Secret Ingredients (72 page)

“Perhaps the death of time concerns only us,” Olivia answered. “We who tear one another apart, pretending not to know it, pretending not to taste flavors anymore.”

“You mean that here—that they need stronger flavors here because they know, because here they ate…”

“The same as at home, even now. Only we no longer know it, no longer dare look, the way they did. For them there was no mystification: the horror was right there, in front of their eyes. They ate as long as there was a bone left to pick clean, and that’s why the flavors…”

“To hide that flavor?” I said, again picking up Salustiano’s chain of hypotheses.

“Perhaps it couldn’t be hidden.
Shouldn’t
be. Otherwise, it was like not eating what they were really eating. Perhaps the other flavors served to enhance that flavor, to give it a worthy background, to honor it.”

At these words I felt again the need to look her in the teeth, as I had done earlier, when we were coming down in the bus. But at that very moment her tongue, moist with saliva, emerged from between her teeth, then immediately drew back, as if she were mentally savoring something. I realized Olivia was already imagining the supper menu.

It began, this menu, offered us by a restaurant we found among low houses with curving grilles, with a rose-colored liquid in a hand-blown glass:
sopa de camarones
—shrimp soup, that is, immeasurably hot, thanks to a quantity of
chiles
we had never come upon previously, perhaps the famous
chiles jalapeños.
Then
cabrito
—roast kid—every morsel of which provoked surprise, because the teeth would encounter first a crisp bit, then a bit that melted in the mouth.

“You’re not eating?” Olivia asked me. She seemed to concentrate only on savoring her dish, though she was very alert, as usual, while I had remained lost in thought, looking at her. It was the sensation of her teeth in my flesh that I was imagining, and I could feel her tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines. I sat there facing her, but at the same time it was as if a part of me, or all of me, were contained in her mouth, crunched, torn shred by shred. The situation was not entirely passive, since while I was being chewed by her I felt also that I was acting on her, transmitting sensations that spread from the taste buds through her whole body. I was the one who aroused her every vibration—it was a reciprocal and complete relationship, which involved us and overwhelmed us.

I regained my composure; so did she. We looked carefully at the salad of tender prickly-pear leaves (
ensalada de nopalitos
)—boiled, seasoned with garlic, coriander, red pepper, and oil and vinegar—then the pink and creamy pudding of
maguey
(a variety of agave), all accompanied by a carafe of
sangrita
and followed by coffee with cinnamon.

But this relationship between us, established exclusively through food, so much so that it could be identified in no image other than that of a meal—this relationship which in my imaginings I thought corresponded with Olivia’s deepest desires—didn’t please her in the slightest, and her irritation was to find its release during that same supper.

“How boring you are! How monotonous!” she began by saying, repeating an old complaint about my uncommunicative nature and my habit of giving her full responsibility for keeping the conversation alive—an argument that flared up whenever we were alone together at a restaurant table, including a list of charges whose basis in truth I couldn’t help admitting but in which I also discerned the fundamental reasons for our unity as a couple; namely, that Olivia saw and knew how to catch and isolate and rapidly define many more things than I, and therefore my relationship with the world was essentially via her. “You’re always sunk into yourself, unable to participate in what’s going on around you, unable to put yourself out for another, never a flash of enthusiasm on your own, always ready to cast a pall on anybody else’s, depressing, indifferent—” And to the inventory of my faults she added this time a new adjective, or one that to my ears now took on a new meaning: “Insipid!”

There: I was insipid, I thought, without flavor. And the Mexican cuisine, with all its boldness and imagination, was needed if Olivia was to feed on me with satisfaction. The spiciest flavors were the complement—indeed, the avenue of communication, indispensable as a loudspeaker that amplifies sounds—for Olivia to be nourished by my substance.

“I may seem insipid to you,” I protested, “but there are ranges of flavor more discreet and restrained than that of red peppers. There are subtle tastes that one must know how to perceive!”

