Monkey Hunting (12 page)

Dos gardenias para tí
Con ellas quiero decir:
Te quiero, te adoro, mi vida
Ponle todo tu atención
Porque son tu corazón y el mío . . .

Domingo dreamed about the blind fishes of Cuba. He’d seen them in the sinkholes south of Alquízar, where he’d gone with his high school science club. The fishes’ eyes had degenerated, and their skin was nearly transparent. They’d remained motionless, suspended near the walls and at the bottoms of the holes. In his dream, he’d swum with the fishes in their frigid sinkholes, round and round in the lightlessness until he grew fins on his belly and back.

Tham Thanh Lan stirred next to him, whispering something in Vietnamese. Domingo looked at her face and wondered what love had to do with memory. Did it ransack the past the way a song could? The body, he suspected, stored everything in its flesh. The sun-warmed spots of his childhood bed. The palms along Parque Martí postponing dusk. His Tío Eutemio had told him once that every person carried the scars of each year in his body like a thick-trunked tree.

Several people came to visit Tham Thanh Lan while she slept. Her boss from the Bamboo Den arrived, fingering a silver dinner bell, and threatened to dock her pay. When Domingo wouldn’t open the door, the boss forced his way in and shook Tham Thanh Lan’s shoulder, but he couldn’t rouse her. He held his knobbly ear to her mouth, satisfied himself that she was breathing, and went off in a storm of obscenities.

Another bar girl, a mixed-blood friend of Tham Thanh Lan’s, stopped by with dried plums. She stood by Tham Thanh Lan’s bed, looking subdued and desultory, as if she’d been brought there for sale.

“I thought she was sick,” she said. Her hands fluttered by her sides, trying to erase any lingering danger.

Domingo had heard the stories about the French families from Bordeaux and Nantes who’d come to Guantánamo to make their fortunes in sugar. What fortunes, he wondered, had the French searched for in Vietnam?

Domingo told her that Tham Thanh Lan wouldn’t be returning to work. “I’ll take care of her from now on.” He was surprised at the resolve in his voice.

A pair of American soldiers knocked hard on the door an hour later. They checked the apartment number against their crumpled paper, sagged with disappointment when Domingo answered.

“How much longer?” the squat blond one asked.

“Never!” Domingo shouted back and slammed the door.

After three days, Tham Thanh Lan awoke. She didn’t move at first but simply stared at the ceiling. Her hands sought the open plane of her belly, her wounded swell of moist silk. She caressed herself, stroking every welt and scar between her legs. Finally, she turned to Domingo and smiled: “I have a baby inside. I have a small world.”

Peonies

HAVANA (1899)

It was a Sunday morning in April, prematurely hot. Chen Pan didn’t want to visit the Chinese cemetery, but Lucrecia had insisted. It was a holiday and people would be taking food and flowers to their ancestors. They would decorate their family’s headstones with lanterns and red paper, too, report the year’s happenings to the dead. The scent of burning incense would fill the air.

Chen Pan put on his white linen suit, the color of mourning in China. He was sixty-two years old. Lucrecia was forty-eight. How could she be dying? The best doctors in Chinatown had confirmed it, so it must be true. Lucrecia was black inside her female parts, her womb withered to nothing. Overnight her hair had turned white. Now it was thin and straight as corn silk. Lucrecia had wanted to shave her head like a Chinese monk’s, but Chen Pan had dissuaded her.

The doctors in Chinatown had tried every remedy— aloe root that had been dug up in winter, sugarcane exposed three years to frost, ardisia mingled with the curative herbs provided by trusted
santeros.
Nothing helped. Poor Lucrecia, they said, would be dead by July.

“What’s taking you so long?” Lucrecia was dressed in her Easter outfit. Her hat was huge, festooned with blue ribbons and tulle. A feathered replica of a hummingbird was perched precariously on the rim. She looked younger today, as though possessed by a life-giving force. In a lacquered basket she carried candles for the dead. She’d wrapped the tapers in the thinnest of paper, a sunflower-green.

It seemed to Chen Pan that Lucrecia had worried excessively about pleasing their neighbors. Now she was seeking favor with her future ones, too. He slipped on his shoes, tying and retying the laces until they were symmetrical. He didn’t want to deny Lucrecia anything these last months, but was this visit to the cemetery necessary?

Chen Pan had been up since before dawn. The rims of his eyes were red and swollen, as if he’d been drinking wine past midnight. Age and understanding were supposed to bring tranquility, but they’d brought him nothing of the sort. Last night, he’d had the same dream again: a hungry wolf followed him at a fixed distance, waiting to eat him. He had woken up so terrified that he couldn’t fall back asleep. Today, he decided, he would choose the more peaceful alternative of an afternoon nap. The dream reminded him of the widow from the mountains who’d come to his village when he was a boy. People said she’d lost her mind after a wolf had snatched her infant son from her doorstep.

Lucrecia was waiting for Chen Pan downstairs, smoking a small cigar. Dr. Chu, who had long, flowing hair like Saint Liu, blamed the cigars for aggravating Lucrecia’s condition. He said that women’s bodies were not designed to properly absorb smoke, that it bypassed their lungs and was inhaled directly into their wombs, irreversibly poisoning them.

