That was the beginning of my sin. Like many sins, it seemed innocuous at first.
I wanted to encourage this man. I began to study what he liked and what he didn’t like.
I served a thirteen-plate rijstaffel, charging 300 pesetas, which was then a little over five dollars. Rijstaffel means rice table. It is a Dutch adaption of Indonesian cuisine. You put the rice in the center of the plate, and soak it with Sajor, a sort of vegetable soup. Then you surround the rice with various dishes—Daging Kerry, which is beef in curry sauce, and Sate Babi, roasted pork on skewers in peanut sauce, and Sambal Udang, liver in chili sauce. These are the expensive dishes, since they contain meat. Then there are Sambal Telor and Perkedel, eggs in chili sauce and meatballs, and various vegetable and fruit dishes. Finally there are the garnishes, like peanuts, shrimp wafers, grated coconut, spiced potato chips, and the like.
Everything is served in little oval plates, and it looks as if you are getting a great deal of food for your 300 pesetas. You are, of course, but not as much as it looks.
My customer ate with a good appetite, and he usually finished eight or ten of the dishes, plus a little over half the rice. That is good going for anyone who is not a Dutchman.
But I was not content with this. I noticed that he never ate liver. So I took it upon myself to substitute Sambal Ati, shrimps in liver sauce. He seemed especially to like my sates, and so I increased the amount, and gave him plenty of peanut sauce.
Within a week I could see that he was definitely gaining weight.
That encouraged me. I doubled his portion of Rempejek, peanut wafers, also the meatballs. The American began to eat like a Dutchman. He was filling out rapidly, and I was helping him along.
In two months he was some ten or twenty pounds overweight. I didn’t care, I was trying to make him a prisoner of my food. I bought a set of larger plates and served him larger portions. I began to slip in another meat dish, Babi Ketjap, pork in soy sauce, in place of the peanuts he never touched.
By the third month he was trembling on the frontier of obesity. It was mainly the rice and the peanut sauce that did it to him. And I sat back in my kitchen and played on his tastebuds like an organist plays on an organ, and he dug in, his face round now and shining with sweat, while Pablo gyrated around with the dishes and changed records like a dervish.
It was evident now, the man was susceptible to my rijstaffel. His Achilles heel was in his stomach, so to speak. But it was not even as simple as that. I had to assume that this American had lived his thirty or forty years prior to meeting me as a thin man. But what permits a man to remain thin? An omission, I think, a lack of some food that really engages the specific desires of his taste buds.
It is my own theory that many thin people are potentially fat people who simply have not found their appropriate and specific food. I once knew an emaciated German who only put on weight when he went to Madras for a construction firm and encountered the astounding spectrum of southern Indian curries. I knew a cadaverous Mexican working as a guitarist in various London night clubs, who assured me that he always gained weight in the city of his birth, Morelia. He told me that he could eat decently (though not voluptuously) anywhere in central Mexico; but that the cuisine from Oaxaca south to Yucatan, excellent though it was, was a total loss as far as he was concerned. And there was another man, an Englishman who had lived most of his life in China until the Communists expelled all foreigners, who assured me that he was wasting away for lack of Szechuanese food, and that Cantonese or Shanghai or Mandarin cooking did not suit him at all; he told me that the regional differences of cuisine in China are (or were greater than those in Europe, and that his case was similar to that of a Neapolitan stranded in Stockholm. He told me that Szechuanese food was quite spicy, but delicate. He lived in Nice, on Provençal food, to which he added imported red bean curd and soy sauce and God knows what else. He told me it was a dog’s life; but perhaps his wife was partly to blame for that.
There are precedents, you see, for the behavior of my American. He was evidently one of those men who have never encountered a cuisine which really suits them. He had found it now in my rijstaffel, and he was eating to make up for thirty or forty years of sensation-starvation.
