The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [114]
"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