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.
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.
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