Saigon (3 page)

“Pousse-pousse! Pousse-pousse!” yelled Chuck Sherman and sprang down the steps of the Continental Palace Hotel into the Rue Catinat with his arm raised in the manner of a French colon. Immediately a swarm of coolies rushed towards him, dragging their wire-wheeled rickshaws behind them, and he leaped into the nearest one with a loud whoop. “Allez! Allez! Vite! Vite!” he yelled, clapping his hands, and the coolie set off instantly at a frantic gallop along the boulevard. 

Joseph clambered aboard his pousse-pousse more tentatively. Both brothers were dressed in neatly tailored white tuxedos and black ties in preparation for the formal reception being given in their father’s honor at the palace of the governor of Cochin China, and it was Chuck who had insisted that they travel separately by pousse-pousse rather than in the official Citroën sent for their parents. “This way we’ll get to see more of the real Saigon,” he said loudly for the benefit of their father — then he winked confidentially at Joseph and whispered in his ear: “And the last one there is a horse’s ass. It’s a race, okay?” 

Before Joseph could agree or disagree, his brother had mounted up and was laughing loudly as he urged his coolie along the boulevard at top speed. Joseph could see tufts of grizzled hair protruding from beneath the sweat-soaked turban wrapped around the head of his aged coolie and he didn’t have the heart to order him to gallop. He was stripped to the waist and as he jogged along between the shafts a few coins — obviously his meager earnings for the day — jingled pathetically in a leather pouch fastened to the back of his belt. 

Before he’d gone a hundred yards Joseph saw a burly French colon cuff an Annamite coolie roughly about the head at the curbside after descending from his pousse-pousse. The American boy turned in his seat and stared, expecting to see a fight, but the cowering Annamite accepted his beating meekly and none of the European passersby spared the man a second glance. Half a minute later another Frenchman sent his pousse-pousse puller staggering in the gutter with a blow to the head after an apparent argument about the fare, and Joseph realized with a shock that such beatings were merely routine. Outside the hotel he had fought down misgivings at the idea of allowing an old man to drag him through the streets when he could easily have walked, and he began to wonder if he should dismount. But when he caught up with Chuck, who had at last relented and allowed his breathless coolie to slow to a trot, he found the older boy grinning and lolling casually in his seat, obviously suffering no such pangs of conscience. 

“I don’t find these little oriental chariots altogether unpleasant as a mode of transport, Joey,” he said, affecting an exaggerated Harvard drawl. “How about you?” 

“Not bad — not bad at all,” replied Joseph hurriedly and he tried to lean back against the cushions in the same careless fashion as his brother while the two rickshaws rolled on together side by side through the light traffic. 

The approach of evening and release from the heat had transformed the city through which they rode, and the tree-lined streets that had been scorched and deserted on their arrival were coming rapidly to life. Saigon’s main boulevard, the Rue Catinat, linked the docks and the cathedral, symbols of the twin goals of commerce and religion which had led France to colonize the land, and in its fashionable sidewalk cafés they saw deferential Annamese waiters in black turbans and linen gowns darting among the marble-topped tables, serving aperitifs to languid groups of their European colonizers. Beneath the tamarind trees white-suited Frenchmen and their women strolled with an indolent confidence through the native throng — goateed mandarins in Chinese long gowns, younger Annamese wearing round caps and black knee- length silk jackets and occasional groups of shabby peasants arrayed in dark calico, cartwheel-sized straw hats and wooden sandals. Bright red betel juice, the brothers noticed, stained the lips of all the Annamese, low- and high-born alike. 

But evidence of the betel habit was no longer the most striking sight for the two Americans. Among the slow-moving crowds slender, graceful Annamese girls wearing traditional silken ao dai caught their eye again and again. The pastel-colored costumes were at once demure and provocative; fitted tight from throat to hip, they clung to every line of the delicate, high-breasted figures, heightening the allure of slender shoulders, tiny waists and the swell of young flanks; below the waist, however, the gossamer- light, side-split skirts and billowing trousers of white silk shrouded legs and thighs in secrecy, and to Chuck and Joseph the exotic girls of Saigon seemed not to walk but to float gently beneath the tamarinds on the evening breeze. 

