Dauphine told me she’d grown up in Alsace-Lorraine hating the Germans. For two years she’d also lived in Brazil, where she sailed the Amazon and once watched piranhas eat a horse to the bone.
Her husband had been the French consul general in Havana during the Great War. It was the time of the Dance of the Millions, she explained, when Cubans made overnight fortunes in sugar. Palaces lined the boulevards, and fancy cars cruised up and down the city’s seawall. She said that the Cubans, like the Spaniards, used a spice in their rice that turned it the color of kumquats.
Dauphine had many photographs of Havana, including one of an old Chinese man in a doorway smoking an opium pipe. I liked to imagine that this man might have known my father or grandfather. She played Cuban records on her phonograph, too. At first the music sounded strange to me. But I grew to love the torrent of drums, the torn-sounding voices of the singers. Dauphine showed me how to dance like the Cubans, clasping me tightly and making me swing my hips.
There was a club in Old Havana, Dauphine told me, where women wore men’s evening clothes and kissed each other on the lips. They drank rum punch, lit their lovers’ cigars, picked their teeth clean with silver toothpicks. I knew, listening to her, that I knew nothing at all.
Occasionally, Dauphine cooked for me. Nothing lavish. Our favorite snack was toasted ham-and-cheese sandwiches—croque monsieurs— that she served with tiny pickles and beer. Another time, she steamed mussels in a wine broth and insisted on feeding them to me one by one.
She asked me about my life. I told her about the stone wall that encircled our mountain village to keep the bandits out. At the west end of the gorge, Mother lay beautiful as an empress in her bed, wreathed in opium smoke. One spring the musk deer ate all the leaves off the trees and the goats swelled from a mysterious disease and died. What more did I have to tell?
On my thirtieth birthday, Dauphine had her chef prepare for me the traditional longevity noodles. She knew I loved green plums and presented me with an exquisite jade bowl filled to the brim with them, although plums were long out of season.
“For my beloved Fang,” Dauphine whispered as she presented me with the fruit.
“You are too kind,” I answered, lowering my eyes.
That day, we became lovers.
The hardships of the times receded for me. Our lives became hidden as if in a thousand-year dream. Behind her fragrant embankment of candles, I knew only the wrinkled petals of Dauphine’s eyelids, the caress of her knowing fingers, the easy laugh of her rapture. With every embrace, a tide of blood rose between us. Far from the bright censoring light, I recited for her all the love poems I had memorized as a child.
But joy, I soon learned, is only a fleeting passage from one sorrow to the next.
That autumn, Dauphine’s husband took his family back to France. There was talk of markets failing, of their fortune in ruins. So much red dust. I noticed Dauphine’s earrings, long and linked, the delicate chains grazing her shoulders. They were returning to Paris, she told me, to tend to their ruins.
Dauphine gave me an ivory back scratcher, her rabbitskin hat, a lock of her hair wrapped in rice paper, and, at the last moment, the painting of the piebald charger. I did not sleep for a year. My face grew sallow, my eyes filmed with ash. Where did history go, I asked myself, if it could not be retold?
I felt raw with the knowledge of pleasure, charred by it. I understood finally the truth of the Tao Te Ching:
The reason that we have great affliction is that we have bodies.
Had we not bodies, what affliction would we have?
Once in the mountains, I saw a snake shedding its skin. It began at the back of its neck, a faint split, before slowly unsheathing its yellow-brown length. In the end, the snake was still itself but somehow shinier and new.
Sometimes when I teach, I see myself in the younger girls and wonder: Will they ever learn their singular natures?
After Dauphine left, ordinary pleasures eluded me—the heat and noise of the opera, the taste of roast duck with pepper and salt, the warmth of the sun’s first rays as I walked to school. I dreamed the same dream every night. A woman, not myself, is drowning in a river, the water collecting in her lungs. Her hair is long and unspools in the current. She pulls it out by the fistful until the river flows cleanly through her net of black strands.
