The Zenith (51 page)

But this is quite strange: Why is he so jealous? In the many meanderings of his life’s journey, he had not lacked encounters; he had not gone without the warmth of women. As a philanderer, he is certainly someone who has lived. Thus he cannot escape this ordinary, low-down feeling. After making love, he had told her that he urgently needed to read a stack of documents and he had left the room. But, sitting by the light, he had turned each page while trying to imagine who those others were who “had been” with her. Who had been the first one to have possession of her gorgeous and enticing body? He knew she was a girl from the highlands where life flows free like streams and forest clouds. Boys and girls there make love freely at puberty. For Easterners, people in the mountains are by that very token very much “Westernized.” A healthy and pretty girl like her, there had to have been dozens of guys who had taken a good look, especially those fellows growing up in the same region, by the same streams and woods.

“I cannot escape these so ordinary feelings,” he thought to himself. “It’s hard to understand: after all, I am a guy who spent twenty years in the West—and the first woman in my life was a blond with white skin.”

Instinctively he lets out a sigh:

“The first time I had sex, now that’s over half a century. To be more accurate, about sixty-five years ago. Nobody can really measure time, because it expands and contracts with one’s memories.”

Pouring himself a second cup of tea, he sees that first woman in the steam rising from the cup’s rim: “A widow. A woman in an alley. A seamstress, big and grotesque—my first sex teacher…”

Her face now appears opaque like smoke, but he can never forget her panting and interrupted screams during the lovemaking. They were both renters in a house in the short alley off Rue St-Jean, next to a waterless fountain that stood there rusty amid a flock of old pigeons. She was much older than he; her husband had worked for the post office and had died a few years earlier.
Three kids of uncertain paternity were kept locked inside the house. Back then, he was just twenty, at an age when youth exudes seductiveness like a muskrat leaves a scent to attract a mate. One afternoon, the widowed woman had passed him in the alley; she lived in the room built for the housemaid, facing an old garage. She was a seamstress in a small shop that made sleeping caps. Most likely a family business; she had worked there since she was thirteen. They silently walked side by side for a stretch; then all of a sudden the widow smiled and asked him:

“Well, is everything all right?”

“Thank you, I hope so,” he replied, but inside he was quite depressed, because his legs were tired from searching for a job and there was not a hint of hope.

“Good,” the woman said, then she lowered her voice: “Tonight, at one a.m., my door is open. Will you come?”

He was shocked, not knowing what to say. The woman held his elbow, squeezing it hard while repeating: “Don’t forget! One a.m. tonight!”

Then she turned to her apartment. He continued down the next stretch to the last house in the short alley, then climbed to the seventh floor. There he drank water and ate a piece of dry and hard bread from the day before. Cold water and plain bread, with no butter or milk or meat and fish, but his blood managed to stir. The hardest organ in his body could not wait until one a.m.; it had stood up like a mast. He had to walk back and forth in his room; he could not do anything else. His heart beat fast from anticipation but his intellect forced him to smile with bitterness. He had dreamed so often of the first time he would make love but had never imagined it would arrive in such crude circumstances. There was to be no princess of his dreams, no prince of her heart; just a widow needing to fill an empty space in her bed. In those days, even though young, he was already quietly bitter about his fate. It has never occurred to him that the first one who would possess his young body would be a widow twice his age and with blond hair and white skin but no beauty. Nevertheless, he waited with excitement like someone who had never tasted life but was ready to eat his first feast. Then it was time. He silently walked to the already opened door. The woman, too, said nothing; she pulled him to the private room, which was in the old garage, walls hung with loud, flowery wallpaper; it had an antique bed, a quite large one filling the whole room. This confirmed that the postman must have been larger than average.

“Strange! Fate takes care of everything; any path will bring you to where you are supposed to be.”

Also strange is that while he had almost forgotten the widow’s face, he recalled the tiny room very well, especially the old bed with iron posts holding globes on their tops. One could feel that this solid black bed was like the gravel-making machine that had survived since antiquity and would continue to exist for many centuries. He remembers vividly the brown sheet with large stripes, the bed cover colored café au lait. He remembers the ways she taught him how to love. The arms of that seamstress were hot but her muscles were flabby and her hands large, full of calluses that hurt him when her caresses became wild. He remembers the gestures, determined and at times rough, when she took her nightgown off over her head to throw it on the floor. He remembers the glass of hot milk she offered him, the sounds of the spoon clacking in the late night; he was scared because the kids were sleeping on the other side of the wall. All the details of practice preliminary to lovemaking. His twentieth year was thus marked.

“A bigger worry than the jealousy she stirred up in the neighborhood has been the jealousy of other women that I am still ashamed of.”

