The Book of Salt (17 page)

As careful as Blériot was by then with his body, he lacked all control when it came to his tongue. He placed great trust in the power of his language to elevate him from the fray, to keep his nose clean even when he was rooting in the dirt of someone else's land. At ease with its power to exclude, its gate-slamming pronouncements, he grew reckless, especially when we were in the company of these three boys. He assumed, and he was right, that they could not understand a French word that he was saying. He failed to comprehend, though, that the tonalities of sex are, like those of desperation, easily recognizable and instantly understood, no matter the language, no matter the age. Yes, as soon as Blériot said, "...there are
some
things that are still
new
to you," the three boys recognized it, and they laughed, skittish and cheerless, the same as if we had embraced in front of them and kissed each other with our mouths open, hungry.

From his bed of marigolds, the gardener's helper heard the laughter and the slamming gate. He snapped up his head of white hair and caught Blériot's face as it turned from mine back toward the direction of the Governor-General's house. The gardener's helper had seen that look before. Fires have been started by less, he thought. The laughter of the three boys was, to him, also not new. Memories of it bloomed in his stomach. The gardener's helper lowered his head. He was already in a posture akin to prayer. The earth below him was warm. He dug his fingers into the soil and longed for the day when his limbs would take root.

When I left the Governor-General's household, the gardener's helper assured me that it was not he. "I would never tell," he said. "I, of all men, would never tell," he insisted. I looked at his face, a drought-scarred plain. I looked through his parting lips, cracked by the lack of touch, and I saw the nubs and shoots of all that he had swallowed in the fear that some day what was natural in him would grow. Yes, I thought, of all men, this one would have never told.

The chauffeur was a different story. He liked the sound of his own voice, especially when he was speaking French, and he and Madame's secretary always conversed in French. The chauffeur had returned from France like all the others. He had developed a passion for the leisurely game of tennis and had acquired an appreciation for the worst-smelling cheeses. The latter, we in the household staff assumed, explained his fascination for Madame's secretary. Given her French father, we in the household staff felt that Madame's secretary should have been more beautiful, but she was not. She was more robust than most, maybe, but otherwise not much improved, we thought. If you took the average Saigon girl and pumped her full of air, the result, I think, would be the same. I suspect that her beauty or what passed for it, at least for the chauffeur, was her father's French. She spoke it from birth and it showed. There were rumors that she wrote it beautifully as well, and that it was she who composed Madame's more delicate rejections and affecting apologies. Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, on occasion also wrote speeches for the Governor-General. We in the household staff did not know what to make of this boast, uncertain whether we were dealing with a French expression that had lost itself in translation. We thought that, maybe, "writing speeches" for the Governor-General was just another way of saying that Madame's
secretary was graciously offering her services to him as well. What kind of services these were would depend on the kind of woman Madame's secretary wanted to be. None of us really knew the answer to this question because, with the exception of the chauffeur, Madame's secretary ignored us all, even Minh Still the Sous Chef. My brother's functional French and his long white apron were obviously still not enough to hoist him up to her line of sight. Madame's secretary was as tall as the chauffeur, and taller than he when she wore her heels. Those shoes must have broken the chauffeur's heart. Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways. Weak is another way of putting it. Madame's secretary, unlike the chauffeur, was often invited to the larger receptions and dinner dances held at the Governor-General's. Nothing intimate but still very lavish affairs that called for a silk dress and dyed-to-match high heels. During these occasions, the chauffeur sat out back on the steps leading up to the kitchen door and smoked his cigarettes one after another. When he stomped out their lit tips, we all knew that he was thinking of her, of who was resting his hands on the silk of her dress, on the small of her back. At least it is not Blériot, thought the chauffeur, as he peered inside the doorway to make sure that the chef's toque was still leaning into the heat of the stove.

