Monkey Hunting

by Cristina Garcia

  Except for Arturo Fu Fon, those who’d returned to their villages had boasted of having three or four wives, twenty children or more. The more cows, the richer the man! Chen Pan knew these men viewed him as foolish, still in love with a dead woman. “You can’t warm yourself against ashes,” they’d admonished him. Everyone had expected Chen Pan to have more wives, many children. It showed strength that a man could satisfy a young wife, keep producing sons. It was a disgrace to grow old alone.

  To this day, his friends teasingly compared him to the revered widows of China, who worked miracles through the force of their virtue. (They retold the story of the widow from G——, who cut off both ears to save her honor and was rewarded by heaven. Her ears grew back during the next rainstorm!) Was Chen Pan, they chided, counting on performing miracles in Havana with his record celibacy?

  But Chen Pan thought them the foolish ones. Did they think their young wives hadn’t noticed their thinning hair and dried-up faces? Would death be dissuaded by so much confusion and noise? Chen Pan suspected that every last one of them was fed up with his wives, his homes, and his children and would have preferred nothing more than to be left alone. So why would they want him to share their fate?

  From his pocket, Chen Pan pulled out what was left of the sky-blue dressing gown that had belonged to his wife. The gown was in tatters, the neckline torn, but he wrapped the fragment around his wrist. For ten years the nightgown had held Lucrecia’s original scent—a peppermint and sea-salt odor—before it had gotten musty with old tears. It was true that his love for Lucrecia had grown with each passing year. Chen Pan was astonished at its persistence. Who was it who said: If only one person in the world knows me, then I will have no regrets. So why was he so regretful?

  Chen Pan imagined taking a small blue boat and sailing it beyond the rim of the horizon, beyond the slowly rising sun to where he knew Lucrecia’s spirit rested. Last March, he’d bought a revolver and polished it every day. He couldn’t decide whether to go on living or simply shoot himself. Sometimes he spun the revolver on the nightstand or on the counter of his shop, waiting for it to stop and point at him directly. It never did.

  What did it mean to die, anyway? What if there wasn’t a shred of truth to anything he’d learned? After all, who had ever returned from the beyond to inform the living?

  Chen Pan marveled at the optimism of others in the face of death. Their insistence on pasting paper money everywhere. Or burying their loved ones in three coffins, one inside the other. Or inserting bits of mercury-dipped jade into the orifices of the deceased to delay their decay. What if death was no more or less than this: the ka-pling of a broken string? Each time Chen Pan thought about this, he felt as if each hair on his head was on fire.

  Recently, the young merchants of Calle Zanja had convinced him to sit for a portrait. They’d wanted paintings of all the old-timers for their new associations building. Chen Pan had found it wearisome to sit still. Why had they wanted to immortalize him now, wrinkled as he was, his face like chewed sugarcane? Why trace his withered limbs on silk? “You should save your rosy paints for the young beauties of Chinatown!” he’d rebuked them.

  Every day Chen Pan heard of this one or that one dying, another losing the power of speech. All his closest friends—save Arturo Fu Fon—had passed to the land of the ghosts. A few had suffered overly long: tumors grown to coconuts in their stomachs; legs cut off from too much sugar in their blood. There was a sad, scraping sound to all their partings. Last month, Fausto Wong had died at the age of ninety-three after eating fifty-six dumplings in one sitting.

  Chen Pan regained his humor only when his youngest grandson visited him. Little Pipo was already five years old and looked just like his father. The boy wore two-toned brown shoes buttoned on the side, and his shirts were a gosling yellow. While it was true that Chen Pan was getting harder of hearing every day, his grandson’s face, so liltingly animated, more than compensated the loss.

  Chen Pan liked to entertain Pipo with stories of Lu Yang, the warrior who had divided night from day by shaking his spear at the sun. Or of the incorrigible Monkey King, who’d stolen peaches from the Immortals’ sacred grove and eaten his fill. “The most important thing about life is to live each day well,” Chen Pan told his grandson, who looked up at him, perplexed. “In the end, you’ll have a pattern. And that pattern will speak more than anything you can remember.”

  Most days, Chen Pan settled with Pipo on the outdoor rocking chair for an afternoon nap. How sweet it was to feel his grandson’s plump cheek pressed against his chest.

