Illustration by Kiều Trinh
By Nguyễn Thị Ngọc Tư
Whenever entering the house, Sáu Tâm grumbled. Grumbled because he always saw his wife Điệp engrossed in tidying up the house or cooking something, ”Let me do such a trifling thing. Why don’t you lie down for a rest?” Today, it was her turn to grumble upon seeing Sáu Tâm arriving home with his two knees bloodstained.
“Tâm, you’ve fallen again? You should be careful when going out, you know!”
“No, I haven’t fallen,” he said. “Today I taught San how to go on her knees.”
“What is the name of the traditional theatre opera?”
“It’s Phàn Lê Huê Opera.”
She forced him to sit down on the bed, gently rolled up his trouser legs, removed his artificial leg and bandaged his still bloody amputated knee. Sáu Tâm felt some tears dropping onto the wound and some violent pain at that.
He grunted: “Don’t cry! It’s nothing, my dear!”
At noon, San embraced his knees and cried.
San was his student; she was a waitress at the Mây Lang Thang Restaurant. Every noon, he went by the restaurant with a towel on his shoulder and saw the girl sitting in the front yard, her face plastered thick with face powder, looking like a woman going into a trance. One day, he stood by the Terminalia tree, hawking his towel and he found the girl smiling. The other day, the girl asked him if he used to be an opera actor.
Sáu Tâm said: “With my pock-marked face, tousled hair, bony shape and sweaty body all the time, how could I be an actor? Please don’t pull my leg.”
But San believed that Sáu Tâm was an opera actor. At that time, the Mây Mùa Thu Troupe was performing at Tân Thuận Communal House. On that day, the troupe performed “Đời Cô Lựu” (Ms Lựu’s Life), a play that lasted until late at night.
The towel seller was still young then. He played the role of Luân in a patched-up loose blouse and a pair of trousers with one leg rolled up and the other one down. When the play reached its peak, Luân kneeled and embraced Ms Lựu, then he looked up and cried “Mother.”
Oh my God! San stood dumbfounded with a basket of unmarketable boiled sweet potatoes in her hands, her eyes welled up in tears. How affectionately Ms Lựu embraced Luân; how happy Luân was!
It was the time San dreamt of being an opera actress when she grew up. Oh yes, there was no need to play the leading part to become an opera actress, she thought, I could play the auxiliary role, the evil role, the maid role, the role of a palace maid or even an old woman…
But San liked to play the role of a mother the best. Even a mother was poor or spurned, or a mother who was so rich and so cruel as to sever the bonds of her daughter (something like this was frequent in traditional theatre operas these days), but whatever this woman could do was only because she had an immense love for her daughter.
San was twenty-four years old and her mother had passed away for twenty-four years. She died of a difficult delivery. San’s father was drunk. When he was drunk, he often spoke up very closely to San’s face, and there would be a bad smell: “I am very miserable because of this useless daughter; my wife died and I had no money!”
San tried not to be a useless daughter. When her father’s clothes were tattered, she mended them. When her father vomited, she quickly ran for a washing basin and wetted a towel with hot water and covered his face.
At six years old, San had to carry a heavy basket of boiled sweet potatoes or a barrel of icy sugarcane juice to sell in every corner of the village. At twelve, she worked as a waitress or a dishwasher at the Mây Lang Thang Restaurant. At sixteen, she got married.
She had to get married to have money for her father to change a cyclo to a Honda motorcycle, but it was strange that San had married a guy she had detested bitterly when he was still small.
She remembered well that many times when she had pushed the barrel of sugar cane juice through his house, her husband who at that time was only ten or twelve years old had always stopped her and seized the cane to eat.
Once she resisted him, and he immediately pissed into the barrel of sugarcane juice, laughing a horse laugh. On that day, she went home penniless. Her stepmother grabbed her hair and beat her. San tried to explain, but to no avail. Now they had married each other and every time her husband took off his trousers, San felt hatred against him. After two weeks, she again left to work for the Mây Lang Thang Restaurant, but this time she did not work as a dishwasher; she worked in small, square rooms to receive customers.
Her one-time dream never came true. When the restaurant was empty, San tried to sleep as much as possible, to sleep just to forget her sadness, to sleep just to imagine if she could become an actress or not. She slept because she did not want to huddle together with other girls to play cards, sell lottos, file their nails, squeeze out their pus or go to buy short skirts.
It took Sáu Tâm nearly six months to know her whole life. San told him each part of her life when they sat in front of the restaurant, and during the chat, this old actor did not mention his old “halo.” Only San mentioned it repeatedly and she asked him to teach her the job, but Sáu Tâm said: “An actress's job is thankless.”
