Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

mind a previous life, when he’d been my mortal enemy. He’d gotten very old and had a severe case of asthma that had him gasping for air from the slightest exertion. He stood off to 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. La-ya-la — La-ya-la-la-ya-la — Notes from the straw hat song rose slowly in the air, but the lyrics had undergone a major change: Mama — My testicles are gone — The testicles you gave me are gone — Tears welled up in my eyes and, for the first time in my life, I understood the torment implicit in the saying “all beings grieve for their own kind.” I also regretted the underhanded tactics I’d used in my fight with him. I heard Jinlong curse Xu Bao:
    “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 Jin at least. The meat from a boar might be on the tough side, but it’s a far sight better than bean curd.”
    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