Rising Abruptly

by Gisèle Villeneuve

  Later, Mom sent this postcard:

  That diplomat Prior wrote: “Who would ask for her opinion / Between an oyster and an onion?”

  Still drawing concentric circles on walls in the middle of warped insomnia. Leek / poireau. Investigating the root of the matter. Kalonji. The black seed of the wild onion. Kali for black humour? Kalonji, the black seed sprouting out of lidless vigil, forming concentric circles on walls. Getting hypnotized, getting closer.

  At four A.M., Maddie made Japanese rice that she seasoned with powdered green tea and rice vinegar. She smelled the rice. Mild, sweet. A pearl onion flitted across her mind, a shadow on her night walls of concentric circles. She formed small sticky balls between oiled palms and stacked them in a pyramid on a glass plate. The rice balls released a faint pickled onion smell and they did resemble cocktail onions. After her nuits blanches, her stomach quivered. Even cardamom seeds wouldn’t help. She could only eat the gentle grain, sacred in other parts of the world where people slept. And she catnapped in the corners of certain hours.

  For twelve nights, the smell of onion followed her everywhere.

  She roamed the streets; the smell accompanied her. She tensed up at noises hiding in shadows; the smell clung to her. On her way back to her room, she passed under the purple neon sign of a martini glass with a swizzle stick of light and an olive at the bottom of the glass. The purple had a defect and the olive shone white. Not a martini then; rather, a Gibson. She saw herself snatch the pearl. Pop it into her mouth.

  At five A.M. on the twelfth night, out of the irritant of sleep deprivation, she knew she had to create the perfection of a thousand-year-old pearl.

  Maddie visited her mother’s house.

  Mom, I have a calling. Le sacerdoce de l’oignon.

  Le sacerdoce de l’oignon? Sounds serious.

  It is. I can’t sleep. I smell onions all night long. Be my mentor. Teach me everything you know about onions.

  Lillian was halfway through Bouvard et Pécuchet. She laid the book face down on her lap and motioned her daughter to sit on the ottoman. Maddie plopped herself down at Mom’s feet, waiting for her to reveal the secrets of Allium cepa.

  Madeleine, you could be having brain seizures. Those recurring smells worry me. Onion is likely related to childhood memory. A mother–daughter bonding over a basin of cocktail onions and boiling vinegar and sugar. Do you smell spices as well? You don’t? I may have added a pinch of ginger, but I don’t think so. In my day, clove and ginger were reserved for the Christmas tourtières, and cinnamon for the autumn apple pies. But that persistent phantom smell of onion. Did my pickling activities traumatize you? It would be wise to see a neurologist and asked for a CAT scan.

  Lillian gripped the spine of Bouvard et Pécuchet.

  But, Mom, why presume the worst? I want to know everything there is to know about onions. And my dream. Shall I tell you my dream? My dream is to make the perfect pickled onions. Cocktail onions that will send the eater into fits of ecstasy. I want to make the pearl onion queen of aphrodisiacs.

  Ovid thought the white shallot from Megara was an aphrodisiac.

  Will you teach me, Mom? Will you?

  Lillian tapped the cover of Bouvard et Pécuchet with her forefinger: Ces messieurs failed miserably in their attempt at canning. Mould and mildew in every jar. You will not, I hope, throw yourself lightly into canning. As you know, since your papa’s stomach took him away from us, I have no desire to go back to the kitchen. I padlocked it, remember. Of course, I still make myself BLTS and cups of tea. But nothing beyond the simplest food. Besides, let’s face it. My pickled onions were of the humblest fare, in the tradition of our farming grandmothers. Unlike you, I had no calling. So, my empirical knowledge will be of little use to you. Lillian reopened Bouvard et Pécuchet: This is where I dine now, Madeleine. I tell you what. Experiment. Meanwhile, if in my readings I come across something useful to your search, I’ll pass it on to you.

  But Mom, you learned at your mother’s elbow. And she at her mother’s elbow.

  Lillian flapped one elbow and laughed: So did you, ma chérie. So did you. That smell of onions is the surest path to your deep memories of the early kitchen. Follow your nose. It will guide you. I will help you through my readings, but not the other way.

  Will you worry about brain seizures?