That little quarter of Paris was full of women without men in their lives: wives of soldiers unable to be with their husbands; widows from the ongoing colonial wars from Africa to America; Italian women who had escaped their own country. There were too many reasons those beds were cold. The postman’s widow hung tight to her twenty-year-old lover as a drowning person would hold on to a float. At first she was somewhat shy; later she became to him like a prisoner’s warden. And the other women, younger and prettier and no less daring, started throwing swords at the one who had gotten there before them. They stirred up jealous passes around the young and fresh Asian fellow who was crunchy like an apple. He was ashamed. He could not accept the way they used him as bait. He quietly looked for another place in another quarter. And one night he took his bag and left.

“Mr. President, are you done with your tea so that I can clear it?”

“Thanks, I am done.”

The soldier carries the tea tray outside, and he, by habit, pulls over the stack of materials in front of him and turns the pages, while musing to himself:

“I turn these pages not unlike that time long ago. People sometimes can be so mechanical; their automated gestures take up most of their time. Really, living life is only the tip of the iceberg—always the small part.”

Another thought rushes in quickly, like the crest of a wave thrown back on
the rocks: “Those little parts are actually life. If they melt away, then our living can have no meaning at all, can only be a copy of a picture in which what we see is no more than an approximation of what is real.”

That comparison suddenly reminds him of the darkroom where he once made a living by printing photographs, a boring and ungrateful occupation where one was imprisoned all day in darkness with the smell of silver salts. In the afternoons when you stepped out of that little prison, your eyes blurred and your back hurt.

“Actually, no, that old darkroom was a place I chose so that I might buy lousy bread to get through the days. Now, here is my real prison with a whole army of guards. Why? Why did I let them push me into such deprivation?”

In the end, he is incapable of forgetting; nor can he escape. He is trapped to return again and again to the frightening dream he had just experienced during his nap. He cannot avoid her. She stands somewhere, right behind his back. She casts a huge shadow over him, looking lovely and lonely. He feels she has just emerged from somewhere frigid, from a spacious, snow-white space where rivers freeze into clear crystal, where woods of dry trees and grass leave imprints in the wild space of dark branches crooked like snakes, where flocks of blackbirds fly while uttering imploring cries like peeling bells to summon the ghostly spirits. How strange! She never set foot across the border; she is locked in the sleeves of his shirt; she offers a life of fleeting happiness later to be thrown straight down into hell. Then in his dream she becomes an eternal companion. Wherever he lives, her shadow is there. He sees her on the boat across the sea; he sees her in the alley in Paris; he sees her wandering on the street of a quay:

“My beloved! When are we going to see each other again?”

That lyric rises up in the empty air and hits his heart. More and more he feels that his soul is akin to a mountainside confronting an ocean on a stormy day, where the thoughts advance nonstop like the ocean waves crashing against the cracked rocks, in an eternal struggle without a victor.

“I could have had happiness with her. I should not have backed off before them. Those who had warmly called me ‘Venerable,’ ‘Eldest One,’ and those who I had considered my soul mates, close brothers who shared with me their handful of rice, real ‘pals’ as they used to call themselves. Turns out all those ‘should bes’ and ‘can bes’ were misunderstandings. In a special instant, all values turned upside down just as if we had believed films about life and then life itself appeared.”

On that day when he had requested the Politburo to make public his relationship with his young wife, all the smiling faces of his “buddies” suddenly became dour:

“Mr. President, you should never bring this subject up. It is ‘taboo,’ to put it exactly and accurately.”

This from Thuan, who was pretty fluent in French. Only half those present understood the term he has used—“taboo.” Those who hadn’t understood that word expressed themselves brutally and without mincing their words.

Sau followed Thuan. He stared at the president as if he were surprised. Theatrically, he suddenly pursed his lips and firmly asserted, “Women. I think, Mr. President, you bring up this subject to please Miss Xuan, and that is your only purpose. I am sure this request starts with Miss Xuan; or from the coaxing of her family. And our president is far too smart to recognize that this is something that is unacceptable.”

“Naturally it is impossible.
C’est sur,
” stressed Thuan, using French as was his habit.

Waiting for the uncomfortable feeling to pass among those not familiar with “the language of the enemy,” another leading comrade, named Danh, said, “Even if it is Miss Xuan, we cannot be lenient. Women only think of the roofs over their heads, their own self-interest, but the president must respect the interest of the nation and the people over all other considerations. Our revolution is successful because all the people together trust your leadership. Your image brings strength to the nation. We cannot let that image be defamed.”

Comrade To raised his voice to object: “How ‘defamed’? We should not use such loaded or extreme words.”

Immediately Sau turned around and retorted strongly, “We need not be shy; we don’t need to weigh our words. We face the life or death of the revolution. The needs of the revolution are at stake; we must protect those interests at all costs. Thus, now is not the time to play with words or choose one over another.”