"Simple?" What an odd request, especially of a dessert. What sort of man does not hunger for richness and sweet at the end of a meal? A dessert should never be just a farewell, no matter how simple the sendoff. A dessert, if I may borrow from Bão, should deliver the same message that Serena the Soloist does at the end of all her shows.
While the curtains slowly descend, the action on stage continues nonstop. Serena continues to amaze and to satisfy.
The curtains slowly descend.
Those in attendance are mesmerized and are desperate for more.
The curtains slowly descend.
Suddenly, Serena is no more. But like temptation, she has not bid the audience farewell. Rather, she has alluded to what's in store in the event of an encore.
Those in attendance respond with a resounding request for more.
"Simple?" Maybe, you meant something that could be left unattended. Something that I could leave for you to serve, to apportion at just the right moment. A soufflé is most definitely out of the question. Too temperamental, a lover who dictates his own terms. A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine. I will leave it cooling in the kitchen with a small bowl of crème fraîche alongside. Then, once the duck has been served, I will leave your garret for the night, for a café and a glass or two of something strong, very strong, and you and your someone else will be alone at last. My departure will signal that intimacy has joined the party. Civility has called it a night. You two can now dispense with the forks, knives, and spoons. Your hands will tear at an animal whose joints will know no resistance. The sight of flesh surrendering, so willing a participant in its own transgression, will intoxicate you. Tiny seeds from heat-pregnant figs will insinuate themselves underneath your nails. You will be sure to notice and try to suck them out. You will begin with each other's fingers. You will end on your knees.
I lie to myself like no one else can. I always know what I need to hear. What else am I to do, revert to the truth and admit that I am a twenty-six-year-old man who still clings to the hope that someday his scholar-prince will come? Will hear my song floating over a misty lake, fall in love with my voice before ever laying eyes on my face. Will rescue me from my life of drudgery and labor and embrace me in the shadows of his teak pavilion. I am filled with these stories. My mother fed them to me as we worked side by side. From the time I was six until I turned twelve, banana leaves, raw sticky rice, overripe bananas that no one else would buy, and my mother's stories were the subjects of my everyday life. The leaves Má taught me to cut crosswise into three pieces. We would then soak them in water to keep them pliant. They had to drink in as much water as their veins could hold. They would need it later, when the heat would be merciless and full of rage. There was a steady rhythm to our movements that I still carry with me, a dream to lull me to sleep:
Her right hand dips into a basin of water, shaking from it a fragrant sheet of green. Her left hand skims a large bowl, where the raw rice has spent the night, cool underneath a blanket of water. She grabs a handful of grains, slowly spreading her fingers apart, letting the milky water drip and drain. She places what remains in her hand onto the middle of the leaf. I reach over and add thick slices of bananas, cut lengthwise in order to maximize the surface that is split and exposed from where their sweet juices will then flow. Each piece shows off two rows of black flecks, the distinctive markings of their tribe. "The darker the seeds," my mother says, "the riper the fruit." Her left hand returns to the bowl for a second handful of kernels, which then completely cover the bananas. Her hands join together for a brief moment and leave behind a packet of green. She slides it over to me, and I wrap it with a length of fibrous grass. The steamer will finish the task.
While my mother's hands followed a set routine, her stories never did. They were free to roam, to consider alternative routes, to invent their own ways home. Sometimes the "she" was a peasant girl bending over a bed of rice seedlings, which had yet to take root. "She" was occasionally a servant girl in the Imperial Palace, a noble face misplaced among the lowly rank and file. "She" was also a fishing village girl, who sat by the shore and darned the nets, who sang the same songs as her brothers but had never been allowed out to sea. "Home," though, was always the same, the teak pavilion and the scholar-prince, a man who was first and foremost wise and kind. His handsome looks, my mother always mentioned as something of an aside. As I got older, I thought her brief description was unsatisfactory, and I began pressing her for details about the scholar-prince. The first time I asked about him, I was eleven. My mother smiled in response and called me her "little scholar-prince." I stopped tying the packet in my hand.