San said: “My job is more thankless. Those playboys have treated me without any respect, you know! I will definitely become an actress like actress Điệp in your troupe.”
San took a look and found that that actress was very gentle and rustic. After the performance, this actress, still in the performing costume, sat there, eating a bowl of rice gruel with duck meat. Having found San standing there, hesitating to look at her, the actress asked San if she was hungry.
San nodded her head; she was not hungry but she nodded her head anyway. The actress asked for another bowl of rice gruel and asked San to eat it, sitting near her to eat. San sat before the bowl of rice gruel, and only wished to nestle onto her lap and cry “Mother.”
Actress Điệp asked San: “Have you sold your boiled sweet potatoes? Why don’t you go home after the performance? Do you still have potatoes, let me buy them? After eating, do go home because the road is empty and dark after the performance, you see!”
San had remembered for so long a time that gentle face; she always thought if her mother was still alive, her mother would definitely have looked like this actress. San concluded that she had met this actress only once, but she loved her for her whole life.
The story had moved Sáu Tâm. His statue-like quiet dark face had suddenly become so gentle. He said that he would teach her. But where? Right at that cement yard under that Terminalia tree. That yard strewn with fallen leaves had one day been an imperial courtyard. Sáu Tâm called out: “Palace maid!” and San said “Yes!” and quickly went to offer a cup of wine on the level of her eyebrows. The people passing by had laughed.
The diners in the restaurant knew that Sáu Tâm the actor was a bit passé now, yet they wanted to enjoy his singing at any cost. Many times, the owner of the restaurant came to ask him to sing and said he would be paid, but Sáu Tâm shook his head. She was offended, thinking he was poor but trying to save face. San asked him and he said:
“Whatever I’ve done, wherever I’ve gone, I have never forgotten that I am an actor; an actor is a man of the public; they love us because they find that we are the noble people, so I cannot live a lowly life because of money. You are still young, so to become an actress, do remember my words.”
Each day, Sáu Tâm dropped in where San was for ten or fifteen minutes. The remaining time, he went to hawk towels, scarves or clothes on a hand cart. He needed money, lots of money. But he also wanted to go home; therefore he always felt an agony of impatience.
Sáu Tâm’s house was in Gò Mả Hamlet. It was a small hamlet built on a former graveyard. His house was built right on an often haunted place, but he was not frightened, thinking that ghosts were like men; if we were honest to them, then they were honest to us. But he feared that when he was not at home, his wife often opened the door, looked out onto that green grass and thought about death.
His wife Điệp had gotten ever weaker. She was ill and as thin as a lath. Her hair had shed to such an extent that you could see every single strand of hair from several metres away. She had no longer felt sorry for it, right from the day Sáu Tâm had broken the mirror and he was yet to buy it. She stopped dreaming about it when she saw her husband picking every strand of her hair and hiding it. She pulled him and buried her face onto his chest, crying:
“Oh, my dear Tâm! How suffering you are for me!”
How could you know about it? It was fate. Điệp was twelve years older than Sáu Tâm. When he had just joined the Art Troupe, he called Điệp his older sister. Điệp had always played the role of a mother of his, or he played the role of her younger brother. Then day-in and day-out, their love took root. At first, Điệp found it funny and then they were both head over heels in love.
It was on the day when they came to give the performance in Vàm Lẽo where they slept on a mat at the foot of the stage and unfortunately the stage collapsed, that Sáu Tâm pushed Điêp away, but he had broken his leg. The troupe manager was not rich enough to take him to the hospital. So at the end of the day, when he was hospitalized, his joint had to be removed. It was his great pain, though he was not able to speak out; from then on he had to leave the stage for good.
It was the year that the renovated theatre stage landed in great difficulties. The art troupe had to give its performances at the corner of the villages and its props were in bad shape. The “Mưa Mùa Thu” art troupe had crumbled and nobody wanted to sing, even Hồng Điệp had left the job, so there was no hope, the troupe manager said.
Điệp and Sáu Tâm had hand-in-hand come to settle down in Gò Mả Hamlet. Điệp did not regret it, thinking that for a man’s life, apart from eating and sleeping, the remaining time was to search for his other half. She now had him. In the past, they both got used to playing the sword and waving the rod to urge the fake horse on the stage. They had to work hard, but they had never forgotten their old job. Điệp had asked his manager to give her some props. At that time, she was yet to be ill.
Now she felt she was no longer able to live on. That tumour in her neck had gotten bigger and gone into the brain. Her beautiful face had now been deformed and many times when she got up, blood had oozed out from her nose. Her ears had a ringing and she was hard of hearing.