That morning, from where the chauffeur stood all he could see was Chef Blériot returning from the market with four lackeys in tow. A prince and his entourage, thought the chauffeur. Well, the chauffeur more likely thought, a prick and his entourage. No matter, either way his dislike for Blériot was at that point no more or less than that of the others in the household staff. That morning the chauffeur was, in fact, more intrigued by the gardener's helper and his sudden jolt to life. The chauffeur saw the spot of white in the marigold bed. He saw it moving with an alertness, an uncharacteristic determination not to miss the moment, and he followed it and the old helper's gaze like the tracks of an animal. What the chauffeur saw, he stored away. He came to no hasty conclusions. He preferred to gather more facts. But in all honesty, the chauffeur did not even know
what he was looking at or for. As for Blériot and me, we were that morning just two figures in the chauffeur's line of sight. Over the next few months, the chauffeur made it a point to see what the gardener's helper was seeing. He watched as the gardener's helper searched for the lopsided smile on my face. He watched as the gardener's helper correlated its appearance to that of Blériot's. He watched as the gardener's helper watered, at midnight, the jasmine vines that trailed up to the kitchen windows. He watched as the gardener's helper marked the end of the workday by the lights dimming one by one in the kitchen, by the bodies that departed, by the bodies that always stayed.

When I left the Governor-General's household, the chauffeur drove up behind me in Madame's automobile. its approaching headlights bore two dust-filled holes into the Saigon night.

"Hey, hey, where are you going?"

"Home," I said. If I had bothered to look up, I knew that I would have seen the chauffeur's head bobbing, barely above the steering wheel. Struggling for air, he always seemed to me.

"No, no. I meant where are you going to work now?"

"Why do you care?"

"Look, I'm sorry. She made me do it ... You, you don't know what it's like to hear her go on about that prick. It was as if she were holding a gun to my head, and each time she said 'Chef Blériot' she was pulling the trigger."

"A gun to
your
head?"

"I can't take it back. I want to, but I can't. You should have seen her. All powdered and rouged, and she smelled great. She smelled new. When was the last time you smelled something new? When was—"

"Are we done here?"

"No. Look, I'll get to the point. When I was in medical school—"

"What? When were
you
in medical school?"

"In Paris."

"Stop lying!"

"I'm not. When I was in medical school, I heard about treatments for your condition."

"Condition?"

"Yes, your condition. There are doctors ... there's been extensive research done in England and in America. can help you. "

"Never mind my condition. What is
wrong
with you?" I demanded to know. None of us in the household staff, not even my brother, knew what the chauffeur had studied while he was in France. We assumed it was poetry, as that was the only thing that he could do, besides driving, that could be called a skill.

"What do you mean, wrong' with me?" the chauffeur asked.

"Well, there must be something. Otherwise, why would a doctor make his living as a chauffeur?"

"At least I get to work with people."

"What did you say?"

"Look, like I said, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is probably—"

"Never mind a cure. What is wrong with
you
?" I interrupted.

"Nothing, nothing. Look, if I tell you, will you hear me out?"

Yes, I nodded.

"It's simple. When I came back to Saigon, I applied for a staff doctor position in their Native Affairs Office. Basic stuff. Mostly physical examinations to be performed at the beginning and at the end of their commissions and the routine visits in between. Venereal diseases, tapeworms, diarrhea. Basic stuff. And so I was hired."

"So?"

"So those overgrown French schoolboys hired me as a staff veterinarian. They wanted me to travel from plantation to plantation, checking on hooves, snouts, and whatever else was ailing them. When they said that I had the job, they didn't even say a word to me about it. No explanation, no nothing."

"Oh."

"As I was saying, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is..."

This time, I had to let him continue. All that training should not be wasted, I thought.

The chauffeur prided himself on being cosmopolitan, a man of the world via Saigon and Paris. So he began by telling me about all the cafés and dance halls in Paris that are filled, he said, with men like me. He never visited any of them, he said. He had only read about them in the writings of those doctors who were trying to find a cure. "Men with men. Men with men who behaved like women. Women who behaved like men with women who behaved like women, et cetera. The mutations of your condition are endless," the chauffeur explained. Endlessly fascinating, I thought. After his informative and in-depth lecture on the varietal nature of human attraction, the chauffeur, or "Dr. Chauffeur," as he in all fairness ought to be called, prescribed for me a regimen of rigorous physical exercise and a decreased intake of garlic, ginger, and other "hot" spices. No garlic? No ginger. What a quack! I thought. But I suppose the chauffeur was simply proving himself to be a poet, after all. His recommended course of action had little to do with science. It was based on something more intuited than learned. It identified him as a believer, a healer who places his faith in the body's ability to transform itself through the denial of what it naturally craves. I would hardly call
that
a skill, I thought.

