Read Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & Online
Authors: Anna Tambour
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary Collections, #General
Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (23 page)
- 2 -
It might as well have been Paris, Texas. His job opportunities were about equal.
He thought with his skills, it wouldn't matter that he was illegal. When had it mattered in the USA? And if he could have spoken half-way decently, maybe he could have gotten a decent job and decent pay. But he wanted to do more than the army of illegals from Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria in the bowels of a restaurant. He hadn't come to France to cut up vegetables and scrape pots.
He had taught himself to speak French from Berlitz mail order tapes. His inflections were non-existent. As a Midwesterner, he felt stupid lifting his voice up any old place. Where he came from, even when you ask a question, your voice is steamrollered flat. His sensible tongue didn't lift the lilt at the end of a question, let alone the middle of words. And anyway, Why? It didn't make sense. These tapes wanted him to turn his sentences into sharp-peaked mountains, but until he could see a reason, he sowed his words over the flat plains of language as he knew. The "r" was simply impossible. Just take the insouciant,
"De rien."
When he tried, it sounded like he was prying a chicken bone out of his gullet with both hands. He'd never seen the language spoken, although he'd heard it muttered and yelled in the kitchen, and mocked by fake French waiters—always hoping to break into film.
His flat, slow, toneless diction, with the bottom jaw hanging slack like a screen door without springs, made his words unintelligible, even to a Frenchman
trying
to understand. But who's ever accused a Parisian of trying to understand?
Randy was shrugged at when he wasn't
ne comprends pas
'ed at till he sat on the corner of Rue de l'Abreuvoir and Rue des Saules and—it just happened—he was glad he didn't know anyone—cried like a spoilt brat. August in Montmartre. Four p.m., another strung-out American kid. Who notices?
Behind him suddenly a yelling louder than the normal motorist verbal punch-up made him turn his head.
A door was flung open and disgorged two furious men. One pushed the other, who fell over an open-mouthed Randy. Still in his whites, the ejected man dusted himself off without a look at the boy, up-fisted a hard Gallic
Bugger You
and stumbled off.
René Artis, the cock of the roost, leant over Randy. The boy's eyelashes were beaded with tears,
so
touching, and René
had
pushed George.
René led Randy over to the wall near the back of the restaurant ("Le Petit"—easy for tourists). Randy looked around, saw through the small window into the cramped kitchen, spied what looked like a pile of elephant vomit on the floor, asked without thinking,
"Le pâté pour ce soir?"
René nodded. Randy's French was no problem to René, who was gazing at those eyes.
"Speak English," he murmured.
"I cook," said Randy.
"I don't," said René. "George did." He motioned in the direction taken by the defeated. "That was George."
~
René didn't get anywhere with Randy, except rich and famous.
By 1980, L'Artisarts as it was now called, was a five-star tourist attraction, and René Artis a celebrated star in the rising firmament of celebrity chefs. His angle was that he never demonstrated his secret techniques. His seduction was describing the taste of the food, talking about who enjoyed it.
Randy stayed in the kitchen and René never told anyone that it was entirely the Iowan's artistry that reached the heights, and that René's soft, fluttery hands were only expert at riffling through the day's receipts, and resting on the honoured shoulders of privileged patrons when he deigned to visit. For a birthday of a truly important client (he called them all "guests" to their faces), he would personally carry out a single portion,
avec
his signature, edibly emblazoned on the plate.
Randy and René spoke quiet English together at work. Randy ran the kitchen alone with a team of illegal Moroccans who understood Randy's English as well as his French—which was why he used mostly sign language. No one was ever going to know the secret of L'Artisarts' success from
them
.
The maître d' and the waiters were all collected by René—scrapings from park benches near the Ritz. Incredibly professional and impossibly old, they were so grateful to René for having a purpose in life again that they exuded an air of kick-me toadyism unheard of in Paris but all too familiar to Randy. Delightfully refreshing, and so appropriate for the sentiment of the times. They kept their mouths shut, too. The boss was a fraud but a saviour, the chef was unintelligible, but an artist who never raised his voice. Their only turnover was through death. Randy accurately picked their contribution as worth at least one star.
René didn't know the first thing about food, but he was a master at showmanship. He knew just the look for a restaurant, just the attitude to take with the customers you want. Just the right smoothness of gab, just the right amount of reticence to display to become the celebrity he wanted to be.
From L'Artisarts, Randy learnt that food is only half of it, and now he knew the tricks to the other half.
