned a phrase or two.

But Chen Pan had no patience to teach her Chinese. The little that Lucrecia had absorbed she’d picked up in the streets, or from her friend Esperanza Yu. It wasn’t always polite. Lucrecia had relished the alarm on Chen Pan’s face when she’d come home with a few choice obscenities. Other
cubanos
who had business in Chinatown also learned some Chinese. Like her, they spoke a kind of
chino-chuchero.

When she’d moved to Calle Zanja, no business had been as prosperous as Chen Pan’s. Today there were groceries and hotels, pharmacies, bakeries, and gambling dens—even two Buddhist pagodas. And everyone knew the Chinese made the best ice cream in Havana. On Sundays people came from everywhere to buy it.

It was true that she could go shopping in the Mercado de Cristina or at the fancy stores on Calle Obispo, buy muslins and ribbons at St. Anthony’s or a three-layer cake at Goddess Diana. But what need did she have for such frills? Everything she loved was in Chinatown. The tamales with smoked duck. The fried sweet potatoes, finely chopped. Her favorite dessert was also Chinese—a pound cake with so many sesame seeds it was called
chino con piojos,
China-man with fleas.

She was a part of Chinatown now, at peace here, with the smells and sounds she’d once found so foreign. How could she think of baking chicken without plenty of ginger? Or deciding something important without offering persimmons to the Buddha? Lucrecia had encouraged her children to learn Chinese, too, but only Lorenzo showed any interest.

Last fall, she and her son had gone to the Chinese theater on Calle Salud. It was beautiful, painted like Christmas in red and gold. There were acrobats from Shanghai who climbed on each other’s shoulders and flew through the air like show-off birds. Singers in satin costumes wailed of lost love and the bittersweet gifts of spring. And the music was a clang of cymbals and drums that couldn’t have been more different from the Cuban
danzón.

At four o’clock, a gigantic carriage pulled up in front of the Lucky Find. Chen Pan pointed to the loaded cart behind him. “We’ll have to take over the shop next door!” he laughed, loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear.

Sometimes Lucrecia questioned the origin of her birth, but she didn’t question who she’d become. Her name was Lucrecia Chen. She was thirty-six years old and the wife of Chen Pan, mother of his children. She was Chinese in her liver, Chinese in her heart.

Plums

Chen Fang

SHANGHAI (1939)

I had been teaching for nearly twelve years when I met Dauphine de Moët. She was the mother of three boys at our school. Her children were escorted everywhere by a pair of White Russian body-guards. Kidnapping was rampant in Shanghai—it has always been something of a local specialty—but those were extraordinary measures a decade ago.

Dauphine’s husband, Charles de Moët, was a French businessman and former diplomat. He’d speculated in the Shanghai stock market and invested in a leather factory that later made army boots for the Japanese invaders. The de Moëts lived in a French Concession mansion with many antiques and a full-time staff. Once I saw D—— leave their house. He was the gangster who terrorized Shanghai.

Dauphine invited me to tea to review the boys’ grades, which were less than satisfactory. It was a Sunday, and Dauphine answered the door herself. I noticed her thick hands as she poured the rare jasmine tea. There were sweetmeats wrapped in crimson paper and miniature cakes oozing cream. Dauphine wore a silk tunic cut in the Chinese style. Her long blond hair hung like a voyage.

She watched my every gesture, the uncertainty of my lips as I formed the words to speak. She told me that I was beautiful. Nobody had ever said this to me before. I felt a heat rise to my cheeks.

Dauphine had a wonderful library of books and allowed me to borrow whatever I wished. She also liked to paint and showed me a watercolor she’d done of a piebald charger that was quite delicately rendered. It galloped toward the viewer as though it would fly off the paper. Her other paintings were not as good, but still rich with poetic intent.

I was invited to tea many times that winter of 1928. The months were brutally cold, lashed by unforgiving winds. My visits were the same: an empty house, the steaming tea, Dauphine’s gentle attentiveness. Sometimes she wore a crystal necklace that caught the faint winter light, or a scarf double-tied at her waist.

Dauphine told me she’d grown up in Alsace-Lorraine hating the Germans. For two years she’d also lived in Brazil, where she sailed the Amazon and once watched piranhas eat a horse to the bone.