The next morning we left Oaxaca in Salustiano’s car. Our friend had to visit other provinces on the candidate’s tour, and offered to accompany us for part of our itinerary. At one point on the trip he showed us some recent excavations not yet overrun by tourists. A stone statue rose barely above the level of the ground, with the unmistakable form that we had learned to recognize on the very first days of our Mexican archeological wanderings: the
chacmool,
or half-reclining human figure, in an almost Etruscan pose, with a tray resting on his belly. He looks like a rough, good-natured puppet, but it was on that tray that the victims’ hearts were offered to the gods.

“Messenger of the gods—what does that mean?” I asked. I had read that definition in a guidebook. “Is he a demon sent to earth by the gods to collect the dish with the offering? Or an emissary from human beings who must go to the gods and offer them the food?”

“Who knows?” Salustiano answered, with the suspended attitude he took in the face of unanswerable questions, as if listening to the inner voices he had at his disposal, like reference books. “It could be the victim himself, supine on the altar, offering his own entrails on the dish. Or the sacrificer, who assumes the pose of the victim because he is aware that tomorrow it will be his turn. Without this reciprocity, human sacrifice would be unthinkable. All were potentially both sacrificer and victim—the victim accepted his role as victim because he had fought to capture the others as victims.”

“They could be eaten because they themselves were eaters of men?” I added, but Salustiano was talking now about the serpent as symbol of the continuity of life and the cosmos.

Meanwhile I understood: my mistake with Olivia was to consider myself eaten by her, whereas I should be myself (I always had been) the one who ate her. The most appetizingly flavored human flesh belongs to the eater of human flesh. It was only by feeding ravenously on Olivia that I would cease being tasteless to her palate.

This was in my mind that evening when I sat down with her to supper. “What’s wrong with you? You’re odd this evening,” Olivia said, since nothing ever escaped her. The dish they had served us was called
gorditas pellizcadas con manteca
—literally, “plump girls pinched with butter.” I concentrated on devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia—through voluptuous mastication, a vampire extraction of vital juices. But I realized that in a relationship that should have been among three terms—me, meatball, Olivia—a fourth term had intruded, assuming a dominant role: the name of the meatballs. It was the name
gorditas pellizcadas con manteca
that I was especially savoring and assimilating and possessing. And, in fact, the magic of that name continued affecting me even after the meal, when we retired together to our hotel room in the night. And for the first time during our Mexican journey the spell whose victims we had been was broken, and the inspiration that had blessed the finest moments of our joint life came to visit us again.

The next morning we found ourselves sitting up in our bed in the
chacmool
pose, with the dulled expression of stone statues on our faces and, on our laps, the tray with the anonymous hotel breakfast, to which we tried to add local flavors, ordering with it mangoes, papayas, cherimoyas, guayabas—fruits that conceal in the sweetness of their pulp subtle messages of asperity and sourness.

Our journey moved into the Maya territories. The temples of Palenque emerged from the tropical forest, dominated by thick, wooded mountains: enormous ficus trees with multiple trunks like roots, lilac-colored
macuilis, aguacates
—every tree wrapped in a cloak of lianas and climbing vines and hanging plants. As I was going down the steep stairway of the Temple of the Inscriptions, I had a dizzy spell. Olivia, who disliked stairs, had chosen not to follow me and had remained with the crowd of noisy groups, loud in sound and color, that the buses were disgorging and ingesting constantly in the open space among the temples. By myself, I had climbed to the Temple of the Sun, to the relief of the jaguar sun, to the Temple of the Foliated Cross, to the relief of the quetzal in profile, then to the Temple of the Inscriptions, which involves not only climbing up (and then down) a monumental stairway but also climbing down (and then up) the smaller, interior staircase that leads down to the underground crypt. In the crypt there is the tomb of the king-priest (which I had already been able to study far more comfortably a few days previously in a perfect facsimile at the Anthropological Museum in Mexico City), with the highly complicated carved stone slab on which you see the king operating a science-fiction apparatus that to our eyes resembles the sort of thing used to launch space rockets, though it represents, on the contrary, the descent of the body to the subterranean gods and its rebirth as vegetation.

I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun—into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest, down the high steps onto the forest of tourists with super-8s and usurped, broad-brimmed sombreros. The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting.

Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a riverbank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other’s with the intensity of serpents’—serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and
sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la veracruzana,
and
enchiladas.

