The nurse honoured the love between Mai and Alexandre by moving to Saigon to take care of Tâm as a mother would, in the role of her mother. Every day, she was waiting for Tâm after her classes with a glass of green herbal juice filled with ice cubes. Others copied her, believing that the vitamins in rau má were the reason for the girl’s excellent grades. The nanny preferred this drink to sugar cane juice because of the word má, which means “mama.” She wanted Tâm to hear the word má spoken every day. This routine was observed without fail during the first year of her studies at the lycée. The gold rings were sold off as needed—paying for everything from the rental of a former shed, two metres by five, squeezed between two new buildings, to a bottle of mauve ink, to underwear, and right down to four barrettes to hold back her fine hair during classes.
The nanny had sewn the remaining rings into two pockets doubly hidden in her white cotton blouse, which she wore under another long-sleeved blouse whose wine-red colour had faded in the sun. Protected by her old conical hat, she glided through the streets among thieves, criminals, and the curious, like a shadow with no soul or history. Without her, the city’s wolves would have made short work of Tâm. Even though she wore a white uniform identical to those of her friends, even though she wore her hair in two braids like most of the students her age, her luminous complexion dazzled the most jaded eyes. Fortunately, Tâm’s strong shoulders discouraged people accustomed to the traditional idea of beauty that extolled discretion in a woman. From one age to another, poets celebrated the grace of sloping shoulders. From one era to another, designers of the Vietnamese tunic were determined to provide it with raglan sleeves that held in place the two pieces of cloth with a seam going from the collar to the armpit, thereby avoiding any emphasis on the physique. It was hard for foreigners to imagine the strength of those shoulders that bore the heavy yokes transporting both soups and bricks for sale, not to mention glass and the metal from exploded shells to recycle.
No one could have suspected that Tâm’s nanny was capable of carrying five dozen cobs of corn in one basket and a charcoal oven in the other. She offered passersby choices for their corn: boiled or grilled, seasoned with green onion sauce. She roamed the neighbourhood during class hours, but never later. If she wasn’t able to sell everything, she gave what was left over to the neighbourhood beggars.