The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [61]
"I held out for as long as I could," the chauffeur insisted. "She's just talking nonsense, I told myself, but..."
"But what?" I asked.
"But then this morning, she ... she brought them in to show me. To show me, of all people! She had them dyed to match her dress, and they were returned to her speckled like a robin's egg. 'They're ruined!' she said, sobbing into my handkerchief. "
"What's a robin'?"
"It's a kind of bird. Never mind, I forget that there aren't any here. Never mind, I just mean that her shoes were supposed to be blue."
"Oh."
"They were blue all right but not all over like she wanted them to be. They looked like someone shook a brush dipped in blue paint at them. I wanted her to stop crying, so I ... I said that if she could get me more paint, I would help her fill in the spots. She just cried harder. I thought ... I thought that if I told her about Blériot, it would cheer her up. I thought that if she knew that there was no prize at the end of the race, she wouldn't care so much about running in it."
"I don't need to hear any more," I told the chauffeur. "I know the rest."
The chauffeur drove away after I finally agreed to meet with him in a week to discuss "my condition." What a quack! I thought. No garlic? No ginger?
When I now think about the chauffeur, especially in the early morning hours when the streetlamps of this city are hanging above me, muted by the mist that rises from the Seine, I think about the two dust-filled holes that receded into the Saigon night. I think about his floating head. I think about the sadness of this man who crossed oceans, chasms blue with the broken eggshells of the birds who flew so far away from home only to return with nothing at all.
In Saigon when the rain falls, the sun remains white with heat and the earth below steams. Heat, there, attaches herself to my back and I carry her with me no matter where I go, outdoors or in. "Sultry" and "swelter" are, there, the names of the seasons, an uninterrupted interlocking sequence of months that feel like years. Flowers, there, learn to bloom at night. Festivals, there, celebrate the moon underneath her forgiving blue light. I had grown accustomed, there, to life moving slowly. I had taken it for granted that speech would be an act forever slowed and delayed because words were so reluctant to leave the shaft of coolness that is the speaker's throat. I assumed that sudden flashes of anger were something to be avoided, as they would only encourage and increase the production of sour sweat. Madame's secretary, though, belonged to a different school of thought. Heat was to her a Madame, demanding action. When the sun seared, she did not seek refuge like the rest of us. No afternoon naps, no shedding of clothes, no lying down in the pathway of a known breeze. Madame's secretary thought of heat as a competitor, a ruthless compromiser. She was particularly frustrated by how quickly her body gave in to it. Every day, she felt defeated by the wetness that collected in the folds beneath her breasts. Every day, the watermark that was left behind, a wavy line where sweat had saturated the fabric of her dress, reminded her that these folds were deepening. Every night, when she lifted her breasts up to wipe away the salt of her own body, she thought of Chef Blériot's hands. Her body responded by blistering, turning itself inside out. Heat was to her a thief and a harlot. Heat was to her the woman whom she wanted to be.
This is all to say that the sun beating down on that day, the day before the anniversary of Madame's birth, served only as a reminder to her secretary of all that needed to be done before the sun set and, like her, faded away. Madame's secretary started with a list, as the order of things was very important to her. First, she summoned Blériot, whose hands smelled that afternoon of caul fat and thyme. He had been preparing squabs since the early morning, wrapping