Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (38 page)

The thoroughly delighted girls came running toward me, led by Ximen Jinlong. I waved with my left hoof. “How do you do?” I said. They didn’t understand me, of course, but they knew it was a friendly gesture. But then they doubled up laughing. “What’s so funny? Behave yourselves!” I know, I know, those giggling girls still didn’t understand me. Crinkling his brow, Jinlong said, “This one’s got a trick or two up his sleeve. I hope he’ll climb that tree again at tomorrow’s gathering.” He opened the gate to my pen and said to the girls behind him, “Come on, girls, we’ll start with this one.” He walked up to the tree and scratched my belly with an experienced hand. It felt so good I could have died right then and there. “Pig Sixteen,” he said, “we’re going to give you a bath and a haircut. When we’re finished, you’ll be the handsomest pig in the world. I hope you’ll cooperate and set a good example for the rest of them.” He turned and gave the high-sign to four militiamen behind him who ran up and — you guessed it — each grabbed one of my legs. They were strong and, since they were used to treating people roughly, hurt me as they pulled me down out of the tree. “You pricks!” I cursed angrily. “Instead of lighting incense in the temple, you’re destroying the idol!” My curses went in one ear and out the other as they dragged me on my back up to the cook pot filled with salt water and tossed me in! Some deep-seated fear gave me strength I didn’t know I had, and the liquor I’d consumed turned to cold sweat. A thought hit me like a hammer: I recalled that before the new butcher law took effect, pork was eaten with the skin still on, and pigs scheduled for slaughter were tossed into just this sort of pot to soften up their bristles, which were shaved away before their heads and feet were cut off, their bellies slit open, and they were hung on a rack to be sold. The second my feet hit the bottom of the pot, I jumped out so fast I scared them all. Just my bad luck to jump out of one pot and into another, and this time the warm water swallowed me right up. I can’t tell you how good that felt. It broke my will. I didn’t have the strength to jump out this time. The girls surrounded the pot and started scrubbing me with coarse brushes under Ximen Jinlong’s direction. I moaned, my eyelids drooped, and I just about fell asleep. When they were finished, the militiamen lifted me out of the pot, and when the cool air hit my body, I was sluggish and light as a feather. So the girls started in with their scissors, trimming the hair on my head and then brushing the bristles on my back. Ximen Jinlong thought it would be nice to cut the hair on both sides in the shape of plum blossoms, but they wound up shaving it all off. There was nothing Jinlong could do about that except add slogans with red paint: “Mate for the revolution” on the left side, “Bring benefits to the people” on the right. Then he dressed up the slogans by adding plum blossoms and sunflowers with red and yellow paint, turning me into a sort of bulletin board. When he was finished, he stepped back to admire his handiwork, wearing a mischievous smile that couldn’t cover up the look of self-satisfaction. Everyone was shouting and calling me a great-looking pig.

If they could have beautified all the pigs on the farm the way they did me, then every one of them would have been a work of art. That would have been hard. Merely bathing them in salt water was out of the question, especially since the day of the on-site conference was rapidly approaching. Absent any obvious solution, Jinlong had to adjust his plans. What he came up with was to draw some simple but artistic samples of facial makeup, which he gave to twenty clever and skillful young men and women, along with a bucket of paint and two brushes, with instructions to paint the pigs’ faces while they were still under the influence: red paint for the white pigs, white for the blacks, and yellow for all the others. For a while, the youngsters threw themselves into their work, but slapdash results soon became the norm. Even though the late-autumn skies were clear and the air was fresh, a horrible stink hung over the pigpens, not the sort of atmosphere that fostered a good work ethic. The young women dedicated themselves to the task at hand from the start and refused to do sloppy work no matter how unhappy they might be. The young men would have none of that. They just slapped paint on the pigs’ bodies. White pigs wound up with red spots all over, as if they’d been hit by a shotgun blast with red pellets; black pigs were given white faces that made them look like sly old scoundrels or treacherous court officials. One of the youths, Mo Yan, to be precise, painted large-framed white spectacles on four black animals and red legs on four white sows.

