Hotel Continental: Saigon’s Eyes and Ears

The Continental Hotel Saigon has the hauteur of an old uncle.

Slightly crooked. Eyebrows gone wild. Hair sprouting from his ears. Glasses held together on the bridge of his nose.

He watches the street with the quiet certainty of a man who knows he’s still got it.

Even if nobody asked.

You Can’t Pull One Over on the Old Hand

He lets the young guns wear themselves out chasing the light, stacking fake marble and LED screens as if the future had to be assembled in a showroom.

He keeps his dim light. His cracked leather. His heavy carpet.

He has nothing to prove to an age that changes its mind every six months.

And doesn’t have much of one to begin with.

The Ghosts of the Continental

When he sees me coming, he moves towards me with the composure of a man who has seen it all go through his doors:

Regimes.

Currencies.

Uniforms.

Tourists in Bermuda shorts.

“The terrace can wait. Come upstairs with me,” he murmurs.

Dark wood staircase. Red carpet pinned down by brass rods. That massive banister.

The whole history of Saigon has been going up and down these stairs for more than 140 years.

He has carried more History than plenty of books.

He stops outside a room.

“Listen. Can you hear the furious clack-clack of his Remington? Smell the cold cigar smoke? Bodard’s heavy footsteps on the parquet. Back and forth. Back and forth.

He’s hunting for a story.

Sweating buckets. Shirt in disarray. Still wearing yesterday’s lunch and dinner.

A flamboyant warlord. An unattainable taxi girl. A grimy croupier from the Grand Monde. A crooked Sûreté cop. A junior import-export clerk, already poisoned. A millionaire Chinese merchant in a singlet. A bearded mandarin.

An entire Indochinese menagerie walks through that door.

It sits down. Drinks. Cheats. Lies. Fucks. Negotiates.

And Bodard weighs it all up.”

“In a little while,” he adds, “Bodard will come down to the bar. He’ll buy Jean-Baptiste Corsi a drink.

To buy himself a rumour.”

“Come on.

Let’s move past Lartéguy, Malraux and Greene.

Come with me to Room 307.”

The door opens onto a room of tired gilt, a threadbare bedside rug, ceilings too high to be entirely honest.

“This is where Phạm Xuân Ẩn stayed,” he says quietly.

It takes me a good ten seconds.

Patrick Pesnot. Monsieur X. That voice that knew how to tell the stories of men with two lives.

Time journalist. Communist spy. Friend of the Americans. Clandestine informant. A guy who could sit down to lunch with the very men he was spying on, then go back and pass what he’d heard to Giáp.

Saigon in one man.

The kind of guy who lived an extraordinary double life and never needed a plaque in downtown Saigon to be everywhere in the city’s history.

That’s the Continental.

A door left open.

A slap straight in the face.

The Human Comedy of Radio Catinat

“Come on, follow me to the heart of the reactor.”

And here I am — the Continental’s terrace!

That gigantic machine for manufacturing information, rumours, alliances, intrigue and trouble. The one I’d fantasised about for years through books.

For years, I had imagined it.

The hacks. The diplomats. The military men. The traffickers. The girls. The guys who know. The ones who talk too much. The ones who never talk. Vermouth. Pernod. Cognac and soda. The informants. Bình Xuyên’s henchmen. The big fortunes. The ones looking to steal them. The cuckolds. The suitors. The perfectly respectable slave traders.

Humanity, stinking.

Sipped under parasols, in white suits.

Impeccable.

And now I’m sitting right in the middle of it.

In a sad little set.

Not a scrap of gossip to overhear.

Not a girl in an áo dài to admire.

Not a headwaiter calling you over for a telex.

Not an officer to throw my gloves in the face of.

Just the sickening flood of scooters and SUVs.

I don’t even really miss the past.

I never knew it.

What I miss is that there’s nothing left to listen to.

To watch.

“By the way, I’m Mathieu. Mathieu Francini,” he says, walking off.