“You heard what the doctor said,” Chen Pan reprimanded her. “Are you in such a hurry to leave me?”

“
¡Por favor!
If what he said was true, half of Havana would also be dying!”

It was no use arguing with Lucrecia. Once she’d been a reasonable woman. Now she bickered with everyone, especially their daughter. Caridad had threatened to run away if they didn’t let her join the traveling theater troupe from Camagüey. Soon, Chen Pan thought sadly, they would have to marry her off.

Some days the pain in Lucrecia’s womb kept her in bed. Other days she seemed almost fine, and she and Chen Pan would walk along the shore to watch the frigate birds plunge into the sea. To him, Lucrecia’s impending death felt like a voyage he was preparing to take to a foreign land—to China, perhaps, where he kept promising they’d go before she died.

“Come on, we don’t have all day!” Lucrecia said. She took his arm as they walked down Calle Zanja.

The stores were closed, but a few vendors were roaming the street. One bedraggled man sold
garapina
from a giant jar on his head. Chen Pan bought two cups of the fermented pineapple drink. It was so sweet it made his molars ache. After forty-two years in Cuba, Chen Pan hadn’t grown accustomed to the amount of sugar in everything. In China, white sugar was a luxury for the stoutly rich. Here it was so common that handfuls of the stuff were tossed into soups and stews.

Lucrecia drank her
garapina
with a long swallow. How could she be so sick, Chen Pan wondered, and still drink like that?

Yesterday she’d woken up in a sweat that had stuck to his fingers like glue. And she’d been giving off a scent that he didn’t recognize as hers—a combination of alcohol and old straw. Lucrecia must have noticed it, too, because she bathed night and day with an array of new soaps, bubbling and lathering like a spawning river crab.

“Esperanza Yu told me that Peking has the best opera. She said there’s an acrobat there who can turn ninety-six somersaults in a row.”

“We could go and be home in five months,” Chen Pan offered.

“If you don’t want to bury me in the Chinese cemetery, then bury me in the garden. This way, I’ll help the vegetables grow.”

How Lucrecia loved her garden! The fig tree with its stubborn roots. The rows of herbs lovingly arranged in brocades of green. The butterflies that browsed through her bougainvillea like customers at the Lucky Find. Who would take care of it all when she was gone? Only his great-aunt in China had loved her garden more. At night, the scent of her flowers had mingled with those of the wheat fields and river weeds.

“Before I die, I want to go to the mountains. You said yourself it’s where the powers of heaven and earth meet.”

“That’s only true for China,” Chen Pan said.

“I don’t see why this can’t be true for Cuba, too.”

Lucrecia’s family was from the Sierra Maestra, and from the Congo before that. Her grandparents had been runaway slaves,
cimarrones,
like Chen Pan. For years they’d lived in a cluster of
bohíos
in the mountains outside Guantánamo and had grown okra, corn, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes. Lucrecia had told him that her uncle had gotten so hungry once that he’d boiled his mother’s cat for soup. This was the same uncle who’d later sold his sister to that bastard Don Joaquín in Havana.

On Calle San Nicolás, a shoe seller idled by with his offerings suspended on a rod. “¡Zapátos! ¡Zapatillas!” Lucrecia stopped to inspect the slippers on display. She concentrated on picking out an attractive pair for her burial. Chen Pan sighed. How could she be so macabre? Didn’t she care about his feelings at all?

Lucrecia selected a pair of embroidered high heels, but the vendor didn’t carry her size. It was true that her feet were exceptionally large and she’d often had her shoes custom-made. For this the merchants in Chinatown had criticized her. Moss-tongued men who knew nothing of love, Chen Pan thought. To them, a man with a woman was commonplace, a need of the body, nothing more. They saved their deepest affections for each other.

When they’d suggested to Chen Pan that he go fetch a bride in China, like Ibrahim Wo had done, Chen Pan ignored them. Everyone had admired Ibrahim’s wife, a fifteen year-old doll from C——, until she’d killed Ibrahim by poisoning his tea. Another child bride had committed suicide after setting eyes on her ancient groom. An unripe melon, Chen Pan had warned the men at the barbershop, didn’t yield so easily to the knife.

His friends believed that women, by and large, were mankind’s menace. How many kings and ministers, sages and saints, had been ruined by the presumably gentler sex? Recently, they’d heard reports from China that unfaithful wives no longer jumped in wells and that widows remarried without so much as threatening to commit suicide. “Such disrespect!” they cried. But Chen Pan didn’t share their views.

He and Lucrecia had never married, but had this stopped their children from coming? Chen Pan had caressed Lucrecia’s growing belly, teased her about being his concubine, claimed that there was no greater pleasure than bringing forth children late in life. “Too hot for cooking,” he’d often announced, even in winter, and took her to eat at Oscar Shoy’s noodle shop.

“
Mi amor,
I asked you a question.” Lucrecia was looking at him with a puzzled expression.

“What is it?” Chen Pan turned toward her.

“After I die, will I become a ghost?” Lucrecia repeated.

