"Why green?" Blériot wanted to know.
"What?"
"I said, ' Why green?'" he repeated.
"I know what you said, but what do you mean?" I asked. "Why does the gardener's helper always wear green?"
"Does he?"
"' Does he?' You sound as if this is new to you."
"It is new to me."
"I'm glad to hear that there are some things that are still new to you," Blériot said, as he turned around to look at me or, rather, to allow me to look at him. A man in love with his own face, Blériot was feeling generous and wanted to share. From the dip and the swivel of his voice alone, I could tell that he was no longer talking about the helper's penchant for the color green. No, he was talking about me, a garde-manger who had taught him, a chef de cuisine, a thing or two about heat, about sugar, about the point at which all things melt in the mouth. Cooking had nothing to do with it. We were returning at that moment to the Governor-General's house, and I was walking behind him as usual. Behind me were three young boys carrying the vegetables and fruits that Blériot had purchased earlier that morning from the central marketplace. Blériot always hired the same three boys. They came as a set. Even if there was only enough for one of them to carry, the other two would come along as well. Companionship, loneliness, or fear? It was difficult to say what drove these three.
The three boys made their living in the marketplace. At first they tried shining shoes, but the real shoeshine boys—the ones who had invested in platform boxes filled with polish and two kinds of rags, one coarse for rubbing off the mud and the other soft for buffing what was left of the leather—had banded together and chased them away. After several weeks the three boys returned. This time they watched over the stalls for vendors who needed to relieve themselves in an alleyway or who wanted to check out a competitor's new display of goods. The payment that the three usually received for their services was the last slurp of broth from the vendor's lunchtime bowl of phỏ. Lukewarm, beefy, but with no beef left, just a flotilla of broken noodles, and, if they were lucky, at the bottom of the bowl a bit of gristle that had been bitten off and spat back into the broth. I have seen other children work for this sort of pay before. How many slurps does it take to fill a growing boy's stomach? This is a trick question. It assumes that there is a finite number, a threshold at which point there is no longer a need, a gnawing that defines poverty at any age but especially in the young. I have seen other children trying to answer this question before, but it was the sight of these three sharing the broth left at the bottom of one bowl, the careful passing from one small set of hands to another, the look of relief as each of their faces emerges from a feast more imagined than had, that forever sanctified that marketplace for me. No incense, no marble, no gold, but faith lives here, I thought. Faith that there will always be something left at the bottom of the bowl, that none of them will take more than his share, faith that there will always be three.
The first time Blériot hired these boys I translated for him their asking fee, which was admittedly laughable or larcenous, depending on the mood of your Monsieur. Fortunately, Blériot was too fresh off the boat to know that the quoted amount was the equivalent of three bowls of phỏ, hold the gristle, thank you. It was Blériot's first time to a Saigon market. The vendors had overpriced, and he had overbought. Blériot was existing in a monetary system created just for him. Worth is relative, after all. Blériot looked at my arms weighted to the ground by his purchases. He looked back at my face and agreed to the three. The boys followed us to the Governor-General's house, carrying sacks of onions, carrots, and celery, the trinity of a French kitchen, horizontal in their arms. Later that same week when we returned to the marketplace, the three boys ran up to Blériot and held out those same arms. Still skin and bones, I knew, was what they wanted to say. Three bowls of phỏ can do only so much. Blériot held out a single coin, exactly one-third of what he had agreed to before. How quickly they learn. Madame's secretary is a good teacher, I thought. The boys nodded their heads in unison, knowing that even with the steep devaluation, Blériot's offer was still more than what they were worth in this marketplace. To his credit, Blériot never reduced their pay further, not even after he saw how they were usually paid. The first time he witnessed it, he asked me whether the woman selling bitter melons was their mother. "No," I replied, "those three boys are not even related to one another."
