Clare who didn’t usually care for desserts ate both of them and felt better. It’s very clever of you, she said to Miriam, to know exactly how to make me feel better. You’ve made a healing dessert. David was playing a CD with songs her father used to sing in the shower.
So kiss me my sweetheart
And so let us part
And when I grow too old to dream
I’ll have you to remember
When I grow too old to dream
Your song will live in my heart
She bent her head over the sweet food, the sweet song, and her eyes filled with tears that were a soothing lotion to her tired eyes.
One of the reasons for the greater slenderness—let’s be clear about this, she says to herself, you aren’t thin, you aren’t slim or slender, certainly not lean, you wouldn’t have a hope of fitting into the clothes of even fifteen years ago, you’re just less fat, but she’s too busy enjoying the difference to take much notice of this carping self—one of the reasons is the hectic life she’s been leading. Early on she realised that sitting in front of a white page was too hard, she didn’t write, she thought, and the thoughts got into her chest and swelled and blocked it and this made her jump up and start doing something to shake them down. They were like a huge rich disgusting meal she couldn’t digest, that was giving her heartburn, she had to exercise herself to use up the terrible fat excess of them.
So then she said yes every time anybody asked her to go anywhere or do anything. She spent a lot of time in aeroplanes and even more in airports, wrote papers, shaped panels, all with edgy nervous deadlines. She liked this life, though she complained about it too; she found it exciting though she knew she would gratefully give it up soon.
She started going back through her own books for the material for these papers. At one conference she read a bit about a woman at a market weeping before a stall crowded with olives. The woman is remembering how all her life she went to markets and bought little packets of food and brought them home and unwrapped them before her husband, and how he shared her pleasure, how it was a gift she was giving him as well as food for both of them to eat, and he would open wine to drink with them, he is a man good at wine, and now she won’t be doing this any more, she has lost him, not to death in this case but another woman but he is still lost and is grieved for, or rather, she is grieving for herself who has lost him. She looks at the olives and weeps for him. Black olives, green, cracked, peppery, hot chili, small, wrinkled, fat. And the large violet ones from Tunisia. There is something surprisingly poignant about that line. The large violet ones from Tunisia. When she reads it she feels and knows her audience feels that all the heartbreak of the husband’s loss is in that line, and all the more so because it is mysterious that it should be.
In Adelaide at a festival of food writing she goes to a session called Murder in the Kitchen: Killing and Cooking. One of the panelists says that if we are to eat animals it is important that they have a good death. Don’t we all want that, mutters the woman next to her. Nick Nairn whom they’ve all seen doing it on television talks about the pleasure he gets from hunting. Which is better, he asks, shooting a rabbit through the head so that it dies cleanly and instantly, or keeping hens in a battery for the whole of their miserable lives. Of course, there is only one answer, and the audience knows it.
But the star was Cheong Liew. He looked as though he’d just stepped out of a painting on silk of a sage. Earlier Gay Bilson had said she thought he was one of the two most important chefs in Australia. He is a man whose intellectual engagement with food is matched by the lucidity of his technique, who cares for its philosophical and spiritual elements as well as the pragmatic and practical. These rather grand words are Clare’s, she’s framed them in response to speakers who pretended to engage with the serious questions they were meant to be examining but were actually saying, I’ve got this shiny new cookbook just published why don’t you go and buy it.
Cheong Liew likes to cook pigeon, and if you are cooking pigeon for a lot of people you need a lot of birds. He described how he kills them himself. He cradles them in his hands, and he showed the gesture, a bit like Picasso’s child with a dove, but more enclosing. He cradles the bird, presses his thumbs on the bird’s neck and gently squeezes until it dies.
He related how one of his apprentices said to him, If I am going to cook pigeons I need to be able to kill them, too. So Cheong Liew showed him, as he described it to his audience. How do you know when it is dead, the apprentice asked. You feel the life go out of it, said Cheong Liew. You feel the moment when the life goes out of it, and it dies.
