Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (34 page)

Seven days after I was born, Jinlong and Huzhu came and moved eight of my siblings to a neighboring pen, where they fed them millet gruel. A woman was put in charge of their care, but the wall between us was too high for me to get a look at her. Her voice, her lovely voice, sounded familiar, but when I tried to dredge up a memory of who she was and what she looked like, I just got sleepy. The three marks of a good pig are: big eater, deep sleeper, fast grower. I mastered all three. Sometimes the murmuring of the woman on the other side of the wall would be my lullaby. She fed the eight little pigs six times a day, sending the fragrance of corn or millet gruel wafting over the wall, and I could hear my brothers and sisters feasting happily. “My little darlings,” she’d mutter to them, “you little dears,” and I could tell she was a bighearted woman who treated the little pigs like her own children.

After a month, I was more than twice the size of my siblings. My sow mother’s twelve teats were pretty much mine alone. Every once in a while one of the other piglets, crazed from hunger, would attempt the death-defying act of charging one of the nipples. All I had to do was stick my snout under his belly and easily send him rolling to the wall behind our mother, who would moan weakly and say, Sixteen, oh, Sixteen, won’t you let them have a little? I brought you all into this world, and I can’t bear to see any of you go hungry! That sickened me, so I ignored her and sucked so hard her eyes rolled back in her head. Later on, I discovered that I could kick out with my hind legs, like a donkey, which meant I didn’t even have to let loose of a nipple or use my snout to rid the area of a hungry sibling. Whenever I saw one of them approach, red-eyed and squealing, I’d simply arch my back and kick out. Even if two came up at the same time, I could drive them back by landing well-placed kicks on their heads. All they could do then was run in circles and squeal out of jealousy and hatred, cursing me as they foraged for scraps at the base of our mother’s feed trough.

It didn’t take Jinlong and Huzhu long to see what was happening, so they invited Hong Taiyue and Huang Tong to watch from the other side of the wall. I knew they remained silent in hopes that I wouldn’t know they were there. So I pretended I didn’t know and ate with such exaggerated gusto that Mother Sow lay there moaning. I intimidated my brothers and sisters with one-legged kicks and struck fear into them with the two-legged variety, until all they could do was roll around and squeal miserably.

“That’s no pig, it’s a goddamned baby donkey!” Hong Taiyue shouted excitedly

“You’re right,” Huang Tong agreed. “See how it kicks with its hind legs.”

I spat out the now dry teat, stood up, and strutted around the pen. Raising my head, I looked at them and let loose with two loud oinks. That threw them.

“Get those other seven piglets out of there,” Hong Taiyue said. “We’re keeping this one for stud. Let him have all her milk so he’ll grow big and strong.”

Jinlong jumped into the pen and made a noise to call to the other piglets. The old sow raised her head and gave Jinlong a menacing look, but he was so quick he had two of them in his hands before she knew it. She jumped up and charged him; he forced her back with a kick. The two pigs hung in the air, squealing frantically. Huzhu managed to take one of them from Jinlong; Huang Tong took the other. I could tell they both wound up with their eight dull-witted siblings in the pen next to mine, where those eight little assholes took out after the two new little assholes; they’d get no sympathy from me, I was too happy. By the time Hong Taiyue had smoked a cigarette, Jinlong had removed all seven of the little morons. The pen next to mine turned into a battlefield, with the eight early arrivals fighting it out with the seven late arrivals. Me? I was alone, casually taking it in. I looked at the old sow out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was grief-stricken. But she’d also been relieved of a heavy burden. Let’s face it, she was just an ordinary pig, incapable of having her emotions stirred, humanlike. Look, she’s already forgotten the torment of losing her litter. She’s standing at her trough gobbling up the food.

The smell of food came rushing toward me on the wind. Huzhu walked up to the gate with a bucket of feed wearing a white apron with “Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm” embroidered in big red letters. She also had white protective sleeves covering her arms and a soft white cap on her head. She looked like a baker. Using a metal ladle, she scooped the contents into the feed trough. Mother Sow raised up and buried her front legs right in the middle of it. The slops splashing all over her face looked like yellow shit. It had a sour, rotten smell I found disgusting. It was a product of the minds of the brigade’s two most intelligent members, Lan Jinlong and Huang Huzhu, a fermented feed made of chicken droppings, cow dung, and greens. Jinlong emptied the bucket into the trough. The sow had no choice but to eat it.

