The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb Read Free Book Online

he really cannot say. The effect upon him is the same, regardless.
    There is a particular bird that sings in the same register as her speaking voice, but he has managed to so thoroughly block out the song of this bird that it may as well belong to a species extinct. He even finds the cataract that began to cloud his vision a couple of years agosomething of a blessing. It limits his peripheral vision so that he can’t see her shack when he retrieves the apron he leaves to dry outside over the handle of his cart. Why then does he find himself glancing briefly to his left this afternoon as he reaches for his apron? Why has he been thinking of her at all? It is because of the girl who came for breakfast. A beautiful girl, imploring. Maggie Lý, the daughter of an artist, Lý Văn Hai.
Tell me
, she might just as well have said,
teach me
.
    Lan is hunched over a wicker basket now, picking dirt and stones out of a bushel of rice, or perhaps shelling peanuts for sale, or maybe she has been lucky enough to find a cluster of tree ear mushrooms from which she is brushing dirt.
    Hng shakes his head to be rid of her and looks to his right instead, toward his neighbour Phúc Li, a man who, as a boy, lost his legs to a land mine and perhaps a bit of his mind as well, sitting as he does with his hand cupping his genitals, his old mother trimming his hair.
    The legless Phúc Li waves to Hng, grinning like a child watching fireworks. His mother snaps the rusty shears shut over his head. “Do you want me to do you next, Hng?”
    “I’ll give it another week,” Hng says, running his hand over his few remaining strands of hair.
    Hng crouches to enter the door of his shack, lays his dry apron down on his straw mattress and roots for the needle and thread he keeps inside an old rubber boot. He stares at Ðạo’s framed image on the altar as he digs around in the toe. The picture is all he really has left of Ðạo, having forgotten all his poems over the years. It was drawn for him by a woman who had come begging decades ago. “Look, we’re all poor here,” he had said to her as she stood on the threshold of his shack. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing to give you.”
    Much to his horror, she unbuttoned her shirt then and tossed itto the ground, revealing a bony, scabbed chest. “Stop that,” he reprimanded, picking up her shirt and tossing it back at her. “Cover yourself. What do you think you are doing?”
    “You can lie with me and do what you want,” she said. “Pay me anything.”
    “Woman,” he said with disgust, “what did you do before life came to this?”
    The woman said she had been a tea lady at the art school.
    “And did you learn anything of art while you were there? Did you learn to draw, for instance?”
    She nodded once and cast her eyes to the ground. But Hng had no paper. The only thing he could think to do was tear out one of the endpapers from
Fine Works of Spring
, the journal Ðạo and his colleagues had published a few years earlier. And so Hng had squatted beside the woman as she laboured her way toward some likeness of Ðạo, using a piece of charcoal from Hng’s kitchen fire.
    He attempted to describe Ðạo to the woman as best he could, but found a simple physical description of the man could not adequately capture his spirit. Once she had a basic outline of his face, Hng interjected, “His eyes were set a bit farther apart, almost as if he had a wider view than an ordinary man, that of a visionary.”
    Ðạo had made references in his poetry to tragedies that had not even befallen them yet, as if he could intuit the future. He had sought to warn people of what was imminent, hoping to inspire them to action. And Hng had marvelled at his ability to do so in such few perfect words.
    “He was fearless,” Hng told the woman. “He had a scar, just here, a mark of courage that ran two inches across the bone of his cheek.”
    Hng had offered the woman his bed for a week as payment, while he