Monkey Hunting (13 page)

It hadn’t been easy to find food during the war, no matter how much money he made. Desperate neighbors had raided Lucrecia’s garden, leaving them with nothing but taro weeds and sweet potato shoots to eat. The hard times had reminded Chen Pan of when he was a boy—the taxes and famines, the soldiers and bandits all squeezing his family dry.

He and Lucrecia had been at El Moro when the soldiers raised the Cuban flag. Thousands of people danced in the streets. Chen Pan, though, was in no mood to celebrate. He recalled how after the Civil War, Confederate refugees had come to Cuba from the American South and pawned their weapons and pearl stickpins at his shop. The Cubans had sat in the laps of those Americans like yapping little dogs, begging for scraps. Now they were disgracing themselves in a similar manner.

Several families were at the Chinese cemetery already, paying their respects to the dead. When Chen Pan had accompanied Lucrecia to the Colón cemetery last week, she hadn’t liked it much. Most of the Cuban graves were not kept up. There were cobwebs everywhere and not nearly enough shade. Striped mosquitoes hummed amid the puddles and in damp pockets of soil.

In contrast, the Chinese cemetery looked as neat as Lucrecia’s own kitchen. Willow trees were putting forth new shoots. The grass was moist and green. Nobody, it seemed, was forgotten. The graves of the gamblers and beggars and those with no family (including the hunchback who’d sold notions and spent all his free time in the teashop) were respectfully sprinkled with water, too. Here, no spirits went hungry.

Chen Pan and Lucrecia strolled along the cemetery’s swept dirt paths, greeting the families picnicking beside the headstones. Hilario Eng and his brothers, all bean curd dealers, were solemnly gathered by their father’s grave, setting out dishes and a bowl of warm rice. Others burned paper money or laid down their wreaths, and wailed.

For the New Year’s sacrifice back home, the women used to kill chickens and geese and buy plenty of pork. They lined up along the river, washing rice for the festivities. Even Chen Pan’s own mother, renowned for her indolence, joined in the scouring and scrubbing until her arms had turned red in the water. For days, the sounds of exploding firecrackers would sing in Chen Pan’s head.

“That’s it,” Lucrecia said, smiling, indicating a shady spot under the pomegranate tree. “That’s where I want to be buried.”

Chen Pan tried to imagine his wife lying peacefully in a coffin, her hands nested at her waist just so. How could he ever bear to have the lid closed down upon her?

There was a crow perched on an upper branch of the pomegranate tree.
Send me a sign,
Chen Pan prayed, rubbing the medallion he kept in his pocket as a talisman.
Show me that Lucrecia won’t die.
But the crow stood stiffly, as immobile as any statue in the Lucky Find. Chen Pan had made desperate pledges to his ancestors and to the Buddha and to Lucrecia’s panoply of saints. What difference had it made?

When he’d returned from delivering his machetes to Commander Sian in 1869, Chen Pan had been prepared to die. It was Lucrecia who saved him. She bathed him, cleaning out a festering wound that kept him limping to this day. “You’re lucky you don’t have to cut off your leg altogether,” she scolded.

Over the years, Chen Pan had revealed to her bits and pieces of that journey—of the camps overcrowded with dying men, of the cowardice of the Spaniards who’d left their wounded to rot in the battlefields. In the wildest parts of the mountains, the rebels had eaten sour oranges and the pulpy tops of palm trees. Sometimes they caught fat
jutías
and roasted them over fires. (In those days, the woods were so dense that the rodents could run in the treetops for weeks.)

Lucrecia had asked Chen Pan if he’d seen anyone killed. He told her about the Spanish soldier, a boy, really, who pleaded for his life in perfect Cantonese. This had shaken Commander Sian, but he slit the Spaniard’s throat just the same.

Unhappy as he’d been, Lucrecia helped Chen Pan settle back on Calle Zanja. She painted their apartment a soothing blue and kept the Buddha’s altar smoking with incense. Next to it she put a statue of Yemayá, in honor of her mother, and offered her water-melons and cane syrup, now and then a fresh hen. Chen Pan began wearing traditional Chinese clothes again, baggy cotton pants and wide-sleeved shirts. None of his old dandy wardrobe. He decided that he wanted nothing more to do with anything modern.

