The Book of Salt (6 page)

I will forget that you whispered to Miss Toklas that you were looking for a cook. You accompanied my Madame into the kitchen, bestowing upon her all the while compliments and congratulations for the composition of her tea table. The cakes are almost as sublime as their setting, you said. Honeysuckle roses and acacias, you lied, are your favorite floral combination. Leaning in, you explained in a conspiratorial tone that some friends are visiting and that you want to host a dinner party in their honor. I hope that I may impose upon you for a bit of advice, you murmured into the curving canals of my Madame's ear, and in that polite but intimate way you began the story that you were telling for me.

Miss Toklas admired the timbre of your voice. She wondered if she were hearing bells. She thought that you resembled a young novice whose face she once had glimpsed through the crumbling, honeycombed walls of a Spanish convent. Something feral and fast underneath the gentle garb, she recalled. Her eyes lingered on the cut of your suit. So American in its forthrightness, she thought. No bells and whistles, she thought. Miss Toklas approved of the scent of bay and lime on your skin. Like a Frenchman, she thought, announcing himself even before he enters the room, making an impression even after he is gone. With each breath my Madame was taking you in, and you knew it.

Later that night Miss Toklas asked me what I did with my Sundays. I had been in their household for over four years, and that night was the first time, the first time either one of my Mesdames had asked me about my one day away from them. My Sundays belong to me, I thought.

"Nothing," I said.

"Nothing," Miss Toklas repeated with a smile.

Are you mocking me, Madame? I thought.

"Why?" I asked.

"Do you remember the young man who came into the kitchen with me this afternoon?"

Remember him? If I am fortunate, I will think of nothing but him all night long, I thought.

"Yes," I said.

"He is looking for a cook for this Sunday.

"I am the cook he is looking for, I thought.

"Oh," I said, without blinking an eye.

Miss Toklas explained to me that you were a young bachelor who would allow me free rein with planning the menu. An American, but one who could still afford to pay a premium, she assured me, for the inconvenience created by such short notice. She handed me your calling card and told me to meet you the following day at a quarter past two.

"Did I mention that he complimented you on those lovely, actually, I think he said sublime,' cakes that you served this afternoon?" Miss Toklas added, knowing that I am vain and that my vanity would understand the honey in her voice, even if I had to flick aside her hollow words like ants.

I had no hope, so I had no suspicion. I looked at the name on the card and saw nothing there but a fine pair of boots for the winter. My shirt cuffs are worn. Frayed edges are the telltale filigree
of secondhand garments. My gloves bare the tips of my fingers to cold, observant eyes, but my shoes, my shoes belong to a man who does not think twice about strolling through life on the heels of luxury. Supple leather, hand-stitched details, eloquent in form and function and, yes, they gleam. I shine them each day with the sweat of my labor. I shine them each night until I can see my reflection, muddied and unpolished. I had arrived fifteen minutes early, and there was no one home.

I sat in the doorway of 12 rue de l'Odéon and lost myself in the passing street life. In this way, I am afraid, I am very French. I am entertained best by the continuous flow of people whom I do not know. I am amused by the faces that fade in and fade out as they pass me by. What these Parisians will declare out loud under their blue-tented sky, I will never fully understand, but I do not need their conversations. There are always the stock characters with their classic poses, which even I can comprehend: lovers, best when configured in threes, two locked in a visual embrace, the third trailing, losing self-respect but not hope with each frantic step; students, traveling in a band of fours and fives, eyes bloodshot from endless nights of too many books or too many drinks but rarely both; poets, always alone even when they are accompanied by their muse, casting long shadows in long coats with too many holes and patches, carefully cultivated emblems of creativity that disqualify them from pity.

From the other side of the street you approached holding two books in one hand and in the other, dangling from one finger, a white paper box tied with some red string. Sweets, I thought. My eyes fell into the rumpled folds of your coat, the waves of your hair. I want to be at sea again, I thought. I want to be at sea again.

