Monkey Hunting (5 page)

His father had worked for seventeen years as a short-order cook at the American naval base in Guantánamo. Once a year he used to bring Domingo to work, usually on the Fourth of July. The Americans had looked gargantuan to him, another species altogether. Still, he’d liked their uniforms and their parades and the chocolate-filled lollipops everyone gave him. At the PX, Domingo had been impressed by the walls lined floor to ceiling with cans of peaches in heavy syrup.

On weekends Papi had brought home sirloin steaks, buckets of mashed potatoes, and buttered peas from the officers’ events. Domingo used to wait for his father on the porch of their whitewashed cement house off Parque Martí, rubbing a lucky fish vertebra in his pocket. That was before the Revolution. Afterward, Mamá refused to eat any of the Yankees’ food—even when Papi donned his chef’s hat and grilled cheeseburgers for Domingo’s tenth-birthday party. Domingo often fell asleep to his parents’ bitter arguing.

When revolutionary officials had ordered his father to give up his job with the Americans, Papi had refused. Working the grill had made him a traitor? No amount of haranguing from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution could convince him of that.

On his afternoon break, Domingo took a walk along the Hudson River. The sky was low and dark with clouds. Lush smells seeped up from the soil, stung with unexpected perfumes. He watched as two sailboats glided by in opposite directions. Domingo had used his father’s contacts at the U.S. naval base to get Papi and himself out of Cuba. Finally, they’d left the island behind like a rainy season. But what was their world now? What belonged to them? Was it possible, Domingo wondered, to be saved and destroyed at once?

He wasn’t sure that he regretted leaving Cuba, but he still missed it, including its more ludicrous thefts. Last year, his Tío Eutemio had been forced to give up his congas. The authorities in Guantánamo had decided that the drums were cultural artifacts because they’d once belonged to Domingo’s great uncle, the legendary El Tumbador. Now the congas were on display at a folklore museum where
el pueblo
could admire them but never hear their
boom-tak-tak-a-tak
again.

On Domingo’s mother’s side, most of the men were
congueros
and
batá
drummers from way back. In Cuba, the name Quiñones was synonymous with rhythm. His uncles and cousins were in demand for the
toques,
holy ceremonies that coaxed the gods down from heaven. When their drums started talking, all available deities would stop their celestial bickering and drop in for dancing and good times.

Domingo had no aptitude to play, but he was an ardent listener. In Guantánamo, the drums were everywhere: on street corners and in carnival bands, at parties and
fiestas de santos. Kimpá, kimpá, kimpá.
His mother said that drumming was for blacks who didn’t work and drank too much, meaning, of course, her brothers and uncles. But Domingo paid her no mind.
Tinkitín, tinkitín.
When he listened to the drums, he felt right in his own skin.

Business picked up at dinnertime. A crowd of customers rushed in to the Havana Dragon after a movie let out down the block. It was raining and people shook themselves dry like dogs. The humidity steamed up the windows. Pinkish bolts of lightning lit up the sky. Domingo loved lightning, especially when he woke up to it in the middle of the night. It reassured him to know that nature soldiered on while he slept.

After the storm subsided, a famous trumpeter dropped in for
cafesito
and a slice of pound cake à la mode. The man had fronted one of the best bands on the island until he’d defected in 1962. The trumpeter was wearing a shabby suit and a woolen cap pulled low on his forehead. His fingers were long and translucent. Ash from three cigarettes slowly collected on his plate.

Que te importa que te amé
Si tú no me quieres ya?
El amor que ha pasado
No se debe recordar . . .

At eight-thirty, two policemen walked into the Havana Dragon looking for Domingo. He watched them confer with Liu before they moved toward the kitchen. The shorter one took off his cap. His hair was flaming red and cut so short it stood on end. The sound of him cracking his knuckles gave him even more of an electrical air. The policeman said that Domingo’s father had jumped off a subway platform on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. A dozen people had seen him jump, including the conductor of the #4 train. There were two bruises on his head, not much left to the rest of him. Could Domingo accompany them to the morgue to identify his father’s remains?

Domingo felt every nerve in his body converge in his throat. He wanted to say something, but all he could think of was the questions he used to ask Papi as a kid, the ones that had made his father laugh and shake his head.
What does distance look like? Who
discovered time? What is sound made of? Does everyonefeel pain the same?

