Monkey Hunting (6 page)

He took the money and went to the market, to a stall that sold toys and children’s clothes. Chen Pan selected a wooden train, a rag-stuffed horse with a painted grin, calf-leather shoes, and a minuscule linen suit. He ordered all of it delivered to his shop in an hour.

Then he visited a fabric kiosk
. Basic principles of
sewing.
Chen Pan tried to remember all the fripperies he removed from the whores on Calle Rayos. Voluminous dresses with endless ribbons and bows. Satin corsets with whalebone stays. Lace petticoats. Bustles that made their
nalgas
swell. Beneath all this were slips and silk stockings rolled above the knee. So many buttons and fasteners to undo, it frustrated the clumsier men.

Lucky for Chen Pan, his fingers were nimble. The ladies favored him. Plump dumpling girls were what he liked now. He hated to feel any ribs whatsoever. He went for the older ones, twenty-five and up. No paying two hundred pesos for a virgin like some of his friends. A waste of money, in his opinion. The ladies praised Chen Pan for not ripping their garments. No violent pushing, either. Smooth tiger from China. Never left a bruise.

Chen Pan bought forty yards of gingham, another twenty of a fine scarlet satin. Assorted fluff and ribbons for the underthings. A brand-new pair of scissors. A tin box filled with needles, buttons, and thread.

On his way home, he stopped at a restaurant called Bendición for meat pies, tamales, and sweet potato fritters. Chen Pan was perplexed by the names Cubans gave their shops. La Rectitud. La Buena Fé. Todos Me Elogian. How could anybody guess what was sold inside? Once he’d walked into a shop called La Mano Poderosa, only to find huge wheels of Portuguese cheese for sale.

Lucrecia had swept the apartment clean and was chopping an onion in the kitchen when Chen Pan returned.
Very regular cook.
He watched as she peeled and diced two potatoes, dropped them into a pot for soup. In a few days, he would teach her how to make milk pudding for his breakfast. And in the spring, when fresh bamboo shoots were available in Havana, he’d show her how to cook them in a great earthen pot with boiling rice.

A whimpering came from the bedroom. Lucrecia went to her son and settled him at her breast. He suckled eagerly, his fists resting possessively on her chest. Chen Pan showed Lucrecia his purchases, offered her a stretch of the satin to touch. She didn’t admire the fabric. Instead she stared at him again, her lips pressed together by the icy muscles of her face.

There was a loud knocking downstairs. It was Federico Véa. The Lucky Find was crowded with tourists from England who needed Chen Pan’s assistance. What the British considered precious amused Chen Pan: silver letter openers with strangers’ initials and farm animal figurines. They would pay a premium, it seemed, for anything sporting a pig. He noticed that their teeth were small and mossy, like woodland creatures’.

After they left, Véa complained that nothing at the Lucky Find had a fixed price. How could he be expected to remember figures that changed from one hour to the next?

“Those pigs you sold for fifty pesos apiece were ten pesos yesterday,” he huffed.

“Of course they went up!” Chen Pan bellowed back. “The price is what a customer needs to pay!”

When he returned to his apartment, Víctor Manuel was asleep. Chen Pan arranged the baby’s clothes and the rag horse for him at the foot of the bed. Lucrecia watched him closely.

“¿Que quiere con nosotros?”
Her voice could have sharpened knives.

“
Nada.
I want nothing.” Chen Pan wasn’t sure this was true, but could he simply set them free?

Lucrecia ate her food in silence, gave him no thanks, stiffly rinsed the dishes. Then she slept, fully dressed, curled around her infant son, her coarse hair spread loose on the pillow. Chen Pan forswore his usual cups of red wine and settled on the velvet divan. For once, he insisted that Lady Ban sleep by herself in the kitchen.

He thought of going to Madame Yvette’s. It was Thursday night and the voluptuous Delmira from Guïnes would be there. Maybe he should take
her
the river of satin. She’d know how to thank him. Chen Pan thought of Delmira’s rained-on earth scent, her kindling thighs. Best of all, Chen Pan loved the salve of her pink padded lips working every inch of his
pinga
before swallowing him whole.

A bright half-moon shone through the window. The wind raved, tearing the leaves off the palms, altering the sky. Chen Pan recalled how years ago, a fierce windstorm had coated his family’s wheat fields with dust. The same day, his father had claimed that he’d procured a magical herb that would enable him to remember everything he’d ever read. Before he could test its efficacy, the bandits had come. By nightfall they’d severed Father’s head with a sword, parading it on a pole for the entire village to see.

