The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [60]
"At least I get to work with people."
"What did you say?"
"Look, like I said, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is probably—"
"Never mind a cure. What is wrong with you?" I interrupted.
"Nothing, nothing. Look, if I tell you, will you hear me out?"
Yes, I nodded.
"It's simple. When I came back to Saigon, I applied for a staff doctor position in their Native Affairs Office. Basic stuff. Mostly physical examinations to be performed at the beginning and at the end of their commissions and the routine visits in between. Venereal diseases, tapeworms, diarrhea. Basic stuff. And so I was hired."
"So?"
"So those overgrown French schoolboys hired me as a staff veterinarian. They wanted me to travel from plantation to plantation, checking on hooves, snouts, and whatever else was ailing them. When they said that I had the job, they didn't even say a word to me about it. No explanation, no nothing."
"Oh."
"As I was saying, your condition has been studied and is much better understood now. A cure is..."
This time, I had to let him continue. All that training should not be wasted, I thought.
The chauffeur prided himself on being cosmopolitan, a man of the world via Saigon and Paris. So he began by telling me about all the cafés and dance halls in Paris that are filled, he said, with men like me. He never visited any of them, he said. He had only read about them in the writings of those doctors who were trying to find a cure. "Men with men. Men with men who behaved like women. Women who behaved like men with women who behaved like women, et cetera. The mutations of your condition are endless," the chauffeur explained. Endlessly fascinating, I thought. After his informative and in-depth lecture on the varietal nature of human attraction, the chauffeur, or "Dr. Chauffeur," as he in all fairness ought to be called, prescribed for me a regimen of rigorous physical exercise and a decreased intake of garlic, ginger, and other "hot" spices. No garlic? No ginger. What a quack! I thought. But I suppose the chauffeur was simply proving himself to be a poet, after all. His recommended course of action had little to do with science. It was based on something more intuited than learned. It identified him as a believer, a healer who places his faith in the body's ability to transform itself through the denial of what it naturally craves. I would hardly call that a skill, I thought.
But being both a poet and a doctor did help the chauffeur to see that whatever the gardener's helper was suffering from had afflicted him too long ago and was now only an aching, a bell ringing in his kneecaps when it rained. Painful, yes, but hardly worth a thorough examination, the chauffeur thought. As for Blériot and me, the chauffeur saw blood pumping through a nicked artery. Immediate attention was required, he decided. Though if I am to believe the chauffeur, it was in the end Madame's secretary who told. "A woman is always to blame," as the Old Man would say.
Madame's secretary, according to the chauffeur, had devised an elaborate plan to seduce Blériot. Madame's birthday dinner was to be the place and time. A new dress, a string of freshwater pearls to accentuate the pink in her skin, and her signature special-occasion heels, the whole thing was sordid, but the worst part of it, according to the chauffeur, was that Madame's secretary had to go and tell him all about it. "Like I was her sister!" he said, shaking his head from side to side, a pendulum swinging from embarrassment to disbelief. "Like I was her sister," the chauffeur repeated. As the anniversary of Madame's birth drew closer, the details became more elaborate, said the chauffeur. Lace for the dress, perfume for the skin, barrettes for the hair, but all he could think about were her high heels. How they would make her feet raw with pain, red even, he thought. How tender they would be by the night's end. How he could rub them with salt and water. How swollen they would be in his hands. Desire comes