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.
“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
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.
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.
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
