Ru Page 6

  That memory definitely explains why I never leave a place with more than one suitcase. I take only books. Nothing else can become truly mine. I sleep just as well in a hotel room, a guest room or a stranger’s bed as in my own. In fact, I’m always glad to move; it gives me a chance to lighten my belongings, to leave objects behind so that my memory can become truly selective, can remember only images that stay luminous behind my closed eyelids. I prefer to remember the flutters in my stomach, my light-headedness, my upheavals, my hesitations, my lapses … I prefer them because I can shape them according to the colour of time, whereas an object remains inflexible, frozen, unwieldy.

  I love men in the same way, without wanting them to be mine. That way, I am one among others, without a role to play, without existing. I don’t need their presence because I don’t miss those who are absent. They’re always replaced or replaceable. If they’re not, my feelings for them are. For that reason, I prefer married men, their hands dressed in gold rings. I like those hands on my body, on my breasts. I like them because, despite the mixture of odours, despite the dampness of their skin on mine, despite the occasional euphoria, those ring fingers with their histories keep me remote, aloof, in the shadows.

  I forget the details of how I felt during these encounters. I do remember fleeting gestures, such as Guillaume’s finger brushing against my left baby toe to write his initial G; the drop of sweat from Mikhaïl’s chin falling onto my first lumbar vertebra; the cavity at the bottom of Simon’s breastbone, Simon who told me that if I murmured into the well of his pectus excavatum, my words would resonate all the way to his heart.

  Over the years, I’ve collected a fluttering eyelash from one, a stray lock of hair from another, lessons from some, silences from several, an afternoon here, an idea there—to form just one lover, because I’ve neglected to memorize the face of each one. Together, these men taught me how to become a lover, how to be in love, how to long for an amorous state. It’s my children, though, who have taught me the verb to love, who have defined it. If I had known what it meant to love, I wouldn’t have had children, because once we love, we love forever, like Uncle Two’s wife, Step-aunt Two, who can’t stop loving her gambler son, the son who is burning up the family fortune like a pyromaniac.

  When I was younger, I saw Step-aunt Two prostrate herself before Buddha, before Jesus, before her son, to plead with him not to go away for months at a time, not to come back from those months of absence escorted by men holding a knife to his throat. Before I became a mother, I couldn’t understand how she, a businesswoman with clenched fists, keen eyes, a sharp tongue, could believe all the lying tales and promises of her gambler son. During my recent visit to Saigon, she told me she must have been a serious criminal in her former life, if she was obliged, in this life, to constantly believe the deceptions of her son. She wanted to stop loving. She was tired of loving.

  Because I had become a mother, I lied to her too by remaining silent about the night her son took my child’s hand and wrapped it around his adolescent penis, and about the night when he slipped inside the mosquito net of Aunt Seven, the one who is mentally retarded, defenceless. I shut my mouth to keep my aging, worn-out step-aunt Two from dying because she had loved so much.

  Aunt Seven is my maternal grandmother’s sixth child. Her number, seven, didn’t bring the good luck it was supposed to. When I was a child, Aunt Seven sometimes waited for me at the door holding a wooden spatula, ready to hit me as hard as she could to drive out the heat that was stored in her body. She was always hot. She needed to cry out, to fling herself onto the floor, to let off steam by hitting. As soon as she started howling, all the servants ran through the house, leaving their bucket of water, their knife, their kettle, their dust cloth, their broom along the way, and came to hold her down. To this tumult were added the cries of my grandmother, my mother, my other aunts, their children and my own. We were a twenty-voice choir nearly hysterical, nearly mad. After a while we no longer knew why we were howling, because the original cry, Aunt Seven’s, had been muffled by our own noise for so long. But everyone went on crying, taking advantage of the opportunity to do so.

  Sometimes, instead of waiting for me at the door, Aunt Seven would open it after stealing the keys from my grandmother. She would open it so she could leave us and end up at large in the alleyways, where her handicap wasn’t visible, or was at least ignored. Some ignored her handicap by accepting her twenty-four-carat-gold necklace in exchange for a piece of guava, or by having sex with her in exchange for a compliment. Some even hoped that she would become pregnant so they could make the baby the object of blackmail. At that time, my aunt and I were the same mental age, we were friends who told each other what scared us. We shared our stories. Today, my handicapped aunt thinks of me as an adult, so she doesn’t tell me about her escapes or her old stories from the alleyways.

  I too dreamed of being outside, playing hopscotch with the neighbourhood children. I envied them through the wrought iron grilles over our windows or from our balconies. Our house was surrounded by cement walls two metres high with shards of broken glass embedded in them to discourage intruders. From where I stood, it was hard to say if the wall existed to protect us or to remove our access to life.

