“I already said no one can humiliate you but you. The same with mocking; only if your true self does not mock.”
Her face is white pale. After some inner debate, she bows her head and says intelligibly, “I kind of know that. That is why I came up here to look for you.”
“Ah, that’s why…” He lets out a cry, an unconcerned, almost insignificant one. In the meantime, his eyes never stop following the fishermen’s boats, which increasingly fade away on the silvery waves of the lake.
“He does not care about me. He does not love me any longer, not even a little bit,” she thinks to herself, and in her despair, she suddenly screams:
“You are a miserable husband. Why don’t you turn around and look at me? At least I am still in front of you, talking to you. Not even a hint of courtesy left.”
“Oh, is that so?” Surprised, he turns around and looks at her. “All right: now I turn and look at you, I will try to be courteous to please you and try to be like a gentleman…Is that all right?”
She does not answer and he continues: “I’m listening to you now. Will you go on?”
“You can’t drop that style of speaking, can you?”
“I myself do not understand when I start talking like that. Maybe it becomes a habit that is hard to break.”
“Vu, dear, we’ve had some very happy times together. Do you miss those days at all?”
“I miss them terribly, if you want to know the truth. I miss them and I am very unhappy, many times more than you can imagine. But I am not one of those who pretend to forget, who pretend to be blind or deaf. This is the crux of all the misfortune under our roof.”
“I still love you. Or else things would be different.”
“I know. Thank you.” He laughs reflexively. “But now you can do anything; including taking up Fishmonger Tu’s lifestyle. I will not intervene. You have the freedom to act to your satisfaction.”
“You do not want to understand the truth. You didn’t change, even after half a century.”
“What truth?”
“The truth that you always look at life your own way, just your own. But life follows its own course, not yours; and that is why, always, you stick your nose out to get it hit; always, you stand against rivers and in front of storms.”
“I am sorry. I’m forged and nurtured by my parents. When I met you, I was middle-aged. I cannot change to satisfy your wishes.”
“This government has only a few hundred with your rank. No one has to bear all the hardships and shortcomings that you do.”
“You can free yourself from your ties to me. You have the full capacity to start a new life.”
“But I love you,” she shouts, tears streaming down. “Why? Why can’t you understand that simple fact?”
Vu is silent. A question sneaks inside his head: “When a woman loves, she believes she can do everything, even the craziest, the most illogical of things. All in the name of love. Is that really love? Or is it a way to accommodate some spiritual demand? Or a means designed to satiate corporal desires? ‘Love’—maybe the most un-thought-through term in the human vocabulary, the one that is the most abused and carries the most hidden meanings.”
Van cries. She pulls out a handkerchief to wipe her nose while he turns the empty cup in his palm. The wind off the lake howls and reddens the coals in the stove, making them pop. Warmth spreads and envelops them. Vu looks at the stove, waiting. But his wife cries for a long while, so he pours himself another cup of tea.
“Have you calmed down?”
“…”
“We are getting old. No need to shout like that. I do not want the stall owner thinking that we’re not stable mentally.”
“I only want one thing. That we love each other as in the past.”
“I also want that. But time does not turn back. Time has its own law, like you just said. Life goes by only on the path it draws for itself.”
“I will do anything you wish, as long as you love me like before.”
“Thank you.…But I firmly believe that you can only do everything according to your wish, and because you—”
“You refer to the living room upstairs? I can ask the workers to carry all that stuff to the dump tomorrow.”
“That only creates gossip. You are aware how people look at that kind of woman.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I cannot ‘want’; what I ‘want’ for you is impossible.”
“Impossible because you always look at things in a wrong way vis-à-vis others. It was like that in the war zone. Things that people find obvious, you fiercely oppose. Things that people think are impossible, you find ways to get done.”
“What you are trying to say? Really, we seem not to have a common language anymore. Strange. Will you please explain?”
“Don’t pretend!” she says, her voice rising again.
He turns to look back as a signal that the stall owner can clearly hear their argument.
She stops and finishes the cold cup of tea to regain her calm. Then she continues: “At the front line, everybody agreed with the choice of Miss Minh Thu for the president. You were the only one who vehemently objected all the way to the end. You alone cast a vote for Miss Thanh Tu. Do you recall the journey to recruit soldiers in the cities in the lower plains? It was Sau who gave that order so that everything could go smoothly.”
“I remember. I understood that, back then, that people purposely pushed me away so they could do as they wished.”
“But that was the responsibility of the organization, for the Old Man. How was it your personal responsibility?”
He looks at his wife, as if he were looking at some strange woman from another land, from the Sahara Desert or from the Antilles Islands. And she turns red at his glance. She repeats, with less confidence:
“That was the organization’s task. How can it be wrong for me to say that?”
He slowly asks, “Van: If I were one-eyed, buck-toothed, and only three feet tall like a circus midget, would you nevertheless have loved me and married me?”
She remains quiet.
He looks at her attentively and continues: “Or if I were an albino, or had rickets or six fingers and toes, would you have married me?”
She does not answer and turns away to look at the west lake.
