Sometimes he distracted himself by spying on the few female slaves in the fields. On lucky Sundays, Chen Pan watched the younger ones bathing in the stream or lying with their lovers in the thickets. He noticed with longing that in the heat of love they didn’t close their eyes or turn their heads.
The fights over the women grew so bloody and bitter that someone usually ended up dead. As long as bones are rare, a pack of dogs can’t share. Three slaves came to blows over a plump girl who worked in the kitchen. The two smaller men managed to strangle the bigger one, then bashed in his head. At the funeral the slaves chanted and clapped over the lifeless body, clamoring for the dead man’s safe passage to Africa. Then they sealed his eyes shut with semen before burying him in the woods.
On weekends, fiestas animated the barracón. The criollo trader came around with his white bread and fritters. He also sold calicoes and muslins, peanut candies, muscle ointments, and gingham handkerchiefs. An occasional cockfight heightened the excitement. Chen Pan used to play the cocks in China, sneaking off to W—— after his mother and wife were asleep. He liked to judge a rooster by its battle-trim, by the ferocity in its eyes. Once, he’d bought a new hoe with his winnings.
There were other entertainments. Slave games over whose prick was biggest. Many such contests. In one, the men thrust their pingas through a hole in a deep wooden box with ashes at the bottom. The man who pulled his pinga out with the most ash was pronounced the winner. Cabeza de Piña frequently won this game.
When Cabeza was ordered to sleep in the stocks for fighting with the mayoral, several Africans surrounded Chen Pan. They accused him of getting Cabeza in trouble. But Chen Pan fought back. No other Chinese bothered to speak to the slaves, he complained, so why were they attacking him? When the Africans forced Chen Pan to put his pinga in the ashes box, he wanted to vanish from the shame. He pulled it out, shriveled, with no ash at all.
By harvest’s end, Chen Pan was hacking his way through the fields with the same proficiency he’d first admired in the Africans. As the last of the cane matured, its skin grew brittle, its stems clotted with treacly juice. Chen Pan learned to move to the rhythm of the swaying stalks, to the heat and buzz of the insects. He cut cane until time lost all meaning, until his throat cracked drought-dry, until his dreams blew nothing but dust.
If he completed his contract in Cuba, what would he have to show for it? No money and an old-man body. His fate burnt in the fields. A dead-dog luck.
In the last grueling weeks of the zafra, the sugar mill bell tolled twenty times in a single workday. Chen Pan’s life was metered by the snap-crack punctuations of the whip, by his sun-cured skin torn off in strips. A few of the chinos got less arduous jobs. They loaded the cane onto the crushing machines or tended the boiling sap. Chen Pan was picked for these jobs, too. But after the suffocation of ship and barracón, he couldn’t bear to stay indoors for long. The sun was brutal, it was true, but sometimes cranes flew overhead, rinsing him with their shadows and wandering luck.
A cloud-crane setting out, you’d rather go back home, white clouds and beyond, sip streamwater, sleep in empty valleys . . .
Chen Pan missed his great-aunt most of all. Before going to Amoy, he’d taken leave of her under the eaves of her thatch-roofed house. How he’d loved the neat rows of her chrysanthemums. They’d spent hours collecting mulberry leaves, and her blackened teeth had flashed whenever she’d told him a ribald joke. As a child, Chen Pan had believed that his penis (and every other boy’s, for that matter) was little more than a source of mirth for women.
“Remember, we own nothing in death,” his great-aunt had said, embracing him. “Go safely and return home.”
Chen Pan’s father often had auditioned his poems for this beloved aunt. She was old and unschooled, but she listened to her nephew attentively. Whenever Father read her an expression she didn’t understand, he would scratch out the line. He’d decided to write only what any good peasant could appreciate.
Chen Pan composed letters to his family in his head. Dear Auntie. Dear Wife. Dear Brother. I am not dead. But he didn’t finish these letters. Better to let everyone think that brigands had robbed and killed him, that vultures had come and plucked out his eyes. He knew that his wife would burn incense in his name, urging his ghost home. Chen Pan liked to imagine her surprise at his return. But with each swing of his machete, that prospect grew more and more remote.
