The Book of Salt (15 page)

He usually worked, he told me, on large shipping liners, which carried more than seven hundred passengers and crew. Most recently Bão had crewed on a liner called the
Latouche Tréville,
which, like the
Niobe,
made its primary run between Saigon and Marseilles. He would have never considered a freighter as bare-bones as the
Niobe,
he said, but he was broke, and having no money at sea, he had learned, is better than having no money on land. All meals are taken care of, and there is nothing on board to buy except, maybe, cigarettes or a bottle of gin. There are also no women on board or none who are for sale. "A great money saver," Bão assured me. It was only my first night at sea, and the
Niobe,
despite everything, did not seem so shabby to me. So I asked him why the
Latouche Tréville
was that much better. "Even the ship's cooks had cooks!" Bão replied, jumping off his bunk, leaning his upper body into mine.

Even the ship's cooks had cooks? How in hell does that affect you? I wanted to know but did not ask. The slight shift in the air temperature, a sudden warming as his body came closer to mine, was making it difficult for me to speak. AnhĐẹpTrai is definitely a fitting name for you, I thought. GoodLookingBrother, indeed.

By the time we left the
Niobe,
I had a long list of questions that I had never asked Bão. I learned early on that his answers were unhelpful at best and at worst entirely uncommunicative. A ruse to deny me the full depth of his feelings, I told myself. If I had questions, lingering and persistent, I was better off answering them for myself. For instance, the
Latouche Tréville
was better because Bão, I imagined, liked being so close to luxury, so intimate with its smells, the rumpled linens loaded in his arms, lavender-scented still by the fresh-bathed bodies of women whom he would never meet, the perfume and cigar smoke still dancing in the air as he mopped the decks clean at three in the morning. He walked on water, but he was a servant, after all. And like all servants he
had
to take solace from wealth and pleasure, even if they were not his own.

THE GARRET
is cold this morning. You must have been out late last night, coming home shoulder to shoulder with the rising sun. I throw another piece of wood into the stove, a funny iron Buddha, presiding in the middle of the room. You prefer the steam heat, which rumbles through the coiled pipes, an innovation that you pay extra for with each month's rent. Odd that this modern contraption produces such ancient sounds. A trapped animal, it sounds like to me. I prefer the wood-burning stove. If I am to feel the warmth, I insist on seeing the flames. I kiss you hello, your cheeks, eyes, temples, saving your lips for last. I press my body against you to say that my lips have longed for you, have begged to touch your skin. I say your name, "Maacus Laat-ti-moe," a greeting that makes you laugh. I try again, "MARcus Lat-timore." You award my effort with a kiss, one that does not end until we are on the floor, fumbling for buttons, flaps of fabric, until we are skin on skin, a prayer for the Buddha with the fire in his heart. You tell me that on Friday I was at the flower market on the Île de la Cité, that I had a small white blossom drooping from my lapel, that I looked lost. As I begin to understand what you are saying to me, I become
acutely aware of my skin. I detect the existence of a forgotten terrain. I believe that my relationship to this city has now changed. I have been witnessed. You have testified to my appearance and demeanor. I have been sighted. You possess a memory of my body in this city, ink on a piece of paper, and you, a magician and a seer, could do it again. How can I carry my body through the streets of this city in the same way again?

