The Book of Salt (13 page)

"I want to know more about you, friend. What brought you here?" the man on the bridge asked.

"The same thing that brought you here."

"Really?" he asked, his eyes brightening.

Like firecrackers in the night, I thought.

"Yes, a boat," I said.

He laughed again.

That is a very good sign, I thought.

"A boat did bring us all here. How true. I suppose the better question is what keeps you here?"

"I have no family left in Vietnam," I lied.

"I see," he said, shaking his head, visibly moved by the idea of me alone.

"And you, what keeps you here?" I asked.

"You mean what kept me here. I'm just a visitor now, a tourist. And you know how this city can make a tourist feel ... like he's a poor relation, tolerated but not necessarily welcomed."

"This city makes me feel like that, too," I said, "and I have been here for a year now. "

Why, I thought, are they always visiting? Just once, a man with a Paris address, or, rather, a man with a Paris address who will invite me there afterward.

"A year is not so long, friend. I lived here for almost four," said the man on the bridge.

Wishes, believe me, are tricky things, sly even. Precise wording is required. Figurative speech should be avoided. Being specific about date, time, and location is of the utmost importance.

"Where?" I asked.

"In a room." He smiled.

"Tell me the name of the street, and I will tell you where it is located, Left Bank or Right, what arrondissement, even."

"You'll know the second street that I've lived on, but not the first one."

"Try me."

"Fine, I'll start with the easy one first. Rue des Gobelins."

"That is too easy. Thirteenth Arrondissement. That is not too shabby of a neighborhood, friend."

"Wait until you hear where I first lived in this city."

"Shall we make it interesting, friend? How about a drink for the right answer? There is only one, right?"

"Friend, if you know where it's located, I'll not only buy you a drink but a dinner," he said.

Please, please if there is a god, let me know the street, I thought.

"Impasse Compoint."

"I know exactly where it is! Seventeenth Arrondissement. An alley with only three or four houses facing out onto it, right? Forgive me for saying, friend, but I did not know that anyone lived in those houses. Mostly storage places, I thought."

"Amazing, friend, amazing. Maybe, I shouldn't say anything more about myself and let
you
tell me the rest."

"I only know streets. The poorer they are, the easier, and I am sorry to say, but impasse Compoint is one of the worst off in this city."

"You definitely know it, then," he said.

The man on the bridge, true to his word, suggested a restaurant on the rue Descartes. "I know the chef there," he said.

"From where?"

"A city."

"An English one?"

"An American one."

An American restaurant. Bargelike slabs of beef and very tall glasses of cow's milk, I imagined. But when we got there, the red lantern hanging outside announced that this was no American restaurant. "Oh," I said, sighing, "I was not expecting a Chinese restaurant." Three kinds of vegetables, any three will do, just as long they are cheap and drowned in a cornstarch-thickened slurry, I thought.

"Friend, I promised you a dinner, and it will be a
good
one," he said, resting his left hand lightly on my shoulder. He opened the door with his right, and we walked in. The interior of the place immediately struck me as, well, un-Chinese. No red letterings, no gold-leaf flourishes, no spangled dragon, no shiny-bellied Buddha, all the things that the French look for in a good Chinese restaurant were here nonexistent. No wonder it is empty, I thought. How can they tell this place apart from Chez Jean, Jacques, or Jules? Look, there is even a pretty French cashier, seated just inside the front door, a strategic position
that will allow her to ignore us from the very beginning, I thought.

"Mademoiselle, a table for two," said the man from the bridge, his French delivered with a pleasant touch of authority.

"Any table is fine," she responded with a short, quick sweep of her right hand.

"
Cám on,
" he said, lapsing unexpectedly into Vietnamese to express his thanks.

The young woman lifted her eyes from the book that she was reading and looked at us for the first time. Her eyes were brown with ripples of sand inside. Like Madame's secretary's, I thought. "You're welcome, Monsieur," she whispered, even though there was no one else in the restaurant.

