The Book of Salt (18 page)

This is all to say that the sun beating down on that day, the day before the anniversary of Madame's birth, served only as a reminder to her secretary of all that needed to be done before the sun set and, like her, faded away. Madame's secretary started with a list, as the order of things was very important to her. First, she summoned Blériot, whose hands smelled that afternoon of caul fat and thyme. He had been preparing squabs since the early morning, wrapping each bird in a web of fat and holding it in place with a jab of thyme. The birds looked like babies swaddled in crocheted shawls. They looked like babies with a branch of tiny leaves stabbed into their hearts. As they roasted, the sticky weaves would sear into their skins and disappear, leaving behind a glossy slick that would make lips smack in anticipation. Without the benefit of the oven's cleansing heat, Blériot's hands reeked. "I, too, am shocked. You must believe me that there have been no such indiscretions. None whatsoever," whispered Blériot, as he searched the office for a place to sit down.

From behind her desk, Madame's secretary nodded her head compassionately, reached out her hands understandingly, and said, "Leave it to me, Chef Blériot. But, if I'm to help, you must leave it all to me.
All
to me, do you understand?"

"Yes."

I often wondered whether Blériot had waited, paused for just a second before the "yes" or whether it was immediate, a pit poised on the tip of his tongue, discarded as a matter of instinct.

Second, Madame's secretary cornered Madame, who was returning home from the club and was still dressed in her tennis whites. "Get rid of him. Immediately! I don't want such filthy lies in my home," Madame announced in a squeak even higher than usual. "I can get two of them for what I'm paying for that one. Family always breeds trouble. Unfortunately, these people are all related to one another. These people! If they're not thieves, then liars. Poor, poor Chef Blériot. The humiliation," said Madame, carefully placing the appropriate outrage upon the alleged falsehood and not upon the alleged acts. She is French, after all. Madame is a snob but not a prude. She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race.

Third, Madame's secretary sent for my brother. "I don't believe it," Minh the Sous Chef lied. "I don't want to call the chauffeur a liar, but I just don't believe it. I don't believe—"

"Of course you don't," Madame's secretary interrupted. "You're not paid to believe. You're paid to cook. I'm telling you that there is no doubt. He's been spreading lies of an explicit nature about Chef Blériot. Madame does not want him in the house. Who knows what he's capable of next? He's to leave here at once. "

All of that took less than an hour from beginning to end. But Madame's secretary was not done. "A woman with a knife never cuts, she plunges it in and digs" is another of the Old Man's sayings. It became clear to me that afternoon that
that
was not a reference to a cooking technique. For her final act, Madame's secretary sat down at her desk and took out a small mirror and smiled into it. She used a fingernail to fix the coral edges of her lipstick, smudged in the excitement of all that swift talking. She inspected the skin around her mouth. This was her nervous tic. We in the household staff have watched her becoming more and more "nervous" over the years. She could not walk past a mirror or a shiny surface without looking and searching. It was the inevitability of it, we believed, that made her so nervous. Someday, she knew, she would find it. At first it would resemble the fine lines underneath the surface of old porcelain.
Then it would deepen and set itself in, until the area around her mouth became a cracked riverbed from which the colored wax that she applied to her lips would run. In the end, she would be left with the appearance of coral radiating from her mouth.

In the end, Madame's secretary sent for me. Spite was not flowing through her veins that day, just a curiosity about desire, Chef Blériot's desire. A closer inspection, she thought, would reveal what attracted Blériot's body to mine. She wanted to see for herself, to examine anew this
garde-manger,
this willow b ranch, she thought, of a man. A movement, a temperament, a tilt of the head, a swing of the hips, a tint of the lips, a thing she could adopt so that she could call Blériot her own. After all, Madame's secretary knows that the Vietnamese call men like me
lai cái.
What they mean is that I am mixed with or am partially a female. If a female is what Chef Blériot wants, why not the real thing? she thought. It was a rhetorical question because even she knew that lust and longing are never that simple, never falling into even halves when cleaved. Curiosity, however, is a weak-willed thing easily subsumed by crueler impulses and emotions. That afternoon, it was self-preservation that stepped in and suggested to Madame's secretary that she should be more thorough and absolute in her approach. "I've told your father," she said to me in Vietnamese, then again in French for emphasis. I stood there, the doorknob to her office door still in my hand. A note to the Old Man, she claimed, was her fourth, and this meeting was her fifth and final step.

