The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [82]
The Bishop of Saigon had been duly informed of the papal largesse and had sent Father Augustine to the Vatican to ensure the chalices' safe delivery. But when a year had gone by since Father Augustine was last seen kneeling in the apse of St. Peter's, his death at sea was assumed, and a Mass was celebrated in his memory by the Bishop himself. Meanwhile, Father Augustine's journal, with its black leather cover, the insides lined with marbled paper, a tribute to the only stone that Father Augustine believed was virtuous enough for Him, traveled the open seas and found its way home and into the hands of the Bishop of Saigon. The Bishop admired its Italian craftsmanship and thought the marbleized pattern tastefully done, a palette of plums and sea foam greens. The Bishop turned to the final entry. Father Augustine's last page, like those before it, was written in Vietnamese, a language that had centuries ago been cast into a neat Romanized script, chased with tildes, circumflexes, breves, acute and grave accents, an oblation from the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The Jesuit, like all missionaries after him, understood the power of literacy. The written word never stops proselytizing, never dies of malaria, and has an uncanny tendency to reproduce, an act that he as a man of God was not privy to. The Jesuit dismantled the ideographs of Vietnam and taught his converts their catechisms in a language reconfigured for the sake of simplicity. Easier to learn and easier to teach, thought the Jesuit. The Bishop of Saigon was a living testament to the success of the Jesuit's invention. The Bishop's blue eyes skimmed the last page of Father Augustine's journal and were enraged to learn that a simple country priest had traded away his gold chalices for a burial in Avignon. The Bishop ripped out all traces of Father Augustine and kept the journal, with its remaining blank pages, for his own. Father Augustine was a simple country priest, indeed. He was an errand boy in the guise of an emissary, or maybe he was an emissary in the guise of an errand boy. Either way, the man was robbed, said the man on the bridge. His worship and his obedience had landed him in the depth of a faraway sea.
My mother, like Father Augustine, had experienced passion, rapturous, transformative passion, which she continued to feel long after the schoolteacher went away. My father may not have been constant, but he was brave. Brave enough to love even though he knew that his love, like his vision, was predisposed to weaken and fade. She herself braved more, I tell myself. And this is where her story ends. Bravery, for me, is always the culmination of the story. What more is there left to say? My mother would certainly have agreed, if she had been there to hear. Bão, though, was the only one present. "This is the story of my mother" was how I began. "It is about a life that she must have lived, if just for a while, with her scholar-prince. It is a story filled with misty lakes, shadow-graced embraces, exotic locales, travel on the open seas, family secrets, un-Christian vices."
"Go on," said Bão. In the end, Bão thought that my mother was admirable, like Serena the Soloist but in a different way.
"Yes," I agreed, as I closed my eyes. The Niobe, calmed by the light of the moon, rested in a valley between two waves, a mother's bosom in a distant sea. In the dark, where my thoughts traveled without a trace of fear, I longed for her touch, for the look in her eyes when I parted the sheet of honey and stood before her.
Inside her kitchen, my mother had waited for me on her sleeping mat. She had heard the Old Man's shouts. When I entered, she got up to pour us a cup of tea. I sat down on the dirt floor because my life was moving too quickly, and I thought being closer to the ground would slow it down. I rocked back and forth on my