The Book of Salt (8 page)

A smile appeared on the Old Man's face, like a sudden blistering of the skin. Again, his oldest son was making him proud. Minh the Sous Chef was thinking like a man, thinking of how to turn a profit from a loss, the Old Man thought. He was right. Anh Minh was thinking like a man, thinking of how to hide away a pain he could not bear. Anh Minh sent his words swirling through the Old Man's house, searching. They found for me there a room that the Old Man never deigned to enter, the only room in the house with a dirt floor. "Good enough for her," the Old Man had said, casting a sideways glance at my mother. The gesture had the same careless force as the spittle that shot from his mouth.

The last time I saw my oldest brother, he revealed to me the heroic deeds of his spent words, how they foretold the story of my life, kitchen-bound and adrift at sea. "I have given you everything," Anh Minh said, "and you have wasted it."

Both of us were raised by the Old Man, after all. Anh Minh, like me, was always looking for something more, and he had found it, I am afraid, in the darkness of the Governor-General's kitchen. Anh Minh, what did you think you would find there? Chef Blériot and Madame's secretary, a bit of fallen cleavage, a knot of lace underclothing wrapped around her bloodless ankles, a bit of sex to leverage into something more? My dear brother, I did not waste the life that you gave me. I traded it away for Blériot's lips counting down the notches of my spine, parting at the small of my back, for my fingers wrapped inside the locks of his hair, guiding his mouth as it arched my back, as
he brought us both heavenward without shame, as he made me cry "Mercy, please have mercy!"

The last time I saw Anh Minh, he stood with a fingernail moon at his back, with his heart in his throat. "How can I save you now?" he asked, repeating the only words that he had left for me that night.

WHILE WE WERE ABOARD
the
Niobe,
laboring the distance between Saigon and Marseilles, Bão told me about a sailor who came from a family of basket weavers going back many generations. In the beginning their ancestors had tried to sow their land with rice shoots, but the water hyacinths that grew first in those flooded fields refused to give up their claim. For three seasons, the family struggled and the water hyacinths won. When they looked around them, these people felt mocked, cursed even, because all of the neighboring plots were a rich rice-paddy green. Desperate and starving, the sailor's ancestors said so many prayers to their ancestors that finally they received a response. The matriarch of the family one morning announced that she had had a vision, which was particularly unexpected as she had been blind from birth. She said that from now on they would harvest the water hyacinths and dry their stalks for weaving baskets. According to Bão, she even showed them how, devising a pattern so intricate and tight that the baskets held water. Their neighbors thought them very useful and gladly traded some rice for a basket or two. In this way, the family no longer starved. In fact, by the time that the boy who would become the sailor was born, his family knew of no other way to make a living.

On his fifteenth birthday, the boy stopped his weaving and announced that he would travel to the next village over. When his family asked him why, he said, "Just to see." It was the anniversary of his birth and he was the oldest son, so his family packed him some rice, enough for the four-day journey to the next village over. Eight days later, the boy returned to his family's house, surrounded by water hyacinths in full purple bloom, and he told his family that he wanted to move to the next village over. When they asked him how he would survive, he said he would take some water hyacinth cuttings with him and begin a weaving business of his own. Four days away is not so far, and he
was
the oldest son. The following day the boy departed his family's land with a basket filled with cuttings, poised upon his right shoulder. With each forward stride, he left behind the impression of a slightly tipping scale.

"Can you guess what happened when he got to the next village?" Bão asked.

"He forgot the pattern," I answered.

"No, you ass! A person can't forget a skill like basket weaving because he moves from one village to another."

"Oh."

Bão's words can often be unkind, but I did not mind because he himself was never that way. That is not an implausible thing. Believe me, I am the one who knew him, shared the darkness of sleep with him, heard him humming during the hours before light. So I am the one, really the only one, who is qualified to say what is implausible about Bão.

"Come on, try again," he beckoned.

"The basket weaver didn't have any land," I guessed.

"No, he wasn't the village idiot like you. He bartered his labor during the rice harvesting season for the right to work on a small parcel of his neighbor's land."

"Just tell me then, Bão."

"No water hyacinths!"

"What?"

