“Why?” I asked, looking rapt but thinking he could have kept the sermon to himself.
“Because Italians are not up to it! Making sacrifices, I mean, or considering washing dishes in a restaurant to be important and essential, and as an opportunity. Italians are big dreamers. They want to be valued, their egos need stroking, they don’t want to serve the kitchen, they want the kitchen to serve them. Whereas for foreigners, maybe illegal immigrants, the job means everything to them — to them and to their family back home in Bangladesh. You bet it’s important and essential.
“A Bangladeshi doesn’t get depressed washing dishes, doesn’t collapse after ten hours with his hands in water, doesn’t get pissed off when he’s nearly finished for the night and another table of ten walks in, and doesn’t have a life waiting for him at home. This, right here, is his life.”
“And … as far as wages are concerned, what were you thinking?”
“Fifteen hundred euros a month, no overtime, no penalties if we close some days or go home early. No written contract, my word is good enough.”
“No contract”—that made no difference to me, I didn’t give a damn about contracts, all I needed was the money. And I kind of liked Mauro. Sermons or not, I agreed with him. We shook hands. We’d start in a week. Michele appeared as well, and I recognized him. He was the tall guy, the first one to poke his head in the kitchen at the end of the party on the riverboat to congratulate me, with his cheery, candid expression and admiring comments. And so much taller than I remembered! We said hello, and I strode up to him, laughing, my nose only inches from his chest; there was quite a distance between the top of my head and the tip of his chin. Mauro joked about the difference in height, declaring that it was all for the better, we’d fit in more easily between the flattops, the fryer, the oven, and everything else. So that was that, I was officially a member of the team. A handshake was all it took.
On my way back home, the promises I’d made to myself the previous night and even that very morning vanished into thin air. I’d get back to capoeira eventually, too bad for the July and September exam sessions, there would be others, and I didn’t have the scholarship requirements to maintain any longer either. Nothing else mattered, except maybe the photography, but that was a private thing. There was the lawyer to pay, of course, but from May to September I’d earn €7,500, exactly the amount I needed. The rent was, all things considered, reasonable, and as far as food was concerned, I’d be eating at the restaurant. It didn’t matter if this was my calling or not, whether it would be for a season or the rest of my life, if it was a stroke of luck or a nosedive. I was ready and raring to go, and it was more than I deserved. Safer not to think too much about it, or let in even the merest shadow of a doubt. It had to be like the dream that floats away when you suddenly wake up. All I wanted was to get to work on time on my first day.
13.
I returned to the farmhouse a few days later for a meeting before work was due to begin. The place was buzzing like a beehive, and just as chaotic. There must have been more than thirty laborers going about their business in small groups, swamped by piles of building materials. The deck leading to the outdoor stage for the jazz concerts was still a bare frame, there were yards and yards of electric wires lying around everywhere; lighting fixtures to be installed, plaster and wooden boards around what would eventually be the outdoor grill for the self-service area, carpets for the dining room still wrapped in cellophane, and everywhere chairs, tables, boxes of glasses and flatware. It seemed impossible that the opening was only days away. Yet everything had a reassuring air of commitment about it. I felt like I was in the right place, a moment before the right time. Michele’s hair was as scruffy as last time, and he wore a chef’s jacket over Bermuda shorts and a pair of wacky flip-flops.
The kitchen was large and square, accessed by a door opening onto a sort of corridor that gave onto the dining room. Crates of wine and mineral water were stacked in a corner, along with two chest freezers and a fridge display for cakes, as well as a rusty, discarded pass left over from what the place had probably been in a previous incarnation: a pizza restaurant. The pizza oven was gone; in its place was shelving crammed with tablecloths, glasses, napkins, trays, rolls of paper towels, gastronorms in all shapes and sizes, everything covered in dust, and heaps of other stuff in random piles.
