The Book of Salt (16 page)

"Impotence, Prince Norodom."

The Emperor of Vietnam telephoned you the very next day. He wanted an appointment for later that same afternoon. He said that he would send over his automobile. The Emperor knew that Prince Norodom would see the vehicle, with its telltale curtains, cruising down the rue de l'Odéon. The Emperor's chauffeur opened the car door, waited for you to climb in, and shut it with just the right amount of force, a good sign in a driver. It says that the chauffeur is unlikely to go over a cliff with you asleep in the back seat. Once inside, you looked around, touched the flocked cushions, pulled the velvet curtains open, and wondered how many women the Emperor had sent for in this very car. Every
bonne vivante
in this town has at least one story to tell about the young Emperor. The plot is appallingly similar. The Emperor of Vietnam spots a beautiful Mademoiselle or Madame. The Emperor has no particular age or marital status preferences, but she
must
have blond, blond hair. The color of wheat is even too dark for him. His Highness sends his car for her. She arrives at his abode and is given a tour, which ends in his bedroom. He points her toward an ornate armoire and opens the door. The armoire, depending on who tells the
story, is filled with stacks of French francs, carved jade bracelets, loose diamonds sitting atop red velvet pouches, gold bars stacked like a display of foil-wrapped chocolates. The supposed contents are endless. They grow more and more extravagant with each telling. As the Mademoiselle or Madame is sucking in her breath, trying to keep her knees from shaking, the Emperor says, "Please,
ma chérie,
choose a little something for yourself." The act of choosing, of course, has its consequences. Many blond, blond Mesdemoiselles and Mesdames have strolled into the fashionable cafés of Paris, not to mention Nice and Monte Carlo, with very consequential bracelets and diamond rings.

"He's not a subtle man, Bee."

A "cad," I think.

"Are you a Negro, Lattimore?" the Emperor of Vietnam immediately asked upon your entrance into the room.

"No, Emperor, I am an iridologist."

He winked at you, and said, "Doctor, please drop the ' Emperor. ' I obviously know who I am. I thought I may know who you are as well. "

There was another wink. A nervous tic? you wondered.

"Doctor, I've seen your face before. I can smell the bleach in your hair, the touch of lye. I'm not a bigot, Doctor Lattimore, but I'm no fool. You and I, we understand each other now, and
that
is the beginning of a trusting relationship.
Vous comprenez?
"

"Not a subtle man, Bee."

An Old Man, I think.

You took out the maps and searched the room for an uncluttered surface.

"Skip the educational part, doctor. I've no head for those things. Let's get straight to the part where you predict my future," said the Emperor.

"I am a scientist, your Highness. I do not predict.' I render a diagnosis."

"
Mais oui,
Lattimore. I'm making light of your profession, your science. I make light of everything, doctor. No offense was meant. I'll make it up to you. Before you go, we'll take a little
visit to that armoire that I'm sure you have heard so much about." The Emperor smiled. "You may choose an item, a small item, as you don't render the usual services."

Yet another wink, you tell me.

Not a subtle man, I agree.

You seated the Emperor of Vietnam in a chair. As you raised the magnifying glass to his eyes, you felt a rush of intuition. You looked immediately into his right iris, and there it was—a cluster of small spots at about five o'clock, a twin of Prince Norodom's. This time you did not hesitate.

"Impotence, your Highness."

The young man across from you collapsed, you tell me, as did the one who had sought your services just a day before.

You ask me to do the same for you, to tell you a story of my life, to let you hear it in the language that urged me into this world, a language whose words now congest my head and flood my heart because they have nowhere else to go. Trapped as it is inside my mouth, my Vietnamese has taken on the pallor of the dying, the faded colors of the abandoned. I comply with your request but within minutes, I can tell that the experiment is disastrous, a torture that your body is responding to with a noticeable curving of the spine and a heavy-headed plea for mercy. The pleasure that I take from your words, you cannot take from mine. You are unused to the darkness that surrounds you, stuffs itself into your ears, coats your tongue. You struggle instead of letting your body float. It is the first time that I see you cry. I swear I will never do it again. I have been expertly trained, I try to tell you, if not bred for such things. Your training is different.

