Alexandre’s servant had waited more than two decades before rising to the position of nanny when Tâm was born. She was the only one to have survived the storms, outside and inside, the boundless desponden-cies, the senseless excesses of her employer. She could read the worries in the sound of his heels on the tiles. She alone sensed the burden of his homesickness and his resistance to putting down roots in Vietnam. In the beginning, he had worn his jacket and behaved as an engineer in front of his predecessors with their shirts half-open, wrinkled, and soiled. He forced himself to sit up straight in his chair to avoid developing the loose tongue of his compatriots. Unlike the older owners, he plunged his hands into the red earth to feel it at the same time as the natives. But slowly, perniciously, his body began to resemble that of his counterparts. Unconsciously, he had little by little let his hand come down on the backs of his coolies’ necks, blaming them for a drop in production instead of inspecting the poisoned roots of his trees. He became an old warrior worn down by monsoons, by financial uncertainties and disillusionment, resembling the other owners more and more.
At the age of fifteen, a single mother separated from her child, the servant girl became his employee. She started as the maid of the maid of the head maid. She was the last to eat the remains of meals—even if it was she who had plucked the chicken, scaled the fish, and minced the pork. On the day her immediate superior left, she inherited the cleaning to be done in Alexandre’s bedroom: in other words, it was up to her to see to her employer’s well-being without attracting notice. Studying the folds in his sheets, she could tell on what nights his worries had frozen Alexandre on the edge of his bed, head between his hands. Noting the presence of ebony hairs and the places where they were found, she could almost describe the choreography of his love making. The years spent in Alexandre’s wake taught her his logic when it came to hiding some of his savings. She became the guardian of a great book emptied of its pages and packed with bundles of bills and gold rings strung on a chain that was also twenty-four carat gold. She checked the stiff cover every day to erase the marks of Alexandre’s fingers. This would make it hard for thieves to distinguish the volume from the others on the shelf. She was the shadow that followed Alexandre’s shadow. His guardian angel.