The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [118]
I stand there still.
In my then twenty years of life, I had been exceedingly careful about all matters of faith. I had been meticulous, vigilant, clear-eyed, even cold-hearted. The Catholic Church had, for me, never been a threat. From the time that I was old enough to walk, I followed my brothers to Father Vincente's church and into the second-to-last pew. When the Old Man led his new converts to morning Mass, their mumbled prayers perfumed the streets with so much alcohol that the children and stray dogs who followed them along the way often fell down drunk, pissing all over themselves. My forced participation in these processions left me in all respects profoundly unmoved. I was not one to lay offerings before the ancestral altar, either. I would never feed the souls of a man and a woman who were so eager for the afterlife that they had left their only daughter behind to him. Even Anh Minh's beliefs in Monsieur and Madame had no effect on me. I am afraid that the only way that my dear brother's prayers will be answered is for him to lie down one night and die. Then, he must hope that when the next morning arrives, his bruised but uncrushed spirit is reborn inside the body of a Frenchman.
I stand there still.
I hear your voice, Old Man, and I know that despite my vigilance, my clear eyes, my cold heart, I have failed. I have guarded myself against all the false idols except you. Faith, after all, is a theory of love and redemption. In my life, there was no vessel more empty of that than you, Old Man.
Má, please do not cry. From the morning of my birth to the night of my death, I will never have to want, to question, to solicit your affection. That is the gift that you have given me. But I, like the basket weaver, looked at the abundance around me and believed that there was something more. Fire ants and tiny orange marigolds make me shudder as they spin the globe the other way, bringing me back to the dirt path where I stood looking at your straw hat, hanging in its usual place at the entrance to the kitchen, and I, blind, saw there nothing but a fraying chin strap, moving listlessly in the sun.
"Bình," I replied without blinking an eye. Bão's raised voice told me that he had had to ask his question one too many times. I apologized, blaming my inability to hear him on the waves, foaming their mouths outside.
"Bình, huh? That's good. We cancel each other out," Bão said, punching my arm to let me know that I was forgiven and also to highlight his own effort and rare success at wordplay. What he meant was that since the name "Bình" means "peace," it was a lucky, not to mention an elegant counterbalance to his "storm." Thank you, I thought the same myself.
But when Bão again encouraged me to choose a new name in preparation for the following morning's arrival on shore, I was surprised. I asked him, "But how many days have we been at sea?" His reply was a revelation. When I signed up with the Niobe, I needed a ship that was leaving that same day, as I again had no place to sleep for the night. My dismissal from the Governor-General's was abrupt but inevitable. My dismissal from the Old Man's house, that I did not expect. I gave no thought to the Niobe's final port of call and even less consideration to the duration of its run. Though sea travel, I had assumed, was something that generally took many years to complete. The world was enormous before I left my corner of it. But once I did, it grew even more immense. As for that corner, it continued to shrink until it was a speck of dust on a globe. Believe me, I never had a desire to see what was on the other side of the earth. I needed a ship that would go out to sea because there the water is deep, deeper than the hemmed-in rivers