The Book of Salt (26 page)

I did not learn until many days at sea that I had been resting my head on a pouch filled with gold leaf, one sunlit layer on top of another. Lighter and more valuable than its paper counterpart, gold is worth that is of the earth, my mother knows, and
has to be honored anywhere upon its curving surface. Paper money gets its values from those who print it and therefore often suffers, finds itself totally degraded, when transported and removed from familiar surroundings. Perishable, like a fish out of water, or imagine a man on the open seas.

Every day, I hear the Old Man's voice shouting at me from beneath the earth, where, I tell myself, he now lies. The moment that he took his blood from mine, separated it as if his were the white and mine the yolk, I placed him there. "Where there is gambling, there is faith" is the tired aphorism that the Old Man clings to and continues even now to push through the soft center of the globe, coordinating its location with the longitude and latitude of wherever I happen to be. For a man who has never even seen the sea, he is a master navigator. His internal compass is where his heart should be. I had faith, Old Man. I had faith—

"I know all about your faith'! How dare you use the word of God to describe the things that you practice. Only a fool like you would believe that that French sodomite was going to save you. Out of love? Out of lust for your scrawny, worthless body? I've always told your mother that you are a pathetic loser, and here was the final proof. Yeah, you gambled and you
lost—
"

Is that what really upsets you, Old Man? That I
lost?
If that French sodomite' was still keeping me warm, if he was still keeping your bottles from going dry—

"Shut your mouth! It sickens me to think about what you do, shaming my name. After all that Minh the Sous Chef did for you. I told him he shouldn't have bothered with you, and I was right. But he needs to learn how to read and write,' he insisted. ' In this day and age, a
chef de cuisine
has to be versatile, adaptive, fluent...' he kept on saying. Now look at what you've done with it."

What are you talking about, Old Man? Anh Minh taught me how to read and write so that I could make a list of provisions, answer a help-wanted ad, follow the recipes that some French chef had committed to paper in anticipation of his death. But above all, Anh Minh wanted me to recognize the contours of our surname, a one-word epic that would one day be embroidered on the chef's toque of his dreams. White and tall, like a beautiful French girl, Anh Minh sighed in the middle of the night. Are you so pissed drunk, Old Man, that you think that I learned how to love, how to find passion in another man's body, from reading and writing? Do you think I learned it from a book? I am not like you, Old Man. I love my fellow man because of who I am, not because I was told to by the holy fathers and their holy gospel. In the name of your god, I commit your body to this earth where it...

But that, I am afraid, was my mistake from the very beginning, the fatal flaw in my design. I thought that I could suffocate the Old Man with shovelfuls of dirt and mud. But with his body in the soil, in the specific silt of this family's land, everything on it was bound to die. Rancor seeped from his eyelids, his mouth, his ears, his ass, where his head had been all the days of his life. I should have never made him one with the land. I should have thrown his body into the sea, expelled it and not me. My anger keeps me digging into the earth, pulling at its protective mantle, eager to see his body decaying deep inside. The Old Man has refused to cooperate. His body is wholly intact. Years of alcohol can do that to a person, make him dead but not departed, make him indelible to those who have had the misfortune of sharing his name. Pickled and preserved is another way of thinking about it. All the water that is normally found inside a body had been in his displaced by alcohol, of a proof strong enough to kill anything that comes into contact with it. The tiny animals, the grubs, the worms that help to bring about the decomposition of the body before it can be returned to the earth, had with him no hope of doing their work. So they left him alone, left his hate to poison the land, a process so gradual, so obedient to his still functioning will, that it would take my lifetime to complete. If I had a son, it might take his lifetime as well. This is as close to being immortal as
the Old Man ever had the right to be, and I am the one, the only one who keeps him that way.

Yes, Old Man, I gambled. I gambled away my position as a
garde-manger,
a pitiful lifetime tenure that, contrary to what you thought, I was not lucky to have. I gambled away the long white apron, the coveted position as Sous Chef Someday, under the reign of Minh Finally the Chef de Cuisine. I gambled away a future—"better," I know, was presumed—that Anh Minh believed in like a benevolent god. Merit will be promoted. Service will be rewarded. Loyalty will beget loyalty. Anh Minh's faith sustained him but not me.