~
René's murder by his twenty-year-old lover didn't mean that the world found Randy. L'Artisarts was quickly taken over, not by GJUI, the restaurant consortium, but by BNP (Bank National de Paris) for debts undisclosed, and the napery, crystal, artworks, pots and pans, auctioned off the same as for any failed eatery anywhere in the world.
Randy had proven himself to himself over the past six years, but that was not enough. He had learnt to speak French as well as any Japanese businessman does when he is on assignment abroad. Or any sweatshop worker living on the premises (which exactly described his circumstances). He had hardly been out of the kitchen. Hardly slept. And the confidential introductions René had promised had somehow never materialized. The cook from Iowa who had given pork a new, heavenly taste, was still a cook from Iowa—lank, sandy hair, a farmer's hands, slow drawl, affable, but with a patois that placed him ("acrost the waater") in central Iowa—he needed something desperately. Not cooking skills.
One good thing, though. Randy was only out on the curb again figuratively—René hadn't shared prestige, but he had shared money (because he had no choice). Randy now had enough socked away to start on his own, but he didn't have connections. And worse—he didn't have what it takes. So he set out to buy it.
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He stashed his money on his person; then bought a second-hand knapsack from a broke and hung-over Australian sprawled on the steps of Sacré Coeur cathedral, filled it with his only important possessions: his knives, three spoons, "Angelique" (his heavy copper, but old faithful 10-liter Mauviel cocotte stewpot), and his own book of recipes—and got himself to N'Djaména, Chad.
He enrolled in Alliance Francaise, taught by a decayed old customs official from Marseilles who was now too unsavoury to live anywhere else but N'Djaména. Perfect. Randy kept him well-oiled, and soon had private classes of however many hours he could keep the guy upright in a chair, still able to purse his lips. Randy's biggest problem was that he couldn't tell the patois from the French, but when he made Nico write down any new expression, it was easy to tell the difference. With nothing on his agenda but language, Randy absorbed the lessons just as he had cooking techniques years before.
Soon he found he enjoyed slipping his decent, slack-jawed face behind, and donning the cable-strung lips of a Frenchman. But even more so, he loved the free-swinging twang of the Marseilles docks. He couldn't have picked a better teacher, or place. No one would think to have known him there. Like Chicago—who knows anyone, and who cares? Maybe because of the breakdown of class by credit card purchasing limits, the low-class places were now becoming very fashionable to be from.
Six months in Chad. Then Bangkok. A private clinic specializing in transsexuals. Excellent work, very discrete. Dr. Phanupong ("Randy" in Thai) T.'s specialty was vaginas, complete with lush labial lips. Randy's genes (Swedish and German) had allotted him just the sort of lips you would expect from great-grandparents who built, and willingly lived in, sod houses, until there was enough cash to buy boards. He had the lips of a tax collector. Dr. T. couldn't do anything with Randy's upper lip without exposing too much tooth, so Randy covered it with a gingery moustache. As to the bottom lip—Georgia O'Keefe would have stopped painting flowers.
The nose was the true masterpiece. Randy's formerly cute, modest, freckled, couldn't-tell-a-lie Midwestern smeller became a huge, blotched bulb of respect, a botryoidalous mass, a factory of olfaction—a nose of noses. No one could possess that nose and not be a gourmand, if not posed horizontal in a gutter. So Randy went into the clinic, cute enough to be Dr. T.'s normal client (and come out as a beautiful Angelina), but came out—a masterpiece of handsome ugliness.
~
Three months later, and a Hungarian-forged-passport later, "Didier Monterra" arrived back in Paris, his cheeks and gut blown out by jellied pigs feet, sweet and sour cabbage soup, liver dumplings, pork goulash swimming with cream, poppy seed strudel, and torte after torte—ready to set up his first five-star.
He did, in the 7th Arrondisement near the Luxembourg Gardens
—
Le Rivage
—
specializing in Parisian interpretations of Marseilles' classics (he couldn't get close to his beloved pork yet).
Then, by the third—Trotters—very chichi now to have a non-French name for a French-only restaurant in Paris, Monterra openly made pork his speciality.
By this time, Randy—uh, Didier (we shall respect the reincarnation) was thirty-four and greed was good, ostentation better. His legend was worldwide, especially for pork. Monterra was now a name more valued than Strasbourg, and in Monterra-inspired restaurants around the world, patrons stuffed themselves with Monterra pork. "When the best is not good enough" was the slogan in twenty-five languages for this new delicacy with a price that would made you think that the low birth-rate of pigs must rival that of dodos.
