The Devil's Larder (14 page)

Those foolish ones who stand and stare report his backing gait, his clumsiness. He has the odours of a kennel, plus boiled eggs, scorched hair and sweat, they say. They cannot capture him. He
will not talk or give his name. He slips away, enveloped by the unresisting darkness. But first he holds his open sack for them to see and smell the rootless puffballs and the chanterelles, the
honey funguses, the magic heads, the ceps, the shagcaps, boletes, morels, the inky dicks, which he will push into the earth that night like unconvincing garden ornaments.

Sometimes they only see his stooping back and watch his white hands coming from his sack.

I, too, have met the devil in the woods. I, too, have seen the mushrooms in his bag, lolling like eviscerated parts, meringues of human tissue, sweetbreads, smelling of placenta and decay. To
tell the truth, these mushrooms baffle me. I’ve eaten them in many of their forms, I’ve tried the best, but always I am bored by them. The moment that you take them from the earth,
they’re dull. The moment that you place them in your mouth, they let you down. I’ve always thought they were expensive and absurd. If they’ve been planted by the devil, then he is
making fun of us.

So I was curious when he and I crossed paths. I followed him. He let me follow him, for he is not afraid of us. He turned his back on me and didn’t care. I watched his antics in the night.
I watched his white hands and his sack. And I can tell you, he has fooled you yet again. The devil is not emptying his sack, but filling it. He does not plant. He picks, he picks, he picks:
that’s why his back is bent. He is the one who wants the mushrooms for himself. His greed is stronger than his spite. He thinks the mushrooms are too good for us. We’d not appreciate
the poisons or the tangs that they provide, their blasphemies. We are too dull and timid for the magic and the flesh. He roams the woods and meadows when it’s dark to satisfy himself. He
knows which mushrooms to pull up. The ones he leaves for us are flavourless.

H
ERE IS AN
average restaurant. Each Sunday, we take our seats to order omelettes and to watch the chef present our mussels to the visitors. He has
become the weekend entertainment of the town. There’s nothing else to do – except in church, or ten miles up the coast, away from friends and family.

Last summer (so the chef reports) a politician from the state drove through. The woman with him couldn’t be his wife. They sat right there, next to the window, with a sideways view down to
the port. He ordered local produce for her (‘I always dine from the region,’ he said. ‘That’s how you end up with the simplest and the freshest food.’ The cheapest,
too). They’d have the brandied aubergines to start with – oily, cold, lascivious – and then the pork stew and a bottle of the earthy, hillside wine that no one from the region
drinks. You can imagine what he had in mind for her – what with the alcohol, the aphrodisiacs, his hand pushed out across the table top to stroke her painted fingernails, the showing off.

A little ancient jealousy from chef, perhaps, explains what happened next. The politician only wanted to impress his guest and not be made a fool of by the food. He had a point. The wine bottle
was insufficiently chilled, he complained. The bread (served in one of the yellow, woven-plastic baskets that gave the restaurant its name) was ‘not today’s’. The aubergine was
bitter. Had no one in the kitchens degorged it with salt before they dished it up? Did they employ a comic or a cook?

The waiter at that time (a student long since gone up north with one of our town’s better-looking girls) returned the wine and the dish of aubergine to the kitchens. ‘I heard!’
chef said. ‘So give them my apologies. And they can have two dozen mussels on the house.’

Oh, surely, everybody knows that our mussels can be dangerous, particularly at that time of the year. The tides are far too weak in summer to clear the soup of sewage from the banks. Dead
shellfish decompose more thoroughly when it is warm. So was it just bad luck that nearly all the mussels that finished up on that free dish were treacherous?

Now, this is supposition. No one truly knows exactly how the lovers spent their afternoon. It’s possible, of course, that their intestines had been lined with steel and that the sifted
toxins of our lavatories passed through without effect. But where’s the anecdote in that? We’d rather have the chef’s report in which (and God knows how chef knew) the politician
and his lunch guest had hardly reached the hotel down the coast when justice called. It might have seemed to other guests or to the ever-patient clerk that their eagerness to reach the room was
simple summer lust. But no, they were too pinched about the haunches and too self-involved to be true lovers. And no, his hands were shaking at the lock with something more disruptive – and
less fleeting – than desire. Inside at last, alone, they would have tussled for the sink and toilet seat, her skirt half up, his trousers down, but not for the reasons they had planned.

