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“Five hundred sheep,” Nguyen Nhu Quynh muttered to herself, fixated on the TV, “and none of them mine.”

On the screen, five hundred sheep were being prepped for a journey from China across the Vietnamese border. Ten trucks rolled toward neat formations of sheep herders, arrayed like a reception committee on both sides of the highway.

Nhu Quynh had a sheep farm. Sheep, at one time, were the only thing that mattered to the family. They were more important than people. This is what Nhu Quynh’s husband often said. But now her sheep farm had no sheep.

She tapped the screen. “Look at those sheep,” she said to her husband. “They’re gorgeous!” To Nhu Quynh, this was a sacred image. Sheep, after all, were not merely sheep, but stabilized borders and friendships between neighboring states. Sheep were more than animals. Sheep were the sign, the symbol, the sublime...

Nhu Quynh’s husband knew that she was not talking about the sheep on the old television set. He knew that in her mind, she was seeing the hundred head of sheep on the family farm before their sudden deaths.

The sheep farm had been passed down to Nhu Quynh by her grandfather.

She switched off the TV, rose, boiled tea, and drained one cup after another. Her husband had told her about how the sheep were transported to the veterinary station. To avoid any chance of the virus jumping to humans, they were culled and burned. The incineration was set for late at night, on a date near the start of the month. Nhu Quynh refused to attend. Her husband took care of everything.

The carcasses were stacked, jowl to jowl, haunch to haunch, five meters high on transport trucks. The workers at the veterinary center dragged them away on carts. As they labored, they muttered to themselves, cursing the stench.

When he returned, Nhu Quynh’s husband told her that some of the sheep were still alive and wept as they were tossed into the incinerator. “How do you know they were crying?” she asked her husband. “Did you see them crying?”

“I saw them crying,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said solemnly. He told her about how the sheep were dragged from the truck, and how they shed tears in the moments before they were dumped into the oven.

Nhu Quynh’s husband mimicked the workers dragging and dumping the sheep.

“They weren’t being gentle,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said.

Nhu Quynh didn’t believe that sheep could weep. She had seen dogs and cats crying, but never a sheep.

“Of course sheep can cry,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said.

Nhu Quynh wondered what could make a sheep weep as it faced its death. Could a sheep have regrets? Did they curse fate for making them a sheep in this life? As these thoughts went through her mind, Nhu Quynh felt as if she could see the sheep being incinerated.

Although she could have passed for younger, Nhu Quynh was in her fifties. She and her husband had planned to sell the hundred head of sheep and leave Hanoi for Ho Chi Minh City in the south. They wanted to open a guesthouse. They heard that tourism was a growth industry. Wealthy people from all over the world were giving Vietnam a try. Drawn by cheap prices and scenic cities, Westerners were visiting and settling down there. This was why she was learning English.

She knew that the sheep her husband raised were valuable. Most Vietnamese preferred sheep imported from China’s northern plains because the meat was less gamey than Hanoi sheep, but her grandfather and father had handed down breeding techniques that guaranteed better meat. This was the reason for Nhu Quynh’s husband’s frequent observation, “Sheep are the only thing that matters to this family.”

Even after the sheep were culled, Nhu Quynh still cleaned the yard and went up into the hills to cut fodder. The grass she stacked in the yard spoiled, then was covered up by another layer. She dispatched her husband to the village every other day to collect loads of trimmed leaves and stalks to chop and mix with the silage.

Nhu Quynh’s husband, a slight but strong man from China, never refused her requests.

One morning, as usual, Nhu Quynh woke up, pulled open the curtains, took the kettle off the stove, and went out to splash boiling water across the floor of the sheep pen. She always opened the curtains first, so that she could watch her husband wash his face in the pond on the far side of the yard. He’d put the kettle on the stove for her before going out, and the sound of it coming to a boil was her alarm clock.