Finally, the pig-raising convention got under way, and since I’d already given away my tree-climbing secret trick, there was no reason to hold back. In an attempt to keep the pigs from acting up and to impress the visiting VIPs, the quality of feed was raised and the quantity of liquor doubled. The pigs were blind drunk by the time the gathering was called to order. The smell of alcohol in the air was unmistakable, but Jinlong brazenly announced that what they smelled was a newly perfected fermented feed. He told everyone that the new feed required very little high-quality ingredients, but the nutritional value was surprisingly high and kept the animals from acting up or running around. They ate, they slept, and they put on weight. In recent years a lack of nutritional food, which had adversely influenced the birth rate of pigs, had become a matter of great concern. The creation of this new fermented feed solved that problem and paved the way for the commune to actively develop its pig-raising enterprise.

“Esteemed leaders, comrades, I am pleased to announce that our new fermented feed is an international breakthrough. We make it out of leaves, grass, and grain stalks. In other words, we’ve turned cast-off items into high-quality pork, which in turn produces a more nutritious food for our citizens and digs a grave for the imperialists, revisionists, and reactionaries.”

A cool breeze brushed my belly as I lay cradled up in the apricot tree. A cluster of audacious sparrows that had landed on my head were pecking away at crumbs from the corners of my mouth all the way back to my ears. Their pointy beaks had a numbing, even slightly painful effect on my ultrasensitive ears, with their tight web of capillaries and nerves, sort of like an acupuncture treatment. Such contentment, I could barely keep my eyes open. I knew Jinlong would have liked nothing more than for me to be fast asleep up there. That way he could put that oily mouth of his to use — he could talk a dead pig back to life — saying anything he wanted. But I didn’t want to sleep. In the long history of humankind, this was surely the first such meeting focused on pigs, and who could say if there would ever be a second? If I slept through such a momentous meeting, the remorse would last for three thousand years! Since I was a pampered pig, I could sleep pretty much whenever I wanted. Now was not one of those moments. I flapped my ears as a means of slapping my cheeks and letting everyone know I had standard ears, not the kind that adorned the heads of the Yimeng pigs, which stood straight up like dog ears. I realize, of course, that these days there are lots of urban dogs whose ears hang down like worn-out socks. Modern people have too much time on their hands, so they bring all sorts of unrelated animals together to mate and produce bizarre offspring, a true blasphemy to God, who will punish them one day. After flapping my ears vigorously to shoo some sparrows away, I picked a blood-red leaf from the apricot tree, put it in my mouth, and began to chew, its bitter, puckery taste working like tobacco to keep me wide awake. So then, from my commanding position, I began observing the goings-on around me to get a thorough grasp of what transpired at the pig-raising convention, taking comprehensive mental notes in a way that surpassed the most technologically advanced machines of today, since they are limited to recording sounds and images, while I could include overall flavors and my feelings.

Don’t argue with me. Pang Hu’s daughter messed up your mind so much that even though you’re only in your early fifties, your eyes are glazed over and your reactions are dulled, both warning signs of dementia. So I advise you not to stick stubbornly to your opinions or think you can debate me. I can confidently tell you that when the pig-raising convention was held in Ximen Village, the village was not equipped with electricity. That’s right, you yourself said it, people were burying concrete poles in the fields just outside the village at the time, but those were for high-voltage wires for the state-run farm, which belonged to the Jinan Military District and was designated an independent production and construction corps. Its leading cadres were military men on active duty, its laboring force made up of rusticated high-school graduates from Qingdao and Jinan. It goes without saying that an operation like that required electricity; we would have to wait a decade for electrification to reach Ximen Village. What that meant at the time was when night fell during the convention, except for the pig farm, blackness settled over the entire Ximen Village Production Brigade.

That’s right, my pen was lit up by a hundred-watt bulb, which I taught myself how to turn on and off. The electricity was supplied by the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. In those days we called it “self-generated power.” A twelve-horsepower diesel motor generated the power. It was Jinlong’s idea. Go ask Mo Yan if you don’t believe me. He came up with a wild idea that ended up very badly. I’ll get to that in a minute.