In the kitchen, over to the right, was Mambo, an olive-skinned Bangladeshi with gleaming white teeth, and his two kitchen sinks, a huge hood-type dishwasher (the kind with a bar that you raise and lower to start the cycle), and a garbage bin for food scraps. The dishwashing area occupied around a fifth of the total kitchen space. In the middle was the pass, a stainless steel table with a sizable space underneath for storing plates, and on the left, the work area for entrées, two adjacent refrigerator counters, and immediately next to them, a nonrefrigerated counter with drawers, a ten-gallon boiler, a stove top with six decent-size burners and plenty of shelves below for stacking aluminum frying pans, the hot plate, a deep-fryer and, last, the gas grill with lava rocks, where I would be working.
Behind the cooking area were two double-door fridges, one for the meat, fish, and cheese, the other for the vegetables. Next to these was a smaller chiller, for all the cooked food during prep, and right next to that the glass door leading outside, near the stage where the concerts would be held. Along the wall between the grill and the fridges stood, in all its glory, a six-tray convection oven, with a rack underneath and two side shelves jutting out to hold smaller utensils and equipment. So, no blast chiller and no vacuum sealer, but pretty much everything else needed to work comfortably and prepare and store food for a pretty big crowd.
Mauro took me to the locker room and handed me two black uniforms: I’d never seen uniforms this color. I got changed, tied the apron firmly around my waist, fastened the buttons and turned back the cuffs: clothes really do maketh the man. I felt like a bizarre lay preacher or a homegrown version of Neo from The Matrix. Anyhow, I felt awesome and you can’t make good food unless you do.
I saw myself reflected in a shiny surface, and once I’d stopped staring at the uniform, I looked myself straight in the eye and asked myself what the hell I was doing there. No, that’s not true: I’d glimpsed a lost soul in eyes that didn’t seem to be mine. I don’t know if everyone’s brain works this way, but here’s what happens to me: I home in on one small detail that gradually swells and expands and obliterates whatever else is going on. There is always a whisper of uneasiness at the back of my mind, a foreboding. I continued doing what I was doing — I’d never step back or jump ship at a time like this — but for a split second my gut told me something meaningful, which was gone as fast as it had come.
I still wasn’t too familiar with this world, but it seemed clear to me that résumés mean nothing, they’re asked for as a matter of form and then not glanced at. What matters is that you’re proactive and relatively cheap, and all the better if you’re a fast learner and have little experience. Experience, as we know, is an asset, a commodity, for those who promise they’ll give it to you. No experience translates into fewer headaches for the “informally” hired, and it means that not having a contract is the least of your worries. After two days of chitchat and goofing off, it transpired that everyone (and I mean everyone!) in here was working cash in hand.
We were a bunch of guys who wanted to help get this slow-moving multiheaded monster off the ground so it could start spewing out the best jazz music on the planet and gobbling up more than two hundred people a night. No one was tied down by a family, no one owned a home, and no one imagined making headway in the job they were doing here and turning it into a career. Everyone lived in the here and now, had a life, had plans, and had a desperate need for cash. Peddling drugs would be a viable option if it weren’t so damn dangerous. So instead of drugs, they peddled cheap labor and did what had to be done.
Michele and I did too, but we identified with that semi-legal world, and with the job. We arrived at ten in
the morning and left long after midnight. Everything else got put in standby mode, it couldn’t be otherwise. Or at least, that’s how we were with the others, as if everyone except us was just messing around. I never get whether it’s the environment that shapes people or people who shape the environment around them, or whether it is awareness or inertia that dictates how we view others. The thing is that nobody ever suspects that a chef might have another life — as a waiter or a barman, for instance — probably because, if you really think about it, they never do. The chef is, for all intents and purposes, the restaurant. Deep down, I enjoy this role-play. I like being entitled to top-dog status, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m always finagling my way into restaurant kitchens.
I passed the bug on to Michele, who ever so slowly began taking on some of my habits while I acquired some of his meticulous manual skills and knowhow. I started getting to know this shy and intelligent guy, who was awkward, unhurried, and methodical, who measured his words before speaking, did not have an impulsive bone in his body, and was utterly engaging as well as hypersensitive.
