The Second Biggest Nothing

by Colin Cotterill

  Nobody answered, not even the abbot whose French was by far the best at our temple. He slunk back into the prayer hall, took up a broom and started sweeping.

  “My word,” she said. “They sent me here because your temple has such a fine reputation. Yet I cannot find one person who understands me.”

  I don’t know what possessed my skinny legs to walk me forward, nor how I dared look her in the eye.

  “We all speak French, Madam,” I said, “but we are embarrassed to attempt it in front of you.”

  She walked toward me, her heels sinking into the dirt with each step.

  “And why would you be embarrassed?” she asked.

  “Because we are not perfect,” I said.

  Despite the tightness of her dress, she crouched and wiggled her index finger in my direction.

  “Come here, Little Prince,” she said.

  I shuffled forward close enough to see the wrinkles under her makeup.

  “Only in nature can we find perfection,” she said. “Man must settle for ‘good enough.’ And you are good enough for me. I choose you.”

  And, just like that, I became her project. She made donations to the temple for extra tuition. She produced excellent counterfeit documents proving my links to the Lao royal family that gained me entry into the lycée in Saigon where she paid my fees. She attended my graduation and presented me with a second-class ticket on the Victor Hugo to France. In my pack, I had a letter of introduction from the governor general in Saigon to the director of Ancienne University and enough funds to cover my first-year expenses in Paris. Madam Loulou guaranteed me funds for every year that I achieved excellent grades until the day I became a doctor.

  What she didn’t guarantee was that she would stay alive long enough to honor that promise. Even as I was journeying across the Atlantic my sponsor succumbed to consumption and was dead by the time I docked in Marseilles. It wasn’t until several years later that I learned of the background of my dear Madam Loulou. For many years, my sponsor had been the proprietor of one of the most popular whore houses in Saigon. She had amassed a small fortune mainly from the patronage of French army officers, one of whom was the aforementioned governor general. She had arrived in Vietnam early in the French campaign and in a city with more brothels than drain holes, she quickly made a name for herself. This was achieved, not from the beauty of her girls but from their unique skills. Madam Loulou had trained each one in the ancient art of fellatio. You might say she’d become a celebrity by word of mouth.

  Loulou had never married nor produced offspring. She had nobody to share her wealth with. Somewhere along the line she got it into her head that she was on her way to hell: a belief loudly supported by the wives of the officers she serviced. A Catholic priest in Saigon—also a customer—suggested she might readjust her trajectory by saving poor orphans. And, in the shell of a nut, that’s what led her to me and twenty other young boys. I still look for her in the back alleyways of the Other World, but I never see my darling Madam Loulou. And that, omitting several years of struggles and humiliations, of poverty, of retaking high school courses and accepting disgusting jobs to keep myself alive in France, explains why I was sitting in front of the Café de la Paix that chilly May morning. I was in my third year of medicine at Ancienne and doing moderately well, “for an Asian.” But I’d run into a bad patch of my own doing and I needed counsel.

  “Anybody sitting here?” came a voice.

  The young fellow leaning over me was dark-skinned with a fine head of black hair greased back. He was dressed like half the men there at the café, and he grasped a tennis racket in his left hand. His right hand he held out to me. I grabbed it, laughed, and shook the hell out of it.

  “Sit down, you fool,” I said, “before someone challenges you to a game.”

  Civilai pulled out the chair and apologized in charming French to the three ladies behind him who needed to shuffle slightly to allow him to sit. They smiled. He gestured to the waiter, pointed to my cognac and held up three fingers.

  “What makes you think I couldn’t beat them?” he said.

  “I doubt that racket’s ever kissed a ball,” I said.

  “You’re right. But see how impressed everyone looks. A Chinaman trained in the fine art of tennis. They’ll go home and tell all their friends we can count to forty.”

  Civilai was, in many respects, my cultural savior in those tough years. We’d met at the Louxor, a small cinema in La Chapelle, where I worked as an usher and confectionary seller. I’d been there so long most of the patrons knew me by name. Civilai was from a wealthy family and never really had to work for a living. Our backgrounds were so different we really had no right to have become friends, but our love for the cinema drew us together. He told me that he was a Communist. At the time, I really didn’t know what that meant. It seemed everyone in Paris had to have a cause. You had to be something other than yourself: a fascist, an anarchist, a poet. So I paid little heed to Civilai’s constant references to Karl Marx and Lenin. He told me about his pal, Quoc, a Vietnamese who had great plans to go back to Indochina and rescue the slaves in the French colonies. Together they would establish a Communist state, just as soon as Quoc got out of jail in Hong Kong. He seemed, to my mind, to be spending a lot of time in jail.

  As a child at the temple in Savanaketh, I hadn’t had many dealings with the French administrators. In fact, I probably viewed them as great white gods educating us natives—through armed force—how to be civilized. I liked their uniforms. It didn’t occur to me they were raping our land. We didn’t have anything when they arrived and several decades later we had even less and were paying taxes on it. But, to a ten-year-old boy, that seemed to be the way of the world. If you had a big gun you had the right to do what you wanted.

