The Book of Salt (7 page)

The last time I saw Anh Minh, he was in the garden behind the Governor-General's house with a crew of his strongest men, beating buckets of egg whites and shovels of white sugar in oversized copper bowls. Worktables had been set up just steps away from the door to the kitchen. On a night like this, Anh Minh knew that it was better to labor under the open sky. A breeze might blow through, and the leaves on the branches overhead would fan his men as they worked. On a night like this, the kitchen fans—giant star anises suspended from the ceilings—did little to lessen the heat coming from the ovens. If they had stayed inside, the egg whites, my brother knew, would have cooked solid. He had seen it happen to French chefs, newly arrived, who had no idea what can happen in the kitchens of Vietnam. The egg whites hit the side of the bowl, the wire whisk plunges in, and before the steady stream of sugar can be added, the whites are heavy and scrambled, a calf's brain shattered into useless lumps. In comparison, the garden was an oasis but still far from the ideal temperature for beating air into the whites until they expanded, pillowed, and became unrecognizable. Anh Minh compensated by setting each fire-colored bowl in a tray of chipped ice, a fortune disappearing before our eyes. Except for the "whoosh whoosh" of air whisked by taut forearms, there was silence. Sweat beads descended from necks, arms, and hands and collected in the bowls. Their salt, like the copper and the ice, would help the mixture take its shape.

Sixty-two guests were expected that night at Madame's birthday dinner. One hundred twenty-four turban-shaped islands of meringue, crisscrossed by fine lines of caramelized sugar, would bob two by two in crystal bowls brimming with chilled
sabayon
sauce. Anh Minh claimed that this was the one dish that proved that old Chaboux had been worthy of the chef's toque. His replacement, Chef Blériot, must have agreed, as this was the one recipe from the former regime that he followed without change. Even though it was highly unorthodox, said Anh Minh, a clear deviation from the classic recipe for
oeufs à la neige.
"Eggs in the snow," Anh Minh had translated for me, like it was the first line of a poem. He, like Chef Blériot, refused to condemn old Chaboux's actions. "Poor Chaboux," Anh Minh said, "no one had been more surprised by Madame's command than he. "

After all, "As if in France!" was Madame's unflinching rallying cry, one that had never failed to set old Chaboux's Gallic heart pounding. "The Governor-General's household has the duty to maintain itself with dignity and distinction. Everything here should be
as if in France!
" Madame commanded, failing to note that in France she would have only three instead of fifteen to serve her household needs. "As if in France!" ended each sharp command, a punctuation that Madame inserted for our benefit. Even the oldest member of the household staff, the gardener's helper with his stooped back and his moss-grown tongue, could mimic it. Every afternoon when Madame donned her tennis whites and departed for the club, we would let it slip from our lips, an all-purpose complaint, a well-aimed insult, a bitter-filled expletive. Madame's phrase had so many meanings, and we amused ourselves by using them all. Accompanied by our laughter, "As if in France!" barreled through the house, hid itself inside closets, slept behind curtains, until Madame returned, her face flushed from lobbing a little ball to and fro, to
reclaim the words as her own. "As if in France!" lost its power over Madame, though, when the topic at hand was her growing distrust of cows' milk. "In this tropical heat," Madame had been told, "it is not unheard of for the milk to spoil as it is leaving the beast's sweaty udder."

"Imagine living among a people who have tasted only mother's milk," the chauffeur overheard Madame exclaiming as she dictated a letter. "Before we arrived," Madame continued, "what the Indochinese called milk' was only water poured over crushed dried soybeans!" Madame knew that this would set her sister's head shaking, thinking of how fortunate she was to have married a man with no ambition. Madame ended her letter, which was to be typed by her secretary onto the Governor-General's official stationery, with a few parting lines about the managerial difficulties of overseeing a household staff of fifteen. This, explained the chauffeur, was just in case her sister lingered too long on such unenlightened thoughts.

