The Bush Negro villages where we stayed were small communities of fewer than thirty people in wooden huts. The different carvings marked different tribal groups, each with slightly different languages. They lived on the river, or libi, which in their languages came from the word liba, which means life: they fished in it, travelled in it, washed in it, and the children played in it. The adults were reserved but the children were open and full of fun. They seemed very free and played in yard-long dugout canoes, developing boating skills that I could only dream of. They liked to find coves in the river with piranhas so they could plunge sticks into the water and watch the fish snap them in two.
As in Africa, whose societies they had imitated, it was important in the Bush Negro lands to act out very large displays of friendship to anyone encountered. Without this demonstration, you would arouse tremendous suspicion.
‘Fa weki!’ I would shout, my arms wide open, my face smiling.
The smile and gesture would be returned, larger than I could ever manage. ‘Yu de?’
‘Me de,’ I answered.
This conversation was repeated ten times in every village. How are you? – And you? – I’m fine.
At the centre of every Bush Negro village was a steel skillet more than a yard in diameter over a wooden fire. This was for making couac. It was made from bitter cassava root, the kind laced with a natural poison that indigenous people had used on arrow tips to shoot at intruders such as Christopher Columbus further up the island chain. The cassava root was soaked for a few days. Then it was grated and hung in a hemp press to squeeze out the poison. Dried into a flour, it was put in the skillet and gently stirred for a full day until it was reduced to little dry beige grains. Couac travelled well on the river and would keep for months. We ate it with every meal, absorbing the juices of whatever fish or game we cooked. I tried not to think how similar their use of couac was to the role of rice in Chinese food.
After dinner I would choose two trees to hang my hammock. Between snakes, lizards and mouse-size insects large enough to be spotted crossing a trail from twenty feet away, suspended from a tree was the only place I wanted to spend the night. Being on the equator, the Guianas have almost equal hours of daylight and darkness, meaning nights were very long – and very dark. The forest roared at night with birds, mammals and insects making so much noise that it seemed like one continuous scream. Since we camped by the riverbank, there was a break in the canopy and I could see up to a night sky so bejewelled with stars that it looked like mica schist in the sunlight. In bed with a bottle of rum and a cigar, I would gaze up at this wonder and feel content.
Next morning there would be couac for breakfast, sometimes with fish if anyone had caught one, then we would shove off in the first light of day. The river was the colour of satin-finished pewter, and trees on the opposite bank showed as black hulks above the thick white river mist. We left so early that by ten o’clock, when the sun had turned white hot, we had already been travelling for four hours and the guide would smile and announce, ‘Uh, c’est l’heure du premier punch,’ and I would concur and fix everyone their first punch of the day. Sometimes we would drag lines and pick up a fish for lunch or we would trade with villagers. We had rum, which was of great value because it was used as an offering to the spirits at little stone and wood altars called obiasanis in every village.
Once a Bush Negro of the Boni tribe supplied a skinned iguana. Like most exotic animals, it had that predictable resemblance to chicken. And of course we ate it with couac.
The Ndjukas went fishing and hunting at night and I asked to go with them, which they politely agreed to, though it was easy to see that they weren’t happy. They loaded a tiny two-man pirogue with fishing tackle and ammunition. These little dugouts shifted with every movement of your body. I knew I could not handle the large wooden-stocked antique rifle that fired with a kick like the right hook of a heavyweight champion. How, I wondered, could the rifle-bearer absorb that recoil and not capsize our unstable craft? It seemed hard enough to swing a lantern to find the reflection of eyes in the bush. I tried simply to land a small fish on a hand line and nearly capsized the three of us. After that they silently rowed back to camp and dropped me off – the rejected hunter.
They shot agouti; these small, cute rodents were too gamey in stews but their flavour was moderated by lots of couac. They also shot tapir, a delicious animal that tasted like pork in a rich stew with couac and was big enough to last for days. Tapir was an endangered species but we were eating a lot of endangered species – to people who live in the rainforest, they themselves are the only species that is in danger.
Along the river with its cooling breezes, fuchsia water hyacinth bloomed on the water’s surface. The trees on the bank were flecked with yellow and blue from flitting butterflies, and the black ebony trees, known locally as gringon fou or wild fantasy tree, had bright yellow leaves that glowed in the distance. In the hot light it looked like a green fauvist canvas of dazzling beauty.
But when we pulled over to the shore, we entered a world of complete hostility. After we sank into the mud, stinging flies attacked us and butterfly-like creatures dropped stinging darts; the grass had razor-sharp edges that cut our legs and if you lost your balance and grabbed a branch, chances were it had sharp thorns or thistles or was covered with some type of aggressive insect. Everything seemed to single out the photographer for attack and he was becoming red-eyed, swollen, itchy and grumpy. Sooner or later, every outsider who ventures into the green hell, from Sir Walter Raleigh to escaping French political prisoners to curious European Union officials, cries out, ‘Damn this place!’
