The Book of Salt (23 page)

A few months after his second son was born, she found at the back of the neighborhood schoolhouse an old discarded calendar. All the signs of the zodiac were illustrated on it in red ink. Red was the color of good luck, she had been told. So she hung the calendar on the wall of her kitchen, and every day she looked at her sign, that of the Dog, and wondered why her father and mother could not have waited another year so that she could have been born under the sign of the Pig. The Dog is watchful, loyal, a fierce defender of its own, she had been told. The Pig, though, is endowed with the gift of resignation and acceptance, the two things that would always ensure ease in a Pig's life. In this way, she had heard, a woman born in the Year of the Pig would always be lucky. But if luck was not her birthright, she thought, then she would have to look for it on her own. So from then on at the end of every week, the girl made it a point to return to the back of the schoolhouse to see if any other thing of value had made its way into the trash.

Why throw something so precious away? she thought, as she bent to pick up a tin box covered in a gaudy design. On its lid, a woman was flying up toward a full moon, and that reminded her of her mother. The Moon Festival had just ended, and she could still smell the cakes that the box had held for the occasion. She took the tin home and added it to the altar. Even without this offering, she knew that her father and mother were proud of her. She had just given birth to her husband's third son. Her belly was still distended, and she knew that her husband would not notice her again for several months. A blessing, she thought.

By the time of the Lunar New Year, her belly had collapsed, but she was too swept up in the festivities to worry about her husband's footsteps in the night. Like everyone else in Saigon, she wanted something new to welcome in the new year. A tiny bead of gold on a pink silk cord, an
áo dài
with a touch of embroidery around the neck, a straw hat with a cotton sateen chin strap—but she knew such luxuries were not in her future. So she went by the back of the schoolhouse to see what she could find. Lying there on the ground was another tin box. From the design on its lid, she could tell that it had held candied lotus seeds. She kneeled down to pick it up and was surprised to find that the box was unopened, a length of string wrapped tightly around it. She felt like a thief with something so brand-new in her hands. She looked up to see if anyone was watching her. She looked up and she saw my father. He was watching her through the schoolhouse windows. He wore wire spectacles, small, oval, and almost invisible from where she was still stooped. They marked him as educated and of another class. A scholar-prince, she thought.

Their courtship began like that. Simple. A box of candied lotus seeds sweetened their first sighs of love. The schoolteacher loved her, and he loved her body. He loved it until it started to show. Her hair grew thick, shiny with oil, and smelled of the fresh orange peels that she used to mist her comb. Her face glowed, the color of sand, warm and clean. Her breasts grew tender, sore with milk. She was carrying her fourth and his first. The schoolteacher told her that he was going abroad for further studies. To France, he said. He gave her a small amount of money and no way to contact him. She could have sworn, though, that she saw him a few months later walking out of Saigon's Notre-Dame with a young woman by his side. It was
Ash Wednesday, and they each had on their forehead a fingerprint the color of a monsoon sky. My mother took some of the money and bought a bolt of white muslin and an
áo dài
made of gray silk. For the future, she thought. She knew that it would have been impossible to keep the money in its paper form. If she had hidden it, the Old Man would have found it. He takes everything of value from me, she thought. My mother was eighteen, about to turn nineteen when she gave birth to her last son. She was a young woman, and she had three boys by one man and one by another.

"Please, please, please," my mother begged. She had given what was left of the schoolteacher's money to the midwife, but she was afraid that the woman would renege on their deal.

"Are you sure?" the midwife repeated.

My mother nodded, yes, exhausted from my birth. The midwife stuck her hand inside her, and then there was an unfamiliar pain. When my mother woke up she heard: "She'll survive, but she'll never give birth again." My mother's husband was standing over the midwife as she washed her hands in a basin of water. His arms were folded across his chest. His rosary was caught in the crook of his bent arms, and the cross was pushed up and out. From across the room where my mother lay, she could see the man nailed onto it, the man who had given Himself for her sins, as Father Vincente had told her. For
my
sins? she had thought.

Her husband approached her, and she turned her head abruptly to one side because she thought he was going to hit her. He held out his right hand and said, "Give them to me."

She heard him say, "Give
him
to me." But I do not have the baby in my arms, she thought. The baby, she should have known, was of no interest to him. I was a boy and that was good, but otherwise he was through with her.

