Domingo tried to teach Tham Thanh Lan Spanish, another language of the body. Mi reina. Mi adoración. Eres mi sueño. She said that they were having a boy and Domingo didn’t doubt her. He taught her how to say mi hijo, my son. But she wasn’t interested in learning new words.
He wanted to show Tham Thanh Lan how to dance, but her hips resisted.
“I’m too tired,” she said, and settled down for another nap.
Domingo went on a shopping spree, bought Tham Thanh Lan things she didn’t need: hair curlers and a waffle iron, lemon cake mix, and a brand-new sewing machine that she sold for a fortune to a tailor who fitted uniforms for the Vietnamese navy. He bought Tham Thanh Lan a radio, but she made him return it.
“No more sound,” she insisted. Even turned down to a crackle, music made her unbearably sad.
Domingo couldn’t get used to the silence, to the monotony of her sleeping. Soon he was hearing music everywhere—in the ping and hiss of the new teapot; in the percussive rumble of his stomach. Tintintintin patá patí. Who was he without a little rhythm?
His Tío Eutemio had told him that during slavery days, drumming had been forbidden altogether. The sugar mill owners hadn’t wanted their “property” getting overly excited and sending messages to slaves on other plantations. In those times, to own a drum, to play a drum, were acts of rebellion punishable by death. And so the drums and the drummers learned to whisper instead.
The day Domingo brought Tham Thanh Lan an electric fan, she told him that he would leave her, ride horses in a place with blazing rocks and no trees, a landscape Domingo had trouble imagining. Then she turned on the fan and lay down in front of the artificial breeze. Behind her, the sticky curtains stirred.
She dreamed of crabs, dead and rotting on river-banks, their casings picked clean by seagulls and sand fleas. Tham Thanh Lan recalled the summer the Mekong River died, how the fishermen’s nets pulled only dead fish from its depths. Sometimes she woke up frightened, thinking a crab had replaced the baby in her womb. “It moved like a crab! It ran sideways!” she cried until Domingo soothed her with fish sauce kisses, placed his hands on her belly, and said, “Mi amor, crabs don’t kick like that.”
His mother had blamed the yanquis for every deformed baby she’d delivered in Guantánamo—the infant born with an eye in his umbilicus; the hairdresser’s triplets attached like paper dolls by their hands and feet. The Americans, she said, had dumped poisons into the Río Guaso, contaminating the sugarcane fields, making the coffee trees redden with blight. One Easter Mamá had delivered a Haitian boy whose heart had steamed furiously outside his chest. A moment later, his tiny heart had exploded in her face like a grenade.
Domingo took Tham Thanh Lan for walks in the flame tree garden behind the Buddhist temple. He entertained her with stories about the general he drove around all day. General Arnold F. Bishop had an artificial leg that replaced the one he’d lost in Korea. The leg kept coming loose at inopportune moments. Last week they’d hit a bump on a country road and his leg flew out of the jeep, knocking a startled peasant off his water buffalo.
In March, Domingo was away for ten days driving the general in an armored convoy to inspect the troops in the South. General Bishop was a big Bob Hope fan and looked forward to the Christmas shows every year. He claimed he’d fucked one of those Gold Digger showgirls, a kinky one from Kansas City who’d gotten off sucking the stump of his leg. “Damn, it gives you something to kill for!” General Bishop exclaimed.
Domingo had seen the Christmas show his first winter in Vietnam. The women were skinny and flatassed, no breasts to speak of, their legs all horse-bone and sinew. Plus he didn’t get the jokes. Not a single one. He missed the girls of Guantánamo—their stretch shorts and the tight-fitting military uniforms that showed off every curve. The year he left, they were wearing a Polish perfume that smelled like a mixture of wisteria and gasoline.
What would General Bishop know about any of this? Still, when the general offered Domingo his regular girl in My Tho, he didn’t refuse.
When he returned to Saigon, Tham Thanh Lan had barely eaten or slept. Her dark, swollen eyes accused him. How had she known that he’d slept with another woman?
“You’ll marry me, right?” Tham Thanh Lan demanded each time they made love. Domingo was always weak and grateful then. And always he said yes.
