Ram, 1936
He looks at her with a slight frown that pierces through the glint of his white teeth as she lights the incense for the ancestors and places fresh persimmon, dusting the painted little figures and a few of the pictures she managed to salvage from her old home. He's quiet, but she knows something is turning inside his head, under that mop of dirty blond hair, minds running words and numbers, questions and answers, truths and lies.
The altar is smaller than it used to be, but at least it's there, and France hasn't tried to take it away from her just yet. Maybe it's because she's agreed to bow and bend under his will, with the fashionable silk dresses he brings her from Paris, knowing perfectly well that she will never really wear them when he's away. It's mostly made of dark wood, with pictures of the generals that had marched South, centuries ago, of long dead emperors she's not even surprised France hasn't said a word about, and of memories that felt both dead and alive at the same time. She salutes, very briefly, their memories
France watches her, standing still, naked in the early dark hours of the morning. She's not sure if it's disapproval or amusement, but she can never know with France, not really. In fact, she isn't sure France himself always know what to do with himself on most days, whenever he comes here in a white linen suit and the dainty, almost womanly hands he asks her to manicure when he's feeling like putting on a show. It makes Vietnam's face harden, but her voice stays the same tinkling, running river as she stumbles upon flat French words.
He's not supposed to be awake. Maybe he's developed some sort of resilience to the opium they take together at night, in the small room only furnished with pillows and incense he likes to call la cour des miracles with a lopsided smile. Their eyes meet briefly, and Vietnam instantly lowers hers, lets the tempest of rage and resentment rage inside for a few seconds, keeps it hidden, as always. Quickly enough France's form has disappeared from the doorway, footsteps heading back to bed.
Vietnam still wishes she could get herself to strangle him in his sleep.
Later that morning, when the sun finally comes out to shine over the South China Sea, she sits crosslegged on the floor of the veranda, preparing the morning's meal. The house is quiet at this time of the day, and she can see the land she's tried to live on ever since France had her move away from Hue, the waters glinting over the horizon. It's during those kind of moments that she understands, maybe, a little, why France even bothers with coming here even though he knows he doesn't have to do so nearly as often as he does.
He's made her move, with soft words and caresses on her shoulders that feel like chemical burns, on a beautiful land that gets flooded every year as a punishment for her failures. It's almost ridiculous, how acutely he can crawl under the careful walls she's built, against the sea and against the rest, sometimes, without really knowing it.
She makes him phở with beef, which he eats with a fork and a spoon. It never fails to remind her of their first encounter, how barbaric he had seemed to her, with his strange religion, his dirty rags and his untrustworthy blue eyes. She'd nodded as he'd talked to her through a translator, about the unique god and eternal salvation, about kings that lived in gilded palaces that reminded her of the lies China would tell her centuries ago. It hadn't managed to make her smile, and she had turned him away the way she had turned other white men away, clad in her silk gown, her sharps smiles and her pride.
The weight of her own memories she tries so hard to suppress makes her choke on her own breath, sometimes.
"It always puzzled me, Tonkin..."
He calls her Tonkin when she works for him, Annam when she fights with him, and Cochinchine when she sleeps with him. None of these are her real name, and they both know it.
"I mean, I would understand if it was Cambodia still holding upon things like altars, like serfdom or witchcraft, but you've always been my dearest and brightest, the most eager to embrace change. What exactly do you get from doing this?"
Vietnam sighs. She'd hoped he wouldn't start this. The smiling and the questioning, and the words that cut through bones. France doesn't even seem to realise his own conceit, toying mindlessly with the noodles in his soup, and it makes Vietnam mad. Maybe it's part of the game. Maybe it's part of the reasons why he hasn't had the gentlemen from the Sureté Générale take care of her and send her to Poulo Condore last time she tried to poison him withjincan in a very stupid, very brash surge of anger.
J'ai pu vivre dans la servitude; mais j'ai toujours été libre: j'ai réformé tes lois sur celles de la nature; et mon esprit s'est toujours tenu dans l'indépendance.
Vietnam shakes her head.
"It is not about what I get from it, but what I must do. It is about dignity and respect."
It makes France laugh, open mouthed, and Vietnam remembers a time where she would have found him disgusting for it. She doesn't anymore. Times and armies and wars and unions have changed her. Modernity has changed her. Colonisation has changed her. France has changed her.
He doesn't even have to answer and she knows what he's going to say. She knows because she's read it, read the elegant quốc ngữ translations of Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Marx, enough to be able to quote the best passages and put a smile on France face that she knew never failed to taste sour. She knows France and she knows what he feels, what he is, intimately, far more intimately that he imagines she knows him.
