Good point. Le Cao Boi nodded at me. Follow Sleepy. He’ll show you what to do. After that, we get to the real work.
I followed Sleepy to the back of the restaurant. He paused before a grimy door and said, with a grin, Got to start from the bottom and work your way up, right?
Sleepy laughed mightily at his joke and seemed somewhat resentful when I did not laugh in turn. Grumbling, he kicked open the door and said, Got to keep your hands clean. Clean hands, clean food, am I right? When Sleepy noticed me gagging, tears coming to my eyes, he stood on his tiptoes outside the open door to look down into the toilet and said, Jesus Christ. Ugh. I mean . . . good luck, new guy.
I saw no sign of rubber gloves, not that the interior of such gloves would have been sanitary. The only tools for the excavation of the clogged orifice were a plunger with a short handle and a woefully small rubber cup, as well as a soiled toothbrush of a toilet scrub. If either the plunger or the scrub could speak, they would undoubtedly scream eternally, as I was already doing internally.
I emerged from the toilet some twenty minutes later, trembling and trying not to think of the fine droplets of water that had sprayed all over my clothes and possibly even misted my arms and face. I had seen worse in the refugee camp, but this was supposed to be the City of Light!
All done? Le Cao Boi said. I keep telling Grumpy not to eat the food here. Fair warning. Okay, let’s go. There’s a debt to be collected.
Our destination was in the Marais, popular with Jews and faggots, according to Le Cao Boi, although our target was neither. What he was, Le Cao Boi said, was a client who liked to beat the girls, which could be acceptable, depending on the payment. What was not acceptable was that he had accrued a debt for which he was now in arrears.
Never go into debt for a woman, said Le Cao Boi, pausing outside the door to a travel agency to let a Japanese tourist wander by, a zoom lens the length of his forearm attached to a camera around his neck. Inside, a young couple sat before the travel agent, whose only crime appeared to be combining a knit tie with a short-sleeved plaid shirt. His eyes twitched in fear at the sight of two and a half Asian men who did not appear to be respectable bourgeoisie seeking respite from the low-grade demands of 1980s French capitalism. Bon sat down in the chair next to the young couple and stared at the client. Le Cao Boi explained that we would wait, they should take their time, the Spanish coast was beautiful this time of year. The next few minutes passed awkwardly, at least for the travel agent, with Le Cao Boi meandering around the office, whistling “Stairway to Heaven” as he ran his finger along the posters of beaches and palm trees on the walls, the brochures on the counter, and the backs of the chairs on which the young couple sat.
Bon remained next to them, staring only at the travel agent but keeping the couple in his peripheral vision. They glanced at each other as the travel agent began stuttering, fingers trembling over the binder of travel packages. I watched them all while I stood silently with my back to the wall by the door, and when the young couple smiled nervously and promised to return, I opened the door for them. The travel agent waved his hands at Le Cao Boi and alternated between explaining and begging, but Le Cao Boi ignored him and said to Bon, He’s a thief who beats girls. We couldn’t give you a better job to begin with, could we?
No, you couldn’t have. Bon stood up. This will be easy. At least for me.
As I watched the travel agent tremble and moan as he curled up on the spotless floor—Bon being careful not to extract blood—I understood with a sudden twist of shame that I shared something in common with this man, besides our plaintive desire to live. I also shared his manhood, his lust, his febrile brain that could not pass ten minutes without a sexual fantasy crossing its field of vision. Men were all the same, or at least 90 to 95 percent of them. Bon, perhaps, might be an exception, so pure of heart that even in the oceanic depths of his mind and soul he did not fantasize about the opposite sex. But most men will. And I—I was like most men.
I wept a little for the travel agent, but more for me and myself and my mother, who had to watch me in dismay from above. Le Cao Boi sniffed in disgust, not over the battered travel agent but over my tears. Pull yourself together, man, he said outside the door of the agency.
Bon, embarrassed, said, Get that kopi luwak, and we parted ways. While they returned to Delights of Asia, I made my way to my aunt’s, wiping away my tears, seeing Bon twisting the travel agent’s manhood until the pitiful fellow nearly blacked out and cried for his mama, which made me think of my mother. I had never lived with a woman other than my mother, and I had no idea what to do with a woman who was not my mother and who I was not pursuing. I opened the door to my aunt’s apartment softly and found her at her desk, tucked into an alcove of the hallway. She was editing a manuscript while smoking, or perhaps smoking was the real activity and editing the distraction.
How was your day? She waved her cigarette at me and offered me one.
Nothing remarkable, I said, wondering if the kopi luwak was still intact. Just met my boss and did some work for him.
Freshen up and tell me about it. She pointed toward the bathroom, halfway down the hall. Some guests will be arriving soon and I have told them all about you, my accomplished nephew.