"I want the earrings," he said. "How am I supposed to pay the midwife?" he asked.

But I have already paid her, my mother thought, for different services, though. The midwife had asked for her payment
many months in advance for performing an act of mercy. The midwife had promised to give her a reprieve for the rest of her life. "No more pounding, no more collapsing belly, no more breasts swollen with milk," my mother had begged.

My mother and I liked this ending best:

The night that Father Augustine died, the captain had the man's frail body wrapped in an old tablecloth and dumped into the Mediterranean Sea. Father Augustine's shoes went with him because no one else on board had such small feet. A day later when the ship docked in the harbor of Marseilles, the captain woke up, soaked in his own guilt. The Indochinese whom he had robbed was not just a man but a priest. The captain hastily arranged for Father Augustine's travel journal to make its own arduous journey back to Vietnam and to the Bishop of Saigon. A note from the captain accompanied the journal and declared in a shaky hand: "The Father's dying wish was, of course, respected."

My mother and I enjoyed this version because the last words did not belong to Father Augustine but to the man who took the gold chalices home with him. We wondered how they must have looked displayed on the windowsill of the captain's house. We imagined that they must have caught the glint of the sun and poured its light all over the room. Beautiful, we thought.

When I now think about the story of Father Augustine, I tell myself that the Bishop of Saigon must have known—not about my mother's blasphemous endings but about the gold chalices and Father Augustine's transport of them. This version I did not hear, however, until I had already left Vietnam. The man on the bridge told it to me in the Jardin du Luxembourg while the rest of Paris slept:

The Bishop of Saigon had been duly informed of the papal largesse and had sent Father Augustine to the Vatican to ensure the chalices' safe delivery. But when a year had gone by since Father Augustine was last seen kneeling in the apse of St. Peter's, his death at sea was assumed, and a Mass was celebrated in his memory by the Bishop himself. Meanwhile, Father Augustine's journal, with its black leather cover, the insides lined with marbled paper, a tribute to the only stone that Father Augustine believed was virtuous enough for Him, traveled the open seas and found its way home and into the hands of the Bishop of Saigon. The Bishop admired its Italian craftsmanship and thought the marbleized pattern tastefully done, a palette of plums and sea foam greens. The Bishop turned to the final entry. Father Augustine's last page, like those before it, was written in Vietnamese, a language that had centuries ago been cast into a neat Romanized script, chased with tildes, circumflexes, breves, acute and grave accents, an oblation from the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The Jesuit, like all missionaries after him, understood the power of literacy. The written word never stops proselytizing, never dies of malaria, and has an uncanny tendency to reproduce, an act that he as a man of God was not privy to. The Jesuit dismantled the ideographs of Vietnam and taught his converts their catechisms in a language reconfigured for the sake of simplicity. Easier to learn and easier to teach, thought the Jesuit. The Bishop of Saigon was a living testament to the success of the Jesuit's invention. The Bishop's blue eyes skimmed the last page of Father Augustine's journal and were enraged to learn that a simple country priest had traded away his gold chalices for a burial in Avignon. The Bishop ripped out all traces of Father Augustine and kept the journal, with its remaining blank pages, for his own. Father Augustine was a simple country priest, indeed. He was an errand boy in the guise of an emissary, or maybe he was an emissary in the guise of an errand boy. Either way, the man was robbed, said the man on the bridge. His worship and his obedience had landed him in the depth of a faraway sea.

My mother, like Father Augustine, had experienced passion, rapturous, transformative passion, which she continued to feel long after the schoolteacher went away. My father may not have been constant, but he was brave. Brave enough to love even though he knew that his love, like his vision, was predisposed to weaken and fade. She herself braved more, I tell myself. And
this is where her story ends. Bravery, for me, is always the culmination of the story. What more is there left to say? My mother would certainly have agreed, if she had been there to hear. Bão, though, was the only one present. "This is the story of my mother" was how I began. "It is about a life that she must have lived, if just for a while, with her scholar-prince. It is a story filled with misty lakes, shadow-graced embraces, exotic locales, travel on the open seas, family secrets, un-Christian vices."

"Go on," said Bão. In the end, Bão thought that my mother was admirable, like Serena the Soloist but in a different way.