He knew from experience that pregnant women didn’t act normally. He’d seen the butcher’s wife, Leoncia Agudín, a religious woman, assault her husband with sailor-mouthed insults in Parque Martí. His crime: buying a cucurucho from the comely peanut vendor. Of course, she was five months’ pregnant at the time. Women who had baby after baby were nicknamed barrigonas (there were many barrigonas in Guantánamo) and forgiven for a different standard of behavior altogether.
Domingo had grown up around these crazy pregnant women. They’d sat in his mother’s kitchen, splashing rum into their morning coffee, hunched together over the latest scandal, laughing raucously over men, whom they’d ridiculed or lamented with such ferocity that it made Domingo ashamed to be a boy. His mother would see him blushing and say, “Don’t worry, mi cielo. This has nothing to do with you.”
The women had played Radio Mil Diez at top volume and danced with each other, colossal belly to belly, or pulled Domingo close and taught him how to cha-cha-chá. “Así, little Papi. Don’t grind too much or the nice girls will refuse to dance with you.” In this manner, he’d learned the secrets of women.
Domingo heard of GIs taking their Vietnamese fiancées or wives home after their tour of duty. The army frowned upon this, did everything possible to keep the couples apart, more so if children were involved. A few men had killed themselves for the love of these whores. Everyone said they’d been gook hoodooed. No cure for it except death itself.
Stories drifted back to Vietnam of former bar girls waking up in Georgia, bleaching their hair, wearing blue jeans and cowboy hats, renaming themselves Delilah. Other stories were sadder still. Of underaged girls dressed up like China dolls at their husbands’ insistence, paraded around small towns in Texas or Mississippi, shopping for trinkets at Woolworth’s. Saddest of all were the suicides—the poisonings, the slit wrists. Anything to set their souls free to fly home.
Domingo wondered about these migrations, these cross-cultural lusts. Were people meant to travel such distances? Mix with others so different from themselves? His great-grandfather had left China more than a hundred years ago, penniless and alone. Then he’d fallen in love with a slave girl and created a whole new race—brown children with Chinese eyes who spoke Spanish and a smattering of Abakuá. His first family never saw him again.
Domingo was permitted into the officers’ club because he worked for General Bishop, but he wasn’t welcomed there. His skin was too dark, his features not immediately identifiable as one of them. The bartender refused to make him a mojito—rum, club soda, lime juice, a sprig of mint. Domingo got a warm beer instead. In the hospital, wounded and with a couple of medals to his name, he hadn’t been treated right either. The nurses had been as tight with him as one of their overtucked sheets.
The problem wasn’t exclusive to the U.S. Army. Four years ago, he’d been arrested by a policeman in Guantánamo for practicing “negritude”—all because he’d let his hair grow into an Afro. Por favor. His mother had taken one look at the precinct captain, whom she’d happened to have delivered, exceedingly jaundiced, thirty-four years earlier, and he’d released Domingo without a word. Now here he was fighting for the Americans nine thousand miles away and mistrusted by them, too.
Another driver, an Indian, also complained about the unfair treatment. Emory Plate said his father had been a famous stargazer back in New Mexico, that he’d known when sickness would claim a child or a ewe would lose her litter, that people had come from everywhere to see him. Emory said he wished that he’d paid more attention when his father had talked about starlight. Now his old man was dead a year and who understood anything about their lives?
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sp; In Cuba, Domingo had learned that the white settlers in North America had murdered most of the Indians, that they’d killed off their buffalo, millions of them roaming the Great Plains, that the Indians were partitioned off on reservations, aimless and mad-eyed. Domingo’s teachers had taught him this, teachers who’d spat when they said yanquis, teachers who’d made him do the same.
He remembered the time those same teachers had asked everyone in school to pray to God for ice cream. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday they’d prayed. Then on Friday, the teachers had encouraged them: “Now pray to El Comandante and his great humanitarian revolution for ice cream.” A half hour later, the assistant principal arrived carrying two huge buckets of vanilla.
One night over drinks, Domingo told Emory how he felt trapped between obligation and pleasure. How Tham Thanh Lan would threaten him one minute, then go down on him the next. How the force of his need pulled him down. Domingo was on his seventh beer. His eyes were watery, his hands unsteady. Back home, his uncles could polish off quarts of a fermented pineapple brew that unhinged even the most stalwart drinkers. They’d called it el crocodilo because when you least expected it, the liquor snapped you in two.