His father had been alive yesterday, Domingo thought. In the morning Papi had shuffled toward the subway station on Broadway, his lobster fists in children’s mittens, his thick-socked feet stuffed into cheap canvas shoes. He’d returned home that afternoon, his hands chapped scarlet, his body shrunken. He’d made stir-fried cabbage with dried shrimp for dinner. Before Domingo had left for the late shift, he’d undressed his father for bed like a baby.

Outside, the street looked smoky and distorted after the rain. The diseased oak in front of the restaurant was gone. Last week, men in blue jumpsuits had come with their helmets and electric saws and methodically dismembered it. In New York, Domingo knew, it was always cheaper to kill something than to save it. He popped a menthol cough drop into his mouth and sucked it to nothing. It burned the small sore in his cheek that wouldn’t heal.

The Lucky Find

HAVANA (1867–1868)

A negress (with her first child) young and robust,
birthed six weeks ago, good and abundant milk, very
regular cook, basic principles of sewing, excellent
handservant, particular skills, healthy and without
vices: Calle San Juan de Dios n. 84.

Shortly after reading the advertisement in El Diario de la Marina, Chen Pan closed up his secondhand shop and went to inspect the slave and her child at Calle San Juan de Dios. He’d seen notices for slaves before, next to rewards for runaway servants and ads for horses and plows, but never a mother for sale with her baby.

The blazing sun bored through Chen Pan’s new Panama hat. The rainbow of awnings stretching across the street offered only intermittent relief. Chen Pan could have hired a
volante
to take him across town, but he much preferred to walk. A chain gang of slaves trudged over the cobblestones, scattering children and a loose parrot in the dust. Chen Pan touched the knife he kept in his vest pocket and stared at the overseer. His day would come, maybe sooner than the criollos feared.

The vendors hawked fresh okra and star apples, sugarplums, parakeets, and pigs’ feet. Lottery tickets were for sale alongside the fruit preserves made by the country
mulatas.
There was a contortionist on a square of carpet, twisted like a
buñuelo.
Another man sold
cocullos,
giant fireflies, six for twenty-five cents. Twine-muzzled donkeys were strung nose to tail, barely visible beneath their burdens of fodder. Everywhere Chen Pan went, the grumous smell of salted beef thickened the air.

A Chinese peddler sauntered by with toasted peanuts:
“¡Mani tosta’o caliente, pa’ la vieja que no tiene
dientes!”
A newcomer with a queue trailed after him with an identical basket.
“¡Lo mismo!”
he shouted. “Same for me!” Other Chinese sold vegetables from baskets hung on bamboo poles. One skin-and-bones in floppy slippers juggled dishes, his pale green pottery clattering as he walked. The ginger vendor nodded when he saw Chen Pan. Others did, too. Everyone knew him in Chinatown.

His regular customers called him
un chino aplatanado,
a Chinese transplant. The recent arrivals from China wanted to be like him, rich and unflinching. From them, Chen Pan heard heart-sorrow stories. Famine and civil war were rampant back home, they reported. Long-haired rebels were destroying everything. Boys were being kidnapped and carried from their plows against their will. There were mutinies on the high seas. Death voyages. Devil ships. On one journey, there was nothing to eat on board except rice.
They thought we ate only rice!

Six years ago, Chen Pan had left the forest the same day he’d killed the
jutía.
He’d cut off his queue and stopped dreaming of returning to his village. After two years on the plantation and nearly another battling his mother’s ghost, what else could be as hard? It had taken him four months more to work his way to the capital—hauling scrap metal, grooming gamecocks, and furiously gambling. Chen Pan never understood what the sight of Havana, with its seductive curve of coast, stirred in him; only that from the moment he arrived, he knew it was where he belonged.

On Calle Barcelona, Chen Pan stopped to buy a cigar twice the length of his middle finger. It burned slowly and evenly, warming his lungs as he strolled. A handsome woman in a chiffon dress stepped from her carriage on the corner of Calle Villegas with several servants in tow. A
calsero,
wearing a red jacket and shiny black thigh boots, sat in the driver’s seat. The woman brandished her silk fan before entering the pharmacy with her entourage.

Thirty-five pesos for the fan, Chen Pan thought, maybe forty in mint condition. Wherever he went, Chen Pan priced everything. Sooner or later, he knew, it would end up in his shop.

At the Lucky Find, he sold all manner of heirlooms and oddities: ancient braziers, powdered wigs from long-dead judges, French porcelains, coats of arms, plaster saints with withering expressions, patriarchal busts (frequently noseless), hand-carved cornices, and a variety of costumes and accoutrements. Occasionally, Chen Pan perused the city’s streets for abandoned gems, but the pickings were no longer so plentiful. More often, he checked the newspapers for the funeral announcements of illustrious men, then approached the widows with cash for their treasures to help settle their husbands’ debts.

