Chapter 7 lover(7)

Section VII It was a few months before our final separation, when we were still living in Saigon, and one day, it was late, and we were all sitting on the balcony of the house on Desdar Street.Aunt Du was also there.I look at mom.At first, I didn't recognize her a little bit.Later, her image suddenly became blurred, and in a blink of an eye she was completely changed, and even I couldn't recognize her at all.Suddenly, there was a strange woman sitting next to me in the place of my mother. She was not my mother, but her appearance was quite similar to my mother, but this woman was definitely not my mother.Her demeanor was a little dull, her eyes fixed on a certain corner of the garden, as if she was suddenly detecting some urgent event.What she saw, I couldn't figure it out.She has the lines and eyes of a young man, and a sense of happiness suppressed by shyness. It seems that she is a woman who is used to shyness.This woman is very beautiful.Aunt Du was sitting next to her, but she didn't seem to notice anything.I was really surprised not only by my description of her, her lines, her happy look, and her beauty, but what surprised me was that she was sitting in the same position as my mother just now, and became a substitute for my mother.I know very well that no one has ever sat in my mother's seat, so it can only be her, but just such an irreplaceable real person suddenly disappeared, and she could never be called to reappear.Nothing can replace the image of such a living person.I watched sanely as I went crazy.I yelled.I uttered a faint cry, with which I wanted to smash the mirror that was fixed on this unreal scene in front of me.The mirror was finally shattered, and the mother's image was restored.

I feel that the whole city is full of women like the beggar on the street, whether it is in the city, in the country, at the foot of Siam, or on the Mekong River, they are all derived from the crazy woman who terrifies me. Come, she comes from all directions.Wherever she came from, she finally came to Calcutta.The little girl always slept in the shade of those sweet-apple trees in the schoolyard, and her mother was always there to take care of her, treating her insect-bitten and fly-ridden feet.The one lying beside her mother is the girl in this story.It was the mother who brought the girl two thousand kilometers away.But now the mother was tired of the girl, and she wanted to give her to someone else, and she said: Here, take her!She no longer wants children.She has no children around her.The children all died or were abandoned, or else they became a large crowd in later life.The girl who slept under the shade of the custard apple tree is not dead yet, she will be mourned by the world.

She stood on the slope of the rice field by the roadside, howling and laughing loudly.Her benevolent pen can wake up the dead under the nine springs, and can wake up anyone who is willing to listen to the child's pen.Once, she woke up just after dawn, so she got up and went on the road.This day she set off.Perhaps because she saw the yellow and green sky beyond the plain, she crossed the plain.Start towards the sea.Go to the end of the earth.She strode down the slope of the forest next time.Here are some large forests full of miasma, and it is a hot climate area.There is no refreshing sea breeze here, only the noise of mosquito swarms and dead babies.It rains non-stop every day.Finally came to the Delta.This is the largest delta on Earth.It's all black sand here.Here the rivers join and flow towards Chittagong.One day, she finally came to the shore of the sea.She was jumping for joy, and she was giggling magically like a bird.Because of her laughter, she called a sailboat sailing across the sea in Chittagong, and the fishermen on board were happy to take her in and take her across the Bay of Bengal.

She was later spotted near garbage dumps on the outskirts of Kolkata, and she was never seen again.Later she returned and was seen behind the French embassy in the city.She spent the night in the park with plenty of food around her and a full belly. One day, I also came to this place, and I passed by here temporarily.I was only seventeen at the time.This is the British residential area and the garden of the embassy.It was the monsoon season, and the billiard court was empty.Along the river, groups of lepers laughed. We came to Kolkata for a short stop due to the breakdown of our liner.To pass the time, we toured the city.We set sail again the next evening.

When I was fifteen and a half years old, my reputation was spreading fast in Sa Dec town.Just the way I dress makes people think that I am an inappropriate person.My mother has no idea about anything, not even how to raise this little girl.What a poor child.Don't you think that the hat is innocent, and that mouth full of lipstick, all of that has a purpose and is not innocent, that is to say, it's just for attention and money.There are also two villainous elder brothers. People say that this Chinese is the young master of a billionaire. He owns a villa with blue glazed tiles by the Mekong River.His father didn't appreciate this white girl, and he would never allow his son to find such a girl, a girl from a white bad family.

