The Sea & Us by Catherine de Saint Phalle

Author:Catherine de Saint Phalle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Lounge

11

Sung-ki

THE BAD DAYS in Seoul, the days when I felt like a shit, making love to another man’s wife, the ‘mother of his three children’, while giving English lessons to aseptic kids who planned to study in American or Australian universities – someone who did ‘pottery’ like housewives take on ‘creative writing’ or tapestry – those bad days, I would find myself walking out to find Sung-ki. Actually, I never seemed to find him; he always found me.

He would walk up quietly, his face a bed of wrinkles where his happy expression lay curled up. He was as small as a child, and as nimble as one. Only his eyes seemed centuries old. He scraped a living by selling small looking glasses, which he pushed around Seoul on a cart. They were of every shape and form and every one of them seemed to be responsible for reflecting its portion of the world. He didn’t speak a word of English and we’d soldier on in my Korean. The strangest thing about Sung-ki was the way one always seemed to bump into him when one was at a loss or in trouble.

I didn’t know where he lived and hardly knew anything about him. He was one of those people whose openness was like all those little looking glasses, always mirroring, always giving, and receiving nothing. One could imagine his death as simply a folding up of himself, disappearing into his innumerable wrinkles, stepping back into one of his looking glasses – leaving only his twinkling cartload behind. But one day, a few weeks before I left Seoul, I discovered that he had a grandchild – a little girl called Iseul. His eyes closed when he pronounced her name, as if his eyelids were folding over his memory of her. Yet he never seemed to spend time with this granddaughter. He never referred to any shared outing and I never saw them together. Still, she glowed in his eyes, in his gestures when he spoke of her.

He seemed to live on the streets. At least, I never heard mention of anywhere else. He was so short and I was so tall that I always sat down next to him on a stool to be able to hear him, because he spoke in nearly a whisper, and this seemed to make for longer conversations. Little by little, our differences were worn away, as a beach on whose sand you tread is ground into familiarity.

Sung-ki didn’t giggle like other old Korean men when talking of women or sex; maybe his love for his granddaughter had made him like that. Also he never drank soju like the other older guys you saw in bars, sitting in a row, all together, a bit like the way Mediterraneans sit in fishing villages, or Englishmen in their clubs, a male huddling as a protection against destiny, against fear or even death. Sung-ki didn’t seem to need such a protection, as children don’t when they haven’t been warned about things or been abused in some way.

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