Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (47 page)

Diao Xiaosan careened around frantically until he finally managed to throw me from his back. Blue-tinged blood oozed from his eye sockets. Covering his eyes with his hooves, he cried out in agony as he rolled on the ground:

“I can’t see . . . I’m blind . . .”

La-ya-la
—
La-ya-la
— All the pigs were quiet, looking very solemn. The moon flew high up into the sky, the straw hat fell to earth, bringing an end to the straw hat song; now the only sounds swirling around the air of Apricot Garden were the agonizing shrieks of Diao Xiaosan. The castrated boars headed back to their pens, their tails between their legs, whereas the sows, under Butterfly Lover’s leadership, circled me and turned their heads outward, offering up their backsides to me. Master, they muttered, beloved master, we are yours, all of us, for you are the king, and we are lowly concubines fully prepared to become the mothers of your offspring . . .
La-ya-la
—
La-ya la-la-ya-la
— The straw hat that had fallen out of the sky was crushed beneath Diao Xiaosan’s body as he rolled on the ground. My mind was a blank, except for soft strains of the straw hat song, and those soft strains were, in the end, like pearls sinking to the bottom of a lake. Everything had returned to normal; the watery rays of the moon were chilled, causing me to shiver and raising goose bumps on my skin. Is this how territory was won? Is this how you gained dominance? I couldn’t possibly handle all that many sows, could I? To be perfectly honest, by then I’d lost interest in mating with any of them. But all those nice rear ends raised in my direction were like an indestructible wall penning me in, with no way out. How I wished I could escape on the wind, but a voice from on high made my position clear: King of Pigs, you have no right to escape, just as Diao Xiaosan has no right to mate with them. Mating with them is your sacred obligation!
La-ya-la
—
La-ya la-la-ya-la
— The straw hat song rose slowly to the surface like pearls. Yes, a monarch has no domestic affairs; politics rest on a monarch’s sex organ. It was necessary for me to faithfully discharge my duties by mating with those sows. I absolutely had to fulfill my obligation to deposit my seed in their wombs. It made no difference whether they were pretty or ugly, whether they were white or black, whether they were virgins or had already mated with other boars. The real problem that presented itself was selection. They were all equally demanding, equally passionate, so who was I to choose? Or, to put it differently, who was going to be honored by an imperial visit? With all my heart, I wished I could be aided in my selection by one of the castrated boars, but there was no time for that now. The moon, close to fulfilling its nightly obligation, had retreated to the western edge of the sky, until only half of its red face was still visible above the treetops. A shark’s-belly silver-gray sky had already appeared on the eastern horizon; dawn was breaking, the morning stars sparkled. I nudged Butterfly Lover’s rear end with my hard snout as notice that I had selected her for the first imperial visit. She moaned coquettishly. Ah, Great King, your slave’s body has long awaited this moment. . . .

For the moment, I put aside all thoughts of past lives and gave no thought to what would follow my present life. I was a pig, through and through, so I rose up and mounted Butterfly Lover . . .
La-ya-la
—
La-ya la-la-ya-la
— The straw hat song rose triumphantly. As the background music swelled, a sonorous tenor voice rose into the sky:
Mama’s straw hat has flown up to the moon
—
Taking my loves and ideals with it
— All the other sows, free of jealousy, took the tail of the pigs in front in their mouths and began a circle dance around Butterfly Lover and me to the rhythms of the straw hat song. With Apricot Garden birds singing and a morning glow lighting up the sky, my first mating went off without a hitch.

As I lowered myself from Butterfly Lover’s back, I spotted Ximen Bai walking unsteadily, aided by a homemade cane, baskets of food over her shoulder. Calling upon what energy remained, I leaped over the wall and into my pen to await Ximen Bai’s food delivery. The scent of black beans and bran made me drool. I was famished. Ximen Bai’s face, burnished red by the morning glow, appeared above the wall of my pen. There were tears in her eyes. Nearly overcome by emotion, she said:

“Sixteen, Jinlong and Jiefang are now married, and so are you. You are all grown-ups. . . .”

The weather during the eighth month of that year was sweltering, with so much rain it was as if the heavens had sprung a leak. The canal running alongside the pig farm swelled with floodwaters, the saturated ground rising like dough in the oven. Several pathetic old apricot trees, unable to withstand the watery onslaught, shed their leaves and waited for death to claim them. Branches of poplars and willows that served as roof beams above the pigpens sprouted fresh appendages, while fences made of sorghum stalks were covered with gray spots of mildew. Pig waste that had begun to leaven filled the air with a moldy smell. Frogs that ought to have gone dormant instead began mating, interrupting the nightly stillness with croaks that kept the pigs from their sleep. And then a powerful earthquake struck the city of Tangshan, its shock waves collapsing more than a dozen pens with weak foundations and causing my roof beams to creak and sway. That was followed by a meteorite shower, with meteors streaking across the sky, accompanied by great explosive rumblings and blinding lights in the black curtain of night; the earth shook. All this occurred as my harem of twenty or more pregnant pigs awaited the impending birth of their litters, teats swelling with milk.

