I had no hope, so I had no suspicion. I looked at the name on the card and saw nothing there but a fine pair of boots for the winter. My shirt cuffs are worn. Frayed edges are the telltale filigree of secondhand garments. My gloves bare the tips of my fingers to cold, observant eyes, but my shoes, my shoes belong to a man who does not think twice about strolling through life on the heels of luxury. Supple leather, hand-stitched details, eloquent in form and function and, yes, they gleam. I shine them each day with the sweat of my labor. I shine them each night until I can see my reflection, muddied and unpolished. I had arrived fifteen minutes early, and there was no one home.
I sat in the doorway of 12 rue de l'Odéon and lost myself in the passing street life. In this way, I am afraid, I am very French. I am entertained best by the continuous flow of people whom I do not know. I am amused by the faces that fade in and fade out as they pass me by. What these Parisians will declare out loud under their blue-tented sky, I will never fully understand, but I do not need their conversations. There are always the stock characters with their classic poses, which even I can comprehend: lovers, best when configured in threes, two locked in a visual embrace, the third trailing, losing self-respect but not hope with each frantic step; students, traveling in a band of fours and fives, eyes bloodshot from endless nights of too many books or too many drinks but rarely both; poets, always alone even when they are accompanied by their muse, casting long shadows in long coats with too many holes and patches, carefully cultivated emblems of creativity that disqualify them from pity.
From the other side of the street you approached holding two books in one hand and in the other, dangling from one finger, a white paper box tied with some red string. Sweets, I thought. My eyes fell into the rumpled folds of your coat, the waves of your hair. I want to be at sea again, I thought. I want to be at sea again.
Your hair looks clean and freshly washed, I thought. An important indicator of anyone's overall cleanliness. You wear it parted on the left-hand side. A personal preference of mine as well. Your tie is tucked into the V of your sweater. I too prefer a sweater's soft drape to the buttons and bulk of a vest. Your coat looks warm. I would look good in it. Your hands ... your hands? But where are your gloves? Ah, hands like yours will not stay cold for very long. Your eyes, coffee and cinnamon. An infusion to wake me from sleep.
"Well, are you coming in with me, or shall we conduct our interview here in the doorway?"
Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. "Interview," though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts. I got up and walked with you into a stairwell paneled with sheets of sunlight, slipped one by one through the dusty window-panes. I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic.
Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate—useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.
5
THE LAST TIME I saw Anh Minh, we met at the back gate of the Governor-General's house. I remember looking inside the brightly lit kitchen and seeing the ceiling fans whirl, pushing hot currents of air out the windows. It was two o'clock in the morning, but the kitchen was all oven heat. Chef Blériot had fired up all four of the coal ovens and stuffed them with slender loaves, their smooth surfaces slashed at even intervals. The rest of the house was dark, except for a dim glow coming from the window of the chauffeur's room.
