Rising Abruptly (14 page)

Mom, I have a calling. Le sacerdoce de l'oignon.

Le sacerdoce de l'oignon? Sounds serious.

It is. I can't sleep. I smell onions all night long. Be my mentor. Teach me everything you know about onions.

Lillian was halfway through
Bouvard et Pécuchet
. She laid the book face down on her lap and motioned her daughter to sit on the ottoman. Maddie plopped herself down at Mom's feet, waiting for her to reveal the secrets of
Allium cepa
.

Madeleine, you could be having brain seizures. Those recurring smells worry me. Onion is likely related to childhood memory. A mother–daughter bonding over a basin of cocktail onions and boiling vinegar and sugar. Do you smell spices as well? You don't? I may have added a pinch of ginger, but I don't think so. In my day, clove and ginger were reserved for the Christmas tourtières, and cinnamon for the autumn apple pies. But that persistent phantom smell of onion. Did my pickling activities traumatize you? It would be wise to see a neurologist and asked for a CAT scan.

Lillian gripped the spine of
Bouvard et Pécuchet
.

But, Mom, why presume the worst? I want to know everything there is to know about onions. And my dream. Shall I tell you my dream? My dream is to make the perfect pickled onions. Cocktail onions that will send the eater into fits of ecstasy. I want to make the pearl onion queen of aphrodisiacs.

Ovid thought the white shallot from Megara was an aphrodisiac.

Will you teach me, Mom? Will you?

Lillian tapped the cover of
Bouvard et Pécuchet
with her forefinger: Ces messieurs failed miserably in their attempt at canning. Mould and mildew in every jar. You will not, I hope, throw yourself lightly into canning. As you know, since your papa's stomach took him away from us, I have no desire to go back to the kitchen. I padlocked it, remember. Of course, I still make myself BLTS and cups of tea. But nothing beyond the simplest food. Besides, let's face it. My pickled onions were of the humblest fare, in the tradition of our farming grandmothers. Unlike you, I had no calling. So, my empirical knowledge will be of little use to you. Lillian reopened
Bouvard et Pécuchet
: This is where I dine now, Madeleine. I tell you what. Experiment. Meanwhile, if in my readings I come across something useful to your search, I'll pass it on to you.

But Mom, you learned at your mother's elbow. And she at her mother's elbow.

Lillian flapped one elbow and laughed: So did you, ma chérie. So did you. That smell of onions is the surest path to your deep memories of the early kitchen. Follow your nose. It will guide you. I will help you through my readings, but not the other way.

Will you worry about brain seizures?

I won't force you to apply poultices to your forehead.

With Mom's blessing, Maddie hiked the onion trail, sometimes over steep bends, sometimes along sweet alliaceous stretches. Always guided by desire. The trail brought her far from her early Montréal memories. Failed to cure her insomnia, but filled her slanted Montréal flat with information on the ancient
Allium
family.

Shortly after her visit to Mom's house, Maddie received a postcard that had nothing to do with onions:

I came across the distant cousin of your thousand-year-old pearl, ma chérie. The Chinese thousand-year egg. In a wooden bowl, clay is mixed with lime, ashes, salt and black tea leaves. Rice husks are crushed into the mush. An uncooked duck egg is coated with the material and buried in a clay pot for three months. Such a descent into darkness may appear to take forever, say, one thousand years. In its anaerobic environment and with a little underground heat, the egg white becomes firm, amber-coloured and transparent like jelly. Sometimes
with feathery markings. The yolk turns dark green and becomes
firm without losing its moisture. One never gobbles up paydon the way one does a pickled egg at a fish-and-chip shop counter
after pub-closing time. Rather, a morsel is served as an appetizer
on a toothpick with a slice of ginger. A fitting tribute, following the delicacy of unearthing, removing husk and clay, peeling and slicing the egg. Revealing the work of time and darkness and seclusion. Can your cocktail onion surpass paydon, Madeleine?

Cleaning the mess of the failed first Calgary experiment, Maddie turns to Jacques.

I had to take up Mom's challenge. Her challenge was as pungent as onion smell. Tout aussi piquant. It piqued my curiosity. It was as enticing, if you know what I mean, as the sharpness of desire.

I understand that, the sharpness of desire.

Ah, oui?

Certainly. It's all there in mountain climbing. If I tell you about the excitement and the frustration and the challenge and the many repeats of a hard route through all kinds of weather until you finish it, and then, what a relief, what a release, you will understand that I understand.

I do.

Yes, you do. But until you come along, it'll remain something of an abstraction. Once you're there, right there in the doing and the exertion, and in the impatience and the momentum, only then will you know that I know about that kind of desire. Mountaineering and the perfect pickled onion you seek. Same thing. It's not always grand, but it's always worth the trouble. Even its tedious moments…

Tedious! As in peeling a kilo of tiny onions? That, I understand.

And as in your onion practice of peeling and steeping and boiling and pickling, mountaineering may look like you keep doing the same thing over and over. A scree is a scree. A rock face is a rock face. Or ice is ice. Or terror is sheer terror, yeah. But it's not. Each time, it's different. Each and every time, you can taste and smell the sharpness of your desire.

