Have you told him that I am here?
Of course. No reply yet. She regarded me shrewdly. My first loyalty lies with him, my actual nephew, or not even really him, but the revolution you have abandoned.
I didn’t abandon the revolution. It abandoned me.
Disappointments, abandonments, betrayals—unfortunately all typical of revolutions, as with all passionate love affairs. Something happened between you two?
Because I became a refugee again?
Yes. Or is that just another cover? To keep you safe from Bon? He would kill you if he knew you were a communist, wouldn’t he?
My cup was empty except for a fine black silt of coffee ground. Yes.
When you wrote me and asked for help, I agreed—
And thank you for that—
—because of all that you have done for the revolution. And because I want to know what has happened to our revolution. I can recognize propaganda when I see it, and what is coming from our revolution is propaganda. But as imperfect as our revolution may be—and what revolution is perfect?—that does not mean I support counterrevolutionaries. So tell me, my former communist: Are you now a reactionary?
Are communist or reactionary my only choices?
What are your other choices?
You’re an editor, I said. I have something for you to read.
I retrieved my confession from the false bottom of my leather duffel and gave it to her, all 367 pages of it. She had barely had a chance to look at the first page when a knock at the door announced our visitors, dressed well and yet casually, making me aware of my simple white long-sleeved shirt, rolled up to the elbows, and my boring black slacks, and my dusty shoes—an ensemble that made me look like a waiter, which was what I now was. They, too, wore shirts and slacks and had arms, legs, and eyes as I did. But while we shared the same elements that made us human, they were clearly filet mignon, rare and perfectly seared, while I was boiled organ meat, most likely intestine. We were distantly related, in other words, but no one would ever mix us up. The fine quality of the cotton of their shirts, woven by a bedraggled child laborer somewhere in a dark, poor, hot country, was visible from a distance. As for their pants, they fit so well they needed no belts, while my pants were so loose they required a hideous strap of snake leather, provided by the refugee camp and donated, presumably, by somebody of typical American girth from Texas or Florida, which is to say it was long enough for two emaciated Vietnamese.
The first gentleman, whose rumpled black hair was speckled with gray, was a psychoanalyst. The other gentleman, whose sleekly coiffed gray hair was streaked with black, was a politician. He was a socialist, an honorable affiliation in France, and a very happy man, since a fellow socialist had won the presidency last week. The politician was well-known enough that he could be introduced just by his initials, which initially befuddled me.
BHV? I said.
BFD, my aunt repeated.
BFD and the psychoanalyst, who was also a Maoist and who had completed his PhD, regarded me with a curiosity that soon devolved into disdain, which the French have difficulty concealing, since they consider disdain a virtue. My aunt introduced me as a refugee from the communist revolution in my homeland, and these two were leftists for whom the Vietnamese revolutionaries were modern-day noble savages. If I was not one of these noble savages, then I must be an ignoble savage, a situation that was not helped by the fact that my schoolboy French was stiff from not having been used for many years after the lycée. After a few halting rounds of conversation where I rapidly proved that I could not swim in the intellectual, cultural, and political currents of Paris or France or the French—I mentioned Sartre, for example, and did not know that the great existentialist had died two years previous—the Maoist PhD, BFD, and my aunt ignored me. I sat on a corner of the couch in the state of humiliation, a region I have visited quite often, most often when someone called me a bastard. I usually responded with rage, a good mask. But I was not myself, or rather I was both me and myself, my screw quite wobbly, taking comfort from the first and then the second bottle of wine that the visitors had brought, the conversational freight train rushing past me and revealing only glimpses through its windows. Smoking my aunt’s cigarettes, gazing at the ceiling, the carpet, the polished toes of the men’s shoes, I knew I was not just a clown but a dunce.
When my aunt offered hashish, I accepted with relief, unsure of how to exit gracefully from their ménage à trois. But under the spell of the hashish it was all perfectly normal that later in the evening, when the Maoist PhD said farewell, even to me, BFD stayed seated. My aunt closed the door behind the Maoist PhD and said, What a very nice evening. Until tomorrow . . .
She nodded at BFD, who rose, inclined his head to me somewhat mockingly, and followed her into her bedroom. I could hear them laughing behind the door, undoubtedly at me. I laughed with them. I was, after all, the refugee, not the revolutionary, the hick from the hinterlands, the nitwit nephew from the colony, the dumb bastard who was so provincial and prudish that even floating on hashish he was shocked at the idea of his aunt making love to a politician, or any man, even if he was a socialist.
Later that evening, a time bomb of a lesson finally exploded in my head as I lay on the sofa. I was trying to sleep when I suddenly recalled a professor at the lycée who had earned his degree in Paris in the 1930s. We students worshipped and envied him. Indeed, worship and envy pervaded our steamy colony, as they do any colony. Colonizers imagined themselves as divine, and the native middlemen who served them, like my professor, fancied themselves as priests and disciples. Not surprisingly, the colonizers looked down on us as savages, infants, or sheep, while we looked up at them as demigods, masters, or brutes. The danger with worshipping human beings, of course, is that eventually they reveal their flawed humanity, at which point the believer has no choice but to kill the fallen idols or die trying.
Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. It is difficult to be loved by someone, as the French imagined their relationship with us, or to be abused by someone, though the French pretended otherwise, without being shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue. Thus we learned French literature and language under the tutelage of this professor who had actually stepped foot on the soil of la Gaule, our fatherland, as a scholarship student dispatched to absorb the best of French culture. He returned as a sopping wet sponge to us benighted natives, applying himself to foreheads that might be feverish with revolution.
Ah, the Champs-Élysées, the Sponge rhapsodized. Oh, the Eiffel Tower!
And we all swooned, just a little, and dreamed that one day we, too, could board a steamer ship for the metropole with nothing more than a suitcase, a scholarship, and an inferiority complex.
Ah, Voltaire! the Sponge effused. Oh, Descartes! Oh, Rousseau!
In truth, we delighted in reading these masters in the original French for the Sponge’s classes, and we believed what the Sponge told us, that the greatest of literature and philosophy was universal, and that French literature and philosophy was the greatest of the greatest, and by learning French literature and philosophy and language we, too, could one day be Frenchmen, although our lessons in the canon were complicated by our context of a colony. From Descartes, for example, I learned that because I think, therefore I am! But I also learned that in a world divided between the body and the mind, we Vietnamese were ruled by our bodies, which was why the French could rule us with their minds. From Voltaire, I learned that it was best to tend to my own garden, which might mean many things, but when taught to us by the French meant to mind our own business and be happy with our little plots, while the French took care