"What? I am the scholar-prince?" I repeated, struggling to retain meaning in a fantasy turned upside down. As I sat wrapping and tying, I had never had a doubt. All this time, it was I who had the voice that would float over a misty lake, and it was always I who, in the end, got the scholar-prince, the teak pavilion, the shadow-graced embraces. I was, of course, the peasant, the servant, the fishing villager, except that in my version the "she" was undoubtedly a "he." The scholar-prince, I left as is, a man wise and kind. Though, in truth, in my version he was much more handsome than my mother could have ever imagined. My dear mother would have stopped the stories if she had known in whom I found solace and in whom I found love. So in order to hear her stories, to keep her voice in the room, I never told her that in my version I was a kitchen boy who skipped smooth shards of stone across a silent lake, that as they skimmed the water's surface they would sing. The stones landed one by one each day at the feet of a scholar-prince, who strolled the shore, contemplating the water and its relationship to the sky. At first the scholar-prince was too immersed in his own thoughts to notice, but then the stone shards began to amass, noticeably altering, intruding upon his tranquil path. The scholar-prince interrupted his reverie and picked up a shard, and as he was about to fling it back into the lake, he noticed a single word cut into its surface. Intrigued, he examined the others and found that each bore the traces of a different word. He, being a scholar-prince, naturally recognized that they were the broken pieces of a poem. Love was the subject. He, being a man, thought it was a challenge and a game. The scholar-prince rearranged the stones and composed a response. He sent them skipping across the lake. Of course, the lake was "misty." Some things are classic and should never be changed. Mist, as I had learned from my mother's stories, allows unlikely lovers to meet and forbidden subjects to wander the land. In my stories, the lakes are in a perpetual state of mist or under heavy cover of ocean-borne fog. As the stones crossed and recrossed the lake, each one a fragment of a rippling, luminous poem, the scholar-prince fell deeply in love with the kitchen boy who was now a man, and in the end, well, the end for me is always the same.
***
Even with my eyes closed, I know. Emptiness lowers the temperature of any room. I breathe in deeply, searching for coffee burning inside a still warm pot, for soap or shaving lotion evaporating, a fragrant steam rising from the bare surface of skin. I roll over on my back and listen for water flowing from a tap—hot and cold each have their own rhythm—for the rustling pages of a newspaper, for the sound of steady breathing in an otherwise silent room. No, nothing but absence mouthing the same wordless tune. I open my eyes and look around me. The light of a December sun hangs, a faded gray curtain, from the windows. Bottles of wine lie on the table, tipsy from their own fumes. Russet-colored pears, half-eaten, bear the bite marks of distracted eaters. Nubs of candles sit in pools of melted wax.
I will forget that no one came to dinner last night. I will forget that we celebrated Sunday by drinking wine from each other's lips. I will forget the baptismal and the communion. Last night was freely given, I tell myself. Pleasure for pleasure is an even exchange. Lust for lust is a balanced scale.
Do not bother chiming in, Old Man. I do not have to listen to your god anymore. Sad, though, how I can always anticipate both of your condemnatio
ns, that they have become second nature to me.
In the end, I get dressed, feeling my toes sinking into the rug by the side of the bed. I put on my socks and tie the laces of my shoes. I comb my hair with my fingers and grab a pear for the walk back to my Mesdames. I put on my coat, and I feel something foreign. The breast pocket, the thing closest to my heart, is stuffed and distended.
"Well, well, well. It looks like I was right all along. Whores do become cooks on boats. You pathetic piece of shit. I knew you would amount to nothing, but I would have never guessed that you would amount to even less. For once, you have exceeded my expectation. My oldest son, the sous chef, and now you, the whore. "The Old Man, being dead and thus clairvoyant, confirms my worst suspicions.
