The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [58]
As careful as Blériot was by then with his body, he lacked all control when it came to his tongue. He placed great trust in the power of his language to elevate him from the fray, to keep his nose clean even when he was rooting in the dirt of someone else's land. At ease with its power to exclude, its gate-slamming pronouncements, he grew reckless, especially when we were in the company of these three boys. He assumed, and he was right, that they could not understand a French word that he was saying. He failed to comprehend, though, that the tonalities of sex are, like those of desperation, easily recognizable and instantly understood, no matter the language, no matter the age. Yes, as soon as Blériot said, "...there are some things that are still new to you," the three boys recognized it, and they laughed, skittish and cheerless, the same as if we had embraced in front of them and kissed each other with our mouths open, hungry.
From his bed of marigolds, the gardener's helper heard the laughter and the slamming gate. He snapped up his head of white hair and caught Blériot's face as it turned from mine back toward the direction of the Governor-General's house. The gardener's helper had seen that look before. Fires have been started by less, he thought. The laughter of the three boys was, to him, also not new. Memories of it bloomed in his stomach. The gardener's helper lowered his head. He was already in a posture akin to prayer. The earth below him was warm. He dug his fingers into the soil and longed for the day when his limbs would take root.
When I left the Governor-General's household, the gardener's helper assured me that it was not he. "I would never tell," he said. "I, of all men, would never tell," he insisted. I looked at his face, a drought-scarred plain. I looked through his parting lips, cracked by the lack of touch, and I saw the nubs and shoots of all that he had swallowed in the fear that some day what was natural in him would grow. Yes, I thought, of all men, this one would have never told.
The chauffeur was a different story. He liked the sound of his own voice, especially when he was speaking French, and he and Madame's secretary always conversed in French. The chauffeur had returned from France like all the others. He had developed a passion for the leisurely game of tennis and had acquired an appreciation for the worst-smelling cheeses. The latter, we in the household staff assumed, explained his fascination for Madame's secretary. Given her French father, we in the household staff felt that Madame's secretary should have been more beautiful, but she was not. She was more robust than most, maybe, but otherwise not much improved, we thought. If you took the average Saigon girl and pumped her full of air, the result, I think, would be the same. I suspect that her beauty or what passed for it, at least for the chauffeur, was her father's French. She spoke it from birth and it showed. There were rumors that she wrote it beautifully as well, and that it was she who composed Madame's more delicate rejections and affecting apologies. Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, on occasion also wrote speeches for the Governor-General. We in the household staff did not know what to make of this boast, uncertain whether we were dealing with a French expression that had lost itself in translation. We thought that, maybe, "writing speeches" for the Governor-General was just another way of saying that Madame's secretary was graciously offering her services to him as well. What kind of services these were would depend on the kind of woman Madame's secretary wanted to be. None of us really knew the answer to this question because, with the exception of the chauffeur, Madame's secretary ignored us all, even Minh Still the Sous Chef. My brother's functional French and his long white apron were obviously still not enough to hoist him up to her line of sight. Madame's secretary was as tall as the chauffeur, and taller than he when she wore her heels. Those shoes must