  I won’t force you to apply poultices to your forehead.

  With Mom’s blessing, Maddie hiked the onion trail, sometimes over steep bends, sometimes along sweet alliaceous stretches. Always guided by desire. The trail brought her far from her early Montréal memories. Failed to cure her insomnia, but filled her slanted Montréal flat with information on the ancient Allium family.

  Shortly after her visit to Mom’s house, Maddie received a postcard that had nothing to do with onions:

  I came across the distant cousin of your thousand-year-old pearl, ma chérie. The Chinese thousand-year egg. In a wooden bowl, clay is mixed with lime, ashes, salt and black tea leaves. Rice husks are crushed into the mush. An uncooked duck egg is coated with the material and buried in a clay pot for three months. Such a descent into darkness may appear to take forever, say, one thousand years. In its anaerobic environment and with a little underground heat, the egg white becomes firm, amber-coloured and transparent like jelly. Sometimes with feathery markings. The yolk turns dark green and becomes firm without losing its moisture. One never gobbles up paydon the way one does a pickled egg at a fish-and-chip shop counter after pub-closing time. Rather, a morsel is served as an appetizer on a toothpick with a slice of ginger. A fitting tribute, following the delicacy of unearthing, removing husk and clay, peeling and slicing the egg. Revealing the work of time and darkness and seclusion. Can your cocktail onion surpass paydon, Madeleine?

  Cleaning the mess of the failed first Calgary experiment, Maddie turns to Jacques.

  I had to take up Mom’s challenge. Her challenge was as pungent as onion smell. Tout aussi piquant. It piqued my curiosity. It was as enticing, if you know what I mean, as the sharpness of desire.

  I understand that, the sharpness of desire.

  Ah, oui?

  Certainly. It’s all there in mountain climbing. If I tell you about the excitement and the frustration and the challenge and the many repeats of a hard route through all kinds of weather until you finish it, and then, what a relief, what a release, you will understand that I understand.

  I do.

  Yes, you do. But until you come along, it’ll remain something of an abstraction. Once you’re there, right there in the doing and the exertion, and in the impatience and the momentum, only then will you know that I know about that kind of desire. Mountaineering and the perfect pickled onion you seek. Same thing. It’s not always grand, but it’s always worth the trouble. Even its tedious moments…

  Tedious! As in peeling a kilo of tiny onions? That, I understand.

  And as in your onion practice of peeling and steeping and boiling and pickling, mountaineering may look like you keep doing the same thing over and over. A scree is a scree. A rock face is a rock face. Or ice is ice. Or terror is sheer terror, yeah. But it’s not. Each time, it’s different. Each and every time, you can taste and smell the sharpness of your desire.

  Maddie is astounded. In an odd way and right there in the middle of their Bowness night, just like that, Jacques understands the essentials of onions without ever having pickled a single one. At least, he does, in a kind of abstraction. She turns off the lights and they go to bed. He falls asleep instantly. She, though… Her mind’s eye roams the room, searches the myriad maternal postcards that dot the walls of this house.

  In rapid succession, Mom’s postcards fell into Maddie’s Montréal mailbox, bringing her on the Grand Onion Tour:

  To Ashkelon you go, ma chérie, the land of the scallion and the shallot. To Egypt, the land of onion worshippers. To Wales, the land of leek patriots. To Chicago, the land of the wild onion (or wild garlic). To Georgia, the land of the Vidalia, sweet as a harvest apple.
To Korea, the land of the garlic eaters. To India, the land where five pounds of onions may routinely be cooked down to their essence in lamb korma, the finished concoction filling a bowl no bigger than the hors d’oeuvre dish in which I served my pedestrian cocktail onions.

  Maddie thumbtacked to her drab walls Mom’s stories gathered along the Allium trail of time and places. And still, she did not sleep. And still, each experiment ended in failure.

  Beside her, Jacques sleeps, his breath a little urgent. Is he climbing hard rock? Risking rotten ice? Slipping and sliding up tedious scree? She rests the flat of her hand on the small of his back.

  One year to the day since the first nuit blanche. And in her hometown, the scurrying in the inner walls seemed to intensify, the floor seemed to warp in an endless wavy motion that gave her le mal de mer. Unless it was sleep deprivation that caused nausea.

