Monkey Hunting (9 page)

After a year, Papi became fixated with a yellow warbler that bathed in a puddle beneath his window. He was convinced that the bird was his grandfather, Chen Pan, returning to warn him of “everywhere evil.” Mostly, Papi sat under the sapodilla tree in the courtyard, watching the pearly trails of the striped snails and talking to himself in Chinese.

Once, Domingo showed up at the hospital and found his father strapped to his bed, his arms and legs swollen, his temples burned from electrodes. His sheets were drenched with blood and urine, and a river of saliva poured from his mouth instead of words.

“Part of his treatment,” the attending nurse snapped.

No one bothered telling Domingo anything more.

A thick mist twisted down from the mountains, stifling the usual anthem of jungle noises. There was no breeze, no echo to Domingo’s own cough. Normally a silence this complete would have jolted every last man in the platoon awake, but everyone continued to sleep soundly. Domingo wondered whether he could ever return home to the life before this war. But he suspected that it was too late to go back the way he had come.

Earlier in the evening, Joey Szczurak had kept Domingo company. Joey was a compulsive talker, an insomniac pill popper from Queens. He carried his P-38 can opener on a gold chain around his throat, right next to his crucifix, and charged anyone who’d lost theirs a cigarette to use his. He claimed he’d won an elocution medal at twelve, had tried heroin at fourteen.

Joey was the skinniest person Domingo had ever seen, skinnier even than Mick Jagger. His face was raw with acne. Joey’s parents had lived in Warsaw during World War II. They’d begged their son not to go to Vietnam, but Joey had dropped out of Fordham and enlisted. It bothered Domingo that Joey thought nothing of unbuttoning his fatigues and masturbating to the memory of his mother’s seamed stockings, his sperm arcing into the moldering sandbags.

Domingo remembered his own mother in her militia uniform, marching off to fight in the Bay of Pigs. People said that she’d killed a man, shot a
gusano
in the back who’d tried to escape. There’d been a parade for Mamá and the other veterans when they returned to Guantánamo, followed by a luncheon with the governor. Domingo had asked his mother about the shooting. Mamá’s face had strained the way he’d seen it do during her more difficult deliveries, when she’d chain-smoked cigars and flung herbs in every direction. But she hadn’t answered him.

The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The trees were drenched and tremulant. They looked sheepish somehow, as though they’d overindulged in the storm. Domingo wished there were someone he could speak to in Spanish, but there was only that wiry Puerto Rican kid from New Jersey who missed his
arroz con gandulas.
Domingo was losing a lot of his Spanish, forgetting all his marine biology. Polyps. Holothurians. Gorgonians. The curses he still remembered. He guessed they’d be the last to go.

Domingo considered the enemy, imagined them speaking to him in Spanish, fast and with a Cuban accent, hardly an “s” every hundred words. They would tell him things—like how the wildflowers in Vietnam had changed colors from one spring to the next or how the river fish were bloating pink with chemicals, the hills wearied to nothing by napalm. In-country, Domingo had seen newborn deformities stranger than the ones in Guantánamo, infants in the central highland’s villages, their features monstrously shuffled, their mothers stick-dry from weeping.
When
bad things happen to the land, bad things happen to
the people.
His Tío Eutemio had told him that.

When Domingo was a boy, he’d loved hiking into the mountains with his uncle to cut wood for new drums. The moon had to be full
para que no le cayeran
bichos,
to keep the insects at bay. Cedar was the best and most durable, but
guásima
and mahogany, when they could find it, were also acceptable. The skins came from billy goats because the drums were
cosa de
hombres.
White or yellow goats that had proven their fertility were best.

Tío Eutemio would examine the goatskins for imperfections (to avoid dead spots), then soak them in water with charcoal before scraping them clean with bricks. He always tested the skin’s
tantán,
its vibe. He had an infallible ear. Tío Eutemio used to tune all the drums in the same corner of the house, the only place he “found” the sounds.