The audience was silent. There was a small solemn moment of respect for the life of this bird and all the other animals that die so people can eat them. This was a gift that Cheong Liew gave them, that they must know what they do and do it wittingly and with respect.
Food and death. You can’t get away from it. Clare may not care to eat meat very often, but she is totally carnivorous. Pay attention to what you do. She and Geoffrey once found that inscribed on the capital of a column in a small town in France. Not fortuitously, they’d read in the guidebook that it would be there and searched for it. Gara que faras were the actual words, in the late Latin that turned into French. It could be a motto for most of your life; all of it. She thinks of the wood pigeons that coo in the trees outside her bedroom window, and flutter up from the grass when she walks in her garden. And the pigeon breasts she ate in a restaurant two nights ago, red-rare, juicy, tender, because they were cooked with the care they deserved. A good life, and a gentle attentive death. Afterwards treated with respect for the delicate nourishing entertainment they offer.
Eric Rolls in one of his books celebrating food says the best thing to do with endangered species is to eat them. To breed them, nurture them, sustain them. They will continue to exist, and we to enjoy them. He’s speaking specifically about Wonga pigeons, which have lost so many feeding grounds that now they’re protected. We should breed them for the table, he says, because most of the pigeons we eat are squabs, killed at thirty days, before they can fly and toughen their muscles, and since they don’t eat wild food their flavour is domestic. Wonga pigeons have exceptional flavour, and breeding them to eat would ensure their survival.
Rolls also recommends cooking feral pigeons in olive oil, barely simmering them, for ten hours.
Once she and Geoffrey had gone to a barbecue at the property of a hobby farmer who’d had some Galway cattle; he crept up and shot one to butcher and barbecue it, the creeping and shooting being because that way it wouldn’t die in fear and so its flesh would not taste of fear. All this was explained beforehand. But in fact the beef tasted horrible, and privately they’d wondered if they were used to the taste of fear, that their palates were trained to it and liked it, and the taste of a beast happy in its life and unsuspecting in death was horrible to them. But Clare decided the problem was that it was too fresh, too newly slaughtered; it had been shot on Saturday and eaten on Sunday, not being hung at all, not aged. Their friend gave them some hacked up chunks of meat to take home—he was a kind killer but no butcher—taking them down from the tree branches where they’d swung in the shade, covered in sheets and thick with flies, and although she didn’t like the smell of them she put them in the freezer. Later she thawed them out and smelt them again and threw them away.
Clare knows a man who became a vegetarian out of intellectual persuasion. He read a book that convinced him that eating other animals is wrong. At first when she invited him to dinner she made meals of vegetables, but she realised this was not what he wanted. He enjoyed meat, and liked to be obliged by politeness to eat it. Whereas her nieces are truly vegetarian. They can’t stand meat. Once their mother made a caesar salad, in the classical manner, beating a raw egg with oil and vinegar to make the dressing. She put in cos lettuce, added Parmesan, and fried cubes of bread with garlic in olive oil to make croutons. When it was all tossed together her daughters tasted it and said, Yuk, chick
en, we can’t eat this. Though in fact they normally ate eggs, were not vegans, ate cheese and even fish sometimes, but the raw egg gave the salad a taste of chicken and they couldn’t stomach it.