"No ... water ... hyacinths!" Bão repeated, as if the pauses, the added silence between his words, could also confer meaning.

According to Bão, the family's cuttings would not take to the new land, even though the field was suitably waterlogged and growing conditions were in all other ways favorable. The basket weaver had to pull the cuttings from the mud and the water and replant the plot with a local variety, which soon flourished under his care. He harvested them and dried them, but when he went to weave them, they broke apart in his hands. When the next growing season came along, the basket weaver brought his family's water hyacinth cuttings to the next, next village over and attempted to plant them in another small parcel of land. Again, there was not even a tiny shoot. Again, he tried the local variety, but the stalks proved brittle or, worse, they would hold the pattern of the weave only until he was done, and then they pulled themselves apart. The basket weaver, Bão said, continued his travel from village to village, hugging along the southern coast of Vietnam, only to find that there was not one place where his family's water hyacinth cuttings would grow. Exhausted and literally running out of land, the man ended up at sea.

"There must be another place," the basket weaver said to Bão after weeks and weeks at sea.

"I told him to try Holland!" Bão said, evidently proud of himself for ending the weaver's journey and his story with such practical advice. That, for Bão, was of course the point of telling the basket weaver's story. No matter who else may be present, Bão was the hero in all of his stories.

I think about him now usually when I am between jobs, which, granted, is often. About the basket weaver, not Bão. (Well, yes, him too.) For me, it is more than just the differences, the obvious contrast between the nature of the weaver's livelihood and mine. I am struck by how nonexportable it is, how it is an indigenous thing, requiring as it does the silt of his family's land. But this is not why I return to the basket weaver's
story again and again. I keep him with me because I want to know the part of his story that Bão did not tell me. What happened in the house, surrounded by water hyacinths in full purple bloom, that made him go? "Just to see" sounds to me like something Bão would make up, substituting his own vagueness for something twisting and more difficult to say. I can imagine the weaver's desire, all right, the geography of it reasonably extending to the next village over and, maybe, one or two after that. But to take one's body and willingly set it upon the open sea, this for me is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it, maybe.

When I first heard the weaver's story, I was twenty years old, seasick but otherwise healthy. I was a very healthy twenty-year-old man, in fact, full of sex and pride, full of these things that my brothers had exhibited before me like brave medals for wars that they had never fought. But there was a place and a time. Pride, for instance, was never worn to work. Minh the Sous Chef had taught us that. Monsieur and Madame are very sensitive to the sight of it, an eyebrow cocked too high, lips crooked in irony, shoulders pulled straight by sinews and unbroken bones. Sometimes even before the servant realizes that he is exhibiting it, Monsieur and Madame have detected it, like something alive underneath their bed. They, of course, would be the first to know. Unemployment is inevitable, so why not just get it over with now? I imagine that is their rationale for the resulting automatic dismissals. Monsieur and Madame think it is like training an animal, a dog maybe. Once we learn that certain actions have no consequences, we are useless. Our arms and legs, moved by our own free will, can no longer respond quickly enough, obediently enough, to the sound of our master's voice. Every Monsieur and Madame knows that pride carries with it danger. They think of it as a slight foaming around the mouth. Pride is, therefore, reserved for the home, if you are a Vietnamese man, a father or the oldest son. Otherwise, take it out into the street. Strut it in the alleyways, where girls hang their laundry and
young men show off the pomade in their hair. That, of course, brings me to the subject of sex. Yes, sex. Why else would someone put pomade in his already greasy hair or lay bare her undergarments in the slow, baking heat of a Saigon sun?

As we all had heard from the Old Man, my brothers Tùng and Hoàng were not the brightest ones in the family, but they never needed his malicious pucker of a mouth to tell them that they were the handsomest. Young girls, our mother, the neighborhood ladies of all ages, sang songs to them, secret notes of desire hidden inside everyday greetings and pleasantries. Tùng and Hoàng have always been beautiful, but as they grew older their beauty changed from an almost girlish thing into something completely their own, a thing that hovered around them, not quite touching the still wet canvas of their skin. These two, believe me, never had to look for sex, search it out like scavengers. When we would walk the alleyways, the girls, in their rush to get noticed, hung out clothes still dripping with water, so heavy that they sagged the lines. My brothers noticed them, all right, the sheerness of their wet clothes, the way the water ran down their arms, the steam that rose from them. Tùng and Hoàng would harvest these scenes for all that they had to yield. Memories of these girls would feed them during the night, very well from what I could hear, a gruff moan for each imagined nibble and bite. But these two would not have to rely on their imagination for very long.