Chen Pan didn’t know how to answer her. While it was tempting to believe in the Pureland, he found it equally tempting to find peace in a blank and endless eternity.

“I’m not sure,” Chen Pan said, and his spirits sank lower still.

On Calle Cuchillo, a bare-chested mulato sat on a mossy wall plucking the lice off his body and popping them into his mouth. Two men stumbled, drunk, out of a nearby gambling den. The smaller one was known for his powerful singing voice, and the other’s face was as brown and creased as a walnut. Chen Pan also loved to gamble, but his family hadn’t starved for this habit. His friends said that he was blessed with good fortune. This was true. His coins turned reliably to pesos, his pesos to silver, his silver to gold.

Lucrecia disapproved of Chen Pan’s gambling, but she helped him with the riddles to the
charadas.
All of Havana was wild to play. Everyone talked about sheep and rats and peacocks until Chen Pan thought the whole city had gone mad. Last month, Lucrecia had correctly guessed the answer to this riddle:
One
who is not a nun but always stays in her house.
The snail, of course.

Now their son, Desiderio, planned to open a gambling den four blocks from the Lucky Find. Lucrecia blamed Chen Pan for spoiling their oldest. Was this what happened when a man waited too long for a son? Chen Pan was convinced that there was too much heat in Desiderio’s diet—fried pork and shredded beef washed down with multiple bottles of imported wine. Cooling foods would help him: fruit, vegetables, anything from the sea, crabs particularly. Or herbs like white peonies.

Fortunately, Lorenzo was more reasonable, gentle and deliberate and kind. How Chen Pan missed him! Why was it so impossible to keep a good son by his side? Ten years ago, Lorenzo had left for China and wrote to them every few months of his travels. Lucrecia believed that their son would come home before she died. Chen Pan said nothing to discourage her.

Down the street, Lucrecia stopped before a shop window filled with Spanish fans. Most ladies in Havana wouldn’t go anywhere without one. How else could they say what they’d been taught never to directly express? Lucrecia was too plainspoken for such nonsense. In the center of the window, a hand-painted fan was displayed on a pedestal. Its sticks were made of ivory inlaid with gold, and tiny oval mirrors were mounted on the outer sides. Three hundred pesos at least, Chen Pan estimated. He hoped Lucrecia wasn’t planning on including
that
in her grave.

A stolid matron in pleated satin rode by in her carriage, startling a beggar cooling himself off with a banana leaf. Chen Pan had seen the woman before— her round crimson face was unmistakable—but he couldn’t remember precisely from where. Had she frequented his shop?

“There’s one for you,” Lucrecia joked, pointing to the matron’s receding back. Lately, she’d begun encouraging him to look for another woman. This was more than Chen Pan could stand. There was no one he could ever love again and Lucrecia knew this.

“Bah!” Chen Pan snorted. He looked up at a row of royal palms against the flat, discolored sky. Everything was futile, he decided, equivalent to doing nothing at all. What was the point of working or talking, bathing or bargaining, when Lucrecia was dying?

If only the wine shops would open early, he’d stop and have a bowl or two. Maybe a plate of salted bamboo shoots to go with it. How else to endure this torment? When he was most mournful, Chen Pan drank his red wine and recited a poem.

Bathed in fragrance,
do not brush your hat;
Washed in perfume,
do not shake your coat:
Knowing the world
fears what is too pure,
The wisest man
prizes and stores light!

Mostly, the poems made Chen Pan lonely. And his loneliness was growing by the day, coiling about him like a snake. Long ago he’d dreamed of returning to his village, tall in his sedan chair, in the spring when the cassia trees were in bloom. That dream, like the others, had come to be forgotten, and Chen Pan had seen nothing in this to regret. So why were his old sadnesses coming now to flood and rot in his chest? He thought of his father, who’d been a hero for a few brief weeks after his death. Who besides Chen Pan would ever remember this?

It seemed to him that life’s true tragedy was to lift up one’s voice among the living and be met with indifference. In the barbershop the men spoke of the old ways, for which they had an inflated regard. They fondly recalled how criminals were expected to sing a line or two from an opera to entertain onlookers before their own beheadings. And warriors regularly carved out the hearts of their enemies, fried them in oil, and ate them to increase their courage.

But who, Chen Pan asked himself, was his enemy? Whose head could he knock against a wall? He knew only that he would’ve gladly eaten his share of hearts for a chance to save his wife.

Four years ago Chen Pan had wanted to saddle a horse and ride into battle behind José Martí. He’d wanted to fight this time, not just deliver a few weapons like he had during the Ten Years’ War. Thirty years had passed, but what had it mattered to him that his hair and his eyebrows had grown white and his legs weak from city life? Somehow Lucrecia had managed to convince him to stay home.

Instead Chen Pan had ended up sending the rebels all the money he’d made off the Spaniards, who had departed Cuba by the shipload. Many of them had lost fortunes in the war and had disposed of their treasures in his shop. Quickly, Chen Pan had resold their things to his foreign clients at a high profit. He’d kept only one item—a rare hardwood cane carved into a snake that he’d bought from an old
gallego.