If Lucrecia wanted to be buried under the pomegranate tree, Chen Pan sighed, he would arrange it. His best friend, Arturo Fu Fon, had told Chen Pan this:
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor
can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the
earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin
with, but when many men pass one way, a road is
made.
Nobody ever knew whom Arturo Fu Fon was quoting, but it frequently sounded worthy of bamboo tablets and silk. For just such pronouncements—more than for his barely adequate haircuts and shaves—the men of Chinatown went to his barbershop.

In the far corner of the cemetery, a plump
chino
Chen Pan didn’t recognize sat smoking a three-foot-long pipe with a pewter bowl. Chen Pan thought he might buy it for his shop. Would fifty pesos be enough? All manner of Chinese curios were becoming popular with the tourists from Europe. When his friends returned to China, he gave them money to pick up heirlooms for the Lucky Find. He easily made ten times his investment, sometimes much more than that.

Chen Pan bowed slightly and backed away, a disconcerting buzzing in his ears. He felt a cold wind blow into him, although the day was humid and the sky a sober blue. Around him the trees were still. A faint steam rose from the heavily watered graves. He had a sudden urge for watermelon, the jade-green ones that used to grow by the shore in China.

He rejoined Lucrecia under the pomegranate tree. She was deciding on the flowers that she wanted surrounding her grave. Recently, she had planted a bed of peonies for him in their garden. They were one of his favorite flowers and had grown wild in the fields outside his village. After Lucrecia was gone, he would gaze at the peonies, call her name in the breeze. Then he’d light a candle in her name and watch the smoke rise to heaven.

“Look at me.” Lucrecia grabbed his sleeve.

Chen Pan said nothing. He felt as if his whole body were scattering like particles of dust. He imagined himself swirling higher and higher, merging with the passing clouds, inducing a lightning storm.

Lucrecia stared at him a long time. “More than half my life has been happy,” she said softly. “How many people can say that?”

On the way home, Lucrecia had a sudden craving for shrimp in garlic sauce. Chen Pan took her to Alejandro Poey’s restaurant on Calle Salud. She ordered dish after savory dish as Chen Pan watched, too dispirited to eat anything himself.

When he was a boy, he’d spent days by the river digging up worms to fasten onto his homemade copper hooks. He and his friends had considered shrimp to be the most hopeless of creatures because they used their own pincers to push the point of the hooks into their mouths. Why, the stupidest fish had more sense than that!

After lunch Lucrecia’s movements seemed slow and laborious, as though she were struggling underwater. She had difficulty climbing the steps to their apartment over the Lucky Find. By the time Chen Pan helped her reach the top, she was breathless and blaming it on the garlic sauce.

Painstakingly, Lucrecia removed her Easter hat and little jacket, her lavender bodice and layered skirts down to her petticoats. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and loosened her hair. Chen Pan pulled off her boots and stockings. Her feet were swollen and studded with blisters.

He brought her a handkerchief he’d rinsed in cool water and pressed it to her temples. Lucrecia’s eyes seemed unusually large, the whites clean as starched napkins. She looked so flushed and beautiful that Chen Pan almost kissed her on the mouth. Instead he settled her to sleep and held her hand. Lucrecia’s wrist pulsed rapidly, like something apart from her, a captured bird, its brown plumage smooth and dry. Suddenly, it lay still.

Outside, the dark, lowering clouds flashed with lightning and the temperature dropped sharply. If this weren’t Cuba, Chen Pan might have expected it to snow, big plum-blossom petals of snow that would flutter to earth and thickly mute, for the afternoon, all signs of life.

The Little War

SANTIAGO TO HAVANA (1912)

Chen Pan was sitting in a barber’s chair in San-tiago de Cuba when Lorenzo, Chen Pan’s son, received the news that his wife had gone into labor early with their third child. Lorenzo’s hair was only half cut as he bolted from under Francisco Ting’s scissors. It was a seventeen-hour journey by train back to Havana under the best of circumstances, and the times were not good. Yesterday word had spread that
los negros
were rising up, arming themselves with muskets and machetes, readying to launch a bloody race war that would leave every criollo dead.

