I stand there still.
Will you wake up tomorrow, Old Man, and look at yourself in the mirror and declare to your right foot, "No, you do not belong to me"? The day after that, will you deliver the same judgment to your two hands? Will the ritual continue with your vicious mouth doing the bidding of your vicious heart until you, Old Man, are nothing more than a torso and a head? Then Father Vincente, I imagine, will devote the rest of his natural life, tirelessly campaigning for your beatification. A martyr able to self-inflict such wounds is a surefire candidate for sainthood, Father Vincente will think, as he envisions himself kneeling with your remains before the Holy See.
I stand there still.
In my then twenty years of life, I had been exceedingly careful about all matters of faith. I had been meticulous, vigilant, clear-eyed, even cold-hearted. The Catholic Church had, for me, never been a threat. From the time that I was old enough to walk, I followed my brothers to Father Vincente's church and into the second-to-last pew. When the Old Man led his new converts to morning Mass, their mumbled prayers perfumed the streets with so much alcohol that the children and stray dogs who followed them along the way often fell down drunk, pissing all over themselves. My forced participation in these processions left me in all respects profoundly unmoved. I was not one to lay offerings before the ancestral altar, either. I would never feed the souls of a man and a woman who were so eager for the afterlife that they had left their only daughter behind to him. Even Anh Minh's beliefs in Monsieur and Madame had no effect on me. I am afraid that the only way that my dear brother's prayers will be answered is for him to lie down one night and die. Then, he must hope that when the next morning arrives, his bruised but uncrushed spirit is reborn inside the body of a Frenchman.
I stand there still.
I hear your voice, Old Man, and I know that despite my vigilance, my clear eyes, my cold heart, I have failed. I have guarded myself against all the false idols except you. Faith, after all, is a theory of love and redemption. In my life, there was no vessel more empty of that than you, Old Man.
Má, please do not cry. From the morning of my birth to the night of my death, I will never have to want, to question, to solicit your affection. That is the gift that you have given me. But I, like the basket weaver, looked at the abundance around me and believed that there was something more. Fire ants and tiny orange marigolds make me shudder as they spin the globe the other way, bringing me back to the dirt path where I stood looking at your straw hat, hanging in its usual place at the entrance to the kitchen, and I, blind, saw there nothing but a fraying chin strap, moving listlessly in the sun.
"Bình," I replied without blinking an eye. Bão's raised voice told me that he had had to ask his question one too many times. I apologized, blaming my inability to hear him on the waves, foaming their mouths outside.
"Bình, huh? That's good. We cancel each other out," Bão said, punching my arm to let me know that I was forgiven and also to highlight his own effort and rare success at wordplay. What he meant was that since the name "Bình" means "peace," it was a lucky, not to mention an elegant counterbalance to his "storm." Thank you, I thought the same myself.
But when Bão again encouraged me to choose a new name in preparation for the following morning's arrival on shore, I was surprised. I asked him, "But how many days have we been at sea?" His reply was a revelation. When I signed up with the Niobe, I needed a ship that was leaving that same day, as I again had no place to sleep for the night. My dismissal from the Governor-General's was abrupt but inevitable. My dismissal from the Old Man's house, that I did not expect. I gave no thought to the Niobe's final port of call and even less consideration to the duration of its run. Though sea travel, I had assumed, was something that generally took many years to complete. The world was enormous before I left my corner of it. But once I did, it grew even more immense. As for that corner, it continued to shrink until it was a speck of dust on a globe. Believe me, I never had a desire to see what was on the other side of the earth. I needed a ship that would go out to sea because there the water is deep, deeper than the hemmed-in rivers that I could easily reach by foot. I wanted the deepest water because I wanted to slip into it and allow the moon's reflection to swallow me whole. "I never meant to go this far," I said to Bão. What I meant was that when I boarded the Niobe I had no intention of reaching shore. In the black-and-white photograph that is the world at night, Bão looked over at me as if he knew.
24
"OYSTERS, Lovey, there will always be oysters," Miss Toklas insists.
GertrudeStein shoots a rueful look at Miss Toklas by way of expressing her growing apprehension that oysters alone may not be enough.
