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blood. And it really was unto death. It has been unto death.
    He lit a cigarette and gave it to me. And very quietly, close to my lips, he talked to me.
    And I talked to him too, very quietly.
    Because he doesn’t know for himself, I say it for him, in his stead. Because he doesn’t know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him.
    Now evening comes. He tells me I’ll remember this afternoon all my life, even when I’ve forgotten his faceand name. I wonder if I’ll remember the house. He says, Take a good look at it. I do. I say it’s like everywhere else. He says yes, yes, it’s always the same.
    I can still see the face, and I do remember the name. I see the whitewashed walls still, the canvas blind between us and the oven outside, the other door, arched, leading to the other room and to an open garden—the plants are dead from the heat—surrounded by blue balustrades like those at the big villa in Sadec with its tiers of terraces overlooking the Mekong.
    It’s a place of distress, shipwrecked. He asks me to tell him what I’m thinking about. I say I’m thinking about my mother, she’ll kill me if she finds out the truth. I see he’s making an effort, then he says it, says he understands what my mother means, this dishonor, he says. He says he himself couldn’t bear the thought if it were a question of marriage. I look at him. He looks back, apologizes, proudly. He says, I’m Chinese. We smile at each other. I ask him if it’s usual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, Whether people love one another or not, it’s always terrible. Says it will pass as soon as it gets dark. I say he’s wrong, it’s not just because it was in the daytime, I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve alwaysbeen sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. Today I tell him it’s a comfort, this sadness, a comfort to have fallen at last into a misfortune my mother has always predicted for me when she shrieks in the desert of her life. I say I don’t quite understand what she says, but I know this room is what I was expecting. I speak without waiting for an answer. I tell him my mother shouts out what she believes like the messengers of God. She shouts that you shouldn’t expect anything, ever, either from anybody else or from any government or from any God. He watches me speak, doesn’t take his eyes off me, watches my lips, I’m naked, he caresses me, perhaps he’s not listening, I don’t know. I say I don’t regard my present misfortune as a personal matter. I tell him how it was just so difficult to get food and clothes, to live, in short, on nothing but my mother’s salary. I’m finding it more and more difficult to speak. He says, How did you all manage? I say we lived out of doors, poverty had knocked down the walls of the family and we were all left outside, each one fending for himself. Shameless, that’s what we were. That’s how I came to be here with you. He is on me, engulfed again. We stay like that, riveted, moaning amid the din of the still external city. We can still hear it. And then we don’t hear it any more.
    •  •  •
    Kisses on the body bring tears. Almost like a consolation. At home I don’t cry. But that day in that room, tears console both for the past and for the future. I tell him one day I’ll leave my mother, one day even for my mother I’ll have no love left. I weep. He lays his head on me and weeps to see me weep. I tell him that when I was a child my mother’s unhappiness took the place of dreams. My dreams were of my mother, never of Christmas trees, always just her, a mother either flayed by poverty or distraught and muttering in the wilderness, either