Like Coca Cola, Monterra pork was created for different tastes, with the secrets to "you are what you eat" only fully known to Monterra himself. He had his piggies moved at different stages of their lives, and their diet changed, so that the full sum of their parts could never be properly added up. They were also bred for different tastes. The Europeans were his own taste.
When seeking your ideal breeder, it often pays to go to the most backward places where the ignorant have not learnt modern techniques. Thus, in seeking his ideal pig nurseries, he found his favourite pig breeder living in conditions not any different from his pigs.
As a child on the farm back in Farbold, Randy never saw a piglet on a plate. They were either sold or grown to maturity. The thought of eating the best produce was not contemplated by any farmer. The best was always sold.
So it wasn't until he became "Didier Monterra" that he experienced his first piglet as a culinary delight. It was bought and cooked by him in the smoke-blackened kitchen of a stone farmhouse in the myrtled hills of Corsica, where the old farmer loved his pigs with chestnuts, till death. Didier roasted the little pink youngster over the fragrant wood and shared it with Monsieur Achilli and his bemused wife in their kitchen, on the ancient scrubbed oak table. It was the first piglet any of them had ever tasted—and for the old couple, it meant that, once a year after that, one
petit cochon
was destined to come to a very unbusinesslike end—an end that the Grossnickles would never have been able to understand. As to the other piglets, Achilli made a canny enough deal with Monterra that the old couple's only problem left in life was making life last as long as they'd like—another hundred years would do nicely. So Achilli raised piglets for Monterra, feeding them on chestnuts as he'd always done. At the perfect piglet-to-platter age, he sold them to Monterra, but Achilli didn't know that most of the succulent little squealers went on to have longer lives in the hills near the Spanish border, reared on a mixture of chestnuts, apples, pumpkins, and barrels and barrels of wine.
Cavorting in the herb-scented air was an essential part of their perfection. No battery pigs these. They needed to clink their hooves against the stones, play, snuffle the aromatic dirts, hope for the stray human baby to come their way—a stimulating and energetic existence. This is what gave them the perfect texture of muscle and chewiness that Didier so loved, and the diners in his restaurants in France so appreciated.
The secret to Monterra pigs for Americans was sugar. Iowa was their birth place, and the sweet corn that is the basis of the lakes of corn syrup made in Cedar Rapids fattened their first months. Americans who are used to their meat being rectangular, don't go for piglets—a piglet looks too much like Baby Jesus on a plate. So all the piglets grew up, and their finishing was done in the Appalachians, nosing around in the wild hills amongst people who don't take kindly to questions from strangers. Monterra bought, in the trading name of XL Distributors, bulk candy canes and caramel popcorn every January. This, combined with white bread and hickory nuts, was the secret of Monterra Pork in the USA. He also had them fed at the top of a hill, and watered at the bottom, as Americans recoil as if from Plat du Live Rattlesnake, if they see a band of fat on a plate.
The Chinese were a different problem, as their goal was more fat and as many ears as possible. Also, he could not make any money off a joint state-Monterra enterprise, let alone keep trade secrets to himself. So he hadn't set up anywhere in Asia to date, but made money out of televising his cuisine there instead.
Television was something that Didier Monterra looked born for. That bottom lip made men and women want to suck on it forever. And when it pouted into that deep, spoony V of Monterra's French "U", then pencils stopped and hearts thudded. His hair—that once lank farmboy hank, was since the visit to Thailand, frizzed. Its now Moorish taint lit off secret frissons in both sexes.
Monterra's BBC series
No travails: Easy French Cooking
was such a success that America had to have him. Those splayed legs, outstretched arms, that belly that made stomachs everywhere rumble, "Eat, eat! Why not?" But, most of all, that wonderful deep, broguish tongue—Americans could still understand everything he said perfectly, which was more than they could say about those English.
~
Didier was the
millefeuille
of New York. His first restaurant, Monterra, was almost indecently thrust upon him, and in its first year, won the James Beard Restaurant of the Year Award. His
spécialité
was
Tête du Porc Monterra
—a delectable creation in which a pig's head is first boned, then squashed between two boards, then seasoned with juniper, ginger, and then ... you might know something a bit like it that is usually less elegant and called by the mostly low-class names of souse, brawn, and scrapple, made by great-grandmothers and eaten exclusively by people with upside-down cars in their front gardens.
But for TV and in his restaurants, the finishing and presentation were inimitably Monterra's. For squeamish Americans, he showed the head looking positively friendly—a God-Bless-You-All-This-Christmas face. Expansively smiling, rosy-cheeked, garlanded, and in profile (remember, it was squashed). For Americans, on TV as in his restaurants, firstly viewers would see the profile of the head, then a plate with what looked like cold cuts.
