Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (40 page)

Knowing he’d done something terrible, Mo Yan remained in the generator room meekly waiting for Jinlong to come punish him. When Jiao Er returned after his nap and found Mo Yan standing there, he lambasted him: “What are you standing here for, you little prick? Planning more bad tricks?” “Brother Jinlong told me to stand here!” Mo Yan replied, as if that were all that was needed. “So what!” Jiao Er said pompously. “Your ‘Brother Jinlong’ isn’t worth what’s hanging between my legs!” “Okay,” Mo Yan said as he started to walk off, “I’ll just go tell him.” “Stay right where you are!” Jiao Er said, grabbing Mo Yan’s collar and pulling him back, in the process sending the last three buttons of Mo Yan’s worn jacket flying; the jacket opened up to reveal his belly. “You tell him what I said and you’re a dead man!” He held his fist under Mo Yan’s nose. “You’ll have to kill me to stop me from talking,” Mo Yan replied, refusing to back down.

Jiao Er and Mo Yan were two of Ximen Village’s worst citizens, so let’s forget about them. They can do what they want there in the generator room. Meanwhile, Jinlong led the throngs of attendees up to my pen, where I won over the crowd without a word of introduction. They’d seen plenty of pigs sprawled in the mud, but never one up a tree; they’d also seen lots of slogans painted in red on walls, but never on the sides of a pig. The county and commune VIPs laughed until it hurt; the production brigade officials laughed like little fools. The uniformed head of the production command stood there staring at me.

“Did he climb up there by himself?” he asked Jinlong.

“Yes, he did.”

“Can he show us?” the commander asked. “What I mean is, can you have him come down from there and then get him to climb up again?”

“I’ll try, but it won’t be easy,” Jinlong said. “He’s smarter than other pigs, and has powerful legs. But he can be stubborn and he likes to do things his own way. He doesn’t take orders well.”

So Jinlong tapped me on the head with a switch and said in a voice that seemed to beg co-operation and promise lenience. “Wake up, Pig Sixteen, come down and relieve yourself.” Anyone could see he wanted me to perform for the VIPs. Relieve myself, what a joke! That made me unhappy, though I understood why he was doing it. I wouldn’t disappoint him, but I wouldn’t be docile in the process either; I wasn’t about to do what he wanted just because he wanted me to. If I did, instead of being a pig with an attitude, I’d be a lapdog performing tricks to please my master. I smacked my lips, yawned, rolled my eyes, and stretched. That was met with laughter and an interesting comment: “That’s no pig, it can do anything a man can do.” The idiots thought I didn’t understand what they were saying. For their information, I understood people from Gaomi, Mount Yimeng, and Qingdao. Not only that, I picked up a dozen Spanish phrases from a rusticated youngster from Qingdao who dreamed of studying abroad one day. So I shouted something in Spanish, and those morons froze on the spot. Then they burst out laughing. Go ahead, laugh, laugh yourself into your graves and save the country some rice! You want me to take a leak, is that it? Well, I don’t need to climb down for that. Stand tall, pee far. Just so I could have some fun with them, I let fly from where I was, alternating between fast and slow, spurting and dribbling. The morons couldn’t stop laughing. I glared at them. “What are you laughing at?” I said. I meant business. “Have you forgotten that I’m a cannon shell fired into the stronghold of the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries? If a cannon shell takes a leak, that means the powder got wet, so what are you laughing at?” The morons must have understood me, because they laughed until snot ran from their noses. The hint of a smile even appeared on the permanent scowl of an official who always wore an old army coat, as if his face were suddenly covered by a layer of golden bran flakes. He pointed to me.

“What a wonderful pig!” he said. “He deserves a gold medal!” Now I was someone who had little interest in fame and fortune, but hearing such praise from the mouth of a high official turned my head. I wanted to learn how to walk on my hands from Little Red. Doing that up in a tree would be especially hard, but when I eventually mastered the technique, everyone would sit up and take notice. So I planted my front hooves in the crotch of the tree and raised my hind legs, head down until it was resting in a space between branches. But I’d eaten too much that morning, and my strength was affected by my heavy gut. I pressed down on the branch with all my might, causing it to shake and sway. Yes! I said. Okay, I can see the ground. All my weight was now on my front legs, and the blood rushed to my head. My eyes were getting sore, ready to pop out of their sockets. Hold on, hold on for ten seconds and you’ve done it! I heard applause. I’d done it. Unfortunately, my left front hoof slipped, I lost my balance, everything went dark, and I felt my head bang into something hard. Thud! I passed out.

