Tongue

by Kyung-Ran Jo

  CHAPTER 27

  I OPEN MY FRONT DOOR and Mun-ju pokes her head out from behind the pocket door. I pause, taken by surprise. It’s been a long time since someone greeted me when I got home. In January, when I was in bed for ten days, Mun-ju wrote down the contact information for the hospital Uncle was in and made a copy of my keys, saying, So this won’t happen again. I’m not bedridden anymore but something in me is shattered. Even if something disappears it isn’t completely gone. After Paulie’s death I’ve become more attuned to sound. I’m not scared by big noises, like the sound of thunder or lightning or fireworks. But the sound of rain coasting down the windows, the door closing, the fridge whirring, a few grains of rice falling to the floor, my own breathing—I feel those more immediately than the pounding of a drum. And the sounds I hear—Paulie’s slow footsteps, his sniffing, his breathing. One night, when Paulie’s death finally sank in, his sounds wounding me, I had to stifle my moans. Paulie used to give a single bark when the wind rustled the leaves, when he sauntered into the yard, when I brushed my teeth, when the blender was whirring, when I was grinding coffee beans. I keep brushing my teeth even after they’re clean, in the darkness, to feel Paulie coming up to me and pressing his wet nose on the back of my knees. Yeah, I remember. We shared something deep, something fundamental. Right, Paulie?

  Now I run alone on the track at night.

  Everything in this world, including those long dead, makes noise. But I can’t tell even Mun-ju that Paulie runs next to me, his teeth suppressing his panting.

  “Exercise is fine and good, but not right before you sleep.”

  “It was always at this time.”

  “What?”

  I stay quiet.

  “Oh, right. That’s true.” Mun-ju nods.

  I get up and boil water and steep some lavender. We sit on the sofa, side by side. Mun-ju has just returned from a week in Venegono Superiore, a small town about an hour from Milan, for a special feature about slow food. If you take the train from there and travel south for two hours, you arrive in Tuscany. The last time I went to Italy through Nove’s program, I learned how to butcher pigs and cattle, observing butchers for three weeks. It was a unique chance, but when the most renowned butcher in the region pulled out the backbone of a pig lying on its side, with a flourish, I let out a surprised shriek, so I lost the opportunity to learn more. The butcher’s glare was cold and jagged, reproachful. The way Chef looked at me if I made a mistake at the chopping block as a novice.

  “Are you already done with the article?”

  “The issue’s already out. But it’s not that interesting.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “This slow-food movement.”

  “Didn’t it come from the desire to live at a slower pace?”

  “Yeah. You ride a bike instead of driving a car, you take naps in the afternoon, and you cook the fruit and vegetables from your garden.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You have too much time to think.”

  “You don’t like that?”

  “A happy person doesn’t have that much to think about.”

  We laugh. A bitter laugh, as if to acknowledge that we are far from being happy.

  “How are things?” Mun-ju asks.

  “Fine, I guess.”

  “I stopped by Nove yesterday afternoon for a cup of tea but you weren’t there. Where were you?”

  Yesterday afternoon I met Mr. Choe at the Shilla Hotel café. “He asked if I wanted to move to a different kitchen.”

  Mun-ju doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “He’s going to open a restaurant.”

  “Chef is opening another one?”

  “No, Mr. Choe.”

  “Mr. Choe from Mido?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So is he scouting you?”

  I don’t answer. Was that what he meant? Mr. Choe said that he was going to renovate a two-story wine bar into an Italian restaurant. The location is great and so is the salary he mentioned, much more than what I make at Nove. He said that I would be sent overseas to learn about food for one month every year. Every cook who starts the day peeling hundreds of potatoes wants this, and, unless your dream is to run your own restaurant, this is the best—and rarest—opportunity. I smiled at Mr. Choe. He said, We should keep this quiet from Chef for the time being. He wetted his lips and added, When you get to my age, you start wanting a cook. Your own cook.