Blériot's mistake was an easy one to make. Madame made it all the time. At first she even thought that the entire kitchen staff clambered out of the same womb because everyone called the sous chef "Brother" Minh. Madame's secretary had to explain to her that "Anh" was used by the staff here as an honorific and that only the garde-manger was a blood brother of the sous chef. Madame was wary of the explanation, suspicious that it was all merely a cover-up for rampant nepotism. As for Blériot, I could not in truth blame him. How could he not assume a familial relationship after witnessing the boys eating from the same bowl? Blériot had not lived in Saigon long enough to understand that poverty can turn an act of intimacy into one of degradation. That in this marketplace, eating from the same bowl was the equivalent of pissing in the same pot. It was fine, especially if you were the first to go.
As we walked through the back gate of the Governor-General's house, it slammed shut behind us with such a clash that the sparrows fled from the surrounding trees, a scrap of black lace lifting into the sky, that the butterflies rose from the gladiola spikes, their wings filtering for a moment the strong light of the Saigon sun. But in the end I am afraid that it was the three boys who really gave us away. Blériot, admittedly, was of no help either. He was behaving like a typical colonial official. He walked several steps ahead, keeping enough distance between us to say, We are not one. Yet he was still close enough to relay his exclusive control over the four Indochinese who followed him. At first Blériot thought the streets of the city were like the pathways of the Governor-General's garden. He walked everywhere with his head held high, which meant his eyes caught nothing of what went on below his chest. Frenchmen like him are a boon for Saigon pickpockets. During Blériot's first week, we on the household staff overheard Madame's secretary comforting him with mothering sounds, peppered with an occasional insult for what she called the City of Thieves. In fact, it had to happen to him several more times before he finally chose to learn. For men like Blériot, pride is apparently worth more than money, an extravagance that thieves everywhere adore. Blériot then became overly concerned about the carriage of his body and the bodies of those around him, especially if they belonged to an Indochinese. The rules he set forth for me were simple. No touching. No smiling. The first I could understand, but the latter I thought absurd. A smile is like a sneeze, necessary and not within my control. Any effort to suppress it would only draw more attention to it. So I defied him and smiled anyway, and given the manner in which Blériot had us walking through the streets of that city, the pathways of that garden, he never saw. I smiled at the back of his head, at his hair streaked red in the morning light. Like threads of saffron, I thought. I smiled at his white shirt, at the loose weave of the cotton, at the muscles that only steady work in a kitchen can provide.
As careful as Blériot was by then with his body, he lacked all control when it came to his tongue. He placed great trust in the power of his language to elevate him from the fray, to keep his nose clean even when he was rooting in the dirt of someone else's land. At ease with its power to exclude, its gate-slamming pronouncements, he grew reckless, especially when we were in the company of these three boys. He assumed, and he was right, that they could not understand a French word that he was saying. He failed to comprehend, though, that the tonalities of sex are, like those of desperation, easily recognizable and instantly understood, no matter the language, no matter the age. Yes, as soon as Blériot said, "...there are some things that are still new to you," the three boys recognized it, and they laughed, skittish and cheerless, the same as if we had embraced in front of them and
kissed each other with our mouths open, hungry.
From his bed of marigolds, the gardener's helper heard the laughter and the slamming gate. He snapped up his head of white hair and caught Blériot's face as it turned from mine back toward the direction of the Governor-General's house. The gardener's helper had seen that look before. Fires have been started by less, he thought. The laughter of the three boys was, to him, also not new. Memories of it bloomed in his stomach. The gardener's helper lowered his head. He was already in a posture akin to prayer. The earth below him was warm. He dug his fingers into the soil and longed for the day when his limbs would take root.
When I left the Governor-General's household, the gardener's helper assured me that it was not he. "I would never tell," he said. "I, of all men, would never tell," he insisted. I looked at his face, a drought-scarred plain. I looked through his parting lips, cracked by the lack of touch, and I saw the nubs and shoots of all that he had swallowed in the fear that some day what was natural in him would grow. Yes, I thought, of all men, this one would have never told.