The Ndjuka boatmen made their only mistake at Abounasanga falls, a treacherous stretch of white water and rocks. We had ventured beyond Ndjuka territory into the protected area of the Vayana Indians, and at one point the pirogue was see-sawing on a pile of rocks in the middle of the river. We all jumped out into the shallow water. The dugout could not be rocked out of this situation because the log would split and that would be the end of our return ticket. So carefully and anxiously, following instructions from the two boatmen, we lifted it back into the water and were on our way. ‘Danki, Danki!’ – Thank you! Thank you! – we gratefully cheered.
The Indians lived in thatched structures built above the ground on stilts. The grouchy swollen photographer, who did not like the Bush Negroes because they were camera shy, absolutely hated the Indians, who completely refused to be photographed. He cursed them and barked at them but they kept their faces hidden from his lenses.
Trading was more difficult here. Alcohol was forbidden by the French and devastating to the Indians. But I had my cigars. I traded a Montecristo for one of their hand-rolled leaf smokes, and we agreed that I had the worse of that trade. More cigars yielded some fish to cook up with the couac we had brought. When it was time to go, the four-foot chief spoke with a gentle, soft voice to the French guide, who translated for me. We could leave but they had decided to kill the photographer. With heartfelt candour I explained to him that they couldn’t because I wanted to kill him myself, which the leader understood and we quickly shoved off.
As we headed swiftly downriver, the dark water rushing towards the Atlantic, my mind turned to dreams of banal things – a drink that had been chilled in a refrigerator, a bed to stretch out in, a shower, air-conditioning. I would not go to my favourite game restaurant in Cayenne. I was through with game. Instead, my fantasies turned to Chinese food in St Laurent. I would order the duck. With imported rice, not couac.
Speciality of the House
SIMON WINCHESTER
Simon Winchester is the author of twenty-three books, including The Surgeon of Crowthorne (also published as The Professor and the Madman), Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World and The Map that Changed the World. His most recent book is The Man Who Loved China. His Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories will be published in late 2010, and The Alice Behind Wonderland in early 2011. Simon was made Officer of the Order of th
e British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006. When not travelling, he divides his time between a farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts and a flat in Chelsea, New York.
Seldom has anything that I have written over the years ever brought forth from readers a truly violent reaction. Of course, like any scrivener, I manage from time to time to get things wrong, and people have sent notes, couched in tones kindly or occasionally less charitable, to correct me. A few people get quite rude. And to be sure, once in a very long while, things have become a little more heated.
One book I wrote was so loathed by a particular critic that he said he wanted nothing more than to drop-kick it out of his back garden. And once I offended so many people in the Cayman Islands that a group called the Tradewinds wrote a calypso about me with a charmingly melodious chorus that included the words: ‘If you get a dog call it Rover; if you get a cat name it Tabby; if you get a parrot call it Polly; but if it come to pass that you get a jackass, call it Simon Winchester’. (The calypso, by the way, got to Number Three in the Caymanian hit parade, and is still whistled at me by cheeky reception clerks when I check in to hotels in George Town.)
But, as I say, generally speaking, nothing truly awful, nothing violent. No hexes or public curses. No threats of enforced exile or public maiming.
Until, that is, one day in the early 1990s, when I wrote a perfectly innocent little essay about the time I ate a dog.
It was, as I recall, an unexceptional and not very pretty yellow dog, of the sort one sees in the outback of Australia. It might have been called a dingo, or a close relative of a dingo, and was not the sort of animal upon which one wished to heap affection. But I am getting ahead of myself here, so powerful is the memory. First things first.
I was in Korea, and it was a cold and rainy day in late March. I had been walking in the hills to the south of Seoul with a friend, a Mr Kim, who was at the time a similarly keen hiker. We had been up since before dawn, and were by now wet through and weary of the day, when my friend – a former soldier in the Korean army who was acting as my translator – suggested that we adjourn for a good and warming lunch. He said he knew a place.
So, after a further half-hour of walking, we turned down from the hills and emerged from the trees at the head of a narrow valley where there was a village, and beside its rain-swollen stream a small market. It was far from impressive: it was little more than a network of muddy lanes lined with stalls and display cabinets and with what appeared to be cages, all protected from the sheeting rain by sheets of plastic.
Eventually, after a minute or two of head-scratching, he found the inn that he had said he knew and liked. Its owner seemed to be a large and very boisterous and motherly woman, the kind you might find in a Dickensian grog shop, and the two of them beckoned to me to come to their stall, and to an entrance behind it. To get inside we dived behind some more sheets of dripping plastic, and then squeezed through a tiny entrance into what seemed to be a hidden room lined with walls made of plaited straw. It was quite dry here, and nicely warm. Three or four of the tables were occupied; it wasn’t terribly noisy, just the normal buzz of amiable conversation. Most of the customers were men, and most were smoking. There was a cosy fug about the place, of a kind already faded into the recent past.
