In Cuba, nobody ever asked him where he was from. If you lived in Guantánamo, you were usually from there, several generations back. Everyone knew who you were. That didn’t necessarily mean they were nice. Domingo’s childhood nemesis, Héctor Ruíz, used to taunt him, saying his Chinese eyes tilted everything he saw. Domingo was smaller than Héctor, but he fought him every time. Now he wondered whether Héctor wasn’t right all along: that his world was intrinsically askew.
Tonight the lieutenant had canceled the regular helicopter so as not to call attention to their jungle camp. Why stir up unnecessary dust? To him, choppers were good only for bringing in ammunition and food or hauling the men out when things got nasty. The lieutenant wanted everyone lying low, too, despite the pressure from headquarters to pile up enemy casualties. The men were grateful for the lieutenant’s good sense. Nothing worse, Domingo agreed, than an officer who actually liked his job. Same went for squad leaders and grunts.
So far, Domingo had been lucky. In May he’d stormed into a temple with two soldiers and found a wrinkled monk bent in prayer, his teeth wired to a statue of the Buddha loaded with explosives. Domingo was standing a few feet away when the monk blew up, but he barely got scratched. After that everyone took it as fact that he was freak lucky, his instincts antennae-fine.
Domingo had had so many close calls—the dud hand grenade that had landed at his feet, the malfunctioning booby trap, the sniper’s bullet deflected off the rim of his helmet—that other soldiers began clinging to him like plastic wrap. It got so nobody dared cross a rice paddy dike without checking with him. Domingo kept his great-grandfather’s spectacles in a buttoned-up pocket of his flak jacket. He suspected that they were his charm.
But how long his luck would last was a matter of heavy speculation. Lester Gentry, who’d been a runner for his bookie father in Brooklyn, took odds out on Domingo every day. Domingo even placed bets on himself now and then. If, in fact, he was invincible, he wanted some of the action. A month ago Lester had machine-gunned an old woman and two little boys in their hut, the rice still warm in their bowls. Since then, Lester distracted himself by betting on how long Domingo would live.
Last week Domingo and he had managed to capture a VC, hands up, along with his Russian pistol, some salted eggplant, and a twelve-year-old French pornographic magazine. Upon closer inspection, they found that the prisoner was barely fifteen, stringy-chested and half eaten by fire ants. He’d been living underground for a year, he confessed in his fractured English, crouched in the dark. A paperback of inspirational verse by Ho Chi Minh was stuffed in his back pocket.
Domingo had climbed into the boy-soldier’s hole and felt oddly at home there. He’d found a few scraps of paper covered with poems. One was called “Nuóc,” “Water,” which he knew also meant “country.” He’d wanted to keep the poems, maybe translate them in his spare time. But the lieutenant had ordered him to turn them in with the maps and other military debris. Domingo liked to imagine Army code breakers racking their brains trying to make sense of a Vietnamese love poem.
The rain began suddenly, igniting a soft rustle in the trees. The mountains murmured in the distance. Domingo took off his helmet, still tied with branches from the afternoon’s patrol. The damn thing distorted every sound, felt like a block of concrete on his head. He was dead tired and sweating heavily.
Between the humping and the night watches, Domingo hardly slept. At least it was better than dying unconscious. When his time came, he was determined to meet death head-on. If he were really lucky, maybe some distant relative would kill him. He’d heard that Chinese advisers were all over the VC. Still, he hated the theatricality of dying here. The sudden, light-suspended buoyancy. The senseless grace of blood. Shins protruding from mud-stuck boots. The colorful mess of intestines. Who’d told him that men killed whatever it was they came to fear?
When Domingo had gone for R&R to China Beach, he’d slept solidly for five days. He’d skipped the surf and the steaks and the whores, mostly rousing himself to drink pineapple juice and pee. In the evenings, he’d smoked Buddha weed or a little raw opium until his brain uncoiled sufficiently to sleep some more. His dreams were hazy and oranged, like rotting film. He couldn’t remember a single one, only their persistent grinding light.
All the men there had just wanted to get back to the World. One guy from Arkansas fantasized about dying in his sleep, his family gathered around him, loudly grieving; a rosy, erotic death with pinup angels escorting him to heaven, sucking his dick along the way. Domingo didn’t understand this hunger to grow old, this clinging to life as though anyone owned it outright. Besides, who would want to live so long when you could die dancing or go up in flames?
His last night at China Beach, Domingo had hung out by the jukebox with the black Marines, drumming along on the tables and doing his Otis Redding imitation (“I’m a Changed Man,” “Groovin’ Time”). Then he’d returned to the jungle, refreshed, for another killing round.
Domingo looked out at the damp horizon, imagined death coming toward him from the trees. He pressed his thumbs on his eyelids and willed himself to see in the dark, like the vampire bats in the caves outside Guantánamo. It was rumored that the bats stuck themselves to the jugulars of sleeping horses and cows, guzzling their meals of blood. One wing soot, one wing death, the guajiros would say.
After all these months, what could he believe anymore? What could never happen happened every day. Men blown out like matches. A split second cleaved living from oblivion. Once in the interrogation hut, Domingo saw the lieutenant plunge a knife into a prisoner’s thigh and slash him down to his knee. He still got no answers. The prisoner was old, in his forties, lean as a kite. The old ones, everyone said, were the hardest to break.
Now all Domingo knew was this relentless feeding of death, as if feeding it were a specialty of the poor, like playing the congas or tending water buffalo. In-country, the motto was simple: There it is.
Last Christmas Eve his platoon had gotten caught in a firefight outside Pleiku. Six men had died in five minutes. It’d been raining so hard and out of season that their socks had rotted inside their boots. The sun had been off brooding in Cambodia. Leeches had feasted everywhere. Domingo’s feet had festered so badly he could’ve scraped off his soles with a fingernail.
He remembered the Christmas celebrations when he was a kid, the pig roasting in the open pit, the fat dribbling from under the crackling skin. Noche Buena. After the Revolution, pork was hard to come by and people made do with scrawny chickens and yams. Only Mamá hadn’t seemed to mind. She was the first to volunteer for everything, cutting sugarcane until her hands blistered and her ankles swelled with chigger bites. She never forgave Domingo for going fishing with his father on the first anniversary of the Revolution. Instead of joining the parade of his classmates with their paper flags, he’d sat by the Río Guaso waiting for the tarpon to bite.
When Papi had been arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary activities, Mamá had refused to come to his defense. She’d testified against him, reporting that he’d trafficked in contraband (a few packs of cigarettes here, a case of condensed milk there, just enough to get him in trouble). Then state security agents had tried to recruit him, but Papi refused to help. (Everyone knew that there were insurgents in the Escambray Mountains, plots to kill El Comandante, a flourishing black market in foreign weapons.) And so he was sent to the psychiatric hospital in Santiago.
Domingo had hated visiting him at the asylum. Patients caterwauled out the windows and defecated in the hallways. They bludgeoned each other with their plastic food trays. In his father’s ward, rusted buckets overflowed with vomit and shit. It was no secret that his wing of the hospital was dedicated to political prisoners, although a few lunatics were sifted in for appearances’ sake. Most of the men were ordinary, like Papi, except for their hatred of El Comandante. It was this that had qualified them for special revolutionary treatment: psychotropic drugs, electroshock therapy, beatings by the criminally insane
released in their ward.
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 dis
close? 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.
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