Monkey Hunting (11 page)

Small World

SAIGON (1970)

Domingo Chen was released from the hospital just in time to turn twenty. His belt buckle scraped his gut where the shrapnel had torn him up a month after he’d signed up for his second tour of duty. The land mine had claimed four limbs from three different men. He’d lost only a clump of his intestines, the smoothness of his hairless chest, and the brand-new tattoo—a reproduction of a Santa Bárbara prayer card—that he’d gotten on R&R in China Beach.

Actually, he hadn’t lost the tattoo entirely. Bits of green and red still flecked his scars with a dull glitter. A tilted eye had knit itself below his left nipple, a minuscule hand gesticulated above his navel, waving wildly whenever he laughed. His great-grandfather’s spectacles had survived intact, but whatever luck they’d imparted obviously had run out. When the gun-ships had flown in to retaliate for the mine, Domingo had watched trees, roots and all, somersaulting through the air.

In the hospital, he’d found it difficult to follow his father’s long-ago advice.
Don’t watch with interest the
suffering of others.
But how could he avoid it? Everywhere he looked, crisply gauzed catastrophes looked back. Maimings and head injuries and the fevered hallucinations of desperate men. He was impressed by how the mind adapted to severe pain with saving visions—the homely nurse transformed into an erotic goddess; the soldier convinced that his missing dick was a flowering cherry tree.

To pass the time, Domingo gambled with the other patients in the hospital corridors or smoked dope out the windows, courtesy of the sympathetic orderly who came around midnight with the ward’s supply. Domingo was surprised at the number of black soldiers who’d been named after presidents—Washingtons and Roosevelts, Lincolns and Jeffersons. It was no different in Cuba, he supposed. Every tenth boy a little Fidel. American officers had simpler names, like John or Bill or Fred. As far as Domingo could tell, the higher the rank the vaguer their mission.

Sometimes fights broke out in the ward. Men missing an arm or a leg, restrained by pain and morphine drips, hurled syringes and urine bags, whatever was at hand, trying to finish the job the jungle hadn’t. The MPs were sent in to restore order, but the sight of those whole, strong men depressed everyone. Besides, what could the MPs do? Handcuff the amputees?

The pomaded little chaplain showed up after every brawl, too. His job was to convince the men that everything was going to be okay when everyone knew for a fact that nothing would ever be right again. After all, what was left of them to save? And even if their bodies healed, their minds would go on suffering. Domingo thought the chaplain spoke in a strange compressed way, as if his sentences weighed more than anyone’s. Dead men sentences. Later, Domingo never could remember what’d started the fights.

Outside the hospital, the sky threatened rain. Domingo looked up at the thickening clouds and thought of the monk from Hue, who’d drenched himself with kerosene and set himself aflame on a busy Saigon street. He’d watched the footage on Cuban television and the reports of copycat self-immolations. “Read this!” His mother had thrust the newspaper at him in disgust. “Let’s see what your father says about that!” Madame Nhu, the Vietnamese president’s sister-in-law, had proclaimed the rash of self-immolations a “barbecue party” and said, “Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.”

On Le Loi Street, Domingo passed a bareheaded man selling two fertilized duck eggs. Domingo knew that the eggs, boiled and salted, were a delicacy in Vietnam. He paid too much for them and carefully slid them into the pockets of his fatigues. From another vendor he bought one ripe apricot.

It was winter and the air was cold. Domingo made his way to Cholon, the Chinese district. More vendors hurried by with vegetables on bamboo poles. Others squatted behind straw mats of green bananas, sweet-sops, batteries, or cigarettes. One toothless woman had a single used book for sale.

The sound of a shrill flute drifted toward Domingo, but he couldn’t determine its origin. Garbage was everywhere—decaying rinds, filthy scraps in every shade of moldering gray. Down one alley, stink fruit vines overflowed from rusty cans on a balcony. Domingo thought of how his mother used to say that all mysteries grew from dead or dying things because death was the color of everything.

Mamá had become president of the Guantánamo chapter of the Cuban Physicians in Solidarity with Vietnam Brigade. Napalm victims were being sent to Cuba for treatment. Children missing eyes and ears and feet. When his mother had learned that Domingo was in Vietnam fighting for the Americans, she’d stopped writing to him altogether.

