by Reif Larsen
Renoit was sitting on the patio, thumbing at a glass of Courvoisier, the ledger sheets splayed out before him. A fleeing diplomat had given him the bottle in Saigon for services rendered on the battlefield, and Renoit had been saving the cognac for a special occasion ever since, but it was becoming more and more likely that he would die before a worthy occasion came, so he had broken the seal and let the old liquid cut through the heat of his body. These grapes were from Napoleon’s time, when empires were carved with simple gestures of the hand. Renoit found himself wondering whether, if the worst were to happen, he would kill himself or let another man have the pleasure. He had seen enough to know that in every death, someone suffered and someone triumphed, and often those two were the same person.
He was startled out of his reverie by a group of coolies coming up the hill from the rubber fields. Someone must have died again. This was both annoying and somehow exhilarating.
We’re still making the rubber. We’re still dying to make the rubber. It didn’t matter what the ledger sheets said. La mort est notre mission civilisatrice, Renoit thought, and took a sip of the cognac.
When presented with the baby, Renoit, like all the others, was taken with the child’s almost mystical diminutiveness. Its fingers like tiny spiders, toes like grains of rice.
“What the hell do you want me to do?” Renoit said to Tien, who was offering the child with outstretched arms, like a gift. “He’s one of yours. Fais-en ce que tu veux.”
Tien bowed. His heart sank. As he feared, the blood would now be on his hands. He turned away, sheltering the child, who had suddenly grown quiet, as if sensing the imminence of his doom.
It was then that Jean-Baptiste emerged from the main house. He was carrying a wireless, intently swinging its long, spindly antenna toward the sky, fishing for an elusive, invisible signal.
“Why ever did we get this thing? I wasn’t worried about receiving the news before,” he said. “But now I can’t seem to live without it.”
Jean-Baptiste saw the crowd of workers around Renoit.
“This heat’s miserable. Even the radio waves have wilted.” He paused. “Did someone die?”
“Not yet,” said Renoit.
Tien’s hopes rose. He offered the baby, still wrapped in his scarf, to the master of the house.
Jean-Baptiste studied Tien closely.
“Whose child is this?” he said. He put down the radio, still expelling its plush blanket of static, and took the small creature in his hands.
“Whose child is this?” he said again.
Tien bowed. “He is yours, Monsieur de Broglie.”
2
As Tofte-Jebsen points out, it might at first seem curious that Jean-Baptiste de Broglie, reluctant sovereign of La Seule Vérité, would be one of the last remaining kmaoch sbaek sor (“white ghosts”) in the twilight of a dying empire, especially considering his almost total indifference to the actual business of running a plantation. But dig beneath the surface and you will discover an uncommon resolve; Jean-Baptiste, willingly or unwillingly, had inherited that strange but effective colonial alchemy of nostalgia, loyalty, and imperial duty.
Jean-Baptiste’s grandfather, Henri de Broglie, had been part of the first wave of eager settlers to the newly formed French Protectorate of Cambodia in the 1870s. Henri was an early champion of the magnificent ruins of Angkor, and through a series of articles in respected periodicals such as Le Globe and Le Petit Parisien, he had helped to popularize their “rediscovery” among Western audiences. At the time, the temples still fell under the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Siam, and Henri was part of the diplomatic delegation that had negotiated their successful return to the Cambodian people.
“The Khmers are a friendly but short-sighted race,” he wrote in an editorial in Le Petit Journal. “If they are to achieve anything in the future, they must see what magnificence was possible in the past.”
Along the way, Henri had forsaken Catholicism for his own Westernized version of the local Theravada Buddhism: he borrowed selectively from Khmer traditions but also subtly aligned spiritual enlightenment alongside the tenets of Rousseau’s rational enlightenment. For Henri, ascendancy to nirvana meant total mastery of one’s own domain using the latest advances in technology. It was a convenient alteration: such cultural blending allowed him to shirk responsibility for his actions by locating himself in the ethically ambiguous space between the colonizer and the colonized.