This exchange, repeated every few minutes or so with Miss Toklas's words getting lost now and then in the whistle of the train, has taken us from Paris right through to Rouen. Miss Toklas began her mollusk mantra right after the last of the photographers were escorted off the already moving train by a conductor who, like the concierge at 27 rue de Fleurus, kept on shaking his head, unable to comprehend the source of the attraction. The looks of dismay from GertrudeStein followed soon after.
"And honeydews," Miss Toklas offers, "they assured us that there will be honeydews."
This addition to my Madame's repertoire confirms, as I suspected, that we have just passed a significant juncture in our journey. If I push down the window and hang my head out, I know that soon I will smell the sea. The church bells in Le Havre, like those in all port cities, transmit the city's proximity to the water with every swing that they take, wafting its salt breezes, its mineral odors, far beyond the usual boundaries of such things. Miss Toklas must know about this as well because for the first time since our journey began she leans over and cracks open the window closest to her. I take in a long, slow breath. Oysters, I think. Really, what else could I think about with Miss Toklas's incessant intoning? To ride the train with my Mesdames has long been my wish. To share a first-class compartment with them a secret desire. Wishes, as I have always known, can be cruel in the terms and conditions of their fulfillment. Yes, since our journey began I have thought of nothing but oysters. Even before I knew their word for them, I knew that Americans, at least those who were invited to the rue de Fleurus for dinner, were all very partial to oysters. GertrudeStein, however, was an exception. She has rarely exhibited in the years that we have been together a great love or appetite for them, especially in their raw, gelatinous state.
"And honeydews," Miss Toklas again reminds GertrudeStein, "they assured us that there will be honeydews."
Now that surprised me even more. Even when we were in Bilignin, where fruits of all sorts grow lush in the gardens of my Mesdames' summer house, I have seen GertrudeStein wave away a vine-ripened Charentais melon, split in half, baring its orange belly and its button full of seeds for all the world and especially for GertrudeStein to see. Miss Toklas, I knew, trembled with a mild form of heartbreak each time. She was the gardener, the only one, who tended to that beauty from the time it blossomed to when it globed in the heat of the summer sun.
As the train pulls us closer and closer toward the sea, I understand more and more about my Mesdames' unusual pairing of oysters and honeydews. I want to tell Lattimore that his color-based explanation is not complete, but as usual my conclusion is too slow in coming. Lattimore had left me and presumably Paris at the end of February. The train that my Mesdames and I are on is smoking its way through a French countryside lit by October's harvest light. There is no doubt in my mind that he is right. Oysters and honeydews are soothing to GertrudeStein. Miss Toklas has been acting on that very assumption from the moment our train left the Gare du Nord, and even now as it is coming to a stop in the Le Havre station. Miss Toklas believes that just hearing the words is enough to sedate her Lovey. As for the effect on her cook, Miss Toklas for once has made me very full. Raw oysters, I think, can slide down my throat, and honeydews, as with very ripe melons of any kind, can become a pool of juices once in the heat of
my mouth. It is precisely these fluidlike qualities, I conclude, that recommend these two foods to a nervous GertrudeStein. One thing I know about my Madame is that she is unable to do more than one thing at any one time. That is what Miss Toklas is here for. If GertrudeStein is anxious before she lectures, then she cannot be expected to worry and to chew her food at the same time. If Miss Toklas could, she would perform both of these acts for her Lovey. As she cannot, she has devised a menu composed of foods that are solid in form—thereby never acknowledging GertrudeStein's condition or injuring her pride—and yet both courses can be consumed without the pesky need to chew. Miss Toklas is a genius after all.
"Oysters, Lovey, there will always be oysters. And honey-dews, they assured us that there will be honeydews," Miss Toklas whispers to GertrudeStein as we step from the train onto the platform at Le Havre.
"Oysters" and "honeydews" are two words in the English language with which I am by now overly familiar. As for the rest of Miss Toklas's words, well, the rest I can imagine. But even if I was not equipped with such skills, my Mesdames' behavior alone is telling. I have, believe me, heard them say things over and over again to each other before. Lovers who have lived a lifetime together have the luxury of never having to say anything new. Also, my Mesdames are both reaching that age in life when repetition is the mind's way of retaining all the tiny details that it would otherwise lose. Miss Toklas's voice, though, is softer than I have ever heard it, and GertrudeStein's expression, made worse by the red spiders in the whites of her eyes, gives her the appearance of a child abandoned on a train.