Voilá
. Nothing to squeam about.
The Italians wanted to see it eaten ear by ear. And the Chinese (by now,
Monterra Cuisine
was watched in forty-seven languages, and even salivated over secretly in Kuwait and Haifa)—well, the Chinese wanted to see how he seared the hairs from inside the ears, then squashed the head in the first place. So different segments were done for different markets—always with the same drooling results—oh, to eat food like that! How the French know food!
His pig ears (the newest worldwide fad) were copied by aspiring chefs from Butte, Montana, to Le Puy, France, with deliciously glutinous to decidedly rubber-gluey results.
~
At forty-two, Didier acquired an analyst. He'd been wanting to for years, but he couldn't in France. He couldn't take the chance there of his voice slipping under hypnosis. If it did, he couldn't trust the sacred oath of confidentiality. Not when food and France's honour is concerned. Didier-Randy wasn't worried about his French analyst dying with honour. He was worried about his analyst poisoning Didier before Didier could wake from his self-incriminating sleep.
In New York, Didier could let his hair down in front of one person. He could slip off his mask (though not all of it—the nose was his for life), loosen his jaw, grab a chance for an hour a week to get positively jowly and down-home with one person—who relievingly, refreshingly, did just what Didier wanted. Care with all his heart about Didier for as long as he got paid (actually, a little less, as he was a clock-watcher until Didier gave him a pocket timer and draped a scarf over the clock's face for the session).
Didier had no complex relationships to explore, although he did, by now, have some "friends"—Didier owned up to himself that they were all a bit whiffy. But like him, only people of this type could see that there was something hidden behind the frank, successful eyes. It gave a degree of comfort in the mutual respect for a private zone larger than most people needed, but outside of which, the confidentialities shared were much more exciting. Each of Didier's few friends had unusual talents and enthusiasms, but the extent of each was only shared to the extent of tantalisation, frissons of non-conventional hedonistic pleasures talked about and mutually appreciated, and then the respect of the private world beyond.
Didier couldn't confide in any of his friends the reason why he now sought out Ben Dreiser
If Dreiser had wanted a reputation (public, that is), he would have been dubbed "analyst to fading stars". But Ben preferred to be rich, and he needed money to pay off two blackmailers who kept
his
secrets. So Ben was very rich, private, discrete.
He was a talk-natural type of therapist. He'd been driven to it to survive. When faced with the sentence, "Within the framework of longitudinal cohort studies, we have analyzed the interplay of socialization conditions, the personality system, and sociomoral cognition," he didn't have a clue what the hell the writer was getting at—if anything. The pressure to keep ahead of his clients had almost caused him a breakdown. Most of them could out-Jung him any day, and to keep one step ahead, he'd plowed through five refits of his offices and three moves—from the middle of shrink ghetto on East 86th just off Madison Avenue, to 5th Ave overlooking Central Park, to the new walking distance from his clients—Washington Square West in the Village; he'd endured perms, the shaved look, clothes that he felt ashamed to be seen out in public wearing; and the agony of learning and spouting Rogerian, Gestalt, Transactional, and Bioenergetic Analysis; EST, Reichian Body Psychotherapy; and fiddling with the Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor. He still had the table for his clients to swim like a crocodile while experiencing the Feildenkrais "Awareness through Movement" techniques. Crystals, iridology, numerology, the Kabala ... He'd been through them all, including the digging up of former lives, all rich, titled, or famously talented. What happened to cabbage-eating drudges who populated most of the earth most of humanity's life? Must be that the plebes of today were plebes of yesterday, God's class-system in perpetuity.
The workload keeping ahead of the crowd was crushing. He never could remember the jargon as well as his clients, and they increasingly demanded the next technique, just as he was getting used to the present fad. So he beat them all with an original. He adopted a mid-west folksiness. His unusual approach was the secret of his success, and he toned it up by reading the Kansas City Star every morning, and watching the Chicago Board of Trade's market report on cable television. His best advice for most clients came from rediscovering
Dear Abby
, whose namesake, he was sure, died at least twenty years ago. Ben's own psyche's complexity—the original cause for his choice of profession—was not in
Dear Abby
territory. It was, indeed, of a caste that most of his clients would have paid vast sums to purchase, it was such a mess.
~
What Didier went to Ben for, was impotence. Didier wasn't recently impotent. He'd never had a hard-on in his life. And at forty-two, he thought maybe he'd been missing out.
