The Book of Salt (4 page)

"No, no, a writer and, umm, a companion. But that's not the point! They are nice, very nice."

"And?"

"Well, no point really. Except. Except, you should call her by her full name, Gertrude Stein. Always GertrudeStein.' Just think of it as one word."

"Is that it? What about the other one?"

"Her name is Alice B. Toklas. She prefers ' Miss Toklas.'"

"And?"

"Well, that's it. That's it."

"I'll be back in an hour, then. Good-bye, Monsieur."

This is a temple, not a home.

The thought—barely formed, fluid, just beginning to mingle with the faint smells introduced by the opening door—changes so quickly from prophecy to gospel that I am for a brief moment extricated from my body, made to stand beside myself, and allowed to serve as a solemn eyewitness. Ordinarily, I am plagued, like the Old Man, with a slowness. In him, it was triggered by cowardice. In me, it is aggravated by carelessness. Ours is a hesitancy toward an act that is habitual and common to those around us: the forming of conclusions. We are, instead, weighted and heavied by decades of observations. We gather them, rags and remnants, and then have no needle and thread with which to sew them together. But once they are formed, ours become the thick, thorny coat of a durian, a covering designed to forestall the odor of rot and decay deep inside. But to the neighbors whose prying eyes were members of our extended family, the Old Man was a person of sure-footed opinions, a man of unwavering morals, a man who laid down judgments with the ease of an ox marking its path with piles of its own dung. Since my first night away from home, I have been suffer
ing through a dream, sad and naked. I am standing in front of the Old Man's coffin, which has been laid out in front of his house underneath the morning sun, and I am saying, as if in a trance: "This was a man who benefited from a long life. Over the course of his many decades, he had reached a handful of conclusions about the world around him. In his hands they, the coarse sediments of his life, lost their natural complexities, became a string of pearl-like truths, a choker for the necks of those who share his name." Taking a deep breath, I then solemnly declare, "He was a coward who finally had the courage to die, knowing that in the silence that he leaves behind him, I would have the last word, would come forward to ensure that his reputation dies along with his body." In my dream, I am saying all of this in French, though I know that this is impossible. But in my dream, cruelty greases my tongue and I am undeniably fluent.

This is a temple, not a home.

The thought—growing stronger with the scent of cloves and sweet cinnamon in the air—takes me out of the past, a borderless country in which I so often find myself, and returns me to Paris, to the rue de Fleurus, where a door, joints rusted red but otherwise unadorned, is opening. A woman with the face of an owl emerges and positions herself inside of a wedge of light. The woman, I think, has the face of an "Ancient." This is not to say that her face is wrinkled or dulled. Ancients, according to Bão, my bunkmate on board the
Niobe,
wear faces that have not changed for centuries. To look at them, he said, is to look at a series of paintings of their ancestors and their descendants, as when two mirrors endlessly reflect each other's images. Bão said that Ancients possess features so strong and forceful that they can withstand generation after generation of new and insurgent bloodlines. Women, who are accused of adultery because the faces of their children refuse to resemble those of their husbands, are often Ancients. In a firefly moment of introspection, Bão said that these women are feared because they make a mockery out of the marriage union, that their children's preor
dained faces proclaim too loudly that the man is irrelevant, that maybe he is not needed at all. Bão, of course, did not say it in exactly these words. His were more immodest, recalling with photographic details the acts performed by Serena the Soloist, a mixed-blood beauty from Pondicherry who commanded half a week of his wages, money he now thought was well spent, for a glimpse of his own irrelevancy. Money well spent, indeed. Serena and her talented fingers and toes have become for Bão a supple example, a sort of explicit device, that helps him to explain everything he knows in life, from how to bargain for a few extra slices of beef in his bowl of
phỏ
to the difference between serving under English ship captains and French ones. But no matter why Serena was introduced, after each encore Bão without fail would offer this advice: "Remember, as Serena the Soloist showed me, there are just
some
things a man can't do!" Bão's eyes would then open wide, and his body would remain perfectly still, as if he were removing all distractions so that the indelicate meaning of his words could be fully savored. Bão's own convulsive, silent laughter would then officially end the show. When we first met, I asked Bão why he became a sailor when his name meant "storm." He responded with a rhythmless shaking, an open-mouthed silence, that I would only later learn to equate with laughter.