Chen Pan didn’t believe this was true. But what did his opinion matter? He saw how the
chinos
were treated, even the respected ones like Lorenzo. When the criollos needed medical attention, they were very solicitous of his expertise—it was Doctor Chen this and Doctor Chen that. In fact, the mayor of Santiago, Perequito Pérez, had thrown a banquet in Lorenzo’s honor after Lorenzo had cured him of a debilitating leg spasm. But Chen Pan was immune to their flattering tongues. When the times grew difficult or the jobs scarce, he knew well enough that they were just
chinos de porquería.

The train station was crowded with people battling to get on the afternoon train to Havana. Chen Pan leaned against the ticket booth as he watched Lorenzo maneuver his way around the station. With one hand, Lorenzo held on to his son Meng, with the other, he grasped his satchel of herbs and curing potions. Their suitcases were back at Fong’s hotel, the bill unpaid. There would be time enough to rectify this once they were home.

Lorenzo returned with three first-class seats. Chen Pan wasn’t surprised. His son had survived for more than a decade in China barely knowing the language. Chen Pan laughed when Lorenzo told him how he’d exchanged six months’ worth of potency powder for the tickets. It turned out the stationmaster was an habitué of the dance halls of Santiago, and his troubles had come, conveniently, to Lorenzo’s attention as he’d made his rounds last week. Chen Pan, Lorenzo, and Meng pushed their way to their compartment and settled in the empty seats by the window.

A stiff-looking couple sat down next to them. The woman wore an elaborate wide-brimmed hat and a gold lorgnette. They were Belgian, they said, and had just come from visiting their daughter and Cuban son-in-law in San Luís. The experience had displeased them immensely. The other passenger, a femininely elegant young man in buttoned vest and polished boots, spent most of his time posing in the mirror above his seat. His boots squeaked each time he shifted his feet.

The steam engine billowed and roared. On the platform, the vendors were making their last sales. Lorenzo bought half a dozen ham sandwiches and a large bottle of mandarin juice. Meng ate eagerly. He was only seven, but he was as tall and corpulent as a ten-year-old. His older brother, Shoy, was thinner and looked many years Meng’s junior. Chen Pan wondered what his third grandson—he never doubted it would be a boy—would look like. He’d suggested naming him Pipo, like the happy chiming of a bird.

If only Lucrecia had lived long enough to see their grandchildren! It seemed impossible that she’d been dead thirteen years. Chen Pan recalled how she’d given birth to their own children, expelling them like damp red blossoms with hardly any trouble at all. Lucrecia had been buried in the Chinese cemetery in the shade of the pomegranate tree, just as she’d wanted. Chen Pan’s plot was waiting next to hers. Often he adjusted the time in his mind so that Lucrecia was still with him, living in his flesh, her hair a springy black. He unfolded his memories of her delicately, turning them this way and that. What else was there for him to do?

Chen Pan hadn’t been so old when Lucrecia had died. His friends had told him that he should take another wife, father more children. They’d looked up to him then. “There goes Chen Pan,” they’d said. “He lived in the forest for a year, then opened the biggest store in Chinatown.” The elderly criollas had continued to flirt with him in his shop. “
Ay,
Señor Chen, you are the lucky find here!” they’d crooned, tottering back to their carriages.

Now here was Lorenzo awaiting the birth of another son. Lorenzo had met his second wife at her buckwheat noodle stall in Canton. Chen Pan understood why his son had fallen in love with Jinying. It was obvious that she had excellent
ch’i.
Her blood sang with energy and her eyes were bright with life, everything in balance. Her cooking was a perfect blend of elements, too.

Lorenzo had three more children back in China with his first wife, two girls and a boy. If Lucrecia had been alive, she would have made the journey to visit them. Lorenzo said that his first wife was beautiful, but like the stars she was coldly inhospitable. He sent her money so their children would lack nothing— ample dowries for the girls; a scholar’s education for the boy. Perhaps one day the boy would come to Cuba and teach them all Chinese.

