The Book of Salt Read Online Free PDF

her full name, Gertrude Stein. Always GertrudeStein.' Just think of it as one word."
    "Is that it? What about the other one?"
    "Her name is Alice B. Toklas. She prefers ' Miss Toklas.'"
    "And?"
    "Well, that's it. That's it."
    "I'll be back in an hour, then. Good-bye, Monsieur."

3
    This is a temple, not a home.
    The thought—barely formed, fluid, just beginning to mingle with the faint smells introduced by the opening door—changes so quickly from prophecy to gospel that I am for a brief moment extricated from my body, made to stand beside myself, and allowed to serve as a solemn eyewitness. Ordinarily, I am plagued, like the Old Man, with a slowness. In him, it was triggered by cowardice. In me, it is aggravated by carelessness. Ours is a hesitancy toward an act that is habitual and common to those around us: the forming of conclusions. We are, instead, weighted and heavied by decades of observations. We gather them, rags and remnants, and then have no needle and thread with which to sew them together. But once they are formed, ours become the thick, thorny coat of a durian, a covering designed to forestall the odor of rot and decay deep inside. But to the neighbors whose prying eyes were members of our extended family, the Old Man was a person of sure-footed opinions, a man of unwavering morals, a man who laid down judgments with the ease of an ox marking its path with piles of its own dung. Since my first night away from home, I have been suffer
ing through a dream, sad and naked. I am standing in front of the Old Man's coffin, which has been laid out in front of his house underneath the morning sun, and I am saying, as if in a trance: "This was a man who benefited from a long life. Over the course of his many decades, he had reached a handful of conclusions about the world around him. In his hands they, the coarse sediments of his life, lost their natural complexities, became a string of pearl-like truths, a choker for the necks of those who share his name." Taking a deep breath, I then solemnly declare, "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." In my dream, I am saying all of this in French, though I know that this is impossible. But in my dream, cruelty greases my tongue and I am undeniably fluent.
    This is a temple, not a home.
    The thought—growing stronger with the scent of cloves and sweet cinnamon in the air—takes me out of the past, a borderless country in which I so often find myself, and returns me to Paris, to the rue de Fleurus, where a door, joints rusted red but otherwise unadorned, is opening. A woman with the face of an owl emerges and positions herself inside of a wedge of light. The woman, I think, has the face of an "Ancient." This is not to say that her face is wrinkled or dulled. Ancients, according to Bão, my bunkmate on board the
Niobe,
wear faces that have not changed for centuries. To look at them, he said, is to look at a series of paintings of their ancestors and their descendants, as when two mirrors endlessly reflect each other's images. 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 preor
dained faces proclaim too loudly that the man is irrelevant, that maybe he is not needed at all. Bão, of course, did not say it in exactly these words. His were more immodest, recalling with photographic details the acts performed by Serena the Soloist, a mixed-blood beauty from Pondicherry who commanded half a week of his wages,