  On another insomniac nuit montréalaise, still experimenting and failing, kilos of pearls ruined in her attempt to achieve the perfect state of crunchiness, the correct balance between tart and sweet, her onions too perfumed with ginger root or too aggressive with peppercorns, Maddie detected a new anomaly. On that night, following the one-month maturing period, when she twisted open the lid of the jar, her pearls had a persistent, if subtle, taste and smell reminiscent of inferno. Where in hell did the sulphur compounds emanate from?

  Maddie read again the postcard thumbtacked above the stove and which Mom had sent a few weeks earlier:

  In garlic, once the cell membrane separating the molecule alliin and the enzyme alliinase is cut, the enzyme destroys the unstable alliin molecule to generate another sulphur compound, and this is what imparts the characteristic garlic smell. In the case of onions, a similar process makes you cry, ma chérie. But, there is hope. Since that molecule is water soluble, you will keep dry eyes if you chop under water. Most people don’t go to the extreme of diving to chop, but some people go to the extreme of wearing goggles. Or chewing on a hunk of bread. A burned match does not work. Contact lenses, I’m told, do. Though beware of onion myths.

  But Maddie’s pearls were never cleaved. So, no release of the lachrymator. And their salt bath and their sixty seconds in boiling water had never triggered malodorous emanations. The remaining problem was the ratio of vinegar to sugar, not the scent of hell. She was at a new crossroads and at a loss. Maddie continued to read, moving along her walls, letting her too-wide-open eyes dart among Mom’s postcards:

  Allium cepa contains 91% water. Has twenty-eight calories per 100 grams. Germinates between 9 and 30°C. Tolerates frosts to –2.5°C. Matures in 115–135 days. The milder the climate, the milder the cepa.

  Maddie began to speak to her postcards: Ninety-one per cent water. Allium, you are a fine desert food. Low in calories, you won’t send the traveller into fits of night sweats and your water will keep the pilgrim cool. Toi, l’oignon, tu es la gourde du désert. Water. Is water the culprit? It’s Montréal water, she declared louder, staggering in her flat-ship anchored on the edge of downtown.

  Montréal water gushing from the tap would not poison. On the other hand, a faint unpleasant odour, undetectable to the average city dweller, but noticeable to the sensitive nose of the chronic insomniac, may have laced the clear liquid. Maddie noted in her lab book that, either during the two-day steeping in their cold salt bath or during the crucial minute in their boiling water bath, her baby onions soaked up the volatile compounds, which infested them to the core during the one-month maturing period. Or was the taste, like the onion smell, only in her head? Mom worried about phantom smells. For that matter, were there truly rats scurrying in her inner walls?

  In the end, the Allium trail brought Maddie to Calgary via the waterway and, possibly, to onion salvation. Jacques is sleeping now, in the fetal position, his breathing calm. In the dark, Maddie’s mind reads Mom’s last Montréal postcard:

  It is worth going, Madeleine, if only for the water. And the City by the Bow being rat-free, you may finally sleep. I read in a travel book that the Calgary water is nonpareil, coming deep from the frozen land in high mountains west of the city. As good beer begins with pure spring water, I surmise that glacier water will give genius to the genus and only then will you achieve the perfect pickled onion. Or, as you baptized it, your thousand-year-old pearl, for which, like its counterpart, the preserved egg, some period of burial must be accepted. When you achieve success, send me a jar. As your papa used to say, bonne chance, ma fille.

  Back in Montréal, Maddie stored her postcards and thumbtacks in a plastic box. The pasty walls with the peeling paint appeared pockmarked. With a felt pen, she connected the thumbtack holes at random. Stepped back from her drawing as far as the cramped room allowed. To the vivid imagination or sleep-deprived eyes, the lines formed a giant head of garlic, with the skinny tails of rats scurrying away in terror of Allium sativum.

  Maddie stuffed her few possessions in a backpack. Invited Mom to a farewell dinner in a bistro on rue Saint-Denis.

  Lillian declined: This month, I’m banqueting with Proust, ma chérie. But I promise to write.

  Maddie watched Montréal grow smaller under the belly of the plane.

  Later a flight attendant shook her until she woke up. They had landed in Calgary twenty minutes before.

