The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Prior to his departure, Charles had entrusted a sum of money not to me or to Old Iota but to a butcher, the one who had the room above his shop, the one who had witnessed the Sacrament of Marriage, his sour yeast and unwashed feet stench in my nostrils. This man, round and soft with the flesh of the animals that he sold, was to be the holder of my purse strings because he could read and write. “You do not even know your numbers, Rosa. Old Iota is no better,” Charles had said, his eyebrows lifted in disbelief that I would object to the arrangement that he had made on my behalf. “You and Old Iota know what? One to ten, courtesy of your fingers?” he added. “That is not enough for such matters. That is enough for buying fish and garlic.”

  I did not correct my husband, but he was wrong. I knew the number of name days that had passed. Twenty-seven by then, more than enough for buying fish, garlic, and more.

  The butcher, Charles informed me, would pay the monthly rent on the house and Old Iota her wages. Every week, the butcher would dole out to me an allowance for foodstuffs and sundry expenses. If I needed to send news to Charles, the butcher would write to him on my behalf. The butcher, in turn, would read to me any letters that arrived from Charles. It was a gentlemen’s agreement between two men who knew more than fish and garlic.

  Elesa, there is no need to write down what happened next—What good can come from Patricio knowing the ways of women?—but you, my dear, should know that it was an agreement that would work in my favor as soon as I understood that the butcher was not a gentleman.

  In the absence of Charles, Old Iota never cooked beef. She preferred rabbit or chicken, the smaller animals of the land. The butcher’s youngest son, Geranium Leaves, made these deliveries to our front door. About a month after the birth of my blessed second, the butcher began to deliver Old Iota’s orders. He arrived in the early mornings with his hair combed and still wet, and he would ask if the Sióra was home. If told no, he would reluctantly leave the order plus a gift for me in Old Iota’s hands. He delighted in purchasing for me pastries and confections. Boxes full of kourabiedes, their little half-moons dusted with icing sugar; amygdalota, shaped like tiny pears, each studded with a clove for its stem; and pasteli, chewy and thick with sesame seeds. If I agreed to see him, then Old Iota would take Giorgio and Patricio out for a stroll.

  Elesa, your eyes are betraying you. You must learn to hide their disgust, as the Sióra would tell you. Dear girl, do you think that I gave myself to this man of meats? I was not a fool, and I was not blind. Also, I could still smell him before he even turned onto my lane.

  Reminding myself of his odor has soured my stomach. Pour me a glass of water, Elesa. Pour one for yourself too, if you would like. Or, perhaps, we should stop for that pot of tea now?

  You would prefer to continue? Ah, I thought so. You are a very bright girl, Elesa.

  Tip a bit of whiskey into that water glass. The flask is underneath the bed pillows. Then I will tell you what to do when life gives you a butcher.

  Sióra Gazi said that whatever their profession—military commander, surgeon, landowner—when it comes to matters of the heart—the Sióra did not say “heart,” she said “flesh”—either a man is a butcher or he is not.

  I laughed out loud when my butcher was an actual butcher.

  You are polite to him. You look somewhat disappointed whenever he departs your company. You note where his eyes linger when he offers you his goodbyes. My butcher’s eyes were on my waist, which was not surprising, because his wife, like him, was barrel-shaped, her waistline lost long ago to her five children.

  My blessed third is heavy within me now, so I know it is difficult to imagine me as I once was. My waist, corseted, same as yours, Elesa, could be encircled by a pair of male hands.

  At the butcher’s next visit, you call attention to his region of interest by wearing a bright ribbon around it or pinning a fresh flower there. You touch the place often, smoothing the fabric of your dress or brushing away fanciful lint or crumbs. You may even spill a drop of coffee there, which requires you to rub the area with a handkerchief dipped in water, leaving a coin-sized stain behind, a little circle of wetness for him to think about later, once he is alone with his hanging carcasses. Then you wait. You wait until you know what you truly want from your butcher.