Years ago when I had just joined the Governor-General's household, Anh Minh told me that the chauffeur was the first son of a rich merchant, had studied in Paris, returned to Vietnam to see his father smoke away all of the family's fortune in puffs of opium, lost his automobile to a gambling debt, and spent hours now, when he was not driving Monsieur and Madame's Renault, writing poems about Madame's secretary, a slightly cross-eyed girl who was half-French and half-Vietnamese. All this, my brother said to me without a breath or a pause. He ran in a similar speed through the life stories of the others who made up the household staff of fifteen. He was motivated by a sense of duty and not by a love of gossip. He knew that I would need these facts in order to survive. That they would help me to avoid the pitfalls of those personalities who ranked higher up than I. I was told these stories so that I could think of them before I opened my mouth. At the Governor-General's, a servant whom Monsieur and Madame disliked would need to be careful, but one whom his fellow servants disliked would not last the night. Think of it as having thirteen enemies as opposed to two, Anh Minh told me. He had kindly excluded himself from the count of possible assassins, and that fact I also stored away. Overall, my oldest brother preferred to limit his lessons to the goings-on of the kitchen. I always knew when Minh the Sous Chef was preparing to teach. First he would wipe his fingers on the handkerchief that he always kept in his pocket, then he would throw his head back, tendering his throat to the blades of the kitchen's ceiling fans. From out of his mouth then came praise for the merits of Breton butter, heavily salted and packed in tins, which was served to Monsieur with his morning baguettes. Madame preferred preserves, in thick glass jars with hand-lettered labels, made from yellow plums that have the name of a beautiful French girl. "Mirabelle," Anh Minh repeated so that I, too, could see her. When old Chaboux passed away and young Blériot arrived to take his place, my brother told me that these French chefs were purists, classically trained, from families of chefs going back at least a century. Minh the Sous Chef agreed that it was probably better this way. After all, the chef de cuisine at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon—a man who claimed to be from Provence but who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of a high-ranking French official and his Vietnamese seamstress—had to be dismissed because he was serving dishes obscured by lemongrass and straw mushrooms. He also slipped pieces of rambutan and jackfruit into the sorbets. "The clientele was outraged, demanded that the natives in the kitchen be immediately dismissed if not j ailed, shocked that the culprit was a harmless-looking Provençal,' incensed enough to threaten closure of the most fashionable hotel in all of Indochina, and, yes, the Continental sent the man packing!" said Anh Minh, delivering another lesson in the shortest amount of time possible.
Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and have enough to start life all over again. Even then, I knew that every night those minutes saved were squandered away in a deep sleep from which my brother awoke with nothing but the handkerchief in his pocket. But in the kitchen with Minh the Sous Chef, I was content just to listen. Anh Minh, being the first, had inherited the voice that we, the three brothers who followed, coveted. If I closed my e yes, the Old Man was there with his river tones, low and close to the earth, a deep current summoning me from ashore. He was there without the floating islands of sewage, the half-submerged bodies of newborn animals, the swirling pools of dried-up leaves and broken branches. Making its way through Anh Minh's parted lips, the Old Man's voice, purified, said, "I believe in you." In the kitchen of the Governor-General, I learned from my brother's words and found solace in the Old Man's voice. I received there the benediction that I would otherwise never hear.
"Stupid! Hey, Stupid, get me my box of chew."
The Old Man was talking to me all right, but he could have been talking to any of my
brothers instead. By the time we were able to walk, we had learned our name. "Stupid" was shared by us like a hand-me-down. We were all the same until one of us redeemed himself, collecting small tokens, brief glimpses of the man whom the Old Man wanted us to be.
One became a porter for the railroads, second-class, but he hoped to see the interior of first before too long. The French had tattooed the countryside with tracks, knowing that mobility would allow them to keep a stranglehold on the little dragon that they called their own. Every day, mobility pounded on the shoulders of my second oldest brother. Every day, Anh Hoàng was shoved into the ground by the weight of the vanity cases of French wives. They, with their government-clerk husbands, were touring their colony, forgetting who they were, forgetting that they had to cross oceans to move up a class.
My third oldest brother worked at a printing press. He cleaned the typeset sheets, ready to be dismantled, voided by the next day's news. He removed each block and cleaned the letters while they were still warm and cloaked in a soft scab of ink, getting his brush into the sickle moons of each "C," the surrendering arms of each "Y." In his hands were the latest export prices of rubber, profitable even though the natives had delayed the caoutchouc harvest with their malaria and dysentery. In his hands were the numbers of heads guillotined for a foolhardy assassination attempt—the lone Nationalist did not even reach the gates of the villa, but justice demanded that an example be firmly set. Anh Tùng looked down and saw only the "O" roar of a lion's mouth, the "T" branches of a tree, the "S" curve of the Mekong. Anh Tùng smiled to himself thinking how the heat of the presses was not as bad as his friends had warned him, how the taste of ink can be washed away by a cup of tepid tea, how he would just hide his graying fingernails in his pockets when he went courting.