As sunlight swept down onto the sheep farm, her husband was still washing at the pond. He scrubbed his brow, his nose, his lips, and his sagging cheeks over and over again. As he splashed cool water on his face, a sound like the bleating of a sheep was released from deep inside his chest. The sound thudded down on his heart.

Nhu Quynh swept the floor of the pen with a bamboo broom as she splashed water across it. When she was done, she spread a fresh layer of straw.

“Hey!” Nhu Quynh called. She straightened herself and stretched her back.

Her husband didn’t seem to hear her. His head was bent as he stared into the pond.

Her husband had built the one-square-meter goldfish pond himself. He had poured cement, drilled a hole in the bottom, and installed a faucet. Nhu Quynh had asked him why he raised his goldfish that way. She was worried that they would die from lack of oxygen. Her husband told her that it was fine, and that goldfish didn’t mind spending their lives in a concrete pond under the hot sun. They were not suffering at all. He put some plants in the pond, though, and put a canopy over it.

The two goldfish in the pond had been there for a month. Nhu Quynh’s husband went out every morning to change the water. He would swivel the faucet out to the side so that he could fill his hands with water to splash on his face.

He watched the two fish while he washed.

In the days since the sheep had died, Nhu Quynh’s husband went out more frequently to watch the fish. He used to check on them a few times a day, but now he went at least every hour.

“Ah.”

Nhu Quynh saw her husband’s mouth half-open. He was motionless.

She rushed to the pond when she heard his voice.

One of the fish was dead. Nhu Quynh turned on the faucet. She splashed the pond, trying to stir the water. The still-living goldfish shot to the edge of the pond. After Nhu Quynh’s efforts, the dead fish bobbed and spun belly-up to the surface. When the pond was calm again, the still-living fish rushed into the weeds. Only a little of the dead fish’s belly was left above the water.

She couldn’t bring herself to reach out, and neither could her husband. They looked at the fish, and then they looked into each other’s eyes.

“Let’s go back,” Nhu Quynh said.

She took her husband’s hands in hers and pulled him toward the house.

The next day, Nhu Quynh found the other goldfish dead, too. She couldn’t work up the nerve to get rid of them before her husband saw. She called him over to look. He told her to leave them in the pond. He didn’t want to cremate them. He didn’t want to bury them, either.

He told Nhu Quynh that their bodies would dissolve in the pond. They could live forever in the clear water.

“They came to the ends of their lives,” Nhu Quynh said. “Every fish eventually comes to the end of its life. The same is true for people. The same is true for sheep.”

The speech startled her husband.

His routine of getting up to look at the dead fish did not change. Four days went by. Five days went by. Many more days went by before the bodies of the fish disappeared from the pond. Nhu Quynh’s husband thought that his wife had disposed of them. Nhu Quynh thought her husband had disposed of them. They each denied it to the other, and let the matter drop. However, a few days later, a sudden rain came, which forced out the shadows concealed in their hearts.

As the rain fell, Nhu Quynh was crouched, peeling potatoes.

At that moment, everything that came before seemed to have been forgotten. The rain slapped down noisily on the sheep pen, the concrete, and the window frame. She couldn’t figure out why she was incapable of—or unwilling to—remember those sheep and fish. “I want to tear that building down,” Nhu Quynh said to her husband. She didn’t mention the sheep pen. She only said “that building.”

“My father built it when he was alive,” she said, “to store things in. We don’t need the space. I’m tired of cleaning it out every day.”

“If you want to tear it down,” her husband said, his back turned to her, “you’ll have to do it yourself. I don’t want to destroy anything here.”

Her husband opened the shutters to let in fresh air. The storm suddenly faded, as if it had only been a soundtrack to their conversation about the building.

The sun came out a short time later. Nhu Quynh’s husband beamed. He looked more cheerful than he had in ages.

As he waited for the kettle to boil, Nhu Quynh’s husband blurted out that he wanted to go to Barcelona.

