I rode over to the car, took off my earphones, and leaned in the open window, slightly out of breath.
“Where are you off to, Leo?”
“Home, where else? You guys heading over to Balduina? You’re an item, aren’t you, eh?”
“Yep, we’re going to my place, wanna come with us? We can fill up the plastic swimming pool.”
“As long as I can take a shower. I’m all sweaty and I stink of roast meat.”
“We like it when you’re sweaty, Leo,” Vanessa said with a giggle, “and we’ll be taking a shower too.”
“What about the bike?”
“Leave it here — have you got something to tie it up with?”
“Just this crappy lock, let’s hope it’ll do.”
The Balduina neighborhood wasn’t that close, and we chatted about everything except Mauro with his stench of failure.
At Michele’s place, nothing much happened. We cracked open a couple of beers, I rolled my usual joint, and in the end we didn’t inflate the plastic swimming pool — the water would’ve been too cold anyway. The air was weirdly tense, but I couldn’t decide whether it was in my head, or I was feeling anticipation. Vanessa was wearing a T-shirt that did not quite cover her shapely ass. She also had on burgundy panties with navy blue stitching. When we called it a night and said we were tired, I asked Michele if I could crash on his sofa, because the guest room was so damn hot.
“Why don’t you sleep in our room, there’s air-conditioning. We can grab a mattress and put it on the floor.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and so we grabbed the mattress and put it on the floor. We turned the lights off and said good night.
Wide awake, my heart was thumping, and every minute movement they made broke into the soft hum of the night. My breathing seemed too loud. I waited until they started to kiss before stretching out my arm in the darkness and brushing Vanessa’s. As she kissed Michele, she lightly stroked my fingers. This went on for a few seconds, and then I climbed onto the bed. They made room for me. Michele sat up as my lips found Vanessa’s mouth, and he kissed the nape of her neck. I closed my eyes and let myself go. She smelled of spices and her skin was taut and damp. She took off her T-shirt, then mine and Michele’s, and wrapped herself around him. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I could see them now: They were kissing, almost meticulously, neither of them wanting to take control, searching for and avoiding each other at the same time. I wondered if I was just a plaything: Was I their chosen one, or would anyone else have done? Vanessa broke into my pointless ruminations by folding her legs around me and rubbing herself against my stomach. Michele wore the same expression as when he was cooking something for the first time and I thought he was taking it too frigging slowly; yet his calm, measured pace had saved the service time and time again. I seemed to be doing all the moving, still entwined with Vanessa, and like Michele, I was contemplating the situation that up until a few hours before had been no more than wishful thinking.
No one was talking. Vanessa turned over and lay on her back, parted her legs, took my head between her hands, and pushed it down toward her belly. It was exciting and perfect in every way, but I had to be sure they were both okay with it. So I got up, leaned over, and gave Vanessa a quick kiss, ruffled Michele’s hair, said I had to go to the bathroom, and left the room.
I stood in front of the mirror for a couple of seconds, wiped my forehead and chest with a T-shirt I picked up from the floor, then went out onto the balcony to enjoy the cool night air. When I returned to the bedroom, Michele was lying on top of Vanessa, moving rhythmically. She turned her head and looked at me, the bedside lamp now switched on. “Come over here, Leo,” she said, chuckling, “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” So I sat on the floor next to the bed and basked in the joy of nature taking its course, from the somewhat unnatural perspective of a very close observer. As I rolled a joint, Vanessa reached over and gently touched my face. I got up and opened the window above the bed to let some air in and smoke out. Michele’s ass continued bobbing up and down, then he stopped and sat up; Vanessa crossed her legs, still lying on her back. My gaze lingered over the curve of her breasts. Of the three of us, she was the only one who knew exactly what she wanted. I passed the joint to Michele, who took a quick puff and offered it to Vanessa, who inhaled deeply, filling her lungs. Her eyes became small as the smoke swirled around us. Vanessa said that men don’t understand women, they have a distorted idea of them. I asked if she’d imagined this happening, and she replied, “Why? Didn’t you?”