Chuck peered intently at each girl they passed, but without exception they avoided his gaze. “The local flappers appear most agreeable, if unduly maidenly, don’t you think, Joey?” he called, grinning wolfishly across at his brother from his moving rickshaw. 

“Indeed they do, Charles!”Joseph laughed and smacked his lips loudly, feeling very grown up. He had felt sure when he left his hotel room that every eye in Saigon would be on him that evening because he was wearing a white tuxedo for the very first time in his young life. The Continental Palace orchestra had been playing the new popular melody “Tea for Two” as he came out onto the terrace, and he had been faintly surprised in the event that nobody had turned to stare at him. He had noticed the eyes of one or two French matrons stray wistfully to the tall, spectacularly handsome figure of his brother, and as the rickshaws bowled on side by side he darted a glance at him and decided it must be his new blond mustache that set him apart. Enviously he raised his fingers to his own top lip but could still detect only the finest thistledown there. 

“You look just great in that new white tux, Joey,” called Chuck suddenly, as though reading his mind. The rickshaws moved together and he leaned across and punched his brother affectionately on the biceps. “I’m sure you’re going to be the belle of the Saigon ball tonight.” 

Joseph leaned outwards and aimed a violent retaliatory blow 4t his brother’s midriff, but at that moment both rickshaws swerved apart and skidded to a halt. Joseph looked ahead and saw that their side of the boulevard was blocked by two carts with big, iron- rimmed wheels. One had overturned and they stared in amazement as a swarthy-featured European lashed out with a thick bamboo cane at what they first thought was a small animal collapsed between the shafts. When they looked closer they saw that he was whipping, not a fallen beast, but a spindly-legged Annamese; both carts, they could see, contained refuse and had shafts front and back that terminated in cangue, big wooden halters that were locked around the necks of four sweating Annamese. These human beasts of burden also wore heavy leg-irons chained to thick steel bands clamped around their waists. 

The Americans watched the bamboo rod rise and fall and heard the sickening thud of wood on flesh and bone; as the fallen Annamese struggled to raise himself from the dusty road they saw blood welling from the crimson weals on his back. His eyes were squeezed tight in agony, and he and the other three men locked in the shafts grunted loudly with exertion as they strove to get the heavy carts rolling again. Gradually they began to move and the colon flayed each of them in turn once more to increase their speed. As the carts came abreast of the Americans seated in their stationary rickshaws, the Annamese who had fallen opened his eyes, and his pain-clouded gaze locked for a moment with Joseph’s. Then his lids fell closed again and the veins in his neck and forehead bulged as he strained afresh against the neck halter. 

When the carts had moved on Joseph turned a horrified face to his brother. “Those poor devils looked nearly dead, Chuck.” 

The elder boy nodded grimly. “That certainly wasn’t betel juice on their backs this time.” 

A thin, stoop-shouldered Frenchman wearing a pince-nez, who had been watching and listening from the curbside, stepped into the road suddenly and leaned close enough to Chuck for the American boy to smell the garlic on his breath. “They are prisoners! Convicted criminals! They deserve nothing better. Don’t feel sorry for them. All outsiders make that mistake.” He spoke heavily accented English, screwing up his pinched sallow face in disgust. He carried a silver-topped malacca cane and he waved this vaguely in the direction of the strolling crowds all around them. “These people are not like the white races. Don’t think that. Most of them are idle, work-shy, good-for-nothing. Don’t waste your sympathy on them.” He peered belligerently through his pince-nez from one brother to the other, then turned and stumped off, shouldering his way roughly through the oncoming crowds of Annamese. 

The Sherman brothers looked at each other in silence. ‘Then Chuck shrugged dismissively and raised his eyebrows. “Like the captain of the Avignon said, it’s another world — different from ours.” 

