Sometimes writing is a job: obliquely tracing the path of certain ideas that seem indispensable to us, that we have to set down. But other times it’s a question of conceding what remains, accepting the museum and contemplating the balance while awaiting death, asking forgiveness of the sea for whatever was fucked up. Placing our little boxes on the table and knowing that what came to an end was also the whole universe.
TWO WALTZES TOWARD CIVILIZATION
After this we’ll know how to eat against death, to
devour only dead things, cooking to kill them again.
We’ll know that feeding means dealing with other
bodies, that desire makes us itch, and it only finds
relief in order to get worse, that to love is to devour.
ESCAPE FROM SUICIDE CITY
I leave the Soul behind; bearing onward,
my pilgrim body, deserted and alone.
Mr. Hinojosa was waiting for me outside the Lima airport in the sinister black Mercedes Benz the Swiss television producer had rented to pick up the guests for Lard, the highly successful European TV cooking show that had been a minor cable hit in the United States and Canada.
Although I’d heard some of my colleagues express their admiration, and even reverence, for the program, I never watched it because I don’t own a TV. My own gastronomic principles require me to live in total retreat from the world; I don’t believe that one can recreate seventeenth-century Mexican conventual cooking unless one exists in harmony with the ways of life that gave rise to it.
This vision that I’ve nurtured my entire life was by no means easy to make a reality, especially because my restaurant is located in Washington, D.C., the world’s most shameless city, with its ten-foot-wide sidewalks, its streets the size of soccer fields, and its monuments standing as an architectural prelude to national obesity. Nevertheless, it was here that I found a financier to invest in my talents, and I do what I can to recreate those customs and conditions. Both my sesame honey glazed squid, and my chilpachole verde—a spicy green crab soup — have earned me some slight recognition in the pages of the local food section.
The concept behind Lard is that six young, promising chefs compete to eliminate each other by passing a series of trials putting to the test their charisma, manners, and hygiene, as well as their ability to improvise with unusual ingredients. The producers film the whole competition — in itself, quite boring — then jazz it up in editing. Each episode takes place in a different location and is judged by a different celebrity from the world of international gastronomy. The broadcast I was invited to was filmed in Lima because the theme was “Latin American Seafood Cuisine” and Max Terapia was the guest star.
Like all chefs of my generation, I admire and envy Terapia, although I realize that I’m never going to achieve his level of celebrity: when his star began to rise, in the ’60s, Latin American cuisine enjoyed no international cachet, while European cuisine was still trapped in the excessive experimentation that characterized that decade. So, thanks to his creations, as fine and transparent as a razor blade, he scooped up all the prizes and honors without any competition. They called him the master of gastronomy povera, an authentic revolutionary in an eminently bourgeois art. These days he’s based in Miami, where he owns a restaurant catering to an exclusive clientele and which is only open during the cooler months of the year. The place has neither a name nor a front door; you enter by car, through a rolling metal shutter at the rear of the building. Terapia spends the rest of his time as a guest chef at important, high-level culinary events, and at his nineteenth-century house in the center of Lima, which is said to have, and which I confirmed, its original kitchen intact, with a stove that burns charcoal and guano, a cool room, and a hand-powered water pump. A kitchen, it must be said, on account of which I’m almost dying with envy. All my silent partner would pay to have installed in my own place was a bread oven and a wood-fired grill; he told me to buckle down, get busy, and use them to make something wonderful, which I’ve never stopped trying to do since Teresa left me years ago, and I turned my back on the world.
The Swiss, it seems, are naturally mysterious. One day, an enormous glossy envelope arrived at my office. Inside it was a signed letter from some enigmatic Secretariat, informing me that I’d been nominated to compete in Lard. I answered them the very same day, that I was quite honored to receive their invitation but that I had no idea what Lard was — of course I knew, but I wanted to keep them on their toes — and could they do me the favor of explaining things to me. I said that I’d be grateful if they could tell me who’d nominated me so that I could thank them: as far as I know, the only people who eat at my restaurant are Adams Morgan residents and a few Mexican diplomats and professors who tend to be excessively nostalgic — as if the food that I make really has something in common with the country that we were all so happy to escape from.
The same, mysterious Secretariat answered with another extremely pompous letter, along with a promotional flyer for the program, informing me that under no circumstances could they reveal the identity of their advisory committee. In the coming weeks a new panel of connoisseurs would visit my restaurant — they would make the final decision about who would and who wouldn’t take part in Lard.
Again I requested more precise information, to be sure that we would treat the visiting committee well when it showed up. They replied by saying that the anonymity of the visit was sacrosanct. I felt humiliated, and in one of those crazy, headstrong moments that make us lose World Cup games we’ve already won by committing fouls, I demanded that they at least tell me who my competition would be. Another giant envelope from the Secretariat, another refusal.
I’ve lost too many contests — including one that was rigged in my favor — for the likelihood of my being judged to keep me awake at night. Even so, I was on the alert for several weeks, awaiting the arrival at my restaurant of a contingent of Swiss gentlemen — tall, balding, red-faced, and wearing thick eyeglasses. In the fantasies produced by my abominably boring and friendless life, in an apartment without a TV, that’s precisely how the Swiss appear.
Nobody who looked even remotely like that ever sat down at our tables, so I supposed that they’d forgotten about me, or that the Swiss might have snuck in in the guise of gringo students or Mexican office clerks. One of my waiters — a Colombian know-it-all — told me that the Swiss were Calvinists, and that’s how we’d be able to recognize them. I asked him what a Calvinist would look like. He told me that they’re very strict, practically vegetarians, and that they’ve got no lips. I took note.
At last a woman with a neutral French accent phoned to let me know that my masterful red snapper in fig vinaigrette had earned me the privilege of competing on Lard. She didn’t speak Spanish but she understood my English, and she was polite, friendly, and obviously very young. It had never occurred to me that there were also Swiss women, much less ones that were young. She was quite insistent that it was the fine quality of my cooking that had won me the honor of participating, that I should be proud and list it as such on my résumé, for which reason I supposed my restaurant to be lacking in hygiene and me in charisma. I asked her if she was from the Secretariat. She didn’t understand and again recommended that I include my status as a finalist on my résumé.