The Bread and the Knife Page 10

  Margarita Island. When I told one of the other assistants where I was going, he asked incredulously, “Are you joking? Is that next to Piña Colada Island?” Not quite, but it was paradise. It wasn’t called the Pearl of the Caribbean for nothing. Unfortunately, every paradise has its serpent, and ours was a tour guide named Wilhelm, a good-looking German with chilly gray-green eyes. I could feel them on me in the hotel lobby, in the breakfast room, in the tour bus as he explained why the tree trunks along the side of the road were painted white. When I emerged from the cathedral at La Asunción, disoriented by the sudden glare, our gazes finally collided, mine skittering off like a pool ball. As I stepped into the bus later that morning, he grabbed my upper arm and pulled me back down to the ground. His lips almost to my ear, he hissed, “You pretend to be a good girl, but I know what you really are.” Then he let go of my arm and smiled. I climbed onto the bus, too shaken to be angry. Nancy asked me what was wrong, but I just shook my head. I knew he was right. Being a good girl was only a charade. Staring out the window, I wondered if the powerful protection that marriage to Nathan had conferred on me was beginning to wear off, like a vaccine that loses its efficacy.

  After a few lazy days on the beach, our group went snorkeling off El Farallón, a massive white rock completely colonized by masses of wheeling, shrieking birds. It was hard to tell if El Farallón was naturally white or if the years’ accumulation of guano had entirely cloaked it. The underwater sightseeing was drab (the water was rough, and poor Nancy was so seasick she stayed in the boat), but one of the young snorkeling guides managed to communicate by gestures that it was possible to climb onto the island if you swam around the back. He took my mask and snorkel and threw them into the boat. It was difficult to swim against the current wearing the unfamiliar flippers, but it was exciting to approach a wholly avian universe, its inhabitants now squawking and flapping even more riotously because humans were approaching. Watching them plunging and swooping and jostling each other for prime real estate reminded me of the Times Square subway station during rush hour. Exhilarated, I felt my face stretch into a smile as I dove under the water. Coming up for breath with my eyes still closed, I was shocked by the feel of something slippery on my mouth. I opened my eyes to find the guide’s face inches from mine. He had kissed me—I could smell his unbrushed teeth, see the freckles where the zinc oxide had rubbed off his nose. He put his hands on my shoulders, and my pounding heart communicated to me quicker than my thoughts how helpless I was, treading water in my awkward fins, screened from the others by the huge, noisy rock. I pushed him away, yanked off the fins, and swam as fast as I could to the boat. He didn’t follow me.

  Once I heaved myself over the side, breathless and wiping my face with a towel, I whispered to Nancy what had happened. Back on shore, we were still discussing whether to complain to the tour company when the other guide came over. Clearly the brother of the offender, he explained haltingly in English that Marco, whom I could see squirming with embarrassment and fear a little way off, was horribly sorry. It was a big misunderstanding, he said. Marco had thought I wanted him to. Even as I protested huffily that I was married, it occurred to me that I might have unconsciously given off some of the old signals the German tour guide had picked up on, or that perhaps the misunderstanding had been a cultural one. In any case, I could tell they were sincere, and I realized he would almost certainly lose his job if I said he accosted me. Jobs were in short supply on this island. It didn’t seem fair to salve my ruffled feelings at the expense of ruining his life. I said it was okay. As we left, I turned to look back at the ocean. Marco was standing on the beach, one arm raised in a curiously solemn, almost archaic gesture of farewell.

