Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (54 page)

Jinlong strode confidently in through the gate, followed by his companions. All eyes were on the current top leader of Ximen Village. Hong Taiyue pointed to Jinlong and cursed:

“Ximen Jinlong, I must be blind. I thought you were born and grew up under the red flag, that you were one of us. I had no idea that the polluted blood of the tyrannical landlord Ximen Nao ran in your veins. Ximen Jinlong, you’re been a fraud for the last thirty years, and I fell for it. . . .”

Jinlong signaled Panther Sun and the others with his eyes. They ran up and grabbed Hong Taiyue by the arms. He fought, he cursed:

“You’re a bunch of loyal sons and grandsons of counterrevolutionaries and members of the landlord class, running dogs and spitting cats, and I’ll never knuckle under to you!”

“That’s enough, Uncle Hong. This play is finished.” Jinlong hung the battered canteen around Hong Taiyue’s neck. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said. “I’ve spoken to Aunt Bai. We’ll pick a good date for the wedding. That way you can wallow in the muck with the landlord class.”

Jinlong’s companions spirited Hong away, his feet dragging along the ground like a couple of gourds. He turned his head, refusing to yield.

“Don’t think I’m giving up. Chairman Mao came to me in a dream and said there are revisionists in Party Central.”

Jinlong turned to the crowd and said with a smile, “You folks should go home now.”

“Party Secretary Jinlong, we bad elements would like to drink a toast to you.”

“Jinlong, you must be tired,” Qiuxiang said affectionately to her son-in-law. “I’ll have Huzhu make you a bowl of thin noodles.”

Huzhu was standing in her doorway, head down, her miraculous hair stacked up high, her hairstyle and facial expression reminiscent of a neglected palace girl.

Jinlong frowned. “I want you to close down this restaurant and put the compound back the way it was. And everybody has to move out.”

“We can’t do that, Jinlong,” Qiuxiang said anxiously. “Business is too good.”

“How good can it be in a little village like ours? If you’re looking for good business, open up in the township or the county town.”

Just then, Yingchun, a child in her arms, came out of the northern rooms. Who was that child? It was Lan Kaifang, the son born to you and Hezuo. You say you had no feelings for Hezuo. Then where did that child come from? Don’t tell me that they had test-tube babies back then. You’re such a hypocrite!

Yingchun turned to Qiuxiang. “Please keep your door shut. Arguing late at night, smoking and drinking, I don’t know how your grandson ever gets any sleep.”

All the players had shown up, including Lan Lian, who walked in the gate with a bundle of mulberry roots. Without so much as a glance at anyone else, he walked straight up to Wu Qiuxiang and said:

“Roots of the mulberry trees on your land crept into mine. I chopped them off. Here they are.”

“I’ve never seen a more stubborn man in my life,” Yingchun said. “What else are you incapable of doing?”

Huang Tong, who had been sleeping in a reclining chair, got up, yawned, and walked over.

“If you’re not afraid of tiring yourself out, go dig up all those trees. These days only the dumb pigs make a living off the land!”

“Everybody out!” Jinlong shouted with a frown before turning and walking into the main building of the Ximen family home.

The people left the compound in silence.

The Ximen compound gate closed with a thud. The village was shrouded in silence. Only the moon, with no place to go, accompanied me as I strolled around the area. The moon’s rays seemed to be made up of cold grains of sand falling on my body.

In “Tales of Pig-Raising,” Mo Yan wrote in detail about how I bit off Hong Taiyue’s testicles and turned him into a cripple. He wrote that I waited until Hong was squatting beneath the crooked apricot tree doing his business and attacked him from behind. He made a great show of reporting truthfully by describing the moonlight, the fragrance of the apricot tree, the honeybees buzzing around the apricot blossoms as they gathered nectar, and ended it all with what appeared to be a sentence of great beauty: “Bathed in moonbeams, the road curved like a stream for washing water buffalo.” I came off looking like an abnormal pig strangely addicted to eating human testicles. Me, Pig Sixteen, a true hero for half my life, since when would I launch a sneak attack on someone taking a shit? His mind was in the gutter when he wrote that, and I was disgusted when I read it. He also wrote that during that spring I ran around Northeast Gaomi Township doing despicable things and that I bit to death sixteen head of cattle belonging to a peasant. He said I waited till they were doing their business and then ran up, sank my teeth into their anuses, and pulled out their twisted gray-white intestines. “The frenzied animals ran in excruciating pain, dragging their guts in the mud behind them until they fell dead.” The rat drew upon his evil imagination to make me look like some kind of monster. You know who really butchered those animals? A demented old wolf that came down from Mount Ghangbai, that’s who. He was so sneaky he left no tracks, so everybody pinned it on me. Later on that wolf slipped back to Wu Family Sandy Mouth and my savage sons and grandsons, without my even having to show my face, stomped him flat and tore him to pieces.