When you remembered a wind, Chen Pan thought bitterly, it blew forever.

Had Chen Pan gone mad? Soon that was the word in Chinatown. Over the next few weeks his fellow merchants visited him, trying to dissuade him from his imprudence. Chen Pan listened to them, treated them to warmed wine at the Bottomless Cup in return for their admonitions. But he didn’t change his mind.

“Too much heat is simmering in your head!” the grocer Pedro Pla Tan warned him. He advised Chen Pan to get a proper wife from China or, better yet, to visit the new whorehouse on Calle Teniente Rey. Why invite trouble by buying this slave? There was a French girl just arrived at Madame Yvette’s, a fourteen-year-old natural blonde who wore red lace panties slit in two. “Her waist is like a roll of new silk,” Pedro Pla Tan sighed.

The fish seller, Benito Sook, quoted Confucius, who said that it wasn’t until a man reached sixty that his ears obeyed him. It was clear, Sook insisted, that Chen Pan’s ears were nowhere near obedience.

Sook and the other merchants agreed that Chen Pan’s sentimentality surely would cause a deformity. After all, look at how Evelio Bai’s head had so swollen from his love of flattery that he could barely hold it upright. Or how that Ramón Gu’s arms had stretched to preternatural lengths from his greediness. And what of the sad example of Felipe Yam, who continued to grow lumps on his breasts from sheer indolence?

Yes, the men agreed, Chen Pan would suffer this decision. At the very least he would be plagued with backaches and blurred vision, a sore neck, a dizzy head, a parched tongue.

On her first morning at the Lucky Find, Lucrecia knocked over a marble bust of a Spanish general, prompting the patriotic Véa to quit on the spot. Lucrecia swept up the broken pieces, then continued dusting from one tenebrous end of the store to the other. But each time she turned around, Lucrecia knocked another heirloom to the ground. Only a bronze Moroccan elephant, defenselessly sprawled on its back, escaped with just a minor dent.

How could she be so good with a knife, Chen Pan wondered, and ox-clumsy in his shop?

“The air is nervous in here,” Lucrecia said, unsettling the stale air of centuries with her feather duster. She insisted that the objects in Chen Pan’s store confessed their miseries to her. The Virgin of Regla statue loathed the drunkard sculptor who’d carved her face into a grimace. And the mantilla draped over that gilded mirror had once belonged to a flamenco dancer who’d lost her left leg to gangrene.

“Foolish girl!” Chen Pan interrupted her. “Talking to knickknacks!” For days she’d said nothing at all, and now this?

When Lucrecia went upstairs to prepare his lunch, Chen Pan brought his ear to the Virgin’s lips. For him, though, there was nothing but a stagnant silence.

A week later, with his inventory in near shambles and the baby’s squalling fraying his nerves (Chen Pan, too, had begun breaking his share of antiquities), he asked Lucrecia, “What else can you do?”

“I make candles,” she said. It was a skill she’d learned with the Sisters of Affliction.

Chen Pan bought everything she needed to get started. There was slow-burning string, beeswax, assorted dyes, a copper cauldron, flexible scrapers, and a wooden drying rack. Then he set up a workshop for her in the back of the Lucky Find.

Before long, Lucrecia was peddling her candles all over Havana. For Easter, she made pastel tapers dipped in vanilla and rose oil. By June, she was selling votives scented with crushed orange blossoms and calling them
velas de amor.
Word spread among the city’s savviest women of the candles’ stimulating effects in the boudoir. Every Thursday when Lucrecia offered a fresh batch of her love candles for sale, women came from everywhere to secure their week’s supply.

In July, Lucrecia announced to Chen Pan that she’d gone to the magistrate to have herself evaluated. Chen Pan knew what that meant.
Una coartación.
Lucrecia wanted to buy her and Víctor Manuel’s freedom.

“You’re free to go today,” he told her. “I won’t hold you here against your will.” Lucrecia didn’t answer him, but she also didn’t leave.

Instead Lucrecia planted a garden behind the Lucky Find. Yuca. Taro root. Black-eyed peas. Three types of beans. No ornamental flowers whatsoever. She said she would grow only what they could eat.