The next day Domingo went to the army library with a lingering hangover. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he longed for a cheap distraction. The first book he checked out was So You’re Pregnant! Domingo learned that human fetuses reached the size of a rosebud by three months, that fat deposits settled under their skin by six. He tried to picture his child’s still-blind eyes, its ear buds and fingers with their little whorled tips. By seven months it’d be covered in vernix caseosa, a cheesy wax that would protect its skin the way grease protected ocean swimmers. Domingo had trouble imagining the baby any bigger than this.
That night, as he studied Tham Thanh Lan’s enlarged body, Domingo grew frightened. How could he become a father? He hadn’t been able to protect his own father, much less finish being a son. Tham Thanh Lan was in the kitchen boiling water for tea. She sat at the table, lost in thought, stirring her tea until it got cold. Now and then, she looked over at Domingo and smiled.
Coño, what did he really know about this woman?
If only everything could stop, remain fixed and knowable for an hour. Instead everything raced forward, unrelentingly, like a river, never settled or certain. Sometimes the same Vietnamese phrase stomped inside Domingo’s head: Chêt rôì. Dead already. A hook in his mouth like one of his river fish. Maybe what he needed was a rip cord out of his whole damn life.
Domingo started checking out other books from the library—cowboy stories, a volume on tropical diseases, a history of the American Civil War—the more remote from his life, the better. He turned down poker games, stopped throwing dice, put his money away in an army savings account. At the Vietnamese water-points, where the other drivers went for a quick wash-and-service and two-dollar lays in the refreshment shed, Domingo kept reading.
He read A Child’s Book of Saints nine times. Domingo admired the way Saint John had refused King Wenceslaus when he’d demanded to hear his wife’s confession. Prison, torture, Saint John kept his mouth shut.
At times he wondered what the men from his first platoon were doing back home in Brooklyn and Omaha, St. Louis and Tuscaloosa. Was Lester Gentry still running numbers for his father? Had Joey Szczurak gone back to college, or was he shooting heroin instead? Were they watching the war on the evening news now like everyone else? What did it matter, anyway? They’d all die sooner or later, slowly or mercifully, emptied of light.
On the last day of August, Domingo showed up at Tham Thanh Lan’s apartment with a ten-dollar box of chocolates. He didn’t find her there. It was hot and humid, and the mosquitoes were pitiless. After a while, Domingo ate the chocolates, but he had difficulty swallowing them. His throat felt stripped and raw. He feared that he was forgetting something important, something that could change everything. His ears ached from listening so hard to nothing.
There was an orange on the kitchen table. He sat down and peeled it with his pocketknife. The thick rind scented his fingers. He remembered that his father had told him that in 1857, the year Chen Pan had arrived in Cuba, the price for a Chinese coolie was 150 pesos. One hundred fifty pesos for eight years of a man’s life—that is, if the chino lasted that long. In twice that time, Domingo figured, his own son would be grown.
His legs grew numb from sitting. He stood up and jumped in place, felt a prickly sensation return to his feet. He began pacing the apartment. Suddenly everything seemed small to him, cramped like a little cage—the toy bed and coverlet, the kitchen table no bigger than a drum. Domingo felt huge in contrast, a giant, especially his hands.
What was he meant to do? He wanted to know, whatever it was.
Domingo felt in his pocket for his great-grandfather’s spectacles. He polished the lenses with his shirttail and put them on. Papi had told him that Chen Pan’s eyesight had been excellent until six months before he’d died. Domingo looked at himself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. The middle of his face looked perfectly clear, but he was blurry around the edges.
He closed his eyes, still wearing the glasses, and saw his father on the day they’d left Cuba. Papi had been wearing his white linen suit and Panama hat, a red carnation in his lapel. He’d held tight to Domingo’s hand during the short flight over the Straits of Florida. When they’d arrived at the Miami airport, Papi’s hat had been confiscated for harboring tropical fleas, and so he’d immediately bought another one, his first purchase on yanqui soil.