  A chef prefers customers that keep him on his toes. You ignore the customer who orders steak well-done or the person who asks for chicken. People who don’t know what they’re eating order chicken at Italian restaurants. Those who eat well-done steak don’t appreciate the taste of meat. Gourmets want something that’s not on the menu. They eat only plump Cornish hens or castrated roosters or the choice parts of a whole roasted duck. They want swan, as if it’s the eighteenth century. They understand that taste is triggered by the sense of touch, through the lips, and they want to have a mouth longer than the beak of a crane, to enjoy the ecstasy of food sliding down to their intestines. Cesare Ripa’s Crapula satirizes the fat stomachs and crane necks of extreme pleasure seekers. Food lovers ignore even death threats when it comes to something they want to eat. The possibility of death is why gourmets love blowfish. If you put a thin piece of blowfish—sliced so thin that the cook’s fingerprint is visible—in your mouth, your lips redden and heat up and tremble from the fear and excitement of death. Your spirits rise and saliva pools in your mouth. Finally a childlike smile spreads across your face.

  The obsession over food is tenacious. The eighteenth-century writer Nicholas-Thomas Barthe, who wrote Les Fausses Infidélités, had the habit of eating everything on the table. Barthe did not have good eyesight and was fearful that he wouldn’t be able to see all the food and might miss some of it. He would hound his servants, asking, Have I eaten this? Have I eaten that? He died from indigestion. King Darius, who liked beef, put up curtains to hide from the others as he ate an entire cow. Balzac, a coffee addict, drank forty to fifty cups a day and died of gastritis. The philosopher Democritus, upon realizing that his life was coming to an end, deprived himself each day of one food until there was only a jar of honey left. He stuck his nose in the jar and smelled the honey, and as soon as the jar was taken away, he died, at the age of 109.

  President Mitterand had the most extreme obsession with ortolan, a bird on the verge of extinction and illegal to eat. In 1995, knowing he didn’t have much time left before he died of cancer, Mitterand invited friends to a New Year’s Eve dinner. The main course was ortolan. This bird, which signifies purity and the love of Jesus, was considered the best dish in the world, and after it’s roasted in the oven you put the entire thing in your mouth, on your tongue, when it’s still very hot. You enjoy the feeling of the fat spilling down your throat, and as it cools, you start crunching on the bird’s head and the crunch rings in your ears rhythmically. That night, Mitterand broke the tradition of eating only one bird per person and ate two. The next day he couldn’t keep anything down and soon passed away—ortolan became his last supper.

  The worst kind of gourmet is the one who tries to fulfill his perverse sexual desires with food. Such people do not truly love food. True gourmets understand that the mingling of curiosity and fear produces a heightened joy. They try to taste the new and revere beauty and deliciousness. Great chefs exist behind such gourmets.

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “That I’d just stay at Nove.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want anything more.”

  “That’s an odd way to say it. Just say you like Nove.”

  “Yeah, I want to stay there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think that was the right thing to do?” I ask.

  “I do.”

  “You know, to Chef.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”

  “I think that would be best.”

  �
�The rainy season has been going on for so long.”

  “It’ll be over soon.”

  “After the peak season, how about we go somewhere for a few days?”

  “… Sure.”

  “Where should we go?” Mun-ju goes into the bathroom, yawning. From my dresser, I take out a cotton T-shirt and pajama pants for Mun-ju and place them on the table. I pick up the heavy bag she’d flung onto the floor. The July edition of Wine & Food is sticking out. She said it was about Italy. I flip through the pages. The days when I worked from morning to night for eleven months at Nove and then took the last month off to wander through Italy eating and learning feels like a dream. My hand pauses from flipping the pages. I turn a few back.

  A familiar face.

  People I know.

  I hear water running in the bathroom.

  On the “Special Interview” page, a man and a woman sit on a long U-shaped butcher block, wearing matching white shirts and jeans and bright smiles. Their arms are around each other’s shoulders and their feet may be swinging.

  I know them. I can’t really read the title.

  I think it says Lee Se-yeon’s new cooking class and maybe also a modern kitchen built by the young architect Han Seok-ju. The magazine is snatched out of my hands.