Damn it! That rotgut liquor really messed me up.

The winter of 1972 was a test of survival for the Apricot Garden pigs. In the wake of the pig-raising on-site conference, the county government rewarded the Ximen Village Production Brigade with 20,000
jin
of pig feed, but that was just a number. The actual delivery of the feed was entrusted to a man named Jin, a granary official whose nickname — Golden Rat — spoke to his fondness for rat meat. Well, this granary rat actually sent us some moldy dry-yam-and-sorghum mix that had lain in a corner for years, and far less than 20,000
jin
of it. There was probably a ton of rat shit mixed in with the feed, which was why a peculiar cloud of rank air hung over the farm all winter. Yes, around the time of the pig-raising on-site conference, we were given tasty food and strong drinks, enjoying the decadent life of the landlord class. But after the conference, the brigade granary was critically low and cold weather was on its way, and it looked as if the snow, despite its romantic image, would bring us bone-chilling days. Hunger and cold were to be our constant companions.

The snowfalls that year were abnormally heavy, and that’s no exaggeration. You can check the records of the county weather bureau, the county gazetteer, even Mo Yan’s story “Tales of Pig-Raising.”

Mo Yan, always ready to deceive people with heresy, is in the habit of mixing fact and fantasy in his stories; you can’t reject the contents out of hand, but you mustn’t fall into the trap of believing everything he writes. The times and places in “Tales of Pig-Raising” are accurate, as are the parts dealing with the winter weather; but the head count of pigs and their origins have been altered. Everyone knows they were from Mount Yimeng, but in the story they’re from Mount Wulian. And there were 1,057 of them, though he gives the number at something over 900. But since we’re talking about fiction here, the details should not concern us.

Now even though I was contemptuous of that gang of Mount Yimeng pigs, being a pig myself was a source of shame; when all was said and done, we belonged to the same species. “When the rabbit dies, the fox grieves, for his turn will come.” The Mount Yimeng pigs were dying off in twos and threes, and a tragic pall hung above Apricot Garden Pig Farm. To keep up my strength and lessen the dissipation of body heat, I cut back on the number of night rounds. I pushed the shredded leaves and powdered grass I’d used for such a long time into a corner of the wall, leaving a line of hoofprints that looked like a designed pattern. I lay down on this bed of leaves and grass, holding my head in my hands to gaze at the snowy landscape and smell the cold, fresh air that is so common to snowfalls. I was overcome by melancholy. To tell the truth, I wasn’t a pig normally given to sadness or emotionalism. Most of the time I was euphoric, either that or defiant. You’d be hard put to associate me with the petty bourgeois affinity for sentimentality.

Wind from the north whistled, river ice splintered with ear-shattering
crack crack crack crack,
as if Fate had come rapping on a door in the middle of the night. A snow drift in front of the pen seemed to merge with sagging, snow-laden apricot branches. Throughout the grove, explosions of sound announced the snapping of branches unable to bear up under the weight of wet snow, while dull thuds gave voice to accumulations of snow falling to the ground. On that dark night, all I could see was an expanse of white. The generator, thanks to a scarcity of diesel fuel, had long since stopped producing electricity. A dark night like that, covered by a blanket of white, ought to have created the ideal atmosphere for fairy tales, should have been a source of dreams, but cold and hunger shattered both fairy tales and dreams. I have to be honest with you and tell you that when the quantity of pig feed had dwindled to a dangerous low and the Mount Yimeng pigs were reduced to eating moldy leaves and cast-off seedpods from the cotton processing plant to survive, Ximen Jinlong continued to ensure that a fourth of what I was given to eat was nutritious food. While it was only dried moldy yams, it was certainly better than bean-plant leaves and cotton seedpods.