But being both a poet and a doctor did help the chauffeur to see that whatever the gardener's helper was suffering from had afflicted him too long ago and was now only an aching, a bell ringing in his kneecaps when it rained. Painful, yes, but hardly worth a thorough examination, the chauffeur thought. As for Blériot and me, the chauffeur saw blood pumping through a nicked artery. Immediate attention was required, he decided. Though if I am to believe the chauffeur, it was in the end Madame's secretary who told. "A woman is always to blame," as the Old Man would say.

Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, had devised
an elaborate plan to seduce Blériot. Madame's birthday dinner was to be the place and time. A new dress, a string of freshwater pearls to accentuate the pink in her skin, and her signature special-occasion heels, the whole thing was sordid, but the worst part of it, according to the chauffeur, was that Madame's secretary had to go and tell him all about it. "Like I was her sister!" he said, shaking his head from side to side, a pendulum swinging from embarrassment to disbelief. "Like I was her sister," the chauffeur repeated. As the anniversary of Madame's birth drew closer, the details became more elaborate, said the chauffeur. Lace for the dress, perfume for the skin, barrettes for the hair, but all he could think about were her high heels. How they would make her feet raw with pain, red even, he thought. How tender they would be by the night's end. How he could rub them with salt and water. How swollen they would be in his hands. Desire comes to us in many guises, and the chauffeur's were apparently shod in a punishing pair of heels. And he thinks I am the one with the condition, I thought.

"I held out for as long as I could," the chauffeur insisted. "She's just talking nonsense, I told myself, but..."

"But what?" I asked.

"But then this morning, she ... she brought them in to show me. To show
me,
of all people! She had them dyed to match her dress, and they were returned to her speckled like a robin's egg. 'They're ruined!' she said, sobbing into my handkerchief. "

"What's a robin'?"

"It's a kind of bird. Never mind, I forget that there aren't any here. Never mind, I just mean that her shoes were supposed to be blue."

"Oh."

"They were blue all right but not all over like she wanted them to be. They looked like someone shook a brush dipped in blue paint at them. I wanted her to stop crying, so I ... I said that if she could get me more paint, I would help her fill in the spots. She just cried harder. I thought ... I thought that if I
told her about Blériot, it would cheer her up. I thought that if she knew that there was no prize at the end of the race, she wouldn't care so much about running in it."

"I don't need to hear any more," I told the chauffeur. "I know the rest."

The chauffeur drove away after I finally agreed to meet with him in a week to discuss "my condition." What a quack! I thought. No garlic? No ginger?

When I now think about the chauffeur, especially in the early morning hours when the streetlamps of this city are hanging above me, muted by the mist that rises from the Seine, I think about the two dust-filled holes that receded into the Saigon night. I think about his floating head. I think about the sadness of this man who crossed oceans, chasms blue with the broken eggshells of the birds who flew so far away from home only to return with nothing at all.

In Saigon when the rain falls, the sun remains white with heat and the earth below steams. Heat, there, attaches herself to my back and I carry her with me no matter where I go, outdoors or in. "Sultry" and "swelter" are, there, the names of the seasons, an uninterrupted interlocking sequence of months that feel like years. Flowers, there, learn to bloom at night. Festivals, there, celebrate the moon underneath her forgiving blue light. I had grown accustomed, there, to life moving slowly. I had taken it for granted that speech would be an act forever slowed and delayed because words were so reluctant to leave the shaft of coolness that is the speaker's throat. I assumed that sudden flashes of anger were something to be avoided, as they would only encourage and increase the production of sour sweat. Madame's secretary, though, belonged to a different school of thought. Heat was to her a Madame, demanding action. When the sun seared, she did not seek refuge like the rest of us. No afternoon naps, no shedding of clothes, no lying down in the pathway of a known breeze. Madame's secretary thought of heat as a competitor, a ruthless compromiser. She was particularly frustrated by how
quickly her body gave in to it. Every day, she felt defeated by the wetness that collected in the folds beneath her breasts. Every day, the watermark that was left behind, a wavy line where sweat had saturated the fabric of her dress, reminded her that these folds were deepening. Every night, when she lifted her breasts up to wipe away the salt of her own body, she thought of Chef Blériot's hands. Her body responded by blistering, turning itself inside out. Heat was to her a thief and a harlot. Heat was to her the woman whom she wanted to be.