The Book of Salt (22 page)

MADAME'S SECRETARY
, like most Vietnamese Catholics in Saigon, had heard of the Old Man. A proselytizer of the city's poor, they were calling him. A holy man even, except for the fact that he had a wife. They had heard, though, that after his fourth son was born, he took a vow of chastity. He is now fully devoted to God, they say. He is our next Father Augustine, they say. And among them, who had not heard the story of Father Augustine, a simple country priest who was handpicked by the Bishop of Saigon for the journey that is the closest that any of them will come to the doors of heaven while still standing on this unflinching earth? Father Augustine, they say, stood underneath the soaring dome of St. Peter's and marveled at the softness of marble, at the way that his God had allowed His servants to drape it, clothe His Son's image in it. Father Augustine kissed the papal ring but died before he could reach his final destination, the one that he believed would make his pilgrimage complete. He died on a cargo ship that was taking him to the south of France to the town of Avignon, the birthplace of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. Father Augustine was compelled, as the story goes, to see all that this Jesuit had left behind him, all that this missionary had relegated to a memory
that would fail him, all that this man had sacrificed in order to bring Catholicism to the land that Father Augustine would never again see. His life for His faith, they say. A worthy trade, they say. The Old Man is cut from the same cloth as Father Augustine. That is his destiny. But now, he has the unseemly distinction of having a sodomite for a son. The wife is easy to overlook, but the sodomite is a sin against God. How could such a blasphemous fruit fall from such a holy tree? they will ask. Maybe the tree itself is corrupted, its wood pocked with grubs, is what they will think.

As all of this was playing itself out in the Old Man's spirits-soaked b rain, he stood waiting for me at the front door of his house. From the look on his face, I could tell that no part of that structure belonged to me now. From the stance of his body, I could tell that he was beyond drunk, one shot glass away from kissing the floor. When I was younger, I used to think that if I shoved a lit match into his ear canal, his entire head would ignite into flames, burning away the alcohol that clogged it in a single flash. Now, well, now it was too late. As I walked toward him, I could see my mother's straw hat hanging in its usual place at the entrance to the kitchen. The kitchen was an addition, an afterthought that jutted out from the back of the house. It had its own entrance but no door. A piece of cloth the color of honey hung in the opening. My mother said that the color soothed her. She saved our tea leaves for a month before she had enough to dye the piece of muslin, which she had carefully ripped from a larger bolt. "Why not leave it white?" I asked, anxious for something to stand between us and the flies.

"White is the color of mourning," she said.

I know that she saved the rest of that muslin, rolled-up and hidden away. Did she take it out after I was gone? Did she take down the sheet of honey, kiss it as she would my cheeks, wrap it up to keep it safe?

"Don't come any closer!" the Old Man shouted. He lowered his voice and greeted me in this manner: "I have three sons. A chef. A porter. A printer."

Is that it? I thought. I was expecting something more vio- i63
lent. It began long ago with his thumb pressed into the soft spot of my skull. Then a stick of wood thicker than my arm splintered into my shin. Lately, a chair leg shoved into my Adam's apple. Though it was true that as I grew older, the Old Man had become less reliant on physical violence to get his points across, or maybe I had grown more adept at dodging his blows. Either way, the same damage had been done. In the end, words were easier for him. They took less of his time, and they tore through the same skin.

"Did you hear me? I said that I have
three
sons."

He sounds as if he is practicing for a speech, I thought. "I am a Catholic Holy Man, and I have three sons..." I imagined him refining his opening remarks.

"I've always had only three. You are your mother's. As for your father, you'll have to ask her. Because I'm a charitable man, I kept you both anyway, and this is how you repay me?"

A question is sometimes best answered with another: "Charity that has to be
repaid?
Wouldn't that make it a loan?" I thought and then uncharacteristically said aloud to him.

The Old Man, who was no longer my father, looked at me, spat in my face, and walked back inside his house.