After the Bay of Pigs, Mamá had predicted that the Americans would invade the island again. But Papi had argued that the
yanquis
were no longer a threat. Take a look, he’d said, at what they ate: pizza and roast beef and triple fudge cake. Who could wage a war eating like that?

Papi had thought that the Revolution was far more dangerous than the United States. He used to pore over the articles about China he’d clipped since the Communists had taken over. “Millions are starving in the provinces in the name of revolutionary change. So how can we support these
descarados
in Cuba who are doing the same?” Papi had insisted that the Revolution couldn’t work because it focused solely on ideas, not people. “The arrogance of El Comandante to give new names to everything! As if he could invent the future!”

Domingo’s first thought when Tham Thanh Lan opened the door was that Danny Spadoto had lied. She didn’t smell like coconuts at all. No, what she smelled like was that tiger balm all the Vietnamese prostitutes used to heat up a flagging cock. Tham Thanh Lan’s eyes widened as if she recognized him but quickly settled back into a wary tiredness. Her mouth was full and poppy red. She seemed familiar to Domingo, like he’d known her as a child.

He’d heard all the rumors: how the whores in these parts kept broken glass in their vaginas, how they passed on incurable strains of venereal disease, how their victims were left spongy-brained and quarantined for life on South Pacific islands owned by Uncle Sam.

Domingo held up a parcel he’d meticulously wrapped with stolen hospital gauze. Tham Thanh Lan stared at it limply, as though it contained something she herself had discarded and hoped never to see again. He continued to stand there, dumbly offering his gift. He tried to smile. His teeth felt unnaturally large in his mouth.

Tham Thanh Lan took the parcel, unwound the gauze, casually considered the contents: a last picture of Danny Spadoto, chin pressing the lower limb of a kapok tree; the half-smoked cigarette Domingo had pulled from his dead lips; Danny’s shiny dog tags; his high school ring with the fake ruby stone—Newark High, class of ’66. She examined only the ring closely, weighed it in her hand, then slipped it into a hidden pocket of her satin pants.

“He talked to me about you,” Domingo began. He wanted to say that Danny had loved her, but he wasn’t sure this was true. Domingo had collected his friend’s remains from the breadfruit tree and then slid him, piece by piece, into a body bag. He’d baby-sat the bag, grief-sickened, until dinnertime when the chopper flew in right on schedule to pick up the dead.

Tham Thanh Lan tried to close the door, but Domingo held it open. “Please.” He tried not to whine. His heart was jumping like the times he’d climbed in the Sierra Maestra with his uncle. Tham Thanh Lan’s gaze rinsed over him, took in the stubble of his newly shaven skull, his bandage-thickened middle, the bulge in his pocket suggesting a promising wad of bills.

“Where are you from?” she demanded.

“Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.” He was tired of explaining this to everyone.

“What happened to you?” Tham Thanh Lan’s voice was pitched high and thin, like an Okónkolo drum.

Domingo didn’t know where to begin—how he carried the darkness inside him now, how trampling on plants made him cringe. He wanted to talk about the forests of rubber trees he’d seen, about the elephant grass and flame vines that reminded him of Cuba. In Vietnam, he’d noticed, everything flowered all at once, not in fits and starts like deciduous New York. At what point had all this foliage turned to camouflage?

Domingo reached into his pockets and pulled out the duck eggs, offering them to Tham Thanh Lan. He gave her the apricot, too.

Tham Thanh Lan wasted no time boiling water in an old tin pot. The steam filled the tiny apartment. Thick droplets collected on the ceiling. Domingo detected the potent aroma of fermenting fish. Tham Thanh Lan said that normally she would have let the ducks hatch and grow, but in Saigon they’d be stolen in no time. It was better to eat them right away. Then she sliced the apricot into abundance and served it on a flowered plate.

There were bits of military trash scattered on her kitchen shelves—belt buckles, canteens, a handful of spent ammunition, a helmet printed with numbers crossed off at fifty-six. On a hook in the corner hung a four-foot-long snakeskin, its yellow diamonds faded to gold. A huge, wrinkled map of Vietnam covered most of another wall, pockmarked with blots of ink. Next to it was a bed the size of a child’s, narrow and neat, the sheets stained with sweat.

When the duck eggs were cooked, Tham Thanh Lan took hers and broke its soft translucent membrane. She drank the liquid, sprinkled salt and pepper on the yolk, then scooped it out with a spoon and ate it with some thom leaves. Domingo gave her his egg and she ate it as well.