Your hair looks clean and freshly washed, I thought. An important indicator of anyone's overall cleanliness. You wear it parted on the left-hand side. A personal preference of mine as well. Your tie is tucked into the V of your sweater. I too prefer a sweater's soft drape to the buttons and bulk of a vest. Your coat looks warm. I would look good in it. Your hands ... your
hands? But where are your gloves? Ah, hands like yours will not stay cold for very long. Your eyes, coffee and cinnamon. An infusion to wake me from sleep.

"Well, are you coming in with me, or shall we conduct our interview here in the doorway?"

Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. "Interview," though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts. I got up and walked with you into a stairwell paneled with sheets of sunlight, slipped one by one through the dusty window-panes. I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic.

Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate—useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.

THE LAST TIME
I saw Anh Minh, we met at the back gate of the Governor-General's house. I remember looking inside the brightly lit kitchen and seeing the ceiling fans whirl, pushing hot currents of air out the windows. It was two o'clock in the morning, but the kitchen was all oven heat. Chef Blériot had fired up all four of the coal ovens and stuffed them with slender loaves, their smooth surfaces slashed at even intervals. The rest of the house was dark, except for a dim glow coming from the window of the chauffeur's room.

Years ago when I had just joined the Governor-General's household, Anh Minh told me that the chauffeur was the first son of a rich merchant, had studied in Paris, returned to Vietnam to see his father smoke away all of the family's fortune in puffs of opium, lost his automobile to a gambling debt, and spent hours now, when he was not driving Monsieur and Madame's Renault, writing poems about Madame's secretary, a slightly cross-eyed girl who was half-French and half-Vietnamese. All this, my brother said to me without a breath or a pause. He ran in a similar speed through the life stories of the others who made up the household staff of fifteen. He was motivated by a sense of duty and not by a love of gossip. He knew that I would need these facts in order to survive. That they would help me to avoid the pitfalls of those personalities who ranked higher up than I. I was told these stories so that I could think of them before I opened my mouth. At the Governor-General's, a servant whom Monsieur and Madame disliked would need to be careful, but one whom his fellow servants disliked would not last the night. Think of it as having thirteen enemies as opposed to two, Anh Minh told me. He had kindly excluded himself from the count of possible assassins, and that fact I also stored away. Overall, my oldest brother preferred to limit his lessons to the goings-on of the kitchen. I always knew when Minh the Sous Chef was preparing to teach. First he would wipe his fingers on the handkerchief that he always kept in his pocket, then he would throw his head back, tendering his throat to the blades of the kitchen's ceiling fans. From out of his mouth then came praise for the merits of Breton butter, heavily salted and packed in tins, which was served to Monsieur with his morning baguettes. Madame preferred preserves, in thick glass jars with hand-lettered labels, made from yellow plums that have the name of a beautiful French girl. "Mirabelle," Anh Minh repeated so that I, too, could see her. When old Chaboux passed away and young Blériot arrived to take his place, my brother told me that these French chefs were purists, classically trained, from families of chefs going back at least a century. Minh the Sous Chef agreed that it was probably better this way. After all, the
chef de cuisine
at the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon—a man who claimed to be from Provence but who was rumored to be the illegitimate son of a high-ranking French official and his Vietnamese seamstress—had to be dismissed because he was serving dishes obscured by lemongrass and straw mushrooms. He also slipped pieces of rambutan and jackfruit into the sorbets. "The clientele was outraged, demanded that the natives in the kitchen be immediately dismissed if not j ailed, shocked that the culprit was a harmless-looking Provençal,' incensed enough to threaten closure of the most fashionable
hotel in all of Indochina, and, yes, the Continental sent the man packing!" said Anh Minh, delivering another lesson in the shortest amount of time possible.

Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and have enough to start life all over again. Even then, I knew that every night those minutes saved were squandered away in a deep sleep from which my brother awoke with nothing but the handkerchief in his pocket. But in the kitchen with Minh the Sous Chef, I was content just to listen. Anh Minh, being the first, had inherited the voice that we, the three brothers who followed, coveted. If I closed my e yes, the Old Man was there with his river tones, low and close to the earth, a deep current summoning me from ashore. He was there without the floating islands of sewage, the half-submerged bodies of newborn animals, the swirling pools of dried-up leaves and broken branches. Making its way through Anh Minh's parted lips, the Old Man's voice, purified, said, "I believe in you." In the kitchen of the Governor-General, I learned from my brother's words and found solace in the Old Man's voice. I received there the benediction that I would otherwise never hear.

"Stupid! Hey, Stupid, get me my box of chew."

The Old Man was talking to me all right, but he could have been talking to any of my brothers instead. By the time we were able to walk, we had learned our name. "Stupid" was shared by us like a hand-me-down. We were all the same until one of us redeemed himself, collecting small tokens, brief glimpses of the man whom the Old Man wanted us to be.

One became a porter for the railroads, second-class, but he hoped to see the interior of first before too long. The French had tattooed the countryside with tracks, knowing that mobility would allow them to keep a stranglehold on the little dragon that they called their own. Every day, mobility pounded on the shoulders of my second oldest brother. Every day, Anh Hoàng was shoved into the ground by the weight of the vanity cases of
French wives. They, with their government-clerk husbands, were touring their colony, forgetting who they were, forgetting that they had to cross oceans to move up a class.

My third oldest brother worked at a printing press. He cleaned the typeset sheets, ready to be dismantled, voided by the next day's news. He removed each block and cleaned the letters while they were still warm and cloaked in a soft scab of ink, getting his brush into the sickle moons of each "C," the surrendering arms of each "Y." In his hands were the latest export prices of rubber, profitable even though the natives had delayed the caoutchouc harvest with their malaria and dysentery. In his hands were the numbers of heads guillotined for a foolhardy assassination attempt—the lone Nationalist did not even reach the gates of the villa, but justice demanded that an example be firmly set. Anh Tùng looked down and saw only the "O" roar of a lion's mouth, the "T" branches of a tree, the "S" curve of the Mekong. Anh Tùng smiled to himself thinking how the heat of the presses was not as bad as his friends had warned him, how the taste of ink
can
be washed away by a cup of tepid tea, how he would just hide his graying fingernails in his pockets when he went courting.

Minh the Sous Chef was the undeniable success. He should have been born in the Year of the Dragon, the Old Man said. A dragon in a long white apron was an irony forever lost on the Old Man. To him, the apron was a vestment, embroidered, consecrated by the outstretched hands of his god. No blotches of chicken grease, no stench of onions, no smears of entrails and fish guts, only the color of success in the Old Man's eyes. He often speculated that Anh Minh, being the firstborn, must have inherited the full measure of his own intelligence, talent, and ambition. When men of his own age were present, the Old Man declared that Anh Minh, being
the first,
must have soaked up all that my mother's womb had to offer. I can still see these strangers licking their lips, hear their low laughter, as they all shared in the thought of my mother at fourteen, at being her first, at soaking her up. Worse, I can still hear the Old Man's words:

"Look at Stupid over there. Good thing she dried up after him. The next one would have been a girl for sure!" the Old Man says, as he spits out the thin red juices flooding his lips. The betel nut and the lime paste that he constantly chews are dissolving in the heat of his mouth. He misses the spittoon. I jump up to wipe the floor clean. It is the reason that he keeps me around. He points his chin at me, offering me up to his cohorts as he had my mother. The laughter is now high and pitched. I am six years old. I am standing in the middle of a room of men, all drunk on something cheap. I am looking at the Old Man as he is spitting more red in my direction. The warm liquid lands partly in the brass pot and partly on my bare feet. I am six years old, and I am looking up at this man's face. I smile at him because I, a child, cannot understand what he is saying to me.