Dusk lingered on the horizon, giving the mountains a preternatural glow, as though someone had set a fire deep inside them. There was a commotion in the corridor. Chen Pan saw two men come to blows over the contradictory reports in the newspapers. The fat one shouted that a posse of
negros
had raped a schoolteacher in Ramón de las Yaguas and had partially cannibalized her flesh. Was he unsteady on his feet from the lurching train or from too much drink? His wiry scrap of an opponent took offense at the fat man’s remarks and slapped him in the face.

Chen Pan felt as if two stones were pressed against his temples. How was it that fear so clotted rational thinking? He was forty years older than these fools, but he could think far more clearly. Chen Pan gestured toward the men and gave his son a look of disgust. Lorenzo shrugged. What was there to do? Already Meng was snoring gently, his cheek flattened by the windowpane. The Belgians remained unperturbed, their eyes glued to their leather-bound books.

Chen Pan noticed a garland of geese flying resolutely south. A tumbledown shack sat neglected at the edge of a sugarcane field. If the arguing men didn’t look too closely, they might take his son for a light-skinned
mulato.
At second glance, they would see that Lorenzo’s eyes were 100 percent Chinese. Would they lynch him to be safe? Chen Pan knew that every man, in his way, was particularly plagued—beset by northern winds, rotting with winter dampness, boiling with summer heat. What did any of it have to do with race?

Smoke from a nearby fire obscured the view to the north. Could they be clearing the sugarcane fields this early in the year? The train pulled into the station at Jiguaní, which was thick with the foul black smoke. Boys with handkerchiefs over their faces were selling late-edition newspapers. Chen Pan caught sight of a headline: NEGROS ON A RAMPAGE IN ORIENTE! Just then their compartment door swung open, and the steward, gaunt in his crisp white uniform, began serving them cookies and tea from a rolling cart. The Belgian couple laid down their books and partook of the offerings.

“Baba!” Meng woke up and started to cry. He pointed out the window. By the tracks lay two corpses, shot in the head, their brains uncoiling in the dirt.

Judging from their clothes, Chen Pan guessed they were rural laborers, farmhands or cane cutters. Others on the train saw the dead men, too, because all at once an uproar ensued, louder than the engine itself as it pulled out of the station. One thick-legged woman in a polka-dot dress ran down the corridor screaming that
los negros
had commandeered the train. Her hands were shaking and she looked as though she might faint.

Lorenzo held Meng in his lap. The boy was sucking his middle finger. Lorenzo gave him a pinch of kaolin powder to take with his juice. Chen Pan wanted to comfort his grandson, to smooth his hair and make the dead men go away. But another part of him wanted to force Meng to look at them again and learn that evil existed in every hour. Lorenzo rocked his son as the train picked up speed. Over their shoulders, three hanged men swung from the limbs of a coral tree. The high-pitched twittering of the warblers cut the air in a thousand places.

Chen Pan adjusted his legs to a more comfortable position and unwrapped a ham sandwich. The Belgian couple and the Cuban dandy had fallen asleep. From his satchel Lorenzo removed a copy of the
YellowEmperor’s Classics of Internal Medicine,
which he was translating from Chinese to Spanish. Lorenzo had grown bored with this effort, preferring to focus on his own anecdotal history of Chinese herbs.

“You’ve grown old from too much work,” Chen Pan chided him.

“And you’re still a hardy goat.” Lorenzo was bemused. “Not so much as a trace of gout.”

“You’ve spoken the truth.” Chen Pan grinned. “And these teeth are all mine, original condition.”

“Regular antiques. You could sell them in your shop,” Lorenzo laughed.

“Only I’m hard of hearing on my left side.”

“So turn your head to the right.”

“Sí, Doctor.”

Chen Pan looked out the window at the passing sugarcane fields, at their endless, swaying green. How inviting they looked from this distance. Who could fathom the mountain of corpses that had made these fields possible? If he had one fantasy left, it was this: to purchase La Amada plantation, sign his name to the deed. He was well off and his credit was good. He might have succeeded with the help of a few fellow merchants. But his aversion to sugarcane was deeper than any sense of vengeance.

“Sometimes I make myself tired,” Chen Pan sighed. “Perhaps it’s time I was dead.”

“Nonsense, Papá.”