  The next day, Nancy and I took a badly needed break from organized activities and rented a car to explore the Macanao peninsula, the arid, uninhabited half of the island. The east side, where we were staying, had nearly all of the population—and the rainfall. The west, which we were driving through, was desert. After miles of nothing, we saw a man leaning on a truck parked on the side of the road. Propped on the ground against two tall aluminum cylinders was a hand-lettered sign: BATIDO DE PARCHITA. We immediately pulled over, having recognized the word parchita from breakfast—passion fruit. We had become addicted to passion fruit juice and now drank it from the hotel dispensers every morning. The cylinders looked cool, beaded with condensation. We were so thirsty, we flew in the face of every tenet of travel safety—don’t eat any fruit you haven’t peeled yourself, avoid foreign ice—and asked for two glasses. The liquid pouring from his ladle had the color and consistency of apricot nectar but it emanated an explosive perfume. Nancy and I toasted and each took a long swallow. The juice looked like nectar, and nectar it was. This must have been what the gods drank on Mount Olympus, I thought. Simultaneously tart and sweet, it produced a pleasurable shock to the palate while soothing it with a cool and satiny texture. It somehow embodied the essence of the tropics, and standing there by the roadside I felt one of the sharp jolts of freedom that are the true reason I travel. The watery simulation we had thought so delicious at the Hilton breakfast buffet tasted like Kool-Aid by comparison.

  Having washed the dust from our mouths, we turned off the road and bumped down a steep, rutted track to a beach marked on the map. Leaving our shoes, we set off, the ocean on one side and a towering cliff on the other. The beach was empty, and it was an almost physical relief to be away from the others on the tour, professional travel agents who peppered me with questions I couldn’t answer about the industry in Florida. I was especially happy to get a respite from the continual, unblinking scrutiny of the guide, whom I had come to regard with an almost superstitious dread. Nancy and I walked in comfortable silence for some time before noticing that we had been joined by a scruffy dog. He trotted behind at a respectful distance, wagging his tail whenever we turned to look at him. After a while he began bounding back and forth between us and the ocean, running ahead, pausing, and racing back to walk first next to one of us and then the other, so as not to offend. In areas where people have trouble getting enough to eat, dogs are generally not welcome, and this one seemed grateful for some friendly company.

  Far out to sea, an enormous bird hovered on a thermal, barely moving its wings. From its deeply forked tail, Nancy recognized it as a frigate bird, and as it rode down the currents of air toward us on its huge bent wings like a pterodactyl’s, our awe turned to fear. From directly below, its wingspan appeared to be six or seven feet, and we were relieved when it began to climb again and disappeared over the cliff. Further down the beach, we spotted two boys crouched on the sand at the tide’s edge, busy filling a pail. We approached and pointed, and they showed us their harvest of shiny black winkles. When the dog trotted over to inspect, they drove him off so ferociously that he hauled off until he was just a dark speck in the distance. One of the boys pried a winkle out of its shell with a pin and proffered it to me. He then gave one to Nancy. The tiny gray mollusk was chewy, sandy, salty—like eating the beach—but it didn’t take up any space in my stomach. It was hard to imagine how many pails they would have to fill to satisfy hunger. We continued on, our canine companion reappearing when we were safely away from the boys. As we approached our shoes, he put his front paws in my sneakers, looking up at me imploringly with his doggy eyes, and cocked his head. Then he sprang playfully away before doing it all again, as if to show me what a charming fellow he was and what a good idea it would be to take him home.

  The day before we left, eight of us loaded into two twin-engine planes and flew over Angel Falls. It was so cloudy that Nancy and I were happy just to have glimpsed a flash of something white and vertical, and there was some discussion between our pilot and the tour guide about whether it was too overcast to land at Auyán-tepuí, the enormous, Precambrian sandstone mesa from which Angel Falls originates. To our immense relief, the pilot decided to set down as planned at Camp Kavac, a small Pemon village at the base of the tepui. After lunch, the group set off on a hike
led by a couple of Pemon guides. Hopping from rock to rock through swimming holes whose jasper bottoms tinted the water the color of strong tea, we followed a stream into a narrow gorge whose fern-dotted walls towered hundreds of feet on either side. Gradually, the water deepened until it rose to our chests and we half-swam, half-pulled ourselves along a rope until we reached a bend. We heard the thundering of the falls before we saw them and, rounding a corner, entered a cathedral-like cavern where the massive curtain of water surged over a cantilevered rock to slam into a dark pool. The air was filled with mist, the droplets illuminated by a crescent-shaped opening above. When I tried to swim toward the falls, the water pushed me away with such force that I made no progress, as if I were on an aquatic treadmill.