As I would discover over the coming months, my aunt’s apartment hosted a veritable salon for writers, editors, and critics, a crowd of intellectuals so leftist that I was always surprised to see that almost all of them ate with their right hands. My aunt’s career in editing, along with a penchant for socializing and a talent for the subtle stroking of masculine ego—though subtlety was rarely required—had led to an extensive network of friends, mostly male, who traded in words and ideas. At least two or three times a week, a visitor would come by, bearing a bottle of wine or a box of colorful macarons. My aunt consumed wine and macarons heedlessly and without any evident impact on her slim waistline. This talent was due to the fact that she barely ate real food, at least in my presence, filling herself instead with smoke, the aforementioned words and ideas, and those light, sweet macarons.
Can I make you some of the kopi luwak? I called from the kitchen, out of view from my aunt’s nook. To my relief, the gift was untouched. When my aunt said yes, it was then a simple matter to switch the packages and return to the living room with a glass coffee press full of the dark brew. My aunt joined me, and I reported on my day’s activities while we smoked Gauloises and sipped the civet coffee.
I can’t say I taste the difference, she said. Not that it’s not delicious. In fact, it’s quite potent.
It’s psychological. Knowing where it comes from affects the taste.
Just like knowing where this Boss and Le Cao Boi come from, she said. I imagine them as dark and potent, like this coffee. The gangster and the romantic. The violent and the lyrical. Doesn’t that define our homeland’s culture?
Isn’t France our homeland? My father, when he was teaching me in school, would make us repeat after him: la Gaule is the land of our ancestors.
Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!
When you talk about me like that, I feel like a symbol.
Get used to it, my dear. We French love nothing more than symbols.
That was the nature of our conversation, the discourse refreshing after the reeducation camp’s brute propaganda and the nuts-and-bolts pseudo-realism of the somewhat rusted American Dream. Americans loathed symbols, except for patriotic, sentimental ones like guns, flags, Mom, and apple pie, all of which the average American proclaimed he would defend to the death. One had to love such a practical, pragmatic people, impatient with interpretation, eager just to get the facts, ma’am. If one tried to interpret a movie’s deeper significance with Americans, they would reflexively claim that it was just a story. To the Fr
ench, nothing was ever just a story. As for facts, the French thought them rather boring.
Facts, my aunt said, are just the beginning, not the end.
Speaking of facts, I thought you were a seamstress.
And I thought you were a patriotic captain who became a refugee. You were given your cover and I was given mine.
By Man? I asked. When she nodded, I said, Have you told him that I am here?
Of course. No reply yet. She regarded me shrewdly. My first loyalty lies with him, my actual nephew, or not even really him, but the revolution you have abandoned.
I didn’t abandon the revolution. It abandoned me.
Disappointments, abandonments, betrayals—unfortunately all typical of revolutions, as with all passionate love affairs. Something happened between you two?
Because I became a refugee again?
Yes. Or is that just another cover? To keep you safe from Bon? He would kill you if he knew you were a communist, wouldn’t he?
My cup was empty except for a fine black silt of coffee ground. Yes.
When you wrote me and asked for help, I agreed—
And thank you for that—
—because of all that you have done for the revolution. And because I want to know what has happened to our revolution. I can recognize propaganda when I see it, and what is coming from our revolution is propaganda. But as imperfect as our revolution may be—and what revolution is perfect?—that does not mean I support counterrevolutionaries. So tell me, my former communist: Are you now a reactionary?
Are communist or reactionary my only choices?
What are your other choices?
You’re an editor, I said. I have something for you to read.
I retrieved my confession from the false bottom of my leather duffel and gave it to her, all 367 pages of it. She had barely had a chance to look at the first page when a knock at the door announced our visitors, dressed well and yet casually, making me aware of my simple white long-sleeved shirt, rolled up to the elbows, and my boring black slacks, and my dusty shoes—an ensemble that made me look like a waiter, which was what I now was. They, too, wore shirts and slacks and had arms, legs, and eyes as I did. But while we shared the same elements that made us human, they were clearly filet mignon, rare and perfectly seared, while I was boiled organ meat, most likely intestine. We were distantly related, in other words, but no one would ever mix us up. The fine quality of the cotton of their shirts, woven by a bedraggled child laborer somewhere in a dark, poor, hot country, was visible from a distance. As for their pants, they fit so well they needed no belts, while my pants were so loose they required a hideous strap of snake leather, provided by the refugee camp and donated, presumably, by somebody of typical American girth from Texas or Florida, which is to say it was long enough for two emaciated Vietnamese.
The first gentleman, whose rumpled black hair was speckled with gray, was a psychoanalyst. The other gentleman, whose sleekly coiffed gray hair was streaked with black, was a politician. He was a socialist, an honorable affiliation in France, and a very happy man, since a fellow socialist had won the presidency last week. The politician was well-known enough that he could be introduced just by his initials, which initially befuddled me.
BHV? I said.
BFD, my aunt repeated.