Chen Pan had begun by collecting cast-off furniture and bric-a-brac in the back alleys of Havana. He’d fixed broken dressers one day, polished rusting urns the next, resoled old riding boots. Then he’d dragged his refurbished wares from door to door in his dilapidated wooden cart. At night he’d slept on Calle Baratillo, near the palace where the Count de Santovenia once hosted a three-day feast that ended with a sunset ride in a gas-filled balloon.

Early one Sunday, Chen Pan had saved the count from a bandit’s assault. As a reward, the count had offered him protection for life. In this way Chen Pan had obtained his Letter of Domicile, which guaranteed his freedom. Then with the count’s support and the money Chen Pan won playing
botón,
he’d opened his shop.

There’d been only a few businesses on Calle Zanja then, mostly fruit stands and a laundry. Now there were four Chinese restaurants, a shoemaker, a barber, several greengrocers, and a specialty shop where Chen Pan bought dried squid and duck’s feet. For steamed dumplings, he went to Paco Pang’s place (which everyone called Dogs Won’t Touch ’Em). And for his red wine, Chen Pan patronized the Bottomless Cup because they served the best eggs pickled in brine.

Chen Pan noticed a young harpist plucking out a discordant tune behind the rejas of her mansion. The windows of all the finest houses in Havana were embellished with wrought-iron grates. On the plantation the criollos had locked up the slaves, but here in the city they locked
themselves
in. Against whom were they protecting themselves? Chen Pan understood them too well. Without a second thought, the criollos took the lives of others to ensure their own survival. Then in defending themselves, bad somehow became good.

In the interior patio of another house, double rows of cane-bottom rockers (ninety pesos for a used one in good condition) were occupied by gossiping women of all ages. A few pulled ivory combs through their hair. Others did needlework or watched the passersby with feigned disinterest. The women looked harmless, but they could be as wicked as their brothers. (How many innocent slaves had been put to death by these dainty ladies’ accusations?) At dusk they crowded into their carriages in a cloud of lace and perfume and rode along the Paseo Prado to the Plaza de Armas, redolent of gardenias, to listen to the parading military bands play their polkas and marches.

A
chino
like Chen Pan in a white linen suit and a Panama hat was something of a spectacle, like a talking monkey or a sheep in evening dress. Many people glared at him before turning their heads. The Spaniards were the worst, often pelting the Chinese with stones. Chen Pan, though, was too well dressed for them to menace. (He made a point of dressing well.) And the police, who normally arrested dapper
chinos
on charges of gambling, were under strict orders from the powerful De Santovenias to leave him alone.

Chen Pan knew that the Cubans would have preferred that he still worked for them in the fields, or sold garlic at their kitchen doors. The manner in which they spoke to him—and expected to be spoken to in return—infuriated him. But he had learned to control his temper. A gracious tip of his hat was more unsettling to the enemy than a stream of curses, and impossible to retaliate against.

The criollos managed to find other uses for the Chinese. They relied on the herbalists and acupuncturists of Calle Zanja when their own remedies proved worthless. Everyone knew that
los chinos
had special unguents for sore joints, roots with abortive properties, seeds to rid the intestines of parasites. And their fire-heated needles relieved the worst cases of arthritis.

The house where the slave girl worked was freshly painted in yellow and lavender. Lucky colors, Chen Pan thought. Next door was a convent with crumbling walls where pigeons stirred and shed feathers among the ancient stones. The bell in the convent tower struck twelve as Chen Pan knocked on the door. Soon the siesta would claim all of Havana.

Don Joaquín Alomá seemed surprised to see Chen Pan. He looked him up and down and immediately demanded one thousand pesos for his slave and her baby. No doubt, Chen Pan thought, he was trying to take him for a fool.

“I’d like to see the girl first,” he said. “And the child, too.”

A moment later, Don Joaquín shoved the girl forward and crudely pointed out her attributes. “You can cancel the milkman with this heifer in your house.”

One thousand pesos was too much money, Chen Pan knew, but for once he didn’t bargain. He took note of the girl’s feet, wide with calluses an inch thick. Nothing like his mother’s shriveled lotuses. Her name was Lucrecia. She was long-legged and wide-hipped and had a star-shaped scar on her temple.

“How did you get that?” Chen Pan asked.