He continues his line of argument: “I remember the first time I met you, the hamlet high school girl, leaning her back against the door, with dreamy eyes, holding in her hands The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Perhaps I fell in love with you out of that vision. Now I ask you: If I were Quasimodo, the hunchback, would the beauty To Van agree to take me as her husband, or would she not?”
She continues to look at the lake and not answer.
Then he keeps on, asking, “Those things you don’t want, why do you force them on others? Why did you impose your cruel wish on someone as decent to you as the Old Man was? Was it you who gave the idea to the association chairwoman to send Miss Minh Thu with her sleeping gear to the big house?”
Van turns around, looks at her husband, and says, with a natural manner mixed with some surprise, “Because Brother Sau asked for my opinion; because everyone agreed with my idea; because the Old Man was not normal. Why can’t you see that?”
“The Old Man was the nation’s president. He was the soul of the revolution. Anything else?”
“The Old Man is the Father of the Nation…you forgot that title.”
“So?”
“Your question is silly. As the Father of the Nation, the Old Man cannot live like ordinary people. If you are full of rice, you have to stop eating meat. You are a learned and intelligent man, how can you not understand this small fact? Brother Sau and many others asked me that.”
“Ah, ah, ah…”
Thunder rings in his head, not once but many times. The string of thunderclaps mimics the peals and clangs of fate that will explode on Doomsday. Vu feels that thousands of strings of mines have been placed in his brain, and now the first on
e has exploded, triggering a second one and making for a chain reaction.
In a storm, lightning always flashes before the thunder. That sequence happens to him in reverse. The thunder explodes first before bundles of bright lights arrive. All things appear so clear down to the very smallest details, as mountains appear in the horizon of a clear autumn, as gardens appear when fog evaporates away under the brilliant sun of June.
“I begin to understand people’s logic; when you are full of rice, then you must give up meat. When you are made a saint, or the Father of the Nation, you are not entitled to ordinary happiness. That is why they forced upon him an old woman, one that had many times been offered in marriage from one unit to another, like a charitable donation, and no one wanted to take her. An old maid, of eighty-four pounds and thirty-four years.
“Why didn’t they think of the Old Man as a king? A king in the old days had the right to fulfill all his sexual desires, no matter how brutal or immoral. If the Old Man had a young wife, that would have been only a very humble consideration.
“Why didn’t they think that if the Old Man enjoyed a little happiness, he would have been more whole both physically and mentally, and thus could have done more for the nation?
“How could they have given themselves the right to unanimously torture the one that they hid behind to seek popular support as well as power?
“When you are full of rice, you have to forgo meat…
“It is with such logic that the cruelty of humanity manifests itself. A pleasure that hides discrimination and envy.”
A concern suddenly rises. He turns to look into her eyes.
“Now I understand everything. In those days I truly believed that you would also go out to the mountains to do assigned tasks while I was away at the front. Now I know you didn’t go anywhere. You stayed to assume the role of an assistant, to push at all costs for Miss Minh Thu to go over to the Old Man’s big house. If you had not taken the opportunity to get everyone in that position, they would probably have assigned Miss Thanh Tu.”
She does not answer, but her look reveals that this was true.
He asks again, “When did you learn how not to tell the truth?”
She turns her head away.
He continues: “In summary, how many times have you lied in your life? How many times since you grew up? How many times since we became husband and wife?”
“…”
“Now I understand that I am stupid. But that’s not all. Besides me there is another one as stupid; so stupid as to trust and admire someone as mean as you. Tonight I will call the Old Man and tell him this: ‘Dear Eldest Brother: don’t think you are ever so clever and proper. You don’t know how stupid you are, and in a big way.’”
Van bows her head, her cheeks pale. Then tears start rolling down her once beautiful but now wilted face. Wrinkles have appeared around her eyes. Her lips, once vibrant red, now are pale even under her dark plum lipstick.
As for Vu, he buttons tight the two panels of his vest; clearly a mental shock is accompanied by a physical one. Suddenly waves of pain course through his chest and all the upper part of his body. Clutching his stomach, he recalls the look on his mother’s face when he first fell in love with Van. His father had seemed calmer, while his mother appeared really upset. He had caught them whispering to each other. Those exchanges stopped when he appeared. Then, a few months later, his mother had confided to him with carefully chosen words:
“Dear son, it is taught, ‘When you take a wife look at her family environment; when you take a husband consider his genes.’ Miss To Van is indeed pretty, she looks like Teacher Luong but we do not know her character. The raising of the children in a family is mainly by the mother. The father’s role is like a big pole to hold the roof up firmly. A woman like Mrs. Tuyet Bong is not likely to produce a nice girl. I am not the only one to notice that To Van does not socialize with other pretty girls. Anytime her cousin Hien Trang, who is both pretty and gifted, gets near her, she becomes uneasy and moves on. Miss Hien Trang tells people that To Van said that she only likes to be with people who are uglier and more stupid than she is. It is as if she is looking for a setting in which to stand out. If, at her young age, she is that self-conscious, she is cruel.”
