Mãn (11 page)

Julie had chosen those lines for the invitation to an orchard picnic with her circle of adoptive parents. I'd copied the words onto ivory paper thirty times or so, dipping my pen in an inkwell as I'd done when I was little. I searched for a long time before I found the mauve of my childhood, the mauve of every Vietnamese student during the best years of our lives. In hard times, we would write the first draft in pencil, the second in ink, in order to reuse the notebook. We were graded as much on form as on content, because calligraphy translated idea and intention as well as respect. All those years of training when I had a mauve ink stain on my fingers had left me with fine and steady handwriting that I like to use now and then so I won't lose flexibility in the downstrokes and
lightness in the upstrokes. So I memorized those words and the precise image of the apple that has come away from the branch at the shock of a stone against the stem. The blotter that absorbed excess ink sometimes depicted, accidentally, the shape of the apple or the apple tree but never that of the stone or the throw. I was far, then, from imagining that one day I would feel like that apple caught up by a hand in the middle of its fall.

cẩm thạch

jade

I DIDN'T SLEEP AT ALL
that night because, on the ceiling, a film of the minutes I'd spent in Luc's presence ran over and over in a loop, sequence by sequence, each shot frozen in a still. I needed to know exactly what had sucked me in and projected me into that state of weightlessness. In my mind I re-examined each of the tessera in the Briare enamels that decorated the bar with a lush landscape, where morning glories were entangled with climbing roses. Was it the naive pink plumage of the cockatoos in the midst of the leaves in the mosaic that had intoxicated me? Or was it the shininess of the copper pan the server was using to prepare the crepe Suzette that had dazzled me? Or the jade green of Luc's eyes?

Colours, like numbers, come to me first in Vietnamese. Moreover, we are not in the habit of distinguishing people by the shade of their hair or the colour of their eyes since Asians have just one tone: from very dark brown to ebony. So I had to keep revisiting the image of his face in close-up to identify the exact colour of his eyes, because blue and green are designated by one word in my mind:
xanh
. His
xanh
represented not blue, then, but green, the green of the waters of Hạ Long Bay or a dark and aged jade green, that of bracelets women wore for decades. It was said that the tones of jade become more intense with the years, that the tender pistachio green grows deeper until it is the shade of a young olive or even an avocado, if the skin of the wrist can give it a patina.
The closer the tints are to lichen, fir, bottle green, the greater the value of the bracelet. At times, then, the mistress of the house would ask the maid to help her age the bracelets by wearing them on her arms. The fragile appearance of jade forces movements to slow down, imposing elegance on gestures even when the hands are chapped or darkened by coal.

Probably that is why Maman put a jade bracelet on me when I was still very young. At the time, I didn't need to soap my hand or to squeeze my palm as do most women who choose to wear the stone, which some people claim is more precious than diamonds. Today, it surrounds my wrist without slipping because the bone has grown to fill the entire rigid circle. Barring some exceptional circumstance, that bracelet will follow me to my final destination. In the meantime, it is my
aide-mémoire
because it doesn't absorb the heat of flames and is never scratched. It reminds me to be solid and, above all, smooth.

yêu

love

I HELD THE BRACELET
tightly like a lifeline during my sleepless night, because I was dizzy at having accepted Luc's invitation to see him the next day and also to hear him play clarinet that same evening, without hesitation, without Francine, without fear. I followed his voice just as my grandfather had followed the traces of my grandmother, two people who had never known me.

Maman told me that this father, who sounded strict, had asked to be buried with a ceramic jar that he kept with great care in his cupboard. It contained some earth he'd taken from the footsteps of his wife the first time he'd seen her. He had used a leaf of a plane tree to take the entire print in one go. His hands were shaking because he had come close to never finding her. A soccer match that had gone overtime made him miss the first appointment, arranged by the matchmaker. He had arrived an hour late to a closed door and some deeply offended people. He had left with no regrets, until the moment when he saw my grandmother's conical hat cross the barnyard. It was a hat like any other, the kind worn indiscriminately by women and men of all ages: ivory, slightly worn, the summit pointing skyward. Yet the strip of cloth on hers, which went under her chin to keep it in place, had ties that hung down on either side. These strips seemed to react differently to the wind, which rendered the hat remarkable and her, his future wife, unique.

In my case, it was Luc's hand straightening Francine's collar over her scarf when he came to say hello. It was his twisted face on stage and his bursts of laughter with his musician friends in the light of bare bulbs. Or maybe it was nothing in particular.

thang

staircase

LUC HAD CLIMBED
the four floors two steps at a time and arrived at my door instead of being announced by the hotel's reception desk. That morning, he had texted me: “Do you know the word
apprehension
?” I didn't know the meaning of the word and didn't know that I was already inhabiting it.

There are words whose meaning I try to deduce from how they sound, like
colossal, disconnect, apostil
, others by texture, smell, shape. To grasp the nuances between two related words, to distinguish melancholy from grief, for example, I weigh each one. When I hold them in my hands, one seems to hang like grey smoke while the other is compressed into a ball of steel. I guess and I grope and the answer is as often the right one as the wrong. I constantly make mistakes, and until now the most surprising had to do with the French word
rebelle
, which I thought was a derivative of
belle
: to be
belle
again, because beauty is acquired and then lost. Maman often told me that in case of conflict, it's better to hold back than to insult someone, even if that person is the one at fault. If we taint the other, we soil our mouth, because we must first fill it with anger, blood, venom. Starting then, we are no longer beautiful. I thought that the
re
in the word
rebelle
opened the possibility of a redemption, the one that would let us regain our beauty from before.

I was often wrong, so that time I dared not guess the meaning of the word
apprehension
. I only felt fear when I opened the door to my room.

mặt trăng

moon

HE STOOD IN THE
hotel corridor for several breaths before he knocked. In one hand he was holding a coat and in the other, two helmets. Still today I try to remember his first words, in vain; at that precise moment, I was probably somewhere else, maybe on the moon. Vietnamese mothers tell children that a woodcutter lives there, sitting under a banyan tree, playing a flute to entertain the moon fairy. Chinese women show the shadows that form the silhouette of a rabbit preparing the recipe for immortality; Japanese women sew for their daughters
hagoromo
, feathered robes like those worn by the fairy who has departed the Earth for the Moon, leaving behind her a besotted emperor. He asked his army to take him to the summit of the highest mountain so that he could be closer to her.

Luc took me into those fairy tales by covering me with his down coat, its sleeves coming down to my knees. “I beg you, please don't protest,” he said, bending down to do up the zipper. I locked the door behind us with the vertigo of an astronaut. I'd read that they sometimes suffer from vertigo in space because they lose the notion of up and down. Worse than that, I had also lost left and right.

thoát

freed

I CLIMBED AWKWARDLY ONTO
the scooter behind him and we drove across Paris to his mother's residence. She wasn't expecting us. She no longer expected anyone. She didn't sing now and didn't care about the person she saw in the mirror. I wondered if she was approaching the state of nirvana, where the soul quietly leaves the body, free of all desire, insensitive to all suffering. Just as Luc was asking me if I was frightened, she placed her hand on my head and started to stroke my hair, slowly, constantly. All around, the walls were covered with photos, including one of her in a bright red T-shirt with a royal blue heart on the chest, sitting at the piano with, in the background, dozing children temporarily freed of their lame bodies.

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