Minh the Sous Chef was the undeniable success. He should have been born in the Year of the Dragon, the Old Man said. A dragon in a long white apron was an irony forever lost on the Old Man. To him, the apron was a vestment, embroidered, consecrated by the outstretched hands of his god. No blotches of chicken grease, no stench of onions, no smears of entrails and fish guts, only the color of success in the Old Man's eyes. He often speculated that Anh Minh, being the firstborn, must have inherited the full measure of his own intelligence, talent, and ambition. When men of his own age were present, the Old Man declared that Anh Minh, being the first, must have soaked up all that my mother's womb had to offer. I can still see these strangers licking their lips, hear their low laughter, as they all shared in the thought of my mother at fourteen, at being her first, at soaking her up. Worse, I can still hear the Old Man's words:
"Look at Stupid over there. Good thing she dried up after him. The next one would have been a girl for sure!" the Old Man says, as he spits out the thin red juices flooding his lips. The betel nut and the lime paste that he constantly chews are dissolving in the heat of his mouth. He misses the spittoon. I jump up to wipe the floor clean. It is the reason that he keeps me around. He points his chin at me, offering me up to his cohorts as he had my mother. The laughter is now high and pitched. I am six years old. I am standing in the middle of a room of men, all drunk on something cheap. I am looking at the Old Man as he is spitting more red in my direction. The warm liquid lands partly in the brass pot and partly on my bare feet. I am six years old, and I am looking up at this man's face. I smile at him because I, a child, cannot understand what he is saying to me.
The last time I saw Anh Minh, he was in the garden behind the Governor-General's house with a crew of his strongest men, beating buckets of egg whites and shovels of white sugar in oversized copper bowls. Worktables had been set up just steps away from the door to the kitchen. On a night like this, Anh Minh knew that it was better to labor under the open sky. A breeze might blow through, and the leaves on the branches overhead would fan his men as they worked. On a night like this, the kitchen fans—giant star anises suspended from the ceilings—did little to lessen the heat coming from the ovens. If they had stayed inside, the egg whites, my brother knew, would have cooked solid. He had seen it happen to French chefs, newly arrived, who had no idea what can happen in the kitchens of Vietnam. The egg whites hit the side of the bowl, the wire whisk plunges in, and before the steady stream of sugar can be added, the whites are heavy and scrambled, a calf's brain shattered into useless lumps. In comparison, the garden was an oasis but still far from the ideal temperature for beating air into the whites until they expanded, pillowed, and became unrecognizable. Anh Minh compensated by setting each fire-colored bowl in a tray of chipped ice, a fortune disappearing before our eyes. Except for the "whoosh whoosh" of air whisked by taut forearms, there was silence. Sweat beads descended from necks, arms, and hands and collected in the bowls. Their salt, like the copper and the ice, would help the mixture take its shape.
Sixty-two guests were expected that night at Madame's birthday dinner. One hundred twenty-four turban-shaped islands of meringue, crisscrossed by fine lines of caramelized sugar, would bob two by two in crystal bowls brimming with chilled sabayon sauce. Anh Minh claimed that this was the one dish that proved that old Chaboux had been worthy of the chef's toque. His replacement, Chef Blériot, must have agreed, as this was the one recipe from the former regime that he followed without change. Even though it was highly unorthodox, said Anh Minh, a clear deviation from the classic recipe for oeufs à la neige. "Eggs in the snow," Anh Minh had translated for me, like it was the first line of a poem. He, like Chef Blériot, refused to condemn old Chaboux's actions. "Poor Chaboux," Anh Minh said, "no one had been more surprised by Madame's command than he. "
After all, "As if in France!" was Madame's unflinching rallying cry, one that had never failed to set old Chaboux's Gallic heart pounding. "The Governor-General's household has the duty to maintain itself with dignity and distinction. Everything here should be as if in France!" Madame commanded, failing to note that in France she would have only three instead of fifteen to serve her household needs. "As if in France!" ended each sharp command, a punctuation that Madame inserted for our benefit. Even the oldest member of the household staff, the gardener's helper with his stooped back and his moss-grown tongue, could mimic it. Every afternoon when Madame donned her tennis whites and departed for the club, we would let it slip from our lips, an all-purpose complaint, a well-aimed insult, a bitter-filled expletive. Madame's phrase had so many meanings, and we amused ourselves by using them all. Accompanied by our laughter, "As if in France!" barreled through the house, hid itself inside closets, slept behind curtains, until Madame returned, her face flushed from lobbing a little ball to and fro, to reclaim the words as her own. "As if in France!" lost its power over Madame, though, when the topic at hand was her growing distrust of cows' milk. "In this tropical heat," Madame had been told, "it is not unheard of for the milk to spoil as it is leaving the beast's sweaty udder."
