Monkey Hunting

by Cristina Garcia

  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 so
on.

  “Your brother is watching her,” Lorenzo murmured.

  “She’ll die!” Meng whined.

  Chen Pan knew that Meng was right. His older brother would most likely forget to replenish the water and seed. Meng sullenly pulled a thread on his sleeve, partly unraveling the cuff. Then he yawned so wide his pink throat was visible.

  “When will we get there?”

  “By lunchtime,” Lorenzo said. “Now go back to sleep.”

  Behind the morning clouds, the sun hesitantly stirred. The Cuban dandy was talking in his sleep. Chen Pan couldn’t make out his mumbling except for the phrase “these damn centipedes,” which he angrily repeated. The Belgians were also asleep. Chen Pan studied their faces and wondered if they’d ever been in love, stayed up whole nights in restless passion.

  Before Lucrecia had gotten sick, they’d often made love twice a day—early in the morning before the children woke up and again at night, after they went to bed. Chen Pan would have preferred spending more time romancing his wife’s body, but she hadn’t encouraged his lingering. Sometimes when they’d slowed down enough, he’d felt Lucrecia’s pleasure ringing from her body to his.

  Since her death he hadn’t so much as visited a brothel. How could he have betrayed her? Besides, Lorenzo reported that the whorehouses had gotten dangerous in recent years. He spoke of their ruinous effects on his clients: carbuncled testicles, penile lesions, pustules, and malodorous discharges that took an arsenal of ointments to treat. Certainly, Chen Pan had heard enough to keep his own temptations in check.

  Still, he fantasized about bedding one last woman— a true tigress, someone who would dance for him in the scantiest of silks, make love to him for hours, collapse with him in happy, erotic exhaustion. But how could he face Lucrecia on the other side after an escapade like that?

  For Chen Pan’s seventieth birthday, Benito Sook had sent him a saucy whore recently arrived from Hong Kong. A moth-browed girl, she had flawless skin and a plum-ripe mouth. She looked like that Fire Swan, the trapeze artist from Amoy long ago. But the Hong Kong girl’s eyes were ruined, Chen Pan noticed, raw as two wounds. He shooed her away with a fistful of bills so she would reveal nothing of what hadn’t transpired.

  The train approached the Santa Clara station, its paint badly blistered from the sun. Chen Pan had been to the station earlier in the year. It was here that he and Lorenzo had changed trains for the Cienfuegos Line to visit Lorenzo’s patients in Santa Isabel de las Lajas, Cruces, and Cienfuegos. In the opposite direction was Sagua la Grande, with its lively Chinatown. It was Chen Pan’s favorite city after Havana.

  In a distant field, Chen Pan spotted a dozen men chained together and marching at gunpoint. They were bareheaded, in rags, without the machetes they would normally be carrying. For what abominations had they been blamed? More to the point, how many of them would be alive by week’s end? Chen Pan wanted to wake up his grandson and tell him something more: Few things are as certain as hatred, mi amor.

  The Belgian couple woke up to the early morning chaos of the station. Soon the steward came by, offering them a breakfast of sweet rolls and coffee. Meng ate voraciously, smearing his bread with all the butter on his plate. Lorenzo wasn’t hungry. He complained that his back was sore from sleeping all night on the torturous seats. Chen Pan accompanied his grandson to the rest room. They squeezed past the passengers in the corridor, glimpsing others behind the thick partitions of glass. He was astonished at the endless layers of crinoline the criollas wore in the dead heat of summer.

  In the toilet, Chen Pan noticed that Meng’s penis was practically the size of a man’s. Chen Pan hoped that the boy would grow into it. Overly large pingas were as problematic as too small ones, he’d learned from the seductive Delmira years ago. She’d complained about a certain guajiro who’d been built like a lead pipe and had damaged her inside. Later, Delmira had announced with no small satisfaction that the man had died from an equine disease he’d gotten while copulating with a mare.

  A new passenger was in their compartment when Chen Pan and his grandson returned. The man introduced himself as Rodolfo Cañizares and said he was on his way to Havana to assume a post with the Ministry of the Interior. His jaw was clean-shaven and strikingly capacious, the size of a small pumpkin. He was talking to the Belgians in a painfully loud Spanish.

  “How are things in Paris? Do you still eat snails there?” He pulled some snuff from a leather pouch and offered it all around.

  The Belgians stared at him blankly. Chen Pan laughed in spite of his instant distaste for the stranger. His oiled hair and studied manner reminded Chen Pan of his eldest son. Desiderio was a year older than Lorenzo and despised everything Chinese. It grieved Chen Pan that his own son was ashamed of him, of his accent and the Chinese “pajamas” he wore. On Christmas Day, Desiderio sent a creaky quitrín to pick him up at the Lucky Find. For one strictly supervised hour, Chen Pan got to visit his other grandchildren.