A pair of loudspeakers hanging from the sides of the stage amplified the words of Ximen Jinlong a good five hundred times, and I figured all of Northeast Gaomi Township was within range of his boastful speech. Six tables taken from the elementary school were lined up at the rear of the stage and covered with red cloth. County government and commune VIPs, in their blue or gray uniforms, were seated on six benches, also taken from the school. Fifth from the left, a man whose army uniform was nearly white from many launderings was a recently retired regimental commander who’d taken charge of the production division of the County Revolutionary Committee. Ximen Village Brigade Party Secretary Hong Taiyue sat to his right. He was freshly shaved and had just had his hair trimmed; the bald spot on top was covered by a gray army-style cap. His ruddy face looked like an oilpaper lantern shining through the darkness of night. My guess was that he was dreaming of moving up the promotional ladder. If the State Council established a “Pig-Raising” Command Post, he might possibly be tapped as commander. There were fat officials and thin ones, and they all faced the east, looked into the Red Sun, so their faces were always ruddy, their eyes in a perpetual squint. One of them, a dark, fat man, was wearing a pair of sunglasses, something rarely seen in those times. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he looked like the leader of a gang of thieves. Jinlong was sitting at a desk also draped with red cloth in front of the stage, speaking into a microphone wrapped in red satin. In those days, that was awesome high-tech equipment. Mo Yan, as always filled with curiosity, had sneaked up to the microphone and tested it out with a couple of dog barks. The magnified barking of dogs rocked the apricot grove and traveled out into the fields with astonishing effect. Mo Yan later wrote about this incident in an essay. This all goes to show that the power for the amplified microphone at the pig-raising convention was not supplied by high-voltage wires strung by the government, but by our own Apricot Garden Pig Farm diesel motor. A five-yard-long, twenty-centimeter-wide leather belt linked the turbine to a generator; when the motor was running, so was the generator, and electric power was the result, something that seemed nearly miraculous. It wasn’t only the more dull-witted residents of Ximen Village who were virtually dumbstruck by what they were witnessing; even I, a very smart pig, had no explanation for what was right in front of my eyes. That’s right, what in the world is this invisible thing called electricity? Where does it come from, and where does it disappear to? After a bonfire burns out, ashes are left behind; digested food becomes feces. But electricity? What does it turn into? This leads me back to when Ximen Jinlong set up the machinery in the two red-brick rooms close to a tall apricot tree in the southeastern corner of the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. After working all day, he did extra duty at night with the aid of a lantern, work that was so mysterious it attracted hordes of curious villagers, including just about all the people I mentioned earlier, with that disgusting Mo Yan elbowing his way all the way up front. Not content to just watch, he talked nonstop, to Jinlong’s great annoyance. Several times Huang Tong grabbed Mo Yan by the ear and dragged him outside, only to have him reappear up front in less than half an hour, leaning up so close his slobber nearly fell on the back of Jinlong’s greasy hands.

I didn’t dare press up to get a look, and I couldn’t climb that particular apricot tree, since the goddamned trunk was too slippery and the lower branches were too high. It looked like one of those white poplars up north, where the branches are all up high, giving it the shape of a torch. But heaven smiled down on me. Behind the rooms where this was all going on was a large grave mound where a dog that had died saving a child was buried. The dog, a black male, had jumped into the roiling waters of Grain Barge River to save the life of a girl who’d fallen in, but the effort had been too much for it, and it had died.

By standing on the grave mound, I could look in through a hole in the wall where a window was supposed to go, and see everything that went on inside. The gas lantern lit the place up like daytime, while outside the sky was pitch-black. It was like they said about class warfare: The enemy is in the light, we’re in the dark. We see what we want to see; we can see them, but they can’t see us. I watched as Jinlong turned the pages of the grimy handbook and wrote things between the lines of a newspaper. Hong Taiyue took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, then stuck it in Jinlong’s mouth. Revering intelligence and talent, Hong was one of the rare enlightened cadres of the time. Then there were the Huang twins, who kept Jinlong’s brow dry with their handkerchiefs. I saw you were unmoved when Huang Hezuo dried his sweaty brow, but noticed the look of jealousy on your face when Huang Huzhu did the same thing. You overrate your own appeal, and later events proved that the blue birthmark on your face not only did not keep you from attracting women, it actually was what drew them to you.