Diao Xiaosan was still my neighbor. Our violent struggles left him with one totally blind eye and one with seriously impeded vision. That constituted his great misfortune and my deep remorse. During that spring, two of the sows failed to get pregnant even after several couplings, and I thought about inviting him to try his luck with them as an expression of my regret over what had happened. Imagine my surprise when he responded somberly:

“Pig Sixteen, I say, Pig Sixteen, you can kill a warrior but you mustn’t humiliate him. You beat me, Diao Xiaosan, fair and square, and all I ask is a measure of dignity. Do not disgrace me with such an offer.”

Deeply moved, I was forced to view this onetime bitter foe with renewed respect. I tell you, in the wake of our fight, Diao Xiaosan became a very somber pig, one whose gluttony and talkativeness ended abruptly. But, as they say, calamities never come alone: a far greater tragedy was about to befall him. Seen from one angle, what happened involved me; seen from another angle, it did not. Pig farm personnel wanted Diao to mate with the two sows I was unable to impregnate, but he merely sat behind them, quietly, not aroused, like a cold stone carving, which led those people to assume that he had become impotent. In an attempt to improve the quality of meat of retired boars, castration was called for, a shameful human invention. Diao Xiaosan was fated to suffer that cruelty. For an immature male pig, castration is a simple procedure accomplished in a few minutes. But for a grown pig like Diao Xiaosan, who must have enjoyed hot, passionate romance back in Mount Yimeng, it was the sort of operation that could leave his life hanging by a thread. A squad of ten or more militiamen held him down beneath the crooked apricot tree and encountered resistance the likes of which they hadn’t seen before. At least three of the men suffered disfiguring bites on their hands. In the end, one man grabbed each of his legs and flipped him onto his back, while two others pressed his neck down with a stick, and one of the others crammed a stone into his mouth, one too large either to spit out or swallow. The man wielding the knife was an old-timer with a shiny bald head surrounded on the sides and back with a few scraggly gray hairs. I harbored a natural loathing for that man; the mere mention of his name — Xu Bao — called to mind a previous life, when he’d been my mortal enemy. He’d gotten very old and had a severe case of asthma that had him gasping for air from the slightest exertion. He stood off to the side looking as the others immobilized Diao Xiaosan. Once that was accomplished, he walked up, the light of occupational excitement flashing in his eyes. The old reprobate, who had lived longer than he had any right to, nimbly sliced off Diao Xiaosan’s scrotum, scooped a handful of lime out of a sack at his hip, and spread it over the wound before walking off with his prize — a pair of large purple ovals.

“Uncle Bao,” I heard Jinlong call out, “should we sew this up?”

“What the fuck for?” was the wheezy reply.

With a shout, the men jumped back away from Diao Xiaosan, who slowly got to his feet and spit out the stone, quaking from excruciating waves of pain. The spiky hairs on his back stood up straight, and blood flowed freely from the open wound between his legs. Not a single moan escaped from Diao’s mouth, no tears fell from his eyes. He just clenched his jaw and ground his teeth with a loud scraping sound. Xu Bao stood beneath the apricot tree holding Diao Xiaosan’s testicles in the palm of his bloody hand and looking them over, unconcealed glee oozing from the deep wrinkles in his face. I knew how much the cruel old man liked to eat animals’ testicles, as I recalled the day he sneakily removed one of my three donkey balls and ate it with hot peppers. How many times I felt like leaping across the wall of my pen and biting off that bastard’s testicles to avenge Diao Xiaosan, to wreak some vengeance of my own, and to gain retribution for all the stallions, male donkeys, bulls, and boars who had suffered at his hand. I never knew what it meant to be afraid of a human being, but I must admit in all honesty that that son of a bitch — a malignancy in the lives of all male animals — scared the hell out of me. What his body gave off was neither an odor nor heat, but a bloodcurdling message.

Poor old Diao Xiaosan walked laboriously over to the apricot tree and, with one side of his belly up against the trunk, lay down wearily. Blood was now spurting from the wound, staining his legs and the ground behind them. He was shivering despite the heat. He’d lost his vision, so his eyes gave away nothing of what he was feeling.
La-ya-la
—
La-ya-la-la-ya-la
— Notes from the straw hat song rose slowly in the air, but the lyrics had undergone a major change:
Mama
—
My testicles are gone
—
The testicles you gave me are gone
— Tears welled up in my eyes and, for the first time in my life, I understood the torment implicit in the saying “all beings grieve for their own kind.” I also regretted the underhanded tactics I’d used in my fight with him. I heard Jinlong curse Xu Bao:

“What the hell have you done, Xu? You must have severed one of his arteries.”