“What are you going to do there?” Nhu Quynh asked.

“Work.”

“What will you do?”

“I’ll work as a carpenter.”

“Do they need carpenters in Barcelona?”

Her husband told her about the country. “It is in Western Europe,” he said, “on a sea called the Mediterranean. There is a cathedral under construction there called the Sagrada Família, which the people are waiting anxiously to be completed. They need people to work.”

“You are too old,” Nhu Quynh said. “You can’t do heavy labor.”

“I’m not too old,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said. “In foreign countries, people work into their seventies, as long as they are in good health.”

Nhu Quynh asked what she should do while he was gone. He said that he wanted her to come with him. She could work alongside him. When they saved enough money, he wanted to start a lumber mill. His own father had been in the timber business.

Nhu Quynh turned him down. “We won’t be able to make a living in Barcelona,” she said. Her husband protested that he could speak English. “I still want to go to Ho Chi Minh City and open a guesthouse,” she said.

“You can’t do it by yourself,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said.

“Yes, I could,” Nhu Quynh said. She told him that she would visit other guesthouses and figure out how they were run.

“You are already fifty years old,” Nhu Quynh’s husband said.

“If you want to run a guesthouse, it is better to be a bit older,” she said.

A

How did I meet Nguyen Nhu Quynh?

I have been staring at the row of sycamore trees in front of the Casa Batlló for about half an hour, waiting for someone.

The sycamores grew to the fifth floor of the Casa Batlló. As if by agreement, they all stopped at the sixth floor. This was pointed out to me by the owner of the jewelry store behind me, who said this remarkable coincidence was discovered one summer ten years prior. Some municipal workers had measured to confirm that the trees in front of Casa Batlló, which had risen steadily for the last twenty years at a rate of two millimeters a day, had ceased growing.

The municipal government called in fortune tellers from Zaragosa, who declared that if the sycamores continued to grow, and crested the sixth floor, the Sagrada Família would be completed by 2026.

The leaf in my hand has nothing to do with the leaves on the sycamores. The leaf in my hand came from a rose acacia. It’s the size of a pebble, small enough that I could close my hand completely around its edges.

I’m nervous. I squeeze the leaf in my hand until it begins to sweat into my palm. The person still has not arrived.

Three days earlier, I was in my guesthouse with nothing to do. It was a four-story Gothic building with an immense wooden door. The landlord kept the door shut against the sound of the busy street outside. In my month of living there, I had never met the landlord, but did receive a note from them that day, passed to me through a Vietnamese guest that stayed in the room next to mine.

I was sitting on my south-facing balcony, reading a short story collection by an Israeli writer. When I sat there, things would fall into my glass of water from the acacia tree above. The tree was always dropping things—bird shit sometimes, or a strip of plastic, but never the beautiful petals from the flowers on the branches above. When I arrived, the tree was in full bloom, and red petals came down onto the ground like a sudden rain. They were trodden on by indifferent pedestrians and swept away as trash.

The Vietnamese woman next door shuffled in in slippers. I didn’t hear her open the door. I looked up and saw her standing there, wearing the same grease-stained housecoat that I had seen her in all week, a paring knife and a carrot stuck in one pocket. I thought it made her look sad.

She announced that the landlord had asked her to pass on a letter to me. “How could that be?” I asked. “I don’t know the landlord. We just exchanged a few messages online. I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”

The Vietnamese woman said she had never met the landlord, either. She knew only that they were not from Spain, but somewhere in East Asia, maybe Japan, or China. She had been in touch for a year through the internet, sending messages and payments. The landlord managed the guesthouse from a distance. There had been no issues so far.

“If the landlord has a letter to pass on to you,” the Vietnamese woman said, “it must be something important. Open it and see for yourself!”