In the kitchen I knew exactly how things played out, whereas here I was just a puppet waiting for its strings to be pulled and afraid of breaking something. Michele got up and said now it was his turn to go into the bathroom, and he’d be back in a moment, leaving the room reeking of naked bodies and longing and shyness. I took it to be a signal, meaning that before the three of us could go at it together, we had to loosen up, one step at a time. Before it was me who’d got up and left Michele some space, and now he was returning the favor. As soon as Michele padded out, leaving the door ajar, I flicked the roach out the window and climbed back on the bed. I clung to Vanessa with all my strength. She tasted just like my recipes and made me feel like I was falling and floating at the same time. She smelled of cut grass and forests. Her taut body guided me, adding salt to the narrative of my dishes. Her sensuality clawed at my heart, and this time I really felt the pain.
She told me to thrust harder, and I was happy to oblige, but after a while, once you’ve given as much as you can, you can’t anymore and I couldn’t. My mind wandered to Michele: Maybe he’ll join in and why hasn’t he come back yet? Vanessa sensed my discomfort and interrupted the flow of my thoughts by climbing on top of me and swaying back and forth until she gave a sudden shudder, froze for a fraction of a second, and let out a throaty groan, her body motionless and tense. Then she collapsed, her damp hair tumbling all around. The world went momentarily black and nothing else mattered but that precise moment, a pinprick in time, and I let go too. When I opened my eyes, Michele was standing there smiling, holding a bottle of wine. We left it at that. Vanessa laughed and covered her mouth and breasts.
I returned to my spot, on the mattress on the floor, and Michele to his, in bed with Vanessa. I sat cross-legged, cradling the bottle, and observed the two of them fondling each other. Sparks began to fly from Vanessa again; I gazed at them as they came, and perceived a vague and conflicting sense of sadness that, oddly, didn’t detract from my pleasure. I felt astonished and incomplete, as if I’d had a brush with something that never materialized. Nibbled on a morsel of food that I could have devoured. And I sensed that this threesome was inexplicably related to the restaurant and the identities that had been forged there. As if without my being the sous chef of a chef like Michele there would now be nothing, and perhaps there was nothing. There was just the three of us and this fragile scrap of pleasure. The kitchen at the Verve had become the axis around which my emotional life revolved, a living entity that isolated every trace of unease and yearning and floated them in the limitless space of my mind. In the end, things are the way we remember them, and this is true for both promises and dreams.
I put these ruminations out of my mind and fell asleep. The next morning no one was in the least embarrassed. We passed by the pole I had chained my bike to the night before — nothing but the lock remained. No surprises there. When the three of us arrived at the Verve, we went about our business. I decided to cook a particularly sumptuous staff lunch. I needed a reason to celebrate, and announced that it was the theft of the bike. I mean, it wasn’t even mine.
18.
It became clear that three of us were not going to be enough in the kitchen once the workload increased and the concert season got into full swing. Management sent us some résumés, and this time I was the one doing the interviews. I told the third candidate, Emiliano, to come back the next day for a week’s trial period. He had cut his teeth in restaurants all over Turin,
and his passion for writing was equaled only by his weakness for controlled substances. His speech was hurried, but what he said was well thought through and coherent. When he was high, it wasn’t his clenched jaw that gave him away, nor was it his slightly compulsive habit of sharing his alarmingly exhaustive opinions of “people,” “the world,” and “eating well.” What gave him away was his language: foulmouthed and funny at the same time. Between relentless ramblings, almost without pausing for breath, he would ask me to taste the sauce, did it need more salt? Was the garlic a touch too pungent in the salmon sauce? By that stage his taste buds were shot.
That was not the usual Emiliano, though. As a rule he was as high as a kite and much, much quieter. Sometimes it was methadone, other times he dampened the effects of coke with rohypnol, Prozac, Lendormin, or any of the other medications the doctor had prescribed for his mother, which he pilfered from her nightstand when he visited her. He didn’t shoot up heroin; he smoked it. He’d stopped doing needles after he got hepatitis. Michele appeared to be oblivious. All he did was make jokes about how crazy Emiliano was and how I only ever trusted my gut when I chose people.
