The Book of Salt

by Monique Truong

Americans traveled here in order to indulge in the “vices” of home. First, they had invaded the bordellos and then it was the cafés. Parisians could more than understand the whoring and the drinking, but in the end it was the hypocrisy that did not translate well.

Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter.

I am afraid.” I had meant to place a comma between “alone” and “I am afraid.” But on paper, a period instead of a comma had turned a dangling token of regret into a plainly worded confession.

paper was not strong enough to bear the weight of what he had to say but that he would have to test its strength anyway.

And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am.

“He was a coward who finally had the courage to die, knowing that in the silence that he leaves behind him, I would have the last word, would come forward to ensure that his reputation dies along with his body.”

Bão said that Ancients possess features so strong and forceful that they can withstand generation after generation of new and insurgent bloodlines. Women, who are accused of adultery because the faces of their children refuse to resemble those of their husbands, are often Ancients. In a firefly moment of introspection, Bão said that these women are feared because they make a mockery out of the marriage union, that their children’s preordained faces proclaim too loudly that the man is irrelevant, that maybe he is not needed at all.

As I slipped into the South China Sea, as water erased the shoreline, absolving it of my sins, I began to believe that conflict and strife were landlocked.

I look into her eyes. They live apart from their housing. Chasing the light that gilds this city in early autumn, her irides are two nets gently swooping over a band of butterflies. Catching the light, the circles erupt, bright with movement, the flapping and fanning of many colored wings.

She is a pagan who secretly yearns for High Mass.

a 360-degree arc of obstinacy. That way, she is technically always going forward.

Spain, Miss Toklas thinks, is where her soul first emerged, fully formed. Spain is where she first experienced Passion, without GertrudeStein. Every town has at least one house, marked by the sign of a cross, in which she could meet Her. Her flirtation, her lover, her Virgin. On their first visit to Àvila, she begs GertrudeStein to stay, to linger in the shadows of the city’s cloistered walls. GertrudeStein suspects that on Spanish soil, Miss Toklas would become another’s devotee.

GertrudeStein’s French is, believe me, common. It is a shoe falling down a stairwell. The rhythm is all wrong.

As Anh Minh would say, “Only the rich can afford not to eat their animals.”

I am entertained best by the continuous flow of people whom I do not know. I am amused by the faces that fade in and fade out as they pass me by.

But to take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea, this for me is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it, maybe.

A curse, I remembered thinking when I first heard the basket weaver’s story, was that man’s boundless search or, perhaps, his steadfast belief that there existed an alternative to the specific silt of his family’s land.

For tenderness, we all know that braising is better than an open flame.

Intimacy, or something very close to it, was spun and webbed this way. Every week brought with it another half-hour, another sliver of the moon, till he had the entirety of a night. Naturally, the space between our bodies began to disappear. Effortlessly, we began to touch.

there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now.

I brace myself for the Old Man’s words, his lips sucking their marrow dry: “Where there is gambling, there is faith.”

There is a fine line between a cook and a murderer, and that line is held steady by the men of my trade. Really, the only difference between the two is that one kills to cook while the other cooks to kill. Killing is involved either way.

Miss Toklas does not believe that there is an innate ability in every one of God’s creatures to recognize perfection. Assistance is sometimes required.

it is possible to be humane even when one is behaving brutally.

coup de grâce. One of my favorite French phrases, I must admit. The “finishing stroke” is how it was taught to me, but I prefer the “stroke of grace.” While I may never master the French language, I have learned that the true faces of its lofty expressions are often found on their most literal meanings. It is a perverse way of hiding something right in the open,

With a knife, the blade is the surrogate executioner. It has no feelings and so cannot empathize with the slipping away of a life. But the fingers feel it all, the quickening of blood through the veins and arteries at the start, the faint fluttering at the end. Worse, they register the slight drop in temperature that accompanies the eventual calm.

A kiss freely given is a wonder to watch, even if it is being seen through the slit of a partially closed door.