The following summer, I found a shaman on the edge of Shanghai. For two days I watched him swirl by his fires, listening to his mournful chants until I fell into a trance. It was then I saw Dauphine again, lovely in a fresh linen dress, fishing by the bluest of rivers. I called to her, and without turning she nodded. Then she pulled a ripe plum from the water. It was raining, hard and slow, the kind of rain that lasts for days. I called to Dauphine again, and again she nodded. Her blond hair bobbed like a New Year’s lantern as she caught another plum. I tried to get a closer look, but a steady wind held me in place. When I awoke, I knew I had lost her forever.
For years, my heart swung in my chest. The wind slept in my empty hands. My life lay scattered like unswept petals after a storm. I sat ch’an for many hours, seeking peace. Perhaps, I thought, I could become like the wise Chieh-yü, who feigned madness and lived as a recluse to avoid public service.
I grew impatient with my students. Only one in a hundred truly listened. As for the rest, I might as well have been reading to monkeys. What could I teach them, anyway? That knowledge was more important than love? (I no longer believed this.) And the pettiness of my colleagues, bickering over supplies and oversights. How could I stand to walk the dreary corridors of that school, pretending to be a teacher? Pretending tranquility?
I forced myself to consider the tentative overtures of specific men: the diminutive chemist with the withered hand; the district supervisor who sang all evening in a moving baritone. Impossibilities! Could they not see how inapt they were for me? One spurned suitor accused me: It is always due to women’s dog hearts that men are never free!
So was this my life’s allotment? To have rejoiced in one brief love?
My bed is so empty that I keep on waking up:
As the cold increases, the night-wind begins to blow.
It rustles the curtains, making a noise like the sea:
Oh that those were waves which could carry me back to you!
No doubt there was a secret language that would restore all my loss. But how was I to learn it? Again, I found the shaman and begged him to make me forget. And for a time, I did. I lived as an insect in amber, protected from memory. Little by little, though, everything returned to me in vivid wisps. Like a stubborn old woman throwing stones in the temple, I hoped for a miracle. Of course, none came. I grew used to the void again.
A few years ago, I began collecting funeral urns. I line them up along the walls of my bedroom. One of the secondhand dealers, Mr. Yi, asked me why I am so taken with ornaments of death, but I could not answer him. I thought of planting flowers in the urns, but they lack proper drainage and I cannot bear the thought of all those blooms facing a certain demise.
Often I think of my son, who will become a man soon. I had not told Dauphine about him, I do not know why. I have a son, the same age as her youngest. A boy who grew up without me. What is Chih-mo like? Is he angry with me for having abandoned him? What did his father’s family tell him? Does he know I am alive?
Outside my window, the magnolia tree has not flowered. Crows fill its branches, three or four dozen at once. No spring onions are left in my flowerpots. On Saturday morning, after an all-night rain, I discovered a striped snail inching its way along my balcony. Where did it come from? How did it find its way to my few sad circles of dirt?
It is summer again. I am forty years old, the year that divides a woman’s life in two. Before this, one can be considered pretty. There is hope of more children. A bit of vanity is still permitted. Afterward, it is unseemly to take pains with one’s appearance. A husband lingers less on his wife’s body, hurrying his pleasure, or if he’s rich enough, bestows his
ardor on a new concubine.
A woman’s second season is long and bitter. Satisfaction comes in arranging a good marriage for her son, fetching a fair bride price for her daughter. I say this, but my life is not a woman’s life. I live like a man, like less than a man, alone in my two rooms.
The hospitable years are over. The Japanese are everywhere. Flags with their red savage suns flutter on every rooftop. The city is stripped down and starving, the fields around us all husks and wind. Only the same pack of dogs is fat from feasting on corpses.
It is said that there are no more poppies in the fields, that the water is unsafe to drink, contaminated by the dead. Others say that in places the rain comes down black with revenge. A mere trickle of water escapes my faucets. I put my cooking pots on the balcony to catch the rain, then boil it for an hour before drinking it. I carry this water in bottles to school. Once a week, I collect enough rain to take a bath.
I have not been paid in months. How I live day to day, I cannot say. I go from home to school, from school to the market and home again. At the market, there is not much to buy: wilted cabbages, an ounce or two of dried noodles. I make simple soups with what is available, or mix a bit of tofu with rice. I keep potato flour and sesame oil on hand for extra flavoring. Mostly, all food tastes the same to me.