When his coolie picked up the shafts and broke into his loping stride, Joseph found he couldn’t look at the narrow, sweat- streaked shoulders bobbing in front of him without seeing the bleeding welts caused by the French colon’s cane. A sudden surge of compassion washed through him, and when they reached the governor’s palace Joseph rashly thrust two piastres into the coolie’s cupped hands, thanking him over and over again in French. This was more than three times the normal fare, and the astonished Annamese stood between the shafts of his vehicle staring after Joseph in amazement until he and Chuck disappeared inside the palace. 

The white stone palais of the governor of Cochin-China was built in the grandiloquent, neoclassical style favored by those fervently patriotic Frenchmen who had erected the great public buildings of Paris in the late nineteenth century. Surrounded by formal gardens in a square off the Rue de Ia Grandière, its imposing façade of fluted Doric columns and carved balustrades had been designed to serve as an enduring testament in stone to the colonial nation’s confident pride in itself. A high-domed cupola of glass and wrought-iron crowned its roof, and from a flagstaff on its summit the French tricolor fluttered in the faint evening breeze as Chuck and Joseph Sherman arrived. They found their parents waiting for them at the top of a wide terrace of marble steps, and the governor’s aide-de-camp conducted them to the reception through a series of lofty, marble-floored chambers forty feet high. 

In the grand salon white-robed Annamese servants glided silently among the potted palms with silver trays, serving chilled champagne to a big crowd of colons already gathered there. The French men were identically garbed in black trousers and “le smoking” — a white dinner jacket cut away at the waist — while the women wore dresses from shops in the Rue Catinat fashionable enough to allow them to forget that the Rue de Ia Paix was a twelve-thousand-mile sea journey away. The governor himself stood waiting to greet them beneath a large, gilt-framed portrait of the Emperor Napoleon. A tall, haughty man with luxuriant black whiskers and beard, he wore a formal uniform of horizon blue trimmed elaborately with gold. On the left breast of his tunic the insignia of the Legion d’Honneur glimmered among a broad cluster of medals, and his plumed tricorne had been placed ostentatiously on a table at his side. He didn’t smile as the Shermans approached but waited with his left hand resting on the hilt of his ceremonial sword, his aloof expression suggesting that he estimated the dignity of his person to be at least equal to that of the fabled hero of France looking down from the wall behind him. 

“Bienvenu a Ia palais belle colonie de Ia France!” The governor offered a formal, white-gloved hand to each member of the Sherman family in turn, but when the affably smiling senator began to say how pleased they were to be there, the aide-dc-camp immediately cut him short and motioned the family aside so that the governor could begin a formal speech. 

“Senator and Madame Sherman, I am highly honored to welcome such a distinguished family as yours to French Indochina,” he said, speaking sonorously in his own language. “You have come here chiefly to hunt the rare wild animals in our jungles so that the people of America will be able to see them on display in the Sherman Museum in Washington. We wish you good fortune and good hunting while you are in our colony — but of course that is not all.” He lifted his head and gazed unseeing towards the ceiling while his aide read a translation of his remarks from a sheet of paper. Then he resumed in the same imperious tone. “We are all very proud of the progress that has been made by France in Cochin-China and the other lands of the French Indochinese Union in recent years. Here I hope you will see some evidence of the high moral purpose with which the government of France is endeavoring to fulfill its civilizing mission.” He slowed his delivery to linger emphatically on each syllable of the French expression “mission civilisatrice,” gazing proudly around at the assembled gathering as he did so. “We have brought new roads, railways and the telegraph to this backward corner of the globe that would otherwise have continued to languish in the toils of an unprogressive past. We have developed rubber plantations, coal mines and other modern industrial amenities in cooperation with the hardworking Annamese, and all these ventures serve the best interests of both the French and the Annamese peoples. We hope our American visitors will have an opportunity to appreciate some of these achievements during their journeys here. We wish them all a pleasant and successful stay.” 

While the aide translated these remarks Joseph Sherman took the opportunity to glance around the room and noticed for the first time that groups of diminutive Annamese were standing quietly with their wives among the taller European men and women. Some wore brightly colored Chinese long gowns and black mandarin bonnets, others, shorter black silk coats and white trousers. Only a few were dressed in European suits, but each of them cultivated a whispy goatee, the mark of the Annamite man of consequence. All, in differing degrees, Joseph noticed, appeared ill-at-ease, looking neither at the governor nor at each other hut directing their eyes most frequently towards the floor. 

