Tongue (13 page)

If I were a fruit, I would want to be a ripe avocado, with a hard stone hidden in the middle of soft, silken flesh. Any fruit would be fine, really, except an orange, a hardy-looking but sensitive fruit that turns even if it’s jostled a little. Then again, I do need bright sunshine, wind, and adequate moisture, just like an orange. What about a cherry? It’s not overly juicy but it has a beautiful red color, like a miniature sun. A banana would be fine too. A banana tree has no branches but is made of large leaves. A smaller banana is sweeter. It’s a unique fruit; nobody knows how it came into being. The tree produces only one bunch of bananas at a time, but that bunch is made of hundreds of clusters of fruit. I think I can fall deeper into slumber.

In my dream I’m surrounded by fragrant fruit and I’m conjuring up various foods but I can’t taste any of them. In dreams, taste and smell affect your soul in a minimal way. But the other senses are as acute as when your eyes are open, so if you weep in your dreams you’ll wake up to a wet pillow. In the dream I am not a turbot or a scallop or a cherry or a banana. I’m an oyster gone sour, my juices dried up. I’m placed on a hot fire. A bad oyster should be grilled with butter and sprinkled with nutmeg. I feel pain, as if a sharp knife is being shoved into my closed shell. I wipe my eyes and push back the covers with a jolt. The phone. I think the phone is ringing. I grab the receiver.

“… It’s me.”

I nod.

“Were you still up?”

“I was having a bad dream.”

“I’m sorry it’s so late.”

“That’s okay.”

“I was debating whether to call. And it kept getting later.”

“It’s okay.”

A phone call you wait for never comes. Except now. My heart pounds.
Tell me that you called because you were wondering how I was doing. That you missed me. And say one more thing. That you want to come back. Tell me you called to see if you could come back. Then all of this can end. Quietly
. I grip the phone tighter. I want to remember this moment forever. What is this love? Is it gold or a diamond, or maybe a truffle? This love is what everyone wants but can’t make, just like gold and diamonds and truffles. I gleam in a sprightly green, a spring asparagus.

“I have to tell you something.”

“… Yeah.”

“I don’t know how to say it.”

“Yes. Come back.”

“… What?”

“Come back.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“It’s okay. Just say it. Say whatever it is.”

“Paulie, he … he died.”

I hear metal grating against metal. “Wh-what?”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but he died.”

I hunch my shoulders. “What are you talking about?”

“Today—no, it’s already yesterday.”

“Is Paulie—is he very sick?”

“… No, he’s dead.”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Tell me you’re joking!” I growl.

“It’s the truth.”

“Say it again.”

“Paulie’s dead.”

I’m silent.

“Are you listening to me?”

“What did you two do to him?”

“It was an accident.”

“… Did he die? Or did you kill him? Tell me.”

“I told you, it was an accident.”

I can’t speak.

He says one more time that Paulie is dead, his voice hoarse.

CHAPTER 22

RESTAURANT
—the word originates from the French verb
restaurer
, “to restore to a former state,” and until the eighteenth century it referred to a nutritious and invigorating soup. It was only after that that the word changed to signify a place that provided meals. The man who opened the world’s first restaurant was a Frenchman named Boulanger. But the gourmets of the world remember not Boulanger but Beauvilliers, a restaurateur and chef. When a customer entered his restaurant, Beauvilliers would take one glance at him and tell him what he should avoid and what he should eat, then personally prepare dishes that couldn’t be found anywhere else. He became famous not only for his cooking skills and the special attention he paid everyone but also for his extensive memory, which allowed him to recognize an occasional customer twenty years later. French newspapers mourned him when he died in 1820, writing about his life at length.

When I was in cooking school, Chef preferred to teach common sense or the history of ingredients or the behavior of cooks
rather than how to cook. And even now he remembers what customers ate and drank on their first visits, which impresses them. Even the way he conveys his knowledge is natural and subtle. This isn’t so much a sales gimmick as his conviction as a chef, as the owner of Nove. Whenever he does it, Manager Park shakes his head, jaw dropping, and says, I still have a long way to go! Chef would have been Beauvilliers had he lived in the nineteenth century. Customers keep returning to the restaurant—to regain strength or for a special dinner or because they don’t have time to cook or don’t want to.

