The Book of Salt Read Online Free PDF Page B

money he now thought was well spent, for a glimpse of his own irrelevancy. Money well spent, indeed. Serena and her talented fingers and toes have become for Bão a supple example, a sort of explicit device, that helps him to explain everything he knows in life, from how to bargain for a few extra slices of beef in his bowl of
phỏ
to the difference between serving under English ship captains and French ones. But no matter why Serena was introduced, after each encore Bão without fail would offer this advice: "Remember, as Serena the Soloist showed me, there are just
some
things a man can't do!" Bão's eyes would then open wide, and his body would remain perfectly still, as if he were removing all distractions so that the indelicate meaning of his words could be fully savored. Bão's own convulsive, silent laughter would then officially end the show. When we first met, I asked Bão why he became a sailor when his name meant "storm." He responded with a rhythmless shaking, an open-mouthed silence, that I would only later learn to equate with laughter.
    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. Too sweat-stained and cumbersome for sea travel, I thought. So during our time together, Bão and I developed a tacit understanding that everything he said was true. A covenant easily kept because there were few on board the
Niobe
with the authority to contradict, to say "No, that is not true," who understood the sounds that we made. The First Officer, according to Bão, knew a few words of Vietnamese, but the woman who sold them to him was from the old Imperial City of Hue. His ears were trained only to respond to her Hue cadence, with its twists and undulations, like the wringing of wet silk, regal even as she sat naked asking for the money she
had just earned. The First Officer heard in our southern market banter the unfamiliar language of a lower class of whores. This is all to say that Bão and I had built a safe house, and we were its only inhabitants. We were also the fatal flaws in its design. Arms raised, palms opened, giving ourselves up to the Indian Ocean winds that carried with them traces of loneliness like airborne granules of pollen, we were its only pillars, absorbing the whole of its weight. As long as we were together, we had shelter. The day that the
Niobe
docked in Marseilles, Bão collected his pay and waved good-bye from a ship heading for America. "As long as we are together, we have shelter," I mouthed to him, but he was already at sea.

    The woman with the face of an owl repeats her question. My memories of Bão must have been swallowing me whole. How long have I have been standing there, silent? My delay in responding, even when what is posed is simple and direct, can usually be shrugged away with a smile and a "My French is not very good." But this afternoon I cannot deliver either one. I cannot respond to any of the woman's jangly French words because I am too enthralled by her upper lip with its black hairs twitching gently as she speaks. Her mustache, I think, would be the envy of all three of my brothers, who could only aspire to such definition after weeks' worth of unfettered growth. The arc of hair, like a descended third eyebrow, is topped by a solemn monument to the god of smells. Protruding from her forehead, abruptly billowing out as it reaches her eye sockets, it is not so much a nose as an altarpiece that segregates the left side of her face from her right. Moving northward, her facial features disappear underneath a skullcap of hair, dark, absorbing the late-afternoon light. I am overwhelmed by the intrusiveness of it all until 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