  But then, in France entre deux guerres, Civilai had become my grapevine to a country I had no other means to communicate with. I had no friends or family back in Laos. Like all the bemused tribesmen and women, who had been corralled together under a Lao flag, I’d been born in a country that I still knew very little about. I’d written ‘Buddhist’ on the application to Ancienne, but the religion of my birth made no more sense to me than the Catholicism drummed into me at school. At 23 I’d already seen more of France than I had of Laos. Without Civilai I would probably have swallowed the colonial line that the country was working in the tropics to improve the lot of ignorant savages. Were it not for a generous fellationist, I would have been one of them.

  “Do you ever order just one drink?” I asked my young friend.

  He placed the newly arrived drinks like chess pieces on the checkered tablecloth and pushed one toward me: cognac to queen’s pawn two.

  “Monsieur L’Usher,” he said, “one never knows when one’s waiter might be struck down with a heart attack, leaving all those at the tables around his prone body deprived of their rightful digestifs. Always order as if these drinks might be your last.”

  “At these prices they undoubtedly will be,” I said.

  “Then consider yourself lucky that this very morning a handsome filly at Longchamp caught my eye. She almost begged me to put a hundred francs on her to win. And she did not disappoint me. Consider this afternoon my treat.”

  I knew there were no races at Longchamp in the morning. With Civilai, there was always a horse, a greyhound or a roulette table keen to cover the costs of our outings. He never once belittled me over my poverty nor offered to pay for my courses or keep up with the rent. My pride remained intact, but I was certain that if a disaster befell me, my friend would be there to help me out. I just had to ask. I never did.

  “Salut,” he said and clinked my glass with his. We drank to nothing in particular. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked.

  “I don’t go to as many classes as I used to,” I said. “I work better from books. I tend to pick out the best lectures to attend. I went to one this morning on di
acetylmorphine.”

  “Sounds fascinating.”

  “It was,” I said. “It was one of those moments when you can be sure the world has just made another one of its serious mistakes.”

  “Like assassinating Archduke Ferdinand?”

  “Potentially much worse than that,” I said.

  “Then tell me all about dicey mental morphine,” he said.

  “Diacetylmorphine is a pain reliever ten times more powerful than morphine. Morphine was first extracted from opium in 1805. It served us well medically, but it tended to be addictive. Scientists, searching for an alternative, synthesized diacetylmorphine, and it was an immediate success. The Bayer Company began mass production. Countries around the world hastily approved this new ‘non-addictive’ painkiller, and soon it was more popular than sex. And for good reason. A year after its launch in North America, 200,000 people had become addicted to this super drug that Bayer had named heroin. It was immediately banned worldwide for anything but medical or scientific use.

  “But, of course, as soon as the drug became illegal, all the criminal networks went up a gear. The Chinese gangs already have refineries. The Corsicans are building labs right here in France under the noses of the gendarmerie. The lecturer believes that in the next decade heroin will outperform opium as the addiction of choice worldwide. It’s less bulky and easier to hide.”

  “And this is what they’re teaching you at medical school?” Civilai asked.

  “You can pass on the information to your boss.”

  “Quoc? Why would he be interested?”

  “Some of the most successful revolutions and coups in history have been funded by the drug trade. It’s how the French maintain their presence in Indochina. You and your Communist buddies could get in on the ground floor.”

  “Siri, communism is all about empowering the workers, not debilitating them. When we take over from the French, the first thing we’ll do is burn their opium crops.”

  “I admire your faith,” I said, even though I didn’t give it much of a chance.

  “So anyway, what brings me here?” he asked.

  “My postcard, I presume.”

  “It gave up so little information.”

  “I didn’t want the French postal service to be the first to know.”

  “Excellent. I have an exclusive, and you want my advice.”

  “More, your blessing,” I said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, no, what?”

  “I sense a liaison.”

  “More than a fling,” I said. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”

  Civilai whooped and held up four fingers to the waiter.

  “Does she know you have fifty centimes to your name?”

  “She does. But she also has fifty centimes to hers. So between us we have one franc, which is the beginning of a fortune.”

  “Have I met her?” he asked.

  “Yes, on your last trip to Paris. You and your Mademoiselle Nong joined us for the matinee of Mata Hari at the Louxor.”

  “Not the Lao beauty with the tight sweater?”

  “The very same: Bouasawan.”

  “Why would a girl whose figure outperforms every erotic postcard on sale along the banks of the Seine agree to marry you?”

  “I’m a catch,” I said.

  “You do know she’s a Communist?”

  “So are you.”

  “No, I mean she’s a Communist said very loudly. I recall she discussed her motivation with Nong that day. She came to Paris for the sole purpose of joining the Party. She’d already memorized the manifesto before she arrived. She signed up with the CPF even before she registered at Ancienne. Nong believed she was a fanatic.”

  “Passion is a wonderful thing.”

  “I hope she can find time for you amid her obsession.”

  “This from a man who’s leaving in a week to muster a proletariat and turn Indochina red?”

  “I’m enthusiastic,” he said, “not fanatical. I like to call myself a middle-path socialist. I appreciate the concept and the potential of communism. I think it could work to unite our people against the French. But I don’t decorate my apartment with hammer and sickle wallpaper. I don’t send photos of myself in a swimsuit to Lenin.”