A fresh swell of mist seemed to aim at Domingo specifically. Around him, the air was thickening with ash and other detritus. He watched it, smelled it, committed it to memory, as if he knew he would have to describe it in minute detail. A dead parrot dropped out of the sky, nicking his elbow. The sweat turned cold on his back. Maybe, Domingo thought, the moon was just having a bad night.

He leveled his gun at the racing fog. His heart was audible to him, loud and fast as an all-out
descarga.
Domingo recalled how in his first month in the jungle, his platoon had come upon the rotting carcass of an elephant, its hide puckered and gray. Killed, no doubt, by starving VC. The squad leader had cried, “Ambush!” but no enemies had jumped from behind the trees. There was only this: the slow suck of the earth reabsorbing the blood and inedible muscle.

Domingo dropped his gun and stood up to receive the fog. A flare bloomed beyond the tree line. Cinders were everywhere now, as if the air itself were on fire. Whatever it was, Domingo decided, he would absorb it, become one with it, like the receiving earth.

Just then the screeching began, tortured and other-worldly. Monkeys, dozens of them, pale and dusty, with slick red throats, clambered over the foxholes, their heads large as gourds. They tore off Domingo’s flak jacket, grabbed his rifle, scratched and bit his shoulders. The men bolted up in their foxholes, bug-eyed terrified, setting off wild rounds of gunfire and haphazard grenades that remarkably killed no one. The air was choked with sulfur and smoke.

They were white, those monkeys, yellow-eyed albinos—like paunchy old men in pancake makeup—was how Domingo described them later to the disbelieving major. What’d happened had nothing to do with reasonable explanations or the military’s misplaced trust in precision (Domingo was no fan of logic himself ). Yet the officers assumed that any experience could be summed up with a handful of right-angled nouns.

“We’ll give you another day to rethink your story,” the major said, snapping his folder shut.

Domingo thought the man looked like an oversized bullfrog.

“Sir, there won’t be any changes.”

The monkeys had disappeared as quickly as they’d attacked, Domingo stated for the record. They’d left footprints everywhere. An anarchy of red-fire prints. The men had tried to hunt the monkeys down, but they were nowhere to be found.

Domingo knew that the monkeys were real. He knew this because they’d torn off his flak jacket and run off with his rifle.
Coño,
the monkeys had scratched and bitten him so badly, his arms looked like ripped sleeves. He’d had to return to China Beach to get a tetanus shot. Why didn’t the major check the record for himself?

“Take a look at this!” Domingo showed the major his thumb, still purple and swollen from the attack. One of the monkeys, he said, had tried to bite off his finger. “Now you tell me, sir, who the hell could make this shit up?”

TRAVELING THROUGH THE FLESH

I only perceive
the strange idea of family
traveling through the flesh.

—CARLOS DRUMMOND D E ANDRADE

A Delicate Luck

HAVANA (1888)

It was Good Friday, and all around the city people were pounding on boards and boxes to demonstrate their grief. Boom-tak-tak-a-tak. It was the one day of the year the church bells didn’t ring. Lucrecia wanted to hammer on wood, too, nail the worst of her memories to a cross. Maybe then she’d finally be rid of them.

Today she had promised to help Chen Pan at the Lucky Find. In the afternoon he was bringing over furnishings from the estate of the widow Doña Dulce María Gándara, who’d lived alone in her Vedado mansion for forty years. There was a carved mahogany bed, velvet-lined boxes filled with silverware, and an extensive collection of Belgian lace. Lucrecia had an uneasy premonition about Doña Dulce María’s belongings. What would they disclose? Often she could discern the history of an object by closely listening to it. Violence and unhappiness, she’d learned, seeped into things more tenaciously than the gentler emotions.

Lucrecia didn’t like working on Good Friday, not because the priests had warned that it was a mortal sin (this would have no effect on Chen Pan) but because she was afraid it might invite disapproval from their neighbors and customers. Lucrecia always wore an evil eye on a chain around her neck and burned candles to clear the air of ill intention. After so many years, she was still superstitious about her own good fortune.

