baby.
The blazing sun bored through Chen Pan’s new Panama hat. The rainbow of awnings stretching across the street offered only intermittent relief. Chen Pan could have hired a
volante
to take him across town, but he much preferred to walk. A chain gang of slaves trudged over the cobblestones, scattering children and a loose parrot in the dust. Chen Pan touched the knife he kept in his vest pocket and stared at the overseer. His day would come, maybe sooner than the criollos feared.
The vendors hawked fresh okra and star apples, sugarplums, parakeets, and pigs’ feet. Lottery tickets were for sale alongside the fruit preserves made by the country
mulatas.
There was a contortionist on a square of carpet, twisted like a
buñuelo.
Another man sold
cocullos,
giant fireflies, six for twenty-five cents. Twine-muzzled donkeys were strung nose to tail, barely visible beneath their burdens of fodder. Everywhere Chen Pan went, the grumous smell of salted beef thickened the air.
A Chinese peddler sauntered by with toasted peanuts:
“¡Mani tosta’o caliente, pa’ la vieja que no tiene
dientes!”
A newcomer with a queue trailed after him with an identical basket.
“¡Lo mismo!”
he shouted. “Same for me!” Other Chinese sold vegetables from baskets hung on bamboo poles. One skin-and-bones in floppy slippers juggled dishes, his pale green pottery clattering as he walked. The ginger vendor nodded when he saw Chen Pan. Others did, too. Everyone knew him in Chinatown.
His regular customers called him
un chino aplatanado,
a Chinese transplant. The recent arrivals from China wanted to be like him, rich and unflinching. From them, Chen Pan heard heart-sorrow stories. Famine and civil war were rampant back home, they reported. Long-haired rebels were destroying everything. Boys were being kidnapped and carried from their plows against their will. There were mutinies on the high seas. Death voyages. Devil ships. On one journey, there was nothing to eat on board except rice.
They thought we ate only rice!
Six years ago, Chen Pan had left the forest the same day he’d killed the
jutía.
He’d cut off his queue and stopped dreaming of returning to his village. After two years on the plantation and nearly another battling his mother’s ghost, what else could be as hard? It had taken him four months more to work his way to the capital—hauling scrap metal, grooming gamecocks, and furiously gambling. Chen Pan never understood what the sight of Havana, with its seductive curve of coast, stirred in him; only that from the moment he arrived, he knew it was where he belonged.
On Calle Barcelona, Chen Pan stopped to buy a cigar twice the length of his middle finger. It burned slowly and evenly, warming his lungs as he strolled. A handsome woman in a chiffon dress stepped from her carriage on the corner of Calle Villegas with several servants in tow. A
calsero,
wearing a red jacket and shiny black thigh boots, sat in the driver’s seat. The woman brandished her silk fan before entering the pharmacy with her entourage.
Thirty-five pesos for the fan, Chen Pan thought, maybe forty in mint condition. Wherever he went, Chen Pan priced everything. Sooner or later, he knew, it would end up in his shop.
At the Lucky Find, he sold all manner of heirlooms and oddities: ancient braziers, powdered wigs from long-dead judges, French porcelains, coats of arms, plaster saints with withering expressions, patriarchal busts (frequently noseless), hand-carved cornices, and a variety of costumes and accoutrements. Occasionally, Chen Pan perused the city’s streets for abandoned gems, but the pickings were no longer so plentiful. More often, he checked the newspapers for the funeral announcements of illustrious men, then approached the widows with cash for their treasures to help settle their husbands’ debts.
Chen Pan had begun by collecting cast-off furniture and bric-a-brac in the back alleys of Havana. He’d fixed broken dressers one day, polished
The blazing sun bored through Chen Pan’s new Panama hat. The rainbow of awnings stretching across the street offered only intermittent relief. Chen Pan could have hired a
volante
to take him across town, but he much preferred to walk. A chain gang of slaves trudged over the cobblestones, scattering children and a loose parrot in the dust. Chen Pan touched the knife he kept in his vest pocket and stared at the overseer. His day would come, maybe sooner than the criollos feared.
The vendors hawked fresh okra and star apples, sugarplums, parakeets, and pigs’ feet. Lottery tickets were for sale alongside the fruit preserves made by the country
mulatas.
There was a contortionist on a square of carpet, twisted like a
buñuelo.
Another man sold
cocullos,
giant fireflies, six for twenty-five cents. Twine-muzzled donkeys were strung nose to tail, barely visible beneath their burdens of fodder. Everywhere Chen Pan went, the grumous smell of salted beef thickened the air.
A Chinese peddler sauntered by with toasted peanuts:
“¡Mani tosta’o caliente, pa’ la vieja que no tiene
dientes!”
A newcomer with a queue trailed after him with an identical basket.
“¡Lo mismo!”
he shouted. “Same for me!” Other Chinese sold vegetables from baskets hung on bamboo poles. One skin-and-bones in floppy slippers juggled dishes, his pale green pottery clattering as he walked. The ginger vendor nodded when he saw Chen Pan. Others did, too. Everyone knew him in Chinatown.
His regular customers called him
un chino aplatanado,
a Chinese transplant. The recent arrivals from China wanted to be like him, rich and unflinching. From them, Chen Pan heard heart-sorrow stories. Famine and civil war were rampant back home, they reported. Long-haired rebels were destroying everything. Boys were being kidnapped and carried from their plows against their will. There were mutinies on the high seas. Death voyages. Devil ships. On one journey, there was nothing to eat on board except rice.
They thought we ate only rice!
Six years ago, Chen Pan had left the forest the same day he’d killed the
jutía.
He’d cut off his queue and stopped dreaming of returning to his village. After two years on the plantation and nearly another battling his mother’s ghost, what else could be as hard? It had taken him four months more to work his way to the capital—hauling scrap metal, grooming gamecocks, and furiously gambling. Chen Pan never understood what the sight of Havana, with its seductive curve of coast, stirred in him; only that from the moment he arrived, he knew it was where he belonged.
On Calle Barcelona, Chen Pan stopped to buy a cigar twice the length of his middle finger. It burned slowly and evenly, warming his lungs as he strolled. A handsome woman in a chiffon dress stepped from her carriage on the corner of Calle Villegas with several servants in tow. A
calsero,
wearing a red jacket and shiny black thigh boots, sat in the driver’s seat. The woman brandished her silk fan before entering the pharmacy with her entourage.
Thirty-five pesos for the fan, Chen Pan thought, maybe forty in mint condition. Wherever he went, Chen Pan priced everything. Sooner or later, he knew, it would end up in his shop.
At the Lucky Find, he sold all manner of heirlooms and oddities: ancient braziers, powdered wigs from long-dead judges, French porcelains, coats of arms, plaster saints with withering expressions, patriarchal busts (frequently noseless), hand-carved cornices, and a variety of costumes and accoutrements. Occasionally, Chen Pan perused the city’s streets for abandoned gems, but the pickings were no longer so plentiful. More often, he checked the newspapers for the funeral announcements of illustrious men, then approached the widows with cash for their treasures to help settle their husbands’ debts.
Chen Pan had begun by collecting cast-off furniture and bric-a-brac in the back alleys of Havana. He’d fixed broken dressers one day, polished
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