  By late morning, the street vendors were aggressively vying for sales. Chen Pan watched one limping guajiro hawking a live pig slung across his back. A bedraggled farmer drove his goats from door to door, milking them for customers on the spot. How much longer, Chen Pan wondered, would their worlds last?

  Just before noon, Lorenzo came for a visit, wearing his yellow doctor’s smock. The family parrot was perched on his shoulder. Everyone knew Lorenzo in Havana and in other cities as well. It was because of him that in hopeless cases, the Cubans said, “No le salva ni el médico chino.” Not even the Chinese doctor can save him. Three years ago, Chen Pan had broken his ankle chasing a pickpocket. His son had coated his foot with bai yao and expertly wrapped it in flannel. Before long, Chen Pan could have kicked his heels together in the street.

  In May, Chen Pan had accompanied Lorenzo and Pipo on a trip to Sagua la Grande. Lorenzo had grown renowned for a potion that restored a woman’s virginity, and his services were urgently in demand. Lorenzo had developed the formula from a weed he collected in the Zapata Swamp. His patients placed a teaspoon of the lavender powder, disguised in bottles labeled VITAMINA-X, beneath their tongues for a week preceding their nuptials. Miraculously, it produced a bloodstained sheet. Lorenzo reported that lapsed society girls and their relatives paid him generously to save their families from disgrace.

  Chen Pan had taken Pipo to Calle Tacón in Sagua la Grande’s Chinatown, which bustled with shops selling incense, puppets, firecrackers, and the honey-peanut candies he loved. He bought a bag of the sweets to share with Pipo and together they watched the Cantonese magicians in the street. He overheard one criollo commenting on the Orientals’ hypnotizing skills. It’s part of their religion, more dangerous than the Haitians’ voodoo. If you look them straight in the eyes, you’re doomed.

  Chen Pan knew that many of his son’s clients also went to him for weakness of sex. Lorenzo complained that all these men wanted was to remain stiff, like soldiers saluting, for hours. What choice did he have but to procure the essential ingredients? Carcasses of wild donkeys. The dried penises of seals and sea lions (which he ground into potency powders). Tips from the tails of red-spotted monkeys. Lorenzo supplemented these with an elixir derived from the yagruma tree, which stimulated his patients’ circulation.

  “Let’s see your middle,” Lorenzo said, leaning forward.

  Chen Pan lifted his shirt and submitted to a cursory examination by his son. He wondered whether he could still please a woman the way he used to please Lucrecia, pleased her so well she’d loved him day and night.

  “History is like the human body,” Lorenzo said, tapping Chen Pan’s stomach, “overly hot or cold or rotting with stagnation.” He spoke of a longevity root called heshouwu that could keep a man alive 130 years or more.

  “Now don’t go sneaking any of that into my tea!” Chen Pan bristled. He was eighty years old. His biggest fear was that he would live so long he would turn to stone. How could he trust his son not to use some decoction to lengthen his life?

  “Don’t worry, Papi.” Lorenzo laughed. “You’re the last person who needs it! I was thinking of taking it myself!”

  At one o’clock, Chen Pan’s daughter-in-law arrived at the Lucky Find with sweet-corn soup and a firepot of steamed fish and vegetables for lunch. Chen Pan called her bing xin, pure heart, and was grateful for her visits. Around her everything smelled and tasted of China. Next month Jinying wo
uld bake mooncakes for the mid-autumn festival and offer their ancestors choice morsels of meat to win their favor through the coming winter. Chen Pan remembered how Lucrecia had learned to bake these same mooncakes for him. She’d tried everything to please his Chinese side until slowly she’d become Chinese herself.

  Chen Pan returned to the front of his shop to read the Chinese newspaper. Over the years he’d followed the reports of the Boxer Rebellion and the lengthy decline of the Manchus. First Sun Yat-sen had been president, then Yüan Shih-k’ai had replaced him. Now warlords ruled China again. Chaos and violence reigned, just like when he was a boy.

  After so many years in Cuba, Chen Pan had forgotten much of his Chinese. He mixed his talk with words from here and words from there until he spoke no true language at all. There were only a few people left in Havana with whom he could comfortably communicate. Long ago he’d lived in China, known all its customs and manners. How useless these had been outside their own geography! Still, it was easier for him to be Cuban than to try to become Chinese again.