The woman called "Madam" is from Savannakhet and now lives in Vinh Long.Her husband was appointed as an official, and he was going to come to Yonglong to take up the post.But for a whole year, people have not seen this lady in Vinh Long.Since this young man who was an administrative adjutant in Savannakhet was about to take up his post in Vinh Long, the wife and her lover could no longer fool around.The wife knew that her husband had been assigned to work in Vinh Long with their daughter with him, and she told her lover that the relationship should end.So on the day her husband left Savannakhet and came to Vinh Long, in the square of the town, in broad daylight, a bullet went through the lover's heart.

Every night, the depraved girl would come to the notorious neighborhood of the Embankment to be fondled by the filthy millionaire Chinese.But during the day, she still goes to middle school.The students in the school are all white girls.They were all white teenage sports girls practicing dive crawls in "sports clubs."One day, the school issued an order to these girls, forbidding them to talk to the daughter of the female primary school teacher in Sadec. During recess exercises, she leaned on the pillars in the wind and rain playground alone, staring at the street outside.She told her mother nothing about her neglect at school.She continued to go to school in the big black car of the Embankment Chinese.The girls watched her go, and none of the girls spoke to her, without exception.This loneliness reminded her of Yonglong's wife.When she came to Vinh Long, she was thirty-eight years old, and the little girl was only ten years old at that time.But now, when the girl recalled this past event, she was already sixteen years old.

This woman stood on the terrace of her house, overlooking the street along the Mekong River. Whenever my little brother and I came back from catechism class, I always saw her standing there.Her house was in the middle of a gorgeous building with a covered terrace in the center of a park full of oleanders and palm trees.Both the lady and the girl in the flat-brimmed hat had the same distinctiveness that set them off from the rest of the town.They were both staring at the long avenue by the river, they were the same stuff.Both of them were isolated from the world.They are the only ones who have become prominent local flair.Their misfortune is self-evident.Both of them were discredited entirely by the nature of their bodies, which were played with, kissed by lovers, and indulged in what they called--a great pleasure, a kind of In the mysterious pleasure of the union of lovers.It is precisely because this mysterious pleasure is so strong that they pursue it with all their might, no matter in the city, in the town hall, in the capitals of various places, at receptions, or even at the ball of the General Administration, everywhere. There was talk of these sorts of affairs.

The lady had just reappeared in public, and she believed that the matter was long gone, and the young man in Savannakhet had long been forgotten.So she reorganized some evening parties so that people here could see each other from time to time, and get rid of the terrible loneliness, because these people work all year round in remote villages and towns, surrounded by large rice fields, which is full of terror. , fanatical and forgotten places. When school is over in the evening, there is always that high-end black car and the girl who always wears that presumptuous hat and those golden shoes, and she goes to commit herself to that billionaire Chinese , he bathed her under the shower, slowly and carefully, just as she did every night at her mother's house.He bathed her with the cold water that was specially prepared for her, then carried her wet to the bed, turned on the electric fan, and then kissed her all over his body, and she always begged him to continue, continue to kiss her .Then she went back to boarding school and nobody punished her, beat her, humiliated her.

He had killed himself at dawn, in the town's brightly lit square.And she was dancing.Later, it was dawn.His body curled up.After a while, the sun's rays deformed the body.She didn't dare to come and clean up after she knew it.By noon, it was cleaned up. Mom said to the headmistress of the boarding school: It doesn't matter, all of this doesn't matter, you see?These shabby little dresses, and this rose-coloured hat, and these golden shoes, did they not all fit her well?Whenever my mother talks about her children, she always looks very charming with joy.The young headmistresses at the boarding school listened with interest to their mother's gibberish.She said: All the men in the town are around her, married or not, they all want this little girl, this little thing that is not yet fully mature, you see, she is still a child.Some say it's shameless!But let me ask you: How can you take innocence as shamelessness?