“She’s prone to accidents,” Don Joaquín interrupted. “Don’t worry, she hurts no one but herself.”

“What’s your son’s name?” Chen Pan tried to catch the girl’s eye, but her head was bowed too low.

Don Joaquín grabbed the boy and thrust him at Chen Pan. “See, he never cries. In a couple of years you could put him to work as well. Then breed his mother with a few young bucks and populate your own plantation!”

Chen Pan ignored him. If he bought the girl and paid her a small salary, would she still be considered a slave? It might be handy to have a woman at his place, to clean and cook his meals. Perhaps he could train her to help him in his shop. Chen Pan was on the verge of firing his Spanish assistant. Federico Véa worked only limited hours and refused to use an abacus, insisting on calculating everything in his head. Moreover, Chen Pan distrusted the way Véa’s tongue slipped and stalled on every syllable.

Don Joaquín cleared his throat as he counted Chen Pan’s money on the solid mahogany table (worth five hundred pesos, at least). Then he gave him the writ of ownership. “Now get out of here, you dirty
chino
!”

Chen Pan turned and looked at the girl.
“Vámonos,”
he said.

Lucrecia bundled her son in a scrap of flannel and followed Chen Pan out the door. The air was as dense as old paint. Lucrecia turned to face the convent, where a nun, snow-white as an egret, nodded to her from a balcony. Chen Pan noticed a mole the size of a peppercorn on the back of Lucrecia’s neck, just below her blue cotton turban. Beyond her, thin clouds curled in the sky.

“¿Como se llama?”
Chen Pan asked her again, bringing his face close to the boy’s. His eyes were brown and alert, two coffee beans.

“Víctor Manuel,” she whispered.

Sweet rabbit! Maybe, Chen Pan thought, he could pretend to be his father. He pointed out a pair of crows to the boy in a breadfruit tree, but Lucrecia shielded his eyes, then crossed herself twice. Chen Pan wondered what sort of foolishness the nuns had taught her. In Chinatown, the Protestant missionaries besieged him constantly with the decrees of their god, Jesus Christ. But Chen Pan distrusted all forms of certainty.

Lucrecia trailed him through the streets, staying three or four steps behind him. The stores were closing their doors to the midday heat. Peddlers jostled for Chen Pan’s attention. Tangerines. Dried snake meat. Fresh eggs from the outskirts of town. One by one, they set down their loads to stare at him and Lucrecia walking by.

“To hell with all of you!” Chen Pan sputtered, and returned their stink-eyes.

Chen Pan’s home was not fancy, inside or out. He lived in three rooms over the Lucky Find. In this way he saved money, afforded more merchandise, issued loans to other
chinos
for a nominal fee. Chen Pan believed that if you spread a bit of money around, blessings grew. To hoard it was to invite disaster. His furnishings were sparse—a hardwood table and chair, an iron bedstead with a plank bottom, a wash basin, and a worn velvet divan he’d salvaged from Calle Manrique. In the kitchen, he’d set up a modest altar for the Buddha.

He also kept a pet she-duck named Lady Ban. She protected the wood beams by eating the termites and guarded Chen Pan’s shop at night. “The slightest rattle and Lady Ban is up in arms,” he told everyone. “She’s a regular Manchu warrior!”

“Don’t eat the duck,” Chen Pan instructed Lucrecia on their first day together. He pointed at Lady Ban. “This duck is not for eating.” But he wasn’t sure that she understood what he said. The girl had barely uttered a word since he’d purchased her on Calle San Juan de Dios.

“¿No entiende?”
Chen Pan asked impatiently. She returned his question with a stare. What language would he need to speak with her? Chen Pan showed Lucrecia the shallow pan of sand where Lady Ban relieved herself. It would need to be cleaned out, he explained, every other day.

Chen Pan thought of how a man could start out with one idea—like sailing off to Cuba to get rich enough to return home an important man—and end up with another life altogether. This never could have happened in China. There the future was always a loyal continuation of the past.

Lucrecia rocked the baby as Chen Pan showed her their quarters. “Rest,” he said, indicating the sagging bed near the window. “This is where you and your son will stay.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, her milk-swollen breasts rubbing against her muslin shift. The baby yawned so wide his tiny mouth trembled.

Chen Pan went downstairs to the Lucky Find. In his absence, the Spanish assistant had reopened the shop and sold a musty oil painting and a seventeenth-century map to a tourist from Boston. One hundred sixty pesos for both. Chen Pan was pleased, although he suspected Véa of pocketing a portion of the sale.