“Did you hear that?” Chen Pan asked suddenly, tilting his head. It was a disagreeable sound, a muted hooting, as if an owl were trapped among the luggage racks. But Lorenzo had buried himself in his book. Chen Pan would have liked to converse more. It was good for his spirits, but he knew his son wasn’t much of a talker.

So much had happened during the twelve years that Lorenzo had wandered through China. Lucrecia had died. Cuba had won its freedom from Spain. Desiderio had opened his gambling den and become the father of twins. Even Caridad had settled down after a quixotic singing career and finally married a quiet shopkeeper in Viñales.

Lorenzo had journeyed to Chen Pan’s village by sedan chair and spice-wood boat. The children there had been barefoot, their heads full of lice, their bellies swollen with hunger and worms (no different from these parts). Chen Pan’s younger brother had been weakly tending what remained of the family’s wheat farm. Lorenzo had treated his uncle with numerous kidney remedies, all fruitlessly. (The more remedies prescribed for a disease, Lorenzo contended, the less likely it was to be cured.) Chen Pan wondered when it would be his turn to die.

His son had returned to Havana a stranger after being a foreigner abroad. Now where could he call home? Lorenzo’s skin, Chen Pan supposed, was a home of sorts, with its accommodations to three continents. Or perhaps home was in the blood of his grandsons as it traveled through their flesh.

Recently, Chen Pan had taken to closing the Lucky Find for weeks at a time and accompanying Lorenzo on his doctoring rounds throughout Cuba. After so many years without his son, he couldn’t bear to be apart from him for long. Last fall, they’d gone to Remedios and had seen Chinese puppeteers in the street. With much fanfare, the performers had burned a flurry of papers, then poked through the ashes with ordinary sticks to retrieve colored ribbons. Lucrecia’s life had been like that, Chen Pan thought, stolen from the ashes, then burst open with carnival reds.

It was after midnight. Through the window, the hills looked artificial with their dark fixed palms. The lights of another town were coming into view, flaring like a multitude of candles. The train approached Victoria de las Tunas and would soon arrive in Camagüey. Lorenzo and Meng were asleep, breathing in unison.

If only their locomotive could fly, they’d be back in Havana in no time. Chen Pan had seen pictures of the new American and French planes, fragile-looking contraptions with dragonfly wings. He grew drowsy imagining the train slowly ascending, overtaking the clouds, outrunning the thunder from the east. Then he dreamed that each car was a child’s coffin festooned with boughs of jasmine, one little coffin after another strung together like the tail of a high-flying kite, a parade of shiny coffins flying toward the sun.

Chen Pan awoke with a start in the middle of the night. Sleep was such a nuisance. He’d just as soon do away with it altogether than endure these maddening interruptions. He slept very little, three or four fitful hours at most. Yesterday, at least, it had come in handy. At five in the morning, he’d woken up in his hotel room in Santiago just in time to find a tarantula on his chest.

Before dawn, Meng woke up calling for his mother. Chen Pan reached for his grandson and patted his sticky fingers.
“Aquí estoy, gordito.”
The lights from a passing station stuttered over the boy’s face. Chen Pan offered him the bottle of mandarin juice and Meng drank, dribbling some down the front of his shirt.

“I want to tell you something important,” Chen Pan whispered. “In your life there will be two paths, one easy and one difficult. Listen well: Always choose the difficult one.”

Chen Pan wanted to explain to Meng that
los
negros
were protesting for their right to form a political party, that they would pay for their protesting with their lives and the lives of many innocent others. What choice did they have? Revolutions never took place sitting quietly under a mango tree. Men grew tired of tolerating misery, of waiting for better days.

“Who’s taking care of Jade Peach?” Meng demanded.

“I don’t know,” Chen Pan said.

Lorenzo yawned. “Go back to sleep,
hijo.
”

But Meng was wide awake. At home he was in charge of feeding the family parrot, an extraordinary bird. Jade Peach ate from a spoon, greeted visitors in Spanish and Chinese, and imitated the broadcasters on the radio. Occasionally, she gave Lorenzo’s patients her own diagnoses:
This is a difficult case, Señora.
Or:
Take this lime powder three times a day, and you’ll
feel better soon.