Asshole? I said with as much bluster as I could. Chink? How about Asiate. Chinetoque. Jaune. Tchong. Bridé!
Beatles laughed. You forgot niakoué.
Niakoué? I haven’t heard that one.
How about FILS DE PUTE!
Well, yes, I have heard that one.
From now on, I will no longer record all the instances where fils de pute or sale fils de pute were uttered, since they functioned thenceforth like commas or periods, invisible and inaudible. In this way, the gangsters in this grimy cellar differed little from the gangsters in the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, who overcompensated for their emasculated status on the lower rungs of the service industry by spitting out “motherfucker” like it was spit, which one should not do in a restaurant. Of course, for me and myself to embrace not just “motherfucker” and fils de pute but the very racist terms used against us was to step onto a slanted slope, but that was always the angle that I, or we, took, first in our dubious profession as a spy and now in our even more dubious apprenticeship as a gangster. But if I thought I was being menacing by stealing from these gangsters the words they might use against me, they seemed less than impressed. At least that was the case for Uglier, who sneered and said, Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Chink?
I was going to die, wasn’t I? But if I was going to die, then I would die to the best of my ability, at least until it was too painful to do so. I like that, I cried. That’s even better than Crazy Bastard, you racists!
We’re not racists, said Beatles. We just don’t like you.
So why haven’t you slit my throat? I said. On the one hand, it might not be a good idea to remind my captors of one of the nastiest options available to them. On the other hand, why not clear the air on the matter of most pressing concern?
Where’s the fun in slaughtering you like a sheep? said Beatles. You’re not even a proper sacrifice.
Ho ho! said the crapulent major with a chortle.
Ha ha! Sonny chimed in with a laugh.
Shut up! I said.
No, you shut up! Beatles shouted, leaping up from the sofa through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Who the fuck do you think you are?
Ah! me and myself both said at once. That is the question, is it not? The universal question. The question that has been with us since the beginning of time!
Let’s not confuse him, said the Mona Lisa. I don’t want him—you—to shut up. I want you to talk.
I imitated God and said nothing.
Are you hard of hearing, you crazy bastard? Tell us about Le Chinois.
Who?
Le Chinois! yelled Beatles.
The Maoist PhD?
Beatles jumped over the coffee table and slapped me twice across the face, first with the forehand and then with the backhand, as if he were Jean Gabin slapping an actress, something charmingly French, as a Vietnamese or an American would have just punched me in the nose. Le Chinois! Le Chinois! Le Chinois!
Your boss, said the Mona Lisa. Stop slapping him. I think he heard you.
He tossed a transparent plastic packet of the remedy onto the table. How innocuous the remedy looked! Nothing more than a white powder that could be flour or sugar.
I would like to find your boss, the one who is selling this and the one who is taking business from me.
I almost said, What do you want to know? Almost. If I had been sane, I would have said it. What loyalty did I owe the Boss? He was a gangster, a drug dealer, a pimp, and a killer, which is not to say that these are characteristics disqualifying one from sympathy. As a sympathizer par excellence, I could see not just any issue from both sides but any person from both sides. That was how I knew that many of our most important world leaders have also been gangsters, drug dealers, pimps, and killers, although they prefer to call themselves presidents, kings, diplomats, and statesmen. The only thing preventing the Boss from ascending to a more legitimate stage of existence, to become a pillar of society, was time. That much I owed him and could give him, not for his sake but for Bon’s. If I turned the Boss over, I would almost surely be turning over Bon as well, and that I would never do.
Who is Saïd? I said instead.
Saïd? Beatles said, astounded.
Careful, said the crapulent major.
The mysterious Saïd, I said.
Not a good idea, added Sonny.
Beatles shook his head and looked at the Mona Lisa, who appeared, more and more, to be the leader. Saïd, the Mona Lisa said, drawing the name out. Saïd is my brother.
Of course, I muttered.
He has unfortunately gone on vacation. But just because he has gone on vacation does not mean that you get to take his business, which is my business. Now I advise you to tell us all you know about this—he pointed at the remedy—and Le Chinois, or things will go very badly for you, as they did for your friend.
My friend?
The short one.
Sleepy.
Is that his name? He’s sleeping for good now.
I did that, Beatles said. Just like you almost did Ahmed.
Ahmed?
My friend! The one you almost killed.
So Rolling Stones was still alive somewhere. I would have felt happy for him, and for me, if I didn’t feel so bad at the moment. Are you going to torture me? I said.
Stop giving them ideas, said Sonny.
I laughed. You can’t torture me. I’ve lived through a reeducation camp.
Now you’ve done it, said the crapulent major.
You think you’re so tough because you went to a reeducation camp? said Beatles. Your war wasn’t so bad! Our war was worse. The stories I’ve heard! You think you’re tough, Crazy Bastard? Let’s try a few things on you that the French did to us.
Aren’t you French? I said.
Shut the fuck up.