The restaurant is fully booked for every meal in May because of its numerous holidays—Coming-of-Age Day, Parents’ Day, Children’s Day, Teachers’ Day. The kitchen becomes chaotic. In May, Chef reminds us during the morning staff meeting that we shouldn’t use perfume, scented lotions, or shampoo. This reminder kicks off the busiest month and the start of summer. When seven cooks, sometimes including Chef, are stuck together like wooden chopsticks in the small kitchen, you can smell cigarettes and each other’s sweat and even bodily fluids discharged during the previous night. Smell, especially that of food, has weighty particles, and when it’s hot they can’t rise and end up hovering near the bottom. It’s also around this time that we raise our voices when even small accidents happen. In May you can’t take off work except for your regular days off. But even if it was my day off I would have headed into work after receiving that phone call yesterday. I don’t want to rest, not for even a day. I come to work earlier than anyone else and do chores that aren’t mine, prepping ingredients and going to the market and bustling about as if I’ll become frozen if I stop for five minutes. Every time I move, I hear my disjointed bones rattling in my body.

Before, I used to look at the world as if a piece of glass separated me from it. If the glass was cracked or broken, the other
side of the glass would look like barely fitting puzzle pieces even if everything was perfect. The glass I look through now has thousands of irreparable spidery cracks in it. If you don’t give up and you wish with all your strength that things go back to the way they were, maybe it could happen despite the cracks. But that’s not common. I know when it’s time to give up.

When I was seven years old, I was always home alone while Grandmother was at work and Uncle at school. I went into the kitchen and brought out a spoon and started to dig in the corner of the yard. When the spoon became bent and unusable, I burrowed with a ladle. I went to the well across the yard and drew water and poured it into the hole. The water disappeared silently into the dirt but I dug wider and deeper and poured in more water. I went back and forth between the well and the hole until the sun went down. I thought I would be able to make a pond. But water didn’t remain in the hole even though I poured and poured—it just vanished into the dirt. I continued to trot between the well and the hole for the satisfaction I got in that short moment—the instant before the water completely melted into the ground. But then I stopped. I realized I wouldn’t be able to make a pond no matter how hard I tried. It’s now time to stop pouring water into the ground. I make this decision and discover I’m changed. A subtle but powerful feeling.

The first change is a realization that I am no longer alone. Even when I’m lying in the dark by myself, I now sense other beings hovering near me. It isn’t just me living in this house, but unfinished love and my dejection and anger and dead Paulie, and their miraculous presence feels as real as my fingernails digging into my hand. The second change is that I’m now more obsessed with cooking, like the Roman gourmets and their cherished chefs, who wanted to put all things wonderful or special or new or majestic or strange or scary-looking on the table. The cooks back then knew only how to bake or boil, but I
understand how a few drops of pomegranate juice can transform a dish. The third change is that with these first two revelations, my sense of taste has become ever more sensitive and sharp, my imagination richer. When I got my ears pierced and walked into the street in the middle of winter, I became one large ear. All sensation and pain were concentrated in my ears. My entire body vanished and I floated around the winter streets, just two giant ears. It’s that same feeling. Everything about me disappears and I’m only a pink tongue. This is the time to grow into a truly good chef. I see an increase in customers who specially order my dishes. People come to restaurants for various reasons but everyone really wants the same thing: a delicious meal. A meal that satisfies their tongues. A meal that brings a smile at its close. All of these customers are gourmets—intelligent, sensitive, with good appetites and acute senses. A good appetite no longer is the subject of condemnation or avoidance as it was during the Middle Ages; rather, it’s the height of beauty and nature and enjoyment. I am surrounded by those with appetites, which triggers the desire for taste, for a physical sensation. I want to create the perfect meal.

Slicing turbot in half is an insult to the fish, and it’s rude to have a mediocre cook handle foie gras. Tonight we need to pay the most attention to the table of Mr. Choe, the owner of Mido, who helped Chef become the owner of Ristorante when he was head chef, before Chef renamed it Nove. Chef will cook the entrée, as he always does when Mr. Choe comes in, and I’m to make the second antipasto: asparagus and foie gras. After we returned from Singapore, we became something like confidants to one another. Was it that we each saw the other’s true face that night, normally hidden behind many masks?