Given a situation like this, the ethical chef must try to assume responsibility for his gluttonous customer. The chef, after all, is in the position of puppet-master; and it is he who manipulates the culinary desires of his customer. I have known a French chef in Paris, imbued with the spirit of Escoffier, who simply would not serve certain of his customers another portion of his Quiche Lorraine or his Tarte d’Ognon, two of his specialties, saying, “Seconds of anything are a distortion of a balanced meal, and I, for one, will not lend myself to the perpetration of perversities for a few lousy francs.”
I applaud that master-chef, but I was unable to emulate him. I was not really a chef at all, simply a poor Italian with an unaccountable flair for preparing rijstaffel. My true desire was to be a painter. My character, much to my regret, was and still is opportunistic.
I continued to stuff my customer, and my anxieties tended to increase. It seemed to me that I owned the man now, although I had no legal bond. Late at night I would wake up trembling; I had dreamed that my customer had looked at me out of his enormous moon face and said, “Your sambals are lacking in savor. I was a fool ever to have allowed you to feed me. Our relationship is now at an end.”
Recklessly I doubled his portions of Satay Kambing Madura, served his rice fried in oil and saffron rather than boiled, added a generous portion of Sate Ayam, chicken in chili sauce with ground nuts: all very fattening, all designed to maintain and increase his dependency on me.
It seems to me that I cooked, and he ate, in a state of delirium. Surely by this time neither of us were quite sane. He had become gross by this time, a distended sausage of a man. Each pound that he put on seemed to me a proof of my hold over him. But it was also a source of increased anxiety for me, for he could not keep on gaining weight forever.
And then, one night, it all changed.
I had planned a little additional delicacy for him, Sambal Ati, shrimps in chili sauce, a pure extravagance on my part when you consider the perpetually inflated cost of shrimps. Still, I thought he would enjoy it.
He did not come to the restaurant, even though it was one of his regular nights. I stayed open two hours later than usual, but he did not come.
The next night he did not come either.
On the third he did not come.
But on the fourth night he waddled in and took his accustomed table.
I had never spoken to the man in all the time he had eaten in my restaurant. But now I took the liberty of walking over to his table, bowing slightly, and saying, “We have missed you these past nights, mijnheer.”
He said, “I was sorry that I was unable to come. But I was indisposed.”
“Nothing serious, I trust?” I said.
“Certainly not. Merely a mild heart attack. But the doctor thought I should lie in bed a few days.”
I bowed. He nodded. I returned to my kitchen. I poked at my serving pots. Pablo waited for me to ladle out the order. The American tucked the enormous red napkin I had bought specially for him into his collar and waited.
I became fully aware then of what I must have known all along: that I was killing this man.
I looked at my pots filled with sambals and sates, my caldrons of rice, my Vats of Sajor, and I recognized them as instruments of slow death, as efficacious as a noose or a club.
Every man has his cuisine. But any man can be killed by the skillful manipulation of his appetites.
Suddenly I shouted to my customer, “The restaurant is closed!”
“But why?” he demanded.
“The meat has turned!” I replied.
“Then serve me a rijstaffel without meat,” he replied.
“Impossible,” I said. “There is no rijstaffel without meat.”
He stared across the room at me, h
is eyes wide with alarm. “Then serve me an omelet made with plenty of butter.”
“I do not make omelets.”
“A pork chop then, with plenty of fat. Or just a bowl of fried rice.”
“Mijnheer does not seem to understand,” I told him. “I make only rijstaffel, properly and in the correct forms. When this becomes impossible, I make nothing at all.”
“But I am hungry!” he cried like a plaintive child.
“Go eat lobster mayonnaise at Juanito’s, or paella at Sa Punta. It wouldn’t be the first time,” I added, being only human.
“That’s not what I want,” he said, almost in tears. “I want rijstaffel!”
“Then go to Amsterdam!” I shouted at him, and kicked my pots of sates and sambals onto the floor and rushed out of the restaurant.
I packed a few belongings and caught a taxi to the city of Ibiza. I was in time to catch the night boat to Barcelona. From there I caught an airplane to Rome.
