Mãn (3 page)

tunic

HIS NAME WAS PHƯƠNG
. Maman had known him since he'd started playing a version of pétanque, bowling with sandals instead of steel balls. She noticed him because he always missed his shot when she passed by him on the way home from school. His teammates said that Maman brought him bad luck. As for him, he waited for his chance every day at the same time, even if he did not yet know what he was waiting for. He was able to give a precise name to that expectation only when he saw her arrive for the first time in a white
áo dài
, the uniform of her new school, whose name was embroidered in blue on a label sewn between her shoulder and her left breast. In the distance, the panels of her tunic blowing in the wind transformed her into a butterfly in gentle flight, destination unknown. From that precise moment, he never missed a single outing of Maman's class and he followed her, keeping his distance, to her home.

guốc

wooden sandals with heels

HE SPOKE TO HER
for the first time long afterwards, when the heel of Maman's shoe broke, as her half-brothers and half-sisters had predicted would happen. He rushed to her spontaneously to offer her his own sandals, then took off with the broken-heeled shoe. He was surprised to observe saw marks in the wood when he tried to repair it in the workshop of a cousin who made coffins. The next day, he was waiting for her in front of the bougainvillea that gave a softening effect to the strict metal of the front door of the judge's house. As soon as he saw Maman's foot on the first paving stone of the path, he bent down to place the shoes in the right direction on the threshold. To avoid compromising Maman's reputation, he stepped away a few metres. She slipped them on and then, in turn, placed in her own footprints PhÆ°Æ¡ng's sandals, the ones that had let her continue home without getting dirty, without stopping, without crying.

mÆ°a

rain

EVER SINCE PHƯƠNG'S SHADOW
had been following hers, she'd stopped crying under her umbrella, which had been pierced with a needle and looked like a sieve, because PhÆ°Æ¡ng's was always there to protect her before the first drop fell and even before Maman had caught sight of the first grey cloud. And so she carried two umbrellas, one beneath the other, and PhÆ°Æ¡ng, bare-headed, walked three paces behind her. He had never wanted to take shelter under the same one because with the two of them, the rain could have dulled the lustre of Maman's perfectly smooth black hair.

From outside the garden planted with longan, papaya and jackfruit trees, it was impossible to hear Maman's silence. No one aside from the servants could have imagined that her half-brothers and half-sisters made a game of breaking every other tooth in her comb and cutting locks of her hair while she slept. Maman was able to convince herself of the innocence of their acts, or the fact that the acts flowed from their very innocence. She remained silent to preserve that innocence as well as her father's. She did not want her father to see his own children tear one another to pieces, for already he was both witness and judge of the ripping apart of his country, its culture, its people.

Mẹ Ghẻ

cold mother

HER FATHER WOULD HAVE
preferred not to have children with a second wife after the sudden death of the first, for that new spouse would inevitably become a
Mẹ Ghẻ
—a “cold mother.” However, he did not yet have a son who would ensure the continuity of his own father's family name and that of all the ancestors who watched over him and carried him from the top of their altar. And so that cold mother played her role as spouse by giving him sons, and the role of parent in the manner of the stepmothers of Snow White, Cinderella and all the other orphaned princesses.

It should be said that
ghẻ
also means “mange.” And so, to live up to the ugly title “mangy mother” that had been inflicted on her, she showed her children how to hate Maman and her big sisters, how to draw the line between the first and second litter, how to differentiate oneself from those other girls even though they all had the same nose. I wonder if that mangy mother would have been less bitter had she been called
stepmother
. Would she have been less afraid of the beauty of Maman's big sisters? Would she have been less eager to marry them off?

sạn

gravel

BEING YOUNGER
, Maman awaited her turn to be given in marriage separating the stone and gravel fragments from the rice like prayer beads. Her cold mother forbade the cooks to help her so she would learn obedience and discipline. And so what she learned above all was how to become flexible, imperceptible, invisible even. When her mother died, people told her that she'd gone because she had finished paying her debts on earth. So then Maman discarded stones as if they were part of her debt, a weight that prevented her from taking flight. She got rid of them in the hope of arriving at the state of weightlessness. She was thrilled to see her jar fill up with those impurities meal after meal, day after day. She buried the jar under the mango tree next to the cookie tin that held
Une vie
, by Guy de Maupassant, a book from her mother's library that she'd been able to save. Her cold mother needed space on the shelf for the wind to circulate around the hammock. She may have been right, because the length of cloth that hung from the ceiling functioned as a fan, moving the air just above her husband's sleeping body.

quạt

fan

IT WAS UP TO MAMAN
to pull the cord that made the fan move from left to right at a steady rhythm so as to drive away the heat without interrupting her father's siesta. Maman loved that special moment with him; she was certain that the gentle, repetitive movement reassured him, confirmed that family harmony existed.

Sometimes, when he was so preoccupied he couldn't sleep, he would ask her to recite
Truyện Kiều
, the story of a girl who sacrificed herself to save her family. Some say that as long as the poem, with its more than three thousand lines, still exists, no war can make Vietnam disappear. Maybe that is why, for more than a century, even an illiterate Vietnamese has been able to recite entire stanzas.

Maman's father demanded that all his children learn the poem by heart, because in it the poet depicted, among other things, purity and selflessness, two shades essential to the Vietnamese soul. As for Maman's mother, she always came back to the first lines of the poem, which remind the reader that everything can change, everything can topple in the blink of an eye.

nhân dạng

identity

MAMAN SAW HER LIFE
turned upside down when the first shot was heard in an ambush between two shores, between East and West, between the resistance clamouring for independence and the current regime that taught Vietnamese students to say “our ancestors the Gauls” without seeing any inconsistency. She was on one of the Mekong ferry boats when the first bullets struck passengers. Everyone fell and took cover instinctively. And instinctively, she raised her head during the first silence as preparations were being made for the second burst of fire. Her neighbour, an elderly man with missing teeth, leathery skin and bright eyes, looked down as he ordered her to throw all her papers overboard: “If you want to survive, get rid of your identity.”

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