We had our pick of twelve tables. Each was covered in white cloth and set with forks, knives, and porcelain soupspoons—basin-shaped and generous, they were the only things inside this restaurant that told me it was in the business of serving Chinese food. We sat down at a table, and we grinned at each other without saying a word. As if we shared a secret, I thought. On the contrary, our childlike behavior was an obvious sign, I am afraid, that neither one of us had been in a restaurant for quite a long time.

"The chef here is American?" I asked. "How did he learn how to cook Chinese food?"

"He's not American. I didn't say he was, did I? As for your second question, he learned how to cook from his mother, didn't you?"

"Oh."

"Listen, friend, the chef here tends to be shy. He may come out of the kitchen, but he won't come to the table and talk. Don't think him rude."

The cashier, who was now doubling as our waitress, handed us the menu. She said if there was anything that we wanted that was not listed, please let her know, as the chef was willing to accommodate requests. She looked at me as she said all this, but her attention, the whole of her body, I could tell was focused on
him. I know the scholar-prince is handsome, Mademoiselle, but he is busy for the night, I thought.

"Please tell the chef that I'll have the salt-and-pepper shrimp with the shells still on, please, and my friend here will have the same," he ordered in a French that did not belong in the mouth of any kitchen boy.

The young woman said, "Of course," and walked toward the curtained-off entrance to the kitchen.

"Friend," I whispered, "that will be an expensive meal..."

"Good food is the only thing I'm willing to pay money for," he leaned in to assure me, "and, besides, the chef here won't charge us a centime." He relaxed his back into his chair. The tightness that was building up in between my shoulder blades, a reaction to impending moments of financial constraint, relaxed as well.

The curtain parted. The young woman, who was holding a tray that looked too large to fit through the narrow corridor, swung her body sideways, and she and the tray entered the room with ease. Grace, I would not call it, because such movements are not inborn, not a willowy gift bestowed upon the limbs on the day of her birth. No, movements like these are practiced daily and perfected via the occasional workplace mishaps. I looked back at the man on the bridge and saw him looking at her, well, admiringly. Surely, he is impressed by the tray and not by the body, I thought. The tray, believe me, was impressive. Most of it was taken up by a pink mound of shrimp, all with their shells and their heads still attached. A red sash at the base of their heads, their coral shining through, identified them as females, prized and very dear when available in the markets of this city. There was also a plate on either side.
Haricots verts
sautéed with garlic and ginger were in one, and watercress wilted by a flash of heat were in the other. A compote dish towered above them all, holding white rice, steam rising at topmast. A bottle balanced out the tray, its cork announcing that it was a decisive step up from the decanted bottles of house wine.

We then exchanged words, sparingly, between generous
forkfuls of food. Chopsticks had not been offered, and we did not ask for them. Why waste time on the technicalities of tableware when a feast is before us? I thought.

"Morels?"

Yes, he nodded.

"Morels," I repeated. An unexpected addition, I thought. Rich with the must of forest decay, these mushrooms were hidden below the
haricots verts
until their aroma gave them away and we began searching for them with the tines of our forks.

"Butter?"

Yes, he nodded.

Salt-and-pepper shrimp finished in a glaze of browned butter! I marveled. Not out loud, of course, as my mouth was entirely too full. When melted butter is brought to the color just moments after gold, it inexplicably acquires, as Anh Minh had taught me, the taste of hazelnuts roasted over a wood-fed flame. A lesson I was now pleased to relearn.

"Watercress?"

He stopped in midbite and stared at me. Startled, I thought. My previous inquiries—they were more like requests for confirmation—may have been simply worded, but they indicated a palate that had spent time in a professional kitchen. This question, however, could have been asked by a simple kitchen boy. Watercress is unmistakable, bitter in the mouth, cooling in the body, greens that any Vietnamese could identify with his eyes closed. I know this dish well. That was not the question. The recipe is a deceptively simple one that calls for oil heated till it smokes, seasoned with nothing more than a generous sprinkling of salt and the blink of an eye. Any more contact with the heat, and the stalks turn themselves into ropes, tying themselves up in your mouth, making it impossible to swallow.