While on a tour of Brazil in 1882, Henri visited a rubber plantation and witnessed the cultivation of hevea trees. He watched in fascination as the men made a V-shaped incision into the soft bark of the plant and then siphoned the milky sap through a half-moon spout into the hollow shell of a coconut. Later, Henri would dip his hand into a great steel drum of warm latex, the rubber coating him like a second skin. Sensing his guest’s great admiration, the plantation owner gave Henri a pair of black rubber boots that smelled of wet ash.
“I am certain that nearly all of man’s inventions in the next 100 years will be made of this material,” he later recorded in his journal. “There is a life to its texture that brings me great comfort.”
He brought back a jar full of hevea seeds and a notebook of instructions for its cultivation, and founded La Seule Vérité in the heart of the colony, on the banks of the Mekong, the great river that would deliver his crop to the world. The plot was expansive but perhaps two hundred kilometers farther upstream than it needed to be. This choice, like all others, was made defiantly, un défi du cœur.
“The river is the spine of the colony, from which all life comes and goes,” he wrote. “My house is built between the fourth and fifth vertebrae. . . . And the view does not disappoint.”
Sometimes the surface of the river was so calm and wide, one could not believe there was any movement at all—it resembled not a river but a thousand-year-old lake. This curving stretch of the Mekong, like the bend of a woman’s knee, inevitably affected all those who passed through it. Either they fell in love with the way les heures bubbled and moaned here or else they urged their capitaine to push through to the next turn, wondering who would ever choose to live in such a place.
The house itself was a lavish, two-story affair built of Italian marble and local rosewood, surrounded by rolling bushes of bougainvillea. It was one of the first rubber plantations in all of Indochine, and for years it stumbled along, producing little from immature trees for a nearly nonexistent Asian market. Henri, undeterred, continued plotting his rise to wealth and fame, writing at length of rubber’s sturdy flexibility, extolling the great rubber farms of Brazil, Java, and the newly formed Congo Free State in Africa.
Henri was a notorious cataloger. He recorded nearly everything that went on at La Seule Vérité in obsessive detail, documenting tree height, wages, temperature, flooding, bird species, even his own bowel movements. Fearful that someone might get hold of these notes and decode his secrets, Henri kept the large calfskin tomes locked in a vault. Years later, when his son and then grandson were able to glimpse their contents, such worries seemed superfluous: the ledgers did indeed contain a wealth of information, but their system of organization was beyond mortal comprehension. Columns of numbers, labeled only with a series of initials, would intersect graphs and tables of equally opaque figures. An unidentified chart could just as easily have been referring to kilograms of rubber output as to kilograms of excrement produced. Henri’s system existed only in the world of the system itself.
Henri married a Khmer woman from the north named Kolthida. Unlike in the British colonies, where race lines were drawn quite clearly, such intermarriages were not unheard of in French Indochina, but the union did not help Henri’s reputation in Saigon as a rogue colonist who had lost himself with the natives upriver. Yet Koko, as she came to be known, would quietly prove her detractors wrong: she spoke good, clean French and quickly mastered the intricate art of judging the world from beneath a par
asol. Her wardrobe featured full-length corsets, ordered specially slim and narrow from Paris, and she subtly inflected her formal ensembles with a touch of tasteful local flair—a bright Khmer scarf or a snail shell bracelet that clicked and tinkled as she strolled the paths. On the mantel in the drawing room she installed two traditional Lakhon Khol masks from the Reamker epic: Sophanakha, the demon seductress, and Hanuman, the noble monkey warrior. The masks smelled of blood, but Henri eventually grew accustomed to this.
Like her husband, Koko managed to toe the finest of lines between the exploiteur and exploité: she ran her house with an iron first, commandeering the servants in a stiff mixture of French and Khmer, and surprised their respected visitors from Phnom Penh by playing a repertoire of jigs on a piano that was always slightly out of tune from the constant damp. These visitors would later remark in private to Henri what an admirable job he had done with the native woman. He accepted their congratulations—for him, the miracle was not that Koko had adapted so well, but why such adaptation did not take place all across the colony.
