The Last Carousel Page 19

“Me Xuong,” she told me, “2 Huong-Dieu,” and walked away.

  When I ran out of oranges I went to find her. Had she told me her number instead of her name she could have saved me a troubled search. In a troubled season.

  “What numba?”

  Then Hiep jumped out of some cranny, put his arms about me and his head against my chest, and bummed me for a cigarette. He wouldn’t lead me to his mother until I’d given him a light. Then he pocketed the matches.

  Xuong was sitting cross-legged on Bed 16 with neither a Christ nor a Buddha above her. Her nose had no bridge and her right cheek bore a long slant scar that must once have been livid but had long since turned ash-grey.

  “Numba-One Mama-san codock,” she explained instead of saying hello; touching a safety-razor blade to her temple with a slanting motion to show me how Numba-One Mama had codocked her. “O, me wuv you too much,” she remembered; and put the thin blade down. Two middle-teeth of her uppers were gold. Her skin was unblemished nonetheless.

  The girl on the next bed put on shades, though the light was dim, and turned up the volume of her transistor as though to raise a sound-curtain between the beds. Some of the beds had drawstring curtains. One woman took her laundry off the curtains and drew the strings. The Mama-san, a woman in her seventies, no bigger than a child, was led in by Hiep.

  “Short-tam?” the old woman wanted to know. “Long-tam? Numba One gel.”

  The girl on the next bed took off her shades, turned down the volume and came out flat against Short Time: “Short tam didi fast. Long tarn Numba One.” A girl lying on her back in a far comer agreed and added, indifferently, “Me wuv you too much too.” Then Mama came out, independent of the opinions of anyone else, for Long Tam.

  The only dissenter was Hiep, who kept pulling the bed’s drawstrings and trying to push his mother onto the bed. He was plainly afraid that unless it was Short Time, it might be no time at all. A bird in the hand was Hiep’s thinking.

  A quorum having finally been attained, the girl on the next bed put her shades back on and turned up the volume while Xuong began to get dressed for the street. She had a slight limp, yet she never went out on the street without looking neat.

  Mama-san took me aside to tell me her sorrows. She had been, when young, she assured me in a mixture of French and GI English, a dancer in Paris. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she had danced a step or two down the Boulevard Sebastapol circa 1917. Up from some Cambodian hamlet to the lights of Montmartre, then down to the alleys of Saigon. Where now she raced curfew, comer to comer, night after night, upstairs and down on her seventy-year-old legs.

  Xuong came out of the curtains wearing a white blouse and a dark pleated skirt. But Hiep clung to her and wouldn’t let her leave him.

  “Give cigarette,” Xuong explained.

  “Eight years old and pimping your mother,” I congratulated the child, “here, son, take the whole pack.”

  On the street I gave Xuong cab fare to my hotel. I walked in the opposite direction to be certain I wasn’t being checked by one of the White Mice. Then took another cab to the hotel.

  What a lovely city this once must have been, I reflected, driving north on the Rue Pasteur, when it was still flowered and wooded. Now its gardens are sandbags and barbed wire. If you want a flower you can buy an artifical one in any market.

  Xuong left her ID card at the hotel desk under the eyes of four bell-boys. Before the night-chameleons had fled the walls, one of them would be rapping my door for 500 piastres for entertaining a guest. But there wouldn’t be a tip in it for him. I always knew they’d like me in Saigon.

  “Beaucoup piastres,” was Xuong’s first reaction to my second-class yet air-conditioned nest. “How much for all?”

  “36,000 P. a month.”

  Xuong rolled her eyes at a sum so fantastic. “Hundred P. a day for me and Hiep,” she filled me in on what it cost her and her son to survive. Her rent comes out of her own half of her fees. The other half, she assured me, is divided between the Mama-san from the Rue Sebastopol and the First District Police.

  Police—the White Mice—and mama-sans alike are terribly hard on these village women. Country girls sometimes have a tough and sinewy pride; so codocking them becomes more or less routine. If a mama-san’s razor doesn’t subdue one, the First District will be happy to take her in hand. After living in darkness a month, on rice cooked in muddy water, never knowing at what moment she’s going to be slapped silly again, then being turned back to mama with her head shaven, the girl may wish she’d settled with mama out of court.