  The alleys were swarming with children skipping, with ropes braided out of hundreds of multicoloured rubber bands. My favourite toy wasn’t a doll that said, “I love you.” My dream toy was a small wooden chair with a built-in drawer where the street vendors kept their money, and also the two big baskets they carried at either end of a long bamboo pole balanced on their shoulders. These women sold all kinds of soups. They walked between the two weights: on one side, a large cauldron of broth and a coal fire to keep it hot; on the other, the bowls, chopsticks, rice noodles and condiments. Sometimes the vendor might even have a baby hanging from her back. Each merchant advertised her wares with a particular melody.

  Years later, in Hanoi a French friend of mine would get up at five in the morning to record their songs. He told me that before long those sounds would no longer be heard on the streets, that those strolling merchants would give up their baskets for factory work. So he would safeguard their voices reverently and ask me to translate them along the way, then he would list them by category: merchants selling soup, selling cream of soya, buyers of glass for recycling, knife-grinders, masseurs for men, bread-sellers … We spent whole afternoons working on translations. With my friend, I learned that music comes from the voice, the rhythm and the heart of each person, and that the musicality of those unrecorded melodies could lift the curtain of fog, pass through windows and screens to waken us as gently as a morning lullaby.

  He had to get up early to record them because the soups were sold mainly in the morning. Each soup had its own vermicelli: round ones with beef, small and flat with pork and shrimp, transparent with chicken … Each woman had her specialty and her route. When Marie-France, my teacher in Granby, asked me to describe my breakfast, I told her: soup, vermicelli, pork. She asked me again, more than once, miming waking up, rubbing her eyes and stretching. But my reply was the same, with a slight variation: rice instead of vermicelli. The other Vietnamese children gave similar descriptions. She called home then to check the accuracy of our answers with our parents. As time went on, we no longer started our day with soup and rice. To this day, I haven’t found a substitute. So it’s very rare that I have breakfast.

  I went back to having soup for breakfast when I was pregnant with my son Pascal, in Vietnam. I didn’t crave pickles or peanut butter, just a bowl of soup with vermicelli purchased on a street corner. Throughout my childhood, my grandmother forbade us to eat those soups because the bowls were washed in a tiny bucket of water. It was impossible for the vendors to carry water on their shoulders as well as the broth and the bowls. Whenever it was possible, they would ask people for some clean water. As a small child, I often waited for them at the fence near the kitchen door with fresh water for their buckets. I would have traded my blue-eyed doll for the
ir wooden chairs. I should have suggested it, because today they’ve been replaced by plastic chairs, which are lighter, don’t have a built-in drawer, and don’t show the traces of fatigue and wear in their grain as wooden benches do. The merchants stepped into the modern era still carrying the weight of the yoke on their shoulders.

  The trace of the red and yellow stripes of a Pom sandwich-bread bag is burned into one side of our first toaster. Our sponsors in Granby had placed that small appliance at the top of the list of essentials to buy when we moved into our first apartment. For years we lugged that toaster from one place to the next without ever using it, because our breakfast was rice, soup, leftovers from the night before. Quietly, we started eating Rice Krispies, without milk. My brothers followed this with toast and jam. Every morning for twenty years, without exception, the youngest breakfasted on two slices of sandwich bread with butter and strawberry jam, no matter where he was posted—New York, New Delhi, Moscow or Saigon. His Vietnamese maid tried to make him change his habits by offering him steaming balls of sticky rice covered with freshly grated coconut, roasted sesame seeds and peanuts crushed in a mortar, or a piece of warm baguette with ham spread with homemade mayonnaise, or pâté de foie decorated with a sprig of coriander … He brushed them all aside and went back to his sandwich bread, which he kept in the freezer. During my latest visit to him I discovered that he keeps our old stained toaster in a cupboard. It’s the only trinket he has carted with him from country to country as if it were an anchor, or the memory of dropping the first anchor.

  I discovered my own anchor when I went to meet Guillaume at Hanoi airport. The scent of Bounce fabric softener on his T-shirt made me cry. For two weeks I slept with a piece of Guillaume’s clothing on my pillow. Guillaume, for his part, was dazzled by the scent of jackfruit, kumquats, durians, carambola, of bitter melons, field crabs, dried shrimp, of lilies, lotus and herbs. Several times he went to the night market where vegetables, fruit and flowers were traded back and forth between the baskets of the vendors negotiating among themselves in a noisy but controlled chaos, as if they were on the floor of the Stock Exchange. I would go to this night market with Guillaume, always with one of his pullovers over my shirt because I’d discovered that my home could be summed up as an ordinary, simple odour from my daily North American life. I had no street address of my own, I lived in an office apartment in Hanoi. My books were stored at Aunt Eight’s place, my diplomas at my parents’ in Montreal, my photos at my brothers’, my winter coats with my former roommate. I realized for the first time that Bounce, the smell of Bounce, had given me my first attack of homesickness.

