Quan Barry - She Weeps Each Time You're Born

The provinces are all going somewhere different. Due to war profiteering, the rubber companies are legion. Michelin. Mimot. Bigard. Cardesac. Because you and your mother hail from Nam Dinh, you will board one of the trucks heading back up north. It will take nearly two whole days to get where you are going. From time to time the truck stops so that you can climb out to relieve yourselves, then fill your arms with as many pineapples as you can carry. Some will wonder why the ship didn’t just stop near Tuy Hoa and let you off, but no one dares to ask.

And then you see it slipping through the trees — Terres Noires — up in the central highlands with its fourteen villages, its million hectares. The earth is red, though the French call it black because the original rock is volcanic and dark in color. In time the dirt turns a deep red as the rock breaks down, fertility beyond anything imaginable.

In the back of the truck your mother holds your hand. Thuan, she says. Remember who you are. You don’t know if she’s reminding you that you’re supposed to be fourteen or if she means something deeper. You jump off the truck, and a woman hands you a thin wooden badge on a tin chain. The woman’s face is dark and lined, her own badge weathered and dangling around her neck like a battered soul. Your mother slips hers on first. No. 1220. Put it on, but don’t become it.

Your first night in the barracks of Village Twelve you hear someone screaming from the woods. There are a hundred people sleeping in the room, but nobody rises to go to his aid. In the morning you learn that a man had gone out to meet his lover but had been mauled by a tiger. Before roll call there is a crowd gathering by the water station. The man’s extremities look intact but his innards have been skillfully removed. A woman bends over the body but doesn’t shed a tear. It is a crime to leave the plantation at night. There is talk of rebels proselytizing in the hills. Nobody comes forward to claim the body. Eventually two men are singled out to take it away. The men load it on a flatbed and drive it to the place where the workers are building Village Fifteen. The body will be planted where the new saplings will go.

A few days later a small shrine goes up by a storage shed, a tiny pagoda with a roof not much bigger than a rice bowl, a place to burn joss. When Eduard, the head overseer, sees it, he orders it torn down. We’re not running a goddamn temple, he says. Your mother bows her head, closes her eyes. When she’s done, she looks to you to do the same. You bow your head but don’t know what to pray for. As the days and weeks pass, this happens repeatedly, words not readily coming to you. Like speaking into the darkness. A feeling of being all alone, though there are thousands at your side, each one stooped and suffering. Lady, keep us in Your sight.

Terres Noires stretches for miles, trees planted in straight lines as far as the eye can see. In the back of Eduard’s flatbed it takes more than two hours to drive from one end to the other. Such cultivation, such care. You will be ten years old in the fall. You are too young to consider how any of this got here. How the first truckloads of men and women came down from the north in the late twenties. Men working to clear the land. Hack down the forest. Rip out the old trunks. Plant the saplings. Build the villages. The barracks and sheds and the garages and the water stations and the cooling rooms where they store the liquid rubber and the system of houses for the network of overseers, the great villa where the propriétaire lives with his thousand-bottle reserve in the cellar.

You will be ten years old in the fall, eyes clear as crystals. Nobody believes you are fourteen as your mother claims, though many of the women who have given birth to children are hardly bigger than you. The first few weeks you work the land around Village Twelve like everyone else. Roll call at five, then up on the trucks and out to the sectors. The day starts at six, then all day in among the trees with your pruning hook, your hand ax. The tin bucket always with you, which you use to empty the small wooden bowls that sit in hooks placed at the end of the track, the track itself a great ribbon cut diagonally around the trunk so that the latex oozes out and runs down the long slanting gouge and into the bowl. The latex white and creamy, which the workers joke about though you don’t understand. You never knew there could be so much to do in the world, every hour of your life given over to something, the need to stay in constant motion. You spend the days filling your bucket, careful not to spill.

This is what you learn that first week at Terres Noires. There are no eight-hour shifts. No medical clinics worth mentioning. No thirty pounds of rice per month. On the trucks by five, all day milking the trees, then back on the trucks at six. Sundays you spend cleaning the village, sharpening the adzes and pruning hooks, cleaning the tin buckets of their residue. When it is all done, sometimes there is time for cheo , the traditional plays of song and dance that help the workers forget themselves. In cheo lovers meet in wet paddies. Lost princes wander the land before being restored. Tricksters with good hearts ultimately deliver the protagonist from his enemies. It is all a metaphor, but for what you are unsure.

In each of Terres Noires’ fourteen villages there is a commissary, a small store where everything is costly and of the worst quality. Your mother is trying to stretch the money she has been paid, though the salary is only a figure in the manager’s book, a number inked on a piece of paper. Last month the commissariat informed her that they were only paying you half the wages. But she’s fourteen, your mother wailed. Thuan deserves a full salary. The other women in line told her to be quiet. Let them treat her as a child, one woman whispered. The women all lowered their eyes. It is the only line they respect, someone said. Your mother stopped protesting and accepted the eighteen pounds of rice without further complaint, then made her mark in the commissariat’s book.

And that very afternoon as your mother is learning another of the thousand things mothers fear for their daughters, you see him for the first time — a grown man in his late thirties. Underneath the cashew tree with its white flowers the size of fists.

He sees you staring. There is something in his eyes that you have never seen before. A knowing gentleness, the palms of his hands white as clouds. It is 1940 and when he looks at you, you can feel yourself being recognized for the first time.

In each village there is a medical clinic where a Frenchman sits smoking a cigarette as the patient struggles to describe his malade in a foreign tongue. When the patient finishes, the Frenchman will rise and flick his cigarette out the window. Do not eat or drink for the next twenty-four hours, he will invariably counsel. Give your system a chance to purge itself. And the patient is ushered out.

When the people don’t work, it means the plantation doesn’t have to pay them. The company would rather you stay home and starve than go out into the woods and earn a wage.

So the workers turn to him when they fall sick, the man with palms white as liquid rubber. The people’s sicknesses are predictable, the dark siftings leaking from their bodies from the poor food, the dirty water. Depending on whether or not there is blood or pus the man with the unworldly smile will brew a tea made from the bark of the philodendron. Drink this, he says. Within hours the rumblings in the worker’s belly fall silent.

That first time you see him it’s Sunday. He is sitting off behind the barracks in the shade of a cashew tree, legs in the lotus position, eyes shut, the white flowers of the tree big as fists. You have been working Terres Noires for months. The muscles in your thin arms are striated. The empty buckets you are carrying bang rhythmically against your knees as you walk by. You don’t know the word for the thing you are feeling in the pit of your stomach, though you know it has nothing to do with dirty water. The moment like walking a long dirt road directly into the sun, the sound of the buckets like the clattering of your heart. There is something in the stillness of his body, though somehow you know there is a fire burning deep within like one you have never known. How is it possible? The man opens his eyes.