The Book of Salt (9 page)

"Chef Blériot wants you to go with him to the market," said Anh Minh, or Minh
Still
the Sous Chef, as I had begun to call him.

"Why me?" I asked.

"He wants you to show him around, translate when necessary."

"Translate? Did you tell him I could speak French?"

"I said that you've been learning. Don't worry about it. You know more French words than Blériot does of Vietnamese. Here that makes you a translator."

"Oh."

"Remember, just don't lie."

"What do you mean? I haven't—"

"Of course not, I only meant that if you don't know the word in French, just say so. Don't lie. They always figure it out, and then they are pissed when they do."

"Oh."

"I'm serious. There is no kidding around with this guy. Remember to call him Chef' Blériot and remember that what you do reflects back on me."

Anh Minh's words were always considered but often trite. This language of mirroring was overused, especially within the confines of our family. It sounded like something the Old Man would say, except his version would have a swearword at the beginning and at the end. Either way, the threat of having all my indiscretions paraded on the surface of my brother's skin was still not enough to keep me away.

"Slower, slower. Chef Blériot, please, speak slower. My French is not very good. "

He smiled, a closed-mouth movement that concentrated attention in the curves of his lips. At first I saw it as a smirk, a mocking pockmark of an expression, but somewhere between the woman selling bitter melons and the blind man selling onions and garlic, I saw the curves and I saw the lips.

"How old ... are ... you?"

"Nineteen, twenty soon, Chef Blériot."

He smiled again. This time there was nothing that I could do. This image of him shading his blue eyes, each with a black bursting star inside, from the yellow of the early morning sun had already archived itself in me. Somewhere between the twin sisters selling mangosteens and the old woman selling whatever she had in her garden that day, I asked him the same question.

"Twenty-six," he answered.

"Oh."

"Tomorrow, you'll show me the fish market."

"Yes, tomorrow, the fish market I'll show you."

A promise sealed in the language of commerce, in a place of barter and trade.

"Sole?" Blériot asked.

"Sole," I translated.

"Catfish?"

"Catfish."

"Shark?"

"Shark."

A slow seduction, now that I think about it, amidst the fruits of the sea. But back then, well, back then there was nothing to think about. It was already impossible. Blériot, though, took his time. He was a cook, after all. For tenderness, we all know that braising is better than an open flame. At first I met him at the back gate of the Governor-General's house at five-thirty in the morning. By the time we reached the central market, the vendors were just about done setting up. By the end of the first week, all the vendors knew his name, even the blind seller of onions and garlic. I told Blériot that it is no coincidence that this man sells what he does. With onions and garlic, he can protect himself from thieves, because he can always smell them walking away. A little lie makes for a good story. Blériot looked at me as if he agreed. All the market vendors also knew his position—Chef Blériot, the
chef de cuisine
at the Governor-General's house, a man who was more important to them than the Governor-General would ever be. They competed for his biweekly purchases of chicken eggs by the cartful. They saved their wormless tomatoes for him, put aside cucumbers the size of their fingers for him. They agreed to grow spinach for him. They traded their scallions for leeks grown in the central mountain region for him. They learned that he would not barter, and so they always quoted him their most optimistic price. Either
he would buy or he would walk. It was the gamble they took for a chance at an easy week's profit. As for me, they had seen me before, but now they really looked at me, wondering where my allegiance lay. Whether I was the kind who would betray his own to save his Monsieur the equivalent of a couple of centimes. Whether I lived off of their blood or his money. Neither, thank you. After the third week Blériot told me to meet him at five. In the half-light of morning, everyone looks beautiful, I remembered thinking, even the twin sisters selling mangosteens. We took the half of an hour, the half of a waxing moon, and roped it around the city's still, blue streets. Intimacy, or something very close to it, was spun and webbed this way. Every week brought with it another half-hour, another sliver of the moon, till he had the entirety of a night. Naturally, the space between our bodies began to disappear. Effortlessly, we began to touch.

