Once she was sure I wasn’t about to ship her back to France, she pulled at my still warm hair and said, “Actually, Papa asked me to fetch you. I was fetching, you see. He wants to see you on the terrace. We didn’t have a terrace in Paris,” she added, rightly. “Now we do.”
“Come,” I said, taking her hand as soon as Trieu dismissed me from my chair. “Let’s go together.” Lucie held my fingers tightly as we walked down the wide corridor with its twenty-foot ceilings. In the upper foyer, where the tiles were a patterned black-and-white ceramic, she tried to hop from one square to the other. She gave up to descend the grand, half-spiral staircase, jumping from step to step.
“It’s this way, maman,” she said at the bottom, leading me to the double glass terrace doors with brass handles curled like figure eights.
“I remember,” I responded, letting her drag me to Victor.
When he saw us emerge from the house, Victor folded his newspaper in four and said, “Merci, chérie,” to Lucie. She sat next to him on his chaise longue and let him kiss her head. “For your hard labor, I present you with this cake.” He lifted a blue porcelain plate with a pink pastry on it in the shape of a flower and handed it to her. “It’s a mung-bean-and-rice pastry called banh com. A local delicacy, I’m told.”
Lucie raised her eyebrows at the word “bean,” but took the pastry in her hands. She leaned down to sniff it, gave it a lick, and then devoured it after she realized it was indeed made of sugar.
“There aren’t beans in here!” she exclaimed to her father, eyeing the crumbs left on the plate.
“But there are, chérie,” said Victor, pulling on her braid. “Why don’t you go to the kitchen and ask how it’s made? Then you can see the beans.”
Lucie smiled and ran off as if she had lived in the tall yellow house for years.
“Don’t you look beautiful,” said Victor, tilting his head back and smiling at me affectionately once Lucie was out of sight. He was reclining on the metal chaise’s black-and-white-striped cushions, smoking a cigarette. He alternated puffs with sips from his glass of white wine. On the boat journey over, I’d wondered if there would be French wine in Indochine, but that was a silly worry. The French wouldn’t have bothered colonizing a place where they couldn’t consume their own wine.
“Glad to be off the boat?” he asked, standing to kiss me before reclining again.
“To say the least,” I answered, my smile feeling momentarily put on. I let the corners of my mouth relax, trying to forget the journey, and took in this new image of Victor. He had changed into beige linen pants and a crisp white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and he was surveying the small but well-manicured garden, the borders aflame with hibiscus. His shirt buttons were done up only to midchest, and he had a carafe of water full of lemon wedges positioned within reach. Next to it was a small silver bell.
“Do you think you’ll like it here?” he asked eagerly. I could tell that he certainly did. We lived well in Paris, very well, even when the economic crisis hit the country two years ago, but it was already clear that in Indochine, where costs were so low, we would no longer live like Lesages. We would finally live like Michelins.
“I do,” I said, sensing my happiness rise to meet his as we focused on the present, not the weeks we had spent cramped together on the bobbing ship. “The house is incredible, isn’t it? Every room bright and full of light. And so much space. Lucie has her own wing on the third floor. But most of all, I like that it feels like a happy home.”
“I’m glad you think so,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and putting his hands behind his head, the small family-crest ring he wore on his right pinkie quickly vanishing in his thick black hair. “I’m very glad we bought this house, despite those who advised me to rent it, not purchase it. ‘Rent for a year, maybe two, then decide,’ they said. They warned me that Indochine wasn’t for everyone, especially the women. But they don’t know me as well as they think, and they don’t know you at all. You were born to see the world, and so was I.” He smiled at me admiringly. “That’s what you’d say in our early days, when I’d ask you if you were homesick for America, and look at us now. I’m sure that this house, and Indochine, will be right for us. Even if no one else in my family has dared to spend time here.”
It was true. No other Michelins had spent more than a few weeks in Indochine, even Victor’s uncles, Édouard and André, who had controlled everything in the twenties, including first buying rubber from the colony and then deciding to establish their own plantations in the French federation in 1924. They had spent over 200 million francs to acquire land in those early years. But Édouard was now seventy-four years old, André had passed in 1931, the younger generation was engaged in Clermont-Ferrand—and no one wanted to actually live in Indochine.
When they’d considered the colony as a place to set up their own plantations, rather than buying rubber from the existing plantations in Indochine, British Malay, and the Dutch Indies, they sent two executives—non–family members—on a boat, declining to make the journey themselves.
But in January, Victor had volunteered to come to Indochine, not just for a visit but to live. It was an idea I had planted in his head.
He had yet to obtain a high position in the company, kept out of the headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand, working in Paris instead. He’d been frustrated for years that we still weren’t living in Clermont and needed a new approach for climbing the company ranks. Suggest a position for yourself in Indochine, I’d said one morning when Paris had surprisingly started to lose its appeal for me. I knew that there had been some significant difficulties on the plantations in the last few years, including worker strikes, even murder, mostly due to communist unrest. The Michelins had tried to stamp it out, positioning at the head of both plantations men who had been successful at keeping communism at bay among the workers in Clermont-Ferrand. But in 1930, there had been a very large strike on Phu Rieng plantation, one of the three they owned in Cochinchina, where the military had to intervene to put it to rest. Every paper in France had written about it that winter, and three years later, many still used it to highlight either the colonial or the native struggle, depending on their political persuasion. There had also been several deaths, one when a European overseer was murdered by coolies in 1927 and just this December when three coolie laborers were shot dead at Dau Tieng, the other large plantation. It was time that the family did more than observe from a distance, I’d said to Victor. I was no expert, but I had grown up on a farm. I knew that workers who had no face to put to a name could have difficulty with loyalty.
“But there are so many others in the family trying to get to management positions,” Victor had protested, not seeing the opportunity that I was.
“None of your uncles’ children have any interest in living in the colony,” I had reminded him. “But I think they’d let you go. And if you went, and could keep things calm for several years, I’m sure you would be rewarded. Maybe they would finally offer you a position in Clermont-Ferrand.”
Victor had resisted at first, but he finally built up the courage to speak with his uncle Édouard. Édouard’s son Pierre had been delighted by the idea, having felt the pressure to at least visit the colony over the past few years, but having no interest in doing so. Once he had their approval, Victor became enamored with the prospect of life in Indochine. A few weeks later, he seemed convinced that he’d come up with the idea himself, which was perfectly fine with me.