  Chen Pan opened the window and let the wind blow against his face. The Zapata Swamp claimed a shoe-shaped peninsula of saw grass and cow-lily leaves to the south. Lorenzo was convinced that he could find herbs there for his curing potions. It had become impossible for him to obtain ingredients from China. Last summer, he’d contacted two herbal importers in San Francisco, but their products had proved inferior.

  The number of Lorenzo’s clients was dwindling. Few Chinese were immigrating to Cuba, preferring instead to go to the United States. Chen Pan knew that most of the old former coolies, like himself, had died or gone back home for good. These days, there were more funerals than births in Chinatown. The younger generations hardly considered themselves Chinese. And they preferred more modern medical methods, too, demanding overnight results even if it ended up killing them.

  The land of Matanzas province was unremarkable and flat. Here and there, Chen Pan spotted a cluster of bohíos or a dilapidated general store (invariably run by an irascible gallego). Only an occasional flushing poinciana enlivened the view. In China, so many people believed that Cuba was a land of lush jungles that Lorenzo said he’d ended up believing it himself. Upon his return, he’d had to reacquaint himself with the island, with its lusterless plains and dull acres of sugarcane. Sometimes Chen Pan forgot that the sea was never more than thirty miles away.

  Meng looked quietly out the window. It seemed to Chen Pan that his grandson was happiest in silence, that the very sound of words caused him discomfort. Why, the boy hadn’t uttered a word until he was three. His older brother had spoken for him. Little Brother wants more rice. Or Meng says there are thirty-two sparrows in the laurel tree. What Meng finally said when he’d opened his mouth was: “I want pistachio ice cream with extra chocolate sauce.”

  Lorenzo feared that his son was unintelligent, but Chen Pan insisted that this wasn’t true. Little Meng, he said, was a born mathematician, multiplying and dividing long before he attended school. He’d proved adept with Chen Pan’s abacus and frequently helped Lorenzo barter his services. When a patient had no money to pay him, it was Meng who suggested that a tin of kerosene might do instead.

  Chen Pan couldn’t get used to his son’s way of doing business. On any given day Lorenzo might receive as payment chickens, guava paste, tallow candles, salt cod, rum, hatchets, hammocks, yams, or a basket of freshly caught crabs. Four years ago, Lorenzo had gotten Jade Peach after eliminating a baseball-size goiter on a shipwright’s neck.

  It wasn’t easy being el médico chino. Everywhere Lorenzo turned, he saw disease and debility. Chen Pan, too, had learned to detect the sickness in people’s eyes, in the texture of their skin and their faltering movements. On a stroll through the plaza or in a passing donkey cart, he spotted diabetes, hepatitis, cancers, tumors, so many failing hearts.

  And, of course, there were the people whom his son’s herbs and ointments couldn’t cure. The notary in Cárdenas who wore a fur coat every day of the summer. Or the blue-eyed laundress who fancied herself the Queen of the Geese and ate grain from a gil
ded dish. What medicaments did he have for them?

  Near Güines, a wedding procession snaked along a dirt road toward a whitewashed church. The horses were bedecked with a profusion of ribbons, and Chen Pan imagined that he could hear the jingling of their harness bells. At the end of the line was the bride’s carriage, entwined with a thousand camellias. Chen Pan’s heart rose an inch, swelling with good wishes for the unseen couple. How young they would probably seem to him, how naïve.

  The Cuban dandy awoke with a gargling sound and examined Cañizares sideways, like a bird of prey. He began his morning ablutions, which included anointing every exposed inch of his skin with gardenia oil. Then he excavated a bag of walnuts from his suitcase and began cracking them so loudly it sounded like pistol shots. The noise alarmed the occupants of the neighboring compartments, who began shouting again that the train was under siege.

  The downpour came from nowhere. One moment the sky was as blue and enameled as French china and the next, a herd of clouds raced across it, goaded by the wind. The birds flew about in a frenzy, seeking dry places to wait out the rain. A sapodilla tree shivered, lamenting its still-unripe fruit. Tiny bud, kernel of boy awaiting them in Havana! In just a few hours more, Chen Pan thought, the train would arrive and he would meet his new grandson.

  Incense

  SAIGON 1970

  For the first few months of her pregnancy, Tham Thanh Lan ate only bitter foods. Pickled melons. Quail eggs in salted vinegar. Dirt-encrusted roots she collected on the outskirts of town and boiled to make soups. She spread fish sauce on everything, including the Neapolitan ice cream Domingo brought her from the PX. He offered her American treats— peanut butter and saltines, Oreo cookies, hamburger meat. But all these foods nauseated her.

  Now Tham Thanh Lan kissed Domingo only if he smeared nuo’c măm on his lips first. To make love, he had to spread the fish sauce everywhere.