The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [78]
Far from finding it inspirational, my mother and I thought Father Augustine's story was a tragedy. To die so far away from home, we thought, is the worst possible ending. Overall, though, we liked the story. Not for its tears but for its gold chalices and the Father's unknowing transportation of them. We thought that these two details were both loose threads in an otherwise satisfactory tale. They were, for us, not quite inconsistencies but paths that should have been further explored. We used to tell each other different endings, taking up the matter of the gold chalices and their transport, and seeing where they would take us. My mother and I felt free to improvise because we did not attach to Father Augustine's story the religious significance that Vietnamese Catholics did. For them, he was a simple country priest who was chosen to travel to the Vatican as an envoy for the faithful of Vietnam. He was a simple country priest who was granted a papal audience because he had baptized his entire village, starting with his father and mother. He was a simple country priest who, when confronted by the praise of His Holiness, confessed that he had sinned. His motives, Father Augustine admitted, were selfish. He had been afraid of being alone in heaven. He was a simple country priest who kissed the papal ring, whose only sins were his fidelity and devotion to the Catholic Church. The lessons to be learned, the deeds to be emulated, were numerous and growing. For those who told it, Father Augustine's story became, like the chalices that he had unknowingly traded away, a vessel from which they, the truly devoted, could taste heaven, sweet and redemptive. For my mother and me, the story of Father Augustine was like any other, a thing to be repeated and retold. A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word.
Father Augustine's god was, for my mother, not as compelling as the others in her life. She was born a Buddhist. She, in addition, was taught from birth to worship her ancestors. She never saw the faces of her grandparents, so that left her with only her father and mother, a god and something of a demigod in the order of honor at her family altar. It was not until the morning when she was wed that she was baptized a Catholic. Her head was draped in a white cloth, trimmed with two blue bands. When she walked into Father Vincente's church, she saw the statue of the "Virgin Mother," whose head was similarly covered, and she recognized the woman whom this religion wanted her to be. "Virgin Mother? But how do they have babies?" the girl, who would grow up to be my mother, naturally wanted to know. The answer came to her that night and so did the pain between her legs. He is trying to push through to the other side, she thought. She had just begun her monthly bleedings, so when she saw the blood caked to the inside of her legs the next morning she thought it was one and the same. She took out the strips of cotton that her mother had given her and folded one into a narrow wad. She placed it in between her legs, wrapped either end of it around a second strip that she had already tied around her waist. Then she cooked for her new husband his morning rice. Her mother had given her ten cotton strips and a pair of earrings, two small jade hoops taken from her own lobes.
Long, fleshy Buddha lobes are a sign of good luck, the girl's mother had been told, but she frankly had suffered only bad. Her husband had passed away, and he had left her with nothing. Just a young daughter and no sons. That is the worst kind of luck, she had been told. By the time that her daughter turned twelve, the mother was tired of living off the meager, spiteful charity of her brother-in-law. She wanted to see her husband again. Desperately. She saw him in