The Book of Salt (10 page)

I have cut many necks. That is not the problem. Even before I pulled the first one back, aiming for that slight curve that forces the down to part and the skin to peek through, I had already watched my mother put a blade to many a chicken's neck. She would never cut it clean off. Her reasoning, unlike Miss Toklas's, was economical. First, my mother would nick the skin until the blood flowed. If the knife was inserted deep enough, there is a red arc that falls neatly from the notch to the awaiting bowl. A hesitant pair of hands would cause trickling and sputtering, a final messy insult to a body already sacrificed. It would also mean less congealed blood for the soup that night. Hesitancy does not complement death or hunger. Miss Toklas agrees wholeheartedly that speed and decisiveness are required. She believes that it is possible to be humane even when one is behaving brutally. This, I know, is her motto in other endeavors as well. I am fine when I have a knife in my hand, when it is the blade that delivers the
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, very French in its contempt and cruelty for those who are not. Grace, believe me, is undoubtedly necessary when handling a knife. I can always tell a professional chef from a home cook. The knife work gives them away. There is an economy of movement coupled with a warriorlike aggressiveness that immediately identifies the chef. Such deftness is not required for the preparation of commonplace foods. When I began working at the Governor-General's, Anh Minh told me that I would have to relearn everything. "A knife in a professional kitchen is a cherished object," he said. The best ones are kept in their own canvas sheaths, locked away, and only the
chef de cuisine
has the key. There is one for every purpose, boning, skinning, disjointing, cleaving, the list goes on. It is their intended use, according to Anh Minh, that dictates their shape and the width of their blade. "A
chef de cuisine
always knows which one to use," he said. "You'll know too," he promised me. I was impressed. How could I not be? My mother had taught me to slice and chop, and I thought it was an accomplishment in itself not to add my fingertip to the dish. Hers was the kind of knife that would have rusted except that it was continually in use. It was made from an indifferent material that became duller and duller with every cut. My mother always had her sharpening stone at the ready. A rebirth for the blade, she explained.

The difference, believe me, is this. 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. Miss Toklas is right. I can see with my fingertips as well as my eyes, and that is unfortunate, indeed.

I began with my habit. I said that it gives me proof that I am alive, but I have shared nothing but the details of the many small deaths that I have inflicted, of how many of them are required for a truly good meal. I do not mean to be coy. Who am I to hide? There is rarely anyone to notice what I have concealed or what I have left in plain sight. Though Miss Toklas, I must admit, had long ago taken me aside. I had been at the rue de Fleurus for only about a month. Of course, I was taken by surprise.

"Bin, have you been drinking?" my then new Madame wanted to know.

"No."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes."

"Have I not given you enough time? GertrudeStein and I do not mind waiting an additional quarter of an hour or so for our meals."

Yes, I nodded. It seemed appropriate for me to affirm even though Miss Toklas and I both knew that that statement was, in fact, not true.

Without taking her eyes off mine, Miss Toklas reached over and grabbed my hands. Wet from the breakfast dishes that I had immediately started to wash upon hearing her footsteps, my fingers rained all over the kitchen floor, the suds covering them dissolving in my Madame's warm hands.

"GertrudeStein and I tasted—"

"No—" I blurted out.

"Bin, I know what goes into my mouth," Miss Toklas interrupted what would have been my well-worn speech about a broken glass, an uncooked steak, or an unwashed mixing spoon. I never know which excuse I will use until it comes out of my mouth, slow and unconvincing. "Next time, Bin, you need to bandage them. Do you understand?"

"Yes," I replied.

My hands were still in hers, her blood pumping through. Miss Toklas, satisfied, released them. I held my hands behind my back. She wiped hers off on a dishtowel hanging from a nearby peg. She put her right hand into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a roll of cotton gauze. "This is enough," she said.

"Enough," I repeated.