It made her laugh to remember how she’d mistrusted Chen Pan at first. Tall
chino
all groomed and sweet-smelling. Fingernails clean. No pigtail. Nothing like the other Chinese she’d seen—men with baskets of fruits and vegetables on poles, speaking Spanish like they were swallowing water. Men who sat in doorways, wearing pajamas and smoking long wooden pipes. Except for his eyes and his accent, Chen Pan had looked like any other wealthy criollo in the street.

At the time Lucrecia had seen only how Chen Pan looked at her son greedily, as though he could eat him for breakfast. (She’d heard that
chinos
feasted on newborns in winter.) He’d made her so nervous that she’d almost refused to go with him. Then she’d spotted Sister Asunción on a balcony of the convent, waving her on. Lucrecia thought of her words, how God had secret plans. So she followed Chen Pan and kept her suspicions to herself.

What didn’t she love about Chen Pan now? The way he drank his soup, holding the bowl with both hands and bringing it to his lips. The passion with which he recited his father’s poems in Chinese. The fact that he smiled only when he meant it. How he sank his face into her hair when they made love.

Lucrecia pulled the feather duster from its rusty hook and started on the items in the window. She rather liked the candelabra with its six brass peacocks. Next to it was a mannequin in full livery and spats. An alabaster statue of a nude woman occupied a pedestal by the front door. Lucrecia detested the smug expression on her face, like those of the women in church who reclined on their Oriental rugs while their servants knelt behind them on the stone floor.

Chen Pan had asked Lucrecia to make room for the widow’s things, but how could anything more fit in their shop? He would be irritable, too, if she got rid of so much as a teacup.

The door bell jingled as two women in matching dresses entered the Lucky Find. They were twins, their faces shiny as new fruit. Lilac corsages were pinned to their bosoms.

“Are you looking for something special,
señoras
?” Lucrecia asked.

The light was dim, and she could tell that the women were trying to gauge the precise shade of her skin. They weren’t accustomed to seeing
mulatas
in the finer shops. The sisters barely moved their lips, and Lucrecia had trouble deciphering who was speaking.

“Do you have monkeys?” one of them inquired.

Lucrecia led the ladies to an adjoining alcove where the decorative animals were stored. She was partial to a miniature hippopotamus, which she thought looked like an amiable cross between a pig and a cow.

The sisters hunted the shelves stealthily, as if they might sneak up on their prey. They admired a hand-painted lamb and shuddered before a woodcut of a leopard. But there were no monkeys. As they turned to go, Lucrecia spotted one of the sisters slipping a crystal frog into a fold of her dress.

If this had been the street, Lucrecia might have wrestled the woman to the ground to reclaim her merchandise (the other peddlers would have rallied to her assistance). Instead she bent over, pretending to pick up something off the floor, and emitted the unmistakable trill of a frog.
Brrriii, brrriii.
Once, twice, three times it took for the woman to release the frog and tuck it under a chair cushion.

Lucrecia resumed her dusting with vigor. The glass case under Chen Pan’s abacus was devoted to religious articles: prayer books and crucifixes, two chalices and a bishop’s miter, rosaries of varying lengths and hues. One worn blue rosary had been there for years. It reminded Lucrecia of her mother’s hands, of the African sayings she’d made her memorize.
Aseré
ebión beromo, itá maribá ndié ekrúkoro.
When the sun comes out, it shines on everyone.
Champompón
champompón ñanga dé besoá.
What was yesterday is not today.

Mamá had been devoted to Yemayá, goddess of the seas. She used to dress Lucrecia in blue and white and together they’d take offerings to the beach on Sundays, coconut balls or fried pork rinds when she could make them. They’d lived with an evil couple on Calle San Juan de Dios. Mamá had done everything for them—cooked their meals over the charcoal fire, polished the marble floors, washed and ironed their sheets every day. She’d put Lucrecia to work boiling the master’s handkerchiefs, which were always so
mocosos
they’d made her gag.

