• Bardinet's Saigon
  • Bardinet's Saigon
  • Bardinet's Saigon
  • Bardinet's Saigon

Bardinet's Saigon

 Paulatim Crescam: Little by Little We Grow (Saigon’s motto)

French Saigon was always a young city, chartered in 1862, the same year that Christian Bardinet’s Uncle Marius was born. 79 years later, in July of 1941, they both died. They all knew about Uncle Marius. But few could apprehend the quiet death of the ville jeune.

She had no past, to speak of. All was within living memory. She never thought much of the future. She was alive in and of only today. Later, when the Japanese came, with the “permission” of the Vichy French government, people steeled themselves for the duration, strong in the hope, even the surety, that, one day soon they would leave and all would be well again. They turned a blind eye as much as they could, and waited for their deliverance. Unbeknownst to them, they were waiting for the phoenix to rise. But as a wise man of the rue Catinat would later say, "nothing is fabulous any more."

It wasn’t too hard in the beginning. Shipments of what had been thought to be essential goods from France fell off. But other goods from America and Australia and New Zealand went on the rise. American movies, ever popular, were now playing in all the cinemas nearly every day, especially the Eden on the rue Catinat. New Zealand lamb was the rotisserie special every Sunday at Le Coq d’Or at 54 Boulevard Charner. Australian steaks sizzled on the grill of La Triomphe in full view of the opera house. Japanese beer flowed. After December 1941 people made do. They fueled their old Peugeots and Citroens with methane. They made bread with rice flour and taro root. They darned their socks, and they wrapped their babies’ bottoms in pieces of old sheets. The government refinery on the rue Blanchy continued to produce smokable opium, as of old. For there was need of the smoke, as well as its revenues.

But Saigon had died, in her youth; cheeks pink, bosom firm and hair aflow. She still walked. She still talked. Two generations would continue to make love to her, unaware of the obscenity. Her corpse, her beautiful corpse, was like that kind of dream, so vivid, so real, that when you wake it’s still alive in your mind. The voices and the visions take time to abate, and go down to the place where dead dreams lie.