When Blériot came to the Governor-General's, I took one look at his face and one look around me, and I thought, Really, what do I have to lose? The answer to this question, believe me, depends on what the gambler believes is fixed and constant in his life. What will always be there? What will never change? Even if the gambler should lose is the implied condition tacked onto the end of these questions. Another way of thinking about it is: What does the gambler have faith in? Those who never wager, I imagine, do not have to ask themselves these questions, never have to acknowledge that the answers are few. The answer, or if he is truly lucky, the answers, define the gambler's notions of risk and restraint. If "nothing" is the gambler's answer, he is bound to lose because there is nothing to guide him back from the edge, nothing but the urge to jump. Risk encourages a gambler to be brave. Restraint advises a gambler to be prudent. It is the balance between the two that keeps him in the game.

I had faith, Old Man. You are the one who had none. No faith in me whatsoever, if you thought that I was naive enough to look at Blériot and see salvation in his arms. He is a Frenchman, after all. Even in the throes of what I choose to remember as love, my body felt the lines stretched between us, razor-sharp when pressed against the flesh. I understood the limitations, the demarcations, the barbed-wire rules of such engagements. And contrary to what you still think, Old Man, in Blériot's blue eyes with the black bursting stars inside, I did not see a promotion, a
pay raise for Anh Minh, not even cans of tinned peaches and pears for Ma. I did not see a paid ticket to somewhere else—better,' again, was presumed. In his blue eyes, I, unlike you, did not see my savior. I saw a man worth gambling for because I had faith—

"Stop using that word! I told you faith' belongs to God, belongs to the Church, to the Devout and the Saved. It belongs to me," says the Old Man, spitting dirt with every word.

Shut your mouth, Old Man, and let me finish. This is my story. I will tell it, and you will lie there mute.

I had faith. Faith that the Old Man had felt for my mother four moments of kindness, four tender touches, four pure reasons to sigh. That they, like four brief glimpses of the moon, softened the darkness of those nights during which my brothers and I were conceived. When I was a child, I could not look up at the stars or close my eyes to the sun and believe that it was not exactly the same time all over the world. And, like all children, I also could not look up at the man whom everyone called my father and believe that he had brought me into this world in an act of scorn and contempt, which continues even now. Stupid, unquestioning faith that because my life came from his, my father, while cruel in action and brutal in speech, could never be so in heart. A tragic miscalculation on my part, if I am to believe the Old Man, a drunk and a gambler, a thief who took away my home.

"You fool! You
gave
it to me." The Old Man laughs with the satisfaction of knowing that what he has said is fact.

Yes, I thought, how true. I should have known better. I should have thrown his body into the open sea, I should have expelled it and not me.

After my mother gave birth to me, there were many things that she could no longer pray to her father and mother about. They would have disowned her. Then whom would she have left to worship, whose likeness would she have left to reconfigure from memory for her family altar? There is no forgiveness in ancestor
worship, only retribution and eternal debt. Even in the afterlife, my mother was bound to see them, her father and mother and an entire clan of people whom she had never met but whose role it was to sit in judgment of her. What would they all say? she worried. The great sadness of her life was that she already knew. She had paid someone to take away the only worth that her husband had found in her body. She had stolen from him who knows how many unborn sons. She had dared to exert sovereignty over her own body when she had been explicitly told that she had no rights. Thief, squanderer, and, worst of all, a disobedient wife, the epithets followed her every day as she went to the market, and they followed her home at night to pull her sheet away, curling her body up with guilt. She woke up and found herself at forty, the wife of a man who preferred the company of men, his tongue craving the body of a man named Christ—"a Holy Communion," the Old Man told her; a peddler who earned money just to see it taken away; a woman who gave birth to sons to see them learn how to walk, never toward and always away; a mother of four sons, one of whom believed that her love alone was not enough—"otherwise, why would he have left me?" she asked herself; a daughter whose father and mother had barred her from ever joining them in the afterlife. It is one thing to be alone in life, she thought, but to be alone in death would be unbearable.

