第四章
It takes my mother all of a sudden toward the end of the afternoon, especially in the dry season, and then she'll have the house scrubbed from top to bottom, to clean it through, scour it out, freshen it up, she says.
The house is built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong, those that follow the great tornados of the monsoon.
Because the house is raised like this it can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden.
All the chairs are piled up on the tables,the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room.
The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen quarters-The little houseboys are delighted, we join in with them, splash one another, then wash the floor with yellow soap.
Everyone's barefoot, including our mother.
She laughs.
She's got no objection to anything.
The whole house smells nice,with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight,especially when it's mixed with the other, the smell of yellow soap, of purity, of respectability, of clean linen, of whiteness,of our mother, of the immense candor and innocence of our mother.
The house-boys' families come along, and the houseboys,visitors, and the white children from neighboring houses.
My mothers very happy with this disorder, she can be very very happy sometimes,long enough to forget,the time it takes to clean out the house may be enough to make her happy.
She goes into the sitting room,sits down at the piano,plays the only tunes she knows by heart, the ones she learned at the normal school.
She sings.
Some times she laughs while she plays.
Gets up, dances, and sings.
And everyone thinks, and so does she, that you can be happy here in this house suddenly transmogrified into a pond, a water meadow, a ford, a beach.
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