My comprehension, Sweet Sunday Man, is based mostly on my ability to look for the signals and interpret the signs. Words, I will grant you, are convenient, a handy shortcut to meaning. But too often, words limit and deny. For those of us who are better trained, we need only one and we can piece together the rest. We look for blood in the whites of your eyes. Anger, sadness, all of the emotional extremes register there first, a red spider web, a tangle of red rivulets. They all start there and then wash down your face, coloring your cheeks, your neck, the valley above your collarbone. For the subtler details, we consult the dark, round pools, lighter at the shallow edges and darker in the centers' deep, where light collects and falls inside you. Lies, you should know, always float to the top, foreign objects that, for most people, cause considerable discomfort and pain. There are some who are able to still the shift from side to side, calm the spasms of the irritated lids. A skill, I am afraid that you are either born with or not. The origin of a liar is the same as that of a lie: from one breeds another. Shame is often mistaken for one and the same, but I know it is different. Shame is heavy-hearted and does not float. It prefers the deep, where it disrupts the steady balance, tilting the gaze, forward and down. The lids behave differently as well. They are slow to open, slow to let anything in. Shame often passes for a sudden bout of exhaustion, a sleep that will not be delayed. It affects the whole body, slowing down speech, bloating limbs, until paralysis is a constant threat. Shame, I can assure you, Sweet Sunday Man, is the more toxic of the two.

THE FIRST TO NOTICE
was the gardener's helper. This in itself was peculiar given his advanced age and his otherwise turtlelike existence. In what must have been a requirement of his profession, the helper always wore green, a cotton shirt tucked into a pair of slightly heavier-weight canvas pants, both faded, like dried-out grass. He had been with the household staff longer than any of us, and in all that time, through all of the gossip sessions, his wardrobe never caused a stir. We never thought of him apart from the garden that he watered and weeded. In that setting, in the only setting that we could ever imagine him, green seemed very natural to us. Ironically, Blériot was the first to point out this man's camouflage.

"Why green?" Blériot wanted to know.

"What?"

"I said, ' Why green?'" he repeated.

"I know what you said, but what do you mean?" I asked. "Why does the gardener's helper always wear green?"

"Does he?"

"' Does he?' You sound as if this is new to you."

"It
is
new to me."

"I'm glad to hear that there are
some
things that are still
new
to you," Blériot said, as he turned around to look at me or, rather, to allow me to look at him. A man in love with his own face, Blériot was feeling generous and wanted to share. From the dip and the swivel of his voice alone, I could tell that he was no longer talking about the helper's penchant for the color green. No, he was talking about me, a
garde-manger
who had taught him, a
chef de cuisine,
a thing or two about heat, about sugar, about the point at which all things melt in the mouth. Cooking had nothing to do with it. We were returning at that moment to the Governor-General's house, and I was walking behind him as usual. Behind me were three young boys carrying the vegetables and fruits that Blériot had purchased earlier that morning from the central marketplace. Blériot always hired the same three boys. They came as a set. Even if there was only enough for one of them to carry, the other two would come along as well. Companionship, loneliness, or fear? It was difficult to say what drove these three.

The three boys made their living in the marketplace. At first they tried shining shoes, but the real shoeshine boys—the ones who had invested in platform boxes filled with polish and two kinds of rags, one coarse for rubbing off the mud and the other soft for buffing what was left of the leather—had banded together and chased them away. After several weeks the three boys returned. This time they watched over the stalls for vendors who needed to relieve themselves in an alleyway or who wanted to check out a competitor's new display of goods. The payment that the three usually received for their services was the last slurp of broth from the vendor's lunchtime bowl of
phỏ.
Lukewarm, beefy, but with no beef left, just a flotilla of broken noodles, and, if they were lucky, at the bottom of the bowl a bit of gristle that had been bitten off and spat back into the broth. I have seen other children work for this sort of pay before. How many slurps does it take to fill a growing boy's stomach? This is a trick question. It assumes that there is a finite number, a threshold at which point there is no longer a need, a gnawing
that defines poverty at any age but especially in the young. I have seen other children trying to answer this question before, but it was the sight of these three sharing the broth left at the bottom of one bowl, the careful passing from one small set of hands to another, the look of relief as each of their faces emerges from a feast more imagined than had, that forever sanctified that marketplace for me. No incense, no marble, no gold, but faith lives here, I thought. Faith that there will always be something left at the bottom of the bowl, that none of them will take more than his share, faith that there will always be three.