  Mama doesn’t feel she’s asking too much of the girl—just to hold up five fingers or 10, meaning 500 piastres for short time or 1000 for long.

  Each holds up her fingers in the end: police and mama-sans get it all.

  Around the Hotel Caravelle and the Continental Palace, women are available who are never codocked. Who never hold up five fingers or 10, and are never shaven by police. These are city women from Vung Tau, Dalat, Danang, Saigon and Hue. Generally, they’re better looking than the refugee women, and always better dressed. Most are Catholic and have had some French schooling. The village women are commonly Buddhists and speak no French at all.

  These restaurant courtesans, more mistresses than whores, don’t sleep with a man because he pays for a dinner. They pick and choose and take no chances on the common soldier. Most dress in the traditional aodai, and are, essentially, conservative women. They are for men with bank accounts in New Delhi, Cincinnati, Athens, Stockholm, Hamburg, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Manila.

  Some of them must marry a bank account in Cincinnati: anything to get out of Saigon.

  Xuong came out of the bathroom holding a bar of soap.

  “How much?”

  “Fifty P.”

  “Fifty for you, fifteen for me,” she informed me smugly, and returned to experimenting with hot and cold running water. Then gave a yelp of surprise and came out drying her neck, looking both pleased and rueful. She’d gotten an unexpected sprinkling from the shower. Xuong was a fast learner; even if she was a little heavy around the hips.

  The refrigerator was a lesser mystery; some of its contents curiosities. “What name?” she’d want to know, holding up a can or jar. I had to open instant coffee, soluble chocolate, powdered orange juice, and let her taste them all before she could be satisfied. Now she had a tea-bag in her hand. “What name?” When I brought a cup of hot water, she tore open the bag and poured the leaves into the water. She had the right combination anyhow.

  Then she discovered a manicure scissors. She pushed me back on the bed, pulled off my socks, and I had to submit to a toenail paring. She enjoyed the work so I let her go on, meanwhile watching a bug on the wall above her head. He’d been living in the room before I’d moved in, and my thinking had been that if he didn’t bite me, I wouldn’t bite him. Live and let live was how I’d looked at it. Because if he were the kind of bug I suspected he was, he was The King. Now watching Xuong working on my big toe, he began applauding with his feelers. The rascal was growing bold.

  Xuong transferred her scissors to her other hand, smacked the brute with her palm, and went back to paring. Five gets you ten that the stain The King left on that wall remains there to this day.

  Xuong was older than most of Saigon’s refugee whores. For her own refugee time had begun when her father had been killed fighting against the French, or fighting for the French; or for refusing to fight anybody; it all depended on who Xuong was talking to.

  Some of these women have been made homeless by B-52s and some by bulldozers. Some by search-and-destroy, and others by search-and-cordon. Some fled the NLF. Some the Americans. Some because a father said a plague on both your houses; or because he rowed down a river nobody had told him was no longer his own. Some are lost because a pilot had to lighten a bombload; others for revealing a cache of rice. Some because a brother informed to the NLF; others because someone informed to the Americans. And some by the defoliant called Blue Bambo
o.

  Some by knives and some by mines; some by fire and some by water. One says her husband would not have been killed had he not been bareheaded in the paddy. The war has been going on so long, the woman has sold her grief to so many, it is no matter now whether she herself did the informing or was informed upon. Nor upon whose side her father died while being pacified. All she knows is that her name was once Xuong-thi-Nhan; and that it is now Number 16. It all comes under the general heading of winning hearts and minds.

  Xuong was a big girl and a resolute one. My fingernails had to be manicured, too. I tried to get free while she was shining my bedroom slippers and almost made it. But she put the slippers down and began to massage me.

  Later she showed me needle-marks, on her arms, with pride. She wanted me to know that she took anti-VD shots every week. She was reassuring me. Then she splashed about in the tub like a great baby. I fell asleep hoping she wouldn’t drown.

  In the middle of the night, I wakened to find the lights still on, the radio going, and something still transpiring in the bathtub. I rolled out of bed.