WHEN I APPLIED
for the position as live-in cook, I did not know about the house in Bilignin. I assumed that the lives of these two American ladies and therefore mine would be centered in Paris on the rue de Fleurus. They did not inform me during the interview about their seasonal migration. Not that it would have made a difference to me then. Before joining their household, I thought that a home was a home, a Madame was a Madame, a city was ... well, even then I knew that Paris was a city and that many other places were not. So I suppose it might have made a difference if I had known. I might have asked for more money, hazard pay, months-in-the-middle-of-nowhere pay, you-cannot-pay-me-enough-to-live-here pay. It is only February and I know it is early to think about the summer in Bilignin, but Sweet Sunday Man has been asking. He wants to know whether my Mesdames are going there this year and, if yes, when. Of course, they are going. My Mesdames are very regular, Sweet Sunday Man. They like routines and schedules. They do not like to deviate from the chosen paths of their lives. GertrudeStein, after all, burned sixty candles on her birthday cake this month, and Miss Toklas will burn fifty-seven in April. She
has a French document, though, that lists her as being born on a day in June. There have been years when my Madame waits until then to grow older. I do not know what she has planned for 1934. I suppose it depends on how she is feeling about her age, advancing. I would wager, though, that Miss Toklas will celebrate in June again this year because June means that my Mesdames will be in Bilignin. When I began working for them back in the autumn of 1929, they had just finished their first summer in their country house. My Mesdames ' routine there was just beginning.

When summer comes to Paris, my Madame and Madame pack their clothes and their dogs into their automobile, and they drive themselves and their cargo down to the Rhône Valley to the tiny farming village of Bilignin. I am left behind to lock up the apartment and to hand the keys over to the concierge, whom I have always suspected of being overly glad to see these two American ladies go. I have seen him in his first-floor window watching the young men who come to court GertrudeStein, and I have seen him shaking his head unable to comprehend the source of the attraction. With my Mesdames already on the road for over a day, I pack up whatever warm-weather garments I have that year, and I go and splurge on a hat for the hot summer sun. If I find a bargain, then I also treat myself to lunch at an establishment with cloth on the table and an attentive waiter who is obliged to call me "Monsieur." I then take what is left of the money that my Mesdames gave me for a second-class train ticket, and I buy a third-class one instead. I sleep all the way down to Bilignin, where I open up the house and wait several more days—as my Mesdames drive at a speed that varies somewhere between leisurely and meandering—before I hear the honking of their automobile and the barking of two weary dogs. I wait for them on the terrace. I have plates of sautéed livers for Basket and Pépé and for their Mesdames bowls of thick cream, dolloped with last summer's strawberry preserves. There are smiles all around, except for Basket and Pépé, who greet me with the usual disdain. My Mesdames admire my
new hat, which signals that the summer in Bilignin has officially commenced.

I have the hat because the house there, while spacious enough to be called a
petit château,
has no running water, and I am often outside in the gardens, where there is a pump. I also have the hat because in Bilignin as in Paris I have Sundays off. The farmers in the village are gracious enough and at first simply curious enough to invite me, the first
asiatique
they have ever seen, into their homes. And their sons, I have to admit, are handsome enough to make me accept each and every time. All the families in this area make their own wine, so drinking is never a problem, and generosity ills my glass till I thirst for just a bit of water. I have found that water at the end of these nights eases my entry back into Monday. Though sometimes there is not enough water in the sea for me. I awake the next morning to the sound of Miss Toklas slamming pots and pans in the kitchen. These are pots and pans that she and no one else would need for the preparation of the simple breakfast of fruit and fresh sheep's-milk cheese that she and GertrudeStein prefer when they are in Bilignin. I climb down the narrow staircase that leads from my room to the kitchen, and I do the only thing that I know how when I am faced with an angry Madame.