For a moment, remembering this, Domingo felt exalted, at peace, as if he could rest an eternity. He cried out with gratitude.
“Papi!” he shouted. “¡Aquí estoy!”
But when he opened his eyes, his father rose out of sight, high and slow, like a home-seeking ghost. Domingo imagined a flock of geese accompanying him, graceful and sonorous, their stout wings stirring the breeze. How his heart flowered with tenderness! And in the pale air behind him, Papi’s Panama hat floated like a peaceful omen.
At daybreak Tham Thanh Lan appeared. Her hair was in disarray, and the hem of her ao dai was muddied and torn. She held up a rickety bamboo cage filled with crickets she’d collected along the Saigon River. She was nearly eight months’ pregnant.
“Breakfast?” Domingo joked, half relieved.
Tham Thanh Lan didn’t answer. Instead she imitated the crickets’ song by pressing her tongue to the back of her front teeth. She insisted that Domingo accompany her to the Giác Lâm Pagoda. The temple was the oldest in Saigon, three miles by foot into the Tan Binh district. The weather was sweltering. Domingo thought of the army morgue he’d visited in Danang this time last year, the stink of embalming fluids, the dead naked men stitched up like crude science projects. It had taken him two days to eat anything after that.
At the entrance to the pagoda, a statue of Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy, stood on a lotus blossom. Tham Thanh Lan slipped off her sandals and gestured for Domingo to remove his shoes. She led him past hundreds of funeral tablets and an army of gilded figures he didn’t recognize.
Candles burned everywhere, each one a little vote for change. A pot of white lilies wilted sleepily in a corner. Domingo recalled all the petitions buried by the roots of the ceiba tree in Parque Martí, a myriad of wishes and talismans. His mother always prayed under the sacred tree before going to work. Araba iya o, she’d greet the mother ceiba, and ask it for blessings in bringing forth life. On her way home, she’d give the ceiba thanks for another job well done.
Domingo tried to think back to what he’d wanted once, some essential need. When he was nine, he’d run along the beach near Santiago. The Revolution had been only a month old. His father had warned him of the dangerous undertow, of the rip tides that had claimed unmindful lives. But all he’d seen was the waves breaking steadily, predictable as pleats. He’d kicked up sand as he ran, harder and faster, before diving into the sea.
Domingo shielded his eyes from the glare of th
e candles. The wax gave off a scorched smell. Yesterday he’d emptied his entire savings account at the base. One thousand and twelve dollars. He wanted to give it all to Tham Thanh Lan, to count it out for her in a pile on her kitchen table, to promise to send more every month. He needed to go away, to leave her like another country.
Tham Thanh Lan took his hand and led him to the figure of the Thich Ca Buddha as a child, dressed in yellow. “This is mi hijo,” she told the young god, clutching her enormous stomach. Then she lowered herself to her knees. She wanted Domingo to swear his loyalty to her, with this god as her witness. He began to pray—not to the Buddha but to Ochún, on account of the god’s yellow robes:
Madre mía, dueña de todos los ríos del mundo donde todo hijo de santo va bañarse para recibir la bendición del agua dulce . . .
Tham Thanh Lan bought a finger’s width of scented kerosene for one of the forty-nine lamps on the altar that was strewn with miniature Bodhisattvas. The kerosene, she told Domingo, would burn with her wish for their happiness. She wrote their names on a scrap of paper and attached it to a branch of the altar. Domingo’s shirt was soaked with sweat, but his skin felt cold, like a just-caught fish. He heard the senseless rush of his own blood.
The toll of a bronze bell rolled through the smoky temple, ascending slowly, carrying Tham Thanh Lan’s prayer to heaven.
It was dusk when they returned from the temple. Tham Thanh Lan went to bed still dressed in her ao dai. Outside, the rain came down hard and slanted by the wind. Lightning lit up a distant patch of purplish sky. Warblers quarreled loudly in a nearby banyan tree.
Domingo watched himself watching Tham Thanh Lan from a distance, like a ghost on the other side of a riverbank. Noiselessly she breathed in the darkness, slept the radiance of a doubled life, oblivious to the clumsy circling of moths, to the rain, to their ruin. Her tiny feet began paddling the air. And so you go, never to come back. Did he imagine her saying that?
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