  Mun-ju, what is this? I ask silently. Mun-ju’s eyes waver uncertainly like someone caught trying to hide something, welling with tears. No, no. I shake my head. Don’t cry, just tell me. Tell me the truth. I don’t want to be the last to know. Tell me, Mun-ju.

  Silence doesn’t flow, it spreads. Like the rings in a pond when you throw a rock, it gets bigger and bigger and finally ripples throughout all of space. And it skims the body like a spasm.

  CHAPTER 28

  IT’S NOT EMBARRASSING to be injured in the kitchen, but cutting your finger is not a good way to start your morning. I slit the first section of my pinky as I cut up a chicken. I don’t even remember sharpening the knife. I brush over the blade. It’s dull. In a chaotic kitchen where many people have to work together, bumping into each other, you have to keep your knife a little dull, unlike in your home kitchen. If the knife is too sharp you can seriously injure yourself if you don’t pay attention for a split second. You don’t really need a sharp knife unless you have to handle poultry or do delicate work with vegetables. I’m embarrassed, not that I cut my hand in the kitchen in front of everyone, but that I was hurt by such a dull blade.

  You work with fire and knives in the kitchen, where small and large dangers lurk. The ideal place to hide a destructive instinct. I’m engulfed by this unstable urge as I watch red blood dripping onto the cutting board, feeling joy as if a frustration has disappeared. Or relief that this has stopped a bigger calamity. If there’s no possibility of danger, I might not feel tense when I hold a knife.

  Instead of bandaging my finger, I put it in my mouth. A metallic tang spreads in my mouth as if I licked steel. Maybe I should keep my knife sharper so I would use it more carefully and thoughtfully. I start grinding it on the sharpening stone in the corner of the table. When I’m very busy and I don’t have time to hone the knife, I just rub it against a sharpening steel a few times. But it’s always best to use a sharpening stone. Although it’s quicker to use the sharpening steel, the blade goes bad quickly.

  My workstation has stainless-steel containers holding salt and whole pepper and pasta sauce and olive oil and various herbs and chopped parsley and red and white wines and diced tomato and butter and brandy, along with long chopsticks and ladles and tongs and large spoons and pans and pots. Typical items for a workstation. But the knife is indispensable. If you have to get one thing as a cook, it must be a good chef’s knife. A good knife is more important than your passion for cooking. If you have a good knife in your hand, you have an automatic desire to cook. Every cook has at least one knife that is his own. For a Western cook, a knife is his third arm, as is a ladle for a Chinese chef. In truth, knife skills get the cook noticed.

  I have three knives. A thin, long, Japanese sushi knife for fish and a short and flexible knife for chicken or duck. And a plain German Henkel that I use for all other purposes. But usually the Henkel is good enough. When I’m trimming vegetables I use the tip of the knife, and when I’m handling something bigger or firmer I use its end. It’s very old and chipped but I haven’t parted with it. When I started at Nove, I took up this knife, which had been collecting dust in its case in Grandmother’s kitchen. Grandmother had several knives, including a serrated one for slicing bread or fruit. It was my favorite when I was younger, but after I started to cook I couldn’t find it. Chef’s knife is a Japanese Global—it has a slightly pointy tip but is still a plain kitchen knife. The knife stand is crowded with all of our knives, sticking out at 45-degree angles. Each cook can find his knife in an instant, even if the handles are virtually identical. It’s important to have a knife that feels right.

  I sense Manager Park and the new saucier exchanging looks of What’s going on with her? I stand at my station, gripping the knife as if someone might snatch it out of my hand, blood still seeping from my finger. I catch him placing a gentle hand on her waist when they pass by. People say it’s impossible to hide poverty and illness and love, but the gaze of staff members when they fall in love is the hardest to hide in the crowded narrow kitchen. Everyone finds out even if it’s only been for a day—they’re in a clear glass fishbowl. There’s no place as easy to fall in love as a kitchen. But if they break up, one person always ends up quitting, usually the woman. Separation is common, but it’s not altogether rare to hear of couples who marry or open a restaurant together.

