The Village-with-no-name near Mai Chau sits stoically in its mantle of cold. The river flows icy from the mountain and women’s fingers move in slow glaciality over their looms. To the north? south? east? west? of us the mighty mountain grudges and across the valley its brother, green and brooding.

How the swollen waters flow! With what sweet poetry does the dawn come and the heavy awkward fog lift. But only a little, just a little. One centimeter lifted at three kilometers distance give our eyes access to a whole new panel of the mountain, to a whole new range of rising trees and Billy-goat paths; to new species of bush, to lilting streams.

In this delightful and lugubrious winterscape; this green gray morning majesty, this silent demeanor, only the ducks seem to have maintained their undignified summer gaiety.  They chirp, with the amazing stupidity of innocence, their pleasure at life and in thus doing, render unquestioning grace to the simple miracle of morning, grain, rice, water and feathers all in place.

These and other vegetable gardens give us all a glimpse into the divine Chaos: food plants may be planted all in a row, they will nonetheless grow in a line of cacophony bustled left and right by wind and water and an angular wondering stone lodged pebble deep in the soil.

And our son in all this is a wide-open pair of eyes full of wonder. Wonder for the turning of a fan and wonder for a fluorescent lamp. Yesterday we went to the Pa Co market where rural H’Muong come to buy and sell with all the hopeful agitation of sheep in pasture. So many people dressed in exactly the same way! Tribal differences may give variances in women’s headdresses or a shepherd’s sleeves, but not to my untrained eye and ear. In the middle of all this riot of movement and under a sky as low as tree tops and pissing with huge tear drops of rain, Zephyr was the undisputed star.

 The peoples of South-East Asia do not take their children out of the house while they are so young. In fact, due to the stern lessons of experience, for the first thirty days of the infant’s life he is considered to be a non-entity. Mother and child receive neither visit nor well-wisher, flower nor gift. On day thirty the house is traditionally thrown wide open for family and friends. But for the next six months the infant child lives cloistered with its mother; protected, passed from arm to arm and welcomed – between the walls of the house – by the ecstatic smile of every woman happy enough to hold him. The child lives in the dark protection of the wattle hut, the tribal fire-place and the gentle fountain of maternal milk.

So you can imagine their surprise when they saw a child of forty five days as white as snow and with round eyes sucking on a pacifier, held in a kangaroo by his father in the wet earth ad-hoc alleyways of a muddy and rainy winter mountain market tossed between H’muong and Dao and Tai.

Here is where the old ladies come into their own and breaking down any age-old reserve they may have regarding strangers and especially those culture-threatening white men, they rally as one mass to admire the infant.

Old women become babies in the presence of a baby. I am beginning to believe that these wrinkled old leather faced ladies understand better than all of us that the secret of eternal youth is to let oneself go in a surge of infantile ecstasy before the placid beauty of the freshly born.

If it is true that before being born all infants are shown the universe by God and then have that memory erased by the whispering touch of an angel’s finger then these women are communicating directly with that which is old and wizened in young Zephyr.

The old girls are a show in themselves, have no doubt about that! With their blackened teeth and faces scarred by the years; add the native headdresses of their tribe, their bangle jewelry and you can almost read their age-old pantheism into every gesture.

It does not sound nice to say so,  it is not generous and it is certainly ethnocentric, but what can be said must be said: these people do not smell nice. It is almost impossible to calculate the age of the tiny ancient women, but young and old alike carry with them the accumulated effects of huddled winters and unwashed summers. Any romanticized  epic episode I may imagine of living in the mountains of Vietnam for a few months is instantly dissipated by a whiff of those unbrushed teeth, unwashed hair and unscrubbed bodies.

The native Tai villagers living in the Village-with-no-name off the central Mai Chau road have just enough instruction to have passed onto the next stage of ‘progress and civilization’. It may be a bad thing or it may be a good thing, this government meddling, but at least the folks here are clean and inside their stilt long-house is an instruction poster in Vietnamese about Oral Hygiene with a pinky white Timmy the Tooth saying, ‘Brush me, please!’

The Village-with-no-name does have a name but I prefer not to write it. Imagine a central road, a mere asphalt path really, growing off into a mountain flank and sprouting on its way wooden stilt houses with tiled or thatched  roofs. Each house has a vegetable garden, a terraced grazing pasture, a bamboo fence.

The whole business is shaped like a question mark and punctuated by a crystalline mountain stream; you’ve got to mount on a piece of two-by-four to cross the hurrying stream and faces peer down at you from the darkened windows of the houses during your morning walk.

On my first day here I walked with Zephyr and now if I dare walk alone the women call to me from their houses: “con tchai! con tchai! where is your son?!”.

And later:

Walking through the village at noon, its streets and alleyways practically deserted to the freezing siesta, I had the thought that this entire place was holy! That the whole planet may be so is thought far too generous for me and so I’ll make do with this small collection of plants and stones, wells (which plummet) and wooden stilt houses.

How much more beauty, how much more sacred can one man take? All paths seem to lead to this one place of harmony and silence.

Dusk, and the men and women of the village return from the fields, their precarious journey into labor finished for the day. Cloud-scapes (apologies to Durrell)erupt over the forgotten village. Time, no more alive, holds its breath and in so doing allows me the luxury of life. Eternal life.


Mair