Translated, from the Italian, by William Weaver

1983

“Julia Child says it’s delicious, James Beard loves it, Craig Claiborne is crazy about it, but Stanley J. Tischler, Jr., hates it.”

THERE SHOULD BE A NAME FOR IT

MATTHEW KLAM

L
ynn’s roasting a chicken. She takes out garlic, chili powder, and a lime. “What’s that for?” I say.

“There are pine nuts above your head,” she says. I hand them down to her. Now she butters the pan. She’s got the coriander in a bag, cloves, curry, and two oranges. Then other green herbs. Jesus Christ, I’m thinking, all that crap for the chicken.

“All that’s for the chicken?”

“What?”

“What? That.” I’m pulling on my eyebrow hair. It’s a nervous habit, but I feel like plucking these long curly ones. “All that goes on the chicken?”

She rinses off her hands and says, “This is a recipe from my mom.”

It’s early summer. It’s afternoon, and the kitchen is the brightest room in this house. It’s like a greenhouse in here, very sunny. The house itself is small and cheap, though 150 years ago somebody planted a sycamore on the front lawn. Protected from the wind and fed by sun and water, the plant grew into a giant. The limbs stretch up—it’s like an elephant, white tusks against the sky.

“Up we go,” she says, upending the chicken. She pulls a little wax-paper bag from inside it like an envelope and drops it in the sink.

“What the hell is that?” I say. Lynn wipes her forehead with her wrist. She takes the bag out of the sink and tears it open, spilling the contents into her hand. It’s meat—it looks like tongues.

“Oh, my God.”

“It’s chicken livers. See?”

She flicks them with her finger. It’s three glistening pieces of purple meat, but not at all like steak. They look like they were alive five minutes ago. She holds one. She seems to enjoy touching it.

“Okay, get rid of it.” Lynn puts the bag and the livers in the garbage. She says, “You make it with onions. My mother loves it.”

“Yeah.”

This is the whole chicken, an entire animal. Like, I haven’t exactly seen this done before by a person my age. We’re both kids. We don’t know how to cook this stuff. In all the time we’ve been living together, Lynn’s never cooked a whole chicken.

I’m leaning close enough to her that I can smell her shampoo. Her hair is thick and reddish brown, full and shiny, and her skin is the color of creamy tan suede. Mexican mother, Irish father. You know how they airbrush the skin of ladies in
Playboy
? I see Lynn’s body every day, I look at her skin up close, I’ve had my eye an inch above her stomach or her shoulder or her calf, and it’s perfect. It’s golden skin. Every morning after her shower, Lynn comes and stands in front of me—I’m either getting dressed or making notes for work—then she turns around and I rub cream across her shoulders, underneath the bra straps, bright-white fabric against her tan skin.

She cuts the fat off the chicken, that makes sense, but with scissors, of all things. She holds it like a little playmate, flipping it over, rocking it under the faucet. She washes out the hole in it, pouring some little pieces of red guts into the sink, shaking out the dried blood or cartilage that runs down and sticks in the drain. Disgusting. Then she tears off a piece of brown paper bag and folds it, dabbing the outside of the chicken.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“It gets the old oil out of the skin.”

“Old oil? What, like sweat?”

“No, not like sweat,” she says. “Like sweat? Chickens don’t sweat.”

“I know.”

“I’m cooking you dinner and you’re gonna stand here and give me shit?”

“No! No way. This is gonna be great.”

I love her. Man! I really do. She’s a pistol. It’s not placating love, it’s really passionate love. Uncharted territory, yes, definitely. But that’s what love is—undefined.

“Move aside, termite,” she says to me, grabbing the bottle of olive oil. “Termite,” I say. “Good one.”

I love how she says that—“Are you gonna give me shit?” That’s great. The answer is yes, I am.

Lynn’s awesome, though. She knows what she’s thinking, and she knows what you’re thinking. She’s got you. She’s a keeper, as they say. I want to keep her.

“It’s not disgusting, Jack. It makes it taste better.”

“Sounds good,” I say. I mean, whatever this girl touches turns to gold.

Say something bad happened to her, and we have no control over it. All of a sudden there’s a situation. Hang on, let me start this over.