  What was love to me? I put my knife down on the chopping block. To me, love was like music—I could feel it and both my head and heart reacted to it even though it wasn’t taught to me. Love was like food—I salivated, it whetted my appetite. Love was music and food. Every pore felt a pure elation, I lamented but was uplifted, I was confused but desirous. It began as a simple thing but it was beautiful and sensual and affected my whole being. I used to think this described love.

  More than three pages of Se-yeon and Seok-ju’s pictures were featured in the magazine. In one picture they faced each other playfully in her soon-to-be-opened cooking-class kitchen, hands dripping with honey. Licking honey from each other’s palms to signify that they would share food and loving words was a Germanic tradition of promising love. This would have been Mun-ju’s idea. Although she didn’t want to, once she decided to interview them the editor in her would have done her best to get a good picture, an original one. Most don’t know the legend of honey. Mun-ju is the one who told me this story. Thankfully there wasn’t a picture of them licking each other’s palms. Mystics slicked honey on their hands and tongues to fight evil and realize good. I should be the one with honeyed palms now, not them.

  Be careful. Love is like a mushroom—when you harvest mushrooms you shouldn’t pull them out of the ground but carefully cut them with a small knife. So they will keep growing. I want to say this to Manager Park and the saucier. But for me, love is no longer music or food or honey or mushrooms. Everything has changed now.

  I hear something. Blood coursing, bones breaking, blood stopping. Cooks are knife-wielding artists. We express ourselves with our hands. The kitchen could easily become a scene of carnage. With my knife, I fearlessly pin the plump cock’s comb to the cutting board, the cock’s comb that glistens proud and red, like the arrogant tongue of a liar.

  CHAPTER 29

  LOVE AND HUNGER ARE ONE just like the seed and germ of fruit. Physical symptoms that propel your life. Love and hunger, the most instinctive reflexes, are regulated by the same part of the brain. If neither is satisfied, you are overwhelmed with rage. There aren’t very many things you can do to get beyond rage other than to continue eating. Me yelling, me sobbing, me holding a bag of chips all day. A simple montage of me six months ago. When I chewed on thin, crispy chips, shrieks and bone-breaking crunches and sounds of strangling rang loudly in my ears, pounding agains
t my eardrums. A chip is designed so that it’s impossible to put the entire thing in your mouth. The wider you open your mouth to stuff in the chip, the more it affects your eardrums, delivering the irritating chewing sound directly into your ear. I became addicted to chips because of the sheer joy of it—like a kid tasting the fizz of his first carbonated drink. As I lay on the couch for days and the chewing noise grew louder and louder, my inner instinct of attack grew stronger and stronger. I felt unease that I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

  I wasn’t going to retrieve this love with rage. I put down the bag of chips and pressed my lips together. I couldn’t hear a thing. I got off the sofa slowly, in resignation. It was just an illusion that I’d never expressed anger. I’d revealed all of my emotions to him as he moved like a shadow through the house. I wish it hadn’t reached a point where he couldn’t bear it anymore. Now I regret it. I think that was when I developed a fear of opening my mouth. It’s hard to eat with someone I’m not close to. When I taste food in the kitchen I turn around, dip my finger in it, stick it into my mouth, and close my lips around it. But when I see round objects that look hard on the outside but are soft inside, like button mushrooms or an eggplant, I have the urge to chew and lick them. Is it a symptom of my unfulfilled sexuality? Or a gourmet’s curiosity? Once I had to clap my hand over my mouth when I was making an Asian-inspired salad dressing of mayonnaise, soy sauce, minced garlic, and sesame oil. Neither white nor yellow, half transparent, fairly thick. I recalled the man who’d stood upright and aimed directly into my mouth. It was like swallowing a mouthful of stew without thinking. Hot and sour and slightly bitter. I wonder what it would be like if I were to try it again—a common feeling after a first experience. When it was aimed at my mouth, I was surprised that I was able to open my mouth that wide, that I could be that instantly and quickly elated, that it was such a familiar taste. Who was making lip-smacking noises? Was it he who was holding on to my head, or me, lying on the bottom of the box as if in supplication? I tossed away the now-empty tube of mayonnaise. If I had an organ that I could pull out whenever I wanted and aim at someone, I think I would stand straight and stick it resolutely into someone’s mouth.