Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (26 page)

Krischin Pu'atoi, always a troublemaker, stood up. "How come we gotta give our money to you when Detenamo and Pilu got theirs?"

Flora grinned at the two women beside her, who laughed in reply. "Not any more, Krischin," Flora answered. "Not if you want to sleep at home, get fed, get somethin else ever again."

A birdlike titter tinkled out from the crowd, and one or two women clapped.

"Now there gonna be a few rules here," continued Flora. "One, no Mahboros. They too dear. You buy rollee tobacco, pay someone to roll for you. Maybe you buy your wife Iced VoVos with your pay each month ...quiet, please." She had to put up her hands, as a pandemonium of groans, hoots, and clapping broke out. "You be nice to her. She roll your smokes for you."

"It's my hand. I should get all the money for myself," Krischin Pu'atoi whined. He turned to his cowed wife. "Why doesn't Eva cut off her hand?"

"Because with
two
hands, you too lazy bastard and pain to live with. What you think you like with one?" Flora answered.

Eva smiled blissfully, as she got encouraging looks from all the women. "Iced VoVo, Krischin?" asked Eva, brave in front of this crowd.

"Hmm," he answered, but Eva could imagine herself licking the parrot-pink icing off the biscuits already.

"When you're ready," Flora sternly reminded the crowd, that quieted immediately.

"Two, no alcohol except what we make here. Sufisi not gonna be island of drunks like those Aussies on a night off. And besides ... drunks break bottles. Too dangerous. Not ecological—"

"There she goes again," everyone thought, and Krischin actually mumbled under his breath.

But mercifully, she didn't.

"Three. No all-the-time drunks. We have one village pissup every Sunday. That's it. Everybody happy. Everybody dancing. We pay Fred and Thuro (who hadn't put their hands on the list) to play ukelele and the spoons like old days. We all happy together, and sick together on Monday."

Flora turned to Didier. "You're invited, too. You're part of us now."

Didier bowed. He wanted to thank Flora, everyone, sincerely. Their faces were smiling at him as if he were, somehow, the answer to their dreams.

"Now this is the most important part," Flora warned, and the little group stopped its fidgeting, giggling, and for half the men, muttering.

"You all gonna get healthy now. No more bully beef and rice, bully beef and rice, all the time. We—all of us—gonna buy some chickens, we gonna raise them. We gonna plant vegetables. We gonna eat vegetables again. We gonna
all
lose some weight." She looked over at the bloated Didier. "You, too."

She put up her hand to the loud groan. "We all gonna drop dead too soon if we don't. Too high cholesterol. Too much fat."

"Why retire?" yelled Telltale, who was first on the list, "if we gonna be skinny and run by our wives?"

"You won't get skinny, Telltale," Flora smiled. "I just want everybody to live healthier. But I've never been unfair, have I? No one need to lose more weight than me. If I can't, then we all be fat together."

Didier, who was worried that he'd retired to a health farm, relaxed when he heard the explosion of laughs.

"You gonna stop eating those Milk Arrowroots you got stashed away?" Mary asked.

Flora would have blushed, but recovered with an effort that took the last of her willpower away. "Let's try, at least," she laughed.

People began to uncross their legs to stand up, but she held up her hand, and her face wasn't smiling now.

"One more thing. Anyone who tells anyone off Sufisi what go on here—no more payments, and if we catch you, it's long-pig you be. I speak true."

~

The first Sunday pissup/dance/all day feast had a sobering result on Monday. There were no hangovers. Everyone felt a glow and a happy belly from the day before, but no stomach bloating, furry mouths, or the expected pounding drums. They'd all danced and sung so much that the calories and alcohol had been sweated off in the fun. Many couples had continued their private fun into the night, but there was still a suspicion amongst all that maybe they were all turning into old fogies. Temperance doesn't sit with a fierce reputation. Still, the pattern was set. Sunday was a full-on rage, but a healthy one that everyone thoroughly enjoyed. Flora was smart enough to shut up about her happiness, lest some overindulge out of sheer rebelliousness against their sense of fun, in favour of a reputation to reclaim.

Didier experienced a personal renaissance. If he could have shed his accent, too, life would have been perfect. But, he mused, you can't have everything.