Madame's orders to old Chaboux were clear. The
crème anglaise,
the surrogate snow, a concoction of egg yolks, sugar, and milk, had to be replaced. For her birthday dinner, Madame wanted her eggs in the snow, but she would not have any of Indochina's milk in the snow. "Simply too much of a risk," she said. "I've heard that the Nationalists have been feeding the cows here a weed so noxious that the milk, if consumed in sufficient amounts, would turn a perfectly healthy woman barren." The "woman" that Madame and old Chaboux had in their minds was, of course, French. Madame added this piece of unsolicited horror and bodily affront to Mother France just in case old Chaboux dared to balk at his task. It was all up to him. He was the intrepid explorer dispatched to honor and to preserve the sanctity of Madame and all Mesdames who would receive the embossed dinner invitations. In a country hovering at the edge of the equator, in a kitchen dried of the milk of his beloved bovine, this beleaguered chef had to do the impossible. Old Chaboux had to find new snow.

"
Sabayon
sauce instead of
crème anglaise!
" Anh Minh repeated
the now departed chef's dramatic solution. Every year Minh the Sous Chef's retelling of the ingredients, while guarding their exact proportions as his secret, signaled that the all-night preparation for Madame's dinner had begun. "Over the lowest possible flame, whisk egg yolks with sugar and dry white wine," my brother, standing in a makeshift kitchen lit by stars and a barely present moon, explained the recipe to me one more time, knowing all the while that this would be his final lesson, regretting that in the end it had so little meaning.

Misfortune and despair have always propped the Old Man up like walking sticks, like dutiful sons. Not his own but other people's. The Old Man built a business off of other people's last resorts and broken spirits. He delivered them to the open arms of His Savior, Jesus Christ, and, to a lesser extent, the Virgin Mother. Virgin Mother, indeed. Only men who have taken a vow of celibacy could conjure her up, a hallucination who comes to them in the votive-lit nights, who tells them to place their weary heads on her bosom, draped in chaste cloth but ample all the same. The Old Man had no patience for Her. He had felt that way from the very beginning, from the day that he was led to Saigon's Notre-Dame and told to kneel, to turn his face toward the cathedral doors and away from the woman who had to peel his small pleading fingers from her own. From that day, from the moment when he became a Catholic, She was to him an unnecessary attachment, a weak character in a story that he would otherwise come to believe.

A cathedral, even one so close to the equator, can still cause a young boy to shiver. In a country with only two seasons, sun and rain, a cold day if it arrives can rarely survive. The houses of his Lord are a favorite resting place, where the cold is hoarded and stored away in the curtained confessionals, the cathedral's stone floor, the marble Christ, crucified and veined, the gold chalices, icier than their burnished colors would imply. In a cathedral, shuddering, a young boy, who would one day become the Old Man, spent his youth advancing from choirboy to altar boy to seminarian, dutifully living the life that the holy fathers had chosen for him. But when it came time for his ordination, the young man announced that the Virgin Mother had come to him and told him to take a wife. The holy fathers were stunned. Many wondered why She had never said the same to them. The young man had lied, but his words were precise. He wanted not just a woman but a wife. After all, he could join the priesthood and still have a woman. Some of the holy fathers had two or three. It seemed that their vow of celibacy made many women feel utterly at ease. Baring their souls led to the baring of other things as well. When I am feeling generous, I tell myself that he wanted a wife because he wanted something to call his own. More accurately, he wanted something he could own, property that could multiply, increase in worth every nine months. The holy fathers walked away, heads bowed, claiming that they knew nothing about such things.

The young man went to see a matchmaker who told him not to worry. Even a man with no money, property, or a family name could procure a wife. Being a man is already worth enough, he was told, and the rest are extras, baubles for the lucky few. "The trick," said the matchmaker, "is to find a girl worth less than you." For the young man, that meant she had to be worth nothing at all. Sadly, there were a number of suitable candidates. The young man walked away from the holy fathers and from a life garbed in tunicles, chasubles, palliums, and miters, but he did not go far. He found a small house on the outskirts of the city, a good distance from the cathedral but still close enough to hear its carillon bells. He chose it for its location. In order for his new business to thrive, he needed to be within walking distance of poverty. Abject was not required. That would be overdoing it. He needed just a paid-on-Saturday, broke-by-Sunday kind of poverty, a deep-rooted not-going-anywhere-soon kind of insolvency. Given his particular area of expertise, he also needed to find a neglected, preferably withering, outpost of his Lord. The young man soon found all that he was looking for. He walked into a wood-framed church equipped with a native
priest and little else and offered to keep that congregation alive, for a fee of course, paid upon delivery, per newly bowed head. Father Vincente, né Vũ, who had celebrated Mass only as a lonely affair between himself and the occasional visiting seminarians, agreed and did not bother to ask how.