In the evenings I correct my students’ papers, prepare tea, and read for hours. Reading is my one luxury. It does not save me from want, nor will it free me from death. Certainly, it prevents me from getting a full night’s sleep. But immersed in the shadows of other worlds, I find a measure of peace.
When I cannot concentrate, I stand on my balcony and watch the moon. It shines alone in skies clear or clouded, illuminating nothing. I remember watching this same moon as a girl in the mountains. Once I had imagined it to be a magic pearl that would grant all my wishes. But what did I know then to desire?
In China they say the greatest glory for a woman is to bear and raise sons for the future. So where, I ask, is my place? I am neither woman nor man but a stone, a tree struck by lightning long ago. Everything that has followed since counts for nothing.
Small World
SAIGON (1970)
Domingo Chen was released from the hospital just in time to turn twenty. His belt buckle scraped his gut where the shrapnel had torn him up a month after he’d signed up for his second tour of duty. The land mine had claimed four limbs from three different men. He’d lost only a clump of his intestines, the smoothness of his hairless chest, and the brand-new tattoo—a reproduction of a Santa Bárbara prayer card—that he’d gotten on R&R in China Beach.
Actually, he hadn’t lost the tattoo entirely. Bits of green and red still flecked his scars with a dull glitter. A tilted eye had knit itself below his left nipple, a minuscule hand gesticulated above his navel, waving wildly whenever he laughed. His great-grandfather’s spectacles had survived intact, but whatever luck they’d imparted obviously had run out. When the gun-ships had flown in to retaliate for the mine, Domingo had watched trees, roots and all, somersaulting through the air.
In the hospital, he’d found it difficult to follow his father’s long-ago advice. Don’t watch with interest the suffering of others. But how could he avoid it? Everywhere he looked, crisply gauzed catastrophes looked back. Maimings and head injuries and the fevered hallucinations of desperate men. He was impressed by how the mind adapted to severe pain with saving visions—the homely nurse transformed into an erotic goddess; the soldier convinced that his missing dick was a flowering cherry tree.
To pass the time, Domingo gambled with the other patients in the hospital corridors or smoked dope out the windows, courtesy of the sympathetic orderly who came around midnight with the ward’s supply. Domingo was surprised at the number of black soldiers who’d been named after presidents—Washingtons and Roosevelts, Lincolns and Jeffersons. It was no different in Cuba, he supposed. Every tenth boy a little Fidel. American officers had simpler names, like John or Bill or Fred. As far as Domingo could tell, the higher the rank the vaguer their mission.
Sometimes fights broke out in the ward. Men missing an arm or a leg, restrained by pain and morphine drips, hurled syringes and urine bags, whatever was at hand, trying to finish the job the jungle hadn’t. The MPs were sent in to restore order, but the sight of those whole, strong men depressed everyone. Besides, what could the MPs do? Handcuff the amputees?
The pomaded little chaplain showed up after every brawl, too. His job was to convince the men that everything was going to be okay when everyone knew for a fact that nothing would ever be right again. After all, what was left of them to save? And even if their bodies healed, their minds would go on suffering. Domingo thought the chaplain spoke in a strange compressed way, as if his sentences weighed more than anyone’s. Dead men sentences. Later, Domingo never could remember what’d started the fights.
Outside the hospital, the sky threatened rain. Domingo looked up at the thickening clouds and thought of the monk from Hue, who’d drenched himself with kerosene and set himself aflame on a busy Saigon street. He’d watched the footage on Cuban television and the reports of copycat self-immolations. “Read this!” His mother had thrust the newspaper at him in disgust. “Let’s see what your father says about that!” Madame Nhu, the Vietnamese president’s sister-in-law, had proclaimed the rash of self-immolations a “barbecue party” and said, “Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands.”
On Le Loi Street, Domingo passed a bareheaded man selling two fertilized duck eggs. Domingo knew that the eggs, boiled and salted, were a delicacy in Vietnam. He paid too much for them and carefully slid them into the pockets of his fatigues. From another vendor he bought one ripe apricot.