At first I thought my Mesdames were distraught because they were missing Basket and Pépé. Dressed in their finest, those two were beyond consolation when their leashes were handed over to the concierge. Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein had given the concierge enough money to keep His Highness and the Pretender well stuffed with livers for at least a year. In addition to the wardrobe that they brought with them, there was also an emergency fund for extra leashes and new coats for the winter. As Basket and Pépé both have a tendency to gain excessive weight during the colder months of the year, there was no way for my Mesdames to anticipate their eventual sizes in the months to come. That detail was therefore reluctantly entrusted to the concierge. Basket pressed his body into GertrudeStein's tweed skirt, leaving behind curls from his molting fur. Pépé dug his front paws into the pile of Miss Toklas's new mink coat, his howl so desperate and high that it was beyond the range of the human ear. The other dogs in the neighborhood heard him, though, and a chorus full of pity and how-could-you's began. Pépé always had a flare for drama. Basket's approach was more straightforward. He used his body weight, the only thing that he had available to him besides his delirious barking, to keep his Madame by his side.
"Bye-bye, bye-bye, my babies, bye-bye," said Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein, their voices unified in grief, as our taxi drove away. Miss Toklas dabbed the corners of her eyes. GertrudeStein was able to blink hers away. Why the tears, my Mesdames? Are there no dogs in America? I thought.
First-class accommodations, an express train, and now this floating city passing itself off as an ocean liner all the way home, my Mesdames. And if the photographers here on the deck are any indication, there will be so many flashes going off in America that for you there will never be darkness on the shores of the country where you were born.
Standing on the glass-enclosed deck of the SS Champlain, Miss Toklas looks regal as always, lips pursed, moments away from saying "Shoo!" GertrudeStein looks remarkably relaxed. She looks as though she has a present to give, one that she knows will be a delight to receive. Both my Mesdames, but especially GertrudeStein, always perk right up when photographers are around. A new group of them along with the captain of the SS Champlain were on deck waiting for us, and this time GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas seem genuinely surprised by the commotion that is intent on following them back to America. I have just returned to the deck after accompanying a line of porters as they carried my Mesdames' many trunks and cases into the sitting room of their suite. I make my way past the photographers and stand next to Miss Toklas. I am thinking about the bouquets of yellow roses waiting for them in their suite and how they are larger than anything that I have ever seen at the flower market on the Île de la Cité. Miss Toklas looks over at me and mouths, "Here, take this." She slips a small sewing kit into the pocket of my coat. My Madame points with her nose to GertrudeStein's brown velvet-trimmed shoes. Lying in between them is a single pearl button leaning on its metal loop, like a toy top at rest. The strap to GertrudeStein's right shoe flaps up and down, elated to be free. The strap flies especially high every time my Madame shifts her weight from foot to foot. GertrudeStein is dancing a jig because her feet are unused to the new leather and to the extra padding of the velvet trim. Miss Toklas slides her hand out of my pocket, and she grabs onto my hand, the one closest to hers. She squeezes it twice in quick succession. "Please, Bin, sew on GertrudeStein's button. We cannot have photographs of her looking so disheveled in this way!" is what Miss Toklas intends the first palpitation to say. The second, which is thankfully not as blood-stopping as the first, is less of a command and more of a plea: "Please, Bin, sew on GertrudeStein's button. I cannot have photographs of me prostrated before her in that way."
Of course, Madame, of course.
I pull the sewing kit from my pocket, and I do my part to make sure that GertrudeStein will continue to travel in style. The SS Champlain for my Madame and Madame, I know, is just the beginning. When we boarded this ocean liner, I saw no similarities between it and the Niobe. Believe me, there is nothing about my Mesdames' suite of rooms or the boulevard-wide decks of the SS Champlain that remind me of my previous voyages at sea.