I was grateful to the Vietnamese woman for passing on the letter. Her English was not particularly good, but I realized during my brief stay that she was committed to improving it. I found her in the shared kitchen one day peeling carrots and potatoes with her English textbook laid out beside her. When she had nothing else to do, she filled her time flicking through short videos on her phone, studying English vocabulary and grammar. She reminded me of many South Vietnamese I had met. They all seemed to be passionate about learning English. In the parks in Ho Chi Minh City, I had watched schoolchildren ambushing foreigners to practice conversation.

I knew my neighbor was not from southern Vietnam, but came from Hanoi in the north. I met her on the day I arrived, when she welcomed me at the door. When I complimented her English, she said, sounding a bit dejected, a bit shy, “How could I expect to go out and accomplish big things without studying English? How could I travel to the West without learning English?”

I didn’t learn much more about her other than her surname—Nguyen—so I made inquiries with other guests. She had been living there for almost a year, I learned, but nobody was quite sure why. Some of the guests said she was staying in Barcelona to look after a son who was studying at a university there. Some said she was an illegal immigrant who wanted to make a quick buck and scam a local senior citizen into marriage. One guest had another story: She had come from Hanoi to look for her husband, who had given up on their dream of opening a guesthouse in Ho Chi Minh City to flee to Barcelona and find work as a carpenter.

I asked the middle-aged guest for more details.

He shrugged and said that he couldn’t say much more. “Maybe it’s a love story,” he said, “like Sleepless in Seattle.”

When she came with the letter from the landlord, I wanted to ask the Vietnamese woman her name.

I asked her in English.

She wrote it in the air while pronouncing it. She explained that she had the same name as the wife of a famous Vietnamese movie director. She suggested I look him up online, if I wanted to get the right spelling.

I found the name: Nguyen Nhu Quynh.

I thought back to the first day I met her. Even though Nhu Quynh had tried her best to welcome me warmly, the stiff muscles in her cheeks betrayed her vigilance. Now, her expression slackened. When she smiled, her two red cheeks rose like hillocks off the wrinkled plains of her face, like something was coming to life within her.

Nhu Quynh suddenly realized that she was still holding the letter and hurriedly passed it to me. I took it and studied the envelope. The stamp on the right corner showed a temple trimmed in gold. There was no address written on the front. The back bore the postal stamp of a certain nation’s capital. I was stunned. Could it be from my husband? How would he know I was in Barcelona?

Nhu Quynh stared at the letter with curiosity. She gave no sign of being about to leave. She asked what the building on the stamp was. I told her that it was a temple in East Asia. She nodded absentmindedly. “It is nice to still be remembered,” she said, “even when you’re away in a foreign country.”

“You have to chase happiness and hold on to it tight,” I grimaced.

Then I gave her a real smile and she smiled back.

When Nhu Quynh left, I cautiously slit open the envelope. Inside, I found a leaf and a thin, elegant sheet of Japanese stationery. There was a message written on paper: “Four o’clock in the afternoon, three days from now, a mysterious man will be waiting under one of the sycamore trees across from the Casa Batlló with something important to give you.”

I studied the message for a long time. I couldn’t figure it out. I went to the shared kitchen to talk to Nhu Quynh.

The kitchen was too tiny to accommodate many people. The landlord had placed a table in there that took up most of the space. American tourists sometimes sat around it, drinking. In the daytime, it was invariably strewn with their lighters, matches, and rolling papers. The day before, I found a lacey bra tossed across it.

Nhu Quynh was squatting on the floor, peeling potatoes over a black plastic bag. A pot on the stove behind her was bubbling. She raised her head to look at me. “Was that letter really from the landlord?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“How would it possibly have come from them? It doesn’t even have an address on it.”

“The landlord told me that I was to give the letter to the Chinese person staying in room 201 on the second floor.”

“How did the letter get here?” I asked.

“I got an email from the landlord about a week ago,” Nhu Quynh said. The email directed her to go to a building nearby, where a white paper bag would be waiting on a windowsill.