Her husband had been the French consul general in Havana during the Great War. It was the time of the Dance of the Millions, she explained, when Cubans made overnight fortunes in sugar. Palaces lined the boulevards, and fancy cars cruised up and down the city’s seawall. She said that the Cubans, like the Spaniards, used a spice in their rice that turned it the color of kumquats.

Dauphine had many photographs of Havana, including one of an old Chinese man in a doorway smoking an opium pipe. I liked to imagine that this man might have known my father or grandfather. She played Cuban records on her phonograph, too. At first the music sounded strange to me. But I grew to love the torrent of drums, the torn-sounding voices of the singers. Dauphine showed me how to dance like the Cubans, clasping me tightly and making me swing my hips.

There was a club in Old Havana, Dauphine told me, where women wore men’s evening clothes and kissed each other on the lips. They drank rum punch, lit their lovers’ cigars, picked their teeth clean with silver toothpicks. I knew, listening to her, that I knew nothing at all.

Occasionally, Dauphine cooked for me. Nothing lavish. Our favorite snack was toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches—
croque monsieurs—
that she served with tiny pickles and beer. Another time, she steamed mussels in a wine broth and insisted on feeding them to me one by one.

She asked me about my life. I told her about the stone wall that encircled our mountain village to keep the bandits out. At the west end of the gorge, Mother lay beautiful as an empress in her bed, wreathed in opium smoke. One spring the musk deer ate all the leaves off the trees and the goats swelled from a mysterious disease and died. What more did I have to tell?

On my thirtieth birthday, Dauphine had her chef prepare for me the traditional longevity noodles. She knew I loved green plums and presented me with an exquisite jade bowl filled to the brim with them, although plums were long out of season.

“For my beloved Fang,” Dauphine whispered as she presented me with the fruit.

“You are too kind,” I answered, lowering my eyes.

That day, we became lovers.

The hardships of the times receded for me. Our lives became hidden as if in a thousand-year dream. Behind her fragrant embankment of candles, I knew only the wrinkled petals of Dauphine’s eyelids, the caress of her knowing fingers, the easy laugh of her rapture. With every embrace, a tide of blood rose between us. Far from the bright censoring light, I recited for her all the love poems I had memorized as a child.

But joy, I soon learned, is only a fleeting passage from one sorrow to the next.

That autumn, Dauphine’s husband took his family back to France. There was talk of markets failing, of their fortune in ruins. So much red dust. I noticed Dauphine’s earrings, long and linked, the delicate chains grazing her shoulders. They were returning to Paris, she told me, to tend to their ruins.

Dauphine gave me an ivory back scratcher, her rabbitskin hat, a lock of her hair wrapped in rice paper, and, at the last moment, the painting of the piebald charger. I did not sleep for a year. My face grew sallow, my eyes filmed with ash. Where did history go, I asked myself, if it could not be retold?

I felt raw with the knowledge of pleasure, charred by it. I understood finally the truth of the Tao Te Ching:

The reason that we have great affliction is that
we have bodies.

Had we not bodies, what affliction would we
have?

Once in the mountains, I saw a snake shedding its skin. It began at the back of its neck, a faint split, before slowly unsheathing its yellow-brown length. In the end, the snake was still itself but somehow shinier and new.

Sometimes when I teach, I see myself in the younger girls and wonder: Will they ever learn their singular natures?

After Dauphine left, ordinary pleasures eluded me—the heat and noise of the opera, the taste of roast duck with pepper and salt, the warmth of the sun’s first rays as I walked to school. I dreamed the same dream every night. A woman, not myself, is drowning in a river, the water collecting in her lungs. Her hair is long and unspools in the current. She pulls it out by the fistful until the river flows cleanly through her net of black strands.

The following summer, I found a shaman on the edge of Shanghai. For two days I watched him swirl by his fires, listening to his mournful chants until I fell into a trance. It was then I saw Dauphine again, lovely in a fresh linen dress, fishing by the bluest of rivers. I called to her, and without turning she nodded. Then she pulled a ripe plum from the water. It was raining, hard and slow, the kind of rain that lasts for days. I called to Dauphine again, and again she nodded. Her blond hair bobbed like a New Year’s lantern as she caught another plum. I tried to get a closer look, but a steady wind held me in place. When I awoke, I knew I had lost her forever.

For years, my heart swung in my chest. The wind slept in my empty hands. My life lay scattered like unswept petals after a storm. I sat
ch’an
for many hours, seeking peace. Perhaps, I thought, I could become like the wise Chieh-yü, who feigned madness and lived as a recluse to avoid public service.