  After the birth of Patricio, my body was my own again. With Charles on Dominica, I knew that it would remain that way, its figure slimmed again, its waist cinched, its roses in full bloom. I wanted to clothe it, for the first time in my life, with choices that I alone would make. I wanted new dresses measured and fitted, all with much more than a touch of pale gray lace. I wanted a parasol, a pair of ivory-colored ankle boots, matching gloves, a shawl that was not the color of ripened wheat, and two bonnets.

  When I went to Sióra Gazi’s villa with nothing more than a cloth bag of dried sultanas, Charles had to purchase for me a makeshift wardrobe. He found for me secondhand dresses, all ill fitting—their sleeves too long, their ample necklines requiring the addition of a shawl for modesty—along with a set of petticoats and chemises and four white linen nightdresses embroidered with white silk-thread bees. Sióra Gazi disapproved and fumed over the carelessness of these items, except for the nightdresses, which she declared were exquisite. She showed me how the bees were there not for the eyes to enjoy but for the fingertips, which was ideal for a nighttime garment. The shop owner had told Charles that the pieces were part of a trousseau belonging to a British bride-to-be, but the garments were never worn because the young lady died of malaria upon her arrival on Cerigo. I asked Charles what a “trousseau” was.

  It was not Charles but Sióra Gazi who explained to me the meaning of a trousseau, and I had wanted one of my own ever since, even if it were after the fact. A trousseau was what I wanted from my butcher, and I wanted him to pay for it with my absent husband’s money.

  I untied the pink strings wrapped around the box of kourabiedes, the third box that week from the butcher. I peeked inside. Butchers are simple creatures, the Sióra had told me. The quantity of their gifts is indicative of their desire. He brought for me four layers’ worth, enough for his own family of seven.

  Kanella’s kourabiedes were far better than those sold in Lefkada town’s best bakeries. Hers crumbled the moment I bit into them, their almond pieces toasted and chopped fine as sand, their icing sugar freshly dusted and never caked.

  Who is Kanella? the butcher would have asked, if I had shared with him my thoughts.

  She is my family’s cook and the woman who wore my mother’s clothes and now mine, as if I too were dead, I would have had to answer.

  So instead I smiled and thanked him. I set the box aside, and I sat down next to him on the settee.

  The Angels of Cerigo returned to me, though now they all had the throaty voice of Sióra Gazi. They told me to grab on to the meat man’s hands and place them around my waist. I did. Now, jump up as if you have changed your mind and are ashamed. I did. Turn your back to him. I did. Tell him to leave you and pause before adding “for now.” I did.

  The butcher was back early the next morning, without Old Iota having placed an order. He arrived with a chunk of lamb shoulder and a large box of pasteli, my favorite of the confections. The Angels were adamant that I should blush when I see him, so I rubbed my cheeks with my fingertips before he was shown into the house.

  That was all it took, Elesa.

  The butcher’s hands around my waist a few more times, and I began assembling the pieces of my trousseau. When the silks for my dresses were more costly than I had anticipated, the butcher wrote to Charles to say that the landlord had raised the rent on the house. When a linen bonnet was more to my taste than a straw one, the butcher said that he would write again for additional funds. When Charles did not arrange for the requested amount to be delivered, the butcher made up the difference with his own meat money.

  God gives, and God takes.

  My tro
usseau was just completed, when Giorgio went to Him.

  Elesa, you may begin to write again. Patricio should know what happened after my blessed one left this world.

  I took apart one of my linen nightdresses to swaddle Giorgio’s body for burial. In the eternal darkness, he could touch the white silk-thread bees and know that beauty surrounds him still.

  When the butcher wrote to Charles of Giorgio’s passing, Charles wrote back to inquire about Patricio’s health. He did not ask about mine. The household funds, nearly depleted by the quince-orchard burial, were not replenished, as the butcher had requested.

  Geranium Leaves made the deliveries to the house again. The butcher added a sum of his own money to my weekly allotment from Charles. I would like to believe that the butcher did so out of compassion for the loss of my blessed one.