It’s hard to explain—poor kid—a month ago Lynn had to get an abortion. What a lead balloon. What a joke. It ain’t no joke.

“Give me that,” she says, pointing at the pepper, and I hand it to her. She rubs chili powder on the skin. Now the paprika, now salt, now some other stuff.

In Spanish, the word is
aborto,
a foreign word that even I can master and pretty easy for Celia, Lynn’s mother, to yell at her a few times over the phone.
“Aborto! Aborto! Clak-ata-clak-ata-clak-ata.”

Lynn called home. It was night, we were lying in bed, and I heard everything from my side. I wanted to help, but what could I do? You don’t interfere with a family. Lynn nodded into the phone, picked up a pencil and stared at it.

“Mom. We already decided.”

“God damn it!” I heard Celia say. “You slut. You and your jackass boyfriend.”

After two minutes, Lynn hung up. She didn’t say anything.

“Jackass boyfriend?” I said.

“She said to tell you she hates you.”

“Thanks.”

In my mind, I saw Celia stomping barefoot through her newly carpeted house with the antenna phone and her 1950s bouffant hairdo and ten pounds of eye shadow, shaking her fist, saying, “Goddam jackass,” meaning me, blaming it on me.

Lynn and I have a normal sex life. Whatever that means. Sex is never normal with anyone, it’s bizarre, it’s wiggly meats, but Lynn was a virgin when we met. And then a couple of months went by, and we were invited to her parents’ for Christmas.

We drove from Colorado to Ohio. It’s twenty-two hours by car. You know how it is when you go on a road trip—you’re going to a new place together. After five or six hours, the inside of the car smelled like BO; my ass began to hurt; my legs felt like concrete; there were sunflower seeds all over the floor. More miles, and soon we were spitting the shells on each other. Two o’clock in the morning, shit-bag road stop, I’m buying cigarettes in Michigan. Lynn’s standing next to me in a pink pajama top and jeans, sunflower-seed shells in her hair, which is all sticking up in knots in the back from her sleeping on it. She gave me two candy fireballs, her hand was warm and clammy. Outside, no cars passed by. It was silent. It wasn’t particularly cold for December. There was the gas station and then nothing for miles.

We stood in the unfamiliar light of the store in the middle of nowhere, lost. It was at about that time that I felt anything could happen. Me and my girlfriend, Lynn, on our first road trip together. When you’re twenty-three, a road trip is the highlight of your life. I held onto her hand. It’s the same person, and she’s great, but she seemed different all of a sudden, three-dimensional. Like a person you’ve just met for the first time, and would like to get to know. As we drove off, the car went over a speed bump and out of the corner of my eye I saw Lynn’s boobs shake.

They put me in the guest room in the basement. The room had white wicker furniture and green-and-silver jungle wallpaper. Mold in the squishy rug. We’d packed our clothes into the same suitcase, and as I dug through it for my contact-lens holder I came across a bunch of Lynn’s underwear. I took a pair out and held them up to the light, little flowered cotton panties. They had a lacy edge. They were clean and cute and smelled like powder. Eleven o’clock at night I’m sitting on the bed in the dank basement, white wicker furniture and green jungle wallpaper, the underwear crumpled against my nose and mouth, tracing swirl patterns in the stucco ceiling. I really loved her. Two floors above me my girlfriend lay sleeping, down the hall from her mother and father. I never put pressure on Lynn, for I knew that would be wrong, and yet she must’ve felt safe. We’d begun to build up trust. This is the part where Lynn loses her virginity. It was the holiday season. The stage was set.

Lunchtime, Celia had made a Mexican specialty, a casserole, a savory thing, cheap cuts of fatty meat, bone chips, dog lips, and I went into the bathroom to get a stain off my pants. Lynn came in to help me and we both ended up naked from the waist down. She got up on the sink, both of us a little self-conscious, trying to be quiet, except I was so excited my feet itched, the thing so hard it felt like it was pulling off me of its own power. Lynn’s, like, kicking my jeans, she was, like, Don’t come inside me, she was, like, drooling, her eyes rolled back into her head, kind of grunting, her legs around my waist. And there were her parents—Celia and Phil sitting outside the door sopping up the orange grease on their plates from their Mexican lasagna. Man, it was something. Lynn said, “I’m supposed to be a virgin, you bastard. My mother is in the next room. Stop it right now. Stop it before I faint,” laughing. “Somebody, help.” I almost fainted myself, both of us leering and hot as monkeys.

