Read Online The Book of Salt by Monique Truong - Free Book Online Page B

spirits. He delivered them to the open arms of His Savior, Jesus Christ, and, to a lesser extent, the Virgin Mother. Virgin Mother, indeed. Only men who have taken a vow of celibacy could conjure her up, a hallucination who comes to them in the votive-lit nights, who tells them to place their weary heads on her bosom, draped in chaste cloth but ample all the same. The Old Man had no patience for Her. He had felt that way from the very beginning, from the day that he was led to Saigon's Notre-Dame and told to kneel, to turn his face toward the cathedral doors and away from the woman who had to peel his small pleading fingers from her own. From that day, from the moment when he became a Catholic, She was to him an unnecessary attachment, a weak character in a story that he would otherwise come to believe.
    A cathedral, even one so close to the equator, can still cause a young boy to shiver. In a country with only two seasons, sun and rain, a cold day if it arrives can rarely survive. The houses of his Lord are a favorite resting place, where the cold is hoarded and stored away in the curtained confessionals, the cathedral's stone floor, the marble Christ, crucified and veined, the gold chalices, icier than their burnished colors would imply. In a cathedral, shuddering, a young boy, who would one day become the Old Man, spent his youth advancing from choirboy to altar boy to seminarian, dutifully living the life that the holy fathers had chosen for him. But when it came time for his ordination, the young man announced that the Virgin Mother had come to him and told him to take a wife. The holy fathers were stunned. Many wondered why She had never said the same to them. The young man had lied, but his words were precise. He wanted not just a woman but a wife. After all, he could join the priesthood and still have a woman. Some of the holy fathers had two or three. It seemed that their vow of celibacy made many women feel utterly at ease. Baring their souls led to the baring of other things as well. When I am feeling generous, I tell myself that he wanted a wife because he wanted something to call his own. More accurately, he wanted something he could own, property that could multiply, increase in worth every nine months. The holy fathers walked away, heads bowed, claiming that they knew nothing about such things.
    The young man went to see a matchmaker who told him not to worry. Even a man with no money, property, or a family name could procure a wife. Being a man is already worth enough, he was told, and the rest are extras, baubles for the lucky few. "The trick," said the matchmaker, "is to find a girl worth less than you." For the young man, that meant she had to be worth nothing at all. Sadly, there were a number of suitable candidates. The young man walked away from the holy fathers and from a life garbed in tunicles, chasubles, palliums, and miters, but he did not go far. He found a small house on the outskirts of the city, a good distance from the cathedral but still close enough to hear its carillon bells. He chose it for its location. In order for his new business to thrive, he needed to be within walking distance of poverty. Abject was not required. That would be overdoing it. He needed just a paid-on-Saturday, broke-by-Sunday kind of poverty, a deep-rooted not-going-anywhere-soon kind of insolvency. Given his particular area of expertise, he also needed to find a neglected, preferably withering, outpost of his Lord. The young man soon found all that he was looking for. He walked into a wood-framed church equipped with a native
priest and little else and offered to keep that congregation alive, for a fee of course, paid upon delivery, per newly bowed head. Father Vincente, né Vũ, who had celebrated Mass only as a lonely affair between himself and the occasional visiting seminarians, agreed and did not bother to ask how.
    The young man was not brilliant. He was not even clever. He was gifted, though, with a