This incident had obsessed him. Therefore, his mind opened to all those happenings that carry life forward. And so he couldn’t eat those nutritious traditional dishes anymore. He looked at the bowl of duck’s blood on the tray with disinterest — a tureen full of dark red blood, coagulated like Jell-O, with chopped peanuts and herbs spread evenly on its surface. In addition there was a very small bowl of fresh chili peppers. The guard had carried in his tray of food to respectfully place it in front of him and then had waited to see whether he would enjoy the special dish, because for everyone this was so obviously the most elegant meal in the entire year.
“Just leave it for me. Go down and eat with your friends,” he hurriedly said to the soldier so that he could retire at ease.
Left with him was the bowl of blood. He thought of ways to discreetly get rid of it. Since his youth, he had dreaded the smell of blood, even if it was camouflaged under all the various flavors of herbs such as basil, mint, and cilantro, green onion, shallots, roasted peanuts, and minced fresh pepper. Each time his family had drawn pig’s blood, he would slip away into the fields. Nobody could force him to eat that horrible dish, a dish that many had coveted the most whenever a pig was slaughtered, a dish that both male and female elders esteemed as good for having both “yin” and “yang” auspicious properties. They used to make fun of him:
“Smart in his studies but stupid in his eating.”
He never really knew why he was so put off by this traditional dish. Once, when he was a young man living in Paris, he had gone to a movie about the customs of Africa. Watching the local people draw blood from the cow, whose head bobbed in the vat of blood, then drink the still fresh and hot blood, his skin suddenly burst out in goose bumps, sweat dripping wet on his back. His face took turns being hot then icy cold. He imagined that the people around him were looking at him, noting his strange mental state and guessing all the thoughts hidden in his mind. He had sat paralyzed in the theater until the end of the afternoon, waiting for everyone else to leave before he got up. Outside it was freezing cold. The sweat on the back of his shirt was wet and cold, making his body shake uncontrollably. He had turned around and found the restroom, where he picked up a newspaper and used it to pad his chest and back before going home.
At night his dreams were splattered with red. Animals were slaughtered; blood squirted up; they screamed, jerked, and shook in crazy and desperate ways. All the people had their mouths splattered with fresh blood; all their smiles were also bloody. These images all appeared at the same time, on top of one another, tumbling, twirling in his mind. This had been the first time since childhood that he had experienced such fear. It was like the first time he had held a flashlight to clear a tunnel in which eternal darkness threatened one’s life. Thanks to that movie on African customs, he had found a comparison, a point of reflection. He saw that realizing the shortcomings of a nation was like having a fever: you must endure before you can cure.
That night he could not close his eyes, so he had read until the streetlights became pale white in the dawn light.
Then the storm of revolution had sucked him into turbulence. For years, he had thought he no longer needed to concern himself with what he considered his people’s “shortcomings.” He had had too much work on his hands. The struggle of his people against foreign aggressors was always unbalanced, with the scale permanently tipped in favor of the foreigners. In such circumstances, he could not possibly pay attention to all the details. He had to mobilize the citizens, because their unity provided the highest-quality strength, the kind of power most likely to bring victory in this unequal contest. For this unity, he had to accept things that he found to be “shortcomings.” For this unity, he had many times pretended to be blind in the face of coarse behavior and petty reprisals, which he was quite certain were habits of rebellion against culture itself. For this unity, he had to ally with those who belittled him as “someone with Bordeaux wine in his blood.”
On that New Year’s Day in the war zone, he had poured the bowl of duck’s blood into the bamboo tube he used for water, waiting until the afternoon when everyone left to play volleyball in the field before he dumped it out in the privy.
“Are you all right?” Vu suddenly asks.
The president understands that he has just put his hand to his chest to feel a pain in his heart: “Sometimes the tightness recurs,” he answers, smiling.
“With old age, everything is fixed in place, even death. Therefore, it’s smartest of all to learn to coexist with disease. And with disappointments…”
“First come the disappointments.”
They are silent. A floating moment spreads through the springtime, a moment when dampness mixes with sunlight to make a band of shining sea bubbles. They both hear a pair of larks singing somewhere. Then the chubby guard appears before the temple’s front door.
“Mr. President, the office just called to ask Chief Vu to go down to the landing field.”
“What time does the plane leave?” Vu asked.
“The office did not say when.”
“Please call them back to ask the exact time of departure.”
The soldier left immediately.
On the patio, the sunlight spreads like honey, calm and still yellow from the mountain peak. In that yellow, there is not the muggy environment often found in the low plains of the north, but a delicate, pleasant freshness, like the kind of fall weather found in Europe. He closes his eyes to find himself strolling along the river Seine when the leaves are changing color, where on both banks rows of reddish yellows and light reds burst into the sky like vibrant but fragile flames. The white bridges that appear out of the fog were not made for pedestrians but for painters and poets. He remembers the green slopes of Montparnasse; the lights along the streets, the arrows pointing to sidewalk cafés. Europe: part of his life happened there. He recognizes it by all the emotions that had been engraved deeply and permanently in his being, by the taste of cheap red wine on his tongue and the noise of the streets in his ears, by the remembrance of the colors of sunlight and sky. The warm memories of youth are tainted by the sadness of having been away from his country. When living there, he had recalled his homeland, missing it as a void, as a madness. Why now do his thoughts go back to that faraway land? Why now has it become something missing within him? Day by day that feeling is becoming more and more passionate, more and more filling his heart with emotion. So sad, so very sad! Nostalgic, so very painfully nostalgic! Europe! Europe! Is it that Europe is only a subterfuge to remind him of his now finished youth? Maybe he recalls Europe because he recalls all the dreams unfulfilled, all the journeys not completed. Was not Europe a land with both foe and friend and thus a companion both silent and nagging, until the moment of burial? He felt very tightly and permanently attached to a land that did not belong to him. Is this his own private drama or is it some eternal pain for every person?