Indeed, the politician had been right to ask; the chef was more a comic than a cook. The stories that he served were better than the food. He made good soufflé out of lies. He made bad
soufflé out of eggs. And so, while we might only risk the omelettes or grilled fish on our visits to the Yellow Basket, we never tired of his stories of revenge, or hearing him reproduce on
the expresso machine the sound those depth-charged stomachs must have made when his rogue mussels were propelled into the hotel room that summer afternoon. We didn’t mind the repetitions, or
that he would always illustrate the colour of the diners’ skin by holding a lime up to the light, or that some of the details changed – improved – with each retelling.

Was it, then, simply to please himself or to keep us in his thrall (and in his restaurant) that chef announced at the beginning of this season that mussels would be served ‘by way of an
apology’ more regularly at the Yellow Basket? He says that he can tell which mussels will be troublesome. The safe ones snap shut at once if they’ve been prised open with a fork. The
dead ones don’t. Others to avoid are those with shells that have unhinged before being cooked, and any that do not fall open to accept the sacrament of garlic butter and parsley once
(according to his recipe) they have been roasted in hot ash. All these unworthy ones are set aside for chef’s selected guests. Perhaps he’s only teasing us, but still we have to –
want to – swallow all his words.

They look so innocent, those blue-black castanets, their pearly inner cases and their fat grey beans of meat. But they have caused, this year, a banker from America to spoil his trousers and the
front seat of his car. And they have packed their dark export of bacteria into the luggage of at least three lady pensioners from the cruise liner, which puts into our port on its round trip each
spring. The on-board doctor almost had to have one of the women lifted off by helicopter. And the chef’s apology has given the sweats, the vomits and the chills, the cramps and the diarrhoea
to one lone diner from Milan, two German boys, a family of five with noisy children, a Princeton graduate, a priest, the owner of a smart boutique in France, a couple planning a divorce, several
state executives and (according to the chef) a gastronomic writer from the
New York Times
magazine. It was as if we’d made these strangers pregnant. They’d gone away with our
dull, revengeful town inside. And they’d rebirthed our mussels down the coast.

So, as we lift his omelette to our mouths each Sunday lunchtime, we pray for troublemakers. We pray that chef will be offended by his passing visitors, that they’ll complain, that he will
offer his apologies and speak those paralysing words, ‘I hope you will accept a plate of mussels on the house.’ We do not like to stare, of course, but it is hard to resist a sideways
look from time to time. We want to see the empty shells pile up.

So this is how an average restaurant can always have its tables occupied.

But best of all is on the street, when the driver of too large a car, or the possessor of an accent we don’t like or merely someone who appears too fortunate enquires, ‘Where is a
decent place to eat?’ It is a duty and a joy to point and say, ‘The Yellow Basket. Up above the port. The mussels are quite good, I hear.
Bon appétit
.’ An unexpected
opportunity.

We’re cruel, of course. We’re unforgivable. Why should we punish them simply for coming from a different place or having better lives or being on vacation? The pleasure that we get
when we imagine how they’ll pass their afternoons is hardly warranted. We know our laughter is malicious – but surely there’s some justice in it too.

We feel as if we’ve cast a heavy stone onto the all-too-perfect surface of the sea, to send our ripples out against the waves.

E
VERYBODY
– rich or poor – had soup stones in those days. I found ours a half an hour’s bike ride out of town on what, before the
container port was built, used to be Crescent Beach. I had to wet my shoes and trouser legs to retrieve it from the plunging tide. Amongst the million grey-white granite rocks, it caught my eye,
distinguished by a circling band of black, which made the stone appear as if it had been split in two then fixed with tar gum. It was a glinting and dramatic gem, still wet in that hard light, a
perfect fit in my small hand.