Michele became famous at the venue for his slightly affected way of doing things and a disturbing propensity to waffle on seemingly senselessly. He cooked with the dreamy expression of a person always one step behind you or one step ahead of you, his head in another place, and for this reason displayed the utmost composure and clearheadedness. As he swayed imperceptibly to distribute the weight of his tall frame, and julienned vegetables in a Zen-like state, I feared he would be torn to shreds. Because if kitchens were the vaguely cruel and violent places I had so far found them to be, then he’d soon be obliterated, there would be nothing left of him.
He’s harmless enough, I told myself. I could crush him whenever I wanted. And as this new and unfamiliar sensation descended upon me between the pans and stove tops, this lack of conflict, resentment, or rivalry calmed me down. Not only was he harmless, he’d be useful too. His laid-back approach would give me an opportunity to grow.
Up till then I’d managed to disguise my shortcomings, always nudging what needed to be done into familiar territory, and using other people’s weaknesses to hide my own. Maybe here I’d have the chance to turn those weaknesses into strengths. Learn how to make a brunoise the proper way, following Michele’s precise and unhurried example until I found my own pace, but with the same precision. In the kitchen there would be just him and me, plus Mambo, who earned his nickname when he arrived at the Verve for a job interview with Mauro wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with LET’S MAMBO! front and back.
This saddened me a little, reminding me of a modern-day version of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday. But there you go. I never could remember his real name, and Mambo was quick and easy to pronounce. He was always laughing and always cheerful. He had a job, his “bosses” (seriously? Michele and me?) treated him kindly, and €700 a month cash, under the table, was a more than decent salary. He was an illegal immigrant, and this job was his only link to his adopted country, giving him a measure of dignity in a place whose language he still hadn’t mastered. Of course he didn’t have to because he needed only the basics, which he mangled uproariously: uggplant, baseball (basil), shopping (chopping), fush (fish). This became an excellent source of amusement during those long hours of drudgery in the kitchen.
He taught us obscure phrases in Bangladeshi — no doubt rude and offensive — and hooted when we tried to memorize them and repeat them as accurately as we could to the waitresses. Mambo, on the other hand, practiced saying, “Can I whip your ass this evening?” or “You would be an excellent sheath for my huge Bangladeshi dick.” So, as I was saying, I don’t know whether it’s the environment that dictates roles and behaviors or vice versa, but I do know that restaurants have their own crude linguistic code. Outside, relentless sexual innuendo is not my thing, and the same waitress chuckling to herself as she exits the kitchen would probably slap my face if we were in street clothes.
I would never ask Mambo whether Bangladeshi dicks are more like black men’s or Europeans’. Dicks, tits, and gang bangs just don’t feature in my everyday conversation. However, the minute I cross the threshold into the kitchen, my native language changes to a different vernacular. Every industry has its jargon, and in the world of restaurants, it’s an uncommonly foulmouthed one. There’s no pretending in there. You don’t pussyfoot around food, you just dive right in. You can’t clean a fish without yanking out its guts with your hands, and human relationships and dialogue are treated the same way. We handle the basest instincts with our bare hands: Either there is quality or there isn’t, either you love your coworkers or you piss one another off; there is no middle ground. In the end there’s always someone you take a liking to and someone you despise.
In those early days, Mambo worked the hardest of us all. He mopped the restrooms, the floors in the dining room, and the indoor concert space, mowed the lawn, set chairs in front of the outdoor stage, cleaned and polished all the various accoutrements. Mauro had said it — we needed a Bangladeshi kitchen hand, and we had one. Already so enmeshed in all the most demeaning but essential tasks, he was far more part of the machinery than we were. Guardian of the nooks and crannies, unconditionally dedicated to his job, light-years away from the Bay of Bengal and yet closer to his family with the money he was able to send them every month.
