The Sympathizer

An urge seized me to fire a round in the direction of the laughter, just to enliven their evening. When the General got out of the car, I thought he was following the same impulse, but he turned in the other direction, away from the National Assembly and toward the hideous monument on Le Loi’s grassy median. I regretted keeping my Kodak in my rucksack rather than my pocket, for I would have liked a photograph of the General saluting the two massive marines charging forward, the hero in the rear taking a rather close interest in his comrade’s posterior. As Bon saluted the memorial, along with the other men on the bus, all I could ponder was whether these marines were protecting the people who strolled beneath their gaze on a sunny day, or, just as likely, were attacking the National Assembly at which their machine guns aimed. But as one of the men on the bus sobbed, and as I, too, saluted, it struck me that the meaning was not so ambiguous. Our air force had bombed the presidential palace, our army had shot and stabbed to death our first president and his brother, and our bickering generals had fomented more coups d’état than I could count. After the tenth putsch, I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.

Satisfied, the General climbed back into the Citro?n and the convoy proceeded once more, crossing the intersection of one-way Tu Do as it entered and exited the square. I had a last glimpse of the Givral Café, where I had enjoyed French vanilla ice cream on my dates with proper Saigonese girls and their mummified chaperone aunts. Past the Givral was Brodard Café, where I cultivated my taste for savory crepes while doing my best to ignore the parade of paupers hopping and hobbling by. Those with hands cupped them for alms, those lacking in hands clenched the bill of a baseball cap in their teeth. Military amputees flapped empty sleeves like flightless birds, mute elderly beggars fixed cobra eyes on you, street urchins told tales taller than themselves about their pitiable conditions, young widows rocked colicky babies whom they might have rented, and assorted cripples displayed every imaginable, unappetizing illness known to man. Farther north on Tu Do was the nightclub where I had spent many evenings doing the cha-cha with young ladies in miniskirts and the latest in arch-breaking heels. This was the street where the imperious French once stabled their gilded mistresses, followed by the more déclassé Americans whooping it up in lurid bars like the San Francisco, the New York, and the Tennessee, their names inscribed in neon, their jukeboxes loaded with country music. Those who felt guilty at a debauched evening’s end could totter north to the brick basilica at the end of Tu Do, which was where the General led us by way of Hai Ba Trung. In front of the basilica stood the white statue of Our Lady, her hands open in peace and forgiveness, her gaze downcast. While she and her son Jesus Christ were ready to welcome all the sinners of Tu Do, their prim penitents and priests—my father among them—spurned me more often than not. So it was always at the basilica that I asked Man to meet me for our clandestine business, both of us savoring the farce of being counted among the faithful. We genuflected, but in actuality we were atheists who had chosen communism over God.

We met on Wednesday afternoons, the basilica empty except for a handful of austere dowagers, heads shrouded in lace mantillas or black scarves as they chanted, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . . I no longer prayed, but my tongue could not help wagging along with these old women. They were as tough as foot soldiers, sitting impassively through crowded weekend Masses where the infirm and the elderly sometimes swooned from the heat. We were too poor for air-conditioning, but heat stroke was simply another way of expressing religious fortitude. It would be hard to find more pious Catholics than those in Saigon, most of whom, like my mother and myself, had already run once from the communists in ’54 (my nine-year-old self having no say in the matter). To rendezvous in the church amused Man, a former Catholic like me. While we pretended to be devout officers for whom Mass once a week did not suffice, I would confess my political and personal failures to him. He, in turn, would play my confessor, whispering to me absolutions in the shape of assignments rather than prayers.

America? I said.