At that time he had found many reasons to win over his parents. Then he was in love, passionately. Blind are all who love too passionately. Now he understands that his mother had been completely correct; that his wife had purposely encouraged everyone to choose Miss Minh Thu and she had found many ways to push Miss Thanh Tu away. She had acted based on her selfish instincts: she had wanted to accentuate her own attractiveness by taking advantage of the homely women around her. What was worse was that other people also had taken pleasure in this cruelty.
“‘When you are full of rice, you should give up meat.’ This woman has just opened my eyes. After thirty years of marriage, now I see clearly the personality of the one I called ‘wife’…”
His heart roils in fiery waves. He feels his head and his whole body torn in two; both bobbling like two boats tossing on top of ocean waves. In this turmoil, he can’t understand why the president’s smile comes back to him. It is an image from the celebration of the border campaign when the Old Man lifted his wine cup to congratulate everyone and to pronounce these concluding words:
“Best wishes to the entire organization, especially to those men with beautiful wives. Given that criterion, Brother Vu has to drain three cups of wine!”
“How bitter,” he thought to himself. “It was the Old Man who was first to honor her beauty. He had no inkling that such a generous compliment would come to cause him harm. They made him miserable quietly and with complete premeditation…”
Restraining the effects of his pain, he looks over at her and smiles. “How strange fate is. Why didn’t you marry Sau? You were most compatible of all with him. How ironic. Why did you choose me?”
“Because I love you. Because I love only you. If not, all things would be…”
“If not, a bed was always ready, and making love would still have been so relaxing, whether in peace or war. Right?”
“…”
“But the irony of fate is that, most often, those with cruel intentions are not likely to become a couple because they want to safeguard their singularity and their own destiny. Between such accomplices, there can only be a temporary union; for their security they plan behind the scenes to choose those who are nice and stupid, because life is long and full of changes. That’s the main reason you chose me to love. Just like Sau: he did not choose you but another woman.”
Van remains silent as Vu slowly goes on, dropping each word as if he wants to hear the echo of his own voice.
“It takes thirty years to understand a person. What a nasty game the Creator plays. Compared with history, thirty years is like the blink of an eye. But with people, it’s a lifetime.”
She looks into his eyes and sees the deep despair. The eyes of her man—the one she can’t stop loving and longing for, or stop wanting to possess with absolute ownership and sovereignty. The years have not changed the delicate traits of his face. Vicissitudes have not beaten him down but have enhanced his beauty. It’s possible he does not even notice his beauty. But for her, she can see it clearly through her own nonstop longing and through the looks of other women.
“Don’t you still love me?” she asks, even though she knows the question is out of tune. The fear of an open breakup makes her lose her better mind:
“You no longer love me?” she repeats one more time in a higher pitch, with a maddening anticipation.
It seems he does not hear her question; he is somewhere else. After a while, he turns and looks at her in a dreamy way, as if examining an old picture or a moldy, long forgotten knickknack:
“Hey, Van, do you ever probe your conscience?”
“What do you mean?”
“I would like to know if you ever question whether what you did was right or wrong? Do you ever feel your conscien
ce not at peace? Or do you even understand the thing called ‘conscience’?”
“I don’t know. I live like all the others. How other women act, so do I.”
“Liar. Other women are not able to sit in Sau’s office for hours, talking and plotting. Other women do not know how to influence the chair of the women’s association with a bunch of little tricks. Other women are not titled by the Old Man ‘Miss Beauty of the Front’ or ‘Beauty of the City.’”
“I will not answer you any longer. You have no right to question me. This is not the Hoa Lo prison.”
She grimaces, but her nostrils are red and she is about to sob. She knows she has lost the contest. The man standing before her is no longer inside the chalk circle that destiny drew for her at her wedding. He has crossed over permanently, without a hint of regret. Her pursuit has been in vain. But her passion thus increases manyfold; like the fox chasing its prey, she will not abandon the hunt. She coughs, covering her mouth with a cloth. She needs to find another way, one more effective. Over on the lake, the boats still sail by. The waves are whispering, as is the wind. Here, the wind cannot enter because walls face north. The charcoal stove is bright red in front of them. But she still coughs. The intentional coughing does not catch his eyes. Nor does it move him, at least at this moment.
Not bothering to look at her, he says, “Now I understand why—all these years—we had a hard time conceiving children. Women like you cannot become mothers. Because, if you were to have a daughter, when she became a woman, you would be jealous. Like the stepmother queen in the fairy tale who was jealous and chased Snow White. There have been your kind of women for thousands of years.”
“You need not talk anymore. That’s enough,” she retorts.
But he does not stop. She no longer has power over him. Her famous charm of love has lost all effectiveness. Bewildered, she looks down at her dainty fingers, which are full of rings. The fingers are still delicate but their skin has become wrinkled with tortoise patches. Meanwhile, he continues to pour out his rage:
“One thing: women like you lack practical brains. No beauty can survive over time. What lasts the longest and is best in a person is love and moral integrity.”
The Zenith Page 40