His feasts were the first Wednesday of each month. He had to space them out to make his own highlight of a happy retirement last.

But by the fourth month, he was under pressure by the list members to speed things up. That, and his own passion to create, forced him to make one feast every three weeks, but he didn't want to freeze his meat or smoke it (another old Sufisi recipe). He wanted to create with the freshest of ingredients.

Also, he was disturbed by the stump remains. They looked crudely done and uncomfortable.

He spoke in confidence to Flora first. Then he said good-byes to everyone when the
Venture
came again, and left for two weeks.

~

When he returned on the little blue one-man fishing boat skippered by Moses Kufe, Didier's new, discrete acquaintance, his arrangements had been made.

Thereafter, Dr. T. arrived for a two-day visit every three weeks, arriving Sunday morning with Moses and leaving Tuesday morning on Moses' boat. First, the doctor set up a splendid clinic for Flora, equipped with a stash of drugs and equipment that he'd brought with him. Next, he redid the stumps that had been previously sealed, and when these healed, they were all now smooth and beautiful. Next, he, with Flora as nurse, performed subsequent amputations to his satisfaction.

Dr. T. knew what it was all about—Didier had been honest with him. The doctor enjoyed the break from crowded Bangkok, enjoyed setting up the clinic and the challenges of the basic setting. In his chosen calling, he had seen enough of reality to not only keep confidences as part of his nature, but to expect eccentricity as normal. He was tickled by the existential choices made to maintain a passive lifestyle. The Buddhist monks at home cadged off everyone else to reach nirvana. These people didn't. He admired them.

Dr. T. was vegetarian, so declined Didier's invitation to a special
degustation
. But he believed in tolerance, as all Buddhists are supposed to, so never concerned himself with another man's meat-eating tastes.

What Dr. T. craved were his Sunday rages with the islanders. He loved to party, but couldn't in Bangkok. All the party places were full of his clients, exclusively of the fawning kind. These clients were different and fun. He went into Monday ops invigorated, with calm clients and a happy nurse.

Didier was happy, too, because his meat was unstressed. Stressed meat is always tough.

~

So medical standards soared on the tiny island. And after the next
Venture
visit, culinary standards did, too.

A gleaming Smeg gas-powered range arrived, along with boxes and boxes of mysterious paraphernalia. Women wove walls and all the double-handed men in the village were put to work building the most efficient kitchen Didier had ever had the joy to work in.

This kitchen was built beside the house. It had a pitched roof high as a temple. It faced the sea, with wide eaves and walls that could be rolled up or battened down.

The floor was of wave-polished stones, bedded in a thick cement screed. Stainless steel sinks. Fresh and saltwater hoses. A rotisserie made in Beirut (Didier preferred them to the effete European or V-12 American varieties). And all of his utensils suspended on hooks or stored in coconut-wood drawers (all smoothly finished with tiny sea-shell-wheel rollers). A kitchen for a food lover, built in paradise. And although it was space efficient, the building itself was oddly large.

When it was all finished, the whole village celebrated.

That Sunday, the villagers taught Didier to dance. Everyone had lost, on average, about two pounds. They all felt svelte, and even the fruit bats in the trees stopped their munching to listen to those pounding, stomping, singing, swishing, sweating, crazy humans partying up a storm.

The next day, Didier decided that—A)You don't live forever; so, B)He might as well share his riches; and, C)He needed to create for the few outside sophisticates he could trust—his "whiffy" friends. Those who could truly enjoy and appreciate his genius.

He took off on another trip, this time to Singapore. He made some phone calls to arrange his dinner party. RSVP then and there. Venue: Sufisi Island, flying in to Paurotown the next Wednesday to be met at the airport and boated over by Moses Kufe. Conditions of invitation: no one else knows where you're going or have been, or the menu. Warning: you might be shocked. Come at your own risk, but you must swear confidentiality.

~

Food is such a social lubricant. When enjoyed, the ultimate disarmer. Behind every hard-fought treaty these days is an army of slogging chefs.

But Didier felt uncomfortable with his foody fans, those gregarious, prying extroverts who brought their friends to his restaurants and with evangelical zeal, waved their forks and tongues over his creations with the fervour of a revival meeting. Because they "loved" him, they thought he was theirs. When they met him, they spoke in the tongues of restaurant critics to curry favour. Their worship was both claustrophobic and made him feel dangerously vulnerable.

