The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [46]
"Salt flowers," he translated. "Think of it in terms of a poem. A ' flower,' as in the first to bloom in the heat of the sun."
"Now you are a poet, too? Me, I am no good at poetry," I said, filling my mouth with another forkful of watercress. The salt petals opened themselves slowly against the roof of my mouth.
"It's sea salt..." he began to explain.
I threw him a look that clearly said, Do not patronize me, friend! Even if I do have half a bottle of wine and more food in me than my body has held in several months, that does not mean that I have lost all of my powers to think rationally. I knew it was not salt quarried from the earth. That would have had a more explosive reaction on the tongue, pushy, even abusive if there was but a grain past moderation.
The scholar-prince ignored my indignation and patiently resumed his explanation, taking us into a landscape of saltwater basins, rice-paddy-like when viewed from a distance. "Except that the only things growing within these watery grids are mounds of salt," he said. I closed my eyes, and I saw there snowcapped mountains in their infancy, peaks being born out of the sea. "When seawater is evaporated by the sun in this way, it leaves behind its salt, in the same way that we will leave behind our bones." I opened up my eyes and saw him a world away.
A gradual revelation of its true self, as I was beginning to learn, is the quality that sets fleur de sel apart from the common sea salt that waits for me in most French kitchens. There is a development, a rise and fall, upon which its salinity becomes apparent, deepens, and then disappears. Think of it as a kiss in the mouth.
The young woman returned to our table and removed our empty dishes. I looked around the room for the first time since the food had arrived. Still empty but not forlorn, I thought. Empty as in private, a suitable place for a tête-à-tête. Though I have never understood what the head has to do with this sort of get-together. Hand to hand, mouth to mouth, maybe.
"That was not Chinese food," I said.
"I didn't say it was, did I?"
"No. But, that was not American either, and it was not—"
"Again, I made no such claims," he interrupted.
"What do you call it then?"
"First of all, friend, the chef here is Vietnamese. He, like me, thought that he would be a writer or a scholar someday, but after he traveled the world, life gave him something more practical to do. He now cooks here on the rue Descartes, but he will always be a traveler. He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world. "
A kiss in the mouth can become a kiss on the mouth. A hand on a shoulder can become a hand on the hips. A laugh on his lips can become a moan on mine. The moments in between these are often difficult to gauge, difficult to partition and subdivide. Time that refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be "lost." In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars. The trip from the rue Descartes to the Jardin du Luxembourg was slowed by the weight of our full bellies. Our feet shuffled underneath us, unaccustomed to the weight of a sated body. In my ear, anticipation sounded like a strong wind billowing against a taut sail, like a fire when its flames are drunk on a gust of air, less of a tone, more of a vibration that muffled his voice even though his body was only the span of one hand away from mine. When we opened our mouths to speak, the night air became scented with cinnamon. We both have been this way ever since the young woman walked over to our table and said to us, "Please, wait."
Oh no, the bill, I thought.
She disappeared behind the curtain and returned with a tart covered with a bumpy top crust. The aroma of cinnamon, unmistakable and insistent, especially when coupled with sugar and heat, surrounded us. An apple "pie," she said, placing the dessert down in