The Beauty of Humanity Movement (81 page)

“That was my reaction,” says his father. “My mother apparently had another son a few years after me but he lived for less than an hour.”

“But why tell you now?”

“I have no idea.”

T
hates to think it, but it sounds like Old Man H
ng is unburdening himself of secrets. His father is too close to see it.

H
ng is not one for drink, but Bình left him a bottle of rice wine, suggesting it might relieve the pain in his leg. H
ng does feel pain. Not just in his leg, but in his chest. He is lying on his straw-filled mattress, a single candle burning for Ðạo, seeking comfort in the quiet babble of voices in the dark beyond his shack, sipping from a glass—strictly for medicinal purposes.

Over the years, H
ng has tried to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Ðạo that gives Bình some sense of the man’s importance, and apologizing for his behaviour as a father. “He was busy fathering a movement when he might have been fathering a son,” he once said to Bình. How could Bình possibly understand that his father’s neglect was not personal?

While H
ng has tried his best to keep Ðạo’s memory alive for Bình, the introspection of the past few days leads him to the sad conclusion that he has failed. What was he doing giving Bình a baby brother with one hand then taking him away with the other? The only true portrait of Ðạo is one that includes his poetry, the poetry that ran like blood through
him, but H
ng no longer has any of it, neither in his possession nor in his memory.

H
ng’s greatest regret in a life of considerable regrets is that it never occurred to him to write Ðạo’s poems down while he still could. Instead, he shared them with a girl who proved herself unworthy. He was deceived into believing love mattered more than legacy. He squandered the thing that mattered most.

T
and Ph
ng are standing behind a giant potted palm in the lobby of the Metropole waiting for Miss Maggie. T
sees his friend eyeing her up and down as she shakes the hand of a European man in a pinstriped suit before walking over to them.

“She’s an important person, Ph
ng,” T
hisses. “VIP.”