Men like Bão always think that
this
is when the story really begins. But there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now. That is why it is so addictive, so worth the risk. That is why men like me brave ourselves for it. It is a gamble worth taking. I brace myself for the Old Man's words, his lips sucking their marrow dry: "Where there is gambling, there is faith." Anytime that he has said anything truthful to me, I have come to regret it, because with him truth comes barbed in judgment, thick in condemnation. Truth is something strapped to a man's body before he is led to the water's edge and pushed. Yes, the Old Man was right, but not for the reasons that his sour heart attributed to me. In me, faith did flourish and, like the basket weaver, it was with faith that my story began. When I first heard the weaver's story, I did not see that we had more in common than this. No, I did not think to ask, What keeps him from returning home, to a house surrounded by water hyacinths in full purple bloom?

MOST MESSIEURS AND MESDAMES
do not want to think about it. They would prefer to believe that their cooks have no bodily needs, secretions, not to mention excrement, but we all do. We are not all clean and properly sterile from head to toe. We come into their homes with our skills and our bodies, the latter a host for all the vermin and parasites that we have encountered along the way. I have seen
chefs de cuisine
who never wash their hands, never, not even after they stick their fingers into a succession of pots and suckle on them like piglets at their mother's teats. I have seen pastry chefs who think nothing of sticking a finger into their ear, giving it a good swirl, and then working the wax into their buttery disks of dough. Merely a bad habit or a purposeful violation? The answer depends on their relationship with their Monsieur and Madame. When placed in such context, my habit is not so bad. I have, of course, thought about it. The satisfaction that could be drawn from it. Saucing the meat, fortifying the soup, enriching a batch of blood orange sorbet, the possible uses are endless, undetectable. But that is an afterthought. I never do it for them. I would never waste myself in such a way. It is only a few minutes out of my day, usually in the late evening hours when all the real work has been done. The extreme cold or the usual bouts of loneliness will trigger it. I want to say it is automatic, but it is not. I have to think about it each time, consider the alternatives, decide that there are none. I want to say it brings me happiness or satisfaction, but it does not. It gives me proof that I am alive, and sometimes that is enough. I want to say that it is more complicated than this, but it is not.

Most Messieurs and Mesdames never even notice, understandable given their preference for white-gloved servants. Believe me, underneath those cotton sheaths are the things that Messieurs and Mesdames should see, fish-scale cuticles, blooming liver spots, the pink and red ridges of scars and burns, warts like a sprinkling of morning dew. Or if they do notice, they think nothing of it. Most Messieurs and Mesdames are too engrossed by the food on their plates to take a good look at the hands that prepared and served it, a common mistake, an unfortunate oversight. Those with more experience in such matters know that closer attention must be paid. And according to Anh Minh, there is no one, not even the French, with more experience in such matters than the Chinese.

When I began working in the Governor-General's kitchen, Anh Minh told me about the "official tasters" who sat by the side of the Empress Dowager of China, right next to the little dog that lapped up the spit and the phlegm that this old woman in heavy silks would occasionally cough up. The tasters were assigned to eat a small morsel from every dish before the Empress would even place her nose among their wafting flags of steam. The tasters, according to Anh Minh, were chosen based on the refinement of their palates. They were men who could see with their tongues the grit of one grain of sand left clinging inside the frizzled lips of an oyster, the char of one ember tarnishing the skin of a river trout. They could detect the absence of the sun during the growing season and the presence of uncooked blood in the chambers of bones. "Imagine," Anh Minh said, "being the first." To hear him tell it, I thought that the official tasters had coveted positions indeed. With his usual rapid-fire rhythm, Anh Minh evoked for me the epic balance of flavors in the dishes consumed by these long dead mandarins. When he spoke of bitter melons steamed with the brine-plumped tongues of one hundred ducks, I saw a landscape of greens and grays. I tasted parsimony and extravagance commingled on a single plate. Anh Minh, in this way, taught me what he understood to be the most important lesson of his trade. He knew that to be a good cook I had to first envision the possibilities. I had to close my eyes and see and taste what was not there. I had to dream and discern it all on my tongue. Slowly, gradually, I was able to do just that.