On her own panel Clare talked about one of her favourite topics. How we can be charmed by the dangerousness of food. How we like to play on that thin knife edge that separates delicious from disgusting. She mentioned the pork kidney that Leopold Bloom eats, early in Ulysses, faintly deliciously smelling of urine. Or a urologist of her acquaintance who always ate kidneys for breakfast; clearly he had a real interest in them, alive or dead. And of how, when she goes to France the first thing she always eats is andouillettes. Fried tripe sausages; you can see the pink furls of intestines when you cut into them, and yes the taste is rather visceral. Her children would never touch them and Geoffrey wasn’t fond of them, they would eat steak frites while she had the crisp-skinned sausage with mustard and some chips too. And she loved it, but also knew she was being brave, that she was playing with her fear that it might be too visceral, that it would make her palate and stomach heave. It never did, she always enjoyed it, finished every bit, but each time she was aware of the possibility. It’s living dangerously, she said. Like flirting with a violent man. And added to the andouillette she always ate tripe at yum cha in Chinese restaurants, with black beans perhaps, and tried chicken feet flavoured with star anise in the same spirit, and now always ordered them. And on this panel she went on to describe Phillip Searle’s banquet (he was the other cook, along with Cheong Liew the greatest in Gay Bilson’s mind) in the 1980s that pushed its diners far along this path: the great glass aquarium (specially made) filled with turgid and murky green gunk, like a stagnant pond in which lurked indescribable creatures (the guests’ faces a study in doubt), which when served turned into a most sublime and delicate fish jelly with rare morsels of seafood encased in it; the sausage of goose liver like a great turd on a plate; the quails cooked in bladders that were cut open with scissors and waiters with gloved hands pulled out the pale pink bony birds with limbs dangling, in a parody of a caesarean birth. He made his diners face up to the most horrid realities of what they might be eating, and rewarded them with flavours so rare and refined as to be close to a spiritual experience. Well, she said, the whole thing was over the top, the language has to follow it.
Food and death. Food and birth. Pythagoras wouldn’t even eat beans, because the souls of the dead might have been reborn therein. Our souls transmigrating into vegetables.
Once at a dinner party they’d played a game about what sort of vegetable people would reincarnate in. Who would be an asparagus, who an artichoke with a prickly hay inside, who the humble essential potato. Clare said she fancied being an onion, so many layers, so delicious, so indispensable, sweet sometimes, sometimes sharp and strong.
What did they say for Geoffrey? Now she thinks he could be grapes, not spectacular, quite humble-looking, on the vine, but turning into wine. Perhaps the most sublime substance you can put in your mouth. She remembers kissing him. Kissing like sipping at the other’s being. How it continued to be delicious. She never tired of the taste or the feel, never thought she’d had enough. And this would be why people say kisses are like wine. You want to sip and sip. And they are intoxicating.
When Clare got back from her zipping about the country she asked the old lover if she was thinner or fatter than when she left. Maybe fatter? said the lover. But she didn’t think this was true. Her clothes fitted as they had before, that is, a lot were too big, she could still comfortably get into old ones she hadn’t been able to wear for years (being thrifty she hadn’t thrown them away), and the closer-fitting new ones were fine. She likes her body as it is now, not thin but well-fleshed and an okay shape. She finds a quotation from Naomi Woolf, that fat is sexual in women. Ah. The Victorians referred to a woman’s fat as her silken layer. She lies in bed smoothing her fingers over the satin surfaces of her silken layer. Her fingers like the feel of skin, her skin likes to be stroked; this is a fortunate collusion.
And were it to be other fingers . . .
She takes one of her quartered slips of paper. There’s a fine black felt pen to hand as well. She writes.
She pleasured me with her fingers.
She looks at the sentence. The letters are small. The fine black pen has shaped them so that in the their smallness they are round and full of curves.
She pleasured me with her fingers.
It’s compressed. It’s tight with meanings. It will resonate, if the reader listens.
Her breasts jostled softly against mine.
She thinks of Queen Victoria not believing that women made love to one another, because she could not imagine what they did. In a period which could come up with a phrase like her silken layer, and name it after the age . . . and the queen. Poor Victoria. Half a life spent lamenting the death of sex, and no imagination.
It is interesting to think how men’s flesh is different from women’s. Men may be heavily built but there is a lean hard sinewy quality to their bodies. And their tummies, even when they are pot-bellied, are tight and hard. You could play a tattoo on them. Practise a drum roll. There’s resonance for you.
Whereas a silken layer should be smooth, not bulgy, and not too muscley, it should be soft. It mustn’t ripple or bag or droop, should be cushiony and plump but not take over in its own enveloping way so that the bones can only be guessed at. It’s a pleasure to feel the fine sharp bones under it.
Clare ate a large lunch, in a restaurant, with wine, so tonight a salad, with maybe a courgette sliced and quickly cooked in almost no oil with a lot of garlic. Will she ever again become so happy and calm that she grows fat and comfortable once more? Hard to imagine.