“There’s no need for you to seem so shocked, pal,” Xu replied coldly. “All boars like him are that way.”

“I want you to take care of him. He’ll die if he keeps bleeding like that,” Jinlong said with mounting anxiety.

“Die, you say? Isn’t that a good thing?” Xu Bao said with a false smile. “This one’s got plenty of fat on him, a couple of hundred
Jin
at least. The meat from a boar might be on the tough side, but it’s a far sight better than bean curd.”

Diao Xiaosan did not die, though I’m sure there were moments when he wished he had. Any boar who has that punishment inflicted on him suffers not only physically but, to a far greater extent, psychologically There is no greater humiliation. Diao Xiaosan bled and bled and bled, at least enough to fill two basins, and all the blood was absorbed by the tree; the fruit produced by that tree the following year was yellow with streaks of red blood. He grew withered, sort of dried up, from the loss of all that blood. I jumped the wall between our two pens and stood by him hoping, but failing, to find words to comfort and console him. So I picked a plump pumpkin from the roof of the abandoned generator room and laid it on the ground in front of him.

“Eat something, old Diao, it’ll make you feel better.”

Raising his head off the ground, he looked up at me out of his good eye and managed to say through clenched teeth: “Pig Sixteen, what I am today is what you’ll become tomorrow . . . it’s the fate of all boars. . . .”

His head dropped back to the ground, and all his bones seemed to come unglued.

“You can’t die, old Diao,” I cried out, “you can’t! Old Diao . . .”

This time he didn’t respond, and tears finally came to my eyes, tears of remorse. As I pondered what had just happened, I could see that while it may have seemed that Diao Xiaosan’s death came at the hands of Xu Bao, in fact I was the cause of his death.
La-ya-la
—
La-ya-la-la la-ya-la
— Old Diao, my good brother, go in peace. I hope your soul will soon find its way to the underworld, where Lord Yama will arrange a good rebirth for you, maybe even as a human being, at least I hope so. You can leave this world worry-free. I’ll avenge you by giving Xu Bao a taste of his own medicine. . . .

As these thoughts raced through my mind, Baofeng came running up behind Huzhu, her medicine bag over her shoulder. By that time, Jinlong might well have been sitting in the rickety old armchair at Xu Bao’s house sharing a bottle with Xu Bao as they enjoyed Xu’s favorite dish — boar’s eggs. In the end, women are more kindhearted than men. Just look there at Huzhu, sweat beading her forehead, tears clouding her vision, as if Diao Xiaosan were her blood relative, not a scary-looking boar. By then it was the sixth lunar month, nearly two months after your wedding. You and Huang Hezuo had already been working in Pang Hu’s cotton processing plant for a month. The cotton was just then blooming; in three months it would be on the market.

During those days, I — Lan Jiefang — along with the head of the cotton inspection office and a bunch of girls, was sent over from a number of villages and the county town to weed the enormous compound and prepare the surface for the cotton sale. The Cotton Processing Plant Number Five occupied a thousand acres of land and was ringed by a brick wall. The bricks had been taken from the graveyard as a cost-cutting measure initiated by Pang Hu himself. New bricks sold for ten fen; old bricks from the graves cost only three. For the longest time, none of the other workers knew that Huang Hezuo and I were man and wife, since I stayed in the men’s dorm and she stayed in the women’s. A place like the cotton processing plant, where employees worked on a seasonal basis, could not afford to supply married housing. But even if there had been quarters for us to share, we wouldn’t have wanted to, since our marriage was like a child’s game; at least it felt that way to me. It was a sham, almost like being told upon awakening: From today on this is your wife. You are now her husband. How could anyone accept something that absurd? I had feelings for Huzhu, not for Hezuo, and this was the root of a lifetime of agony. On my first morning at the cotton processing plant I laid eyes on Pang Ghunmiao, a lovely six-year-old girl with pretty white teeth and red lips, eyes like stars and lustrous skin, a crystalline beauty. She was practicing handstands in the plant doorway. Her hair was tied with a piece of red satin, she was wearing a navy blue skirt, a white short-sleeved shirt, white socks, and red plastic sandals. Urged on by the people around her, she bent over, put both hands on the ground, and lifted her feet up in the air, until her body was arced at the right angle to begin walking on her hands to shouts and applause. But her mother, Wang Leyun, ran up and turned her right side up. Don’t be silly, my angel, she said. But I can keep doing it, her daughter said reluctantly.