Sometimes a storm broke the monotony of the days, but soon the downpours became predictable: the clouds built their same gray cliffs every afternoon, the rains lasted no more than an hour. And at dusk, the fields grew tremulous with fireflies. Only a calamity made one day different from the rest. Like the time Yeh Nien got struck by lightning as he raised his machete in a storm, or the morning slow-witted Eulice lost three toes to a toppled ox.
Late one afternoon, a magnificent thundershower obscured the fields. The slaves couldn’t see to the ends of their machetes, but they were forced to keep cutting cane just the same. In the blurring confusion, Chen Pan caught sight of El Bigote shouting orders at a field boss. He picked up a sharp stone, aimed carefully, then hurled it at the overseer’s temple—the very spot, Chen Pan knew, that if hit correctly would instantly kill a man.
Every slave was whipped in retribution for El Bigote’s murder, but nobody confessed to the crime or to having witnessed it. No one said a word to Chen Pan either, but the slaves offered him small tributes. He got his pick of the machetes at dawn and was permitted to drink first from the noontime water trough. Akuá mbori boroki ñangué‚ the Africans murmured. The goat is castrated only once.
Years before, a traveling acrobat had come to Chen Pan’s village with an enormous macaque monkey on a leash. It was summer and the macaque broke loose and climbed his family’s kumquat tree, gorging, uninvited, on the fruit. No amount of coaxing could get the monkey down. Then it tried to mount all the local dogs, including the little helpless ones like his greataunt’s Pekingese. Chen Pan had killed that monkey, too, with a single throw of a stone.
The women took more notice of Chen Pan after he’d killed El Bigote. A skinny slave named Rita started coming around to his end of the barracón. Her skin was smooth and mauve-looking, her legs stick-straight. When she walked toward him, her narrow hips shifting rhythmically, Chen Pan felt his whole body grow taut with ardor. Rita confessed to Chen Pan that he tempted her curiosity.
“Chinito lindo, chinito lindo,” she chimed, running her fingers down his arms.
The other men hooted and teased Chen Pan. He began dreaming of Rita, of her voice sifting through his loosened hair, of her lips hungrily parting to receive his kiss. In the mornings, he awoke with Rita simmering under his skin.
Chen Pan thought of his wife waiting for him on their wheat farm, her thin hair tied in a topknot. She wasn’t a bad woman. She’d cooked for him, mended his clothes, lain with him when he’d asked her to, even in the high heat of noon. Chen Pan hadn’t loved her. He knew this now. When they’d separated beneath the willow tree wreathed with a rotten vine, he’d felt nothing.
A few days later, Chen Pan presented Rita with a pocket mirror he’d bought from the criollo trader. “Now you will have to admit how beautiful you are and forgive me the passion I feel for you.” Chen Pan had practiced saying this to himself in his halting Spanish. Rita angled the mirror to catch the sunlight and examined herself full in the face. She seemed pleased by her reflection.
“Do you love me?” Rita asked in her singsong voice.
“Sí,” Chen Pan said, lowering his head.
The same day, Chen Pan noticed the master eyeing Rita. Don Urbano lingered by her patch of sugarcane. He had her machete specially sharpened and sent an indoor slave to serve her fresh mamey juice in the shade. After dinner he ordered Rita’s steady lover, Narciso, to be switched to the night shift at the mill. Then the master summoned Rita to his bed.
When Narciso returned from work the next morning, the mayoral, without a word of warning, shot him dead. Nobody
was allowed to bury him. Instead he was fed to the bloodhounds before the entire barracón , piece by bloody piece. Poor Mandingo spirit, the slaves chanted, lost and forever wandering. How the old hags clucked: Gallina negra va pone’ huevo blanco. Black hen gonna lay a white egg.
As Rita’s belly swelled, the rest of her grew leaner, as if by a transference of flesh. She forgot Chen Pan and her friends in the barracón, forgot her own name and the gift of the little mirror, forgot that she was a slave. Every night Chen Pan knelt by her hammock, whispering in her ear. He told her the story of the herd boy and the weaving maid, who were turned into stars by the girl’s celestial mother and placed on opposite sides of the Milky Way. Only one night a year, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, could they meet.
The other Chinese said Chen Pan was crazy, in love with a dead girl. The Africans also believed this, but they were too tender-mouthed to say it aloud.
