The Book of Salt (27 page)

Faith is the beginning of the story of my life. The Old Man believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. He believed that if one Son was good, an entire brood was even better. He believed in bringing to life men who would forever be indebted to him. Why should I not have servants of my own? he thought. In order to proceed with his plan, he had to procure for himself a wife. He, otherwise, would have never wanted, would have never desired, a woman. The only woman he had loved had given him away, placed him in front of God's doors and told him to close his eyes and pray. He prayed for her smile to come back to her face. He prayed for rice in her bowl and not only in his. He prayed for her chest to heave fewer sighs, especially when she thought that he had fallen asleep for the night. He opened up his eyes and found himself alone. His prayers for her had been answered. Those were the last selfless thoughts that he would ever have. By the time the girl who would be my mother was brought to him, he saw in the despair of those around him only the promise of a steady income. In his long life, the Old Man surrounded himself with gamblers, desperate for good luck in any form. These were the kind of men who already believed in wearing the same pair of pants over and over again. Others ate only beef, when they could afford it, before each game. Many refrained from having sex before an especially important hand. These were men who were susceptible from the very beginning. Faithful fools for the flock was what the Old Man dealt in. One man's superstition is another man's religion, he knew. There were also women with bulging money belts and a willingness to
embrace whatever gods necessary, to repeat whatever prayers needed, in order to win, but the Old Man could not stand the sight of them, the smell of them. One in the house was already too many, he thought. But as he was a man who believed in the proliferation of sons, he had to touch this girl who smelled like the only woman he had ever loved. It sickened him each time. He committed the act quickly and without ever closing his eyes. No woman would play that trick on me again, he thought.

My mother kept her eyes closed. She squeezed them shut, sealed them with the tight weave of her lashes. He can make me open my legs but never my eyes, she thought. When she felt herself ripping, she swam away into the darkness in search of her mother. She wanted to know whether her mother was certain. Was her mother absolutely sure that this was the man? In the darkness, her mother and her father, who came along for added authority, told her, "Yes,
this
is the man!" How could both of them be wrong, the girl thought, and she opened her eyes. Her husband was finished, and she got up to clean herself. She squatted over a washbowl filled with rainwater. She lowered her backside slowly into it. She had added a spoonful of salt to the water to help cleanse the wound, just as her mother had taught her. The water bloomed pink. She looked down at the color and cried. The salt was causing her wound to sting. "Obey," like "worship," is a strong word. Her mother and father had told her so, and she believed them. They gave her life, they told her, so that she could give them grandsons. She had been prepared to perform that task from the very beginning. When her body took the first step, her mother found for her a husband. A scholar-prince, the girl had imagined. In the days that followed her mother's announcement, the girl was reminded again and again that she must obey this man. He must be wise, the girl thought. She must not displease him. He must be sensitive, the girl thought. She must not leave him. He must be kind, the girl thought. From the soft mouth of the woman who gave her life, my mother received the words that would keep her, still and unmoving, underneath the Old Man. The words swam with her in the dark and kept her from reaching up with a knife and cutting his neck like that of a chicken. Her mother told her to swallow her anger, and she gulped it down until her belly became distended with it. Worse, her mother knew that it would.

"
I HAD A BROTHER
, once..."

GertrudeStein is fond of throwing this non sequitur before the baffled faces of her newly formed acquaintances. It is a test for alertness, skill, and agility. Think of a martial arts master who suddenly, violently, turns on her disciple. If the disciple passes the test, he proceeds to the next level of instruction. If the disciple fails, he is left to die of his injuries. Whether the wound is fatal or merely an abrasion is left to the hapless youth to decide by his response. For GertrudeStein, if the young man switches the topic of conversation to the whereabouts or wherewithal of her brother, then it is a fatality. Too easily distracted, therefore not worth knowing, she thinks. A brother is not interesting, not interesting enough to displace her from the center of her own conversation. But if the young man does not venture down that shadowy lane, if he is able to resist the tantalizing reference to the brother Stein, then Miss Toklas and I are certain to see his face again at 27 rue de Fleurus.