I had been cruel to my customer, I will grant that. But I thought it necessary. He had to be stopped at once from eating. And I had to be stopped from feeding him.
My further travels are not pertinent to this confession. I will only add that I now own and operate the finest rijstaffel restaurant on the Greek island of Cos. I get by. I serve mathematically exact portions, not a gram more even to my regulars. There is not enough money in the world to induce me to give or sell second helpings.
Thus I have learned a little virtue, but at the price of a great crime.
I have often wondered what happened to the American, and to Pablo, whose backwages I sent from Rome.
I am still trying to become a painter.
THE WAITER
Dear God,
My sin took place some years ago, when I worked as a waiter in an Indonesian restaurant in Santa Eulalia del Rio, which is a village in Ibiza, one of Spain’s Balearic Islands.
I was young at the time, no more than eighteen. I had come to Ibiza as one of the crew of a French yacht. The owner had been caught smuggling American cigarettes, and his boat was impounded. The rest of the crew scattered. But I remained on Ibiza, coming at last to Santa Eulalia. I am Maltese, so I have a natural gift for languages. The villagers thought I was an Andalusian, and the foreign community thought I was an Ibicanco.
When the Dutchman opened his rijstaffel restaurant, I was uninterested at first. I helped him out for a day because I had nothing better to do, and because no one would work for the miserable wages he paid.
But in that first day I discovered his record collection.
This Dutchman had an extensive collection of 78s, some of them jazz classics. He had a good player, an adequate amplifier, and speakers which, in those days, were considered first-rate.
The man knew nothing about music, and cared less.
He considered music a mere accompaniment to dining, an amenity, like candles in straw-covered bottles and strings of peppers and garlics on the wall. One played music while people ate: that was all he knew about it.
But I, Antonio Vargas, whom he called Pablo, I had a passion for music. Even at that young age I had already taught myself how to play the trumpet, guitar, and piano. What I lacked was an intimate knowledge of American jazz forms, which were my particular field of interest.
I saw at once that I could work for this Dutchman, perhaps earning enough to keep myself, and in the meantime play and replay his collection, learning the American musical idiom and preparing myself for the life of a musician.
The Dutchman was amenable to my playing the records. He had little choice, for who else would work for his wages? Certainly not the foreigners. Not even the native Ibicencos, who dress poorly but tend to be prosperous.
There was only me, and I considered myself well-paid by the Louis Armstrong alone.
I sorted and classified and dusted his records, forced him to order a needle with a diamond point from Barcelona, rearranged the locations of his speakers to avoid distortion, and worked out harmonious programs of jazz.
Frequently I would open with Duke Ellington’s band playing “Mood Indigo”; reach Stan Kenton by the midpoint, and close by way of decompression, with Ella Fitzgerald singing “Bye-Bye Blues.” But that was only one of my programs.
I soon noticed that I was playing to an audience of one not counting myself, and not counting the Dutchman, who couldn’t tell Ravel from Ravi Shankar.
You see, I had acquired a listener. He was a tall, thin, taciturn Britisher, and demonstrably an aficionado of jazz. I saw that he ate in tempo with the music I played, slowly and lingeringly if I had on “You Ain’t Been Blue,” quickly and abruptly if I played “Caravan.”
But more than that, his moods altered visibly as I changed records. Ellington and Kenton tended to elevate him, he would eat furiously, beating time with his left hand as he shoveled in the rijstaffel with his right. Charlie Barnet and Bird acted as depressants, no matter what their tempos, and his eating would slow down and he would purse his lips and knot his brows.
When you are a musician as myself, you wish to please your audience; always staying within your métier, of course. And I set out to capture my only listener.
I leaned heavily on Ellington and Kenton at first, because I was still unsure of myself. I could never accustom him to Charlie Parker’s monumental fantasies, and Barnet seemed to grate on his nerves. But I educated him to Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Earl Hines, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. I was even able to pinpoint the individual sides he liked best, and to orchestrate an evening for him alone.
