Free Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia

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.
    Chen Pan threw a banquet in the boy’s honor, inviting all the esteemed men from