The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

to the next village over and, maybe, one or two after that. 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.

    When I first heard the weaver's story, I was twenty years old, seasick but otherwise healthy. I was a very healthy twenty-year-old man, in fact, full of sex and pride, full of these things that my brothers had exhibited before me like brave medals for wars that they had never fought. But there was a place and a time. Pride, for instance, was never worn to work. Minh the Sous Chef had taught us that. Monsieur and Madame are very sensitive to the sight of it, an eyebrow cocked too high, lips crooked in irony, shoulders pulled straight by sinews and unbroken bones. Sometimes even before the servant realizes that he is exhibiting it, Monsieur and Madame have detected it, like something alive underneath their bed. They, of course, would be the first to know. Unemployment is inevitable, so why not just get it over with now? I imagine that is their rationale for the resulting automatic dismissals. Monsieur and Madame think it is like training an animal, a dog maybe. Once we learn that certain actions have no consequences, we are useless. Our arms and legs, moved by our own free will, can no longer respond quickly enough, obediently enough, to the sound of our master's voice. Every Monsieur and Madame knows that pride carries with it danger. They think of it as a slight foaming around the mouth. Pride is, therefore, reserved for the home, if you are a Vietnamese man, a father or the oldest son. Otherwise, take it out into the street. Strut it in the alleyways, where girls hang their laundry and
young men show off the pomade in their hair. That, of course, brings me to the subject of sex. Yes, sex. Why else would someone put pomade in his already greasy hair or lay bare her undergarments in the slow, baking heat of a Saigon sun?
    As we all had heard from the Old Man, my brothers Tùng and Hoàng were not the brightest ones in the family, but they never needed his malicious pucker of a mouth to tell them that they were the handsomest. Young girls, our mother, the neighborhood ladies of all ages, sang songs to them, secret notes of desire hidden inside everyday greetings and pleasantries. Tùng and Hoàng have always been beautiful, but as they grew older their beauty changed from an almost girlish thing into something completely their own, a thing that hovered around them, not quite touching the still wet canvas of their skin. These two, believe me, never had to look for sex, search it out like scavengers. When we would walk the alleyways, the girls, in their rush to get noticed, hung out clothes still dripping with water, so heavy that they sagged the lines. My brothers noticed them, all right, the sheerness of their wet clothes, the way the water ran down their arms, the steam that rose from them. Tùng and Hoàng would harvest these scenes for all that they had to yield. Memories of these girls would feed them during the night, very well from what I could hear, a gruff moan for each imagined nibble and bite. But these two would not have to rely on their imagination for very long.
    From the beginning the things that kept me up at night were, well, less defined. I noticed the clothesline girls, a blind man would have noticed them, but the effect for me was not the same. When I closed my eyes, their bodies melted away, leaving behind just their desires, strong, pulsating. Now
that
I could feel, and prophetic of this life that I now live, this trade that I now practice, I could taste it too. The last peaches of the season honeyed by the sun, the taste of my own salt on my fingers, it was a cross between the two. As I grew older, my desire filled itself in. It found a face and a body, not so different from that of Tùng and Hoàng's. That was the problem. I will not call it a
curse because it is not. A curse is a