The Britisher was a stupendous listener. But he paid a price, of course: night after night he had to eat the Dutchman’s rijstaffel, which was a collection of little stews with various names, all of them possessing the same overspiced taste of chili sauce. There was no getting around this; the Dutchman did not encourage people to hang around without eating. When you walked in he stuck a menu in your hand. As you finished the last dish, he put the bill on your table. This may be acceptable practice in Amsterdam, but it is simply not done in Spain. Particularly the foreign community, which acted more Spanish than the Spaniards, disapproved, and stayed away. As a result of his crudeness and greed, the Dutchman could only rely on a single customer, the Englishman who really came to hear the records.
After a while I noticed that my listener was gaining weight. I accepted that as an accolade for my beloved jazz, and for me, the selector and orchestrator of that jazz. Anyone who could continue to plow through that monolithic and unspeakable rijstaffel was an aficionado indeed.
I was young, careless, irresponsible. I took no heed to my duties as a musician, viz., to provide balance and catharsis as well as fascination. No, I was out to capture this man, win him with my records, enslave him to Armstrong, Ellington, and myself.
The Englishman grew fat. I ought to have played something austere and classical, like Bix Beiderbecke or some of the other Dixieland formalists. They were not to his tastes, but they might have had a restraining effect upon him. But I did not. Shamelessly I gave him what he wanted.
What is worse, I perverted my own taste to please him. One evening I spun Glenn Millers “String of Pearls,” an amiable piece with no great pretensions. I did it as a sort of musical joke. But I saw at once that the Englishman had a taste for big-band swing.
I should have simply ignored it, of course. The man had talent as a listener, but he was musically uneducated. Had I been willing to take the gamble, I might have taught him something important, might have demonstrated to him what music is really about.
But I did no such thing. Instead, I catered shamelessly to his sentimental passion. I played Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James. I covered myself esthetically by spinning Benny Goodman; but I sunk to the depths by brazenly spinning Vaughan Monroe.
It is a terrible thing to have such power over another person. Within months, I could program my listener as well as my records.
When he came in I might toy with him slightly, playing “Muskrat R
amble,” a composition beyond his comprehension. Then abruptly I would turn to Vaughn Monroe’s “Moon Over Miami,” and the Englishman’s frown would depart, a slight smile would touch his gross lips, and he would shovel away at the unpalatable rijstaffel.
The chef, in his vanity, loaded up the man’s plates. But it was I who made him eat.
Sometimes, when I was playing “Take the A Train,” for example, or Armstrong’s “Beale Street Blues,” the Englishman would sigh petulantly, put down his fork, seem incapable of eating any more. Then I would quickly put on Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls,” or his “Blue Evening,” or “Pink Cocktail for a Blue Lady.” Or I would hit him with Harry James’s “When You’re a Long, Long Way from Home,” or Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola.”
These frivolities acted upon him like a drug. His bullet head nodding in time, tears forming in his eyes, he would dig in with his soup spoon.
He grew monstrous, and I continued to manipulate him like a trained rat. I don’t know where it might have all ended.
Then one night he didn’t show up.
He didn’t come the next night either, or the one after that.
On the fourth night he came to the restaurant, and the chef (understandably worried about his main source of income), inquired about his health.
The man replied that he had had an ulcer attack, had been ordered to stay on bland foods for a few days, but was now feeling fit again.
The chef nodded and went back to dish up his fiery stews.
The Englishman looked at me and addressed me for the first time. I remember that I was playing Stan Kenton’s “Down in an Alley by the Alamo” at the time. The Englishman said, “Forgive my asking this, but might you be so good as to play Vaughn Monroe’s ‘Moon Over Miami’ ?”
“Of course, my pleasure,” I replied, and walked back to the player. I took off the Kenton side. I picked up the Monroe. And I realized then that I was killing this man, literally killing him.
He had become addicted to my records. The only way he could hear them was by eating rijstaffel, which was making holes in his stomach.
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