The young man was not brilliant. He was not even clever. He was gifted, though, with a singular insight: "Where there is gambling, there is faith." This was the gem that his god had unwittingly placed inside his mouth. He, in turn, devised a ritual that made it easier for the two to meet: late-night card games at his house and early-morning prayers at His house. When the gamblers won, they prayed, and the newly converted always won at least once or twice, a hook lodged painlessly inside their cheeks. When the gamblers lost, they prayed. Either way, the young man—as he always got a healthy cut of the pot in addition to the usual per-head fee from Father Vincente—and to a lesser extent the Catholic Church, won. Would Father Vincente have fainted or at least blushed if he had known? But why ask questions when the diocese rewarded him for the steady rate of conversions, the monthly baptismals that multiplied his parishioners, giving him finally a flock.

As the years went by, there developed, however, an increasingly rapid migration from pew to grave in Father Vincente's church. Even Father Vincente acknowledged the irony. "No sooner did they come looking for salvation than salvation came looking for them" became the signature line in his otherwise unremarkable delivery of the last rites. With each passing year Father Vincente noted with growing regret that the young man, who was now the Old Man, could no longer deliver to him that segment of the population that had been the lifeblood of the church. Young men, Father Vincente had been pleased to observe, had a tendency to marry and therefore could contribute wives and offspring to the congregation. Father Vincente eventually understood that the Old Man's appeal was limited to men his own age. "You have to know your customers," the Old Man said with a shrug, his speech slurring, words slipping off his
spirits-slick tongue. Father Vincente held his breath and turned his face the other way.

The last time I saw Anh Minh, he closed his eyes and said that he had seen everything, my foolish grin, the stream of red, the open mouths, the white cloth limp in my hand. He dropped his head and said he could save me then but not now. He confirmed for me what I had always suspected. Anh Minh had a weakness for small animals. He could never cut a chicken's neck and hold it over a bowl and watch the blood drain. He understood life through the parables of his chosen trade, and what he witnessed fourteen years ago in the Old Man's house was a blade being sharpened. What he felt shook his body.

On the day when my six-year-old feet bore stains of red, Anh Minh convinced the Old Man that within a few years he would be able to secure a position for me in the Governor-General's kitchen. "Even the lowest-paid helpers get two meals a day and a chance to wear the long white apron someday," Anh Minh said. "But the competition is stiff," he told the Old Man. "Now, every kid who waits outside the back gate knows a mouthful of French, has worked in a plantation kitchen, has a distant cousin or two within the ranks of the household staff. Now is the time to get started."

"He could first get some experience by helping Ma out with her business. I mean with her chores in the kitchen. Of course, Ma's kitchen is nothing like the Governor-General's," Anh Minh quickly added, upon seeing the glint that had cracked open the Old Man's eyes. "At most, he could learn from Má how to hold a knife, how to chop and peel, work his way around a hot stove. He'll learn the finer points when he comes to work with me. Má can just get him started with the basics," Anh Minh proposed, hoping that our mother was not listening behind the closed door, hoping that her heart was still whole. No matter how many steamed packets of rice she sold, my brother knew that the Old Man would never tolerate it being called a "business." That was
his
word. Anh Minh deferred to him even
though he knew that it was the proceeds from our mother's kitchen that kept rice on our table, that the Old Man's income only kept his bottles from going dry. "Can't be helped," the Old Man had said. "A necessary business expense," he claimed.

"As for the French, I can teach him enough to impress Monsieur and Madame, but I'd have to begin now. Every day once he's done with Ma, he can come to the Governor-General's. I'll teach him a few words during my breaks. Anyway, it'll do him good to see how a
real
kitchen is run."