"Actually, she has three and a sister," Miss Toklas can often be heard amending from her corner of the studio.

"But, Pussy, for me there was only one," my Madame would then insist.

How true, I think. We all have only one, no matter the size of our family. The one for whom we would dive into an algae pond, drink in its muck, and sink into its silt to save. The one for whom we would claim, "It was all
my
fault," no matter the infraction or the crime. The one whom we worship and envy in tandem, until envy grows stronger and takes the lead.

GertrudeStein had a brother, once. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean for him. She had reached the age of twenty-nine in the land of her birth to find there nothing but a sharp, sloping hill. She could take graceful, mincing steps down it, or she could ask, "Can women have wishes?" and run down that same hill flinging her arms in the air in a series of "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Paris had two things to recommend it, her brother Leo and the new century. Already three years into the twentieth, and she still had the distinct impression that she was living inside a museum, under glass, properly shielded from the white glare of the sun. Oakland, Allegheny, Cambridge, Baltimore, all the cities that she had slept in, but never quite awoken in, had the nineteenth century written all over them, she thought. No greater insult could she ever imagine for a city or for herself. Certainly, life for her had been eventful. She had studied and she had loved. She preferred the former because there her talents for thinking and talking allowed her to excel. Thinking and talking, though, were never helpful to her when it came to loving. She, like many of her fellow medical school students, tended to suffer the symptoms of whatever illnesses they happened to be studying. The topic at hand was the heart, so she was certain that there was something terribly wrong with the circulation of her blood, a condition she thought chronic if not fatal. She could no longer take deep breaths. She woke up during the night to find the hair on her head, in the folds of her underarms, in the V that parts her thighs, all matted with sweat. The peculiar smells of her own odors rising, a steam coming off her, nauseated her and aroused her to the presence of her body. During those nights, she did not so much sleep but close her eyes and wish the night
away. During those mornings after, she swore that there had been butterflies, that they had landed one by one on her eyelids and along the empty clotheslines of her lips. She thought it was surely a condition to be treated, if not conquered, by medical science.

Gertrude "Gertie" Stein, twenty-nine and almost two hundred pounds, was in love, and she mistook it for a disease. She, like the chauffeur, believed in the power of strenuous exercise and a modified diet. She stopped having afternoon teas at the home of her beloved and started boxing with a welterweight, a man who no longer had any hope of glory and made up for it by making this fat young lady jab and swing. Lips red with strawberry jam, skin like slowly pouring cream, hair the color of properly brewed tea, all this was what she was giving up. She thought boxing would make her breathe again. She was wrong and that infuriated her. This loving thing is brutal, she thought, especially when there are three. Three is an unlucky number when it comes to love, especially when she was the third, the last to arrive upon the site of a fallen honey hive, still sweet but already claimed and jealously guarded. She wanted to be the only one. She would always want to be the only one.

"Obstetrics failed me," Gertrude wrote to her brother Leo. "Obstetrics has freed me, unlike my counterparts," she added. It was actually the other way around. She had failed Obstetrics. She had failed the class by such a great margin, with such fanfare, that everyone in the university had heard about it. "This young lady is taking and, worse, wasting valuable resources," declared the faculty of the school of medicine in one united, disapproving voice. A woman in medical school means one less man in medical school, these learned men reasoned. That, however, was what they had had to accept in exchange for a generous endowment from two phlegmatic spinster sisters, who had grown tired of disrobing before learned men whom they never, never intended to marry. The medical school took the spinsters' money and admitted women into their program of studies, but when Leo Stein's sister became the first among her sex to, well,
show no interest whatsoever in female reproduction, she became a symbol, a very large living one at that, of how the natural order of things had been violated by the spinsters and their money. The repercussion was felt throughout the university. The male students smirked at her, and the female students shunned her for compounding their already heavy burden. In the end, there was for this young lady no other way except out. She could voluntarily take a leave of absence or she could stay on and suffer a formal expulsion. Without much hesitation, she dove into the Atlantic and backstroked her way toward the Old World, which her brother Leo had assured her was now really the New.