As I slipped into the South China Sea, as water erased the shoreline, absolving it of my sins, I began to believe that conflict and strife were landlocked. Too sweat-stained and cumbersome for sea travel, I thought. So during our time together, Bão and I developed a tacit understanding that everything he said was true. A covenant easily kept because there were few on board the
Niobe
with the authority to contradict, to say "No, that is not true," who understood the sounds that we made. The First Officer, according to Bão, knew a few words of Vietnamese, but the woman who sold them to him was from the old Imperial City of Hue. His ears were trained only to respond to her Hue cadence, with its twists and undulations, like the wringing of wet silk, regal even as she sat naked asking for the money she
had just earned. The First Officer heard in our southern market banter the unfamiliar language of a lower class of whores. This is all to say that Bão and I had built a safe house, and we were its only inhabitants. We were also the fatal flaws in its design. Arms raised, palms opened, giving ourselves up to the Indian Ocean winds that carried with them traces of loneliness like airborne granules of pollen, we were its only pillars, absorbing the whole of its weight. As long as we were together, we had shelter. The day that the
Niobe
docked in Marseilles, Bão collected his pay and waved good-bye from a ship heading for America. "As long as we are together, we have shelter," I mouthed to him, but he was already at sea.

The woman with the face of an owl repeats her question. My memories of Bão must have been swallowing me whole. How long have I have been standing there, silent? My delay in responding, even when what is posed is simple and direct, can usually be shrugged away with a smile and a "My French is not very good." But this afternoon I cannot deliver either one. I cannot respond to any of the woman's jangly French words because I am too enthralled by her upper lip with its black hairs twitching gently as she speaks. Her mustache, I think, would be the envy of all three of my brothers, who could only aspire to such definition after weeks' worth of unfettered growth. The arc of hair, like a descended third eyebrow, is topped by a solemn monument to the god of smells. Protruding from her forehead, abruptly billowing out as it reaches her eye sockets, it is not so much a nose as an altarpiece that segregates the left side of her face from her right. Moving northward, her facial features disappear underneath a skullcap of hair, dark, absorbing the late-afternoon light. I am overwhelmed by the intrusiveness of it all until I look into her eyes. They live apart from their housing. Chasing the light that gilds this city in early autumn, her irides are two nets gently swooping over a band of butterflies. Catching the light, the circles erupt, bright with movement, the flapping and fanning of many colored wings. We stand looking at
each other, waiting for my response. I am here to inquire about the position as a cook, I want to say, but lacking the finer components, I offer instead, "I am the cook you are looking for." Her eyes flicker with recognition and respond with an implicit "Of course."

***

I have been behind the temple door longer now than any other in this city. I have been given my own set of keys. I know the arrangement of the rooms that the door once concealed. I have been given a room to call my own. I have slept soundly, dreamed deeply, inside it. I can walk through the others with my eyes closed. I can walk through them without being seen. I have heard all the stories that inhabit them, know the colorful faces that line their walls. I can imagine my Mesdames waiting here for me from the very beginning. Life at 27 rue de Fleurus, believe me, has the ebb and flow of the sea, predictable, with reassuring periods of calm.