  Desire is a moth, Sióra Gazi had said to me. Its life is frantic and short, and then it dies.

  I am thirty years old, and my life with Charles, though mostly without him, as his truer companion is the British Army, has come to an end. During the past two years in Dublin, Charles was more often elsewhere with his regiment, first on Dominica and now in Crimea. I do not know where Crimea is. I know that it is not an island. The few months when we did live together under one roof as husband, wife, and son, I could not breathe, as if my husband brought with him into every room a swarm of gnats, clogging my mouth and throat. The only interest he took in me was at night, which, given the alternatives, I preferred, as no words were needed then.

  Please leave that out, Elesa. Write this instead.

  In Dublin, Charles’s Venetian was far worse than it had been on Cerigo and on Santa Maura. Even when I loved him, I had never loved this language coming from his mouth. It sounded stingy to me. There was a lack of fullness to his words. At the end of them, he never lingered. Every one of them was a dry peck on the cheek.

  “This Ireland cannot be an island! You lied to me. You promised me an island,” I had shouted at Charles when he told me that he would be leaving for Crimea.

  “Ignorant woman,” he said, as though he were observing that the Dublin sky was gray again that morning. He did not even look up from the newspaper. He took a sip of his tea and ate a bite of his toasted bread, but in his mouth, the whole of his body, there was nothing but the frigid waters of the Irish Sea. Charles never raised his voice to me. I wished that he had. I wanted to know that he felt the stabs of rage in his eyes that I felt in mine, that his heart was a fist breaking through his chest, that the Angels were howling in his ears. I threw my teacup against the wall, and it broke into pieces, leaving a stain of milky tea on the wallpaper.

  “Wasteful woman,” Charles said.

  I knew what my husband’s departure would mean for Patricio and me. We would have to reside again with Mrs. Brenane, Charles’s maternal aunt. While I did prefer the outskirts of Dublin to the city itself, I did not prefer Mrs. Brenane’s household in Rathmines to my own. Widows, especially those without children, had only their grief for company, so they nourished and indulged it, like a lapdog or a parrot. Mrs. Brenane’s grief inhabited all the rooms of her manor house and made it seem much smaller than it was. Her live-in servants took up room as well, the entire top floor, though I doubted any of them ever slept soundly up there, given what she expected of them during their waking hours.

  I had never seen dust treated like a disease before. Each book in her library had to be taken off the shelf every day and caressed with a cloth, like the forehead of a dying man. I had never seen people treated like they were diseased either. Her servants all wore a white cotton cloth tied over their mouths. Every day, their clothing, right down to their undergarments, had to be hung up outside and beaten as if they were odd-shaped rugs. That sound—multiple sails whipping against a strong headwind—and the chirping of the birds signaled the break of dawn in Rathmines.

  Patricio, when you and I first came to your grandaunt’s manor house, I thought that we also would be made to wear a cloth. We came to Mrs. Brenane’s because she came to us first. We had been in Dublin for about a month—a city so shrouded in fog upon our arrival that I knew it at first only by its sounds—and were staying on Lower Gardiner Street at the town house belonging to your grandmother Hearn, Mrs. Brenane’s sister. I never learned which one was the elder of the two. Both wore the same facial expressions—the disgust that comes with the taste of a spoiled oyster—and had sallow, papery skin that would have cracked, if they smiled. I did not need their language to understand that there was no love lost between the sisters and that they had chosen you and me as a site for their duel, but without their language I had no way of understanding the nature of their feud until we were already living within Mrs. Brenane’s home.

  As a young woman, Mrs. Brenane had left the Church of Ireland to marry a man of the Catholic faith, and her sister never forgave her for the religious conversion or for the unusual wealth that came with that Catholic husband. Mrs. Brenane, in turn, never forgave her sister for never forgiving her. Mrs. Brenane gloated when she heard that her nephew Charles had married a foreigner, reported to be a dark-haired Gypsy by the servants, and sired a swarthy son on a malarial island. Mrs. Brenane made it a point to visit us so that her sister would know that she knew.