“If the lovely boulevards of Saigon are anything to judge by, Monsieur le Gouverneur, you have already brought great civilizing benefits to this tropical colony of yours,” Nathaniel Sherman was saying. His public voice was richer in its Southern tones than normal and he was delivering his words in the slow, measured cadences that he normally employed on the floor of the Senate. “Your fine capital fully justifies its appellation, ‘the Pearl of the Orient,’ and the people in its streets seem content and happy and are obviously at ease under your benevolent governance 

Joseph frowned, then looked at Chuck in puzzlement. He had told his father about the pousse-pousse coolies being beaten by their passengers, and he had seemed to listen. “Do you think he didn’t believe me?” whispered Joseph, but Chuck merely shrugged in reply. 

“Our two nations, monsieur, hold many beliefs in common,” the senator continued smoothly. “We both are ready and willing to shoulder the responsibilities and duties which fall upon the rich and powerful nations of the world. Once the United States was itself a colony and fought hard for its freedom and independence. I’m sure your enlightened civilizing mission which is bringing modern communications and industry so unselfishly to the Annamese people will make sure that no such conflict will ever be necessary here 

The aide-de-camp was quietly providing a running translation of the senator’s remarks and the governor looked up sharply at the mention of the word “independence.” But he found the American rocking on his heels and smiling back at him engagingly, and the slow drawl of his address continued without pause. “I think I should point out too, monsieur, that there, are other closer links between our family and France.” He flourished his hand in the direction of his wife like a showman introducing his star attraction of the evening. “My lovely wife, Flavia, was born in an old French colony that the great man in that picture on the wall behind you, Monsieur le Gouverneur, sold to the United States for fifteen million dollars in the year 1803. The Emperor Napoleon got a good deal because France would have had to give it up sooner or later anyway, and I got a good deal because Louisiana gave me a lovely companion for life with all the legendary charms of your people.” 

He turned a dazzling smile on Flavia and she smiled back, her cheeks flushing faintly. She already knew from the sour expressions of the French wives among the gathering arid the open admiration in the eyes of their sallow, perspiring spouses that she had achieved an outstanding success with her greatest extravagance, a simple couture gown of lilac organza. She had dressed her hair daringly with ivory combs, sweeping it straight back from her face to emphasize her high cheekbones, then letting it fall behind her in a dark torrent that contrasted sharply with the pale silk of her gown. Her cheeks were already aglow from a combination of the heat and the exhilaration of being the center of attention, and this had lent an extra, youthful radiance to her beauty. 

“She gave up on me a long time ago, but she made sure that my two sons, Charles and Joseph, speak the language of her forebears, and that will stand us in good stead in your colony.” He paused and beamed affably at his host once more. “We thank you most heartily, Monsieur le Gouverneur, for your kind and hospitable welcome.” 

When the aide finished translating the senator’s remarks the assembled colons applauded politely and an Annamese servant hovering nearby offered champagne to the group. The governor immediately raised his glass in Flavia Sherman’s direction and complimented her elaborately on her French ancestry and the “astonishing combination” of her beauty and her two fine sons. “I trust you will not spend all your time hunting, Madame Sherman,” he ad,1ed, smiling for the first tune. “Your presence would greatly enhance the dull routine of colonial life if you chose to attend any of our social occasions.” 

She returned his smile, then darted a quick glance at her husband; seeing he was engaged in conversation with the governor’s aide, she allowed a confiding note to enter her voice. “Life in Virginia is very limited, monsieur. The social and cultural horizons are very narrow. I’ve been looking forward to this visit for a long time for that reason. My youngest son, Joseph, is very interested in history, and we are going to Hue to look at the Imperial City and watch the emperor perform the traditional ceremonies of Tet.” 

“Then I will hope to have the pleasure of meeting you again in the ancient city of the Annamese emperors,” said the governor, smiling again. “1 too shall be attending the ceremonies prior to a few days’ relaxation at the hill station of Dalat.” 