Here’s what really happened: I spent that night in the company of the lonesome moon wandering the streets and lanes of Ximen Village. When we made our back to Apricot Garden, I spotted Hong Taiyue under the crooked apricot tree taking a piss. His flattened canteen hung around his neck, resting on his chest. He reeked of alcohol. A man once known for his capacity for liquor, by now he was a drunk, plain and simple. As he was buttoning up his pants, he cursed:

“Let me go, you bunch of mongrels . . . you think you can keep me down by tying my hands and feet and putting a gag in my mouth. Not a chance! You can chop me up into little pieces, but you’ll never still the heart of a true Communist. Believe me, you little bastards. Who cares. All that counts is that I believe. , . .”

The moon and I, attracted by his rants, fell in behind him, moving from one apricot tree to another, and whenever one of the trees bumped into him, he raised his fist and glared at it:

“I’ll be damned, even you come after me. Well, here’s a taste of a Communist’s steel fist. . . .”

He wandered over to the silkworm shed, where he pounded on the door with his fist. The door was opened from the inside, lamplight spilling out into the night to merge with the moonbeams. I saw Ximen Bai’s bright face; she had opened the door while holding a basket of mulberry leaves. The crisp fragrance of the leaves and the sound of silkworms chewing their leaves, like the pitter-patter of an autumn rainfall, spilled out through the door with the light. I could see in her eyes that she was taken by surprise.

“Party Secretary . . . what are you doing here?”

“Who did you think it was?” Hong was obviously having trouble keeping his balance, his shoulders bumping into the racks of silkworm cocoons. “I heard you shed your landlord dunce cap,” he said in a strange voice, “and I’m here to congratulate you.”

“I have you to thank for that,” Ximen Bai replied as she set down her basket and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “If not for your support all those years, they’d have beaten me to death long ago. . . .”

“Nonsense!” He was clearly angry. “We Communists have never ceased treating you with revolutionary humanitarianism!”

“I understand, Secretary Hong, in my heart I understand everything.” Somewhat incoherently, she continued, “I thought about talking to you back then, but the dunce cap was still on my head, and I didn’t dare approach you, but now, no more dunce cap, I’m a co-op member. . . .”

“What is it you want to say?”

“Jinlong sent someone to tell me I should look after you. . . .” She blushed. “I said if Secretary Hong has no objections, I’d be happy to look after him from now on. . . .”

“Bai Xing, oh, Bai Xing, why were you a landlord?” Hong muttered softly.

“I no longer wear that cap,” she said. “I’m a citizen now, a member of the co-op. There are no more classes. . . .”

“Nonsense!” Hong was now agitated. He walked up closer to her. “No cap doesn’t mean you’re not a landlord, it’s in your blood, poison running through your veins!”

Bai Xing backed up, all the way to the silkworm rack. The hurtful words emerging from Hong’s mouth belied the depth of feeling apparent in his eyes. “You will always be our enemy,” he roared. But a liquid light flashed in his eyes as he reached out and grabbed hold of Bai Xing’s breast.

With a defiant moan, she said, “Secretary Hong, don’t let the poison in my veins contaminate you—”

“You’re still the target of the dictatorship. I tell you, just because you’ve shed your cap, you’re still a landlord!” He wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his reeking, stubble-covered mouth against her face; the two bodies crashed into the sorghum-woven silkworm racks and knocked them over. Bai Xing’s silkworms wriggled and squirmed beneath the bodies; those that weren’t squashed flat just kept chewing their mulberry leaves.

Suddenly a cloud floated in front of the moon, and in the haze all sorts of reminiscences of the Ximen Nao era — sweet, sour, bitter, hot — surged into my head. As a pig, my mind was clear, but as a human, there was only confusion. Yes, I knew that no matter how I’d died all those years ago, justly or not, fairly or not, Ximen Bai had every right to be intimate with another man, but I could not endure seeing Hong Taiyue do it to her while he was cursing her. What an insult, both to Ximen Bai and to Ximen Nao. To me it felt like dozens of fireflies were flitting around in my head. Then they came together to form a ball of fire that burned its way into my eyes and caused everything I saw to resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. The silkworms were a phosphorescent green; so were the people. I charged, initially intending only to knock him off her body. But his testes came in contact with my mouth, and I honestly could find no reason not to bite them off. . . .