  Today, he concentrated on the foreign news. There was a revolution in Russia and a war between Germany and most of the world. China had sent troops to the Western Front to dig trenches, bury cadavers, do the work no one else would do. In Cuba the war meant the price of sugar was soaring. In times of misery, there were always profits to be made. Chen Pan knew this better than most. With every disaster, his secondhand shop flourished.

  Not long ago, President Menocal had passed a law allowing more Chinese immigrants into the country for the duration of the war and for two years beyond it. Boatloads of chinos were coming to the island to work the sugarcane fields again. Lorenzo sent Meng to the port every morning to pass out notices advertising his herbal services.

  Chen Pan knew it was only a matter of time before the Chinese no longer would be welcomed in Cuba. In times of economic necessity, they were usually the first scapegoats. This infuriated Chen Pan because thousands of chinos had fought hard for the country’s independence. During the Ten Years’ War they’d taken up machetes, fought under Calixto García, Napoleón Arango, all the great leaders.

  They’d stayed long years in the war, too, not like those criollos who swelled the ranks after news of a victory and disappeared when the losses began to mount. Chinos fought everywhere in the eastern provinces—in Las Villas, Quemado de Güines, Sierra Morena, San Juan de los Remedios, Camajuaní. When they were captured, they pretended to speak no Spanish, but not a single one ever surrendered or betrayed the Cuban cause.

  When Chen Pan had delivered his fifty machetes to Commander Sian back in 1868, the battlefield had been littered with torn limbs and severed heads and the Spaniards’ fallen, heaving horses. Chen Pan helped round up supplies from the corpses—swords, muskets, boots, and numerous trumpets. Overhead, vultures drifted patiently, waiting for their turn at the carnage.

  Before long, people from town had come to dance with the rebels and blow the stolen Spanish horns. They roasted a pig under the taper-lit trees and drank a local aguardiente that fire-burned their throats. A former slave entertained them with impersonations of the rebels. He told a joke about a Chinese ayudante who served the troops fresh-roasted chicken after every skirmish.

  “How do you find so many chickens in the woods?” one soldier asked him.

  “¿Tú quiele pollo?” the Chinese cook retorted. “Mata capitán pañol.” (“You want chicken? Kill a Spanish captain.”)

  That night Chen Pan had gotten drunker than he’d ever been in his life. When he passed out, the skies were so dense with stars that he tried to reach up and grab a handful.

  Chen Pan watched the setting sun bronze a royal palm. Laundry fluttered among the crumbling buildings. A glossy Pekingese sniffed its way down the street wearing the oversized collar of a circus clown. A dragonfly drifted by, trailing its gauzy world. To see a thing for the first time, Chen Pan thought, was better than to know it.

  It was at this hour that he saw his errors most clearly, the days he’d wasted in empty pursuits. If only Lucrecia had lived longer. Without a woman, yang ruled a man’s blood. Life became a horse without reins. Strength had to be balanced with weakness. How else could stability be bred?

  To spend his regrets, Chen Pan went to the cockfights with Arturo Fu Fon. They preferred the pit near the Regla ferry. Everyone—blacks, chinos, and criollos—gathered there for the best fights in the city. “¡Mata! ¡Mata!” they shouted until the arena shook with violence. After the fights, the handlers spit rum on the heads of the victors and blew alum into their eyes to stanch the bleeding.

  Chen Pan wished he could go to the pit every day, but it wasn’t easy to arrange. Recently, Arturo Fu Fon had begun falling asleep unexpectedly, sometimes in midsentence. One minute he might be talking or grinning his toothless grin and the next, loudly snoring. And for no reason Chen Pan could discern, Arturo Fu Fon frequently covered his face with his hands like a woman, as if to shame somebody.

  Chen Pan climbed the stairs to his rooms over the Lucky Find and poured himself a cup of wine. He watched the night settling over Havana and wondered whether anything new was possible. The city, it seemed to him, conspired to sadden him with its daily repetitions. The nine o’clock cannon shot. The church bells ringing every quarter hour. The watchmen mechanically shouting the time and the state of the weather.

