Monkey Hunting

by Cristina Garcia

  Domingo reached into his pockets and pulled out the duck eggs, offering them to Tham Thanh Lan. He gave her the apricot, too.

  Tham Thanh Lan wasted no time boiling water in an old tin pot. The steam filled the tiny apartment. Thick droplets collected on the ceiling. Domingo detected the potent aroma of fermenting fish. Tham Thanh Lan said that normally she would have let the ducks hatch and grow, but in Saigon they’d be stolen in no time. It was better to eat them right away. Then she sliced the apricot into abundance and served it on a flowered plate.

  There were bits of military trash scattered on her kitchen shelves—belt buckles, canteens, a handful of spent ammunition, a helmet printed with numbers crossed off at fifty-six. On a hook in the corner hung a four-foot-long snakeskin, its yellow diamonds faded to gold. A huge, wrinkled map of Vietnam covered most of another wall, pockmarked with blots of ink. Next to it was a bed the size of a child’s, narrow and neat, the sheets stained with sweat.

  When the duck eggs were cooked, Tham Thanh Lan took hers and broke its soft translucent membrane. She drank the liquid, sprinkled salt and pepper on the yolk, then scooped it out with a spoon and ate it with some thom leaves. Domingo gave her his egg and she ate it as well.

  Domingo began thinking of stories to tell her. About the time a pack of Jamaican Negresses had chased his Abuelo Lorenzo along the Bay of Santiago, determined to try his virginity powder. Or how his Tío Desiderio had owned the most notorious gambling den in Havana and kept a British pistol strapped to his calf. Or how his father had made the best shrimp dumplings in Guantánamo, maybe all of Cuba. But Domingo wasn’t sure any of this would make sense to her.

  Instead he pulled up his shirt and showed Tham Thanh Lan where the shrapnel had torn him up and the Army doctor had stitched him back together.

  “Touch it,” he said.

  When she didn’t, Domingo took her hand and guided it along his scars. Her nails were long and scratched him lightly. He played with her hands, delicately at first, one finger at a time, before bringing them to his lips.

  The downpour shook the building, rattled the empty glass jars, made the fading snakeskin sway from its hook. The stiff little curtain billowed into the room with each gust of wind. A few storm-littered leaves drifted through the window. One moment, Tham Thanh Lan was swathed in pale satin; the next, there was only the candor of her naked flesh. Domingo’s eyes hurt from trying to see all of her at once.

  He thought of the whorehouse that his Tío Eutemio had taken him to when he was fourteen. The women had been dressed like geishas and schoolgirls, prison inmates, and mermaids with speckled rubber fins. The back room, it was said, had been outfitted like a medieval dungeon and offered a malnourished girl in an ancient chastity belt who was especially popular with the locksmiths in the province. For his first time, Domingo had chosen a pendulously breasted negra who’d reminded him of his mother.

  Domingo brought his face close to Tham Thanh Lan’s. Her eyes were open, but there was no curiosity in them. Her nipples were dark brown coins. Everywhere he kissed—the slight upward curve of her breasts, the length of her sinewy legs—he coaxed forth new scents. The betel nuts her father had chewed the day he’d sold Tham Thanh Lan to the passing fish sauce trader. The banana pudding she used to cook for him Sunday nights. The smell of the men who’d paid the trader a few đôńg apiece to sleep with the girl from the North.

  A seam of numbers paraded along the inside of Tham Thanh Lan’s right thigh, smelling of enemy metal. She told Domingo that the numbers were the identity code of a jealous Republican general. And the scars between her legs—she opened them wide to show him—were from this same general, who had once tied her to the bed and penetrated her with his dagger. Tham Thanh Lan had been told two things in her hospital bed: that she could no longer bear children and that the general had shown up at Army headquarters and shot himself in the head.

  Domingo delicately licked Tham Thanh Lan, pushing the tufts of her hair aside with his tongue. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “Tôi nghiêp,” he repeated in Vietnamese.

  He thought of the pygmy boas that he used to spot by the Río Guaso. Majacitos bobos. The snakes curled up into balls and released a foul smell, squeezing blood from their eyes to scare off predators. They were supposedly benign, but people would tell you otherwise: of the cousin who fell into a trance and croaked like a frog after having been bitten; of the aunt whose thumb blackened and dropped off her hand, leaving nothing but a charred-looking stump.

  Domingo was from the Río Guaso, from the grasses where the snakes lay in wait, from the palm trees where the boisterous parakeets lived, flashing the red patches beneath their wings. He’d spent his whole childhood by that river, assuming he would never leave, swimming beneath its tents of whispering trees.

  Domingo burrowed his face deep between Tham Thanh Lan’s legs, breathed in her sorrows, longed for forgiveness himself. He heard the yelping of a dog on the street, then nothing but Tham Thanh Lan’s mournful pleasure. When she kissed him back, she bloodied his lips with her ardor, stole the breath from his lungs. Then she eased him inside her river of honey until they mingled their sweet distant waters.

  A heavy shelf of clouds settled over Saigon as Tham Thanh Lan slept. The wind moaned a continual dank music, played an African refrán in Domingo’s head: The breeze is wind but the hurricane is also wind.

  On and off he slept, but mostly he watched Tham Thanh Lan. He was consoled by her steady breathing, by her smudged, unmoving lips. He traced a finger along her hipbone, touched the faint blue pulsing at her brow. She looked serene, a spray of fallen blossoms. Only her feet moved, as if they were hurrying somewhere, alternately twitching with dreams. For the first time since leaving Cuba, Domingo had no wish but to remain exactly where he was.

  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 garapinafrom 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.

&
nbsp; 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.