The chauffeur was a different story. He liked the sound of his own voice, especially when he was speaking French, and he and Madame's secretary always conversed in French. The chauffeur had returned from France like all the others. He had developed a passion for the leisurely game of tennis and had acquired an appreciation for the worst-smelling cheeses. The latter, we in the household staff assumed, explained his fascination for Madame's secretary. Given her French father, we in the household staff felt that Madame's secretary should have been more beautiful, but she was not. She was more robust than most, maybe, but otherwise not much improved, we thought. If you took the average Saigon girl and pumped her full of air, the result, I think, would be the same. I suspect that her beauty or what passed for it, at least for the chauffeur, was her father's French. She spoke it from birth and it showed. There were rumors that she wrote it beautifully as well, and that it was she who composed Madame's more delicate rejections and affecting apologies. Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, on occasion also wrote speeches for the Governor-General. We in the household staff did not know what to make of this boast, uncertain whether we were dealing with a French expression that had lost itself in translation. We thought that, maybe, "writing speeches" for the Governor-General was just another way of saying that Madame's secretary was graciously offering her services to him as well. What kind of services these were would depend on the kind of woman Madame's secretary wanted to be. None of us really knew the answer to this question because, with the exception of the chauffeur, Madame's secretary ignored us all, even Minh Still the Sous Chef. My brother's functional French and his long white apron were obviously still not enough to hoist him up to her line of sight. Madame's secretary was as tall as the chauffeur, and taller than he when she wore her heels. Those shoes must have broken the chauffeur's heart. Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways. Weak is another way of putting it. Madame's secretary, unlike the chauffeur, was often invited to the larger receptions and dinner dances held at the Governor-General's. Nothing intimate but still very lavish affairs that called for a silk dress and dyed-to-match high heels. During these occasions, the chauffeur sat out back on the steps leading up to the kitchen door and smoked his cigarettes one after another. When he stomped out their lit tips, we all knew that he was thinking of her, of who was resting his hands on the silk of her dress, on the small of her back. At least it is not Blériot, thought the chauffeur, as he peered inside the doorway to make sure that the chef's toque was still leaning into the heat of the stove.
That morning, from where the chauffeur stood all he could see was Chef Blériot returning from the market with four lackeys in tow. A prince and his entourage, thought the chauffeur. Well, the chauffeur more likely thought, a prick and his entourage. No matter, either way his dislike for Blériot was at that point no more or less than that of the others in the household staff. That morning the chauffeur was, in fact, more intrigued by the gardener's helper and his sudden jolt to life. The chauffeur saw the spot of white in the marigold bed. He saw it moving with an alertness, an uncharacteristic determination not to miss the moment, and he followed it and the old helper's gaze like the tracks of an animal. What the chauffeur saw, he stored away. He came to no hasty conclusions. He preferred to gather more facts. But in all honesty, the chauffeur did not even know what he was looking at or for. As for Blériot and me, we were that morning just two figures in the chauffeur's line of sight. Over the next few months, the chauffeur made it a point to see what the gardener's helper was seeing. He watched as the gardener's helper searched for the lopsided smile on my face. He watched as the gardener's helper correlated its appearance to that of Blériot's. He watched as the gardener's helper watered, at midnight, the jasmine vines that trailed up to the kitchen windows. He watched as the gardener's helper marked the end of the workday by the lights dimming one by one in the kitchen, by the bodies that departed, by the bodies that always stayed.
When I left the Governor-General's household, the chauffeur drove up behind me in Madame's automobile. its approaching headlights bore two dust-filled holes into the Saigon night.
"Hey, hey, where are you going?"
"Home," I said. If I had bothered to look up, I knew that I would have seen the chauffeur's head bobbing, barely above the steering wheel. Struggling for air, he always seemed to me.
"No, no. I meant where are you going to work now?"
"Why do you care?"
"Look, I'm sorry. She made me do it ... You, you don't know what it's like to hear her go on about that prick. It was as if she were holding a gun to my head, and each time she said 'Chef Blériot' she was pulling the trigger."
"A gun to your head?"
"I can't take it back. I want to, but I can't. You should have seen her. All powdered and rouged, and she smelled great. She smelled new. When was the last time you smelled something new? When was—"
"Are we done here?"
"No. Look, I'll get to the point. When I was in medical school—"
"What? When were you in medical school?"
