The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [117]
"I can't, Monsieur. That print is dear to me. It is, you see, an old method from the last century. I charge four times the usual price for a salt print like that one, Monsieur. It takes a full day of sunlight to develop. A full day of sunlight in Paris! Monsieur, can you imagine?"
No, I shook my head.
"You can come and visit him," Lené raised his chin toward the man on the bridge, "anytime."
Yes, I nodded. There was nothing left to say. With me the subject of money always ends the conversation. Lené stood there staring at me as if he knew.
"Here, take this," I heard him saying.
The photographer Lené was by then standing behind the desk where Monsieur Prick had sat and ignored me until I shoved a scrap of blue underneath his face. I looked down at the envelope that the photographer offered in his hand, and again I said, "For your walls." Nobility, pride, a heretofore dormant sense of self-worth had nothing to do with it. I saw the price written on the corner of the envelope, and even though Lattimore had paid for half of it I knew that I would need many weeks, consecutive or not, before I could pay the rest. I would rather save my money, the sweat of my labor, for the man on the bridge awash in storm water blue, I thought. It was the color of the sea that first caught my eye, that made my body draw near but that, believe me, was just the beginning. The photograph was printed on paper that had the appearance of something that breathed, with a porous surface that opened with each intake of air, into which the features of the man on the bridge seeped. Less of a photograph, more of a tattoo underneath the skin.
Clever, I again thought. "Nguyễn Ái Quốc" was obviously not the name with which the man on the bridge was brought into this world. I and almost everyone else in Vietnam have the surname "Nguyen." So it was certainly possible that it may be his as well. The giveaway, however, was the combination "Ái Quốc." By itself, the words mean "love" and "country" in that order, but when conjoined they mean "patriot." Certainly a fine name for a traveler to adopt, I thought, a traveler whose heart has wisely never left home.
***
When Bão first introduced himself with a hand thrust in front of my face, followed by the grunt of his unseaworthy given name, I was speechless. I, who had never even crossed a river, a creek, a rain-swollen street, was standing barely upright in the middle of an ocean and sharing a berth with a man with whom I had nothing in common except a highly inauspicious, fate-defying given name. Two "storms" aboard one ship, I thought, was certainly a sign from somebody's god, a sign to jump overboard and swim back to shore. My inability to tread water, however, had made that course of action impossible from the very beginning. By the time my close-lipped but physically expressive bunkmate bothered to ask me what I was called, I had had a lot of time to consider the matter. In the course of which I experienced what I thought was crippling seasickness, but later when I suffered the same symptoms on land—the spirals inside my eyelids, the taste of my own liver inside my mouth, the sensation of my stomach dropping into a bottomless sea—I understood that water travel was not at fault. Regret was. Not over Blériot. His betrayal, though that would imply a bond of trust, was only a matter of time. I was hoping for several decades during which Blériot would grow old and I would grow strong. No, what happened between myself and this man, who insisted that I call him "Chef" or, worse, "Monsieur," even when our clothes were on the floor, was unfortunate but hardly worth the physical distress that accompanies regret.
I stand there still.
Will you wake up tomorrow, Old Man, and look at yourself in the mirror and declare to your right foot, "No, you do not belong to me"? The day after that, will you deliver the same judgment to your two hands? Will the ritual continue with your vicious mouth doing the bidding of your vicious heart until you, Old Man, are