It was winter and the air was cold. Domingo made his way to Cholon, the Chinese district. More vendors hurried by with vegetables on bamboo poles. Others squatted behind straw mats of green bananas, sweet-sops, batteries, or cigarettes. One toothless woman had a single used book for sale.
The sound of a shrill flute drifted toward Domingo, but he couldn’t determine its origin. Garbage was everywhere—decaying rinds, filthy scraps in every shade of moldering gray. Down one alley, stink fruit vines overflowed from rusty cans on a balcony. Domingo thought of how his mother used to say that all mysteries grew from dead or dying things because death was the color of everything.
Mamá had become president of the Guantánamo chapter of the Cuban Physicians in Solidarity with Vietnam Brigade. Napalm victims were being sent to Cuba for treatment. Children missing eyes and ears and feet. When his mother had learned that Domingo was in Vietnam fighting for the Americans, she’d stopped writing to him altogether.
After the Bay of Pigs, Mamá had predicted that the Americans would invade the island again. But Papi had argued that the yanquis were no longer a threat. Take a look, he’d said, at what they ate: pizza and roast beef and triple fudge cake. Who could wage a war eating like that?
Papi had thought that the Revolution was far more dangerous than the United States. He used to pore over the articles about China he’d clipped since the Communists had taken over. “Millions are starving in the provinces in the name of revolutionary change. So how can we support these descarados in Cuba who are doing the same?” Papi had insisted that the Revolution couldn’t work because it focused solely on ideas, not people. “The arrogance of El Comandante to give new names to everything! As if he could invent the future!”
Domingo’s first thought when Tham Thanh Lan opened the door was that Danny Spadoto had lied. She didn’t smell like coconuts at all. No, what she smelled like was that tiger balm all the Vietnamese prostitutes used to heat up a flagging cock. Tham Thanh Lan’s eyes widened as if she recognized him but quickly settled back into a wary tiredness. Her mouth was full and poppy red. She seemed familiar to Domingo, like he’d known her as a child.
He’d heard all the rumors: how the whores in these parts kept broken glass in their vaginas, how they passed on incurable strains of venereal disease, how their victi
ms were left spongy-brained and quarantined for life on South Pacific islands owned by Uncle Sam.
Domingo held up a parcel he’d meticulously wrapped with stolen hospital gauze. Tham Thanh Lan stared at it limply, as though it contained something she herself had discarded and hoped never to see again. He continued to stand there, dumbly offering his gift. He tried to smile. His teeth felt unnaturally large in his mouth.
Tham Thanh Lan took the parcel, unwound the gauze, casually considered the contents: a last picture of Danny Spadoto, chin pressing the lower limb of a kapok tree; the half-smoked cigarette Domingo had pulled from his dead lips; Danny’s shiny dog tags; his high school ring with the fake ruby stone—Newark High, class of ’66. She examined only the ring closely, weighed it in her hand, then slipped it into a hidden pocket of her satin pants.
“He talked to me about you,” Domingo began. He wanted to say that Danny had loved her, but he wasn’t sure this was true. Domingo had collected his friend’s remains from the breadfruit tree and then slid him, piece by piece, into a body bag. He’d baby-sat the bag, grief-sickened, until dinnertime when the chopper flew in right on schedule to pick up the dead.
Tham Thanh Lan tried to close the door, but Domingo held it open. “Please.” He tried not to whine. His heart was jumping like the times he’d climbed in the Sierra Maestra with his uncle. Tham Thanh Lan’s gaze rinsed over him, took in the stubble of his newly shaven skull, his bandage-thickened middle, the bulge in his pocket suggesting a promising wad of bills.
“Where are you from?” she demanded.
“Cuba,” he said. “I’m from Cuba.” He was tired of explaining this to everyone.
“What happened to you?” Tham Thanh Lan’s voice was pitched high and thin, like an Okónkolo drum.
Domingo didn’t know where to begin—how he carried the darkness inside him now, how trampling on plants made him cringe. He wanted to talk about the forests of rubber trees he’d seen, about the elephant grass and flame vines that reminded him of Cuba. In Vietnam, he’d noticed, everything flowered all at once, not in fits and starts like deciduous New York. At what point had all this foliage turned to camouflage?
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