"Sweet Sunday," I say into your ear, repeating the first English words that you have taught me. On the
Niobe,
Bão had impressed upon me the need to learn a few English phrases. The usual list of the usefuls, he said. Bão claimed that he knew of others but that these should get me through most situations: "please, thank you, hello, good-bye, beer, whiskey, rum,
that
-man-took-your-money, 7-did-not-sleep-with-your-girl, I quit." You, Sweet Sunday Man, have yet to teach me a practical word. Your lessons are about their lush interiors, the secrets that words can keep. I have learned from you that the English word "please" can be a question, "May I?" and a response, "You may." "Please" can also be a verb, an effortless act that accompanies you into every room. Sweet Sunday, indeed. It is the only day of the week that I see you. Two months have passed, but together we have had only eight days. We, though, have already established a routine. I am at your garret by seven o'clock in the morning on Sunday. I stay till three or four the following morning, and then I return to 27 rue de Fleurus. At first it was just a precaution. I could not risk angering my Mesdames by oversleeping again. The arrangement must suit you, as you have yet to ask me to stay the whole of the night, to pick which side of your bed would be solely mine. We, yes, now have a routine, and this is the part of our day when you and I lie like children in our mother's womb, curled into each other for warmth and the feeling of skin. You are always the first to speak. I know you feel compelled to shoo silence away with your words. You speak to me in a childlike French, phrases truncated and far from complete. Your efforts are charitable, noble deeds that are taking you by the throat and strangling you. You open your mouth
only to close it again, knowing that your words would weigh me down, keep me from touching shore, deepen the distance between us.

We will lie side by side, devising our own language. As in Sundays past we will push and pull at the only one we have in common. Yours is a languid French, a vestige of your southern America and its rich cadences, an English so different-sounding from my Mesdames'. My French is clipped and jagged, an awkward careless collection, a blind man's home, a drunk man's stumbled steps. We will throw all our words onto the table and find those saturated with meaning. Like the nights that we have had together, there will be few. We will attempt to tell stories to each other with just one word. We will end up telling them on our bodies. We always do. You, like my Madame and Madame, have already given up on saying my name. You say instead what sounds to me like the letter "B." But you do not say "bé" like the French, but like they do in America, you tell me. You draw me a picture of a hive, and you draw a honeybee nearby. You point to it and then to me and say that I am your "Bee." Better than "Thin Bin," I think, but still no closer to my name.

The thought comes to me gradually, creeps into the room. I struggle six days a week and on Sweet Sunday I struggle no more. I tell you to speak to me in the language of your birth. I free myself from the direct translation of your words into understandable feelings and recognizable acts. I leave your words raw, allow myself to experience your language as a medium of songs, improvising and in flux. I imagine your language as water in my hands, reflective and clear. You reply that if you return to the place where moss hangs, wavy-haired from the trees, where mosquitoes bloody the nights, you will not want to stop. You will talk for hours, unearthing words whose origins lie deep within the shades of magnolia trees, whose roots have grown strong from blood-rich soil. You will tell me that you are southern but that you are
not
a southern gentleman, that your father owns land, which you will never inherit, that you are a son in
blood only. Even before you were born, your mother had forfeited your father's name for a lifetime income. A lover who, unlike your father, would always be constant, she thought. Your mother, you explain, is a woman whose legitimacy had also been compromised from the moment of her conception. Her legacy to you is that drop of blood, which made her an exile in the land of her birth. But you are not like her, you say, touching the tips of my eyelashes. The blood is your key, not your lock. A southern man without his father's surname is a man freed, you tell me, dispensing irony like a hard, uncrushed peppercorn. A man with a healthy income from his mother is also a freed man, you add, with a laugh that falls to the ground, exhausted and sad. Your mother's money has paved your way to this city. It first sent you to the north of your America for college. It knew that there the texture of your hair, the midnight underneath the gauze of your skin, were more readily lost to untrained eyes, you say, tracing the line of my collarbone as it rises to meet your shoulders. You are tempted to call it
his
money, but, when you think about it, it is hers now. She has earned it, fair and square. Squarely on her back, that is, you say, closing my eyes with a lock of your hair. Sweet Sunday Man, go ahead and talk, and I will get up and prepare our evening meal. For your benefit as much as mine, you can pause and say "Bee," your name for me, insert it where a breath would be, and I will look over at you, letting you know that I am listening.

When you first arrived in Paris, the Emperor of Vietnam
and
the Crown Prince of Cambodia were both here, you tell me, amazed by your luck, your lot in life. You have seen them both, you boast.

"Bee, they both speak French beautifully."

Like the Governor-General's chauffeur, I think.