Anh Minh, of course, never mentioned the casualties who were carried out of the Empress's dining pavilion every few months or so. The limp bodies of the official tasters ravaged by poison, as flavorless as a mouthful of pure mountain snow, were buried with a pair of ivory chopsticks, a token of thanks from the Empress Dowager. Only after I heard the chauffeur's version of the story did I understand that the official tasters were men condemned to die for their culinary pleasures. The Empress, the chauffeur told me, had no need for gourmands. The Empress needed warm bodies who could absorb the poison and host death in her stead. The fact that these bodies belonged to men who appreciated good food was merely incidental. In fact, it was the result of a perverse sense of goodwill exhibited by the Empress's closest advisers. It was they, according to the chauffeur, who decided that the official taster positions would be awarded only to those who possessed an uncompromising ardor for the finest of comestibles. The advisers reasoned that the pleasure that these men could milk from each bite would surely be heightened, intensified to an almost excruciating degree, by their knowledge that each taste could be their last. When told of their imminent appointments, these men ate and drank continually for days and sometimes weeks, hoping for death to come to them in the dishes of their own choosing. It rarely did.

I suppose that the moral of the story was there all along, but
it took the chauffeur's rendition to make me understand. There is a fine line between a cook and a murderer, and that line is held steady by the men of my trade. Really, the only difference between the two is that one kills to cook while the other cooks to kill. Killing is involved either way. The wringing of feathered necks, the smothering of throats still filled with animal sounds, the examples are endless. Learning how to take away life while leaving the body whole and the flesh unbruised, that is how I began my apprenticeship. It is a delicate procedure that those who do not know how call by the misnomer "slaughter." That is, believe me, too harsh and grubby a word for such a finely coordinated set of movements, as graceful as death at someone else's hands can get.

***

"Unfortunately, you can see with your fingertips as well as your eyes," Miss Toklas says. "Press here," she continues on anyway, showing me the precise point on the neck before quickly looking away. The pigeon squirms under my fingers, its blood pumping hard, pressing through.

"Harder! Bin, you are letting it suffer."

How does she know? I wonder.

With her face still turned the other way, Miss Toklas lowers her voice and rounds it out into a coax. "Steady yourself. Stop shaking. Keep pressing down. Harder, that is right, harder."

She sounds like my mother, I think. The words are different, but that mix of gentleness and urgent prodding is undeniably the same. After my mother stopped having babies of her own, she helped other women bring theirs into the world. I often heard her voice talking them through what their bodies were still reluctant to do. "Good job! The next one will be easier. Trust me. "

Without looking back, Miss Toklas walks out of the kitchen, leaving me with five more to kill. She had said "Trust me" at the beginning of our lesson as well. "If you cut off their necks, you will lose all the blood. Done
this
way, those birds will come out of the oven plumper and tastier than you can ever imagine. Exquisite!" Doubt must have never left my face because Miss Toklas again said "Trust me" before continuing on: "You will need, when dealing with a larger bird, to feed it a couple of spoonfuls of eau de vie, cognac, or a bit of sherry. In my experience, ducks prefer the taste of eau de vie the most. It improves their flavor immeasurably, and it also braces them for what is to come. It will make your task, Bin, easier in every way."

"You will need..." is how Miss Toklas begins all of her recipes. It is a prophecy that always comes true. "Exquisite!" is how her recipes end. While that may sound more like an assertion than a line of instruction, she means it to be just that: Now
this!
is what "exquisite" tastes like is what she wants me to learn. Miss Toklas does not believe that there is an innate ability in every one of God's creatures to recognize perfection. Assistance is sometimes required. She feels that this was especially true of the cooks who have preceded me at 27 rue de Fleurus. According to the concierge, there have been many. Assistance, Miss Toklas must have felt, was too often required with these now departed cooks. I can imagine, though, that many of them left of their own accord after Miss Toklas showed them her recipe for smothered pigeons. She insists upon the technique for the preparation of all the other varieties of birds that can be purchased live from the Paris markets. The difference in the end result, I must admit, is spectacular, but the required act is unforgivable.