I grew impatient with my students. Only one in a hundred truly listened. As for the rest, I might as well have been reading to monkeys. What could I teach them, anyway? That knowledge was more important than love? (I no longer believed this.) And the pettiness of my colleagues, bickering over supplies and oversights. How could I stand to walk the dreary corridors of that school, pretending to be a teacher? Pretending tranquility?

I forced myself to consider the tentative overtures of specific men: the diminutive chemist with the withered hand; the district supervisor who sang all evening in a moving baritone. Impossibilities! Could they not see how inapt they were for me? One spurned suitor accused me:
It is always due to women’s dog
hearts that men are never free!

So was this my life’s allotment? To have rejoiced in one brief love?

My bed is so empty that I keep on waking up:

As the cold increases, the night-wind begins to
blow.

It rustles the curtains, making a noise like the
sea:

Oh that those were waves which could carry me
back to you!

No doubt there was a secret language that would restore all my loss. But how was I to learn it? Again, I found the shaman and begged him to make me forget. And for a time, I did. I lived as an insect in amber, protected from memory. Little by little, though, everything returned to me in vivid wisps. Like a stubborn old woman throwing stones in the temple, I hoped for a miracle. Of course, none came. I grew used to the void again.

A few years ago, I began collecting funeral urns. I line them up along the walls of my bedroom. One of the secondhand dealers, Mr. Yi, asked me why I am so taken with ornaments of death, but I could not answer him. I thought of planting flowers in the urns, but they lack proper drainage and I cannot bear the thought of all those blooms facing a certain demise.

Often I think of my son, who will become a man soon. I had not told Dauphine about him, I do not know why. I have a son, the same age as her youngest. A boy who grew up without me. What is Chih-mo like? Is he angry with me for having abandoned him? What did his father’s family tell him? Does he know I am alive?

Outside my window, the magnolia tree has not flowered. Crows fill its branches, three or four dozen at once. No spring onions are left in my flowerpots. On Saturday morning, after an all-night rain, I discovered a striped snail inching its way along my balcony. Where did it come from? How did it find its way to my few sad circles of dirt?

It is summer again. I am forty years old, the year that divides a woman’s life in two. Before this, one can be considered pretty. There is hope of more children. A bit of vanity is still permitted. Afterward, it is unseemly to take pains with one’s appearance. A husband lingers less on his wife’s body, hurrying his pleasure, or if he’s rich enough, bestows his ardor on a new concubine.

A woman’s second season is long and bitter. Satisfaction comes in arranging a good marriage for her son, fetching a fair bride price for her daughter. I say this, but my life is not a woman’s life. I live like a man, like less than a man, alone in my two rooms.

The hospitable years are over. The Japanese are everywhere. Flags with their red savage suns flutter on every rooftop. The city is stripped down and starving, the fields around us all husks and wind. Only the same pack of dogs is fat from feasting on corpses.

It is said that there are no more poppies in the fields, that the water is unsafe to drink, contaminated by the dead. Others say that in places the rain comes down black with revenge. A mere trickle of water escapes my faucets. I put my cooking pots on the balcony to catch the rain, then boil it for an hour before drinking it. I carry this water in bottles to school. Once a week, I collect enough rain to take a bath.

I have not been paid in months. How I live day to day, I cannot say. I go from home to school, from school to the market and home again. At the market, there is not much to buy: wilted cabbages, an ounce or two of dried noodles. I make simple soups with what is available, or mix a bit of tofu with rice. I keep potato flour and sesame oil on hand for extra flavoring. Mostly, all food tastes the same to me.

In the evenings I correct my students’ papers, prepare tea, and read for hours. Reading is my one luxury. It does not save me from want, nor will it free me from death. Certainly, it prevents me from getting a full night’s sleep. But immersed in the shadows of other worlds, I find a measure of peace.

When I cannot concentrate, I stand on my balcony and watch the moon. It shines alone in skies clear or clouded, illuminating nothing. I remember watching this same moon as a girl in the mountains. Once I had imagined it to be a magic pearl that would grant all my wishes. But what did I know then to desire?

In China they say the greatest glory for a woman is to bear and raise sons for the future. So where, I ask, is my place? I am neither woman nor man but a stone, a tree struck by lightning long ago. Everything that has followed since counts for nothing.