"You know, I have an old friend, well, a friend..." France is fumbling with his housecoat, looking for his cigarettes, which he finds, placing one between his lips and lighting it, smiling. "Whose only certitude, in life, used to be God and the certitude that his devotion to Him, no matter what, would never fail to keep the odds in his favour. He would say 'Dios aprieta, pero no ahorga', that God wouldn't choke him, whenever things went sour for him, the optimist he was. Obviously, life didn't quite work that way, and his faith made him make the same mistakes, over and over again."
There's something of the old kingdom in his face as he speaks, the one he's let go of forever decades ago, when he came to her once more with rage in his eyes and scars over his chest that he made her wash in the bath, gently, without even one of his usual words of false niceties and petty compliments he'd always have to remind her that she had lost face to the most cultured and the most civilised nation of the world. Empires crumbling into republics once more, under the roaring thunder of German orders shouted to young men in Sedan, Paris, and Versailles, and the shame, the indelible shame.
He takes a drag of smoke, exhales, letting his cigarette rest for a moment on the table.
"What if it was those very traditions of dignity and respect, of faith, that were keeping you in bondage?"
She knows that what she's about to say is stupid, but she can't help herself.
"There are other things than faith that can make one a slave to a higher power."
France stops breathing, for a very short moment, then he exhales, slowly. The usual smile is still in place, but it's stilted, in a way, frozen. He looks at her, sharp, blue, powerful, cruel eyes, and Vietnam knows she can't escape what is to come, what always come.
There's a sharp slap to her face, and she can say France hasn't put his full force into it because she doesn't tumble down on the ground from it like she used to, biting and scratching and hating him, so badly, so badly. She takes it like she takes everything that ever comes from him nowadays, with a stone face and the gnawing feeling of self-hate and sickly need to keep face. Maybe this is what it's all about, in a way, the altar and the fruits decorating it, something she knows France will never understand, not in this century anyway.
Outside the sun shines brightly over the rice fields, whose grains will be taken away from her with the not try to play these games with me…"
He sighs tiredly, but there's this slight curl to his mouth still, something like affection, like lust, maybe. It makes Vietnam feel sick as he caresses her bruised cheek. It burns and she keeps her eyes tightly shut thorough the whole ordeal. France's touches pass over her lips, almost tenderly, the touch of a lover. She knows his smile even behind her closed eyelids, a low hum of satisfaction losing itself in the back of his throat.
"You won't win."
With just that, he rises up, leaves. Vietnam can only swallow her pride and her rage up until he's disappeared back inside the house, before she puts both of her hands to her mouth and bites her fingers to keep herself from screaming.
She hates this, hates France, hates everything, but there's nothing that can quite compare with how she hates herself. She hates losing and she hates the snide looks from Siam whenever she sees him nowadays, great rivals turned into slaves to the West. (Thailand, he'd say with spite in his mouth disguised as a smile. Thailand is my name. It's always been my name). He's no better than her, no better than Burma or any of them. They can all wish to be something else, to be Japan, to be masters, but the harsh truth of the White Man's rule is that they know very well that, given other circumstances, they would have done the same thing. They've yet to come to terms with the failure of the buddhist monk and of the mandarin against the unforgiving harsh steel of rationality.
Outside the sun shines brightly over the rice fields, whose grains will be once more taken away from her with the rising tide.
That night, she lets France caress her sunkissed skin with greedy hand and an even greedier mouth. He's always careful when he undresses her, even when he's drugged up on white smoke, his lips on her neck, on her shoulders, on her breasts. Chasing the dragon. This feels all so painfully familiar and she wishes she could keep herself from thinking about China in times like these. It's really no use.
A moan crosses her lips, and it's a false one, but it doesn't matter, not to France anyway. He's got his teeth on the tense skin of her neck, and his hands between her legs. He's nowhere near as good at this when he's dizzy on poppy smoke, because he doesn't want to break her nearly as badly in those times.
When France is done with her, he kisses her hair, muttering sweet nothings she doesn't fully understands, about centuries flying by, the inevitability of castles crumbling into dust and the powerful feeling of seeing heads, heads, heads roll. Vietnam lets him do so, once more, because letting him do things is all she ever manages nowadays, letting him build mazes of words, paper and concrete for her to get lost into.
The night is warm, as it always is during the dry season, the slight smell of dust and the roaring of the sea that will never let her forget her own roars of war, centuries ago, of gods and dead men, emperors and warriors. She'll wake up tomorrow too, and dust the altar, before France leaves in the morning, with that tension in the line of his shoulders old men like him, crushed by the weight of their own past, always have. They'll kiss each other's cheeks, wave, on the dusty road, as the car takes him back to Saigon for official business. Vietnam will head back, rage in her veins, face turned to stone.
And then she'll read, elegant French words she's grown familiar with, about freedom, about the death of God, and about the ideas that had made France destroy crosses and palaces, kings and queen, centuries ago. She'll show him. She'll show him what kind of monster she can too become.