"The salt?" I asked, moving closer to the crux of my question.

Yes, he nodded. "The chef here," he said, "uses
fleur de sel
to make this dish."

I shook my head. I wanted to signal my unfamiliarity with
that French phrase, but I did not want to open up my mouth, which was again too full.

"Salt flowers," he translated. "Think of it in terms of a poem. A ' flower,' as in the first to bloom in the heat of the sun."

"Now you are a poet, too? Me, I am no good at poetry," I said, filling my mouth with another forkful of watercress. The salt petals opened themselves slowly against the roof of my mouth.

"It's sea salt..." he began to explain.

I threw him a look that clearly said, Do not patronize me, friend! Even if I do have half a bottle of wine and more food in me than my body has held in several months, that does not mean that I have lost all of my powers to think rationally. I knew it was not salt quarried from the earth. That would have had a more explosive reaction on the tongue, pushy, even abusive if there was but a grain past moderation.

The scholar-prince ignored my indignation and patiently resumed his explanation, taking us into a landscape of saltwater basins, rice-paddy-like when viewed from a distance. "Except that the only things growing within these watery grids are mounds of salt," he said. I closed my eyes, and I saw there snowcapped mountains in their infancy, peaks being born out of the sea. "When seawater is evaporated by the sun in this way, it leaves behind its salt, in the same way that we will leave behind our bones." I opened up my eyes and saw him a world away.

A gradual revelation of its true self, as I was beginning to learn, is the quality that sets
fleur de sel
apart from the common sea salt that waits for me in most French kitchens. There is a development, a rise and fall, upon which its salinity becomes apparent, deepens, and then disappears. Think of it as a kiss in the mouth.

The young woman returned to our table and removed our empty dishes. I looked around the room for the first time since the food had arrived. Still empty but not forlorn, I thought. Empty as in private, a suitable place for a
tête-à-tête.
Though I have never understood what the head has to do with this sort of get-together. Hand to hand, mouth to mouth, maybe.

"That was not Chinese food," I said.

"I didn't say it was, did I?"

"No. But, that was not American either, and it was not—"

"Again, I made no such claims," he interrupted.

"What
do
you call it then?"

"First of all, friend, the chef here is Vietnamese. He, like me, thought that he would be a writer or a scholar someday, but after he traveled the world, life gave him something more practical to do. He now cooks here on the rue Descartes, but he will always be a traveler. He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world. "

A kiss in the mouth can become a kiss on the mouth. A hand on a shoulder can become a hand on the hips. A laugh on his lips can become a moan on mine. The moments in between these are often difficult to gauge, difficult to partition and subdivide. Time that refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be "lost." In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars. The trip from the rue Descartes to the Jardin du Luxembourg was slowed by the weight of our full bellies. Our feet shuffled underneath us, unaccustomed to the weight of a sated body. In my ear, anticipation sounded like a strong wind billowing against a taut sail, like a fire when its flames are drunk on a gust of air, less of a tone, more of a vibration that muffled his voice even though his body was only the span of one hand away from mine. When we opened our mouths to speak, the night air became scented with cinnamon. We both have been this way ever since the young woman walked over to our table and said to us, "Please, wait."

Oh no, the bill, I thought.

She disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a tart covered with a bumpy top crust. The aroma of cinnamon, unmistakable and insistent, especially when coupled with sugar and heat, surrounded us. An apple "pie," she said, placing the dessert down in the center of our table. "Compliments of the chef," she said. "He says that he's sorry that you"—her eyes addressed the scholar-prince—"must leave Paris tonight.
Bon appétit,
Messieurs."

I looked over at the curtain. It had closed. I looked over at the young woman. She was back at her post as the pretty cashier. I looked back at the man on the bridge. He was still there. But not even for the whole of the night, I thought. "There is a quiet place that I know in the Jardin du Luxembourg," I suggested, and the scholar-prince smiled.