Then there were the lone diners who had followed his food from France, who deconstructed the offending edifices to get to the gist of the experience—the simple joy of well-made food. They patiently waited for the fashion to pass, and Didier to find his roots again. They dreamed of his "old days" when he simply presented masterpieces of one-time oinkers. These fans made Didier feel even more uncomfortable than the loud sycophants, as they seemed to say but didn't ask when they looked into his eyes:
When will you get over this?
Their patience and faithfulness pained him. He wanted to strip off his layers for them, but their only sins were their revels in eating without distracting company—a foray into misanthropic indulgence achieved with the booking of a table for one. With this ascetic dedication to hedonism being the sum of their secret lives, they wouldn't understand how complex life can be.

So Didier's "friends" were an odd bunch—all with an oblique glint shining behind the civilised glance. He privately summed them up as the privately passionate few. They knew each other by the frank, eye-to-eye contact, only to be pulled down at the corner of the lids as if by a proprietary nurse—
that's far enough
. With each of the passionate few, the world hidden was what linked them, brought them close in ways that the normally gregarious never experience.

Didier's few friends were mostly gleaned from the travels/socialising that are necessary to success. Across a crowded room of babbling sycophants, one quiet jarring element would stand out. A look and mutual curiosity would bring the two into contact, and sometimes, when the clinging crowd had dispersed, a quiet sharing of ironies would bring Didier and the other to the lasting, erratic, and semi-confessional state that Didier could tolerate, and called "friendship". The knowledge of secret passions kept the bond, but the nurse in each always kept things from becoming too clear.

There was Lillian. Elegant, slim, owner of Issimo Issima Isthmus, food tours to men and women who need to be jewelled to eat in public. Lillian's passion was medlars. She was the only person he knew who liked and understood their rotten-looking souls. She loved their wrinkled skins, their fraught-with-putrescence state that has to be, when they're ready to eat. The individualness of their beings. The way they look like their unfortunate common name—dog's arse. She grew them and a weird assortment of fashionable (400 years ago) fruits and vegetables at her hideaway in Oregon, where she lived her holidays in overalls and a film of garden soil.

Then there was Satoru, once fusion-art-sushi emperor of Sydney. His secret passion was eucalyptus. Didier and he met years ago, in a Chefs in the Park gala for the Sydney Carnivale. Big screens showing Didier's anti-gravity acrobatics with edibles, followed by Satoru, wizard of the knife—in front of a salivating crowd of 50,000. Their eyes met ... and like a steak thrown on a smoking pan, the air Zzinged—
We're cartoons! And as for THEM ... !
Satoru could only admit it to Didier, but Japanese food bored him to tears. He made so much money that he could have made futons from it, but every chance he got, he escaped to the Colo River with his dog Kwai (it kept people away), and brewed tea on a billy with tannin-browned river water, the "tea" leaves being Sydney peppermint, turpentine, spotted gum, woolybutt—every time, a different eucalypt. He envied the koalas. They could eat this stuff.

The closest he could get to heaven was his secret bancha tea—koala droppings gathered on a yearly visit to a holiday-house suburbia at Wilsons Promontory, where a family of semi-tame koalas nests in the trees beside garages and family dogs, fierce claws gripping the bark of trees planted in the tame lawns. Facial expressions scornful as malicious old men, but dropping their olive-seed-like excreta with predictable frequency on the grass.

In one visit, Satoru collected two years' special brew-worth for his own private ceremonies, but he usually visited each winter, when the houses were locked up, the sometime-residents working away in Melbourne. Typical of the level of confessional: Satoru knew Didier despised the towers and wanted to get back to horizontal pork, but thought money was the only motivation (same as for Satoru). Didier knew Satoru loved his eucalyptus leaves but knew nothing about the bancha tea.

Then there was Cardinal Florey, who'd only confessed to God and one man the real reason he turned down a promotion to Rome: his insatiable lust for kosher-pickled tomatoes.

Didier met Sean at a dinner arranged by the Cardinal. It was dinner for three—
cruibins
—grilled pigs' trotters. "A most restorative food" the Cardinal called them, and they had been prepared by the Cardinal's own cook.