The stairwell is a shaft of dust and dying echoes. Monday, already half gone, has slept in it, has lost its memories in it. The rue de l'Odéon is a smudge of storefronts and cobblestones, a blind spot disappearing from the corners of my eyes. My pace is so quick that I am generating stares. Passersby are astonished by such a burst of speed, annoyed by such an extravagant display of energy. I am sorry, but I am late. I have no reason to linger here, I think. This street will never commit itself to me, and I will reciprocate in kind. December's overeager shadows may have already claimed the buildings on one side of the street. Those on the other side may appear to glow that much more with light. Attention to such details, though, would be wasted here. It is only a site of business, commercial and mercenary. There is nothing unusual here to see, So move along now, I think, there is nothing here to see. I head toward the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg and toward my Mesdames, who are sure to be furious. Who made their breakfast for them this morning? A pot of coffee, a plate of corn-flour cakes, a golden tower of crumbling squares, an American recipe that Miss Toklas taught me and that she and GertrudeStein adore. Who packed the basket for their Monday-morning drive? Chicken sandwiches wrapped in wax paper packets, which immediately glow with grease, and puff pastry fritters, delicate shells for the molten apples within. Turning onto the boulevard Raspail, I slow down my gait, collect my racing heart, and reacquaint myself with the things that I know best.
9
BEFORE COMING TO 27 rue de Fleurus, I spent many of my Mondays here, especially when there were no help-wanteds to reply to, no interviews to be rejected from, no benches available in the sun-starved parks of this city. When the moon had risen, when a drink or two had gone down, I would often find myself here as well. I would measure the distance down with my eyes, scan the water's surface for rocky formations, sandbars, and other bothersome obstructions. No, nothing but the moon's reflection. "What keeps you here?" I would hear a man asking. Your question, just your desire to know my answer, is what keeps me, has always been my response. I would then see him smile. I would open my eyes, and I would leave this bridge for the night.
I met him, the man on this bridge, in 1927. I have no recollection of the month. It could have been sometime in the late spring or, maybe, in the first days of autumn. What I am certain of, though, is that we met on a day when this city had the foregone appearance of a memory, as if the present had refused to go to work that day and said that the past would have to do. There was a mist rising from the Seine, and as water in all of its forms is inclined to do it softened and curved the city's angles and lines. The woolen sky, hanging low, dampened all the colors that the Parisians had to offer, robbing them of their carefully coordinated defenses against the gloom. A bright red scarf around a man's neck became a rusty coil. A pink veil on a young girl's hat disappeared into a haze of exhaust and smoke. On a day like that, I know that my Madame and Madame would have requested a stew. No, an organ meat of some kind. Roast veal kidneys, braised sweetbreads, sautéed mutton livers, something from deep inside to warm up their insides would have been their rationale. On the day that I met the man on the bridge, though, I was still many days and two years away from finding my Madame and Madame. This is the first Monday since coming to the rue de Fleurus that I have been back here, hands on the railing, face turned to the river. My days, after all, now belong to two American ladies, and they keep me busy with the culinary bustle that is the foundation of a continually entertaining household. Rectangular folds of puff pastry dough, circles of pâte brisée, bowls of heavy cream whipped with and without sugar, fresh fruit purées, fondant flowers and chocolate leaves, these are the basic components of sweetness that fill my days and someone else's mouth. Believe me, I had every intention of returning to them today, of fulfilling these beginning-of-the-workweek functions for them. But on this Monday, half-wasted, the boulevard Raspail took me here instead. The streets of this city are alive, I have always thought. They know better than I where I need to be, or in this instance who I need to see.
***
"Do I know you, Monsieur?"
"Let's say yes, and that way we can immediately call each other bạn," said the man who took his eyes from the Seine to address mine. He had on a black suit, coarse in fabric, too large for his frame, and many years out of fashion, that is, if there was ever a time in this city when such a suit was considered à la mode. Even if his last word had not confirmed it, that suit of his would have. He was undeniably Vietnamese.