“Is that all she gets?” Hong Taiyue asked.

“Up till a few days ago we added some bean cake,” Huzhu said, “but yesterday Jinlong said no more bean cakes.”

Hong stuck his head inside the pen to get a closer look at the sow. “We want to be sure the little porker gets what he needs, so let’s prepare food for her separately.”

“There isn’t enough fodder in the brigade stock room as it is,” Huang Tong said.

“I thought there was a storage shed filled with corn.”

“That’s part of our combat readiness! If you want to tap into that you have to get permission from the Commune Revolutionary Committee.”

“This pig is destined to be part of combat readiness!” Hong said. “If war comes, our People’s Liberation Army soldiers will need to eat meat to win the battles.” Seeing that Huang Tong was still hesitant, he said firmly, “Open up the shed. I’ll take the responsibility. I’ll report to the commune this afternoon. Feeding pigs takes precedence over other political tasks, so I don’t expect any opposition. What’s most important,” he said, sounding somewhat mysterious, “is to expand our pig farm and increase the numbers of animals. There’ll come a day when all the grain in the county stockrooms will be ours.”

Knowing smiles spread across Huang Tong and Jinlong’s faces as the agreeable smell of millet gruel approached them and stopped at the next pen over.

“Ximen Bai,” Hong called out, “starting tomorrow you’re to feed this sow too.”

“Yes, Secretary Hong.”

“Dump half the bucket you’re carrying into the sow’s trough.”

“Yes, Secretary Hong.”

Ximen Bai — that had a familiar ring to it. Ximen Bai. I tried to recall what that name meant to me. Then a kindly but weary face appeared in front of my pen, and I was racked by spasms, as if I’d been given an electric shock. At the same time, the gate to my memory was flung open and the past came flooding in. “Xing’er,” I shouted, “you’re still alive!” But what emerged from my throat was a long, shrill pig noise. It not only scared the people outside the pen, it scared me. Tragically, I had no choice but to return to reality, to the present, no longer Ximen Nao but a little pig, the son of the white sow I shared this pen with.

I tried to calculate her age, but the fragrance of sunflowers confused me. Yet even though no number emerged, I knew she was over fifty, because the hair at her temples had turned white, there were fine wrinkles around her eyes, and her once beautiful white teeth had begun to yellow and wear out.

Slowly she scooped the millet into the trough with a wooden ladle.

“You heard what I said, didn’t you?” Hong Taiyue asked harshly.

“You needn’t worry, Secretary Hong,” Ximen Bai said in a soft but firm voice. “I have no children of my own, so these pigs will be my sons and daughters.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Hong said, satisfied with her response. “What we need is more women who are willing to raise our pigs as their own sons and daughters.”

Brother, or should I say, Uncle, you seem upset. Your eyes are hooded by puffy lids, and you seem to be snoring, Big-head Lan Qiansui said harshly. If you’re not interested in the lives of pigs, let me tell you about dogs.

No, no, no, I’m interested, I really am. You know, I assume, that I wasn’t always at your side during those years you were a pig. At first I worked in the pig farm, but my job was not to feed you. Then, later, Huang Hezuo and I were sent to work in the cotton mill, and most of what we learned about your illustrious accomplishments came to us as hearsay. I really want to hear you talk about your experiences, down to the last detail. Don’t give another thought to my puffy eyelids, because when my eyes are hooded, that means I’m concentrating.

The events that followed were varied and very complex. I can only touch on the highlights and the more spectacular incidents, Big-head Lan Qiansui said.

Even though Ximen Bai painstakingly fed my sow mother, I went on suckling like a crazed piglet — what you might call extraction — which led to the paralysis of the rear half of her body. Her hind legs were like dried-out loofahs, so she had to drag herself around the pen by her front legs. By this time I was nearly as big as she was. My hair was so glossy it looked waxed; my skin was a healthy red color with a wonderful odor. My poor mother’s skin was filthy, the foul-smelling rear half covered in shit. She howled every time I took one of her teats in my mouth, and tears spilled out of her tiny eyes. She dragged herself along the ground, trying to get away from me and pleading: Son, my good son, show your mother some mercy. You’re sucking the marrow out of my bones. Can’t you see the miserable shape I’m in? You’re a full-grown pig, so you should be eating solid food like me. I turned a deaf ear to her pleading, nudged her onto her side with my snout, and wrapped my lips around two teats at the same time. As my ears filled with her shrill cries of agony, I couldn’t help feeling that the teats that had once secreted that sweet-tasting milk had turned rubbery and tasteless and produced no more than a tiny amount of rank, salty, sticky liquid that was closer to poison than milk. In disgust, I rolled her over with my snout. I could hear the pain in her voice as she cursed me: Oh, Sixteen, you are a beast with no conscience, a demon. You were sired by a wolf, not a pig. . . .