It was less glinting when I got home that afternoon. The granite had dried and dulled. A half an hour from the sea was all it took to rob my stone of light. But still I prepared it for my
mother’s kitchen, full of hope. You had first to boil the ocean out, or else your soups would always taste of fish.

My mother used that stone in every soup she made. She couldn’t make good soup without its help, she said. The flavours wouldn’t mix. The bottom of the pot would burn or stick. The
ingredients would tumble on the heat and boil over. A soup without a stone was as heartless as a peach or plum without a stone. But with its help, she claimed, she could even make good soup out of
just tap water. No stock, no meats, no vegetables. Perhaps the granite had a flavour of its own. We’d have to try one day. Perhaps it stored a memory and aftertaste of everything that had
ever shared its pot.

Whenever she made soup and I was home, she used to let me add my piece of granite to the pot before she lit the gas. And, when the soup was cooked, it was my job to take the colander spoon and
lift the soup stone out. I used to marvel at its fleeting smell and how it had briefly regained the light and colour of the beach.

I keep the family soup stone on the windowsill of my apartment now. I haven’t cooked with it for years. Who makes soups these days? There’s such a choice of ready-mades in shops.
Occasionally I use the stone as a pocket companion for travelling, a granite talisman to keep the plane from crashing, but otherwise I hardly notice it. Except sometimes, when I’m reminded of
home, I run my soup stone underneath the tap to bring the smells and colours out, the beach, the sea-tricked light, the gems of silica, the small boy stepping in the tumbling tide, retrieving
flavours for his mother’s thousand soups.

H
IS BREATH WAS
damp and earthy. The old man had tuberous growths in his gut. Dr Gregor could palpate them with his palm. They were starchy, as tough as
carrots. ‘There is some inflammation,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Rest is what you need.’ What was the point of alarming a man of eighty-two with an honest diagnosis,
with hospitals, with surgery? He would be dead within the month. ‘Are you in any pain?’ The old man shook his head. The doctor prescribed warm olive oil to ‘ease the passage
through your bowel’.

He did not die within the month. He lasted ten more months before he came to Dr Gregor’s clinic again. It was the spring of the drought. He looked as tough and sinewy as a man of half his
age. Indeed, he looked a little younger than before, though he was eighty-three now.

‘Are you in any pain?’ the doctor asked again.

‘A little. Once in a while.’ When he bent to tie his boots, he explained, or tug at weeds, the hard knots in his stomach bunched against the waistband of his trousers. It was
uncomfortable. What man of eighty-three could bend to touch his boots without a little pain?

‘I think I’d better take a look,’ the doctor said. He helped the old man onto the examination bed and turned him on his side, his face towards the wall. He pulled on a pair of
disposable lubricated gloves. ‘Knees up. This shouldn’t take a second. Think of somewhere nice.’

The old man searched for somewhere nice. At first it was the modest garden where he now lived in town: the tiny square of lawn, the hem of evergreens, the single potted maple on the patio. But
soon he settled on the larger piece of land that he had owned when he was younger, its trees, its stony paths, its dogged thistles, its flinty earth, the vegetables, which he would harvest on
summer Sundays and bring up to the house in a trug.

The doctor did not have to penetrate too deeply beyond the sphincter to find the woody growths in his patient’s bowel. Perhaps they were elephantine polyps of some kind, and not a string
of cancers. Perhaps they were benign. Clearly they caused no pain, except when the old man stooped to touch his toes. Dr Gregor pushed against the lowest tumour with his index finger. It did not
seem attached, but moved freely. Its shape was odd. It was not symmetrical or funnelled, but complex, with extensions and recessions like the chambered plaster cast of an earth-roach burrow.
‘Have you examined your stool of late? Anything unusual? Any blood?’ The old man shook his head. Why would he want to examine his stool?

The doctor was not a sentimental or a squeamish man. He managed to work a couple of small ‘polyps’ loose. He put one in a lidded specimen tub and labelled it with a date and a
reference for the laboratories. The other he put in a sterile bag with a little purified water. He was puzzled, but doctors are often puzzled. Let the laboratories give a name to it. He put his arm
around the old man’s shoulders and took him to the door. ‘Warm olive oil,’ he said.