  “You know she doesn’t do any of that.”

  He was starting to irritate me.

  “Don’t get defensive, little brother,” he said. “I’m just offering my opinions.”

  While the waiter was putting the new glasses on the table, Civilai knocked back the drinks he already had.

  “How can I not be defensive when you disparage my choice of bride?” I said.

  “Look, Siri, she’s gorgeous. She’d make any man’s heart turn somersaults. And there is no doubt she’s intelligent or that she loves her country. I see no problem with her whatsoever. The only problem I see is you.”

  “I’m not good enough for her?”

  “Like me, she obviously recognizes just how good you are. You are unique and supremely talented. But you don’t believe in what she believes.”

  “I believe.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “Convince me.”

  “What?”

  “Convince me that you share her passion.”

  The cognac had warmed my blood and was making me disagreeable. I took off my muffler. I hadn’t been planning to tell him but he’d left me no choice.

  “I’ve joined,” I said.

  “Joined what?”

  “The Party.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “It’s true. I went to a few meetings with Boua and thought, well, this isn’t so bad, is it? And I decided that, with a bit of work, this communism thing has a chance. So I paid my dues and got my card. I can show it to you if you like.”

  “I don’t want to doubt your motives . . .” he said.

  “I love her, Civilai. I’ve loved her since the first day I saw her in class. She’s the most . . . the most substantial Lao woman I’ve ever met. She has dreams. She has unselfish ambitions. She smells nice. She can change the world, and I want to be beside her while she’s doing it.”

  “Then all I can say is congratulations,” said Civilai, and, as a fitting subject break, a coal cart was pulled over by a fat policeman right in front of us because the horse wasn’t wearing blinkers. In protest, the horse shat all over the boots of the policeman who arrested the driver. He in turn protested that it was the horse that did the damage, not he. Some of the more intoxicated onlookers applauded the horse.

  To my mind, our conversation became a little less amicable after that. We didn’t part on the best of terms. If we’d known how long it would be before we’d meet again, we’d probably have drunk one more glass for the road, said au revoir with a handshake and wished each other luck. In retrospect, I wish we had because then I would have been late for my appointment and not become embroiled in one of the most unpleasant events in French history. Instead, still miffed about his comments, I told Civilai I had to leave in a hurry to pay a visit to the Hotel de Rothschild, where there was a sale of secondhand medical textbooks. But I made the mistake of mentioning that the main event of the book exhibition was its opening by the president, Paul Doumer, himself. I knew that would irritate him.

  It was as if I’d pushed down on the detonation plunger of Civilai’s personal TNT. He launched off on a tirade against the fuzzy-bearded gentleman that, were it not in Lao, would have shocked and offended all those around us. Drinkers tutted their disapproval at the volume, but Civilai ranted on. Doumer had been the Governor General of the colonies in Indochina. His were the taxes that drained the lifeblood out of the villages. His were the laws that favored the French over the natives; favored the low-landers over the tribes people. His were the policies that made a success of their inves
tments for the first time, all on the back of local suffering. More investors came to take the gamble that led to more pillaging and looting. When the Lao proved too backward and lazy to absorb this development, Doumer carted in Vietnamese administrators and laborers by the thousands. There were probably more Vietnamese in the country than Lao at that time.

  And what funded all these grandiose projects? La grande comtesse d’O. Doumer took over the opium monopoly and used the profits to supplement the modest funds he received from France. It was not a new policy. He was merely continuing a historical precedent in the third world. But he was good at the game. His chemists processed raw Indian resin using a technique that made the opium burn faster, thus increasing the demand. He imported impure opium from China for the poor addicted coolies. While the world was seeking bans on the opium trade, Doumer was embracing it. So successful was his policy in the Far East that he returned to France a hero, and his rise through the political ranks was inevitable.

  And in Civilai’s mind, I was on my way to stand meekly in a chilly street alongside the type of people who adored celebrity. We would applaud as he arrived and applaud as he left, and we would go home and tell our loved ones how close we’d been to the great statesman. That could not have been further from the truth.

  “I hope you two have a very good time together,” said Civilai, throwing down his last cognac and leaving me with three untouched glasses of my own. His chair bumped our neighbors’ table as he stood and he bowed in apology. He picked his way through the diners and stood at the border of the sidewalk. He looked back at me, winked and smiled before joining the passersby. On the table he’d left some bank notes and an unused tennis racket.

  Of course, I’d heard a lot about Doumer from the newspapers and the orange box speakers in the parks of Paris. I needed textbooks, but that wasn’t my only reason for attending the event at the Hotel de Rothschild. Even before I learned that it was true, I’d always believed that you could look into a man’s eyes and see his soul. I wanted to see the face of a man who’d been so adept at shifting and shuffling human cargo that he’d been able to change the destiny of a people. The French had killed thousands of us in the name of advancement. Yet, there in Paris, the colonial overlords were saints, sacrificing their valuable time to bring peace and hope to the poor nations. I needed to learn from Doumer—the great magician—how he’d pulled off this trick.