  Xuong, naked in the tub, was stomping the hell out of every shirt, pair of socks, shorts, and tops I owned, regardless of fabric, fast colors, or condition of cleanliness. She’d found it unthinkable to let all that lovely bathwater down the drain without putting it to some use first. Her hips may have been a bit heavy; but she made up for that in frugality.

  Personally, I felt it was a little early in the day to be getting out a laundry. Yet, by the way her big breasts bounced as she stomped, it was plain she was having a ball. So I turned off the radio and went back to bed. When I woke in the morning, Xuong was gone and so were most of my clothes. She’d left me one shirt, one pair of pants, and my shoes.

  I didn’t want company that evening. I got a knock all the same. Xuong, with laundry ironed and my pants pressed. I went for my wallet.

  She looked hurt. “No money,” she reproved me. And kicked off her shoes. I would have preferred paying her. I didn’t think I could stand another toenail paring this soon.

  A lot of good it did me. So what do you know; instead of a Numba One Gel, what I had on my hands was a pedicurist, laundress, masseuse, bodyguard, nurse, cook, seamstress, market-woman, vermin-exterminator, economist, pants-presser, shoe-shiner, and bed-warmer. At the least a mistress; at the most a wife. I didn’t have a shirt-button missing. And clean underwear has its own appeal. I just wasn’t prepared to set up housekeeping.

  “I find Numba One hou’ for you,” she seemed to read my mind, “you come see.”

  Now she was in real estate.

  So we went down a walk so narrow that no light had ever fallen across its walls, into a passage littered with droppings of children and dogs, down a hall, then up a ladder to a floor that sagged beneath my feet. Into a room about 8x10 containing an iron cot bearing a mattress stained with rust or blood. We were home.

  Xuong switched on a floor fan and looked at me as much as to say, “Didn’t I tell you it would be great?” Well, we had electric power at least.

  I just sat on that beat-up bedspring and boggled; this was how people actually lived in the world, born into rooms like this: eat, sleep, pray, make love, and die in such kennels. Whole lifetimes. The floor fan creaked and skreaked. It didn’t like the place any more than I did.

  “Numba One!” Xuong assured me.

  “Numba Ten!” I assured her.

  “Numba Ten for you, Numba One for me,” she reminded me.

  When she knocked the following evening, I didn’t answer the door. She knew I was there all the same.

  “You Numba Ten!” she denounced me from the other side of the door.

  A chameleon on the wall fled for cover.

  The night before I moved, Xuong caught me in. My bags were packed and my escape-route plain. I let her stay. She bathed but didn’t splash about. And wouldn’t turn out the lights until I’d turned off the ceiling fan.

  “Make bad wind,” she explained her superstition: death comes on a night-wind.

  ILL WIND STRIKES SOLDIER

  A soldier slept soundly in his home at Trinh Minh The Street, but alarmed his wife when she heard him uttering indistinct cries. She sped him to a hospital but he died upon arrival. There was speculation that the soldier had died of an ill wind.

  —Vietnam Guardian

  We had breakfast in a Chinese noodle cafe. When she rose, I glanced up. Then let her go. She didn’t turn and look back at the door. She didn’t look back from the street. She didn’t look back at all.

  Those shots she took ought to help one of us, I reflected glumly.

  I’ll say this much for Xuong: she fought with all she had to get out of a whore’s bed and back into a wife’s.

  POOR GIRLS OF KOWLOON

  THOUGH the Macao Palace, the big gambling casino afloat in the harbor, shines blazing-bright all night, the streets of the hot little enclave behind it are dimly lit. If history hasn’t quite brought Macao to a dead-still halt, it has certainly made it hard to find one’s way around after dark.

  The gambling isn’t for Americans unless one is a slot-machine bug. At both the Macao Palace and the Estoril, the big game is dai-sui: The Big and the Small. There is also chemin-de-fer, roulette, pakapoo, boule and black-jack.

  I don’t play other people’s games and I wouldn’t be caught dead yanking the lever of a slot machine. But there was no poker. And the crap table was out of action. So, through streets so humid the banyan trees kept sweating, I wandered into a carnival grounds. There wasn’t any carnival but some fools were standing around betting on fighting crickets. I lost twenty-five patacas. I told you not to play other people’s games.