Again, Miss Toklas's words may have sounded like a suggestion, but they were a line of instruction, a warning even. I knew what she and GertrudeStein thought. They thought I drank, that I could not hold my liquor, that I was sloppy because of it. When I was inebriated and in their kitchen, a sort of knife fight with myself, they imagined, ensued, and they had tasted the aftermath.

In the years that we have been together since then, I have found that my Mesdames are often right and wrong. I am comforted by that and, in turn, am comforted by them. I have felt that way from the very beginning. I never did blink an eye, not even after I saw that 27 rue de Fleurus had a Madame and a Madame and not a Monsieur in sight. Though I know that for the concierge, GertrudeStein qualifies for that position. Either way, my Mesdames cohabitate in a state of grace. They both love GertrudeStein. Better, they are both
in
love with GertrudeStein. Miss Toklas fusses over her Lovey, and her Lovey lets her. GertrudeStein feeds on affection, and Miss Toklas ensures that she never hungers. In exchange, in the fairest of trades Miss Toklas has the satisfaction of being GertrudeStein's only one. No man's god can tell me that
that
is wrong. A kiss freely given is a wonder to watch, even if it is being seen through the slit of a partially closed door.

I must admit that at first I was curious. I never once questioned the substance of their love, but I did want to know
whether their lovemaking was, well, the same. Yes and no. GertrudeStein is a boy, fifteen years of age to be exact, in her greediness. Miss Toklas gives a good chase, not literally of course. Remember my Mesdames were both in their fifties by the time I found them. For Miss Toklas, the hide-and-seek is all accomplished with her eyes. They retreat and are demure, charge and then acquiesce, close and give in. What comes next, I do not have to watch because I hear it. Every night, I hear it. Heat, believe me, has a distinctive sound. My Mesdames are very regular in all aspects of their domestic life. Since coming to 27 rue de Fleurus, I rarely go to bed cold anymore, though that may have less to do with my Mesdames' exploits and more to do with the electric radiators that they have installed. The radiators are smelly but warm, like too many of the men that I have been with. Humorous and true, sad all the same. As for being lonely, it will take more than electricity or my Mesdames to keep me from feeling that way. It will take a fire burning inside. The extreme cold or the usual bouts of loneliness will trigger my habit. I do not remember what happens next. I have a memory of it only from the first time:

I am nine and I am cutting scallions into little O's, green tips meeting the blade, sending it swiftly toward the pale rooted ends. There are five more bunches to go. My fingers, face, hair, stinking of raw scallions, all in exchange for my mother humming a tune that has no ending. I think this is an even trade. I have done this before and have often felt the slip of the knife as it is thrown off its course by the pungent slick that coats the inside of the O's. I grip the bunch with tighter fingers. I secure the cleaver's handle with my thumb. My mother is humming at a small piece of pork that will make the bowl of scallions into a feast. She is humming, and I think that I am hearing birds. I look up just to be sure, and I thread silver into my fingertips for the first time. Silver is threading my skin. Weightlessness overtakes me moments before my vision clears, my throat unclogs, and my body begins to understand that silver is threading my skin. I am floating away, and a sea of red
washes me back. I shove my fingers into my shirt. I look to see whether the blood has dripped into and spoiled the bowl of O's. No, but without warning my instinct and my hunger give way, dislodged by something newer, stronger. A spiral swims away from the red mud seas and grows broader and hotter, and I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it.