Yeah, a moment of rage had incalculable consequences. Ximen Bai hanged herself from a beam in the silkworm shed that night; Hong Taiyue was sent to the county medical center, hanging on to life by a thread. He lived, but as some sort of freak with a monstrous temper. Me, I was labeled a fearful murderer with the savagery of a tiger, the cruelty of a wolf, the craftiness of a fox, and the wildness of a boar.

Mo Yan wrote that after biting Hong Taiyue, I went on a rampage in Northeast Gaomi Township, wreaking destruction on the peasants’ field oxen, and even wrote that for the longest time the locals were afraid to relieve themselves out in the woods, afraid of having their guts pulled out through their anuses. As I indicated before, that’s bullshit! Here’s what really happened. After I had, in a moment of confusion, taken that mortal bite out of Hong Taiyue, I rushed back to Wu Family Sandy Mouth. A bunch of sows sashayed up next to me, but I shoved them away. I knew this was far from over, so I went looking for Diao Xiaosan to come up with a strategy to deal with the situation.

I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened. He sighed and said:

“Brother Sixteen, as I see it, love’s a hard thing to forget. I knew right off that you and Ximen Bai had something special. Now, what’s done is done, and there’s no use in trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Let us go raise some hell, what do you say?”

Mo Yan’s accuracy improved with events that followed. Diao Xiaosan got me to call all the young studs together on the sandbar, where, like a well-tested commander, he intoned the glorious history of their ancestors in struggles against humans and predatory animals. Then he related the strategies those ancestors had conceived:

“Tell these youngsters, Great King, how to cover themselves with pine tar, then go roll in the dirt, and repeat this procedure over and over. ...”

A month later, our bodies were covered with a natural golden armor no knife could penetrate and sounded like a rock or tree hit it when you bumped into it. At first, it slowed us down, but we quickly got used to lugging it around with us. Diao also taught us some battle techniques: how to set an ambush, how to launch a surprise attack, how to lay siege, how to retreat, etc. He spoke with the authority of someone with battle experience. We sighed with admiration. We told Old Diao he must have been a military man in his previous incarnation. He released an enigmatic snigger. Then that iniquitous old wolf foolishly swam over to the shoal. At first he probably thought we were no match for him, but after trying to take a bite out of our virtually impenetrable hide, which kept us safe from injury, his savagery left him. My sons and grandsons, as I said earlier, stomped him flat and tore him to pieces.

August was the rainy season, which raised the water level in the river to flood stage. On moonlit nights, great numbers of fish, drawn to the surface by the moon’s reflection, wound up beached on the shoal. This was the season when we fattened up on watery delicacies. More and more wild animals congregated on the shoal, which led to more violent fights over food. A fierce territorial battle erupted between the pigs and the foxes and ended when the armored cadre drove the foxes off the shoal’s golden hunting grounds and monopolized the triangular protuberance in the middle of the river. But not without a cost: many of my descendants received serious, even crippling, injuries in the battle with the foxes. Why? Because it was impossible to protect our eyes and ears with the armor that covered our bodies, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the foxes, whose last-ditch tactic was to release noxious gases from their anuses. They proved lethal when they entered the eyes and nose. The stronger pigs managed to survive the attacks; the others slumped to the ground and were immediately set upon by foxes who bit down on their ears and gouged out their eyes with their claws. Afterward, under Diao Xiaosan’s command, we split up into two groups, one to launch an attack, the other to lay in wait. When the foxes released their gases, courageous warriors with mugwort stuck up their noses counterattacked. Our commander, Diao Xiaosan, knew that the foxes could not sustain the level of toxicity, that while the first gassing was lethal, those that followed were only mildly noxious. On top of that, pigs that had survived the first poisonous cloud fought courageously, wanting to latch on to their enemies, even if that meant their eyes might be gouged out and their ears bitten off. One assault followed another until at least half the foxes lay dead or injured; their corpses and broken bodies lay strewn across the shoal; bushy fox tails hung from the tips of red willows here and there. Sated flies darkened the willow branches and weighted them down, like heavy fruit, until they nearly touched the ground. The battle with the foxes turned the pig troops into a veteran fighting force. Serving as a training exercise for the pigs, it was a prelude for a war with humans.