Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

were flitting around in my head. Then they came together to form a ball of fire that burned its way into my eyes and caused everything I saw to resemble a will-o’-the-wisp. The silkworms were a phosphorescent green; so were the people. I charged, initially intending only to knock him off her body. But his testes came in contact with my mouth, and I honestly could find no reason not to bite them off. . . .
    Yeah, a moment of rage had incalculable consequences. Ximen Bai hanged herself from a beam in the silkworm shed that night; Hong Taiyue was sent to the county medical center, hanging on to life by a thread. He lived, but as some sort of freak with a monstrous temper. Me, I was labeled a fearful murderer with the savagery of a tiger, the cruelty of a wolf, the craftiness of a fox, and the wildness of a boar.
    Mo Yan wrote that after biting Hong Taiyue, I went on a rampage in Northeast Gaomi Township, wreaking destruction on the peasants’ field oxen, and even wrote that for the longest time the locals were afraid to relieve themselves out in the woods, afraid of having their guts pulled out through their anuses. As I indicated before, that’s bullshit! Here’s what really happened. After I had, in a moment of confusion, taken that mortal bite out of Hong Taiyue, I rushed back to Wu Family Sandy Mouth. A bunch of sows sashayed up next to me, but I shoved them away. I knew this was far from over, so I went looking for Diao Xiaosan to come up with a strategy to deal with the situation.
    I gave him a quick rundown on what had happened. He sighed and said:
    “Brother Sixteen, as I see it, love’s a hard thing to forget. I knew right off that you and Ximen Bai had something special. Now, what’s done is done, and there’s no use in trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. Let us go raise some hell, what do you say?”
    Mo Yan’s accuracy improved with events that followed. Diao Xiaosan got me to call all the young studs together on the sandbar, where, like a well-tested commander, he intoned the glorious history of their ancestors in struggles against humans and predatory animals. Then he related the strategies those ancestors had conceived:
    “Tell these youngsters, Great King, how to cover themselves with pine tar, then go roll in the dirt, and repeat this procedure over and over. ...”
    A month later, our bodies were covered with a natural golden armor no knife could penetrate and sounded like a rock or tree hit it when you bumped into it. At first, it slowed us down, but we quickly got used to lugging it around with us. Diao also taught us some battle techniques: how to set an ambush, how to launch a surprise attack, how to lay siege, how to retreat, etc. He spoke with the authority of someone with battle experience. We sighed with admiration. We told Old Diao he must have been a military man in his previous incarnation. He released an enigmatic snigger. Then that iniquitous old wolf foolishly swam over to the shoal. At first he probably thought we were no match for him, but after trying to take a bite out of our virtually impenetrable hide, which kept us safe from injury, his savagery left him. My sons and grandsons, as I said earlier, stomped him flat and tore him to pieces.
    August was the rainy season, which raised the water level in the river to flood stage. On moonlit nights, great numbers of fish, drawn to the surface by the moon’s reflection, wound up beached on the shoal. This was the season when we fattened up on watery delicacies. More and more wild animals congregated on the shoal, which led to more violent fights over food. A fierce territorial battle erupted between the pigs and the foxes and ended when the armored cadre drove the foxes off the shoal’s golden hunting grounds and monopolized the triangular protuberance in the middle of the river. But not without a cost: many of my descendants received serious, even crippling, injuries in the battle with the foxes. Why? Because it was impossible to protect our eyes and ears with the armor that covered our bodies, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the foxes, whose last-ditch tactic was to release noxious gases from their anuses. They proved lethal when they entered the eyes and nose. The stronger pigs managed to survive the attacks; the others slumped to the ground and were immediately set upon by foxes who bit down on their ears and gouged out their eyes with their claws. Afterward, under Diao Xiaosan’s command, we