  Patricio, your grandmother Hearn despised me from the moment she learned about me, which was only days before you and I came to Dublin. That was when your father’s letter from Dominica had arrived at his family’s town house. Charles had not written to his mother about me or either of his sons before then. She, to this day, does not know about your brother, Giorgio, and his brief life on Santa Maura. When you first peeked your face around my skirt, she stared at you, as if you would pounce and attack her ankles. When you did not, she reached out and felt the small gold rings that you wore in your earlobes then. Her hands pulled back without even patting your head of curls or brushing your soft pink cheeks. Charles had instructed his mother to come to the wharf to meet us, and for me to hold a sheet of paper with “Hearn” written on it by the ship’s purser. From Dominica, Charles had sent the travel arrangements including the arrival instructions, via his letters to the butcher. I had asked the butcher to inquire about Old Iota. Charles wrote back that Old Iota would not be traveling with us. This was not a pleasure trip, he wanted the butcher to remind me. Charles was correct. There was no pleasure in the journey and certainly none at our destination.

  Patricio, touch your earlobes. Can you still feel the little dips in them? Old Iota had pierced your lobes, as she did Giorgio’s, when you were just days old. It was the custom of my island and of hers. It was not the custom of your father’s island. Your grandmother made me take the gold rings out of your lobes while we were still inside of the carriage taking us from the wharf to her house. I pretended not to know what the woman wanted, but the carriage ride was too long for me to resist her fingers as they reached out again and again for your ears. I took the earrings out myself. I kissed them and crossed myself three times before I handed them to her. I knew she was cursing us. The holes in your lobes have closed, but the dimples that took their place, are they still there, my blessed second?

  Upon stepping inside your grandmother’s house, she forbade me to speak to you in Venetian or Romaic. To her, they were one language, which she referred to as “foreign.” English was the tongue that she insisted that we both learn. She assigned to us a girl of about fifteen, who looked like a colorless creature from the depths of the sea washed ashore after a storm, to be your nanny. Soon it became clear that she was there also to be my monitor, reporting back to your grandmother every time I uttered a word to you that she, the deep-sea dweller, could not understand. Your grandmother Hearn took your earrings, and she took our languages. I had been a mute in my father’s house. I would not be one again. So when Mrs. Brenane sent her carriage for us, I did not hesitate. I left with you and never returned.

  Elesa, it was at Mrs. Brenane’s where I m
et your mother. She was waiting there for me, an Angel of flesh and bones. You must not cry, my dear. She is with God now. We cannot begrudge her for leaving us to be with Him.

  Mrs. Brenane had made a great exception when she hired your mother. Patricio’s grandaunt insisted that everyone in her employ share her chosen faith. She wanted only Catholics, but she did not want the diseases that came with them, which went by two names in Ireland, “typhus” and “famine,” your mother would later tell me. The former was the reason for the cloths and the daily airing of the servants’ clothing, your mother explained. As she was not a live-in servant, she was exempted from wearing a mouth cloth. She would be the only one within that household whom typhus would take.

  Your mother addressed me as “Sióra” when we met. She wore the scent of lavender water in her hair, dark and full of waves like my own. I wanted to kiss her for both. Instead, I sat next to her and held on to her hands, as a dear friend would or, perhaps, a sister. A woman on that grim island with whom I could speak Venetian, and I could not find one word to say to her. Instead, I wept, while Patricio napped, his head upon my lap. Your mother promised me that she would return the following morning, and she did.

  The first thing I asked your mother was how Mrs. Brenane had managed to find her. It had not occurred to me that Charles was not the only man within his regiment who had found a wife on one of the Ionian Islands and brought her north with him. Her husband, your mother told me, had also been garrisoned at the Fort of Santa Maura but had been returned to Dublin years prior due to his poor health. When Mrs. Brenane asked for a Venetian and English speaker among the wives of the men within that regiment, she heard about your mother and decided upon her as our interpreter.