My mother, believe me, is strong. Not in the ways of the chestnut trees of this city. These broad-leafed giants withstand the blasts of winter's winds with rigidity and years' worth of concentric armor. There are other ways to survive. When the monsoon winds were thrashing, tossing about plant life and small animals, my mother saw that the bamboos always escaped unscathed. She once saw those in the thicket at the back of her kitchen garden blown sideways during the height of a storm, their skinny bodies parallel with the ground and the sky. Today they would surely break, she thought. As she watched over them, waiting for the tragedy to unfold, the storm picked itself up and went away. By then, the rainwater cistern had fallen on
its belly, and a sheet of water gushing through a crack along its side was washing over red and orange chili peppers scattered all over the ground. Some still had their green stems attached, others had been ripped away too suddenly from the neighbor's garden and had to leave their stems behind. Regret spilled out of them in the form of small, pale seeds. As if in grief, the bamboos were pressed to the ground. But within a matter of minutes, they nodded and waved. They shook off the rain and reoriented themselves toward the sky. My mother was impressed, indeed. Now
that,
she thought, is strength. Perseverance and flexibility are not opposites. Survival requires certain compromises. Endurance is defined by the last one standing. These were the lessons, I imagine, that she must have learned.

My mother resolved to be the last one standing. Unlike her own mother, she would never let a man take away her life. She wanted to watch her husband grow old, decrepit. She thought of how his body would look floating down the Mekong, out into the South China Sea. She, unlike me, would never allow him to claim the land that she calls home. She wanted to be there to welcome her youngest son back to her kitchen and back to her house. But in order to proceed with her plan, my mother first had to reconfigure the confines of her faith. She needed something to believe in that would offer her some way to escape the wrath of her ancestors, some place to go when she died where they would not be waiting for her. She, like the truly desperate before her, turned to Catholicism for refuge. I will not call it a conversion because that implies an abrupt shift, a reversal from one side of the leaf to another, a change of heart. She still kept her family altar and the Buddha that sat there smiling back at her. She is Vietnamese, after all. She hedges her bets.

When I left home, my mother had been in theory but never in practice a Catholic for twenty-five years. The drops of holy water touched her head on her wedding day, after which she was told to open up her mouth and receive the Host, dry and flavorless on her tongue. These Catholics are terrible cooks, she remembered thinking. By the time I left home, my mother had
lived if not with Him, then in proximity to Him for over two decades. She had taken in, absorbed through the tiny pinpricks of her pores, more than any of us had realized. In Catholicism, she recognized a familiar trinity: the guilt, the denial, and the delay in happiness that defined her adult life. She found a Father and a Mother, though these two were here not married to each other. She also found a Son to replace the one who went away. In Catholicism, my mother heard her voice lifted in prayers and in songs. The last time she sang out loud her boys were still her babies, and we had fallen asleep to the rise and fall of a young girl's voice, to the pleasing warmth of that girl's body enlivened by songs. In Catholicism, my mother found a place where she could one day go, ascend to in her gray
áo dài,
like smoke rising from the incense at her family altar. There was only a small part of her, only her earlobes, I imagine, that felt remorse, that regretted that her own mother and father would not be there to greet her. They would just leave me again anyway, she thought.

My mother never wavered, however, when it came to her vow never again to enter Father Vincente's church, the place where she was bought and sold. Every Sunday, after the Old Man washed his face, drank some strong tea to mask the sweetsharp smell of liquor on his breath, he left for Father Vincente's church to assume his post at the frontmost pew. My mother would then put on a clean blouse, tie on her straw hat, and walk all the way to Saigon's Notre-Dame Cathedral. The first time she attended Mass there, she was given a string of beads, maybe not gold on a pink silk cord, she thought, but at least there was a choice: blue with the man on a cross or pink with the woman who kept her head covered, like a perpetual bride. That morning, Notre-Dame's tolling bells told my mother that Mass was just ending and that she was still many boulevards away. She kept up her pace and arrived in time for the beginning of afternoon services. She slipped through the slowly closing doors and sat down in one of the polished pews. She gazed up at the chrysanthemums, gladioli, and Easter lilies that adorned the
altar, stippled with gold. Beautiful, my mother thought. Even if Father Vincente's church could afford more than marigolds and cockscombs, she would never attend services there. To worship in the same house as the Old Man, she thought, would be sacrilege. That morning, my mother did not know that in the Catholic faith what she had done to her body after my birth was also a sin, mortal and irredeemable. By the time she found out, it was too late. Ignorance or a claim to it had already saved her.