The master used to visit her mother every night. Mamá would cover Lucrecia with a sheet, teach her to still her breathing. A terrible pig-groaning, the bed shuddering with fleas, then the master would leave for another day. Lucrecia had believed that this was just another of her mother’s chores, like washing clothes or peeling yams. Mamá stuffed rags that smelled of sour milk between her legs. She never explained anything.

Boom tak-tak-a-tak. All morning long, the penitents banged on their wood. In Havana, everyone suffered as hard as they played. Early on Ash Wednesday, Lucrecia had seen people wear
cenizas
on their foreheads, but by noon they were eating meat and trading horses. Last year, a Dutch nun had told her that Cubans were immoral. Where else was it normal for a priest to go straight from church to the cock pit without bothering to remove his three-cornered hat? And the priests had families of their own with mistresses on the side, just like any other man.

After the Protestant missionaries gave up on Chen Pan, they concentrated on converting Lucrecia. “From what?” she’d ask, serving them
cafesito
with guava and cheese. They told her that she was living in sin, that she had to marry Chen Pan to sit right in the eyes of God. One sermon after another. Lucrecia knew that what they said had nothing to do with her. If she believed anything, it was this: Whenever you helped someone else, you saved yourself. Isn’t that what Chen Pan had done when he’d taken her from Don Joaquín?

In her opinion it was better to mix a little of this and that, like when she prepared an
ajiaco
stew. She lit a candle here, made an offering there, said prayers to the gods of heaven and the ones here on earth. She didn’t believe in just one thing. Why would she eat only ham croquettes? Or enjoy the scent of roses alone? Lucrecia liked to go to church on Easter to admire the
flores de pascuas,
but did she need to go every Sunday?

Chen Pan, on the other hand, grew more inflexible with age. Lately, he’d begun insisting on Chinese-only explanations for everything: such as that everyone was born with
yuan,
a destiny inherited from previous lives; or that the earth balanced on the back of a giant turtle; or—she found this most silly—that everyone who wasn’t Chinese was a ghost.

Lucrecia sighed as she refolded a silk tablecloth. The enormous Spanish armoire was bulging with brocaded curtains, yards of fraying linen, and clothing at least fifty years old in dire need of cleaning. None of it sold particularly well (except to one spindly antiques dealer from New York) and spent years moldering on the shelves. After a time, no amount of fresh air or beating could rid it of its mustiness.

Although Lucrecia kept a few candles for sale at the Lucky Find, she sold most of her wares on the street.
¡Cómpreme las velas pa’ evitar las peleas!
Buy my candlelight to avoid bitter fights! This wasn’t exactly true but it was difficult to find a good rhyme for
velas.
And a catchy
pregón
attracted people like a bad accident. What tickled Lucrecia—and Chen Pan, too—was that her customers claimed that the candles actually brought peace to their homes.

From the start, Lucrecia had loved everything about making candles. The scent of the hot wax in the cauldrons. How it cooled so pure and smooth on the wicks. The way the candles burned in church, shrinking swiftly and painlessly, as she imagined a good life would. Lucrecia once heard a French prioress say that the churches in Havana burned more candles in a month than the churches in Paris did all year long. And Paris, she’d claimed, was many times the size of Havana.

Lucrecia kept her money in an account at the Chinese bank on Calle Zanja. She’d opened the account after Chen Pan had gone off to deliver machetes to Commander Sian. Little by little, she deposited her profits there. A year after Chen Pan returned from the war, Lucrecia gave him the seven hundred pesos she’d saved to buy her freedom. He took the money. What choice did he have? He knew she couldn’t have loved him otherwise. But instead of leaving, Lucrecia told Chen Pan that if it pleased him, she preferred to stay.