As I got closer to Emiliano, I began distancing myself from Michele. My brain seems to work exceptionally well on some levels, but on others it gets tangled up in pointless conflict with itself and slides into perilous bullshit. When that happens, my only escape route is to concentrate on something practical and precise that relieves the tension and wears me out. Cooking is a wonderful medicine, far superior to the benzodiazepines Emiliano took. In that sense the paradox is that my best moments in the kitchen always coincide with the most fucked-up times in my life. I don’t know if that’s why I tend to fuck things up so often.
Emiliano was a deep thinker, maybe the deepest I have ever met. It was just that when he got tired of thinking, he smoked so much heroin that in the morning you’d find him in the kitchen looking like a wreck, his pupils the size of pinheads. Naturally, instead of sleep he was looking for a state of enhanced alertness that transcended insomnia. He never wanted to switch off. People who think heroin makes you close your eyes and fall asleep don’t have a clue. When his body told him to slow down, he stepped on the gas.
I admired his ability to live on the razor’s edge — not only did he not fall but he left everyone else for dead, including me. My snap decision to hire him had been spot-on, because with him the menu took another massive and completely unexpected leap forward into brilliance and sheer genius. And it worked, fuck me, it really worked.
We talked more and more, and more and more we snorted a line of cocaine in the restroom before service. More and more I ended up at his place sniffing heroin between smoking one joint and the next, with thoughts that were strangely lucid and had nothing to do with tingling fingers. I sensed that the game could take over my life, and knew it could happen in a heartbeat, but I was convinced that my work would save me. Together, we fucked up our lives, distanced ourselves from the others, and turned the kitchen into a wellspring of miracles.
It was me who asked to shoot up together. Everyone chooses their own path to destruction, but Emiliano’s strength and sensitivity would never be wrecked by a shot of brown, of this I was sure. Much more than he ever was. And, of course, he was right.
“Chefs reign supreme, Leo, but only in the kitchen,” he told me, while heating the glass vial containing the little dark ball swimming in saline solution with a lighter.
When you do heroin, your thoughts stack up one on top of the other but remain lucid. You get a head rush and you become incredibly rational, which is hard to reconcile with the substance you’ve just injected. You rationalize and reach conclusions that you can transfer into your everyday life, yet you dig a trench between yourself and what it takes to understand them. And, above all, you believe that you are totally in control and no one will notice. You only do it now and again, after all, you think.
First times are sometimes last times — maybe that is why they stay so clear in your memory. When they are not, you stop thinking about them altogether.
19.
The season edged toward its conclusion, and I had learned lots of useful shortcuts. As usual I was sitting up in the circle, opposite Patrizio’s bar, with neither beer nor wine in front of me. Luckily, as it happens, because although by this time he was usually gone or playing poker in the office, I noticed one of the bosses climbing the stairs. He knew we downed a few glasses nearly every night, but he hated actually seeing us drink. He grabbed an upturned chair from the table beside me and sat down.
He told me that the mayor of Rome was planning a meeting at the Verve, and this time he didn’t want a buffet based around couscous but something more elaborate. If I felt up to the task, I could organize it all and there would be a bonus in it for me. The others didn’t need to know about the bonus. I would put together the menu and look after all the details, and he would pass it on to the kitchen as if it came from the client, so Michele wouldn’t feel that he was being pushed aside.
The boss was rewarding me with the prestige and confidence I had yearned for from the moment I set foot in this place. What I hadn’t achieved slaving over a hot grill minus a piece of my thumb was now being offered to me thanks to the arrogance with which I had recently been laying into the menus and recipes. All this after consuming variable amounts of some of the craziest illegal substances out there, more often than not taken right there on the job. And Michele, who was clean, decent, and honest, was slowly being sidelined. And they call it a highway to hell.