  And here she is in Jacques’s bed. His sleep seems agitated again. Is he falling off a ledge? Is the smell of onion attacking his brain deep in his slumber? She warned him. He dismissed her warning. She should leave his house. Why torment him with the pungency of her desire? The sharpness of his own should suffice. Sooner or later, he will kick her and her onion obsession out, so he may sleep in peace.

  After the flight attendant kicked her out of her seat and Maddie deplaned, she stayed at the Y while drumming up business as a window dresser. As soon as she could afford to, she would move into a place of her own and resume her Allium cepa experiments.

  One day in early December, Maddie was dressing the window of a high-end jewellery and glassware store on 17th Avenue. She dropped white glass pearls into martini glasses she had filled with water and glycerine to enhance their size. Added coloured glass swizzle sticks. Then arranged her display on draped white satin. She was finishing her composition with a river of pearls cascading from empty, tipped glasses when she felt watched. From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a young man with thick black hair sticking straight out of his skull, wearing a red Gore-Tex jacket, black fleece pants and steel-toed work boots. Before she could give him a look of annoyance, he raised his hand and formed the O of approval with thumb and forefinger. Her face relaxed into a smile and, immediately, he pointed at the martini glasses and, taking the pose of a swell in a film noir, mimicked drinking cocktails together. She nodded and motioned, wait a moment.

  At The Martini Bar, she insisted on buying the first round: Let’s have Gibsons.

  Gibsons? At a martini bar?

  They’re interesting to me, and they’re cousins. Apparently, the Gibson was named after a teetotalling American ambassador of the Prohibition era. At functions, for diplomacy’s sake, he had to drink with his guests. So, he carried water in a martini glass to which he added a cocktail onion. And today’s Gibson is just a dry martini with an onion. Perfect for martini bars.

  They toasted their encounter. Sipping his drink, he watched her perform a new slant on the old come-on. Between her fingernails, she daintily seized the pearl at the bottom of her glass. Inhaled the sweet-tart scent. Rolled the bulb between thumb and index finger. With eyes half-closed, she licked it, the tip on her tongue hard against the white flesh. Wrapped her lips around the onion, parted her teeth and sucked it into her mouth, rolling it from side to side, then bit. He imagined vinegar and sugar exploding in droplets of sharpness and softness on her tongue and rising in vapour up her nasal cavity to lodge deep inside her brain, causing her whole body to arch, her skin to shiver. She swallowed and opened her eyes.

  He sipped his gin: Was it good for you? He couldn’t begin to imagine what she
could do with a gherkin.

  She drained her glass, shaking her head: Complete imbalance of sugar and vinegar. And cheap vinegar too. French wine vinaigre is best, but it costs an arm and a leg.

  She leaned so close to his face he smelled her onion breath, and wanted to kiss her.

  She licked her lips: Ultimately, the secret is the water. That’s why I came to Calgary. My mother, who is an expert, told me if I use glacier water, I’ll make the perfect pickled pearl. The problem is, how do you get to the glaciers? We’re not talking ice cubes from the freezer tray. Nevertheless, the water brought me to Calgary. What brought you here? Veux-tu qu’on parle français?

  Non non. Anglais is fine. I have one of each.

  One of each what?

  Parents. Ma mère est une Anglo. Mon père est un Franco.

  Moi aussi! Same configuration. How about that! My name is Zoé Madeleine Rivière. Everybody calls me Maddie.

  He laughed, rubbing his steely hair: My name is Jacques Lachance. Everybody calls me Jack Lastchance. I came here for the climbing.

  Maddie’s eyes sparkled: You’re kidding me.

  Why would a guy called Jack Lastchance kid you? You’ve seen the Rocks. They’re but a stone’s throw away from the city. I can tell you about glaciers. Teach you climbing techniques. On rock, ice. The lot.

  She insisted on buying the second round.

  I may not know my pearl onion from a gherkin, but I can recognize the right woman when she comes along.

  He invited Maddie to move her bags from the Y to his Bowness bungalow, which he had been renovating forever and was in no hurry to finish.

  When not shingling roofs, I climb. If you’re not ready just yet, on my way back from the mountains, I can bring you a small supply of glacier water.

  The second round of Gibsons arrived and they toasted their new venture.