  By the time we returned to the camp, a cluster of about a dozen beehive-shaped huts called churuatas, my lips were blue with cold. We each got our own hut, slung with a hammock in which to take a nap until it was time to fly out, but I was shivering. Finally giving up on trying to use my wide-brimmed straw hat as a blanket, I wandered outside. Across a stretch of savannah, the uncanny flat top of Auyán-tepuí rose through scraps of mist. In the far distance, a smaller tepui floated in a wreath of clouds, the valley below obliterated by fog. These massive rock formations with their trick of appearing suddenly weightless had inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World, about a land where dinosaurs still roamed the earth. They emanated something so ancient and self-contained that my overexposed cubicle and dinky little apartment back home receded into insignificance. As I compared the flimsiness of my life in the city with the landscape I looked on, the world seemed to open out and gain amplitude. Drops of cold rain began to hit my bare arms. I had been granted a different scale to measure with, one that I have never lost. Not once in the ensuing years have I again made the mistake of conflating my home life and workplace with the pulsing, multitudinous world.

  The next day, only Nancy and I took the hotel shuttle to the local airport in Porlamar, where we would catch a connecting flight to Caracas. While she went to change money, I sat down in the cafeteria to have coffee and a candy bar. The tiny airport was just a landing strip of packed earth, and flies buzzed in and out through the open windows. I was idly watching a small boy behind the counter, one of those ragged children of indeterminate age who are always scurrying around trying to make themselves useful. The workers were teasing him and shooing him away. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he seemed to laugh it off and refuse to go. Without warning, one of them pulled a can of insecticide from under the counter and sprayed it straight into his eyes. The boy clutched his face and cried out, falling to the floor. I stood up, wondering how to find a doctor, but before I could take a step the boy was on his feet again, and I perceived that it was not the first time this had happened. Hands covering his eyes, tears streaking his dirty cheeks, he was desperately trying to laugh and pretend it was all a joke. I sat back down, filled with a kind of sick horror.

  I was also furious. I wanted to berate those men, but even if they could have understood me, it wouldn’t have helped him. Where would he go if they kicked him out from behind the counter? Maybe they gave him food, or maybe this was what passed for affection, or at least connection, in his life. For that, human beings will tolerate almost anything. Elaborate plans for how I would adopt him began to run through my head. I would go home, find out how to cut through the red tape, jump through the bureaucratic hoops. I was married; I was a good candidate. I would come back and take him home with me. I would give him a good life. I felt it was my moral imperative to rescue him. It didn’t occur to me until I calmed down a few hours later that it was impossible, that he might not even be an orphan, that he might not want to go back to the United States with a stranger. For years, I kept the red and yellow wrapper of my Cri-Cri bar as a talisman of something I didn’t quite understand, something besides my own moral failure. I kept it because I, too, had made a devil’s bargain not to be alone.

  On the flight from Caracas to New York, I put on my headphones and listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Staring out the window at nothing, I was startled by something dripping onto the back of my hand. Tears—cool, silent tears that seemed to have nothing to do with me. I was as surprised as if I had woken to find myself crying in my sleep. I asked myself where they were coming from, and the answer came that I had not thought of my husband in days and that this was the first time in memory that I had felt free to think my own thoughts without running them through the filter of whether or not he would approve. I couldn’t bear the idea of reentering mental captivity, but from this height I caught the first glimmer—which would take another two years to coalesce into a clear picture—that I had designed my own thralldom. Isak Dinesen once said that you can never know the truth about someone else’s marriage. I would go further and say you can’t even know the truth about your own, at least not until it’s over. I have been married twice, and each time, the dawn of understanding augured the beginning of the end.