I had arrived on a Sunday afternoon, after all. Miss Toklas would have been nowhere else but firmly planted in the kitchen. Enrobed in thick woolen socks, secured underneath the leather straps of her sandals, her feet would have stood slightly apart as she peeled the tart green apples that would later that night soothe GertrudeStein's periodic hankering for her childhood in America. Miss Toklas always stands when she is in the kitchen. Cooking, she thinks, is not a leisure activity. But for her, it has become just that, and she is keenly aware of it. She keeps a cardboard box filled with recipes, like other women keep love letters from their youth. She is afraid that she will forget the passion. She now cooks for GertrudeStein only on Sundays. In their household, like others in Paris, the cooks are granted Sundays off. At the end of each week, Miss Toklas by necessity and by desire steps back into the kitchen, gets butter and flour underneath her fingernails, breathes in the smell of cinnamon, burns her tongue, and is comforted. They never dine out on Sundays. No exceptions. No visitors at the studio door with letters of introduction. No requests granted for a viewing of the paintings. On
Sundays my Madame and Madame are safely settled in their dining room with their memories of their America heaped onto large plates. Of course, Miss Toklas can reach far beyond the foods of her childhood. She is a cook who puts absinthe in her salad dressing and rose petals in her vinegar. Her menus can map the world. But lately the two of them have shared a taste for the foods that fortified them in their youth. Neither of them seems to notice that Miss Toklas's "apple pie" is now filled with an applesauce-flavored custard and frosted with buttercream or that her "meat loaf harbors the zest of an orange and is bathed in white wine. GertrudeStein thinks it is unfathomably erotic that the food she is about to eat has been washed, pared, kneaded, touched, by the hands of her lover. She is overwhelmed by desire when she finds the faint impressions of Miss Toklas's fingerprints decorating the crimped edges of a pie crust. Miss Toklas believes that these nights are her reward. She is a pagan who secretly yearns for High Mass. To her, there is something of both in their Sunday nights that lets her spirit soar.

"Pussy, there is someone at the studio door," GertrudeStein would have called out from her chintz-covered armchair.

There are two of these armchairs at 27 rue de Fleurus, and both of them are located in the studio. They were made-to-order and therefore could accommodate both the fullness of GertrudeStein's girth and the conciseness of Miss Toklas's stature.

"Lovey, I am
tired
of dangling my feet in the air. A woman of my age should be able to sit down without having to look like a misbehaving child," Miss Toklas must have declared.

"All right, Pussy, all right," GertrudeStein must have agreed.

And their debate about the costly armchairs must have ended just like that. Because Miss Toklas, I know, rarely has to say more than "Lovey" to triumph.

GertrudeStein, accustomed by now to her comfy throne, would have called out again, "Please, Pussy, please. There is someone at the studio door."

"But, Lovey,
you
are right there!" Miss Toklas, from her position at the kitchen sink, would have stated the obvious, knowing all the while that it was of no use. GertrudeStein will not answer her own door today or any other day. GertrudeStein has in recent years begun to conclude that those who deliberately seek her out are god-awful nuisances, unless they were willing, of course, to recognize her genius. She, it must be acknowledged, is the brightest star in the Western sky. Though in truth, I think GertrudeStein is more of a constellation. She is about the same height as Miss Toklas, but she has a sturdy build, storing most of her weight in her bosom and hips. GertrudeStein is a great beauty, both Miss Toklas and I believe. No, for me, not at first. Only Miss Toklas could claim such immediate clarity. GertrudeStein's features are broad, unmistakable, a bit coarse. Her nose and ears appear to be disproportionately larger than the rest of her face. She, though, carries herself as if she is an object of desire. She carries herself as if she is her own object of desire. Such self-induced lust is addictive in its effect. Prolonged exposure makes those around them weak and helpless.

I have seen scattered around the apartment photographs of a GertrudeStein who wears her hair in a massive topknot, loose, blowzy, somewhat in disarray. The total effect, however, is heroic. The GertrudeStein I know has less hair on her head than I do. The story of her transformation began, I would imagine, around noon, as she is rarely awake until then:

GertrudeStein looks at her reflection floating on the surface of a silver teapot and concludes that the pile of hair on top of her head is unacceptable. It is, she thinks, disrupting the continuity of her face. Shearing it, she tells Miss Toklas, will be an important act. Pointless overdecoration, GertrudeStein explains, thinking of the commas and periods that she has plucked from the pages of her writings. Such interferences, she insists, are nothing more than toads flattened on a country road, careless and unsightly. The modern world is without limits, she tells Miss Toklas, so the modern story must accommodate the possibilities—a road where she can get lost if she so chooses or go slow and touch each blade of grass. GertrudeStein should know.
She is an excellent driver. She lapses, however, when she has to go in reverse. She would rather keep on driving until she can turn the automobile around, a 360-degree arc of obstinacy. That way, she is technically always going forward.