You are greedy, says a wife to her husband. Greedy for food, greedy for books, greedy for CDs, greedy for sex. You want too much.
She says this because he has been what they call philandering.
I just want to experience as much as possible, in the short time left to me, he says. You’re a long time dead.
Clare doesn’t think she wanted too much. Just to keep what she had. Not wanting more. She’s never been greedy for experiences; just a few, and savoured.
Dante had his gluttons in his next circle down from adulterers. Gluttony not such a bad sin, a sin of the leopard too. But it is a ruinous fault, its perpetrators suffer eternal, accursed cold and heavy rain.
When you get to hell, whose gate is wide—remember, narrow is the way and strait is the gate leading to salvation, but the path to hell is easy, it’s comfortable, pretty, a primrose path, and the gate wide and welcoming—you are met by the monster Minos who winds his tail round his body, one coil for each level down. The gluttons are two circles down. Dante doesn’t say much about them. Mainly that they are swinish and sodden, broken by this endless rain, that is hail and snow as well as foul water. It makes them howl like dogs, and they are guarded by the ghastliest dog of all, Cerberus, who’s fed a nasty and foodless meal; Virgil throws handfuls of the stinking earth into all his mouths to make him shut up. The only glutton mentioned by name is Ciaccio, which means pig, but the reader doesn’t find out much about him. Clare would like to know just what he did to be sent to hell for gluttony. But it’s mainly Florentine politics that is the subject here, ancient internecine feuds (not foods) that nobody would remember if it weren’t for Dante, and even then don’t bother much. Just enough to give a little bite to the reading of the narrative.
There’s a small joke in one of her novels, that some olive oil comes from a particular slope in Tuscany, and while the label doesn’t actually say that Dante used it, it implies that he might have. People laugh when she reads it. Though it’s a mild joke. And there is a brand of olive oil called Dante. It comes in four-litre tins, with his picture on, the hawk-beaked profile crowned with bay leaves. The oil is not extra virgin, and it comes from Spain.
Clare is writing a novel about a woman who cooks, but she isn’t a glutton. She’s small and childish in f
igure, her cooking is a mental activity. Paying attention to food isn’t gluttony. It’s ritual and ceremony, and a shared life. With husband, lover, family, friends. Or if you are a chef, with anybody who chooses to come and pay.
Food is love. In fact food is quite like sex. (Remembering the gluttons are the slightly worse companions of the adulterers.) There is desire, and its assuagement, when desire dies, until it arouses again. But always there is disappointment; the desire so full of hope, that this time, this time, there will be the perfect connection with the desired other . . . and it never quite is. Nearly, sometimes, a state of almost perfection, but never quite. That is why there is such pleasure in feasting your eyes in Paris food shops; you are never disappointed. The omelette is never too dry, the sauce too salty, the chocolate cake too sweet. No fishbones, no calories, no chance of salmonella.
And the desire for food is like the desire for sex. You can possess it, but only for the moment of eating it. The consummation is the end of it. Of course, food may stay with you in all sorts of unwelcome ways, as indigestion, repetition, flatulence, fat. As well as the perfect idea of itself. Like a lover, in fact.
A fairly new friend, who lives in New York in a loft with a photographer called Alice, is coming for dinner. Eliza, whose life follows a quite other orbit from Clare’s, but they touch now and again. Touch, and gaze upon one another. Clare has to stop writing and go to the market. She doesn’t know yet what she’ll find to cook. It’s necessary to shop with an open mind. There will be champagne, and red wine. White if she chooses something fishy. And the conversation will tingle with desire. Will sparkle with desire. Like two wine glasses, gently clinked together in a toast, chiming with a faint crystal music. Too hard and the fine bowls would break, falling into dangerous sharp shards on the table, spilling the wine, spreading red stain. The toast must touch gently, so the glasses faintly chime, the faint vibration sparkles from fingers to flesh, the wine remains in the glass, and nothing is broken.
The Fog Garden Page 17