Tongue (16 page)
Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo
Chef plays with a crystal water glass sitting on the desk, his face expressionless. I watch his large, darkened left hand holding the glass. A hand that has been broken and sewn and cut. The hand I’ve been looking up to since I was twenty, the hand that moved efficiently and effectively in the kitchen. Chef picks up a teaspoon and stirs the water in the glass. Even water moves if you stir it, he says. When I stop, the water’s going to continue swirling like a little hurricane for a while. I mean, what would happen if everything stopped? He swallows hard. I wonder if it’s hard for him to vocalize a simple thought, just as it’s hard to make a simple dish.
You know the foods that make you feel better when you eat them? The kind of food that gives you pure joy? I want to make a list of happiness
. Chef stops talking. As if to say, I’m doing this, whether you help me or not. I stay there a little longer, then leave the office and go up the stairs.
A list of happiness.
Is that even possible? I look out the picture window as people come into Nove, study the menu, look toward the kitchen in anticipation of the food, stare into each other’s eyes across a vase with a single violet in it. Nobody is silent in a restaurant. Everyone is smiling or talking or eating. Maybe the table was the birthplace of language. A repetitive gathering place for meals and routine activities is conducive to talking, to conversations. Food goes into a mouth and words come out of it, just like a door. Talking and tasting, expressions of desire, happen in the mouth, on the tongue, and the mouth is the entrance to our bodies, revealing who we are.
The restaurant is filled with upbeat, happy chatter. Red lips, swollen in expectation of warm food and words, float, cloudlike. People move closer, whispering secrets and eating and feeding one another food. When you whisper and eat, the tip of your
tongue, glistening with saliva, peeks out, sparkling like a red jewel. If you touch the roof of your mouth with your tongue and sing,
lalalala
, your bones vibrate with the sound. This gleeful clamor erupts when you eat something delicious.
Now I remember the cookbook I wanted to write—food that brings positive change, the vivid sensations and tastes and textures of my youth, the scents of memories and the stories behind them. Once I wanted to write a book similar to Chef’s. Back then, I whispered and talked and ate and drank and laughed like all the others. I sat close to friends in small circles, like winter bees trying to survive the cold. Am I certain we loved each other? Happiness comes through the mouth, but the mouth is also the doorway through which it walks out. If you lock the door to your body from the inside, the inner darkness traps you. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t keep promises, the mouth is merely a dark, lightless cave.
I OPEN MY FRONT DOOR and Mun-ju pokes her head out from behind the pocket door. I pause, taken by surprise. It’s been a long time since someone greeted me when I got home. In January, when I was in bed for ten days, Mun-ju wrote down the contact information for the hospital Uncle was in and made a copy of my keys, saying, So this won’t happen again. I’m not bedridden anymore but something in me is shattered. Even if something disappears it isn’t completely gone. After Paulie’s death I’ve become more attuned to sound. I’m not scared by big noises, like the sound of thunder or lightning or fireworks. But the sound of rain coasting down the windows, the door closing, the fridge whirring, a few grains of rice falling to the floor, my own breathing—I feel those more immediately than the pounding of a drum. And the sounds I hear—Paulie’s slow footsteps, his sniffing, his breathing. One night, when Paulie’s death finally sank in, his sounds wounding me, I had to stifle my moans. Paulie used to give a single bark when the wind rustled the leaves, when he sauntered into the yard, when I brushed my
teeth, when the blender was whirring, when I was grinding coffee beans. I keep brushing my teeth even after they’re clean, in the darkness, to feel Paulie coming up to me and pressing his wet nose on the back of my knees.
Yeah, I remember. We shared something deep, something fundamental. Right, Paulie?
Now I run alone on the track at night.
Everything in this world, including those long dead, makes noise. But I can’t tell even Mun-ju that Paulie runs next to me, his teeth suppressing his panting.
“Exercise is fine and good, but not right before you sleep.”
“It was always at this time.”
“What?”
I stay quiet.
“Oh, right. That’s true.” Mun-ju nods.