Maddie is astounded. In an odd way and right there in the middle of their Bowness night, just like that, Jacques understands the essentials of onions without ever having pickled a single one. At least, he does, in a kind of abstraction. She turns off the lights and they go to bed. He falls asleep instantly. She, though… Her mind's eye roams the room, searches the myriad maternal postcards that dot the walls of this house.

In rapid succession, Mom's postcards fell into Maddie's Montréal mailbox, bringing her on the Grand Onion Tour:

To Ashkelon you go, ma chérie, the land of the scallion and the shallot. To Egypt, the land of onion worshippers. To Wales, the land of leek patriots. To Chicago, the land of the wild onion (or wild garlic). To Georgia, the land of the Vidalia, sweet as a harvest apple. To Korea, the land of the garlic eaters. To India, the land where five pounds of onions may routinely be cooked down to their essence in lamb korma, the finished concoction filling a bowl no bigger than the hors d'oeuvre dish in which I served my pedestrian cocktail onions.

Maddie thumbtacked to her drab walls Mom's stories gathered along the
Allium
trail of time and places. And still, she did not sleep. And still, each experiment ended in failure.

Beside her, Jacques sleeps, his breath a little urgent. Is he climbing hard rock? Risking rotten ice? Slipping and sliding up tedious scree? She rests the flat of her hand on the small of his back.

One year to the day since the first nuit blanche. And in her hometown, the scurrying in the inner walls seemed to intensify, the floor seemed to warp in an endless wavy motion that gave her le mal de mer. Unless it was sleep deprivation that caused nausea.

On another insomniac nuit montréalaise, still experimenting and failing, kilos of pearls ruined in her attempt to achieve the perfect state of crunchiness, the correct balance between tart and sweet, her onions too perfumed with ginger root or too aggressive with peppercorns, Maddie detected a new anomaly. On that night, following the one-month maturing period, when she twisted open the lid of the jar, her pearls had a persistent, if subtle, taste and smell reminiscent of inferno. Where in hell did the sulphur compounds emanate from?

Maddie read again the postcard thumbtacked above the stove and which Mom had sent a few weeks earlier:

In garlic, once the cell membrane separating the molecule alliin and the enzyme alliinase is cut, the enzyme destroys the
unstable alliin molecule to generate another sulphur compound,
and this is what imparts the characteristic garlic smell. In the case of onions, a similar process makes you cry, ma chérie. But, there is hope. Since that molecule is water soluble, you will keep dry eyes if you chop under water. Most people don't go to the extreme of diving to chop, but some people go to the extreme of wearing goggles. Or chewing on a hunk of bread. A burned match does not work. Contact lenses, I'm told, do. Though beware of onion myths.

But Maddie's pearls were never cleaved. So, no release of the lachrymator. And their salt bath and their sixty seconds in boiling water had never triggered malodorous emanations. The remaining problem was the ratio of vinegar to sugar, not the scent of hell. She was at a new crossroads and at a loss. Maddie continued to read, moving along her walls, letting her too-wide-open eyes dart among Mom's postcards:

Allium cepa
contains 91% water. Has twenty-eight calories per 100 grams. Germinates between 9 and 30°C. Tolerates frosts to –2.5°C. Matures in 115–135 days. The milder the climate, the milder the
cepa.

Maddie began to speak to her postcards: Ninety-one per cent water.
Allium
, you are a fine desert food. Low in calories, you won't send the traveller into fits of night sweats and your water will keep the pilgrim cool. Toi, l'oignon, tu es la gourde du désert. Water. Is water the culprit? It's Montréal water, she declared louder, staggering in her flat-ship anchored on the edge of downtown.

Montréal water gushing from the tap would not poison. On the other hand, a faint unpleasant odour, undetectable to the average city dweller, but noticeable to the sensitive nose of the chronic insomniac, may have laced the clear liquid. Maddie noted in her lab book that, either during the two-day steeping in their cold salt bath or during the crucial minute in their boiling water bath, her baby onions soaked up the volatile compounds, which infested them to the core during the one-month maturing period. Or was the taste, like the onion smell, only in her head? Mom worried about phantom smells. For that matter, were there truly rats scurrying in her inner walls?

In the end, the
Allium
trail brought Maddie to Calgary via the waterway and, possibly, to onion salvation. Jacques is sleeping now, in the fetal position, his breathing calm. In the dark, Maddie's mind reads Mom's last Montréal postcard:

It is worth going, Madeleine, if only for the water. And the City by the Bow being rat-free, you may finally sleep. I read in a travel book that the Calgary water is nonpareil, coming deep from the frozen land in high mountains west of the city. As good beer begins with pure spring water, I surmise that glacier water will give genius to the genus and only then will you achieve the perfect pickled onion. Or, as you baptized it, your thousand-year-old pearl, for which, like its counterpart, the preserved egg, some period of burial must be accepted. When you achieve success, send me a jar. As your papa used to say, bonne chance, ma fille.

Back in Montréal, Maddie stored her postcards and thumbtacks in a plastic box. The pasty walls with the peeling paint appeared pockmarked. With a felt pen, she connected the thumbtack holes at random. Stepped back from her drawing as far as the cramped room allowed. To the vivid imagination or sleep-deprived eyes, the lines formed a giant head of garlic, with the skinny tails of rats scurrying away in terror of
Allium sativum
.