The Book of Salt (32 page)

BÃO WAS WRONG
. Useful foreign words and phrases have little to do with drink, money, or girls. The more impenetrable the language, the more unpronounceable it is, the easier life becomes for a man like me. Choices lose their numbers. Decisions are freed from consideration. Options become explicit and clear. If I do not see it, I cannot have it. If the man next to me is not drinking it, I am unlikely to order it for myself. A quick nod, a finger raised, an eyebrow arched, says: "I will have what he is having." Then I sit tense until the waiter returns, praying the entire time that the liquid in my neighbor's glass is not twenty-five-year-old Scotch or vintage champagne. I do tend to exaggerate. The kind of establishments that I frequent carry little that is over a year old. Youth in such places is cheap, just like the clientele, mostly boys but sometimes girls as well. One can never really tell until there is a thorough examination of the hands. Feet can be made to appear smaller with pointed-toe shoes. High heels can create the visual impression that there is nothing beneath that skirt but ten diminutive tippytoes. But hands, nails painted or bare, are red, waving flags. Gloves—black is best as pastels and bright colors only accentuate size—
are therefore a standard giveaway. In fact, some "girls" wear them just in case the customers are too dumb or too drunk to identify their unique services. As for me, what they see is what they get.

Bão, for one, had no interest in what he saw. On the
Niobe,
he had a collection of already-paid-for memories, which he coaxed forward with hands warm like the South China Sea. While the ship, a hammock strung between two falling stars, swung us to sleep, I often heard him moan.

"Serena the Soloist," Bão whispered, "always had them on."

"Had what on?" I asked, bracing myself for yet another tale about female self-love.

"Gloves."

"Oh."

"Black and elbow-length," he added, "and nothing else."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

Bão's quickening breath told me that
that
was what he wanted to believe. Who am I to question this man's recollection? I thought, and then I heard myself doing it anyway. "Listen, I do not know how Serena, umm, managed the top half, but let me show you how the rest is done." I climbed down from my bunk and stood before his. I took his hands, warmer than the South China Sea, and I showed him how to form a cleft in between my legs that disappeared into my inner thighs. In the dark, I again heard him moan. This time for me, I told myself.

I have learned my lessons well. Believe me, Blériot had many idiosyncrasies, and that was just one of them. "Let's play Monsieur and Madame," Blériot would say before turning off all the lights. What he meant was actually a variation on the theme: Monsieur and Madame's secretary. Blériot liked the additional layer of sin.

"Tell me the word for ' sweet,'" the
chef de cuisine
commanded in French.

"Sweet," the
garde-manger
obliged in Vietnamese.

"Sour?"

"Sour."

"Bitter?"

"Bitter."

Pleasure for Blériot depended on the careful combination of such words. They worked for him during the day. Why should they not during the night?

"Tell me the word for 'salt.'"

The voice demanding in the dark was this time mine. I had played the same game of words with Sweet Sunday—I mean Lattimore. I remembered him smiling. At first I thought he could not understand my laborer's French, but then he bent down and licked the traces of it from the corners of my mouth. He had already taught me the English word for "sweet." "Sour" and "bitter" were soon to come. The word for "salt" I eventually also learned but not from him. In any language, these four words repeated, emphasized with a shake or a nod, are invaluable to me in the kitchen. In the other rooms of the house, they have on occasion allowed me the semblance of poetry, spare not because of a limited vocabulary but because of the weight of the carefully chosen words. Unlike Blériot, I do not forget these words at the night's end only to demand them repeated again at the most inopportune times, when words of all things are unnecessary. Yes, Blériot had many idiosyncrasies, and
that
was just another one of them.