"Bạn? Yes, why not?" I said, switching into the language that I now knew we shared. "Well, friend, are you lost or are you thinking? In my experience, when a person stands on a bridge, it usually means one or the other. "
"' Am I lost or am I thinking?' That, friend, is a question worthy of a philosopher," the man on the bridge replied. "I believe the answer is ... I am thinking about being lost."
"An answer also worthy of a philosopher," I said.
When some men smile, the skin on their face tightens, stretches to cover their cheekbones. His gave him the appearance of flesh underneath the skin. It filled in the hollows of his cheeks, brought out a face from some other time. Not that he appeared old otherwise. Rather the opposite. He appeared without age, I thought, when I first walked by him. Handsome too, I noted, as I turned around and headed back to where he stood.
"Are you a student?" I asked.
"No."
"Oh."
"Guess again," he said.
Ah, a game. Why am I always drawn, I thought, to men who play games?
"Friend, I would not even know where to begin," I said. "You do not have enough bulk on your body to be rich, I know that much."
"A fine start. Please go on."
"I would guess that you have not had cream or cheese for many years now. You may have had some meat but not fatty. No, definitely chewy with muscles. An animal who has worked for its life, if you know what I mean."
"A fine, fine start, friend. And if I were to guess, I would say that you are a cook. "
I smiled.
"Cooks have a vocabulary all their own," he continued, "and I know it always comes from right here." He pointed to the place where his belly would be, if he had had one.
"You must be a cook as well, then?"
"Yes, once."
"Let me guess ... pastries. Thin people always make good pastries."
"Remarkable," he said looking at me admiringly. "Yes, I made pies.'"
"What?"
"' Pies.' It's the English word for tartes."
"Oh."
"Assistant cook in the 'pie' bakery of a five-star hotel, under the command of a five-star chef de cuisine," he added, mocking a military salute and stance.
"Here, in the city?"
"No, in another city."
"Oh, of course! Forgive me, friend, I am slow when it comes to such details. A city that eats pies' must be a city that speaks English. You must have gotten paid well," I said, looking at him in a somewhat refurbished light. A man with savings, I thought.
"Paid well? I was paid very well, if you think paper is an even exchange for the salt of your labor or that—"
"Friend," I interrupted, "I am afraid you are losing me." The truth, I know, saves time, and as I had no idea how much of it I would
have with the man on the bridge I thought it best to speak plainly.
"Please excuse me," he said, "the philosopher in me is talkative today. All I mean to say is that the bakery was unbelievably hot, twenty-four hours a day. We all had to wear a cloth tied around our foreheads so that our sweat wouldn't turn the pies from sweet to savory. I lost so much weight there that I thought one day I would just disappear. I had the moment all pictured in my head like the final scene of a play. ' Where's Ba?' Chef Escoffier would ask. ' There he is!' the other assistants would answer, pointing in unison to a wet spot on the floor, as the stage lights dimmed."
"Well, Ba, that's—"
"' Ba' is not my name, friend," he corrected. "That's what they called me. "
"Oh."
"And you, friend, where do you work?"
"Everywhere," I replied. When I am telling the truth, why does it so often sound like a lie?
"Yes, I have worked there too," he said.
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
"Oh, of course. I told you I am slow."
He laughed and I joined in.
"Everywhere, hmm ... I am beginning to think that yours is a trick question," I teased. "You are not just a cook, are you? You should have told me that there would be more than one right answer. How unkind!"
"That's one way of looking at it. Another is that if my question has many possible answers, then you, friend, have a much greater chance of getting it right. A partial credit—"
"Aha! A teacher."
"Yes, once."
"Come on, friend, let us play Catholic and let you be the first to confess."
He laughed again.
A good sign, I thought.
"The list is long," he began. "My day belongs to this bridge and to the river. Doesn't your day belong to someone?"
"No, not right now. Usually a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, but it is not jealous and it is always willing to share."
The Book of Salt Page 9