The first time Blériot hired these boys I translated for him their asking fee, which was admittedly laughable or larcenous, depending on the mood of your Monsieur. Fortunately, Blériot was too fresh off the boat to know that the quoted amount was the equivalent of three bowls of
phỏ,
hold the gristle, thank you. It was Blériot's first time to a Saigon market. The vendors had overpriced, and he had overbought. Blériot was existing in a monetary system created just for him. Worth
is
relative, after all. Blériot looked at my arms weighted to the ground by his purchases. He looked back at my face and agreed to the three. The boys followed us to the Governor-General's house, carrying sacks of onions, carrots, and celery, the trinity of a French kitchen, horizontal in their arms. Later that same week when we returned to the marketplace, the three boys ran up to Blériot and held out those same arms. Still skin and bones, I knew, was what they wanted to say. Three bowls of
phỏ
can do only so much. Blériot held out a single coin, exactly one-third of what he had agreed to before. How quickly they learn. Madame's secretary is a good teacher, I thought. The boys nodded their heads in unison, knowing that even with the steep devaluation, Blériot's offer was still more than what they were worth in this marketplace. To his credit, Blériot never reduced their pay further, not even after he saw how they were usually paid. The first time he witnessed it, he asked me whether the woman selling bitter melons was their mother. "No," I replied, "those three boys are not even related to one another."

Blériot's mistake was an easy one to make. Madame made it all the time. At first she even thought that the entire kitchen staff clambered out of the same womb because everyone called the sous chef "Brother" Minh. Madame's secretary had to explain to her that "Anh" was used by the staff here as an honorific and that only the
garde-manger
was a blood brother of the sous chef. Madame was wary of the explanation, suspicious that it was all merely a cover-up for rampant nepotism. As for Blériot, I could not in truth blame him. How could he
not
assume a familial relationship after witnessing the boys eating from the same bowl? Blériot had not lived in Saigon long enough to understand that poverty can turn an act of intimacy into one of degradation. That in this marketplace, eating from the same bowl was the equivalent of pissing in the same pot. It was fine, especially if you were the first to go.

As we walked through the back gate of the Governor-General's house, it slammed shut behind us with such a clash that the sparrows fled from the surrounding trees, a scrap of black lace lifting into the sky, that the butterflies rose from the gladiola spikes, their wings filtering for a moment the strong light of the Saigon sun. But in the end I am afraid that it was the three boys who really gave us away. Blériot, admittedly, was of no help either. He was behaving like a typical colonial official. He walked several steps ahead, keeping enough distance between us to say, We are not one. Yet he was still close enough to relay his exclusive control over the four Indochinese who followed him. At first Blériot thought the streets of the city were like the pathways of the Governor-General's garden. He walked everywhere with his head held high, which meant his eyes caught nothing of what went on below his chest. Frenchmen like him are a boon for Saigon pickpockets. During Blériot's first week, we on the household staff overheard Madame's secretary comforting him with mothering sounds, peppered with an occasional insult for what she called the City of Thieves. In fact, it had to happen to him several more times before he finally chose to learn. For men like Blériot, pride is apparently worth more
than money, an extravagance that thieves everywhere adore. Blériot then became overly concerned about the carriage of his body and the bodies of those around him, especially if they belonged to an Indochinese. The rules he set forth for me were simple. No touching. No smiling. The first I could understand, but the latter I thought absurd. A smile is like a sneeze, necessary and not within my control. Any effort to suppress it would only draw more attention to it. So I defied him and smiled anyway, and given the manner in which Blériot had us walking through the streets of that city, the pathways of that garden, he never saw. I smiled at the back of his head, at his hair streaked red in the morning light. Like threads of saffron, I thought. I smiled at his white shirt, at the loose weave of the cotton, at the muscles that only steady work in a kitchen can provide.