  During my early years in Quebec, my clothes smelled of damp or of food because after they were washed they were hung up in our bedrooms on lines strung from wall to wall. At night, every night, my last image was of colours suspended across the room like Tibetan prayer flags. For years I inhaled the scent of fabric softener on my classmates’ clothes when the wind carried it to me. I happily breathed in the bags of used clothes we received. It was the only smell I wanted.

  Guillaume left Hanoi after staying with me for two weeks. He had no clean clothes to leave me. Over the following months, I received in the mail now and then a tightly sealed plastic envelope with a freshly dried handkerchief inside, smelling of Bounce. The last package he sent me contained a plane ticket for Paris. When I arrived, he was waiting to take me to an appointment with a perfumer. He wanted me to smell a violet leaf, an iris, blue cypress, vanilla, lovage … and, most of all, everlasting, an aroma of which Napoleon said smelled of his country before he even set foot on it. Guillaume wanted me to find an aroma that would give me my country, my world.

  I‘ve never worn any other perfume than the one that was created for me at Guillaume’s request during that trip to Paris. It replaced Bounce. It speaks for me and reminds me that I exist. One of my roommates spent several years studying theology and archaeology in order to understand who our creator is, who we are, why we exist. Every night, she came back to the apartment not with answers but with new questions. I never had any questions except the one about the moment when I could die. I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I’ve lost the option of dying. The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I have to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek. My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth, to be a fairy. A fairy smitten with the way they smell.

  Wyatt was smitten with the ao dài because that outfit makes women’s bodies look gorgeously delicate and tremendously romantic. One day he took me to a grand villa hidden behind rows of kiosks built on the ground where the garden had once stood. The villa was home to two aging sisters who were quietly selling off their furniture to collectors to ensure their day-to-day survival. Wyatt was their most faithful customer, so we were invited to recline on a big mahogany daybed like the one my paternal grandfather had, resting our heads on the ceramic cushions where opium smokers once lay. The owner brought us tea and slices of candied ginger. A slight breeze lifted the tails of her ao dài when she bent over to set the cups between Wyatt and me. Although she was sixty years old, the sensuality of her ao dài touched us. The one square centimetre of skin that was revealed mocked the ravages of time: it still made our hearts leap. Wyatt said that the diminutive space was his golden triangle, his isle of happiness, his own private Vietnam. Between sips of tea he whispered: “It stirs my soul.”

  When soldiers from the North arrived in Saigon, they too were stirred by that triangle of skin. They were troubled by the schoolgirls in white ao dàis, bursting out of their school like butterflies in spring. And so wearing the ao dài was soon forbidden. It was banned because it cast aspersions on the heroism of the women in green kepis who appeared on enormous billboards at every street corner, in khaki shirts with sleeves rolled up on their muscular arms. They were right to banish the outfit. It took three times as long to button it than to take it off. One brisk movement was enough to make the snap fasteners pop open. My grandmother took not three but ten times longer to put on the tunic, because after giving birth to ten children her body had to be sculpted, redrawn with a girdle that had thirty hooks and eyes, to respect the cut of that hypocritically modest and deceptively candid garment.

  Today, my grandmother is a very old woman, but still beautiful, lavishly so, like a queen. When she was in her forties, sitting in her parlour in Saigon, she epitomized a whole era of an extreme kind of beauty, of opulence. Every morning a cohort of merchants waited at the door to present their finds to her. Most of them already knew her requirements. They brought new crockery, plastic flowers just arrived from Europe and, inevitably, brassieres for her six daughters. As the country was at war, and the market unstable, it was best to anticipate everything. Sometimes it was diamonds. All the Vietnamese women in our circle had a loupe for examining diamonds. I had learned very young to spot inclusions in diamonds, because it was a skill necessary for dealing with family finances. As the banking system was weak and transitory, women had to master the art of buying and selling gold and diamonds to manage their savings. My grandmother spent days at a time running errands without ever moving. In the midst of the sellers’ visits, she also entertained friends or interviewed servants looking for work.

  My grandmother’s days were filled with these mundane tasks. And while she was a believer, she didn’t have time to sit in front of Buddha. After the markets had been cleaned out of merchandise and merchants, after her Communist tenants had taken the contents of her safe and her lace scarves, she learned to dress in the long grey kimono worn by the faithful. Despite her salt-and-pepper hair, which she quite simply smoothed and tied into a bun just above the nape of her neck, she was still stunningly beautiful. Sh
e said her prayers at all hours of the day, in the smoke of incense sticks, waiting for word from her children who’d gone to sea. She’d let her two youngest, a boy and a girl, leave with my mother despite the uncertainty. My mother asked my grandmother to choose between the risk of losing her son at sea and that of finding him torn to shreds in a minefield during his military service in Cambodia. She had to choose secretly, without hesitating, without trembling, without perspiring. Perhaps it was to control her fear that she started to pray. Perhaps it was to become intoxicated with the incense smoke that she no longer left the altar.