Another little boy born with no name. The manioc seller, with her orange, blue, and white sweet potatoes, gave him a sheet of transparent plastic to protect him from the rain. She called him mỹ đen, or “Black American.” The barber who hung his mirror on the rusted nail on a tree every morning for decades preferred to call him con lai, “half-breed child,” and sometimes simply đen. The woman who every night had to add twigs to her broom to clean the sidewalk breastfed Louis at the same time as her own baby, whose complexion was almost the same. This nursing mother did not give him a name, because she was born mute; or perhaps she became so after having played dead in order to survive a routine visit to her village; or perhaps she lost her power of speech when her son was born, the colour of his body the same as the charred bodies of her mother and cousins. No one knew, because no one asked. That’s how it was in this corner of the world, at this corner of the sidewalk.
One afternoon, on this same sidewalk, a young woman coming out of a bar left the door ajar long enough for a lingering goodbye kiss with her American soldier, who could have been, at nineteen or twenty, with his first lover. The music from inside flooded the space all the way into the street, where the local rickshaw driver was parked. The driver didn’t know all the soldiers who spent time in this bar, but he could predict the consequences of every languorous embrace. He had many times ferried these young girls to those older women who knew how to do away with the traces of those short-lived romances. Sometimes it was the young girls themselves who had to abandon the dance floor and the bar long enough to bring a child into the world.
Louis was not the first baby to turn up at the foot of the tamarinds, like a ripe fruit fallen from the tree or a seedling pushing up from the earth. No one was surprised, then. Some took care of him, giving him a cardboard box, rice water, clothing. In the street, the older children adopted the younger ones as the days passed, creating fleeting families.
You had to wait until the child’s personality asserted itself before choosing a name. Sometimes the children were identified by a nickname: con què (“crippled leg girl”) or thằng thẹo (“scar boy”). In the case of Louis, it was thanks to Louis Armstrong’s voice that often escaped from the half-open bar door after the noon siesta.
The rickshaw driver was happy to have had this bright idea, to have made the connection between Armstrong’s dark skin and Louis’s. Perhaps in that way he wanted to encourage Louis to imagine the softness of the clouds of white despite the heat of the concrete under his behind, to smell the perfume of red roses and not the odour of his own urine, to see the colours of the rainbow when the mosquitoes sang too loudly around his head, when he was chased away by the broom along with the trash, when he salivated in front of people noisily slurping their boiling hot noodles to cool them off just a little, just enough. All to the rhythm of the music of this wonderful world.