They then proceeded to fuck me up. Part of me was in tremendous pain and did the requisite groaning, screaming, begging, and fearing for my life. But part of me was the professional who, in retrospect, could analyze and assess their performance. These guys were amateurs, but that did not mean that what ensued did not hurt. Amateurs can do a lot of damage, even if they damage without finesse. But finesse is key. One can get away with mass murder and wholesale looting of countries and continents if one handles oneself with a splash of élan, a dash of finesse, and gallons of hypocrisy and selective amnesia. Just ask the French (or the English or the Dutch or the Portuguese or the Belgians or the Spanish or the Germans or the Americans or the Chinese or the Japanese or even us Vietnamese, but not the Italians, who were not very good at colonization, having forgotten what their Roman ancestors had done so well). And just as the French did everything with élan and finesse, both terms that they coined, so must those of us who are professionals in “intelligence” carry out our tasks with skill. The extraction of intelligence, like the extraction of a tooth, requires delicacy. The real question is this: Does the torturer understand this fundamental issue? The interrogator is much more likely to succeed in his task with the aid of cigarettes, sympathy, compassion, and an intuitive grasp of human psychology and cultural sensitivity. If the torturer does not understand this, he is a fool. If the torturer really does understand this and simply enjoys the torture, then he is a sadist. Not to say that one cannot be both a fool and a sadist at the same time. One can be just about anything and a fool at the same time.
As for me, perhaps I am a masochist, which is not to say that I am not also a fool. How else to explain why, in the midst of all the shouting and grunting (on the part of my torturers) and the screams and tears (on my part) I began to laugh? Tortured laughing, for sure. Strangled laughing, certainly. What with the electrodes to the nipples and the ropes and the wires used to hang me by the arms from the ceiling and the water poured down my throat—it was very difficult to laugh in a convivial, pleasant way. But it was laughter nonetheless, and the gurglin
g and snorting appeared to confuse my gangster torturers, who undoubtedly expected the more usual responses.
Is he laughing? said Ugly, grimacing because of his bruised knuckles.
I think he’s laughing, said Uglier, leaning against the wall as he took a cigarette break, somewhat worn out from the chokehold he had placed me in, intermittently, for the last hour.
What the fuck is wrong with you? said Beatles. He had stripped off his shirt, as it was quite hot work to beat someone with a rubber hose.
I lay facedown on the cold cement floor, naked and shivering, my cheek resting in a puddle of liquid that may have come from me or may have come from one of them. I wondered whether my mother could see me now. How she and I both loved it when I lay like this, at four or five years old, naked on a bamboo mat with my head on her lap and purring with pleasure as she slowly scratched my dorsal side, beginning from the upper buttocks, proceeding up the back, and ending between the shoulder blades, before starting all over again with the excruciating pleasure.
And then it occurred to me with a sudden stab to my already wounded side that I was now a few years older than my mother was when she died at thirty-four, by herself, in that same ragged hut where she raised me, without anyone to care for her, or so I surmised when I finally returned to my village after my six years in America as a foreign student. I wore my uniform as a newly commissioned lieutenant in the army. No one in the village dared meet my gaze or call me “bastard” the way they used to when I was a boy, not when I now had an American-manufactured pistol on my hip. The hut was so barren that no one had bothered to loot it or steal any part of it, built as it was out of sticks, and mud, and straw, and scraps of canvas, and pieces of cardboard stripped from the packaging of American equipment and rations. Without anyone to tend to it, the hut had gradually collapsed in on itself until it was only an empty husk. I peered inside at the small wooden bed on which my mother and I had slept, its bamboo mat in shreds, and saw the small shelf on which my mother kept a picture of Jesus Christ and a crucifix. She was an orphan and had no mother and father whom she could honor, so she was left only with Jesus Christ, his picture her most precious possession besides me.
From the door, with the carpet of sunlight it allowed into the dim recesses of the hut, I could see the red heart on the breast of a suspiciously Anglo Jesus, with his brown hair, brown goatee, brown eyes, and fair skin. Had my mother been saved, she who had saved me with all the love she had given me without complaint? Where had her love come from, she who had not been loved? From whom had she learned affection, and caresses, and the gentle words that she rubbed on me daily and unsparingly until I had absorbed the little dose of humanity that I now possessed?
Part of me, the recalcitrant communist, believed she had not been saved because there was no God and no afterlife. That part of me was bitter. But another part of me, the recalcitrant Catholic, half fearful and half faithful, shaken and not stirred, believed that she had been airlifted to Heaven along with all the other refugees from that day, which is to say everyone who had died. What were any of us, once dead, but refugees fleeing the wretched earth for the refuge of eternal life? What was the entire earth but a Third World compared with the Second World of purgatory and the First World of Heaven? That fearful and faithful part of me was ashamed at the thought that from her balcony in Paradise, that most exclusive of gated communities, she might be able to see me.