My mother looks up and sees the color of my shirt, a color that is getting deeper and truer as I stand there looking down at my swaddled hand. She takes off her blouse and wraps it in tight circles around my fingers. Her eyes search for the contents of a shallow bowl, perched on the family altar that the Old Man allows her, a bowl that gathers dead flies and clumps of dust held together by kitchen grease. She tells me to sit down on the ground. Put the whole of my weight on top of that hand. She walks over to the altar, reaches inside the bowl, and takes out a small lime, a daughter's offering to the memory of a father and a mother whom she had not seen since she was fourteen. "No one wants a lime when they are dead," she apologizes every day to them. "Oranges, I know, are much preferred," she says. "They can be eaten alone. Sweet is good enough on its own. Sour requires salt and chili peppers, and I have none of that to spare." She rolls the lime on the table. Each rotation smashes the pulp inside. She does this until she feels the hardness of the fruit give way, sink into itself, drown in its own juices. A quick cut across its slackened belly, and she is crossing the kitchen with the halves still facing each other in the palm of her hand. She unwinds her blouse and sees that it will never be the same. Blood, she knows, changes everything. I see there on my fingertips a landscape that would become as familiar to me as the way home. She sits down and wraps herself around me, pressing my stooped back into herself. With one hand, she holds my fingers together. With the other, she squeezes the juice of the lime onto my fingertips. "Fire! Fire!" I yell. She blows them out and begins to hum a tune. My fingertips heal, despite the threat of rust on her knife.

Again lime juice has bleached the edges. Blood has drained, leaving rows of white cliffs flanking the sides of mud red seas. I look down and am amazed that even this landscape is dull compared to where I have just been. I remember, yes, a caress, a slight sensation, and when my hands are shaking it feels like a tickle. In the beginning I preferred the blade to be newly sharpened, licked against a stone until sparks flew, white and blue. Now I know that such delicacy would only deny me that part that I savor most, the throbbing of flesh compromised, meeting and mending. And sometimes when it is deep enough, there is an ache that fools my heart. Tricks it into a false memory of love lost to a wide, open sea. I say to myself, "Ah, this reminds me of you. "

Twenty-four figs, so ripe that their skins are split.
A bottle of dry port wine.
One duck.
Twelve hours.

I MAKE A MENTAL LIST
of the ingredients for the dinner that I will cook and that you and someone else will eat. I was expecting a much larger party. Your French, though, was clear, and even I could see that your garret would not hold more than two or three comfortably for a seated dinner. I had pictured at least six or eight in total, all of them young, all of them male, a smaller cross section, perhaps, of those who congregate around GertrudeStein during the Saturday teas. Tall saplings crowding around an earthy patch, they always seem to me. Of course, I
notice
them. They are my weekly bonus, after all. If I had known, I would have agreed to work for these Mesdames for free. Money, I know, is not everything. Lust is an entirely different story. Thankfully, my Mesdames provide me with a steady supply. GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas prefer each other first and second, and then they prefer their Messieurs, young and American. I would have never guessed that these two ladies, so uncompromisingly past their prime, could surround themselves with such glory. Some are broad-shouldered, the angularity of youth barely contained by a well-tailored suit. Their hands appear to crush all that they grasp, but in place of the expected coarseness is a fluted plate, a shivery disk of eggshell white, bearing tender sweets. Some have lips that have yet to lose their childish pouts, pink and demanding, lush as they kiss with open mouths the rims of china teacups.

The figs and the port I will place in an earthenware jug "to get to know each other," as my oldest brother would say. Anh Minh, though, did not teach me this recipe. He has never even seen fresh figs. He has never walked the markets of Marseilles and counted the last centimes in his pockets. He has never had to learn that in that city figs, oranges, and dates are cheaper than bread. That hunger is magnified by a steady diet of sour and sweet. That a man can thirst for a bit of meat, a stomach-calming slab of savory. He has never dipped a handful of orange peels into the sea and licked away a soothing slick of salt. He has never met a stranger's glance dead-on, followed him to his hotel room, worked there in the dark. Anh Minh has also never dined on a meal costing twenty whole francs, exorbitant even if the menu boasted in a curvaceous hand of roast duck with figs and port wine, exorbitant and foolish even if I did eat my weight in bread, sopping up flavors that the dishes did not know that they had to offer. The remaining five francs, all that was left of my night's labor, sat in my hands and bemoaned the loss. I had emptied my pockets to line my stomach, relinquished my body to keep it alive, nourished my hunger, famished my soul.