It was a Sunday in May when they first made love. Very early, before dawn. Lucrecia went to Chen Pan in her sky-blue dressing gown, midnight dropping her blossoms. He reached for her like the edge of heaven. Then a heat and longing grew between them, a joy so strong and unknown they laughed and cried together.

Lucrecia polished a silver platter and thought of the children they’d had since. Desiderio was born all fire, nine pounds of squalling flame. He was dangerously handsome, too—a woman’s lips, hair sleeked back with perfume, lured by each and every risk. Lorenzo was less flamboyant. His hair was thick and cottony, and his feet were identical to hers. And Caridad was born with a spot at the base of her spine that Chen Pan said made her truly Chinese. She was pretty and fine-boned and sang like the lovebirds they peddled on the Plaza de Armas.

Lucrecia suspected that Chen Pan loved Lorenzo best. By the time their son was nine years old, he was treating all kinds of ailments. Chen Pan put him to study with the herbal master from F——, whose specialty was curing consumption. (A month of the doctor’s foul-smelling plasters, and his patients stopped coughing forever.) Last December, Lorenzo had left to study medicine in China. Lucrecia hadn’t seen Chen Pan so heartbroken since they’d lost Víctor Manuel. Every day, she prayed to the Buddha and to all the saints to keep Lorenzo safe.

It was nearly lunchtime and Chen Pan hadn’t returned from Doña Dulce María’s place. Had the widow’s sons decided against surrendering their mother’s possessions? A change of heart was not uncommon in this business. A month ago, Lucrecia had accompanied Chen Pan to a retired general’s home—he’d promised to sell them his collection of international swords—only to have him threaten them both with beheading should they cross his threshold.

Their own apartment hadn’t changed much since Lucrecia had moved to Calle Zanja twenty years ago. There were no luxuries, no silver or porcelain plates to break. Everything was sturdy and useful, like Chen Pan himself. In the kitchen was an altar with a statue of a fat
chino
sitting cross-legged and content. Her first day there, Lucrecia had offered the Buddha a sprig of mint that she’d worn tucked in her bosom to keep her milk plentiful. What else did she have to give?

Chen Pan had tried to teach her how to eat with chopsticks, but Lucrecia couldn’t balance them on her fingertips. She was accustomed to eating leftovers, a bit of rice or burnt
malanga,
a scrap of jerked beef now and then. She always used her hands. For a long time, Lucrecia had only pretended to sleep as she waited for Chen Pan’s attack. Of course, it never came.

To remember all this made Lucrecia sad and happy at once—sad, because she hadn’t recognized Chen Pan’s kindness; happy, because his kindness hadn’t lessened over the years. What would have become of her life if Chen Pan hadn’t opened the newspaper that day long ago? Sometimes, Lucrecia thought, survival depended on the most delicate luck.

Her mother hadn’t been so fortunate. She’d died from yellow fever—black vomit for days, a stench Lucrecia could still smell. Mamá hadn’t been buried a month when Don Joaquín went to see her. He lifted her nightshirt, spread her legs, jammed a finger inside her. Then he licked his finger slowly. “You’re ready,
puta,
” he said, undoing his pants, and pushed himself on her. When Lucrecia cried out, he hit her. His ring bruised her cheek, made her nose bleed. Then he covered her mouth and finished his business.

It took Lucrecia many years to realize that she was his daughter (her resemblance to him was unmistakable). That what her mother had suffered, she was now suffering. That Mamá had loved her in spite of her hatred for him. That Yemayá had helped them survive.

Ay, Sagrada Virgen, Señora de Regla,
dame tu fuerza y protégenos de nuestros
enemigos . . .

Once, when Lucrecia dared to call him Papá, Don Joaquín choked her so hard she stopped breathing. She saw flashes of white, then nothing at all. He slapped her awake. “Say that again and I’ll grind up your bones and sell you as pig feed.” It didn’t stop him from battering her harder that night.