  As the bats swept along the rooftops, Chen Pan remembered the cranes that had nested in the eaves of his great-aunt’s house, the spring chives she’d cut in the night rain, the river lotuses that had stripped their petals to make room for new blooms. How could he explain this sudden longing he had for home? For the way his heart clamored like a bird in its last moonlight?

  By now, Chen Pan knew the precise length of each darkness. Sometimes he washed his face through the small hours of the night until his skin appeared translucent. Other times, he didn’t wash at all. Tonight the moon seemed to shrink away to nothing, like a fasting monk. In China it was said that a rabbit lived on the moon under a cinnamon tree, pounding an immortality salve.

  The air was much too warm and close in his room. Chen Pan opened the window and saw an owl streak past, stealing the day’s last moments. The old wisteria shivered on its vine. If only he could fly alongside the owl, glide over the rooftops, sleep with a cloud for his pillow.

  Chen Pan poured himself some more riojo. He recalled his fugitive days in the forest, the long months of his mother’s taunting, calling him to her eternal emptiness. Now who could walk the way he’d walked in Cuba anymore? Who could hide for three hundred days, avoiding men and ghosts, living on nothing but memories and his five senses?

  On the island all the trees had been chopped down, the land leveled and torn to plant more sugarcane. Forget the pines, Chen Pan lamented, forget the mahogany, the cedars, the indigo trees (from which he’d whittled the best and sharpest knives). Forget the trogon birds hiccuping in the canopy. Forget them. Forget everything. That island he knew no longer existed. If he could start over, would he board the ship for Cuba again?

  Chen Pan poured himself another cup of wine. A few more, and he would start to feel drowsy. Perhaps he would dream of those cranes again, snow white and wheeling through the sky. Or of the white paper on his front door indicating that he’d already died. Or of the funeral curtains blowing in the storm. Or the steady wailing of his neighbors. In his dream he was shouting, his eyes fixed as a dead fish: I want to live a little longer, my friends!

  He saw his remaining days like so many autumn leaves. The past, the present: where to end his life? Everything had vanished in the breeze. Yes, a man lived less than a hundred years, but he harbored cares for a thousand. Chen Pan took a long swallow of the riojo. It seemed to him that he’d been waiting all his life for this very cup. Soon, he thought, the roosters would rip open another day with their battling cries. But his friend hadn’t lied. When Chen Pan drank his red wine, he smiled and became immortal.

  MONKEY HUNTING

  A Reader’s Guide
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  CRISTINA GARCÍA

  A CONVERSATION WITH CRISTINA GARCÍA

  Scott Shibuya Brown is a writer and professor at California State University, Northridge.

  Scott Shibuya Brown: What inspired you to write the novel? How and why did you decide to write about the Chinese experience in Cuba?

  Cristina García: When I was growing up in New York, my parents took me to my first Chinese-Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side. A Chinese waiter came over, took our order in Spanish, and to my utter delight, I was able to get Cuban black beans with my pork-fried rice. I thought this was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. But when I asked my parents how and why the Chinese and the Cuban dishes could go together like this, they couldn’t tell me. So this book, in part, is an exploration of “why?” In addition, my own daughter is part Japanese, part Cuban, part Guatemalan, and part Russian Jew, and I’ve become interested over the years in compounded identities such as hers . . . not just those people trying to figure out one hyphen but multiple hyphens.

  SSB: Was it difficult to write about Chinese history and culture? Did you have any reluctance about taking it on?

  CG: It was extremely difficult for me because my protagonist was not only a male and Chinese but from the nineteenth century and transposed to Cuba. I had to learn a tremendous amount about Chinese culture and history, as well as Cuban colonial times, and I had to fight self-charges of fraud all along the way. What was probably most useful for me was reading a great deal of Chinese poetry in translation, both for the sensibility and cultural preoccupations that it offered. Even so, I had to work very hard to enter the bloodstream of my character, Chen Pan, more from the outside in than the other way around. I got to know him slowly and painfully but ultimately in a deep and satisfying way. Constantly, I questioned my ability to do his story justice and with authenticity. I was so concerned that I ran my book past several experts just to make sure I’d gotten it right. To me, the book is ultimately a 120-year dialogue between Cuba and Asia.