I hurry. I take five hundred grams of foie gras, hardened by a sprinkling of salt. It’s dark red with a sheen and it’s firm, like
the tongue of a calf. It’s a fresh, good-quality liver. But I smile bitterly. I can’t eat foie gras anymore after I learned how geese were farmed. A cook should eat everything, but even a cook balks at eating certain things, delicious or not. I know cooks who can’t eat poultry or those who can’t eat fish with teeth, like stingray. I can eat crustaceans feeding on spoiled flesh and Milanese sausages stuffed with chopped pig brains, but goose liver is a different story.

A goose hatches in the spring and fattens during the fall. The liver is the best part of a goose. The goose is fed only vegetables in the warm darkness until it’s fat enough, and to make the liver even more tender, to make it the best product, for twenty days it’s fed only dried figs softened in water. A goose has a strong immune system and it’s fairly easy to pull its beak open and force-feed it, allowing for less manpower—but these days, to eliminate even this work, the part in the brain that regulates appetite is removed. All you have to do is paralyze the goose, connect electrodes to the base of its brain, and turn on the electricity. Afterward you cage the goose under artificial lighting and it continues to eat, deep in its hallucinations. Within a week the goose is as fat as if it’s been fed for a month, and so is its liver. If you take out its eyes, you can fatten it up even more.

I rush out of the kitchen and run into the bathroom. It’s as if an eyeless, hallucinating goose is pacing behind me, eating endlessly under artificial lights. I vomit. A sourness rushes up. If you give a goose an egg-shaped rock, it will nestle and protect it without any suspicion. It will look after anything as one of its own, even a cloth doll. Geese develop a continuous attachment to the object they first encounter—the imprinting phenomenon is especially strong in a goose. A gosling develops an unconditional attachment with the first moving object it sees. It could be its mother or a sibling, a cat or a dog, a person or a motorcycle or
a tractor. Even if it is the wrong focus of attention, the goose can’t put an end to its unrequited courting. I throw up once more and press the toilet lever with irritation.

You don’t have the right to handle foie gras if you’re imagining quacking geese following a tractor around. You’re a useless artist who has lost all objectivity toward your model. I wash my hands with soap several times and return to the kitchen. I place the foie gras in the center of the dish, then place cold steamed asparagus on a diagonal. I once thought that if love were tangible, it would be a truffle or asparagus. Things that push through the ground. I shake my head. Asparagus has to be cut and eaten when it sprouts in the spring, while it’s tender. If you leave it alone, it quickly turns into a large, fuzzy leaf, growing into a thick pole too big to grip. Asparagus continues to grow even after you cut it, though slowly. If it’s true that I’ve changed, my thoughts on the food and my fingers on the butcher block will be even colder, even more detached. Unlike the kitchen, the world is filled with things I can’t control.

I spear a leftover piece of foie gras and hand the fork to Chef, asking with my eyes how it is. Chef puts it into his mouth and chews, nods once. I put the plate on the pass. Manager Park comes and quickly takes it away—foie gras has to be eaten warm. I’m done for now. I think I have time to take a five-minute break, but I double back just as I’m about to leave the kitchen. If black caviar is the dream of gourmets, foie gras was born from human desire and pleasure. Horatius once said that liver is the seat of passion, the home to sensual love and wrath. I stick the last piece of foie gras into my mouth and hide it under my tongue. I press my lips together and push it down.

CHAPTER 23

WHEN I WATCH gorgeous women mingling, I think I can understand Seok-ju. He wouldn’t have been able to tear his eyes off Se-yeon, a yellow daffodil in dark soil, standing with her head tilted down as if to convey that she didn’t want to be noticed in a crowd of people. He would have met her gaze. There’s nothing shocking about a young architect with a promising future falling in love with a beautiful former model. There just shouldn’t have been a woman called K between them. The architect should have met the model before he met K. Because he was the first man that K had loved, he—they—should have been more understanding, should have been more cautious about their love. There are rules even when you wrench a toy away from a young child. I nod along to the soft techno music that sounds like sorrowful weeping. The people who have gathered today for
Wine & Food
’s ten-year anniversary party are mostly owners of the best restaurants or companies that import wine or cheese. But there may be even more models and celebrities and stylists and designers. Every time I meet the eyes of the
tall and thin and beautiful, wearing great clothes and a mist of strong perfume, I feel my pupils widen as if I’m a man looking at gorgeous women.