At moments like those, Bão preferred silence, at least on my part. He is a man, after all. He always enjoyed the sound of his own voice. The night before the
Niobe
docked in Marseilles, neither one of us, though, said a word. The lights of the nearby harbor traced the horizon with a thread of gold. Seagulls, the indigenous birds of busy ports, circled the ship swooping down onto our trash-strewn wake. Voices, caught in the curling waves, came out to greet us, a shipful of men almost safe from the grasping arms of the sea. The next morning, I, of all men, longed for water. I was not the only one. Within hours of docking in Marseilles, Bão had signed up with an ocean liner bound for America. He waved to me from a deck that he would personally swab clean. In his shirt pocket that morning was a slip of paper with the name of Minh the Sous Chef written on it for when Bão was next back in Saigon, and at the bottom of his bag, wrapped inside two of his shirts, underneath a pair of shoes, was my mother's red pouch. I gave him my brother's name. The other he took. Worse, if he had only asked, I would have given this man of my own free will my mother's gold, my father's skin, my brother's hands, and all the bones that float loose in this body of mine now that he has gone.

Má, please do not cry. I know I could have bought bread with it, a room for the night. I could have bought acts of love with it, but I could have never bought back the years of your life. Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Má. Better that a stranger circles the globe with it than your youngest son.

An unsatisfying and unbearable ending, I know. That is why the saga of the red pouch, for me, never ends there on the docks of Marseilles:

Bão, the sailor whose name means "storm," traveled the seven seas in seven months, returning eventually to the familiar embrace of the Mekong. Still in his possession was my oldest brother's name and my mother's heart sealed inside an allegory of red and gold. Upon his arrival on land, Bão asked for directions to the Governor-General's house, and at its back gate he asked for Minh the Sous Chef. "Whew!" Bão whistled, when he saw the long white apron and the starched toque perched upon my brother's head. Half the height of the one worn by Chef Blériot, it had been presented to my brother along with a slew of new protocols, all for improving the hygienic standards within the Governor-General's kitchen. But everyone in the household staff knew that the white hat, the "poison mushroom" as they called it behind my brother's back, was in fact the only visible manifestation of Chef Blériot's guilt.

"This is for your mother," Bão said, placing the red pouch in Minh Still the Sous Chef's hands. "Bình wanted her to have it back."

"Who?"

"Bình. Your youngest brother—"

"That's not my youngest brother's name," Anh Minh replied.

"Oh," Bão said, opening his mouth in a long silent laugh, relieved in the end to hear that the kitchen boy was not the only fool on board the
Niobe.
"Doesn't matter," the sailor said to no one in particular, and he turned and walked back toward the sea.

I never meant to deceive, but real names are never exchanged. Or did my story about the man on the bridge not make that code of conduct already clear? I saw him again the other day. He looked younger than when we first met. The same lips, though fuller than I had remembered. The same eyes, alive and inquisitive. Eloquent even, if I am to believe that the eyes can tell the entire story of a man. The same shock of hair parted on the left but a bit longer, more like that of a poet in a Left Bank café than a scholar-prince in a teak pavilion. I have looked for him on the avenues, on the quays, on the park benches of this city. I have even gone back to the restaurant on the rue Descartes and stood across from its red-lanterned entrance, but two months ago I went there and found the lantern gone. The chef, I imagined, had gone back to Vietnam to see his mother, or maybe he experienced a second bout of wanderlust and was again roaming the world. I have heard that at a certain age men either renew a longing for the bosom of the woman who nursed them or those of distant mountains. I have also gone back to the bridge where we met, hands on the railing, face turned to the river. There have been times when I have stood there until my legs felt as if they too were remembering the persistent motion of water. Usually that meant that it was very late, and I had had too much to drink.

