By the age of six or seven, Louis had already mastered the art of thrusting a long hook through the wrought iron grilles on windows to pull out a fried fish, a ring, a wallet. When his hands brushed the pockets of passersby, bills flew out as fast as a wingbeat. From the beginning, he could identify in the blink of an eye someone’s tim đen, the seat of desire and weakness.
The mother who had nursed him had wanted to keep him alive to rent him out to professional beggars. A soft-limbed baby conferred a nobly maternal air on the outstretched hand of a woman in rags. As well, the wild eyes, blank face, and dusty cheeks of a malnourished infant incited people to act as the righters of wrongs.
Louis could differentiate the perfumes of his mothers- for-a-day. The one who rummaged in the corner garbage heaps smelled of life brought to the boil and the sum of the neighbourhood residents’ secrets. The lottery ticket seller gave off a smell of damp earth, while the water carrier exuded coolness. When Louis was old enough to walk, he accompanied a blind singer who, with the aid of a portable tape recorder, played dramatic excerpts from traditional musical comedies. Louis soon learned that the more the speaker crackled, the sooner the people dropped their money into his plastic bucket.
His mothers taught Louis how to roam the street’s kiosks to gather up what was left in the bowls before their owners could chase him away. Some clients left, on purpose or absent-mindedly, a slice of meat at the bottom of their soup. Others, out of embarrassment, preferred to toss a bone and its marrow on the ground for a stray dog to pick up, rather than offer it to Louis. Some would drop a paper napkin into what was left of their soup, under the famished eyes of the beggars. Often, those clients found that their dishes did not arrive quickly enough or that their phở lacked cinnamon or smelled too strongly of star anise.
In the course of stalking and seeking out leftovers, Louis learned to read the customers’ personalities. He guessed who warmed their taste buds with powerful chili pepper so that their tongues could spit words of fire at their unfaithful spouses. He could distinguish which drops of sweat on the side of a face were caused by hot broth, and which were incited by nervousness. Louis knew that drumming fingers were sending messages. In that case, it was better to distance oneself from those coded conversations, because in a conflict zone, innocence was no excuse once one had attained the age of reason. At the age of seven, you start to be able to tell good from evil, justice from a dream, deeds from intentions. At seven, you can show up at a terrace full of soldiers to clean their boots still spattered with blood, or to set off a grenade, depending on what the adults have commanded. At seven, you’re supposed to have emerged from your Oedipal phase, a stage utterly removed from Louis’s development. In any case, Louis’s age varied depending on the patchy memories of the neighbourhood beggars.