  is for

  Quail

  When I was in my mid-twenties, in an attempt to eke out my meager editorial assistant’s salary to support both me and my law-student boyfriend, I decided to try my hand at book reviewing. A friend who worked in publicity at another publishing house gave me an advance galley of a short story collection, and to my surprise and delight, several newspapers accepted the review I sent them on spec. To thank her and celebrate my success, I decided to spend half my earnings on a grown-up lunch at Arizona 206 for the two of us. In my memory, it was a blindingly sunny day, as befit a Southwestern restaurant. The walls were white adobe, smooth and undulating, as if the interior had been shaped naturally, by hands or the long action of water. Stepping down into the dining room felt like entering another country, where we sat on benches and were flirted with in a charmingly professional way by our handsome waiter. He recommended the quail, which I had never eaten before. We must have ordered other things as well, but I don’t remember what they were. I do remember how shockingly tiny the birds were, how fragile their bones, and that knives and forks were useless. The only way to eat them was to pick them up and strip off the meat in a way that felt both barbaric and sensual. I remember how unabashed my friend was about it, so I felt free to be so as well. They were so crisp and lemony and aromatic with sage and thyme. And since I had to pick them up, their smell got right up into my nostrils as it would not have otherwise. When we were finished, I remember wanting more, but perhaps that is the point, as it is with caviar. Whatever else we ate, it took a long time, because we were among the last diners remaining. The light had changed by the time I asked for the bill. Pulling out the cash to pay was the best part of all. I had made that money with my own thoughts, my own words, and I had earned the right to spend it as I chose.

  Perhaps it was this memory that prompted my choice of quail a decade later as the main course in the very first meal I prepared for my future in-laws. I look back now on that brisk, blue, unforgiving day at their country house north of New York City and wonder why I was cooking lunch for them in their own kitchen at all. By then I was a cookbook editor, and no doubt my future husband had been bragging about my culinary skills; my future in-laws (although they were not yet so-defined) were very serious about food. My future husband’s formidable mother had been such an accomplished amateur cook in the early Julia Child era that Craig Claiborne had written her up in the New York Times, and their kitchen walls in the city were covered with framed menus from three-star Michelin restaurants in France. I thought I was showing off, I suppose, but I now see it in a rather darker light, as a sort of audition. From their point of view, I had not yet gotten the part.

  The first course, a sort of afterthought requiring little effort, was a butternut squash soup topped with a very nineties swirl of herb butter. It was perfect for the weather and made quite a pretty presentation in little white crocks with lion’s heads on the sides. It was also delicious, which was a good thing considering what came next. At
that stage of my life, and even for many years afterwards, I prided myself on never making the same dish twice. So, while it was incredibly foolhardy to prepare something unfamiliar for such an occasion, there was precedent. What was even more foolish, though, was trying to reproduce a dish from a chef’s cookbook on a forties-vintage electric stove. It was like trying to make pizza in an Easy-Bake Oven. I’d had the butcher butterfly eight beautiful little quail and then rubbed their skins with a special spice mixture sold by one of my cookbook authors. I heated two skillets as thoroughly as I could, seared the birds on each side for however many minutes the chef indicated, and plated them with panache. They looked and smelled delicious: so plump and golden, with their lovely crisp skin. The four of us cut into them—and found that next to the bone they were nearly raw. The spice rub had made it impossible to tell that the quail were not even approaching doneness.

  What would have been an embarrassment under any circumstances was a positive disaster here: I could not have known that my future father-in-law, a Brahminish Jewish lawyer straight out of The Sisters Rosensweig, had a horror of undercooked poultry that amounted to a phobia. His knife and fork clattered to his plate as he announced that no one could force him to eat raw quail. I rushed to assure him that I had no intention of doing so, gathered up the offending dishes, and put the birds back in the pans for what seemed an eternity while the three of them drank wine and tried to pretend they weren’t hungry. When I finally served the quail again, my future father-in-law politely nibbled a corner of one but did not attack it with the gusto the rest of us did. It hardly mattered that they were really quite good.