So I lay there suffering through the long night, alternating between dream-filled sleep and wakeful reality. Stars peeked out through the darkness from time to time, sparkling like a diamond pendant on a woman’s bosom. The restless sounds of pigs struggling to stay alive made peaceful sleep impossible, and a palpable sense of bleakness settled around me. Tears filled my eyes as I revisited the past, and when they spilled out onto my hairy cheeks, they froze into ice crystals. My neighbor, Diao Xiaosan, was in torment, and was now eating his own bitter — and unhygienic — fruit. There wasn’t a dry spot in his pen, which was littered with frozen turds and iced urine. My ears were assailed by wolfish howls that echoed those in the wild, as he ran around cursing the unfairness of life in this world. At mealtimes he railed at everyone in sight: Hong Taiyue, Ximen Jinlong, Lan Jiefang, even Bai Xing’er, the widow of the long-dead Ximen Nao, whose job it was to deliver his food. She came each day with two buckets of feed on a carrying pole, slowly making her way through the snow on tiny, once-bound feet, her tattered coat shifting back and forth as she walked. She wore a kerchief tied around her head; I could see her breath and the frost that had formed on her brows and her hair. Her hands were rough and cracked, the fingers like wood that has survived a fire. As she made her way through the farm, she kept from falling by using her long-handled ladle as a crutch. Little steam rose from the buckets, but the odor was strong enough to identify the quality of the food inside. The contents of the bucket in front were for me; those of the bucket in back were for Diao Xiaosan. After putting down her load, she scraped the thick layer of snow off the wall, then reached over to clean out my trough with her ladle. Finally she lifted up the bucket and dumped in the black contents. Even before she’d finished, I’d be in such a hurry to get to the food that some of the sticky stuff would fall on my head and in my ears; she’d clean it off with her ladle. What I was given was pretty disagreeable, and not meant for slow chewing, since that kept the unpleasant taste in my mouth longer than it needed to be there. I gobbled it up so noisily she invariably said with an emotional sigh:

“Pig Sixteen, you’re such a good little pig, you eat whatever I give you.”

Bai Xing’er always fed me before Diao Xiaosan; watching me eat seemed to make her happy. If he hadn’t raised such a stink, I believe she might have forgotten all about him. I’ll never forget the look of tenderness in her eyes as she bent down to watch me, and I’m certainly aware of how well she treated me. But I don’t want to dwell on that, since it was years ago and we went our separate ways — one human, the other animal.

I heard Diao Xiaosan clamp his teeth around the wooden ladle and looked up to see his hideous face as he stood with his feet on the top of the wall — sharp, uneven teeth and, oh, those bloodshot eyes. Bai Xing’er rapped him on the snout with her ladle. Then, after dumping his food into the trough, she said:

“You filthy pig, eating and relieving yourself in the same spot. I don’t know why you haven’t frozen to death yet!”

Diao Xiaosan had barely taken a mouthful of food before he cursed her back:

“You old witch, I know you like him better than me. You give Sixteen all the good food and save the rotten leaves for me! Well, fuck you and the whore that brought you into this world!”

The curses quickly turned to self-pitying sobs, but Bai Xing’er ignored him and his foul language. She picked up her buckets, hung the ladle from one of them, and walked off, swaying from side to side.

Once she was gone, Diao turned to me and started in with the complaints, spraying my pen with his foul spittle. I pretended I didn’t see the hatred in his eyes and went back to my food.

“Pig Sixteen,” he said, “what kind of world are we living in? We’re both pigs, so how come people don’t treat us the same? Because I’m dark and you’re light? Or because you’re local and I’m not? Or is it because you’re good looking and I’m ugly? Which isn’t to say that you’re all that good looking.”

What could I say to a moron like that? The world has never been fair. Just because an officer rides a horse doesn’t mean his soldiers ought to as well, does it? A generalissimo in the Soviet Red Army rode a horse, and so did his troops. But his mount was a magnificent steed, theirs were nags. Differential treatment.

“I’ll sink my teeth into all of them one of these days, then I’ll rip open their bellies and pull their guts out. . .” With his front feet resting on the wall between our pens, he ground his teeth and said, “Where there’s oppression there’s resistance. Do you believe that? You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I do.”

“You’re right,” I said. No need to offend him. “I believe you’ve got guts and certain abilities,” I added, “and I’m waiting for the day when you do something spectacular.”

“Well, then,” he said, starting to drool, “how about sharing some of that food she gave you?”

I had a low opinion of him to begin with, but that fell even lower when I saw the greedy look in his eyes and the filth around his mouth. I was reluctant to let that disgusting mouth pollute my feed trough. Considering his petty request, I knew it would be hard to turn it down out of hand, so I stammered: