Monkey Hunting (16 page)

Immortality

HAVANA (1917)

When it rained, the drops tap-tapped the broad leaves of the banana trees. Chen Pan thought it cruel to live so long, plagued with a failing body and a first-rate memory. He used to think forgetting was the enemy, but now oblivion seemed to him the highest truth. Arturo Fu Fon, who was old like Chen Pan but no longer cutting hair, liked to say, “Chen Pan, find your immortality in drink!” Then Arturo would lift his glass high in a toast: “Let us dissolve the sorrows of a hundred centuries!”

So Chen Pan drank. Red wine. A sweet Cuban
riojo.
He never touched the Spanish stuff. Not after what they did to Cuba.

It was the third Friday in August and very hot. Chen Pan sat in front of his antiques shop wearing a wide-sleeved shirt and pantaloons. His hair was fine and white and tied in a queue. The sun had burned off the morning fog, and the fronds of the palms looked rusty in the heat. A
negro,
all rags and bones, swept the sidewalk with a spindly twig broom.

Chen Pan had woken up again with cock’s-crow diarrhea. Lorenzo insisted that he was suffering from a weakness of spleen
ch’i,
that there was excessive dampness inside him. This was why his gums were sore, his abdomen swollen, his legs webbed with varicose veins. Chen Pan pushed his new spectacles up his nose. Lorenzo had insisted upon these, too. A bother they were, but at least they sharpened the edges of things.

The front wall of the Lucky Find was freshly whitewashed and its sign painted red in both Spanish and Chinese. But Chen Pan didn’t deceive himself. He knew he was no longer so important in Chinatown. Younger, stronger men had surpassed him, achieving what was unthinkable when he’d first arrived in Cuba sixty years ago. Now Chinese owned hotels and restaurants in several cities, laundries and chains of bakeries stretching from one end of the island to the other. Last year three
chinos
had bought a sugar mill in Matanzas and quickly doubled its output. To Chen Pan, news of the mill in Chinese hands was more gratifying than any other success.

The other merchants on Calle Zanja were too busy to visit him anymore. They rushed about fretfully from here to there, chasing riches and man-made distinctions, like Chen Pan himself did when he was younger. This knowledge came too late; how quickly the days flickered and were gone. The sun glinted off Chen Pan’s pocketknife, a gift from his grandson Meng. It had three blades and a little corkscrew, scissors, a nail file, and a strange-looking device that was meant to clean out his ears.

Chen Pan was convinced that the air in Havana was growing thinner. Why else could he hear only torn wisps of sounds, as though the air were muffling every disturbance? At times, he barely heard his own voice reciting his father’s poems.
Tether the sun on a
long rope so that youth might never pass.
Chen Pan thought it odd that he could still remember this line but forget his father’s face, or what his hands looked like holding a book.

And who would remember
him
in fifty years? What was the point of enduring life, raising it up like a great bell only to see it crash to earth? Everything that mattered today, Chen Pan decided, that seemed serious and important, would vanish tomorrow. Was there no end to this meaninglessness?

At the barbershop, the younger merchants liked to imagine the world a hundred years after they were dead. They spoke of men flying to the moon in oversized balloons, of reproducing themselves without women (although everyone objected to this!), of ingesting vitamins instead of rice to survive. Chen Pan listened to them with bemusement. How could they imagine death at their age? It was obvious they thought of themselves as
ch’ien-li-ma,
thousand-mile horses, who could run forever without resting.

Life’s details might change, Chen Pan told them, but the essence of it would remain the same: long stretches of misery broken by intermittent happiness and the fear of death.

“Bitter old man,” the young men scorned him. “You belong back in China.”

Arturo Fu Fon, who’d remained a bachelor all his life and to no one’s knowledge had ever sired a child, said the key to a good life was desiring no more than you could use. This alone, he maintained, ensured contentment. Chen Pan hadn’t heard a better prescription from anyone.

Nine years ago, Arturo Fu Fon had returned to China. He’d spent a great deal of money and traveled for months, but when he arrived in his village, he found that there had been an epidemic of dysentery and his entire family had died. Arturo Fu Fon emptied his pockets and bought candles and incense for the deceased. Then he took the next ship back to Cuba.

Over the years, other friends of Chen Pan’s had returned to China. They’d taken the ferry to New Orleans, then a train through miles of dusty plains to the western coast of America, and from there a ship for the voyage across the Pacific. It was an expensive trip, but Chen Pan could have afforded it. Lorenzo had promised to accompany him if he ever decided to go. But where would he go? Whom would he visit? Why would he travel so far just to scratch a bit of long-depleted earth?

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 would 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.