It became clear to the new overseer that Rita was of no more use in the fields. Within a few weeks, she was sold to a coffee plantation in the mountains of Oriente. Everyone said that to pick coffee in the rain would finish off a slave in half the time of sugarcane. La Gorda, the Bantu witch, threw her divining cowries and predicted that Rita would not work in the fields again: She will die upon reaching her destination,choking the boy-ghost in her womb.
After the cane was cut and ground, the days were taken with lesser tasks—repairing tools, weeding the dormant fields, reseeding them in the intervals between the rains. A few Chinese adopted Spanish names, cut off their queues, adapted their palates to the local food. They took the names of wealthy Cubans, hoping for their same prosperity. Yü Minghsing became Estéban Sariñana. Li Chao-ch’un renamed himself Perfecto Díaz and slicked his hair back with perfumed grease. Thickheaded Kuo Chan insisted on being called Juan-Juan Capote.
“Why Juan-Juan?” Chen Pan asked him.
“Twice as much luck,” he replied.
Kuo Chan learned to dance as well as the Africans, learned to move his hips to the drums. He forgot he was a chino at all.
Chen Pan’s grief over Rita made him lucky in gambling. His opponents said that Chen Pan won time and again because he didn’t care if he lost. Distraction, they said, was what he sought. The Chinese and Africans played their games heatedly—botón, fanfän, chiffa. Chen Pan was lucky but not greedy. He stopped playing after winning five or six pesos. No use winning more and losing all, he decided. Dead men—yellow, black, or white—had no friends.
On New Year’s Day, twelve Chinese escaped La Amada plantation. Chen Pan was angry that he hadn’t been included in their plans until all but one of the men were hunted down and stock-shackled for ten days. As a warning, Chen Pan and the other chinos were forced to watch as the fugitives had fingers chopped off from their weaker hands. Then they were thrown back into the fields to cut more sugarcane.
For months afterward, all anyone talked about was the chino who got away: Tiao Mu, the fisherman from F——. It was said that Tiao Mu had jumped into the river with the bloodhounds upon him and disappeared. Vanishing Smoke, everyone called him. The first Chinese cimarrón.
The Africans claimed that Ochún had protected Tiao Mu, that the river goddess had turned him to mist before sweeping him off to the safety of her sister, Yemayá, who ruled the blue seas. Tiao Mu, they said, must offer Ochún honey and gold for the rest of his days to stay well protected. Would he know, the slaves debated, what to do?
Nobody ever heard from Tiao Mu again, but no one doubted that he was alive and free. Everyone on the plantation thought more highly of the Chinese on account of Tiao Mu. After he escaped, los chinos were treated with more respect.
In May, Chen Pan slipped away from the other slaves during a march to weed a distant field. He held his breath and sank to his knees in the tall grasses. The crickets screeched his fear, but nobody noticed that he was missing. Crows squawked and taunted from a nearby ceiba tree. Chen Pan remembered what Cabeza had told him: the tree was their mother; her sap, blood; her touch, a tender caress.
There were mounds of dirt beneath the ceiba, talismans buried amid the roots. Chen Pan crawled to the tree and rubbed its sacred earth on his face and throat, on his temples to clear his thinking. It was moist and acrid and cooled him, steadied his jumping blood. Immense sulfur-colored butterflies hovered in the tree’s lowest branches. A contrary wind stirred its leaves.
Chen Pan stood up and walked away. Too easy, he suspected. How could elation eclipse despair in one fell swoop? In the woods, every rustle and hiss frayed his nerves. How had this happened? He’d come to Cuba to seek his fortune and now he would end up peeling bark for his supper. But what time was there for lamenting? To survive, Chen Pan decided, he would first need to steal a knife.
By midnight, alone in the forest, Chen Pan sat high in another ceiba tree, willing himself invisible. Bloodhounds barked madly in the distance, searching for him, devil ghosts in their throats. The wind carried their news like ten thousand swollen tongues. The Africans had spoken of the restless demons that roamed the island’s woods, disguised in animal furs. High in the ceiba tree, his guts grinding, Chen Pan prepared for the worst.
