“Thank you. What kind of tea did you make?”
“Jasmine; just like the other day.”
“Good, I will come in.”
He turns to the room; the air is filled with jasmine fragrance. Steam comes out of the pot of newly brewed tea. From the full cup, he slowly takes small sips. During the time when he was still in the Viet Bac maquis, he had a jasmine bush planted right by his house. That bush grew faster than weeds, in only one year it spread itself out to the size of a sleeping mat. During both the muggy summer afternoons and nights of trickling rain, the intoxicating jasmine fragrance enveloped the house. How can such tiny flowers exude such a strong scent? Many a night, he had stood by the window, looking out to the pitch-dark forests, filling his lungs with forest smells mixed with jasmine scent. Then when he had her around, he saw jasmine flowers more often because she liked to tuck jasmine flowers and magnolia blossoms in her hair.
“I had her in my arms in 1953. She was over twenty. The afternoon I met her sharing figs with her friend in the tree, I had to wait two more years; two years of longing, excruciating longing. I did not love a minor. By law, I committed no crime. That old woodcutter guy married a girl younger than she, only eighteen.”
The cup of tea is empty, only a dry jasmine petal is left at the bottom. He stares at the dry petal and suddenly feels jealous for the time past. Jealousy, how very strange, a weakness that is hard to acknowledge.
He re-created in his mind the incongruous setting of that night: the smell of Craven A cigarettes mixed with that of the Gauloises he lit continuously, one after another in a desultory fashion, smoking like a machine, without any appreciation of taste. He remembered the ashtray filled with butts and the stack of files that he had turned page after page without being able to absorb one single line. The first night they made love. The first night her smooth white body appeared before his eyes, uncovered by any bra or blouse, just pure flesh, the pure beauty created by nature. Old folks say: “Clear like jade, white like ivory.” He had heard that saying before but not until that night had he thoroughly understood each word, each phrase. Her beauty was indeed as of a precious jewel. He recalled her laugh, in the soft light of the lamp in the corner of the room, her teeth shining like jade. That was an instant that both the past and the present could sustain, when space became dreamlike and the barriers between two living beings just collapsed. She was inside him, melted into his own flesh, kneaded into his soul. Forever, forever…
But this is quite strange: Why is he so jealous? In the many meanderings of his life’s journey, he had not lacked encounters; he had not gone without the warmth of women. As a philanderer, he is certainly someone who has lived. Thus he cannot escape this ordinary, low-down feeling. After making love, he had told her that he urgently needed to read a stack of documents and he had left the room. But, sitting by the light, he had turned each page while trying to imagine who those others were who “had been” with her. Who had been the first one to have possession of her gorgeous and enticing body? He knew she was a girl from the highlands where life flows free like streams and forest clouds. Boys and girls there make love freely at puberty. For Easterners, people in the mountains are by that very token very much “Westernized.” A healthy and pretty girl like her, there had to have been dozens of guys who had taken a good look, especially those fellows growing up in the same region, by the same streams and woods.
“I cannot escape these so ordinary feelings,” he thought to himself. “It’s hard to understand: after all, I am a guy who spent twenty years in the West — and the first woman in my life was a blond with white skin.”
Instinctively he lets out a sigh:
“The first time I had sex, now that’s over half a century. To be more accurate, about sixty-five years ago. Nobody can really measure time, because it expands and contracts with one’s memories.”
Pouring himself a second cup of tea, he sees that first woman in the steam rising from the cup’s rim: “A widow. A woman in an alley. A seamstress, big and grotesque — my first sex teacher…”
Her face now appears opaque like smoke, but he can never forget her panting and interrupted screams during the lovemaking. They were both renters in a house in the short alley off Rue St-Jean, next to a waterless fountain that stood there rusty amid a flock of old pigeons. She was much older than he; her husband had worked for the post office and had died a few years earlier. Three kids of uncertain paternity were kept locked inside the house. Back then, he was just twenty, at an age when youth exudes seductiveness like a muskrat leaves a scent to attract a mate. One afternoon, the widowed woman had passed him in the alley; she lived in the room built for the housemaid, facing an old garage. She was a seamstress in a small shop that made sleeping caps. Most likely a family business; she had worked there since she was thirteen. They silently walked side by side for a stretch; then all of a sudden the widow smiled and asked him:
“Well, is everything all right?”
“Thank you, I hope so,” he replied, but inside he was quite depressed, because his legs were tired from searching for a job and there was not a hint of hope.
“Good,” the woman said, then she lowered her voice: “Tonight, at one a.m., my door is open. Will you come?”
He was shocked, not knowing what to say. The woman held his elbow, squeezing it hard while repeating: “Don’t forget! One a.m. tonight!”
Then she turned to her apartment. He continued down the next stretch to the last house in the short alley, then climbed to the seventh floor. There he drank water and ate a piece of dry and hard bread from the day before. Cold water and plain bread, with no butter or milk or meat and fish, but his blood managed to stir. The hardest organ in his body could not wait until one a.m.; it had stood up like a mast. He had to walk back and forth in his room; he could not do anything else. His heart beat fast from anticipation but his intellect forced him to smile with bitterness. He had dreamed so often of the first time he would make love but had never imagined it would arrive in such crude circumstances. There was to be no princess of his dreams, no prince of her heart; just a widow needing to fill an empty space in her bed. In those days, even though young, he was already quietly bitter about his fate. It has never occurred to him that the first one who would possess his young body would be a widow twice his age and with blond hair and white skin but no beauty. Nevertheless, he waited with excitement like someone who had never tasted life but was ready to eat his first feast. Then it was time. He silently walked to the already opened door. The woman, too, said nothing; she pulled him to the private room, which was in the old garage, walls hung with loud, flowery wallpaper; it had an antique bed, a quite large one filling the whole room. This confirmed that the postman must have been larger than average.
“Strange! Fate takes care of everything; any path will bring you to where you are supposed to be.”
Also strange is that while he had almost forgotten the widow’s face, he recalled the tiny room very well, especially the old bed with iron posts holding globes on their tops. One could feel that this solid black bed was like the gravel-making machine that had survived since antiquity and would continue to exist for many centuries. He remembers vividly the brown sheet with large stripes, the bed cover colored café au lait. He remembers the ways she taught him how to love. The arms of that seamstress were hot but her muscles were flabby and her hands large, full of calluses that hurt him when her caresses became wild. He remembers the gestures, determined and at times rough, when she took her nightgown off over her head to throw it on the floor. He remembers the glass of hot milk she offered him, the sounds of the spoon clacking in the late night; he was scared because the kids were sleeping on the other side of the wall. All the details of practice preliminary to lovemaking. His twentieth year was thus marked.