The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [42]
"Everywhere, hmm ... I am beginning to think that yours is a trick question," I teased. "You are not just a cook, are you? You should have told me that there would be more than one right answer. How unkind!"
"That's one way of looking at it. Another is that if my question has many possible answers, then you, friend, have a much greater chance of getting it right. A partial credit—"
"Aha! A teacher."
"Yes, once."
"Come on, friend, let us play Catholic and let you be the first to confess."
He laughed again.
A good sign, I thought.
"The list is long," he began. "My day belongs to this bridge and to the river. Doesn't your day belong to someone?"
"No, not right now. Usually a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, but it is not jealous and it is always willing to share."
"Kitchen boy, sailor, dishwasher, snow shoveler, furnace stoker, gardener, pie maker, photograph retoucher, fake Chinese souvenir painter, your basic whatever-needs-to-be-done-that-day laborer, and, my favorite by far, letter writer."
"Where do you get paid for doing that?"
"On a freighter. It was a long time ago, and I didn't do it for money. So I suppose you can add 'charitable donation giver' to my list."
"Oh," I said.
I have heard this story before, I thought.
"I helped one of the sailors find the words to describe the color of the Indian Ocean sky, and he deemed it poetic. His favorable assessment made its way to the rest of the crew, and soon I was the official letter writer for the Latouche Tréville," said the man on the bridge.
"What?"
"I said soon I was the official—"
"No, no what did you say the name of the freighter was?"
"The Latouche Grandeville. But it's been so many years now, it's difficult to say for sure."
Why a lie so early on in our game, I wondered.
"How many years could it have been, friend? You look no more than twenty-five," I said.
"And you have been among the French for much too long," he replied, shaking his head. "Your ability to tell a Vietnamese's age is no longer in working order. "
"Let me try again," I said. "A sailor named Bão taught me a formula. Bão said that with the French you subtract. If a Frenchman looks twenty-five, then he is really fifteen. So with us, addition is the rule. That would make you no more than thirty-five."
"I'm thirty-seven," he said, "and if I were to guess, you are twenty-four. "
When Bão was not telling stories about Serena the Soloist, he was telling stories about a young Vietnamese man who had worked as a kitchen boy aboard the Latouche Tréville, a shipping liner that Bão had been signed up with previous to the Niobe. The kitchen boy, according to Bão, was well known and well liked among the crew for three things. One, he wrote letters home for the other Vietnamese sailors on board because he, unlike them, could read and write more than just their names. "No fee, even!" Bão emphasized. Imagine all the profits lost to youth and a lack of business sense! was what Bão was trying to say. Two, the kitchen boy was vague about everything except his and other people's ages. He, according to Bão, could guess a man's exact age and on a dare he could even attempt his month of birth. Three, one night when the kitchen boy did not show up for his usual letter writing appointments, Bão went to the galley and there he found him sitting on the floor. On one side of the kitchen boy was a heap of green shavings and on the other an entire crate of asparagus that he had stripped white. "He even cut the tops off of them," Bão said. "I told him to throw them all overboard before the cook saw them or his hide was going to be in the water with them. You know how the French are about their asparagus."
The kitchen boy shook his head no.
"Yeah, it's clear that you don't know how the French are about their asparagus!" Bão laughed.
The kitchen boy looked up at Bão with tears in his eyes.
Bão's stories tend to have an easily discernible point. Obvious and blunt are other more unkind ways of putting it. The stories he told about the young Vietnamese man, who worked as a kitchen