Ximen Bai was reprimanded by Hong Taiyue over my sow mother’s paralysis. “Secretary,” she said tearfully, “her son’s willfulness caused that, not negligence on my part. If you’d seen the way he eats, like a wolf or a tiger, you’d agree that even a cow would have wound up paralyzed with him at her teat. . . .”

Hong looked into the pen; on an impulse I stood up on my hind legs, unaware that the only other pigs that could do that were trained circus performers. For me it seemed perfectly natural. With my front legs propped up on the wall, my head was right under Hong Taiyue’s chin. He backed up, obviously shocked, and looked around. Seeing they were alone, he said to Ximen Bai softly:

“It wasn’t your fault. I’ll isolate this king of pigs and assign someone to feed him.”

“That’s what I suggested to Chairman Huang, but he said he wanted to wait for you to return. ...”

“Any moron should be able to decide something as minor as this,” he grumbled.

“It’s the respect everyone has for you,” Ximen Bai said, glancing at him before lowering her head and murmuring, “You’re a veteran revolutionary who has great concern for the people and deals with them fairly—”

“That’s enough of that talk,” Hong said with a wave of his hand as he looked into Ximen Bai’s reddening face. “Do you still live in that cemetery hut? I think you’d better move over to the feeding shed. You can move in with Huang Huzhu and them.”

“No,” Ximen Bai said. “My background is no good, I’m old and I’m dirty, and I don’t want to displease the youngsters—”

Hong looked into Ximen Bai’s face, then turned and stared at the lush sunflowers. “Ximen Bai,” he said softly, “if only you hadn’t been a landlord . . .”

I grunted. I had to do something to give voice to my mixed feelings. To be honest, I wasn’t really jealous, but the relationship between Hong Taiyue and Ximen Bai, getting more intriguing every day, instinctively made me unhappy. There was no end in sight, and you know how tragically it ended, but I’ll fill in the details anyway.

They moved me into a large, newly built, single-occupant pen in a row of them about a hundred yards from the two hundred regular pens. The canopy of an apricot tree at the rear shaded half my pen. I lived in a shed that was open in the front, where the eaves were short, and the rear, where the eaves were long, so there was nothing to keep the sunlight from streaming in. The floor was laid with bricks, and there was a hole in one wall, covered by an iron grate that made it easy for me to relieve myself without dirtying my quarters. A pile of golden wheat stalks against my bedroom wall made the room smell fresh. I strolled around my new quarters, taking in the smell of new bricks, new earth, fresh parasol wood, and fresh sorghum stalks, and I was pleased. Compared to the squat, filthy quarters I’d shared with the old sow, my new digs were a mansion. They were airy, sunny, and constructed of environmentally appropriate materials that gave off no noxious fumes. Just look at that parasol wood beam, so newly hewn that puckery sap still oozed from the white interior of the cut ends. The sorghum stalks in the wall surrounding my quarters were also fresh, the fluid secretions still wet, still fragrant, and, I bet, still tasty. But these were my living quarters, and I wasn’t about to tear them down just to satisfy my appetite. That’s not to say I couldn’t take a bite just to see how it tasted. I could stand on my hind legs and walk like humans, but I wanted to keep that a secret as long as possible.

What thrilled me was that my new home was supplied with electricity. A lamp with a hundred-watt bulb hung from the beam. I later learned that all two hundred of the new pens had electricity, but they were lit with twenty-five-watt bulbs. The on-off pull string hung down alongside one of the walls, and all I had to do was reach up, catch the string in my cloven hoof, and tug lightly to make the light go on. That was great. The spring breeze of modernization had blown into Ximen Village along with the east wind of the Cultural Revolution. Quick, turn it off, don’t let them know I know how to do that.