I get up and boil water and steep some lavender. We sit on the sofa, side by side. Mun-ju has just returned from a week in Venegono Superiore, a small town about an hour from Milan, for a special feature about slow food. If you take the train from there and travel south for two hours, you arrive in Tuscany. The last time I went to Italy through Nove’s program, I learned how to butcher pigs and cattle, observing butchers for three weeks. It was a unique chance, but when the most renowned butcher in the region pulled out the backbone of a pig lying on its side, with a flourish, I let out a surprised shriek, so I lost the opportunity to learn more. The butcher’s glare was cold and jagged, reproachful. The way Chef looked at me if I made a mistake at the chopping block as a novice.
“Are you already done with the article?”
“The issue’s already out. But it’s not that interesting.”
“What isn’t?”
“This slow-food movement.”
“Didn’t it come from the desire to live at a slower pace?”
“Yeah. You ride a bike instead of driving a car, you take naps
in the afternoon, and you cook the fruit and vegetables from your garden.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You have too much time to think.”
“You don’t like that?”
“A happy person doesn’t have that much to think about.”
We laugh. A bitter laugh, as if to acknowledge that we are far from being happy.
“How are things?” Mun-ju asks.
“Fine, I guess.”
“I stopped by Nove yesterday afternoon for a cup of tea but you weren’t there. Where were you?”
Yesterday afternoon I met Mr. Choe at the Shilla Hotel café. “He asked if I wanted to move to a different kitchen.”
Mun-ju doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“He’s going to open a restaurant.”
“Chef is opening another one?”
“No, Mr. Choe.”
“Mr. Choe from Mido?”
“Yeah.”
“So is he scouting you?”
I don’t answer. Was that what he meant? Mr. Choe said that he was going to renovate a two-story wine bar into an Italian restaurant. The location is great and so is the salary he mentioned, much more than what I make at Nove. He said that I would be sent overseas to learn about food for one month every year. Every cook who starts the day peeling hundreds of potatoes wants this, and, unless your dream is to run your own restaurant, this is the best—and rarest—opportunity. I smiled at Mr. Choe. He said, We should keep this quiet from Chef for the time being. He wetted his lips and added, When you get to my age, you start wanting a cook. Your own cook.
A chef prefers customers that keep him on his toes. You
ignore the customer who orders steak well-done or the person who asks for chicken. People who don’t know what they’re eating order chicken at Italian restaurants. Those who eat well-done steak don’t appreciate the taste of meat. Gourmets want something that’s not on the menu. They eat only plump Cornish hens or castrated roosters or the choice parts of a whole roasted duck. They want swan, as if it’s the eighteenth century. They understand that taste is triggered by the sense of touch, through the lips, and they want to have a mouth longer than the beak of a crane, to enjoy the ecstasy of food sliding down to their intestines. Cesare Ripa’s
Crapula
satirizes the fat stomachs and crane necks of extreme pleasure seekers. Food lovers ignore even death threats when it comes to something they want to eat. The possibility of death is why gourmets love blowfish. If you put a thin piece of blowfish—sliced so thin that the cook’s fingerprint is visible—in your mouth, your lips redden and heat up and tremble from the fear and excitement of death. Your spirits rise and saliva pools in your mouth. Finally a childlike smile spreads across your face.
The obsession over food is tenacious. The eighteenth-century writer Nicholas-Thomas Barthe, who wrote
Les Fausses Infidélités
, had the habit of eating everything on the table. Barthe did not have good eyesight and was fearful that he wouldn’t be able to see all the food and might miss some of it. He would hound his servants, asking, Have I eaten this? Have I eaten that? He died from indigestion. King Darius, who liked beef, put up curtains to hide from the others as he ate an entire cow. Balzac, a coffee addict, drank forty to fifty cups a day and died of gastritis. The philosopher Democritus, upon realizing that his life was coming to an end, deprived himself each day of one food until there was only a jar of honey left. He stuck his nose in the jar and smelled the honey, and as soon as the jar was taken away, he died, at the age of 109.