A few days had gone by before Nhu Quynh saw the email. When she went to the building, she found the paper bag. There was nobody else around.

She lowered her head and turned back to peeling potatoes.

She cut such wide, thick strips off each potato that not much was left when she was done. I told her she should stop. The potatoes were peeled. She explained that she could not stand any blemishes on her potatoes. Her husband had told her that imperfections would ruin the flavor when the potatoes were made into pancakes. The pot behind her had almost boiled dry, but she didn’t seem worried. When I pointed it out, she said that the first pot of water should always evaporate completely, just like the first pot of tea is meant to be poured out after a quick steep.

“Is this some kind of ritual?” I asked.

“No,” Nhu Quynh said, “this is the way my husband taught me.” She set down her things and turned to look at me.

Her face tensed up. “My sheep died,” she said. “My husband was a good man.”

“How did the sheep die?” I asked. “Why do you say he was a good man?”

“One night, they all died,” she said, “a hundred head...Did you know that sheep cry?”

I noticed that Nhu Quynh had washed her face. Her hair was not as messy as I had seen it before. “Did you look for your husband?” I asked.

“He might be in Ho Chi Minh City,” Nhu Quynh explained. “They called it Saigon in the past.”

She told her story: “He said that he wanted to come to Barcelona to work as a carpenter on the Sagrada Família. I went to ask the workers there about him. They said that no Chinese workers had ever applied for a construction job.”

“Then why do you think your husband is in Ho Chi Minh City?” I asked.

“I was watching TV a couple of days ago,” Nhu Quynh said, “and there was a story about a runaway locomotive. One of the railway workers had spent three hours chasing it. The driver had fallen out. The whole time, the locomotive was ripping down the track at a hundred kilometers an hour. All the stations on the route had to be cleared. Finally, it ran out of fuel outside of a small station.”

“Was the railway worker your husband?”

“Right,” she said, “I recognized him on TV.”

I found her story incredible. I asked if she had called the railway company in Ho Chi Minh City to confirm his identity, or if she was going to go there, herself.

“I’m not in a hurry,” Nhu Quynh said. “I will wait for him here.” Having seen him on TV, she was even more convinced that he would come from Ho Chi Minh City to find her.

“How long will you wait?” I asked. “How can you be so sure he’ll come to find you?”

She wasn’t sure when he would come. But the day was coming...

I told her that I was in a similar situation. “I haven’t been in touch with my husband in a long time,” I said.

She glanced at the envelope, as if asking if I was finally getting word from him. As we talked through the afternoon, the envelope crumpled and tore under my fingers.

B

I remembered why I had gone to see Nhu Quynh in the first place. I wasn’t sure how to proceed.

I still had no idea where the letter had come from. I thought I might get a hint from Nhu Quynh that would help me figure things out.

In the spring, before my husband fell in love with rock gardens, he was consumed with trimming the acacia tree along the street. That was when we lived in the capital. My husband joined the municipal gardening team. That spring, out in the suburbs, he went to prune the acacias in the park.

The acacias were so tall that my husband had to make himself a ladder.

After joining the gardening team, my husband left early each morning with a small saw and a large sack. When he came home each evening, the bag was full of acacia branches. He would produce from the bag one branch, then another, some thin, some thick, and introduce each to me, saying, “Look at this pink acacia...and here is some white acacia...” He sighed over them. “When will we get to see the red acacia blossoms?” he asked.

By the next day, many of the branches he brought back had withered. He didn’t throw them away, but simply mixed them in with the freshly-pruned branches that he brought home. He piled all of these in a corner of the yard. One night, he brought home an unusually large acacia trunk that looked as if it must have taken him a long time to saw through.

He was drunk. His cheeks were red. He collapsed sobbing on the porch. “Plant this acacia for me,” he said, “plant it in our yard. Next year, it will have red flowers...red acacia flowers...Have you ever seen them? Those big red blossoms...”

