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By Root 363 0

by his purchases. He looked back at my face and agreed to the three. The boys followed us to the Governor-General's house, carrying sacks of onions, carrots, and celery, the trinity of a French kitchen, horizontal in their arms. Later that same week when we returned to the marketplace, the three boys ran up to Blériot and held out those same arms. Still skin and bones, I knew, was what they wanted to say. Three bowls of phỏ can do only so much. Blériot held out a single coin, exactly one-third of what he had agreed to before. How quickly they learn. Madame's secretary is a good teacher, I thought. The boys nodded their heads in unison, knowing that even with the steep devaluation, Blériot's offer was still more than what they were worth in this marketplace. To his credit, Blériot never reduced their pay further, not even after he saw how they were usually paid. The first time he witnessed it, he asked me whether the woman selling bitter melons was their mother. "No," I replied, "those three boys are not even related to one another."

Blériot's mistake was an easy one to make. Madame made it all the time. At first she even thought that the entire kitchen staff clambered out of the same womb because everyone called the sous chef "Brother" Minh. Madame's secretary had to explain to her that "Anh" was used by the staff here as an honorific and that only the garde-manger was a blood brother of the sous chef. Madame was wary of the explanation, suspicious that it was all merely a cover-up for rampant nepotism. As for Blériot, I could not in truth blame him. How could he not assume a familial relationship after witnessing the boys eating from the same bowl? Blériot had not lived in Saigon long enough to understand that poverty can turn an act of intimacy into one of degradation. That in this marketplace, eating from the same bowl was the equivalent of pissing in the same pot. It was fine, especially if you were the first to go.

As we walked through the back gate of the Governor-General's house, it slammed shut behind us with such a clash that the sparrows fled from the surrounding trees, a scrap of black lace lifting into the sky, that the butterflies rose from the gladiola spikes, their wings filtering for a moment the strong light of the Saigon sun. But in the end I am afraid that it was the three boys who really gave us away. Blériot, admittedly, was of no help either. He was behaving like a typical colonial official. He walked several steps ahead, keeping enough distance between us to say, We are not one. Yet he was still close enough to relay his exclusive control over the four Indochinese who followed him. At first Blériot thought the streets of the city were like the pathways of the Governor-General's garden. He walked everywhere with his head held high, which meant his eyes caught nothing of what went on below his chest. Frenchmen like him are a boon for Saigon pickpockets. During Blériot's first week, we on the household staff overheard Madame's secretary comforting him with mothering sounds, peppered with an occasional insult for what she called the City of Thieves. In fact, it had to happen to him several more times before he finally chose to learn. For men like Blériot, pride is apparently worth more than money, an extravagance that thieves everywhere adore. Blériot then became overly concerned about the carriage of his body and the bodies of those around him, especially if they belonged to an Indochinese. The rules he set forth for me were simple. No touching. No smiling. The first I could understand, but the latter I thought absurd. A smile is like a sneeze, necessary and not within my control. Any effort to suppress it would only draw more attention to it. So I defied him and smiled anyway, and given the manner in which Blériot had us walking through the streets of that city, the pathways of that garden, he never saw. I smiled at the back of his head, at his hair streaked red in the morning light. Like threads of saffron, I thought. I smiled at his white shirt, at the loose weave of the cotton, at the muscles that