"Yes," I agreed, as I closed my eyes. The
Niobe,
calmed by the light of the moon, rested in a valley between two waves, a mother's bosom in a distant sea. In the dark, where my thoughts traveled without a trace of fear, I longed for her touch, for the look in her eyes when I parted the sheet of honey and stood before her.

Inside her kitchen, my mother had waited for me on her sleeping mat. She had heard the Old Man's shouts. When I entered, she got up to pour us a cup of tea. I sat down on the dirt floor because my life was moving too quickly, and I thought being closer to the ground would slow it down. I rocked back and forth on my haunches, like the old woman who sells whatever she has in her garden that day. My mother walked over to me. She sat down and wrapped herself around me, pressing my stooped back into hers. The gesture stopped time.

I know, Má. I know. I have never left your womb, is how you want me to feel. I will always be protected, safe inside of you, is what you want me always to remember. Yes, Má, I know. Yes, Má, I am there still.

My mother took a red pouch from the inside of the money belt that she had worn around her waist since my birth. The one place where the Old Man will never look, she thought. She put the pouch in my hand and told me she had no real need or desire for that bit of extravagance anymore. I gave her back the pouch,
but she pushed it back into my hand. "I have all that I need," she lied. I smiled because my mother, even at a time like this, could not manage to sound angry or harsh. I put the red pouch in my shirt pocket. I kissed her cheeks, taking the time to smell the oranges in her hair.

STEIN AND TOKLAS
are brazen, you tell me. Lovey and Pussy? My Lord, those two really have no shame, you say, laughing out loud.

You, Sweet Sunday Man, want to know everything about them, from their pet names for each other to whether they have kissed in front of me. You refer to them both as "the Steins," which confuses me, but you assure me that all the boys who gather at their Saturday teas call them "the Steins" as well. Behind their backs, that is, you say, warning me never to say such a thing to their faces. The Steins? Of course not, Sweet Sunday Man, that would make them sound like some sort of a machine. My Mesdames, believe me, are many things, but they are definitely not mechanically inclined. GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas own an automobile, but only GertrudeStein drives. Miss Toklas navigates. GertrudeStein has a love of the open road, but only Miss Toklas has the maps. Both my Mesdames, however, are equally ill equipped when it comes to the sludgy oil drips, the sputtering engine, the familiar slow rolling motion before each unscheduled stop. An automobile, my Mesdames agree, is a machine and animal confused into one. Caught somewhere in between, it is, understandably, a bit temperamental. Experience, though, has taught them that breakdowns are just temporary. Automobiles, unlike humans, have many lives. My Mesdames simply have to be patient and wait for the next reincarnation. Actually, they just have to wait for the next car. The sight of two women sitting in a vehicle, unaccompanied by a man and therefore seen as "alone," always stops traffic of all kinds, though traffic, or what passes for it, is often scarce: a young man on a bicycle, a hay-filled cart pulled by a farm horse and his owner, another man, this time not so young, on a bicycle. All are eager to help, but all are slow to reach it because the actual help is often several towns away. In France, mechanics are not like bakers. One is not needed for each town.

When Miss Toklas knows that their drive will take them outside Paris, to places where a taxi cannot be hailed at a moment's notice for the return trip home, she packs along their "waiting kits." Hers contains a set of knitting needles and several balls of apple green yarn, the disheveled kind with wispy hairs tangled on its surface. She likes the color, so unripe it makes her pucker just to look at it. But most of all, she likes how the crispness of the color serves as a foil for the texture of the yarn, a melt-in-her-hand sensation. The eyes tell her one story, and the hands tell her another. Miss Toklas is particularly fond of this sort of interchange. She thinks it makes the difference between a well-knitted scarf and an intriguing, well-knitted scarf. "Fashionable, stylish, pretty" are too subjective, she thinks, accountable as they are to personal foibles and the mood of the time. "Intriguing," however, always calls for a second look, an irresistible glance back, a heightened desire to know and to have. Intrigue cannot be added at the very end. A sprinkling of sequins, a glazing of glass beads, a handful of store-bought fringes, all suggest a lack of forethought, like salting a roast after it has cooked as opposed to before. My Madame knows that intrigue, like salt, is best if it is there from the beginning.