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."
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 kno
t 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.
6
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.
The Book of Salt Page 6