It’s terrible the way kids work off their parents.

That week was the best sex I ever had in my life: Celia knocking on the door to Lynn’s room during afternoon-naptime, me beneath the blanket, Lynn saying, “I’ll be right out, Mom, I’m getting dressed,” Celia saying, “Where’s Jack, honey?”
and really not knowing where I was
! See? That’s why I love the Midwest. Such a dreamy lack of a clue. That’s what happens in the Ohio River Valley, even to a transplanted Mexican with citizenship. I’m from New York, where dead people are not that dumb. These folks are idiots. I mean innocent. Other friends of their family would come by, I’d run down to the basement to bring up extra chairs and I’d feel it dribbling in my pants. Once the first one was out of the way, we did it every time Phil and Celia turned their backs. Every time they went to the food store. They had to go back to the food store so many times because we were eating everything in the refrigerator and losing weight at the same time. Their whole house must still smell from our spooge. I picture that dumpy suburban street—the snow melting in rivers of mud everywhere, her dad walking around in that stupid fisherman hat, the smell of new wall-to-wall carpet everywhere in their house—and I get an exciting feeling inside. It’s like the first time we did it all over again.

Lynn holds the chicken’s weight in one hand and rubs a stick of butter around it with the other, like a deodorant stick, almost. She sprinkles it with lime, rubbing gently with her other hand around its back and rump. It makes me squeamish sitting there, like it might get up all of a sudden and tap my shoulder, but Lynn’s got a pretty sure grip on it. She grabs it by the cavity, sticks it on its back in the pan, and throws in a bunch of herb leaves and pine nuts. Then she cuts up an onion and an orange with the skin still on.

My officemate Amy told me, after she had her baby, how similar an uncooked chicken felt in her hands to the body of her little daughter. She said how she held it, rubbing olive oil on it, under the wings, around the thighs, with soft loose pink skin, the small, protective rib cage. It was the same weight and size as her baby. She said even the elbows had a similar feel in her wet hands. She said it was too funny, so she loaded her camera, little naked Elizabeth lying next to the chicken on Amy’s leather coat, and all the groceries piled up around them. She stood on a chair and got the two little birds on film.

Lynn is standing at the sink now, measuring out rice, and looking at me with those bright-green eyes that say, “I know what I’m doing here.” She looks like an angel. My knees begin to buckle, and I just want to put her down on the kitchen floor and start the trouble all over again. I want to bare her breast and nod on her nipple. I’m her baby. She’s my baby. Everybody’s somebody’s baby. Let’s make a baby.

Lynn says, “What else besides rice?”

“Do you want salad?” I say.

In April, we put a garden in the backyard. The land behind our house is flat. It gets both sun and shade. The grass is long and lush and light green, and right now there are some dandelions. It’ll need mowing soon. The garden was our team project, although the day we rented the tiller Lynn was sick and I did everything, and I’d just as soon have Fritos over a vegetable any day of the week. But we both like looking at the garden.

After dinner we go and check out the garden, walking between the rows, careful of where we step. Sometimes she’ll pull weeds. When it gets dark we lie on the cold metal basement doors and watch the sky. Above us, the clouds are silently on the move, backlit by the moon. The smell of cut grass is everywhere. The sweet smell and the crickets, and the slick noise of lawn sprinklers hissing in the dark. Grass smells good. There should be a name for it.

“I’ll get the salad,” I say. There’s a basket we use for the vegetables. I take it off the top of the refrigerator.

“I’ll do it,” Lynn says. “I’m in the mood.” She pulls the basket out of my hands and goes out the back door, the glass doorknob banging against the wall.

The sun is going down. Flat, ginger-colored light is sprayed against every surface inside the kitchen, across the counters and the refrigerator door and the walls that are the color of yellow wine. I hear her say hello to Whiskey, the cat. The people next door own him. Stupid name for a cat.