The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [93]
"Stop using that word! I told you faith' belongs to God, belongs to the Church, to the Devout and the Saved. It belongs to me," says the Old Man, spitting dirt with every word.
Shut your mouth, Old Man, and let me finish. This is my story. I will tell it, and you will lie there mute.
I had faith. Faith that the Old Man had felt for my mother four moments of kindness, four tender touches, four pure reasons to sigh. That they, like four brief glimpses of the moon, softened the darkness of those nights during which my brothers and I were conceived. When I was a child, I could not look up at the stars or close my eyes to the sun and believe that it was not exactly the same time all over the world. And, like all children, I also could not look up at the man whom everyone called my father and believe that he had brought me into this world in an act of scorn and contempt, which continues even now. Stupid, unquestioning faith that because my life came from his, my father, while cruel in action and brutal in speech, could never be so in heart. A tragic miscalculation on my part, if I am to believe the Old Man, a drunk and a gambler, a thief who took away my home.
"You fool! You gave it to me." The Old Man laughs with the satisfaction of knowing that what he has said is fact.
Yes, I thought, how true. I should have known better. I should have thrown his body into the open sea, I should have expelled it and not me.
After my mother gave birth to me, there were many things that she could no longer pray to her father and mother about. They would have disowned her. Then whom would she have left to worship, whose likeness would she have left to reconfigure from memory for her family altar? There is no forgiveness in ancestor worship, only retribution and eternal debt. Even in the afterlife, my mother was bound to see them, her father and mother and an entire clan of people whom she had never met but whose role it was to sit in judgment of her. What would they all say? she worried. The great sadness of her life was that she already knew. She had paid someone to take away the only worth that her husband had found in her body. She had stolen from him who knows how many unborn sons. She had dared to exert sovereignty over her own body when she had been explicitly told that she had no rights. Thief, squanderer, and, worst of all, a disobedient wife, the epithets followed her every day as she went to the market, and they followed her home at night to pull her sheet away, curling her body up with guilt. She woke up and found herself at forty, the wife of a man who preferred the company of men, his tongue craving the body of a man named Christ—"a Holy Communion," the Old Man told her; a peddler who earned money just to see it taken away; a woman who gave birth to sons to see them learn how to walk, never toward and always away; a mother of four sons, one of whom believed that her love alone was not enough—"otherwise, why would he have left me?" she asked herself; a daughter whose father and mother had barred her from ever joining them in the afterlife. It is one thing to be alone in life, she thought, but to be alone in death would be unbearable.
My mother, believe me, is strong. Not in the ways of the chestnut trees of this city. These broad-leafed giants withstand the blasts of winter's winds with rigidity and years' worth of concentric armor. There are other ways to survive. When the monsoon winds were thrashing, tossing about plant life and small animals, my mother saw that the bamboos always escaped unscathed.