The radiators are smelly but warm, like too many of the men that I have been with.

Money, I know, is not everything. Lust is an entirely different story.

A soufflé is most definitely out of the question. Too temperamental, a lover who dictates his own terms. A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine.

You two can now dispense with the forks, knives, and spoons. Your hands will tear at an animal whose joints will know no resistance. The sight of flesh surrendering, so willing a participant in its own transgression, will intoxicate you. Tiny seeds from heat-pregnant figs will insinuate themselves underneath your nails. You will be sure to notice and try to suck them out. You will begin with each other’s fingers. You will end on your knees.

All this time, it was I who had the voice that would float over a misty lake, and it was always I who, in the end, got the scholar-prince, the teak pavilion, the shadow-graced embraces. I was, of course, the peasant, the servant, the fishing villager, except that in my version the “she” was undoubtedly a “he.”

Pleasure for pleasure is an even exchange. Lust for lust is a balanced scale.

When some men smile, the skin on their face tightens, stretches to cover their cheekbones.

“Bridges belong to no one,” he continued on anyway. “A bridge belongs to no one because a bridge has to belong to two parties, one on either side. There has to be an agreement, a mutual consent, otherwise it’s a useless piece of wood, a wasted expanse of cement. Every bridge is, in this way,” he explained, “a monument to an accord.”

tolerated but not necessarily welcomed.”

A kiss in the mouth can become a kiss on the mouth. A hand on a shoulder can become a hand on the hips. A laugh on his lips can become a moan on mine. The moments in between these are often difficult to gauge, difficult to partition and subdivide.

Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.

I returned to the bridge alone. I always do.

Jade, she was told, is a living, breathing stone. It would grow old with her, chronicling the passage of time.

Sorrow preys on the unprotected openings, the eyes, ears, mouth, and heart. Do not speak, see, hear, or feel. Pain is allayed, and sadness will subside. Ignorance, I was beginning to learn, is best for someone like me.

Sweet Sunday Man, have yet to teach me a practical word. Your lessons are about their lush interiors, the secrets that words can keep. I have learned from you that the English word “please” can be a question, “May I?” and a response, “You may.” “Please” can also be a verb, an effortless act that accompanies you into every room. Sweet Sunday, indeed.

“A woman with a knife never cuts, she plunges it in and digs”

the Vietnamese call men like me lai cái.

I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: “The French are all right in France.” What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in their colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth. The man on the bridge, I know, would have liked these farmers whose sons never leave Bilignin.

Miss Toklas is in a garden, GertrudeStein, but it is divine. The Holy Spirit is in her when she pulls tiny beets, radishes, and turnips from the ground. When she places their limp bodies in her basket, she believes that she knows the joys and anguishes of the Virgin Mother.

For the farmers of Bilignin, the end of the summer season is marked by two events, the departure of the two Americans and their asiatique cook and the gathering of the grapes. The gathering is a festival at which the younger farmers of Bilignin meet their future wives or lovers, but then again they do not do that sort of thing there. The wine casks and jugs from the past vintage have to be emptied to make way for the new. That requires almost as much work as the actual removal of the fruits from the vine. But that is why the farmers of Bilignin work and drink like horses.

In Paris, GertrudeStein, the constant traffic of people at least includes my fellow asiatiques. And while we may never nod at one another, tip our hats in polite fashion, or even exchange empathy in quick glances, we breathe a little easier with each face that we see.

And am I but one within a long line of others? Are there wounded trophies who have preceded me? But why ask questions, I tell myself, when you are here with me now. Some men take off their eyeglasses, some lower their eyelids. You lower your voice. Desire humbles us in different ways.

But I forget that you, Sweet Sunday Man, are flawed like me. You are a dubious construction, delicate but not in a fine-boned way. Delicate in the way that poor craftsmanship and the uncertainty resulting from it can render a house or a body uninhabitable. Dubious, indeed. I hide my body in the back rooms of every house that I have ever been in. You hide away inside your own.