At 27 rue de Fleurus, Leo was the painter and his sister was the writer. His
métier
was a conscious decision, and hers was somewhat of a default. She had to do something with the pieces of her heart, a solidly built thing, dropped by the fluttering hands of a woman named for the fifth month of an unbearable year. She thought it best to set it down on paper, but there on the blankness that was hers to fill she placed her broken heart inside the body of a man. Unrequited love for a woman, the story that she found herself telling, remained otherwise unchanged. At 27 rue de Fleurus, she sought and found comfort in the tangle of her prose, in the thick nest of her hair, in the wraps and folds of her somber-colored kimonos. A trunkful of these garments, souvenirs from Leo's travels without her, were waiting for her in the studio. She thanked her brother with a slap on the back and a hug that made his crushing lungs wheeze. She immediately discarded the kimonos embroidered with cranes, peonies, and cherry blossoms and began wearing the rest. Solid, impenetrable fields of blues, browns, and grays, these everyday kimonos were ideal, as they allowed her to dispense with a corset altogether. A string of prayer beads that she found at the bottom of the trunk completed her ensemble. The handsome necklace, each bead the size of an unripe plum, swung from Gertrude's neck down to where her waistline would be, if she had had one. She was then just "Gertrude," the sister, the younger, the follower in her brother's footsteps, and so Leo more
appropriately bore their last name.
He
is the one, Gertrude thought. Their household at 27 rue de Fleurus was to be the beginning of a lifetime of cohabitation. No husbands and no wives here, she thought. No husbands and no wives needed in the twentieth century, she proposed and wholeheartedly accepted. She was, of course, wrong.

"
She
is always wrong when it comes to the practicality of daily life," as Miss Toklas can attest. This conclusion required the passage of time—the growing gray of my Mesdames' hair, the yellowing of their teeth, the blue veining of their calves—to be proven valid and true. its corollary—"GertrudeStein is a genius"—did not, and Alice Babette Toklas, thirty years of age and fresh from her own ocean crossing, made it a point to proclaim it so. The moment these words were spoken, a spell that declared its intention never be broken, Gertrude, thirty-three and unabashedly corsetless, became "GertrudeStein." No longer a diminutive, as female names are doomed to be, but a powerful whopping declaration of her full self, each and every time. Not any Gertie but GertrudeStein, the older, the wiser, the writer. "
The
genius," Miss Toklas added, as she gently placed GertrudeStein's head down upon her lap.

"But, Pussy, there can be only one in any given family," GertrudeStein murmured, as she slipped her hands underneath the fabric waves of Miss Toklas's skirt.

"Then for the Steins, it is you, Lovey."

GertrudeStein was already inclined to agree. She, by then, had lived with her brother Leo for four years, and he in her opinion had grown increasingly pale. The reason was clear. Leo no longer painted, and that, thought GertrudeStein, was depriving him of the rush of creativity that kept her own cheeks pink. Worse, Leo had allowed his interest in other people's art to surpass
their
interest in his. Over the years, they together had distinguished themselves in this city precisely for the interest that they showed in other people's art. At 27 rue de Fleurus, they collected paintings, artists, and a society of people who were interested in all three. The relevant three were the paintings, the artists, and the Steins. The paintings, they hung on the walls of
the studio. The artists, they sat on its settees and chairs. The people, they invited through the studio door to gaze up and around. It was the simultaneous existence of all three, as Miss Toklas had come to see, which formed the tricolor of advancing fame that flew high over 27 rue de Fleurus. But Leo, like his sister, thought that there could be only one in any given family, and Leo was certain that it was he. The older, the wiser,
the
genius, thought Leo. Worse, he made it a point to proclaim it so: "Certainly, Gertrude contributes to the cause, but it begins and ends at the cosigning of the check. My sister does have her opinions, but mine are informed. Of course, she has her favorites, but I prefer the artistic to the merely artful."