Morning Exercises |
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by Robert Masterson |
Southern suburbs, Xi’an, Shaanxi, PRC, 1986
Sometimes in the very early morning, in the silent 4:30 a.m. smoking cigarettes and carrying a thermos of sock-coffee (1) spiked with wodaka (2), we go down to the big market on the Number Three Road and watch the axe men slaughter pigs beginning as soon as they can see. They sleep there, too, both men and pigs, and then they stand together, both pigs and men, in darkness together outside and beyond the carbide lanterns’ hiss and bright white light and they all wait for the light of dawn together.
So much killing has made them, the axe men, cruel and in boredom they often torture the pigs just for something to do; for instance, they won’t kill one before gutting it and we watch that, too, its pig eyes rolling first inside its pig skull and then down in the dirt, pig squeals thick in the air like seagulls screaming insane, the cast-iron smell of pig blood falling into Xi’an dust and turning brown then turning black, and axe men laughing and they poke the guts and they poke the pig with their pig-killing axe handles. And they laugh at pig misery and pig suffering and I guess we laugh at them, the pig men.
The so-called people’s so-called radio, really just old loudspeakers affixed to poles all throughout the country, will at 7:00 a.m. Unified China Time still blare military music for mandatory morning calisthenics that nobody does anymore. The cadence overlays all other noise like a tulle fog, shrill skirling, quasi-military, and numbers chanted one-two-three-four for jumping jacks and deep knee bends and instead of stopping, it is starting all over again. The axe men begin to work in time with the music, in time with collectivism. They can’t help it, and their choppers fall together in four-beat rhythm and the pigs fall apart on the 2s and the 4s and pig parts make piles at their feet into a geometry of meat, of snow-white fat tangential to blood-red blood, to iron red meat, to butter-yellow bone. It’s of what we take the pictures and that’s why we come to watch them. And then we walk home along the road now clogged with bicycles and cyclos and roto-buggies and mule-carts and mule-wagons and motorcycles and trucks in what is really merely daylight.
1. Coffee brewed using a thin nylon sock for a filter.
2. Vodka