There were no hitches in the first few days. We had about twenty covers a night, the prep work took a very long time but was doable, and with Michele at the wheel we could afford to waste time on decorations, swapping advice, and experimenting here and there. His julienne was much more precise than mine, his touch neater and more even when spreading sauces, and the consistency of his purees was far smoother: He was simply more methodical. I was by far sloppier but faster and more practical, had a clearer picture of the contents of the fridges, and could see more clearly what was happening (and was about to happen) in the kitchen.
The fact that I was officially the sous chef and he the head chef suited both of us. We learned from each other, merging our individual capabilities into a single organism whose movements and words never got tangled up. I was content to be working for a chef so far removed from the norm, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about power, was unpretentious and cheerful, and whom I had obviously beguiled. Because he probably needed someone just like me. A less experienced cook would be useless; Michele wasn’t domineering enough. Someone with too much experience would eat him alive. Neither of us pretended to be what he was not, and very soon we became close friends. Often in the evening we would stop and have a drink together at one of the tables outside. Mauro would appear from underneath the stage with a bottle of French champagne or some classy Italian sparkling wine, and entertain us with interminable insights into subtle scents and flavors. He impressed us, and bored us a little too. But on such a journey of discovery, every taste is worth savoring and warrants the utmost attention.
I loved learning about wines, about which I knew absolutely nothing at the time, and I loved finding fault in the bullshit dispensed by this little man with his mustache and dramatic pauses. Mauro was a master wordsmith, and with those words he sold his wines, notably the most expensive ones. Words are more than just language: Language is a code for communicating, words are myths, enigmas, talismans. Words are limits, lucidity, arrogance, traps, distance, seesaws, charm. Words are, above all, games. And alcohol plays a big part in those games.
In my opinion, most of us are sorely lacking in both logic and irony. That’s why we call winemaking an art and golf a sport. We’re happy to let ourselves be made fools of by expert crap-mongers. Which explains why we don’t mind spending €50 on a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino, one of the nine, ten million bottles supposedly produced every year on the hillsides around Siena. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the numbers don’t add up, because the quantity of Sangiovese grapes grown there can’t possibly produce millions of bottles of wine. Even so, we happily fork out good money for a bottle of Brunello. If
there were no sommeliers, chefs would be out of a job.
14.
I was sitting in the dining room, a long rectangular space with the tables arranged in two rows with an aisle down the middle; some of the lights were already off, and only the ceiling lamp in the center of the room was still on. Patrizio was wiping down the coffee machine, Michele and Mauro were with me. Two beers and a glass of champagne sat in front of us. The clock said eighteen minutes past one in the morning. Outside, workers were dismantling the stage where Cat Power had just finished performing. A short, fat guy plunked himself down at a table near ours and took a crack at getting a free drink by whining loudly about the shitty, cheating world he was condemned to live in. At the same table sat the last lingering clients, an ineffectual young fellow and a blonde girl wearing all the colors of an impressionist’s palette. The fat guy was still droning on, his strident voice colliding with their silence like a moth against an incandescent bulb. The young fellow and the blonde ignored him, clearly irritated by his presence, until the young man went ballistic.
“Will you do me a favor and just go away?”
The fat guy turned toward us and slithered over to our table. He looked at us with sad eyes. I offered him my beer and said he could have it, as long as he stopped jabbering, because this had been a bad enough night already. He was about to sit down, but Mauro said no, he can go drink his beer outside. I looked at the guy and decided he’d be better off hating it when the lights were on instead of hating it when the lights were off, as he had declared in a long rambling speech. Without missing a beat, he grabbed a chair and went on yakking about concerts costing too much, music should be free, lightbulbs burn out way too fast, which never used to happen, lightbulbs used to last for years but now they design them so they burn out instantly, nowadays engineers are paid to design things that break right away, it’s called planned obsolescence. He pointed to the ceiling light above us, with one bulb burned out. I was bone tired. Michele was listening to the guy and agreeing with him, one softly spoken word coming gently to rest upon the next, and Mauro was dialing a number into his cell phone. The security guard from the main gate, without so much as a how do you do, strode in, lifted the fat guy up, and threw him out.
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