Chen Pan insisted that she plant chrysanthemums like his great-aunt had in China. The flowers bloomed in the fall and promoted longevity, he told her. His great-aunt had drunk wine infusions made from the sweet-smelling petals and had lived well into her eighties.

Lucrecia reluctantly planted a bed of chrysanthemums to honor Chen Pan’s wishes, but the flowers quickly wilted in the summer heat.

Víctor Manuel grew to be a strong boy. He began walking at nine months. One step, two steps, then down in a heap. He never bothered to crawl. His legs were fat with rolls. Sturdy as two dynasties, Chen Pan laughed. It pleased him to squeeze them. Víctor Manuel liked the sound of the drums, of the lute and the Chinese
sheng
pipes, and so Chen Pan paid musicians to come and play for the boy in the mornings.

“Sa! Sa!” Víctor Manuel imitated the lute player, sounding like the wind blowing through the rain.
“Ch’ieh! Ch’ieh!”
he shouted when the notes climbed as high as the voices of chattering ghosts. The boy swayed and rocked with the swelling notes and cried when the lute player went home.

On Saturdays, Chen Pan took Víctor Manuel with him to Arturo Fu Fon’s barbershop for a trim and a fresh round of gossip. Víctor Manuel followed the talk, eyeing each man in turn as though assessing the worthiness of his information. Chen Pan was convinced that the boy would be speaking perfect Chinese soon.

“Perfect Chinese with this bunch of woolly heads?” Arturo Fu Fon laughed, folding his hands over his generous stomach. “Poor little cricket. Who’ll talk to him after we’re gone?”

At the barbershop, the men were most fond of discussing naval disasters. They speculated on the fate of the
Flora Temple,
shipwrecked with eight hundred fifty Chinese aboard. Or the
Hong Kong,
which ran aground after the recruits set it on fire. Most mysterious was the case of
El Fresneda.
Shortly after leaving Macao, the frigate disappeared. Months later, the British navy found it drifting off the coast of the Philippines with one hundred fifty skeletons on board.

“People will devour each other when there’s nothing else to eat,” Arturo Fu Fon said, sliding his razor down the cheek of the remarkably hirsute Tomás Lai.

“Wouldn’t there be somebody left after picking all those bones clean?” asked Eduardo Tsen. He came to the barbershop only to argue.

“A man today, tomorrow a cockroach or a hungry ghost,” Salustiano Chung predicted from beneath his gauze hat. Then he turned to Chen Pan with a grin. “And what do you think, Señor Chen?”

Everyone laughed. Their routine was already well worn.

“As the great philosopher Lao-tzu once said,” Chen Pan began, “ ‘Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.’ ”

“Yes, and those who speak of the virtues of silence are themselves cockatoos!” Arturo Fu Fon chimed in.

When they forgot their shipwrecks, the men spoke longingly of home. The lowliest
chino
in Cuba knew by heart Li Po’s poem:

Before my bed
there is bright moonlight
So that it seems
like frost on the ground:
Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon,
Lowering my head
I dream that I’m home.

Most of Chen Pan’s friends had been farmers in China, and no amount of city excitement could replace for them the quiet pleasures of working the soil. Chen Pan, however, wasn’t the least bit nostalgic. He was most grateful to Cuba for this: to be freed, at last, from the harsh cycles of the land. He’d carried both books and a hoe in his youth. He preferred the books.

When he was a boy, the elders in his village had tried to foretell the harvest by interpreting the movement of beans they tossed in the air, or by puff-roasting rice in an iron pan. They listened to the timbre of thunder linking the old year with the new, then made their prognostications. But there was no predicting the inconstant proportions of sun and rain, the continual affliction of floods. And their palm-bark coats did little to protect them from the weather. In bad times, children were sold to pay the rent, and everyone chewed boiled wheat to calm their empty stomachs.

Chen Pan no longer believed in demons that ruined the harvest, that food eaten from one’s own toil tasted best. He would rather buy a single yam and roast it plain for his dinner than resign himself to the unpredictability of the land. He preferred to pay his weekly bribe to the Cuban policeman, too (a rather modest sum on account of the De Santovenias), than surrender his entire farm to the Emperor’s tax collectors.

Víctor Manuel’s birthday coincided with the Chinese New Year. What could be luckier? Plump, brown, healthy boy. Firecrackers popping all around. Pyramids of oranges and pomegranates. A red satin birthday suit sewn for him with silk thread and tassels. A miniature jade baton to ensure a scholarly future.