"Imagine living among a people who have tasted only mother's milk," the chauffeur overheard Madame exclaiming as she dictated a letter. "Before we arrived," Madame continued, "what the Indochinese called milk' was only water poured over crushed dried soybeans!" Madame knew that this would set her sister's head shaking, thinking of how fortunate she was to have married a man with no ambition. Madame ended her letter, which was to be typed by her secretary onto the Governor-General's official stationery, with a few parting lines about the managerial difficulties of overseeing a household staff of fifteen. This, explained the chauffeur, was just in case her sister lingered too long on such unenlightened thoughts.
Madame's orders to old Chaboux were clear. The crème anglaise, the surrogate snow, a concoction of egg yolks, sugar, and milk, had to be replaced. For her birthday dinner, Madame wanted her eggs in the snow, but she would not have any of Indochina's milk in the snow. "Simply too much of a risk," she said. "I've heard that the Nationalists have been feeding the cows here a weed so noxious that the milk, if consumed in sufficient amounts, would turn a perfectly healthy woman barren." The "woman" that Madame and old Chaboux had in their
minds was, of course, French. Madame added this piece of unsolicited horror and bodily affront to Mother France just in case old Chaboux dared to balk at his task. It was all up to him. He was the intrepid explorer dispatched to honor and to preserve the sanctity of Madame and all Mesdames who would receive the embossed dinner invitations. In a country hovering at the edge of the equator, in a kitchen dried of the milk of his beloved bovine, this beleaguered chef had to do the impossible. Old Chaboux had to find new snow.
"Sabayon sauce instead of crème anglaise!" Anh Minh repeated the now departed chef's dramatic solution. Every year Minh the Sous Chef's retelling of the ingredients, while guarding their exact proportions as his secret, signaled that the all-night preparation for Madame's dinner had begun. "Over the lowest possible flame, whisk egg yolks with sugar and dry white wine," my brother, standing in a makeshift kitchen lit by stars and a barely present moon, explained the recipe to me one more time, knowing all the while that this would be his final lesson, regretting that in the end it had so little meaning.
Misfortune and despair have always propped the Old Man up like walking sticks, like dutiful sons. Not his own but other people's. The Old Man built a business off of other people's last resorts and broken spirits. He delivered them to the open arms of His Savior, Jesus Christ, and, to a lesser extent, the Virgin Mother. Virgin Mother, indeed. Only men who have taken a vow of celibacy could conjure her up, a hallucination who comes to them in the votive-lit nights, who tells them to place their weary heads on her bosom, draped in chaste cloth but ample all the same. The Old Man had no patience for Her. He had felt that way from the very beginning, from the day that he was led to Saigon's Notre-Dame and told to kneel, to turn his face toward the cathedral doors and away from the woman who had to peel his small pleading fingers from her own. From that day, from the moment when he became a Catholic, She was to him an unnecessary attachment, a weak character in a story that he would otherwise come to believe.
The Book of Salt Page 5