The last place I expected to find the man on the bridge was at Lené Studio. Of course, I went back there, the same Sunday that I received Lattimore's note in fact. I wanted my photograph. I had earned it fair and square, as he would say. I could
always cut it in half, I thought, and hide his face away for when a knife blade is no longer sharp enough and his smile will have to do. Also, I thought the photograph was already paid for. I was wrong. Lattimore had been required to leave only half of the cost as a deposit. Unfortunately, this simple matter of a deposit and partial payment took almost half an hour to extract from the clerk, who kept running back and forth between the front office and the back room, where the photographer Lené was presumably in the middle of a session. It did not help matters that the pointy-nosed clerk had little patience for my accent. The French prick kept looking at my receipt and asking, "But, where is Monsieur Lattimore?" Instead of telling the clerk that "Monsieur Lattimore is in the goddamn photograph!" I dropped into my most servile French and begged Monsieur Prick to ask Monsieur Photographer whether I might pick up the photograph now and continue to make the other half of the payment in weekly installments. It was understood, at least on my part, that the weeks were not necessarily going to be consecutive. To my surprise, Monsieur Prick agreed to broach the matter with his employer and disappeared into the back room, where I assumed he was having a series of complicated negotiations with the photographer Lené on my behalf, or where he was merely waiting until I gave up and left.

Meanwhile in the front office of Lené Studio, I had calmed down enough to remember that I had not eaten anything since dinner the night before. I sank down onto a fussy little chair that was only meant to be looked at or photographed. Nothing about it gave comfort, not the ornately carved back or the green velvet seat, which felt suspiciously as if it were stuffed with uncooked lentils. After a few uninviting minutes, I decided that it was better to stand on my own two feet. I got up and slowly walked my hunger around the room. The walls of the front office were covered with sample photographs. There was a wide range of sizes represented, beginning with those tiny enough for a locket. The profusion of faces, I thought, gave the empty room the appearance of being crowded. I studied the expressions of
the people who stared out at me from their carefully chosen photographic tableaus—the photographer Lené is well known in the city for his ability to provide his sitters with a wide selection of fantasy locales, from the simple Grecian Garden in Springtime to the more exotic Midnight in the Harem of the Last Moor—and I wondered how they came to be placed on these walls. I tried to find the commonality that brought them all here. Uncanny beauty, soulful carriage, fearless engagement with the camera's lens? Or maybe these sitters also could not pay for the other half of their photographs and had to forfeit their faces and their bodies to the front office of the fabricator of their now forsaken dreams. I had had no dealings with the photographer Lené, as Lattimore had done all the talking the last time we were here, so it was difficult for me to say which method of culling his subjects was more true to the photographer's character. As I made my way from photograph to photograph, a journey from one fantasy to another, I began to notice that some of them were not black and white. Some showed subtle washes of color, purples and blues, roses and browns, as if they were taken in the subdued light of dusk or dawn. I scanned the walls, spotting the variations in tone. That was when I saw him. I climbed atop the fussy chair for a better look at the man on the bridge, or rather his youthful face, in a photograph no larger than the size of my open hand.

"Do you know him?"

I turned around to see the very top of the photographer Lené's balding pate addressing me. But before I answered him, I thought it best to have the good graces to climb down from his chair.

Lené repeated his question.

"Yes ... I mean no. I am not sure." I replied in a fine example of how this language delights in catching me off-guard and ill-prepared.

"That describes him perfectly." Lené laughed. "The best photograph retoucher I have ever had. Better than that idiot whom I've working for me now."

"What is his name?"

"Pierre Bazin."

"No, no, the man in the photograph."

Lené's assured but atonal response told me that I needed to take a different approach. I handed Lattimore's receipt to the photographer. I asked him to please write down the name of the man in the photograph. When Lené gave the blue slip of paper back to me, there was an unmistakably Vietnamese name written on the back of it: "Nguyễn Ai Quốc." Clever, I thought, a bit heavy-handed but clever all the same.

"So what's this I hear about weekly payments, Monsieur?"

I looked up from the receipt and without hesitation replied, "Give me that one." I pointed to the photograph of the man on the bridge.

"Ah, you do know him then," Lené said. "Let me tell you, no one can paint eyelashes like that one. No one. More delicate than the real thing. Remarkable, remarkable."

"Please, I will pay for the other half of this," I said, again handing him Lattimore's receipt, "but you can keep the photograph for ... for your walls. I will take that one instead." I pointed to the photograph of the man on the bridge.