The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [76]
When Miss Toklas first met GertrudeStein, her countenance was steady. Calm, though, would be overstating it. Miss Toklas's expression, I imagine, was the same as the one that she wears now in all of her photographs: her eyes looking up, partially veiled by their heavy lids; her lips, fuller than one would expect, pressing together to ask silently, Well? Why must you stare? This is her expression in all of her photographs except for one. Taken in the year of the earthquake, a year before she would leave her father's house with no intention of returning, it is the only one displayed at 27 rue de Fleurus that shows Miss Toklas alone. Miss Toklas does not like to be photographed without GertrudeStein. The vice versa she knows is not true. The photograph shows her head and the upper part of her torso. Her head is turned sideways, and her gaze is directed down toward the lower, left-hand corner of the photograph. For those who do not know her, the pose says that she is shy, averting her eyes, modest even. She is standing in front of a fabric backdrop, which is slightly blurred. A ripple is running through it, as if someone had just left the room, closing the door firmly behind her, displacing a current of air, an invisible thing that animates for an instant the unfinished piece of cloth tacked to the wall. The sudden movement, caught by the camera's lens, is now an interloper, an unknown face in the background of an otherwise carefully composed tableau. Miss Toklas is wearing a Chinese long robe with soft rounded shoulders, silk with a heavily detailed border. She feels seduced, or so she imagines that seduction would feel this way, every time she slips it over her skin and lets its loose shape, its generous cut, cover her. The garment is pure theater, with long sleeves ending in bell-shaped openings that could make even the portliest of arms appear spindly. Hers are slender, glowing with youth, accentuated by the photographer's lights. Her face and arms shine white, hot. Her arms are crossed in front of her, the hands holding onto their opposing forearms. Settling just inside the sleeves, her hands are barely visible. The camera is curious and follows them into the shadows. I suspect that this is why she chose the robe, wanted to memorialize herself in it. its sleeves, ample and suggestive, serve as a proxy for an open neckline, bared shoulders, nipples arched against the swirling patterns embedded in the silk. A proxy, I imagine, for her desire to expose her body to light, a compulsion to wake it. This we have in common, I know.
16
MADAME'S SECRETARY, like most Vietnamese Catholics in Saigon, had heard of the Old Man. A proselytizer of the city's poor, they were calling him. A holy man even, except for the fact that he had a wife. They had heard, though, that after his fourth son was born, he took a vow of chastity. He is now fully devoted to God, they say. He is our next Father Augustine, they say. And among them, who had not heard the story of Father Augustine, a simple country priest who was handpicked by the Bishop of Saigon for the journey that is the closest that any of them will come to the doors of heaven while still standing on this unflinching earth? Father Augustine, they say, stood underneath the soaring dome of St. Peter's and marveled at the softness of marble, at the way that his God had allowed His servants to drape it, clothe His Son's image in it. Father Augustine kissed the papal ring but died before he could reach his final destination, the one that he believed would make his pilgrimage complete. He died on a cargo ship that was taking him to the south of France to the town of Avignon, the birthplace of the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. Father Augustine was compelled, as the story goes, to see all that this Jesuit had left behind him, all that this missionary had relegated to a memory that would fail him, all that this man had sacrificed in order to bring Catholicism to the land that Father Augustine would never again see. His life for His faith,