The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [6]
"Ungraciously? Ungraciously? I'll tell you who is ungracious. It's you, you ungracious, disrespectful, disappearing lout! You were taught how to say 's'il vous plaît, merci, Monsieur, Madame' so that you could work in the Governor-General's house. Your oldest brother, he started out like you. At twelve, he was the boy who picked up after Madame's 'petit chouchou when that mutt did its business in every corner of the house, warping the wood floors with its shit and urine. Now your brother is thirty and a sous chef! Wears a crisp white apron and knows more French words than the neighborhood schoolteacher. Soon he'll be..."
I have discovered very few true and constant things in my life. One is that the Old Man's anger has no respect for geography. Mountains, rivers, oceans, and seas, these things that would have otherwise kept the average man locked onto the plot of land that he calls home, these things have never kept him from homing in on me, pinpointing my location, and making me pay my respects. While his body lies deep in the ground of Saigon, his anger sojourns with a "no-good lout" on a Paris park bench. Even here, he finds me.
"Unemployed and alone," the Old Man surmises, distilling my life into two sad, stinging words.
I try to protect myself with the usual retort: Oh, you again? I thought I was dead to you, Old Man?
"No son of mine leaves a good job at the Governor-General's to be a cook! A cook on some leaky boat for sailors who don't even know how to say please' or thank you' in their own language, not to mention in French. Old whores become cooks on boats, not any son of mine," you said.
Sometimes, I cannot give enough thanks to your Catholic god that you, my dear and violent "father," are now merely cobbled together from my unwavering sense of guilt and my telescopic memories of brutalities lived long ago. Because a retort like that, a challenge like that, would have extracted from you nothing less than a slap in my face and a punch in my stomach. But now you, who art up in heaven, will disappear in the face of my calm cool smirk. Unemployed and Alone, however, obstinately refuse to retreat and demand that I address their needs before September disappears into October in this the year of your lord 1929.
"Two American ladies..." Hmm, Americans. I hope their French is not as wretched as mine. What a fine household we would make, hand movements and crude drawings to supplement our mutual use of a secondhand language. Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them. Not my own, of course, but Monsieur and Madame's. The first thing I learned at the Governor-General's house was that when Monsieur and Madame were consumed by their lunatic displeasure at how the floors had been waxed, how the silver had been polished, or how the poulet had been stewed, they would berate the household staff, all fifteen of us, in French. Not in the combination of dumbed-down French coupled with atonal attempts at Vietnamese that they would normally use with us, no, this was a pure variety, reserved for dignitaries and obtuse Indochinese servants. It was as if Monsieur and Madame were wholly incapable of expressing their finely wrought rage in any other language but their own. Of course, we would all bow our heads and act repentant, just as the Catholic priest had taught us. Of course, we would all stand there, blissful in our ignorance of the nuances, wordplay, and double-entendres of that language that was seeking so desperately to assault us. Naturally, some words would slip through, but for the most part we were all rather skilled in our refusal and rejection of all but the most necessary. Minh the Sous Chef, as the Old Man had renamed