Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (48 page)

I can see this as if it had happened yesterday, not nearly thirty years ago. Even great seers like Zhuge Liang and Liu Bowen could not predict that many years into the future. I gave up everything for love. By running off with that little girl, I created a huge scandal throughout Northeast Gaomi Township. But I was confident that what began as a scandal would one day be seen as a true love story. At least that’s what my good friend Mo Yan predicted when we were at the end of our rope. . . .

— Hey! Big-head Lan Qiansui pounded the table like a judge with his gavel and snapped me back to reality. Don’t start woolgathering, listen to me. You’ll have plenty of time to daydream about and ponder, even complain about that ridiculous affair of yours, but for now I want you to listen and listen carefully to my glorious history as a pig. So where was I? Oh, right, your sister, Baofeng, and your sister-in-law — there’s no other way to describe her — Huzhu rushed up to Diao Xiaosan, who was barely alive after a botched operation, as he lay beneath the crooked apricot tree bleeding to death. There was a time when the mere mention of that crooked romantic tree would have had you foaming at the mouth until you passed out. But now, we could put you on the ground right under it and you, like a battle-scarred veteran, would sigh emotionally on a visit to an ancient — for you — battleground. In the face of life’s great healer, time, no matter how deep the torment, all wounds will one day heal. Hell, I was a damned pig then, so what’s with the somber attitude?

Anyway, as I was saying, Baofeng and Huzhu arrived on the scene to come to Diao Xiaosan’s aid. I stood off to the side, crying my eyes out like a dear old friend. At first, like me, they thought he had died, then they found that he had a heartbeat, but just barely. Baofeng took over immediately, taking a syringe out of her medical kit and giving Diao three consecutive injections: a stimulant, a blood thickener, and glucose, all intended for use on humans. But what I want to call your attention to is how she stitched up his open wound. Lacking both surgical needle and thread, she turned to Huzhu, who cleverly took a pin from her blouse — you know how married women carry pins on their clothing or in their hair. But what would they use for thread? As her face reddened, Huzhu said:

“How about a strand of my hair, would that work?”

“Your hair?” Baofeng asked, slightly incredulous.

“Yes. My hair has capillaries in it.”

“Sister-in-law,” Baofeng said with undisguised emotion, “your hair ought to be reserved for the likes of Golden Boy and Jade Girl, not a pig.”

“Listen to you, sister,” Huzhu said with growing agitation. “My hair is worth no more than that of an ox or a horse. If not for my peculiarity, I’d have cut it all off long ago. But while it can’t be cut, it can be pulled out.”

“Are you sure, sister-in-law?”

Baofeng had her doubts, but Huzhu went ahead and pulled out two strands of the most mysterious and most valuable hair anywhere in the world, each roughly five feet in length, a dark golden color — at the time, hair that color was considered especially ugly, whereas now it’s considered by some a sign of elegant beauty — and so much coarser than normal hair that it appeared to the naked eye to have considerable heft. Huzhu threaded one of the strands and handed the needle to Baofeng, who cleansed the wound with iodine, held the needle with a pair of tweezers, and stitched up Diao Xiaosan’s wound with Huzhu’s miraculous hair.

When that was done, both Huzhu and Baofeng spotted me, with my tear-streaked face, and were deeply moved by my deep concern and loyalty. Since only one of the strands was used to stitch up Diao’s wound, Huzhu threw the second strand away. Baofeng retrieved it, wrapped it in gauze, and placed it in her medical kit. The women waited; whether Diao would live or die was now up to him. We’ve done our best, they said as they walked off together.

I couldn’t say if it was a result of the injections or if it was Huzhu’s hair, but Diao’s wound stopped bleeding and his heartbeat regained its strength and rhythm. Ximen Bai brought over a basin half filled with rice gruel and placed it in front of him. He got up on his knees and slowly lapped it up. It was a miracle he didn’t die that time. Huzhu told Jinlong that Baofeng’s skills deserved all the credit, but I couldn’t help feeling that Huzhu’s miraculous hair played a major role in the pig’s recovery.