There was no moon that first night and for many nights afterward, only the mimicking birds, scattering spirits, the trogons hiccuping in the canopy of trees. The owls were the worst, shrieking at him in Chinese. One owl—tattered and brown and without markings—followed him for nine months.
“Unfilial son!” it scolded again and again.
Chen Pan concluded that his mother had died and her ghost had come to haunt him—for running away from China, for not sending her money or producing a grandson. He tried to explain to her why he’d left Amoy, that he’d planned to return to their village and make them all rich. But she wouldn’t listen.
He stole eggs from a tenant farmer to appease his mother’s spirit. He offered her tender meat he’d smoked over a fire—an unborn almiquí he’d torn from its mother’s slit belly, the bones delicate as flower stems. He made her a wreath from palm fronds and jungle orchids, more beautiful than any in China, gave her wild pineapples and pomegranates oozing a ruby juice.
“Eat,” Chen Pan begged her. “These are better than our peaches, juicier than the Emperor’s plums.”
“Unfilial son!” she screeched back.
He brewed teas from sweet leaves to ease her misery, prepared a bed of guinea grass and reeds by a clear stream for her to rest, roasted doves with wild taro and honey he’d scooped from hidden hives. When it rained so hard the forest seemed a swamp and it was impossible to start a fire, Chen Pan built his mother a shelter of lopped branches and palm-tree leaves and bound it with majagua, a natural twine.
“Unfilial son!”
Mostly, Chen Pan walked and walked until his feet bled, following streams and the slow rotation of stars. He grew tired, careless, twisted his ankle in a clump of vines. When his mouth got infected, he packed moss on his gums to keep them pink. He lost one tooth anyway, a molar so black and angry with pain that he had to yank it out with a liana vine.
His own shadow grew unfamiliar to him, thin and strangely angled. He suspected that his great-aunt had died, too. Now only his wife and his brother were left on the farm. In China it was said that owl chicks ate their mothers as soon as they were big enough to fly. Perhaps he could hunt this tormenting bird, cook it, devour it once and for all. How else to get rid of it? At the thought, Chen Pan began to tremble.
That night the owl’s maternal scourge stopped without warning. The forest turned cemetery-quiet. Moonlight unsettled the trees. Birds flew overhead soundlessly. This was much worse than his mother’s scoldings, Chen Pan thought. At dawn he slept a little, dreamed of lotuses and speeding geese.
Chen Pan trudged through the woods, his heart knocking hollow-loud. His footsteps echoed in the leaves before they fell, shivering, from the trees. He ate only wild guavas. Shit a pink stream. His skin turned as red-brown as the island earth. Chen Pan saw smoke rising from behind a cluster of p
alm trees. He heard the sound of coughing. Were there other cimarrones in the forest, hiding like him? Should he turn himself in? Go back to cutting sugarcane? Of what use was his freedom now?
He remembered something his father had told him. It is in death alone that we return home. So Chen Pan arranged a bed of cobwebs and silvery leaves on the bat guano that cushioned the floor of a limestone cave, smeared pollen on his face and hands. He would die there, leave his bones to crumble. He would die there in that nowhere cave, and then his ghost would fly home to China.
The next morning Chen Pan awoke feeling rested. The air was damp and the sky clear. Above him, lumbering high along a branch of a cedar tree, was a fat jutía. If he succeeded in killing it, Chen Pan decided, he would remain in Cuba. He picked up a speckled stone and threw it with all his strength. The rodent seemed to hover in midair before collapsing to the ground. It would make an excellent breakfast.
North
NEW YORK CITY (1968)
Domingo Chen was startled again by the fat D floating egg of the moon. Nobody at work mentioned how it stayed elliptically full all summer, not even Félix Puleo, who kept an extra mattress on the rooftop of his building for his secondary girls and had, one might say, a fine view of heaven. So how could the moon stay full all summer long and nobody notice?
There’d been nothing in the news about celestial aberrations. Domingo would’ve heard about it because there was always a radio pumping, around the clock. At the Havana Dragon, the music rumba-plenamerengued all night, ricocheted off the moon and bounced back to fry cutlets. And when the music wasn’t playing, the bad news was blaring—subway decapitations and hijackings to Cuba and all the tragic static of Vietnam.
Monkey Hunting Page 3