I threw myself into planning the gala dinner and the menu, down to the minutest detail, with the frenzy reserved for a truly major event. The boss passed by the kitchen to announce that he didn’t want this upcoming dinner to disrupt the whole kitchen, and that I could take charge of it with Emiliano’s help.
In truth, there were heaps of things that Emiliano and I still didn’t know how to do. We had never hand-rolled pasta, our ravioli and cappellacci were gnarled and misshapen, and we used lots of gelling agents and stabilizers, yet we still felt head and shoulders above the others. We spent hours immersed in frozen puff pastry, mini rice balls, and sauces thickened with agaragar or xanthan gum, and all kinds of savory dishes set in aspic with no regard for the season, arguably displaying a flair for the bold and inventive. Black truffle and foie gras sauce — a match made in heaven. Igles Corelli’s onion custard paired with a marinated egg yolk inspired by Carlo Cracco, raspberry mayonnaise with grilled baby octopus, pasta carbonara as finger food served in pasta shells and finished with béchamel sauce, chickpea crostini and bream, lumpfish roe, and trout burgers. In other words, a mishmash of everything I had garnered from my own experience, a few articles, and some books, all mixed together with a generous pinch of improvisation and much bravado.
We spent two straight days and nights in the kitchen, without ever going home.
The gala dinner was a huge success.
While I soaked up the satisfying sound of jaws chomping on food and basked in my boss’s praise, a bald guy with dark circles under his eyes wearing a white jacket and tie and pointed dress shoes, also white, came up to me and asked if I was the one who had organized the dinner and made the savory finger food. I looked around. “Yes, that was me,” I replied. The guy wanted to offer me a job. He would be opening a funky new place in Trastevere soon. It would specialize in Milanese-style aperitifs that would be the best in Rome. He’d heard great things about the Verve and about me and wanted to meet the chefs to find out if anyone might be free to work for him. Yes, I’d be free, but not right now, probably not till September. But I’d think about it. “Here at the Verve they’re actually talking about extending our contracts,” I lied. He already had a package in mind for me: €1,500 a month, a part-time contract for €1,000 and the rest under the table. Dinner service only, a smallish kitchen, but entirely under my supervision, minor arrangements to be ironed out at a later date. I countered with, “Not moving for anything less than seventeen hundred eur
os, which is what I get here, and I want at least the same amount.” More lying. Fine, then, let’s make it €1,700, and we’ll meet next week to work out the details.
Unbelievable. God smiles down on assholes and drunks. I went upstairs for a martini at Patrizio’s bar, and while he was mixing it I looked down at the crowd. Yeah, I made the food that all these people are eating. How about that.
20.
One evening Michele asked me why I was looking so glum. He should be used to it by now, since it wasn’t unusual for me to wallow in moody silence, but today he insisted, and that wasn’t like him either. So I told him about the time I had been arrested with Vincenzo, a watered-down version, without too many details, only how this screwed-up genius of a chef had landed me in hot water. Michele didn’t bat an eyelid, he never did. He told me that his uncle was a lawyer. “Everyone hates him,” he said, “but they also say he’s a mean son of a bitch in court. He has a second job as a scuba-diving instructor.”
Scuba diving was one of those things I had always wanted to learn, like hang gliding and chess.
His uncle was right: When you dive at depth with a respirator, you can experience a strange kind of euphoria that is sometimes called a rapture of the deep, because of the oxygen levels.
We were only in a swimming pool and there was no real danger, but in the open sea you have to take care, because being euphoric speeds up your heartbeat and can make you hyperventilate, which makes you consume more oxygen, and it doesn’t take much to find yourself underwater blissfully giddy one minute and unable to breathe the next. You could tell his uncle thought he was a cool dude by the way he spoke. His explanations covered every minute detail and were excruciatingly verbose. Then again, none of us in the diving course had ever put on a respirator in our entire life.
“So what kind of attorney are you? Criminal or civil?” I asked as I stripped off my wet suit.
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