My mother is eloquent, and she can't stop talking.She also told them about me, a respectable courtesan.And laughing as she talked, she laughed at the scandal of the kid crossing the river, at her ridiculous dress, her crooked hat, and her unique beauty, she laughed at the irresistible beauty in this French colony. something—the skin of the white woman, the skin of the young girl.She said that her girl had been buried in the backcountry all the time, but now things have turned around, like a pearl unearthed, shining brightly, becoming a well-known figure in the city, and under the eyes of everyone in the city, she has a relationship with a Chinese billionaire. The rogue hooked up together, wearing a diamond ring on his finger, just like the last female banker, and she couldn't help crying as she talked. When my mother saw the diamond ring, she whispered: This ring reminds me of a small marriage when I was engaged to my first husband.I call him Mr Osgur.We all laughed when we heard the wacky name.She said: "That's his name and it's true. We looked at each other carefully, and then she smiled, very gently, with a hint of sarcasm, showing how well she knew her children and what was waiting for them in the future, I almost put My secrets on the Embankment were revealed to her. I didn't say it, and I never will. She waited for me to speak, and then she said to me in a very sweet voice: Do you know that it's all over for you?Do you know that you will never get married here?I shrugged and smiled.I said: If I want to marry, I can marry anywhere.Mom shook her head, saying it was impossible.She said: No, all your affairs are known here, so you will never get married here.She looked at me and said something memorable: Do men like you?I replied: Yes, of course they like me.What she meant by this was: You can still make men like you. She also asked me: Did you go to see him just for money?I hesitated, then replied: Yes, I'm only in it for the money.She looked at me for a long time again, and she did not believe my words.I said: I was not like you in the past. Although I studied harder than you, I was very serious. I have been serious for too long. It’s too late. It was a day in Sa Dec. She was resting on a reclining chair with her legs propped on top of a chair. She asked someone to open the doors of the living room and dining room to let the drafts pass through.At this time, she was very peaceful and at ease, not at all terrified.Suddenly she saw her little daughter and she wanted to talk to her very much. We'll soon end our days here, and we'll abandon the land in the dike.It was not far from the day when I would leave for France.I watched her fall asleep on the couch. Sometimes my mother suddenly issued an order: the whole family will go to the photo studio tomorrow.She complained that the photos were too expensive, but she was still willing to spend the money to take some family photos.When it comes to photos, we sometimes take them out and look at them together, but usually we don’t look at each other. You look at your photos, and I look at mine. There is not even a comment. Everyone just looks at the photos. They turn a blind eye to each other.Everyone looks at other members of the family from the photos, either individually or in group photos.In those old photos, when we were all very young, we could still see everyone together, but in these new photos, we just have to have you look at mine and I look at yours, never Could not find a picture of the group photo.The rift between us grew deeper and deeper.Once these photos have been seen, they are sandwiched in the clothes and placed in the closet.Mom asked us to take pictures so she could look at us and see if we were growing normally.She often looked at the pictures carefully, like other mothers look at the pictures of their children.She compared these photos with each other and murmured about the growth of each of our children.But no one spoke to her. Mom only lets the children take pictures, never anything else.I have no photographs of Vinh Long, not a single one, not one of the gardens, or by the great river, or of those straight avenues lined with tamarinds in this part of the French conquest.There are no photographs of the house we lived in, these whitewashed rooms with big black iron beds painted with gold powder, as bright as school classrooms by big reddish bulbs for the road, Those lampshades made of green tin, all of this, these unbelievably temporary places that have remained unsightly, have not left a single photograph.Mamma encamped in these places, so that when she came back to France some day, she would choose, according to her temper, age, and melancholy, the region she had talked about all her life--between Bad Calais and the "Two Seas". space, and live a decent life there.But later, when she came back to her hometown to live and work in peace and contentment in the Loire, her room was still the same as the one in the old town of Sadec mentioned above, messy and unsightly.Perhaps she had already forgotten all about the grand plans of the year. She never took photos of places of interest or geographical scenery, but only took photos of us, her children, and often asked us to get together to save some money for photos.The rough and sloppy photos of us were taken by my mother's friends. They are all new colleagues of my mother. They have just arrived in this colony, so they took a lot of photos of tropical scenery, coconut trees, coolies, etc., so that they can be sent back. Appreciation for their families? Whenever my mother is on vacation, she always quietly takes our photos to show her natal relatives.None of us want to go to this house.My two older brothers never went there.I was the youngest girl in the family, so at first my mother always took me.Later, even I stopped going, because my aunts thought my character was not good and my behavior was bad, so they didn't let their daughters have contact with me.Therefore, my mother had no choice but to take our photos to show them.For mothers, it is logical and natural for them to show their children's photos to their direct sisters.She should, so she did.Her direct sisters can be regarded as the only relatives left in the mother's family, so you should take the family photos to show them.Can they comprehend some kind of temperament from what this woman did?Indeed, she will persevere to the end in everything and never turn back. She will never let go of her sisters, and she will never retreat or give up when facing the current difficult situation.I can believe this.It was also from this absurd courage of the nation that I discovered her natural virtue.