President Mitterand had the most extreme obsession with ortolan, a bird on the verge of extinction and illegal to eat. In 1995, knowing he didn’t have much time left before he died of cancer, Mitterand invited friends to a New Year’s Eve dinner. The main course was ortolan. This bird, which signifies purity and the love of Jesus, was considered the best dish in the world, and after it’s roasted in the oven you put the entire thing in your mouth, on your tongue, when it’s still very hot. You enjoy the feeling of the fat spilling down your throat, and as it cools, you start crunching on the bird’s head and the crunch rings in your ears rhythmically. That night, Mitterand broke the tradition of eating only one bird per person and ate two. The next day he couldn’t keep anything down and soon passed away—ortolan became his last supper.
The worst kind of gourmet is the one who tries to fulfill his perverse sexual desires with food. Such people do not truly love food. True gourmets understand that the mingling of curiosity and fear produces a heightened joy. They try to taste the new and revere beauty and deliciousness. Great chefs exist behind such gourmets.
“So what did you tell him?”
“That I’d just stay at Nove.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want anything more.”
“That’s an odd way to say it. Just say you like Nove.”
“Yeah, I want to stay there.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think that was the right thing to do?” I ask.
“I do.”
“You know, to Chef.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.”
“I think that would be best.”
“The rainy season has been going on for so long.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
“After the peak season, how about we go somewhere for a few days?”
“… Sure.”
“Where should we go?” Mun-ju goes into the bathroom, yawning. From my dresser, I take out a cotton T-shirt and pajama pants for Mun-ju and place them on the table. I pick up the heavy bag she’d flung onto the floor. The July edition of
Wine & Food
is sticking out.
She said it was about Italy
. I flip through the pages. The days when I worked from morning to night for eleven months at Nove and then took the last month off to wander through Italy eating and learning feels like a dream. My hand pauses from flipping the pages. I turn a few back.
A familiar face.
People I know.
I hear water running in the bathroom.
On the “Special Interview” page, a man and a woman sit on a long U-shaped butcher block, wearing matching white shirts and jeans and bright smiles. Their arms are around each other’s shoulders and their feet may be swinging.
I know them. I can’t really read the title.
I think it says
Lee Se-yeon’s new cooking class
and maybe also
a modern kitchen built by the young architect Han Seok-ju
. The magazine is snatched out of my hands.
Mun-ju, what is this?
I ask silently. Mun-ju’s eyes waver uncertainly like someone caught trying to hide something, welling with tears.
No, no
. I shake my head.
Don’t cry, just tell me. Tell me the truth. I don’t want to be the last to know. Tell me, Mun-ju
.
Silence doesn’t flow, it spreads. Like the rings in a pond when you throw a rock, it gets bigger and bigger and finally ripples throughout all of space. And it skims the body like a spasm.
IT’S NOT EMBARRASSING to be injured in the kitchen, but cutting your finger is not a good way to start your morning. I slit the first section of my pinky as I cut up a chicken. I don’t even remember sharpening the knife. I brush over the blade. It’s dull. In a chaotic kitchen where many people have to work together, bumping into each other, you have to keep your knife a little dull, unlike in your home kitchen. If the knife is too sharp you can seriously injure yourself if you don’t pay attention for a split second. You don’t really need a sharp knife unless you have to handle poultry or do delicate work with vegetables. I’m embarrassed, not that I cut my hand in the kitchen in front of everyone, but that I was hurt by such a dull blade.
You work with fire and knives in the kitchen, where small and large dangers lurk. The ideal place to hide a destructive instinct. I’m engulfed by this unstable urge as I watch red blood dripping onto the cutting board, feeling joy as if a frustration has disappeared. Or relief that this has stopped a bigger calamity. If there’s
no possibility of danger, I might not feel tense when I hold a knife.
Instead of bandaging my finger, I put it in my mouth. A metallic tang spreads in my mouth as if I licked steel. Maybe I should keep my knife sharper so I would use it more carefully and thoughtfully. I start grinding it on the sharpening stone in the corner of the table. When I’m very busy and I don’t have time to hone the knife, I just rub it against a sharpening steel a few times. But it’s always best to use a sharpening stone. Although it’s quicker to use the sharpening steel, the blade goes bad quickly.