I stand there still. A line of fire ants crawls up the frame of the doorway. Tiny orange marigolds, their petals bunched together, twisted inside themselves, crowd around the dirt path on which I stand. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the fraying chin strap of my mother's hat moving listlessly in the sun. I stand there still.

The story of Father Augustine, as I remember it, also included a journal that he left behind filled with ecstasies, raptures, and a dying wish. Death, they say, was kind to the Father and gave him prior notice. Father Augustine, according to his own entries, took that opportunity to secure a promise from the ship captain that if he were to die before they reached shore, his body would be delivered to Avignon and interred in a Catholic cemetery. In exchange for the promise, the captain was to receive all
that Father Augustine carried with him, which—to the captain's subsequent surprise and to Father Augustine's as well, if only he had been alive to see—was a small fortune in gold chalices, a papal gift for the Bishop of Saigon. This is where their story usually ends. Death is the most moving conclusion, they say.

Far from finding it inspirational, my mother and I thought Father Augustine's story was a tragedy. To die so far away from home, we thought, is the worst possible ending. Overall, though, we liked the story. Not for its tears but for its gold chalices and the Father's unknowing transportation of them. We thought that these two details were both loose threads in an otherwise satisfactory tale. They were, for us, not quite inconsistencies but paths that should have been further explored. We used to tell each other different endings, taking up the matter of the gold chalices and their transport, and seeing where they would take us. My mother and I felt free to improvise because we did not attach to Father Augustine's story the religious significance that Vietnamese Catholics did. For them, he was a simple country priest who was chosen to travel to the Vatican as an envoy for the faithful of Vietnam. He was a simple country priest who was granted a papal audience because he had baptized his entire village, starting with his father and mother. He was a simple country priest who, when confronted by the praise of His Holiness, confessed that he had sinned. His motives, Father Augustine admitted, were selfish. He had been afraid of being alone in heaven. He was a simple country priest who kissed the papal ring, whose only sins were his fidelity and devotion to the Catholic Church. The lessons to be learned, the deeds to be emulated, were numerous and growing. For those who told it, Father Augustine's story became, like the chalices that he had unknowingly traded away, a vessel from which they, the truly devoted, could taste heaven, sweet and redemptive. For my mother and me, the story of Father Augustine was like any other, a thing to be repeated and retold. A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word.

Father Augustine's god was, for my mother, not as compelling as the others in her life. She was born a Buddhist. She, in addition, was taught from birth to worship her ancestors. She never saw the faces of her grandparents, so that left her with only her father and mother, a god and something of a demigod in the order of honor at her family altar. It was not until the morning when she was wed that she was baptized a Catholic. Her head was draped in a white cloth, trimmed with two blue bands. When she walked into Father Vincente's church, she saw the statue of the "Virgin Mother," whose head was similarly covered, and she recognized the woman whom this religion wanted her to be. "Virgin Mother? But how do they have babies?" the girl, who would grow up to be my mother, naturally wanted to know. The answer came to her that night and so did the pain between her legs. He is trying to push through to the other side, she thought. She had just begun her monthly bleedings, so when she saw the blood caked to the inside of her legs the next morning she thought it was one and the same. She took out the strips of cotton that her mother had given her and folded one into a narrow wad. She placed it in between her legs, wrapped either end of it around a second strip that she had already tied around her waist. Then she cooked for her new husband his morning rice. Her mother had given her ten cotton strips and a pair of earrings, two small jade hoops taken from her own lobes.

Long, fleshy Buddha lobes are a sign of good luck, the girl's mother had been told, but she frankly had suffered only bad. Her husband had passed away, and he had left her with nothing. Just a young daughter and no sons. That is the worst kind of luck, she had been told. By the time that her daughter turned twelve, the mother was tired of living off the meager, spiteful charity of her brother-in-law. She wanted to see her husband again. Desperately. She saw him in her dreams, and he told her what to do. Marry off their daughter and join him in the afterlife. "It is the only noble thing to do," he told her. His family could not afford to feed both of them forever, she agreed. She i66
went to a matchmaker the next day and said, "I have a pair of jade earrings." She tucked her hair behind her ears and showed them to him. "Here," she said, "and I have a daughter and that is all."