Postoperative Diao Xiaosan disappointed those who hoped he’d do little but eat and drink and gain lots of weight in a hurry. Fattening up after castration leads straight to the slaughterhouse. Knowing that, he ate in moderation; not only that, as I became aware, he did pushups every night in his pen, not stopping until every bristle on his body was wet with sweat. My respect for him increased daily, as did my sense of dread. Just what this victim of the ultimate humiliation, who had been brought back to life from certain death and who appeared to meditate during the daytime and work out at night, was up to escaped me. One thing was certain, however: he was a hero who was only temporarily lodged in a pigsty. At first he’d been an embryonic hero only. But after Xu Bao wielded that knife, a flash of understanding had sped up the process. I knew he’d be incapable of seeking a life of ease, content to grow old in a pigpen. A grand plan was surely taking form in his breast, with escape from the pig farm at its core. . . . But what could a nearly blind castrated boar do once he’d gotten free? I guess that’s a question for another time. Let’s continue the tale of events from August of that year.

Shortly before the sows I impregnated were about to come to term, that is, on or about the twentieth of August 1967, following several unusual occurrences, a devastating epidemic struck the pig farm.

The first signs occurred when a castrated boar named Butting Crazy developed a chronic cough, accompanied by a high fever and a loss of appetite. The disease spread to four of his sty mates in short order. All this went unnoticed, since Butting Crazy and his friends were thorns in the side of farm personnel, a bunch of pigs who refused to grow. From a distance, they looked like normal little piglets of three to five months, but up close they shocked the observer with their scraggly bristles, coarse skin, and hideous faces. They’d experienced pretty much everything the world had thrown at them, and showed it. Back at Mount Yimeng, they’d been sold off every couple of months, since their voracious appetites had no effect on weight gain. They were menacing eating machines, seemingly lacking normal small intestines. Whatever they ate, regardless of quality, it went from their throats to their stomachs and straight to their large intestines, where, in less than an hour, it emerged in horribly foul form. They squealed when they were hungry, which was all the time, and if they weren’t fed, their eyes turned red and they ran headfirst into a wall or a gate, more crazed by the minute, until they foamed at the mouth and passed out. But as soon as they regained consciousness, it was back to the head butting. Anyone who bought them and raised them for a month or so could see they hadn’t gained an ounce, so it was back to the marketplace, where they were sold for whatever their owners could get. People sometimes asked the obvious question: Why not just kill and eat them? Well, you’ve seen them, so I don’t need to tell you, but if the people who asked that question took one look at Butting Crazy, you wouldn’t hear any more talk about killing and eating those pigs, whose meat was more disgusting than that of toads in a latrine. And that was how those little pigs got to enjoy considerable longevity. After being sold and resold on Mount Yimeng, they were bought for almost nothing and brought over by Jinlong. And you couldn’t say that Butting Crazy wasn’t a pig. He and his friends contributed to the pig population.

Who would pay any attention to pigs like that just because they were coughing, ran a fever, and had lost their appetite? The person responsible for feeding them and cleaning out their pen was someone who has appeared and reappeared up to now and will continue to do so down the line, our old friend Mr. Mo Yan. By kissing up to any and everybody at the farm, he eventually realized his goal of becoming a pig tender. His “Tales of Pig-Raising” had gained him quite a reputation, since it was a work that was clearly related to his experience and position at Apricot Garden Pig Farm. There was talk that the renowned film director Ingmar Bergman thought about bringing “Tales of Pig-Raising” to the silver screen, but where was he going to find that many pigs? I’ve seen plenty of today’s pigs. Like chickens and ducks these days, they’re nothing but empty-headed animals, thanks to chemical feed and all sorts of additives, which have made them feebleminded. You won’t find any pigs as classy as we were these days. Some of us had strong, healthy legs, some had extraordinary intelligence, some were crafty old scoundrels, and others had the gift of gab. In a word, we were good-looking animals with strong personalities, the sort you won’t find again on this earth. Nowadays, you get moronic porkers that weigh three hundred
jin
at five months and couldn’t qualify as extras in any film. And that is why, to my way of thinking, Bergman’s planned filming will never take place. Yes, yes, yes, you don’t have to tell me, I know Hollywood, and I know all about digital special effects. But those are expensive and tricky. But most of all, I’ll never believe that any digital pig could come close to matching the style and substance of Pig Sixteen. Or for that matter, Diao Xiaosan, Butterfly Lover, even Butting Crazy.