  The first Christians to gain a foothold for Jesus in Asia were Portuguese Jesuits, and theirs was a Portuguese Christ. Though Lisbon had to kneel to the Spanish throne, the missionaries of Macao refused to recognize the domination of Spain and sustained their defiance for sixty years. When Portugal then regained her independence, Lisbon rewarded the bishopric of Macao by endowing the city with the title: City of the Name of God, There is None More Loyal.

  The Portuguese had a good thing in the name of God. Trade between China and Japan having been forbidden by the Ming emperors, Portuguese sea-captains carried Chinese silk to Japan and Japanese silver, in payment, back to China. The carrying charge covered more than expenses.

  And while the captains cut themselves a bit of silk for purses to hold their silver, Portuguese bishops covered the action by bearing Jesus, without favoritism, to mandarin and Samurai alike. Macao’s Church of St. Paul, whose magnificence can be seen even in its ruins, was built by Japanese Christians and dedicated to The Mother of God.

  For four hundred years, in this Mediterranean nest of the South China Sea, Chinese and Portuguese handled one another so well that both races subsisted comfortably, without racial friction, on tourism, fishing, gambling, manufacturing incense, firecrackers, and the underground traffic in gold. So skillful were the Portuguese in the uses of neutralism that the enclave wasn’t occupied by the Japanese during World War II.

  Graveyard memorials testify to a curious emigration. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the overwhelming tide of western emigration was to the West, Westerners came to Macao against that tide. George Chinnery, a minor master and the best British painter ever to live in China, came to Macao because it was the farthest port, away from his wife, of which he’d ever heard. But after he’d settled in she showed up, bag and baggage, all the same. He finally rid himself of her by hiding out in Canton.

  The smell of Macao is that of saltfish. The streets of Macao are Portugal. But when a street runs down to the sea, it becomes Chinese. The sea is Chinese. The rain is Chinese rain. The sea-haze that makes rain and mountains one is a Chinese haze. The Chinese here never became a Mediterranean folk. But the Mediterraneans, and Westerners too, British, Irish, Americans, Middle-Europeans, all, eventually, went bamboo.

  The success of the Jews in maintaining their unity, as a peo
ple, in Russia and Poland and France, didn’t succeed in China. There are the remains of synagogues in China; and ancestral memories of Judaism, too. There are even Chinese who claim Jewish descent. But in the end the Jews, too, went bamboo.

  Macao offered sanctuary to Westerners who not only felt that the world was moving too fast, but in the wrong direction. Now here it’s come almost to a stop; but is no longer a sanctuary. When Big Brother Mao’s loudspeakers began thundering Newspeak and Nothink in 1966, the enclave had to capitulate to its dehumanization. Looters and arsonists received rewards; those who tried to preserve order were punished. Political prisoners, bound hand and foot, were handed over to their deaths. The Portuguese flag is still permitted to fly over the enclave. But Big Brother owns all the poles.

  Maoist movie houses make most of their money off American westerns. After the good guys beat the bad guys, the Chairman harangues the audience from the screen and the soundtrack bursts into Anchors Aweigh. The audience has the impression that the Chairman wrote the song.

  POOR GIRLS of Kowloon sometimes prefer to earn their livings in ball-rooms rather than in sweatbaths or bars. If such choice seems narrow, it can be even a tighter squeeze than that. Because working in a sweatbath requires an apprenticeship as a masseuse; and working in a ballroom requires some command of English. But in a bar all she has to be able to do is say yes.

  On a night when mist made the lamps of Nathan Road bum amber, a cab-driver wheeled me to The Oriental Ballroom. I’d missed the 5 till 9 tea dance; but was in time for the 9-1 a.m. night dance. The inside of the program listed, in both Chinese and English, the names of my hostesses:

  PLEASE INDICATE IN FRONT

  OF THE LADY’S NAME

  WHOM YOU WANTED TO INVITE

  IN THE NAME LIST.

  PLEASE NOTE:

  Hostess leaving the ballroom for private party bookings. Will be charge double price as per our regulations.

  Dance-ticket charges: $5.50 including tax (time limit for each ticket 5-15 minutes).

  Cover charge for visiting lady partners $5.00.