As he raved, I helped him into the house and brushed the dirt off his clothes. I realized at that moment that my husband had probably never joined the municipal gardening team. A scrupulously clean and tidy man, my husband always arrived home looking as neat as when he had left the house. I couldn’t figure out how he could have carried the massive acacia trunk home, or how he had secretly sawed it down.

The next morning, I asked what he had been up to. He refused to say. I felt an indistinct anxiety. Secretly, I hid his saw, and went that night to dispose of all of the acacia branches.

I thought to myself that he might decide to go get more tools.

For a few days after that, my husband didn’t go out. His company called many times, demanding that he come back to work. It turned out that he hadn’t been to the office in a long time. When I confronted him about this, he was calm. He didn’t protest or betray any sense of guilt.

My husband began getting up each night to go to an ancient imperial garden near our house. I feigned sleep one evening, waited for him to head out, then followed him. I found him standing in the yard, facing the direction of the garden. He was holding a beautiful black cat with green eyes. I had no idea where it had come from, but it rested obediently in his embrace. There was a thick fog in the air that night. Maybe it was because of the lush greenery of the suburbs, in the gardens, in the homes. It was so quiet that I could hear the insects clearly, so quiet that I imagined I could hear the night mist dripping from leaves...

My husband stood there for hours, the cat in his arms, looking as if he was trying to identify the source of all the sounds in the night air.

For a long time after that, the green-eyed cat was waiting in the yard for my husband whenever he went out. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t want to call out his name. The good thing was that his strange behavior was limited to these meetings with the cat, so after going to observe him a few times, I stopped. After he met the cat, our daytime interactions gradually ceased.

One day, I came home from work and found a note on his desk. It said he was going to the south and would be back in a week.

I learned that he went to visit a temple famous for its rock gardens. He explained to me later that he had fallen in love with this style of dry garden. I didn’t understand the religious aspect of these things. I wasn’t familiar with the Chan Buddhist concepts that underlay them. So, naturally, there wasn’t much about the dry gardens I could talk to my husband about. I wondered what had caused the target of his fascination to change so rapidly. I wondered what had happened in his life.

He called me at home from the city in the south. I flipped through the calendar on the desk and saw that he had been gone for nearly half a month. If he hadn’t called, I wouldn’t have realized he had been gone for so long.

I was in the dark about his comings and goings, and I could rarely reach him. Finally, he stopped calling me.

One day, after I got off work, I found a letter in the mailbox at home. When I opened it, I found a withered leaf inside. More envelopes came. Some of the envelopes had flower petals in them, some contained blank sheets of paper. One was even empty.

In the final envelope I received, I found a postcard-sized picture of my husband standing in front of a cafe on the coast, beaming, and holding a green-eyed black cat. On the back of the picture, he had written a note explaining he was no longer able to go on living with me, and wanted to dissolve our marriage.

I had not been excited by the picture. The note on the back stirred no emotions. The day had come, I thought to myself. I had been preparing for it for a long time, even without knowing it.

All that came to mind was: I had never seen a person smiling quite so magnificently.

1

I had never seen a person smiling quite so magnificently as they escaped from their old life.

I spent the next two days with Nhu Quynh. Every morning, she got up and boiled water, some of which she drank, and some of which she used to wash the street out front. She encouraged me to meet the man at the Casa Batlló. I decided I should go see what was waiting for me.

So, here I am, standing in front of the Museu Frederic Marès, wearing a red blouse and yellow beret.

I wanted to make sure I looked particularly striking.

Author’s Note

“Casa Batlló” tells the story of two women entangled in troubled marriages. They cross paths in a distant, foreign land. Their encounter sparks a series of deeply introspective and searching conversations, unraveling their emotional anguish and inner desires. Both women are bedeviled in wait, as threads of love and memory unspool along with a sense of the inevitable. Their individual life experiences and emotional cravings, disillusionment, and dread echo in our own lives.