Now Mo Yan was never much of a farmer. His body may have been on the farm, but his mind was in the city. Lowborn, he dreamed of becoming rich and famous; ugly as sin, he sought the company of pretty girls; generally ill-informed, he passed himself off as a knowledgeable academic. And with all that, he managed to establish himself as a writer, someone who dined on tasty pot stickers in Beijing every day, while I, the classy Ximen Pig ... ah, the ways of the world are so incomprehensible it does no good to talk about them. Mo Yan wasn’t much of a pig raiser either, and it was my good luck that he was not assigned to take care of me. Fortunately, that assignment was given to Ximen Bai. I don’t care how fine a pig you have, let Mo Yan look after it for a month or so, and you’ll wind up with a crazed animal; so, as I saw it, it was a good thing Butting Crazy and the others had survived a sea of troubles in their lives, or they never would have survived being looked after by Mo Yan.

To be sure, seen from a different angle, Mo Yan’s motive for joining the pig-raising enterprise was a good one. He was curious by nature and given to daydreaming. At first, he wasn’t terribly put off by Butting Crazy and his friends, believing that they were incapable of putting on weight no matter how much they ate because the ingested food spent so little time in their intestines, and all that was needed was for that passage to be slowed down enough for the nutrients to be absorbed into their bodies. This idea went to the heart of the matter, so he began to experiment. His rudimentary solution was to install a valve in the pigs’ anus, to be opened and closed by farm personnel. Obviously, this proved to be impractical, so he next turned his attention to food additives. Both Chinese and Western antidiarrhea remedies were available, but they were too expensive and hard to obtain if you didn’t know someone. So he tried mixing grass and tree ash into the feed, which drew a chorus of curses from the crazy pigs, not to mention a frenzy of head butting. But Mo Yan refused to relent, and eventually the crazies had no choice but to eat what was put in front of them. I recall hearing him pound on the feed bucket and say to Butting Crazy and his friends, Come on, eat up. Ash is good for your eyes and your heart and will make your intestines healthier than they’ve ever been. But when ash proved ineffective, Mo Yan tried adding dry cement to the feed. Now this did the trick, but nearly killed Butting Crazy and his friends in the process. They rolled around on the ground in agony and only escaped death when they were able to pass what looked like a bellyful of pebbles.

Butting Crazy and his friends carried loathing for Mo Yan in their bones. He felt nothing but disgust for the incorrigible animals. At the time, you and Hezuo were off working in the cotton processing plant, so he was feeling somewhat out of sorts. He dumped feed into the pigs’ trough and said to the hacking, feverish, whining Butting Crazy and his friends, What’s up with you little devils? Is this a hunger strike? Mass suicide? Fine with me, go ahead and kill yourselves. You’re not pigs anyway. You’re unworthy of the name. You’re nothing but a bunch of counterrevolutionaries who are wasting the commune’s valuable food.

The “Butting Crazies” lay dead the next day, their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances. As we’ve seen, it was a rainy month, hot and humid, ideal weather for swarms of flies and mosquitoes, so by the time the commune veterinarian had rafted across the rain-swollen river to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm, the pigs’ carcasses were bloated and foul-smelling. The old veterinarian wore a rain slicker and rubber rain boots. With a gauze mask over his nose and mouth as he stood outside the pen, he looked over the wall and said, “They died of what we call the Red Death. Cremate and bury them immediately!”

The pig farm personnel — including, of course, Mo Yan — dragged the five contaminated carcasses out of the pen, under the veterinarian’s supervision, all the way to the southeast corner of the farm, where they dug a hole. They hadn’t gone down more than a couple of feet before water began gurgling to the surface. So they flung the pigs in, doused them with kerosene, and tossed in a match. Since there were strong southeast winds, foul-smelling smoke was carried to the pig farm and beyond, to the village itself — the stupid bastards couldn’t have chosen a worse location for the cremation — and I was forced to bury my nose in the dirt to blot out what must be the worst stench in the world. I later learned that Diao Xiaosan had escaped from the farm the night before the carcasses were burned; he swam across the canal and headed east into the wilds, which meant that the noxious air of latent death had no effect on his health.