“Nearly anything can be cultivated anywhere, given the right care and attention,” Henri said to his bemused guests. “Certain environments demand more care and attention, but this is not a failure of the cultivar. Any failure lies squarely on the shoulders of the cultivateur.”
Then he would take them through the young hevea grove. The trees were planted at precise distances such that no matter where one stood, the rows would form and re-form into an infinite kind of order. There was no way to unbind them.
Koko bore Henri a son, André, who, despite his Khmer lineage, looked very much like a round-faced Frenchman left out in the sun to ripen, a true Indochine français.
Henri would not live to see his grand vision come to fruition. On December 31, 1899, five minutes before the dawn of the new century, he succumbed to a swift and brutal case of hemorrhagic dengue fever. The servants, unsure of what to do, lit off the fireworks anyway. The explosions flushed open the night, momentarily revealing the great jungles beyond before their dying embers streamed down into the cool, black river, where they hissed and sizzled into silence.
On New Year’s Day, as word of Henri’s death spread up and down the river, more news came to join it: Koko had disappeared during the night, taking with her a box full of jewelry and several thousand francs. Despite some efforts by colonial forces to locate her, she would never be seen or heard of again. There were rumors, of course: that she had fled to Paris and had opened a successful Indochine-themed lounge and nightclub; that she had been murdered for her jewels by a group of masked men near the Laotian border. One story even claimed she had used witchcraft to assume the appearance of a white man and now ran a nearby plantation.
“The only way you can still tell who she once was,” said one of the characters in Tofte-Jebsen’s novella, “is to catch her sleeping and shine a torch into her eyes. A person can never change their eyes when they dream” (56).
André de Broglie, barely nineteen years old and now an orphan, was left to manage the plantation on his own. Luckily, his hand was steady, and the fledgling century would witness the swift rise of an automobile driven on the rubber pneumatic tire. Seemingly overnight, the global demand for latex exploded. La Seule Vérité—primed by Henri’s hubris for just such an explosion—eventually grew to thirty thousand hectares, with a workforce of more than six hundred indentured Vietnamese laborers.
When he was twenty-four, André floated down to Saigon and returned with a wife standing upon his prow. Eugenia was the eldest child of Pierre Cazeau, the stately, arrogant owner of the Hôtel Continental, on rue Catinat. She was also deaf. Her tutors had spent the first thirteen years of her life attempting to teach her how to speak like a hearing person, as was dictated by the popular pedagogy of the time. Her tongue was pressed, her cheeks prodded, countless odd intonations were coaxed forth from her lips. Cumbersome hearing horns were thrust into her ears, spiraling upward like ibex horns. It was a torture she finally rejected for the revolutionary freedom of sign, which she taught herself from an eighteenth-century dictionary by Charles-Michel de l’Épée that she had stumbled upon accidentally on the shelf of a Saigon barbershop.5 Based on the grammatical rules of spoken language, L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System was unwieldy and overly complex: many words, instead of having a sign on their own, were composed of a combination of signs. “Satisfy” was formed by joining the signs for “make” and “enough.” “Intelligence” was formed by pairing “read” with “inside.” And “to believe” was made by combining “feel,” “know,” “say,” “not see,” plus another sign to denote its verbiage. Though his intentions may have been noble, L’Epée’s system was inoperable in reality, and so Eugenia modified and shortened the language. In her hands, “belief” was simplified into “feel no see.” Verbs, nouns, and possession were implied by context.
Fig. 4.2. L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System
From de l’Épée, C.-M. (1776), Institution des sourds et muets: par la voie des signes méthodiques, as cited in Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 61
One could not quite call her beautiful, but the enforced oral purgatory of her youth had left her with an understanding of life’s inherent inclination to punish those who least deserve it. Her black humor in the face of great pain perfectly balanced her new husband’s workmanlike nature. She had jumped at the opportunity to abandon the Saigon society that had silently humiliated her, gladly accepting the trials of life on a backwater, albeit thriving, plantation. Her family’s resistance to sending their eldest child into the great unknowable cauldron of the jungle was only halfhearted—they were in fact grateful to be unburdened of the obstacle that had kept them from marrying off their two youngest (and much more desirable) daughters.
