Alexandre was well acquainted with the discipline he needed to impose on his six thousand ragged Vietnamese coolies. His workers knew better than he did how to plant a hatchet into the trunk of a rubber tree, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the vertical, to make the first tears ooze. They were faster than he was at positioning the coconut shell bowls that would collect the drops of latex accumulating at the bottom of the wound. Alexandre relied on their tenacity, although he knew that his employees took advantage of the night to whisper among themselves and to agree on ways to rebel, first against France, then later against him, and through him against the United States. During the day, he had to negotiate with the American army the number of trees to cut down to allow the trucks, jeeps, and tanks to pass through, in exchange for protection against bombs and the spraying of defoliants.
The coolies knew that the rubber trees were worth more than their lives. And so, they hid under the broad canopy formed by trees still unharmed, whether they were employees, rebels, or both. Alexandre’s distress at the prospect of waking one night to the spectacle of his plantation on fire was concealed beneath his unbleached linen suit. He suppressed his fear of being killed in his sleep by surrounding himself with servants and young women, his con gái.
On days when rubber shares hit a new low or the trucks transporting bales of rubber were ambushed on their way to port, Alexandre roamed through the rows of trees seeking a hand with delicate fingers that might unclench his fist, a compliant tongue that could unblock his gritted teeth, a narrow passage between two legs that would contain his rage.
While they may have been illiterate and couldn’t dream of travelling beyond Vietnam’s borders, the coolies understood that elsewhere in the world synthetic rubber was making inroads. They experienced the same fears as Alexandre, which spurred a number of them to leave the plantation and forge new paths in the cities, in the large centres where the American presence—soon in the tens of thousands—created new possibilities, new ways of living and dying. Some reinvented themselves as sellers of Spam, sunglasses, or grenades. Those who were able to quickly master the musicality of the English language would become interpreters. As for the most daring, they chose to vanish into tunnels dug beneath the feet of the American soldiers. They died as double agents, between two lines of fire or under four metres of earth, torn apart by bombs or eaten away by the larvae that embedded themselves beneath the skin.
The day when Alexandre realized that the appli ca tion of Agent Orange on the neighbouring forests had poisoned a quarter of his plantation’s trees and that his foreman had had his throat cut in his sleep by a Comm unist resistance commando, he screamed.
He took out his feelings on Mai, who happened to be in his path, somewhere between fury and despair.