"Don't worry," said the matchmaker, though his wrinkled face said, You should worry! Those earrings are hardly enough for a dowry.

She returned to her brother-in-law's house and wept. Her daughter slept beside her as she had done since her father was wrapped in a sheet of white. Their life continued in this way for another two years. Every few months or so, the mother would hear of another matchmaker who was passing through their village in search of a good deal on a bride. "I want to see my husband again," she finally told one of them. "Desperately," she added as she locked onto the man's eyes, forcing him to see what she wanted to do. "Desperately," she repeated. The matchmaker, a man with a heart, rare for someone of his profession, said that he would see what he could do. He returned a month later and reported the good news. A young man, a Catholic educated by the holy fathers, was willing to take her daughter for a bride. But first, the young man wanted to know three things. One, has the girl started to bleed? Two, is there a history of infertility in the family? Three, when was the mother planning to "see" her husband? The mother immediately answered, "Yes, no, and right after the wedding." The matter was then settled as the matchmaker had been instructed to accept the deal, if those were the exact responses.

"Worship" is a strong word. Especially when spoken as a command, worship should not to be used carelessly or lightly. My mother was taught the meaning of this word, the unblinking force of it, even before she could say "Má" and "Cha." Before she even knew what to call them, what their blood relationship to her was, she knew that their word was absolute, above law, equal to religion. She was told that in their death she would worship them, and in their life she must obey them. From the
very beginning, "worship" was for my mother synonymous with "obey," and so she never thought to run, to stand up and let her bare feet carry her beyond the marshes surrounding her uncle's house. She sat still while her mother heated the needle and bled her earlobes. She sat still while her mother took the jade from her stretched lobes and placed them in hers. She sat still and received from her mother a rare gift of tenderness, which for the girl would always mean pain. This was her last memory of her mother. The next morning the girl awoke with no one by her side. She had been instructed by her mother the night before about what route to take, and how to send word through the matchmaker once the wedding had taken place. The girl touched her ears. She kissed the mat that they slept on because there was nothing else to bid good-bye.

The girl heard of her mother's death from the matchmaker. He always brings me bad news, she thought. The pounding through to the other side continued until she began to show. Her swollen belly brought with it a reprieve. The cycle continued two more times. Three boys. Her husband was lucky, indeed, she was told. After the first one, he was certainly flushed with pride. He built for her a larger kitchen at the back of his house. He wanted a room where she and the baby, who would not stop crying, could go when there was business to be done in the main part of the house. As she sat inside the addition, nursing his firstborn, she heard mumbled prayers and the clicking of coins coming from the central rooms. She heard strange men's voices, sometimes weeping and other times taut with ecstasy, all saying aloud "Amen." This "Amen" must be a powerful Catholic god, she thought.

In her second act of defiance—her first was her vow never to step back inside Father Vincente's church—she set up a small shrine at the back of the kitchen in honor of Buddha, in memory of her father, and in spite of her mother's lack of affection for her. The last, of course, troubled her but she dutifully tried to set it aside. Sometimes, though, during the nights when the rain would not stop and she was touched by something akin to
the feeling of being cold, she would hold her baby boy in her arms and think about the love that her mother bore for her father. She wanted to know how love for a man could outweigh love for one's own child. How could love be so desperate that it would urge a mother to leave her only daughter behind to this man and his pounding to get through to the other side? At first she was afraid that her husband would find the altar, but soon it became clear that he would never go inside the kitchen, that that was hers. The dirt floor, the clay pots, the tin plates, the ladles made from coconut shells, the earthenware cistern kept out back for collecting the rain, she loved it all as she loved her child. At first, she was afraid that she loved it more because it belonged solely to her. The boy, after all, was also his.