At that moment the senator’s wife sensed the eyes of another man upon her and turned her head quickly to find a tall, lean faced Frenchman in a white dinner jacket standing beside the governor’s aide, watching her intently. Because she turned unexpectedly she surprised him in an unguarded moment of frank sexual appraisal, but his dark, unsmiling gaze continued to hold hers steadily until she looked away again. The governor’s aide, who had noticed her turn, saw his chance and ushered the silent Frenchman into the circle. 

“Senator and Madame Sherman, may I present the man who will be your guide and mentor in the jungle, Monsieur Jacques Devraux. Monsieur Devraux was formerly an officer of the Infanterie Coloniale but he is now our most accomplished hunter of big game.” 

Jacques Devraux pressed her fingers briefly and bent his dark head for an instant over her hand. She felt his lips brush against her skin and heard his murmured “Enchanté,” but he didn’t look at her again before greeting the senator, 

“I’m glad to meet you, Monsieur Devraux,” cried Nathaniel Sherman, treating the Frenchman to warm, vigorous handshake. “We’ve got a lot to talk over. How soon do you think we can get our supplies together? When might we think of making a start?” 

The governor raised his shaggy brows at Flavia Sherman in a theatrical expression of sympathy as her husband launched into a detailed discussion of his hunting plans, and taking her by the elbow, he guided her away towards the waiting throng to begin introducing her. 

As they departed an Annamese servant appeared soundlessly at Joseph Sherman’s elbow, offering him another glass of champagne. The American boy stared at his empty glass, which he had drained nervously at a gulp, and looked uncertainly towards the figure of his mother fast disappearing among the crowd. She had admonished him before they left the hotel to drink no more than one glass, and his brother, Chuck, who was sipping his own wine confidently without the restraint of any such embargo, looked down and laughed good-naturedly at his indecision. “It looks like Momma’s upstaged you — she’s the real belle of the ball after all, not you. So take another one and drown your sorrows — I’ll be responsible.” 

Joseph scowled back with mock ferocity at his brother as he picked up another glass and he was Sipping it more circumspectly when a grinning dark-haired French youth of about eighteen approached them, holding out his hand. 

“Bonsoir, messieurs, I’m Paul Devraux. I help my father and I was very glad to hear that you speak good French. The only English phrases I have learned so far are: ‘You have a beautiful figure’. 

‘Will you go to bed with me?’.. . ‘I love you.’. . . And I don’t think these expressions would be much use between us.” 

Both brothers laughed out loud at the deliberately comic delivery of his English phrases as they shook hands. Paul Devraux’s features bore a strong resemblance to his father’s, but his dark eyes twinkled mischievously in his sunburned face and he affected a droll, cynical expression. 

“I hope you enjoyed our governor’s speech,” he said, leaning confidently towards them. “But don’t believe everything he says. Some people claim it is not really a mission civilisatrice at all that the French are conducting here. There were no brothels in the colony you see before we came — but every town now has a fair selection. So perhaps it should really be called a mission syphilisatrice — in English a ‘mission of sphilization,’ yes?” 

Chuck guffawed uncontrollably and Joseph laughed too, but a little uncertainly, wondering whether he correctly understood the French boy’s irreverent humor. 

“It’s really true then, Paul, is it, what we hear about Frenchmen?” inquired Chuck in a low voice. “That they are all sex maniacs?” 

“It certainly is not true!” Paul Devraux allowed himself to look outraged from a moment. “Only most of us are sex maniacs.” He smiled and twirled one end of his black mustache in a little gesture of bravado, and the Americans laughed again. 

“I must say from what we saw on our way here tonight the local female population seems fairly unapproachable,” said Chuck, “even though they look good in those snazzy little silk dresses.” 

“You’re absolutely right, mon vieux,” said the French boy, gravely twirling his mustache again. “They are very unforthcoming. The mandarin classes, you see, have very strict morals. When an Annamese girl gets married, her husband spreads a square of snowy white silk on the bed on the first night of their honeymoon. If she fails this test he’s allowed to send her packing and make a public announcement saying why.”