Lying on my face in that cellar, I could see myself on the trip back to my village and the cemetery where my mother was buried. I had knelt and touched her name. At least she had a name. My headstone, if I ever had a headstone, would most likely read VO DANH. Seeing her name and the dates of her birth and death etched in a vermilion ink that was fading like memory itself, I found myself on a raft carried away by a torrent of my pent-up, dammed love. Eventually I stopped weeping. Leaning against a sturdy steel beam of homicidal rage, I dried my eyes and surveyed the desecration of my mother’s memory. Her grave was located in a marshy margin of the cemetery, where she had been exiled in death as she was in life. She had borne the cross of being a single mother to me, scorned by relatives and villagers who did not know that my father was their priest. My mother protected him out of a misplaced Catholic belief in goodness and kindness, which that very same priest had instilled in her. For her faith in God and him, she was consigned in death to a plot distant from any other grave, far from the honorable dead and their honorable survivors, who could not bear to be near her, she who was the most honest one among them, given her utter lack of the hypocrisy that was fundamental to anyone with even a bit of respectability.
I returned to the hut where I had lived with my mother, the only home where I had known any love, and set fire to it with a Zippo lighter applied to its dry thatch. The neighbors emerged from their homes and watched along with me as the hut became a pyre for my memories, which I hoped would also turn to ashes. My neighbors said nothing, which was the right response. If they had said anything, I might have used my American-made pistol for the purpose for which it was intended when it was designed in the early twentieth century, the slaughter of natives, or so my mentor Claude had taught me. It had proven its worth first in the pacification of the Philippines but was now just as useful in our country. Claude had also given me the Zippo, personally inscribed to me. See this? he had said, his index finger underlining the words. Just between you and me, it’s the CIA’s unofficial motto:
FUCK THEM BEFORE THEY FUCK US
I say this every night before I go to bed, Claude said, winking at me as he slipped the lighter into my palm.
Wise words, I said. Wise words.
After the hut was reduced to a campfire, I walked down the road to the small country church where my father was, miraculously, still the pastor. His survival was not a miracle because of his advanced age—he was now in his seventies—but because he was a white man, a Frenchman, and a Catholic, during a time when all those factors made him a highly attractive target for assassination by the local revolutionaries. He received me in his office, which I had never visited, since I had seen him only in three places: the classroom of the Catholic school, where he had taught me; the church, where I watched him only from a distance; and the confessional, where I saw only his silhouette behind the screen. That bowed shadow was also what his assassin would see the moment before she turned him into a shade.
You are quite the man now, my father said. He spoke in the slow, deliberate, patient French that he used with students and peasants. They were the first words he had spoken to me since I had left his classroom, his best student and his worst fear. We had communicated only once since then, when he had written to me in the United States to tell me of my mother’s passing. He had not used my name in the letter, except to inscribe it above the address, just as he did not utter my name now. He had only ever said my name when taking attendance. Otherwise he called me nothing at all, except “you.”
I’ve been to the cemetery, I replied in the slow, deliberate, patient Vietnamese that I used with the French and the Americans who thought they knew Vietnamese, which my father did after decades of living here. I’ve seen Mother’s grave.
He said nothing from behind his desk, stacked with student exams.
Thank you for getting that headstone for her. It’s the least you could do.
Silence. He would say not another word until the end of our conversation, which was really my monologue. Nor would he drop his gaze, keeping his eyes fixed on mine in a gesture of defiance, or contempt, or pride, or regret, or inarticulate love. Who knows?
Here’s the money to pay for the headstone, I said, tossing an envelope onto the desk. I didn’t have any money when I was a student. I have a little bit now. I should be the one to pay for her headstone, not you.
Still nothing. He was enacting for me the silence of his boss, the godfather of godfathers, the Man Himself, God. This was the silence my father encountered every day during his praye
rs, the silence that hundreds of millions of people heard every day as they beseeched God to say something, anything. He always said nothing, which hardly disabused His legions of fans. For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people.
Why is my mother gone instead of you? I said, getting up to leave. And the fact that she is dead and you are alive—that’s just proof there is no such thing as God.
Now he was provoked. Now he finally spoke, his eyes flashing with the inspiration for his next sermon. Your dear mother believed in God with all her soul, and she is alive now in Heaven because God saved her, he said. Is nothing sacred to you?
Is nothing sacred? I burst into laughter. Then I stopped and said, I wish you were dead instead of her.
My words echoed what I had written to Man from California on learning of my mother’s death and burial from my father’s letter: I wish he were dead. My words foreshadowed what would happen a month after my meeting with my father, when the assassin, posing as a penitent kneeling in my father’s confessional, fired a bullet into his temple, which might have been experienced by his dying brain as the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder that was, at long last, the actual Word of God, spoken by God Himself. Years later, during our tête-à-tête in the reeducation camp, when Man opened my skull with a can opener and fondled my brain, he told me that my fatal wish had been his command. After all, he was my best friend and blood brother. Taking me at my word, he had dispatched the communist agent to carry out my words, and she had found the assassin, a sixteen-year-old girl whose grandfather had been killed by the French and whose father had been killed by the Americans and whose brother had been killed by the Republicans. Who said words couldn’t kill? But I had not known the power of my words, or so I had told myself. I knew their power now, although I also knew that the only thing more powerful than words was silence.
The Committed Page 16
