The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [91]
I know Má, black is the color of our hair, the color of our irides with the coming of dusk, the color of a restful night's sleep, of coal rice, of tamarind pulp, of the unbroken shell of a thousand-year egg. How can this black be the color of sorrow? Underglazed with red river clay, deep water blue, high-in-the-tree-top green, black is luminous, the color that allows us to dream.
"Whew!" Bão whistled upon hearing about the red pouch. He said that I had to open it up because he, for one, was curious even if I was not. Well, he might not have said this in so many words. He might have just mumbled "stupid bastard." "Whew!" Bão whistled again after I undid the ties, and he saw what was sitting inside. "What are you doing down here?" Bão immediately wanted to know. "You can get your own room and a seat at the captain's table every night with that, you stupid bastard."
Yes, I thought, how true. I wrapped up the pouch and placed it back underneath my pillow.
Red is a firmly pressed hand. Red is a mother giving birth. Red is luck that she had somehow saved, stored, and squandered on her youngest son. Before I left home, my mother gave me a pouch filled with what I thought was money. As with all things about her, it would take time to understand, to find out what lay inside, protected as in a womb. When I close my eyes, I can see her in the kitchen still. The dirt floor, the clay pots, the tin plates, the coconut shell ladles, the rain-collecting cistern, all this my mother gave me and, in return, I left her. By no means an even trade, I know.
I did not learn until many days at sea that I had been resting my head on a pouch filled with gold leaf, one sunlit layer on top of another. Lighter and more valuable than its paper counterpart, gold is worth that is of the earth, my mother knows, and has to be honored anywhere upon its curving surface. Paper money gets its values from those who print it and therefore often suffers, finds itself totally degraded, when transported and removed from familiar surroundings. Perishable, like a fish out of water, or imagine a man on the open seas.
Every day, I hear the Old Man's voice shouting at me from beneath the earth, where, I tell myself, he now lies. The moment that he took his blood from mine, separated it as if his were the white and mine the yolk, I placed him there. "Where there is gambling, there is faith" is the tired aphorism that the Old Man clings to and continues even now to push through the soft center of the globe, coordinating its location with the longitude and latitude of wherever I happen to be. For a man who has never even seen the sea, he is a master navigator. His internal compass is where his heart should be. I had faith, Old Man. I had faith—
"I know all about your faith'! How dare you use the word of God to describe the things that you practice. Only a fool like you would believe that that French sodomite was going to save you. Out of love? Out of lust for your scrawny, worthless body? I've always told your mother that you are a pathetic loser, and here was the final proof. Yeah, you gambled and you lost—"
Is that what really upsets you, Old Man? That I lost? If that French sodomite' was still keeping me warm, if he was still keeping your bottles from going dry—
"Shut your mouth! It sickens me to think about what you do, shaming my name. After all that Minh the Sous Chef did for you. I told him he shouldn't have bothered with you, and I was right. But he needs to learn how to read and write,' he insisted. ' In this day and age, a chef de cuisine has to be versatile, adaptive, fluent...' he kept on saying. Now look at what you've done with it."
What are you talking about, Old Man? Anh Minh taught me how to read and write so that I could make a list of provisions, answer a help-wanted ad, follow the recipes that some French chef had committed