Years ago when the Niobe docked in Marseilles, I stayed in that port city for a handful of weeks until I remembered what Bão had told me: It is easier to be broke at sea than on land. I signed up for another freighter of the same class as the Niobe, and I went back to living with water beneath my feet. I jumped from freighter to freighter for the next three years. During that time, I slept on land for a total of forty some days, nonconsecutive. Looking back, I cannot say what kept me on water or what kept me from land. I do remember that the moon's reflection was hypnotic when it shimmered on a saltwater canvas and that when I looked down into that circle of light I always believed that on the next ship, at the next port of call, I would find Bão. I found men like him, but I never did see that GoodLookingBrother again. Then one night as I scrubbed the cooking pots with another kitchen boy, who was from the Chinese island of Hainan but who spoke a bit of barter-and-trade Vietnamese, I mentioned that the moon had changed its shape, that it had grown more oval and long, like an unripe mango. Without even looking over at me, the kitchen boy said, "You need to shit on land again." While I had certainly received more elegantly worded pieces of advice, I thought that there must be some truth in what this kitchen boy said. His tone was confident, almost automatic. To this day, I am still impressed by decisiveness in precisely that form. So when our freighter finished its run in Marseilles, I said so long to the Hainanese kitchen boy, who was actually a man of thirty-five and a father of three, and I went to find a job on land. Besides Marseilles and Avignon, Paris was the only other French city that I had ever thought about. Through various means that even I do not want to remember, I found my way to the city that the Governor-General's chauffeur had made vivid with his stories, his cigarette waving about in the excitement of the retelling, its smoldering tip standing in for the streetlights along the Champs-Élysées, for the great rose window of Notre-Dame, for the beacon atop the Tour Eiffel. When I arrived in Paris, I was twenty-three years old, and cooking was still my only legitimate skill. I began searching for a position as a live-in cook because I knew that it would provide me with the two things that I needed whether on land or on water: a job and a place to sleep for the night. But as with the freighters before them, I am afraid that I was not able to stay at any of these berths for
any real length of time. Messieurs and Mesdames were universally difficult but each in their own inscrutable way. Lessons learned in one home were useless in another. I gained experience all right, but never, never the right kind.
After a year of disastrous placements, one after another, I was contemplating water again. Every day and every night, I stood silent on a bridge as Paris hummed. I looked down and saw how the reflection of the moon was smaller in the Seine than it had been out at sea but how it was still generous enough. I measured the distance down to the water, felt my body numbed by the cold, thought about how all the rivers of the world desire to flow to the seas. I gripped the railing. its iron cooled my fingers, each cut by a flameless fire. Blue sparks and silver threads clung to their tips, marring their surface, forcing them not to heal. I kept my gloves on when I interviewed with a new Madame or Monsieur. That was all right for now as it was still cold outside, but what was I going to do with my gloved hands when the temperature began to rise? Eyebrows and suspicions would certainly be raised, I thought. Then one day before the season had had a chance to change, I stood on that bridge, and I met a man. I do not mean to mislead. Not all of my friendships were so easily formed. A fellow countryman, though, a fellow countryman in Paris was not particularly rare then or now, but he was somewhat of a surprise. Think of it as biting into the cheek of a persimmon when the city's markets are offering only pears. In the course of a day, in the course of a meal, in the course of saying our fond farewells, lit from above by the multiple moons of lampposts in a park made private by a mist that had thickened into a fog, I decided to stay. The man on the bridge was leaving that night and I, of all men, decided to stay. I wanted to see him again. But the man on the bridge did not tell me where he was traveling to, and the world was too vast for me to search for him, I thought. The only place we shared was this city. Vietnam, the country that we called home, was to me already a memory. I preferred it that way. A "memory" was for me another way of saying a "story." A "story" was another way of saying a "gift." The man on the bridge was a memory, he was a story, he was a gift. Paris gave him to me. And in Paris I will stay, I decided. Only in this city, I thought, will I see him again. For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to stop migrating and find a new home. After the man on the bridge departed, Paris held in it a promise. It was a city where something akin to love had happened, and it was a city where it could happen again. Three years later in a park on a bench beneath some chestnut trees, I saw the classified ad that Miss Toklas had placed, which began: "Two American ladies wish..."
The Book of Salt Page 26