André painstakingly mastered Eugenia’s language. Together, they communed via a fluttering dance of fingertips to palms, and their dinners on the veranda were thus rich, wordless affairs, confluences of gestures beneath the ceiling fan, the silence broken only by the clink of a soup spoon, the rustle of a servant clearing the table, or the occasional shapeless moan that accentuated certain of her sentences, a relic from her years of being forced to speak aloud.
Eugenia began to paint. She painted the rows and rows of rubber trees. She painted the bougainvillea. By torchlight, she painted the flowers of the Epiphyllum oxypetalum cactus that bloomed only once a year, and only at midnight. Her paintings were better than they should have been, primarily because of her unusual color palette: nothing appeared as it should. Colors were reversed, dulled, heightened. Eugenia claimed that this was how a blind person would see the world if he or she were to suddenly gain sight.
André had inherited the de Broglie curse of recording everything possible. In the vault next to his father’s giant sheepskin books, he began to accrue his own ledgers. Unlike his father’s records, André’s notes were organized, fastidious, and—perhaps most important—legible. Yet even his rigorous accounting did not always tell the full story, either. For instance, when he wrote, “1906 – 8 personnes contractent la syphilis,” he did not recount that one of these eight cases was actually himself, and that the source of the outbreak was a prostitute who had arrived from Phnom Penh under the guise of being one of the worker’s sisters attempting to escape a battered marriage. The prostitute then proceeded to purvey her services for a month before she was found drowned in the Mekong, her mouth stuffed full of stones. Her death was dutifully noted in the tally for that year without comment: “mortalité totale – 26 (1 de vieillesse, 5 du paludisme, 2 de la dengue, 4 d’une maladie cardiaque, 7 d’une pneumonie, 3 de la tuberculose, 3 de causes inconnues, 1 par noyade).” Flip forward a few pages and you will find the total profit for this year as well: “1,931,398 FF”—an astounding amount, considering time, place, and circumstance.
As their fortune grew, André remained keenly aware that he was reaping the delayed fruits of his father’s pers
istence, that nearly every one of his triumphs was not the result of his own doing but rather a by-product of his predecessor’s brilliance. Yet instead of neutering his sense of achievement, such knowledge exonerated him from ever having to find his own way. His destiny had set him free. Henri’s gravestone, which André paid a visit to every Sunday, presided over the plantation from a hilltop. Its inscription, a phrase of the Buddha’s that a local boatman had reportedly recounted for Henri, read thus:
CE QUE TU AS ÉTÉ DÉCIDE DE CE QUE TU ES.
CE QUE TU FAIS MAINTENANT DÉCIDE DE CE QUE TU SERAS.
Tofte-Jebsen translates this as: “What you are is what you have been. What you’ll be is what you do now” (89).
Jean-Baptiste, full of jaundice, came forth into this cauldron of patrimony and newfound wealth in the monsoon season of 1907, nearly killing his young mother in the process. He was a sickly child, whose first years were marked by a succession of illnesses that kept him bedridden and unable to venture outdoors. A hawkish, unpleasant French tutor (Tofte-Jebsen assigns this tutor no name or gender) was brought in from Phnom Penh to teach Jean-Baptiste in his bedroom, which became a sanctuary not just for restless sleep but for intercontinental and even interstellar travel through the crates of books that arrived on the slow boat from Paris. He developed a devout love of reading, devouring the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas by candlelight as lizards flicked across the ceiling. Later, he read Keats and Blake and Coleridge and pined for an English countryside he had never seen. He wished desperately that he had grown up in the open expanse of the heathered moorland instead of the equatorial cage of Indochine.