"In Paris."
"Stop lying!"
"I'm not. When I was in medical school, I heard about treatments for your condition."
"Condition?"
"Yes, your condition. There are doctors ... there's been extensive research done in England and in America. can help you. "
"Never mind my condition. What is wrong with you?" I demanded to know. None of us in the household staff, not even my brother, knew what the chauffeur had studied while he was in France. We assumed it was poetry, as that was the only thing that he could do, besides driving, that could be called a skill.
"What do you mean, wrong' with me?" the chauffeur asked.
"Well, there must be something. Otherwise, why would a doctor make his living as a chauffeur?"
"At least I get to work with people."
"What did you say?"
"Look, like I said, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is probably—"
"Never mind a cure. What is wrong with you?" I interrupted.
"Nothing, nothing. Look, if I tell you, will you hear me out?"
Yes, I nodded.
"It's simple. When I came back to Saigon, I applied for a staff doctor position in their Native Affairs Office. Basic stuff. Mostly physical examinations to be performed at the beginning and at the end of their commissions and the routine visits in between. Venereal diseases, tapeworms, diarrhea. Basic stuff. And so I was hired."
"So?"
"So those overgrown French schoolboys hired me as a staff veterinarian. They wanted me to travel from plantation to plantation, checking on hooves, snouts, and whatever else was ailing them. When they said that I had the job, they didn't even say a word to me about it. No explanation, no nothing."
"Oh."
"As I was saying, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is..."
&n
bsp; This time, I had to let him continue. All that training should not be wasted, I thought.
The chauffeur prided himself on being cosmopolitan, a man of the world via Saigon and Paris. So he began by telling me about all the cafés and dance halls in Paris that are filled, he said, with men like me. He never visited any of them, he said. He had only read about them in the writings of those doctors who were trying to find a cure. "Men with men. Men with men who behaved like women. Women who behaved like men with women who behaved like women, et cetera. The mutations of your condition are endless," the chauffeur explained. Endlessly fascinating, I thought. After his informative and in-depth lecture on the varietal nature of human attraction, the chauffeur, or "Dr. Chauffeur," as he in all fairness ought to be called, prescribed for me a regimen of rigorous physical exercise and a decreased intake of garlic, ginger, and other "hot" spices. No garlic? No ginger. What a quack! I thought. But I suppose the chauffeur was simply proving himself to be a poet, after all. His recommended course of action had little to do with science. It was based on something more intuited than learned. It identified him as a believer, a healer who places his faith in the body's ability to transform itself through the denial of what it naturally craves. I would hardly call that a skill, I thought.
But being both a poet and a doctor did help the chauffeur to see that whatever the gardener's helper was suffering from had afflicted him too long ago and was now only an aching, a bell ringing in his kneecaps when it rained. Painful, yes, but hardly worth a thorough examination, the chauffeur thought. As for Blériot and me, the chauffeur saw blood pumping through a nicked artery. Immediate attention was required, he decided. Though if I am to believe the chauffeur, it was in the end Madame's secretary who told. "A woman is always to blame," as the Old Man would say.
Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, had devised an elaborate plan to seduce Blériot. Madame's birthday dinner was to be the place and time. A new dress, a string of freshwater pearls to accentuate the pink in her skin, and her signature special-occasion heels, the whole thing was sordid, but the worst part of it, according to the chauffeur, was that Madame's secretary had to go and tell him all about it. "Like I was her sister!" he said, shaking his head from side to side, a pendulum swinging from embarrassment to disbelief. "Like I was her sister," the chauffeur repeated. As the anniversary of Madame's birth drew closer, the details became more elaborate, said the chauffeur. Lace for the dress, perfume for the skin, barrettes for the hair, but all he could think about were her high heels. How they would make her feet raw with pain, red even, he thought. How tender they would be by the night's end. How he could rub them with salt and water. How swollen they would be in his hands. Desire comes to us in many guises, and the chauffeur's were apparently shod in a punishing pair of heels. And he thinks I am the one with the condition, I thought.
The Book of Salt Page 13