If he did not have to pay for the medicine for his wife, Sáu Tâm would not have gone roaming to earn a living. He wanted to stay at home, by her side, to help her when she was in pain; he could give her medicine, and could embrace her in his lap. Many times, he had looked at his hands, which had worked so hard on so many different things: exhumed a grave, repaired a bicycle, worked as a waiter in a restaurant. But now they were powerless, unable to save his love, his wife, he thought.
However, he always came home with a smiling face. Smiling not because he was happy. He thought he was an artist now. If not, how he could laugh booming laughter when his heart was broken. Many times, when he came to the head of the lane, Sáu Tâm had to stop short and have a quick cigarette just to contain his emotion.
He was afraid even when he got into the house and found she was asleep, but Điệp knew it well. However tired she was, she had done something to wait for him. She showed great pity for him.
It was fortunate that they had San. The girl’s life story had made both of them recognise that they had lived a significant artists’ life. Like San, they had not yet changed their unhappy life, but they had given her a lot of consolation.
Điệp said: “I have no regret at all. Tâm, please don’t get so heavy-hearted for me, my dear!”
She told him not to show San that she had lived with him with the disease.
She said: “The girl has kept in her heart this beautiful image to keep on dreaming, so don’t destroy her dream.”
But one night, she did not sleep, lying awake listening to his heart beating, she told herself that this body was alive, so how could she let it live lifelessly with her. Accidentally, she thought of San.
Out of the blue, one noon, San came. Sáu Tâm had not gone to hawk his things and stayed home to recover the roof of the house. He quickly ran to take the towel and covered her head when the guests came. San had come to a standstill, but she had recognized Điệp, the actress of the old times. There still existed two gentle wet eyes.
“Are you San?”
And there still existed her sweet voice.
It was a hot day. It was the day San had recognised that before this ill woman, she had unintentionally committed a guilty act. And her heart was constricted: so this man who hawked towels, scarves and so on was not a single man. She did not know what to do, so she opened the window, looking onto the green grass and she cried for joy: “Oh, God! It’s very beautiful here; I liked the house like this very much”, and her heart was both painful and shameful.
In later days, whenever San was free, even when Sáu Tâm was still hawking his wares on the streets, San came to his house. From afar, San thought it was her house. Now she came to sweep and tidy up the house, cook the meal and waited for Điệp to sleep, she could pull the blanket to cover Điệp; then she came to pick up the shed hairs like fallen leaves, and she hid them. That noon, it was windy and Ms Điệp told San to give her the comb so that she could smooth San’s hair. San had hair identical to hers when she was still young.
“You and I have a lot of things in common. I didn’t have a mother and grew up in an orphanage. I came to the theatre just to look for the affection that I had never had. When I was small, I also had a miserable life, but I did not fall into misfortune like you, San. You and I also have one more thing in common. I bet you know it? You know, you and I love Sáu Tâm, love him so much, don’t we?”
San look bewildered and shook her head. Điệp said that San should not hide it from her, and then she continued:
“All right. If you belittle Tâm because he is disabled, when I go to the other world, I want to entrust him to your care. Turn over a new leaf. Sáu Tâm is a generous man and he has never minded things. He is an easy-going man. Whatever food is alright for him to eat and whatever clothes are also alright for him to wear. He is a dignified, not a frothy, man, you see! It is not easy to find such a man in this world now, San.”
San did not answer Điệp, but she could not say “No.” Nor could she nod her head. Here was not an exchange of a lemon for a pomelo; here was a woman who had entrusted her best-loved man to another woman.
Sáu Tâm did not know what had happened. At night, laying her head on his arm, Điệp said: “San loves you very much.” He smiled, “I am now an old man, and that girl…”
Điệp also smiled. “It’s of no importance, like you and I, you see!” Sáu Tâm said: “Let’s sleep." But she knew that he was still awake because of the new ideas in his heart. She was sleeping, the last sleep of hers, a deep, very deep sleep in an eternal grave covered with green grass.
San left the Mây Lang Thang Restaurant and she sold bananas and boiled sweet potatoes at the gate of the House of Culture. When asked about her dream of becoming an actress, she only smiled, saying that she had forgotten it for quite a time.
If I got fame for my singing, as an example, she thought, and I was known for once being a bargirl in a restaurant it would disgrace the whole circle of artists, and people would dislike the renovated theatre and it would harm the country’s stage.
It is something like a sentimental film; sometimes people, because of love, have to painfully cut off the ones they love. How can they do this? It is a force of circumstances.
Translated by Mạnh Chương
OVietnam