Free Monkey Hunting by Cristina Garcia Page A

Chinatown. They arrived in a slow procession, like self-important elephants. Benny Lan and Lisardo Hu, who owned the biggest restaurant on Calle Zanja. Marcos Jui, the most successful greengrocer. And, of course, the barber Arturo Fu Fon. Chen Pan welcomed his many brothers from the merchants’ association: Juan Yip Men, Lázaro Seng, Feliciano Wu, Andrés Tang, Jacinto Kwok. Even the Count de Santovenia stopped by with a gift.
    In the glow of the colored lanterns, every kind of special dish was served. Fried baby pigeons. Chopped lobster. Jellyfish with cucumber. Shark’s fin soup. Red bean pudding. Lichees all the way from China. Chen Pan gave his guests boiled gold water to drink so that they would continue to prosper, offered them blessings to last a thousand years. Arturo Fu Fon proposed a toast: “May death be long in coming but abrupt when it finally arrives!”
    The men ate and drank, belched and laughed until their eyes watered—at their hardships, at their good fortune, at the many grandsons they hoped would surround them in old age. No man there, though, had the heart or the bitter nerve to remind Chen Pan that Víctor Manuel was not really his son. That, in fact, he had no children at all.
    After dinner, the men settled in to tell their stories. Lázaro Seng spoke of an uncle who had cured his mother’s dysentery by making soup using flesh cut from his own thigh. Jacinto Kwok recalled how in his village a neighbor had been flayed alive for slapping his mother, another exiled at the mere request of his father. Only in China, the men agreed, was life lived properly.
    Listening to his friends, Chen Pan questioned whether he was genuinely Chinese anymore. It was true that he’d left his sorry patch of wheat half a world away, but in ten years he’d built a new life entirely from muscle and cunning. This much Chen Pan knew: a man’s fate could change overnight; only the mountains stayed the same forever.
    The following autumn, a deadly plague infested Havana. Half the street vendors in Chinatown died within a week. People blamed the river that coursed through the city, corpses and filth floating in it. The wealthy fled to their country homes, avoided all contact with the poor. But the sickness did not discriminate between rich and poor.
    One morning, a rash like a fine brocade erupted on Víctor Manuel’s back, and his belly swelled melon-hard. Chen Pan ran to find the doctor from S——. By the time they returned, the boy was shaking and his short pants were soaked with blood. The doctor boiled a pot of odoriferous roots and held Víctor Manuel over the steam. He prescribed fresh lemon juice and cane syrup for him to drink.
    “I’ll protect you like a ghost,” Chen Pan swore to the boy in Chinese. He strung up a tightly woven fisherman’s net over Víctor Manuel’s bed so that as he slept, his spirit couldn’t leave his body. But despite Chen Pan’s vigilance, the boy’s spirit seemed to be escaping in wisps.
    At midnight, Chen Pan put his ear to Víctor Manuel’s mouth. Not a whisper of breath. He clutched him to his chest, forced his own air into the boy’s lungs. How could this be? Chen Pan prayed to the Buddha, beseeched him for one more hour with his son. When nature is not respected, Chen Pan cried, the heart grows empty, night outlasts daylight.
    There’s no swordstroke clarity when grief tears
the heart,
    and tears darkening my eyes aren’t rinsing red
dust away,
    but I’m still nurturing emptiness—emptiness of
heaven’s
    black black, this childless life stretching away
before me.
    The next day the Protestant missionaries came around, wielding their Bibles and explanations. Chen Pan shouted for them to leave.
    “Their god must be lonely in heaven,” Lucrecia said after the missionaries fled. “Who could love such a master?” She stayed by Chen Pan’s side for many days, neither crying nor praying, simply still.
    At the barbershop, Chen Pan’s friends didn’t know how to console