BFD and the psychoanalyst, who was also a Maoist and who had completed his PhD, regarded me with a curiosity that soon devolved into disdain, which the French have difficulty concealing, since they consider disdain a virtue. My aunt introduced me as a refugee from the communist revolution in my homeland, and these two were leftists for whom the Vietnamese revolutionaries were modern-day noble savages. If I was not one of these noble savages, then I must be an ignoble savage, a situation that was not helped by the fact that my schoolboy French was stiff from not having been used for many years after the lycée. After a few halting rounds of conversation where I rapidly proved that I could not swim in the intellectual, cultural, and political currents of Paris or France or the French—I mentioned Sartre, for example, and did not know that the great existentialist had died two years previous—the Maoist PhD, BFD, and my aunt ignored me. I sat on a corner of the couch in the state of humiliation, a region I have visited quite often, most often when someone called me a bastard. I usually responded with rage, a good mask. But I was not myself, or rather I was both me and myself, my screw quite wobbly, taking comfort from the first and then the second bottle of wine that the visitors had brought, the conversational freight train rushing past me and revealing only glimpses through its windows. Smoking my aunt’s cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling, the carpet, the polished toes of the men’s shoes, I knew I was not just a clown but a dunce.
When my aunt offered hashish, I accepted with relief, unsure of how to exit gracefully from their ménage à trois. But under the spell of the hashish it was all perfectly normal that later in the evening, when the Maoist PhD said farewell, even to me, BFD stayed seated. My aunt closed the door behind the Maoist PhD and said, What a very nice evening. Until tomorrow . . .
She nodded at BFD, who rose, inclined his head to me somewhat mockingly, and followed her into her bedroom. I could hear them laughing behind the door, undoubtedly at me. I laughed with them. I was, after all, the refugee, not the revolutionary, the hick from the hinterlands, the nitwit nephew from the colony, the dumb bastard who was so provincial and prudish that even floating on hashish he was shocked at the idea of his aunt making love to a politician, or any man, even if he was a socialist.
Later that evening, a time bomb of a lesson finally exploded in my head as I lay on the sofa. I was trying to sleep when I suddenly recalled a professor at the lycée who had earned his degree in Paris in the 1930s. We students worshipped and envied him. Indeed, worship and envy pervaded our steamy colony, as they do any colony. Colonizers imagined themselves as divine, and the native middlemen who served them, like my professor, fancied themselves as priests and disciples. Not surprisingly, the colonizers looked down on us as savages, infants, or sheep, while we looked up at them as demigods, masters, or brutes. The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.
Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. It is difficult to be loved by someone, as the French imagined their relationship with us, or to be abused by someone, though the French pretended otherwise, without being shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue. Thus we learned French literature and language under the tutelage of this professor who had actually stepped foot on the soil of la Gaule, our fatherland, as a scholarship student dispatched to absorb the best of French culture. He returned as a sopping wet sponge to us benighted natives, applying himself to foreheads that might be feverish with revolution.
Ah, the Champs-Élysées, the Sponge rhapsodized. Oh, the Eiffel Tower!
And we all swooned, just a little, and dreamed that one day we, too, could board a steamer ship for the metropole with nothing more than a suitcase, a scholarship, and an inferiority complex.
Ah, Voltaire! the Sponge effused. Oh, Descartes! Oh, Rousseau!
In truth, we delighted in reading these masters in the original French for the Sponge’s classes, and we believed what the Sponge told us, that the greatest of literature and philosophy was universal, and that French literature and philosophy was the greatest of the greatest, and by learning French literature and philosophy and language we, too, could one day be Frenchmen, although our lessons in the canon were complicated by our context of a colony. From Descartes, for example, I learned that because I think, therefore I am! But I also learned that in a world divided between the body and the mind, we Vietnamese were ruled by our bodies, which was why the French could rule us with their minds. From Voltaire, I learned that it was best to t
end to my own garden, which might mean many things, but when taught to us by the French meant to mind our own business and be happy with our little plots, while the French took care of our entire colony and inflicted Candide-like horrors on us. As for Rousseau, perhaps I learned the most from him, for as I wrote my confession under Man’s heavy-handed guidance in the reeducation camp, the beginning of Rousseau’s own confession came back to me in a flash:
I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator. I want to show my fellow-men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man is to be myself . . . As to whether nature did well or ill to break the mould in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.
Thank you, Jean-Jacques! By you I was inspired to be true to myself, for even if myself was a rotten bastard, I was like no other rotten bastard in history, before or since. I learned to love confessing and have never stopped acknowledging my crimes of violence, torture, and betrayal, all of which our French masters had taught us through the violence and torture they had inflicted on us as they betrayed their own ideals.
These complicated lessons were only reinforced each time I left the hallowed grounds of the lycée and walked the streets of Saigon with a French book under my arm, where, on occasion, I would be abused in the language of Dumas, or Stendhal, or Balzac. Any Frenchman or -woman or child, rich or poor, beautiful or plain, could call us anything he or she wanted and, occasionally, did. Yellow-skinned bastard! Slanty-eyed chink! The most perfectly formed lips and the whitest teeth, borne about by the nicest shoes and daintiest footwear, could spit these seeds at us, ones that would take fertile root underneath our tainted skin, as happened to Ho Chi Minh, who put it best when he wrote about how we, the colonized of Africa and Asia, were to our masters “only dirty niggers and dirty Annamese, good at the very most for pushing rickshaws and receiving the blows of our administrators.”
Some of us ignored the insults, wanting only for our masters to love us.
The Committed Page 4