From the beginning the things that kept me up at night were, well, less defined. I noticed the clothesline girls, a blind man would have noticed them, but the effect for me was not the same. When I closed my eyes, their bodies melted away, leaving behind just their desires, strong, pulsating. Now
that
I could feel, and prophetic of this life that I now live, this trade that I now practice, I could taste it too. The last peaches of the season honeyed by the sun, the taste of my own salt on my fingers, it was a cross between the two. As I grew older, my desire filled itself in. It found a face and a body, not so different from that of Tùng and Hoàng's. That was the problem. I will not call it a
curse because it is not. A curse is a father in name only or the tightness of Monsieur and Madame's hands around my neck even when they are not there. A curse, I remembered thinking when I first heard the basket weaver's story, was that man's boundless search or, perhaps, his steadfast belief that there existed an alternative to the specific silt of his family's land.

When I first heard the weaver's story, I was twenty years old and in love. I mean
in
love, painfully, involving every part of my body except for my head, in a way that I now suspect only a twenty-year-old man can be. Not so much a fever but a quake, a continuous tremor that made it difficult or just unnecessary to think. Talking was difficult as well. Speech was definitely one of the first things to go, as this sort of feeling can be better expressed in other ways. I had been working at the Governor-General's house for about seven years by then. He had been there for less than a month, but he arrived as the
chef de cuisine
and was, of course, French. Both things added up to a seniority beyond any of my earthly years. "So much power bestowed on someone so young!" was the refrain coursing through the Governor-General's house on the day that he arrived. "Abuse and waste," those of us within the ranks of the household staff predicted, "will soon follow." But Chef Blériot made up for his youthful appearance with a harshness of manner that surprised even us. We would have called him Napoleon, except that he defied us by being neither short nor pudgy around the waistline. No, Blériot was as commanding in his looks as in his manners. He was a remarkable specimen of French manhood, we all had to admit. His hair, "chestnut" brown, according to the chauffeur, held the beginnings of several strategic curls that would now and then fall, slightly grazing the arch of his brow, a lyrical move that impressed us in spite of ourselves. And who among us did not look a moment too long into his eyes, blue with black bursting stars inside? "Cow's milk in its immeasurable forms," said the chauffeur, "was responsible for the rest." That, however, was an open topic for debate. We in the household staff often sat and
speculated upon the substance of this man. We cursed his name and blessed his body with words of our desires, all different. The gardener's helper wanted his youth. The chauffeur envied his height. Madame's secretary, we could all tell, was in need of everything that Chef Blériot had to offer. I, of course, was predisposed against him from the start. My oldest brother, after all, would have to settle for the title of Minh the Sous Chef for yet another lifetime of years.

On the day of Chef Blériot's arrival, Anh Minh sat in a corner of the kitchen, this vastness that he had called his own for two unprecedented weeks, with his hands resting on his lap. There was nothing left for him to do. The pots and pans had been scrubbed and rescrubbed and were as shiny as they could ever be. The larder had been swept and cleaned. The sous chef had already taken off the chef's toque and had had it laundered and starched. The sight of my brother sitting, bareheaded, stilled by disappointment, taught me lessons he never intended. This man, who at home was the subject of boasts and the object of praise, was here nothing. Less than nothing, he was just another servant in waiting. I am certain that the rest of the household staff remembered the expression on my brother's face, but I cannot. When I close my eyes and see him now, I see his hands. Hollow, they seem to me. Flimsy enough to be thrown from his lap by the breeze of a slamming door. By the time sorrow shows itself in the hands, it is deep and infinite, no longer a wash but an out and out drowning. This is what I have taken with me, these hands that I now periodically look for in my own. The sight of them should have put an end to the story or there should have been no story at all, but then Blériot chose such a subtle, almost forgettable beginning. How was I to know?