The Emperor of Vietnam and Prince Norodom of Cambodia are very competitive. You are sure that every shopkeeper who has ever sold a trinket to one of these fellows knows that by the end of the day the other will come running in to ask for two or
three of the same. Prince Norodom was the first to contact you. The Emperor of Vietnam is first only when women or gambling are involved. Only nineteen, and yet the Emperor keeps a notebook with the names of all the women whom he has bedded. He likes to name his racing horses after them. He gets a kick out of naming fast horses after fast women.

"Not a subtle man, this Emperor of yours, Bee."

Not a scholar-prince, I think.

Prince Norodom is a choirboy by comparison. He spent his first year in Paris composing music for the piano, exploring the consequences of removing all the sharps from his musical vocabulary. As for your work, he heard about it from his cousin, a medical school man. The Prince said that he was curious but skeptical. He, however, thought that it was very fortuitous, auspicious even, that you two were practically neighbors. " The rue de l'Odéon is not a street for a Crown Prince or for a man of science, but here we are,' said Prince Norodom, 'which means that we were destined to meet.'

"His logic, not mine. Impeccable nonetheless, Bee."

A scholar-prince, I think.

First, Prince Norodom wanted to see your maps. He closed the lid of his grand piano, and you spread them out on top of its inlaid surface. "These are an exact copy of the ones used by Dr. J. Haskel Kritzer," you explained to him. "His groundbreaking book on the subject was published in 1924." You were very fortunate to have studied with him, as so many had already been turned away. In your very first interview with Dr. Kritzer, he asked you to sit in a chair next to a sunlit window. The doctor looked into your eyes and after a short while asked, "Lattimore, do you believe that skin and bones can lie?"

"And
that,
" you told the Prince, "is the first principle of this science." The second is that any quack can diagnose a fracture, but it takes a true doctor to diagnose the potential for breakage, the invisible fault lines, the predisposed weaknesses. Prince Norodom touched the outer corner of his right eye, an instinctual reaction that you have observed in many of your new patients. There is always a moment during the initial consultation when they realize that you may have already begun the examination, may have already recognized all the maladies that will inhabit their bodies in the years to come, may have already foreseen their aches and pains. You can assure them only by taking out the magnifying glass. The instrument allays their fears. It says to them that, No, the doctor has not yet begun.

"Prince Norodom was no different, Bee."

A man like any other, I think.

The Prince saw the circle of glass distorting the patterns of his Persian rug, and he relaxed and lowered his hand. Prince Norodom then leaned toward the piano, and you led him through the triangular sections of your maps one by one, until you had gone full circle, twice. Every organ, gland, and tissue in the human body is here, you told him, bouncing your index finger between the right and the left maps. Some organs are reflected in both. The thyroid g land, for instance, is represented on the right at about two o'clock and on the left at about nine. The theory is simple. Flecks, streaks, spots, or discolorations within a particular section of the iris indicate that there is a trouble spot, a weakness in a corresponding area of the body. As a diagnostic tool, it far exceeds the reaches of conventional medicine.

"Iridology is a science that can see the future, Bee."

A soothsayer, I think.

It is also an economical science, you assured the Prince. There is no equipment to speak of except for the maps and a magnifying glass. "Imagine if your fellow Cambodians were trained in this science," you said to the Prince. Equipped with their instruments, these men could easily canvass the countryside. "Imagine how the health and well-being of your people could be bettered and improved with this Western science," you advocated.

"The Prince looked up and said the oddest thing, Bee."

Prince Norodom said, "Dr. Lattimore, if even a quack can recognize fractures, then quacks are all that Cambodia needs right now."

He sounds like the man on the bridge, I think.

The Prince agreed to an examination nevertheless. You sat him down near a bright lamp and asked him to look straight ahead and past your face. You told him that every iris is unique, which made him smile. You had never seen royal irides before, you tell me. Now, you have seen four.

"Competition is a marvelous thing, Bee."

Sweet Sunday Man is an American, after all, I think.

You saw it immediately. There was a cluster of tiny spots in the right iris at about five o'clock. Unmistakable, but you continued with the examination without showing your agitation. You needed time. You needed to find the right words. You thought about leading up to it with a series of questions, but then you thought that if this was you, you would want it clearly and succinctly.