"It is my health—" I lie.

"But I am improving as we speak," Miss Toklas finishes my usual speech for me.

I had overheard a
femme de ménage
from Brittany use those exact words in the home of a previous Monsieur and Madame, and I had her teach them to me. They are vague enough to cover most household mishaps and oversights and also have the assurance of in-progress improvement tacked on at the end. When she asked me why I wanted her to repeat it, I told her I thought the sentence clever and useful. The
femme de ménage
agreed, but she said that she could not take credit for it, as she herself had overheard an Italian nanny employ the same words in another household some years back. We servants, in this way, speak the same language learned in the back rooms of houses and spoken in the front rooms on occasions such as these. Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein have also developed an apparent appreciation for this sentence. On subsequent Mondays when my head is again too heavy with wine, my Mesdames' breakfast conversation floats up to my bedroom window, like pieces of burnt paper, from the terrace down below. Amongst their otherwise incomprehensible English words, I recognize the phrase "it is my health" spoken in a fair approximation of a laborer's heavily accented French. Laughter usually ensues. No matter, I think, as I turn over on my side. Laughter in this case is a good or, at least, a nonthreatening sign. Of course, I try not to indulge in this sort of behavior very often, not more than two or three times during the season. It is just that drink is cheaper in Bilignin. In fact, it is free. The farmers there ask very little of me, and when they do they seem to enjoy, unlike their Parisian cousins, the sounds of the French language faltering on my tongue. Sometimes they even ask to hear a bit of Vietnamese. They close their eyes, trusting and sincere, and they imagine the birds of the tropics singing. When they are like this, 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.

In the summer, my Mesdames kindly overlook my Monday-morning absences. Halfway through the season, Miss Toklas even suggests that I take Mondays off for "my health." Of course, she also reduces my pay by one day. But life in Bilignin does not require a full wallet, so I gladly accept the change in the terms of my employment. I also gladly accept the additional glasses of wine and whatever else comes my way every Sunday and Monday night. The farmers in Bilignin work and drink like horses. The two activities do not seem to affect each other in any significant way. I, however, begin losing my appetite and my body weight right along with it. By the end of the summer, GertrudeStein, when greeting me, finds it necessary to repeat herself: "Well, hello, Thin Thin Bin."

A cook who has no desire to eat is a lost soul. Worse, he is a questionable cook. Even when I can no longer take a sip, a bite, a morsel of any of the dishes that I am preparing for my Mesdames, I never forget that tasting is an indispensable part of cooking. The candlelight flicker of flavors, the marriage of bright acidity with profound savoriness, aromatics sparked with the suggestion of spice, all these things can change within seconds, and only a vigilant tongue can find that precise moment when there is nothing left to do but eat. For a less experienced cook, such a turn of events, the sudden absence of appetite, would be disastrous. Imagine a portrait painter who attempts to practice his art with his eyes sealed shut. I, thankfully, am able to maintain the quality of my cooking with the help of my keen memory. My hands are able to recreate their movements from earlier times. My loss in body weight, however, I cannot hide. It shows itself as a forlorn expression on my face, one that my Madame and Madame have yet to notice.

When we are in Bilignin, Miss Toklas loses all interest in matters of the kitchen. She leaves that all to me. From May through September, Miss Toklas's heart lies in the gardens, where she too may be found from the early morning till the hour just before the setting sun. I have heard her cooing from the vegetable plots. She does not know that she emits the sounds of lovemaking when she is among the tomatoes. I have heard her weep with the juices of the first strawberry full in her mouth. And I have seen her pray. GertrudeStein has seen her too, but she thinks that my Madame is on her knees pulling out weeds. The god that Miss Toklas prays to is the Catholic one. I have seen the rosary wrapped around her wrist, the beads trickling one by one through her fingertips. From the second-story windows of the house, GertrudeStein sees her lover toiling in a garden, vines twisted around her hands, seeds falling in a steady rhythm from her palms.