Domingo began thinking of stories to tell her. About the time a pack of Jamaican Negresses had chased his Abuelo Lorenzo along the Bay of Santiago, determined to try his virginity powder. Or how his Tío Desiderio had owned the most notorious gambling den in Havana and kept a British pistol strapped to his calf. Or how his father had made the best shrimp dumplings in Guantánamo, maybe all of Cuba. But Domingo wasn’t sure any of this would make sense to her.

Instead he pulled up his shirt and showed Tham Thanh Lan where the shrapnel had torn him up and the Army doctor had stitched him back together.

“Touch it,” he said.

When she didn’t, Domingo took her hand and guided it along his scars. Her nails were long and scratched him lightly. He played with her hands, delicately at first, one finger at a time, before bringing them to his lips.

The downpour shook the building, rattled the empty glass jars, made the fading snakeskin sway from its hook. The stiff little curtain billowed into the room with each gust of wind. A few storm-littered leaves drifted through the window. One moment, Tham Thanh Lan was swathed in pale satin; the next, there was only the candor of her naked flesh. Domingo’s eyes hurt from trying to see all of her at once.

He thought of the whorehouse that his Tío Eutemio had taken him to when he was fourteen. The women had been dressed like geishas and schoolgirls, prison inmates, and mermaids with speckled rubber fins. The back room, it was said, had been outfitted like a medieval dungeon and offered a malnourished girl in an ancient chastity belt who was especially popular with the locksmiths in the province. For his first time, Domingo had chosen a pendulously breasted
negra
who’d reminded him of his mother.

Domingo brought his face close to Tham Thanh Lan’s. Her eyes were open, but there was no curiosity in them. Her nipples were dark brown coins. Everywhere he kissed—the slight upward curve of her breasts, the length of her sinewy legs—he coaxed forth new scents. The betel nuts her father had chewed the day he’d sold Tham Thanh Lan to the passing fish sauce trader. The banana pudding she used to cook for him Sunday nights. The smell of the men who’d paid the trader a few đôńg apiece to sleep with the girl from the North.

A seam of numbers paraded along the inside of Tham Thanh Lan’s right thigh, smelling of enemy metal. She told Domingo that the numbers were the identity code of a jealous Republican general. And the scars between her legs—she opened them wide to show him—were from this same general, who had once tied her to the bed and penetrated her with his dagger. Tham Thanh Lan had been told two things in her hospital bed: that she could no longer bear children and that the general had shown up at Army headquarters and shot himself in the head.

Domingo delicately licked Tham Thanh Lan, pushing the tufts of her hair aside with his tongue. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“Tôi nghiêp,”
he repeated in Vietnamese.

He thought of the pygmy boas that he used to spot by the Río Guaso.
Majacitos bobos.
The snakes curled up into balls and released a foul smell, squeezing blood from their eyes to scare off predators. They were supposedly benign, but people would tell you otherwise: of the cousin who fell into a trance and croaked like a frog after having been bitten; of the aunt whose thumb blackened and dropped off her hand, leaving nothing but a charred-looking stump.

Domingo was from the Río Guaso, from the grasses where the snakes lay in wait, from the palm trees where the boisterous parakeets lived, flashing the red patches beneath their wings. He’d spent his whole childhood by that river, assuming he would never leave, swimming beneath its tents of whispering trees.

Domingo burrowed his face deep between Tham Thanh Lan’s legs, breathed in her sorrows, longed for forgiveness himself. He heard the yelping of a dog on the street, then nothing but Tham Thanh Lan’s mournful pleasure. When she kissed him back, she bloodied his lips with her ardor, stole the breath from his lungs. Then she eased him inside her river of honey until they mingled their sweet distant waters.

A heavy shelf of clouds settled over Saigon as Tham Thanh Lan slept. The wind moaned a continual dank music, played an African
refrán
in Domingo’s head:
The breeze is wind
but the hurricane is also wind.

On and off he slept, but mostly he watched Tham Thanh Lan. He was consoled by her steady breathing, by her smudged, unmoving lips. He traced a finger along her hipbone, touched the faint blue pulsing at her brow. She looked serene, a spray of fallen blossoms. Only her feet moved, as if they were hurrying somewhere, alternately twitching with dreams. For the first time since leaving Cuba, Domingo had no wish but to remain exactly where he was.