Two bottles of Korean beer had been placed waiting on the table, and as we sat down and started unlacing our walking boots and taking off our dripping anoraks and sou’westers, so the owner-lady, who was introduced with much smiling and bowing as Mrs Kim, inevitably, wafted in with two earthenware bowls of steaming soup. ‘Poshin-tang!’ she declared, brightly, and gave us each one of the long narrow metal spoons that the Koreans like to use, and a pair of joined-up wooden chopsticks in a small red envelope. Another serving-wench, a lady as enormous and cheery as the first, then deposited a range of bowls and saucers with salt and beans and pickles and rice – and kimchi, of course – around the soup bowls, and retired to an ante-room as we tucked in.
And my word, what soup! Hot and spicy and as curiously strong as those mints. There were pieces of ginseng and sweet radish and onion and garlic and chunks of a rich meat that somehow out-beefed any beef I knew. The soup steamed and raged, almost bubbling with energy. After a few spoonfuls, all the chill of the drear outside retreated, and suddenly there was fire inside and I felt as though I had been plugged-in to some kind of battery charger and was in an instant just good and ready to hurl myself outside to take on the elements once again.
I chugged my beer and spooned down more and more soup, my insides now ablaze and my vitals back in full working order, and all the muscle aches vanished clear away. I must have become different in aspect too, because my soldier-guide Kim leaned over the table and remarked on the glow in my cheeks and said that he had just known I’d be happy in this place and that a bowl of poshin-tang would do the trick.
What was on earth was it? I asked him.
And he called out to Mrs Kim – who, no, was not so far as I was aware either his mother or his aunt or his wife, but just one of a host of five million Kims in a country that allows very few family names – and asked her to explain. At which point she opened a door in the straw wall of her little café, and there in the back was a cage, and in the cage was, of course, the aforementioned yellow dingo-type non-Australian dog.
I wish I could admit that I was shocked. But I wasn’t, not at all. I am as much of a caninophile as the next Englishman. I had a beagle at the time, name of Biggles, and I adored him as if he were my own child, almost. The thought of eating a soup made of any relative of Biggles, however distant, was theoretically just beyond repugnant. Or at least, it had been, before this. But now I felt somehow altered, curious, different. Drugged, maybe.
And so as Mrs Kim was showing me the dog, offering me the dog, I thought it all out to myself, one point at a time. This is what they do here – they eat dogs, just as some of us eat cows or pigs. This lunch is actually pretty delicious. And besides, I’m a writer and I’m supposed to try anything and everything (subject to the usual codes of morals and decency, I feel I must add). So yes, Mrs Kim, I nodded at her – hit me with it. Yes, Mrs K. More, please! And she winked, went back out into the kitchen, did something I don’t want to think about or ever imagine, and after a few moments returned grinning, and this time with an earthenware plate that was heaped with onions, rice and, layered on top of the mound, a dozen or so small oval slices of meat smothered in a richly aromatic gravy.
Medallions de chien Koreanoise. It could be nothing else. There must have been a moment’s hesitation, but no more than that. I picked up my chopsticks, and with the two unrelated Kims beaming from the sidelines, tucked in happily, finished the plate in five minutes flat, licked chops and sticks with equal vigour and then said to myself: I’ve just got to write about this.
And so I promptly did, 800 crisp words, and I faxed it off (this was during that strange limbo period before the birth of email but after the death of telex, when foreign correspondents like me had the damndest time sending copy around the world) to a small magazine I knew in London. After which (except for the moment a week or so later when the cheque came in, and a month or so later when a copy of the magazine itself followed) I forgot all about it.
Except that the editor, a gentle and fragrant lady – not herself a dog-owner, but an Englishwoman of some sensitivity – rang me up one day not long after publication. The letters, she said. You wouldn’t believe it. Hundreds and hundreds of them! Sacks full of letters. Never seen anything like it. Every day! Twice a day, special deliveries. Torrents of them. And every single one abusive! The worst language imaginable. Threats! Taunts! Warnings! You have to come here and read them – it is just wild!
And so I travelled down to London on the train from Oxford, and found my poor benighted editor-friend sitting woefully amidst a Vesuvian pile of envelopes and cards and Royal Mail sacks, unopened. We laughed at the sight, as much in terror as in joy, and then spent the rest of our day ploughing through the mail and
working hard to try to understand more fully the near mystical connection that apparently exists between the species Homo not especially sapiens Britannicus and Canis familiaris. I suspect you can imagine the tone of most of the correspondence: suffice to say, it could not in any way be described as fan mail, unless the fan was for fanning the flames of my funeral pyre.
Just one letter have I retained from this rather inglorious period of my journalistic career. It came from an elderly sounding gentleman in the seaside town of Bognor Regis, who signed himself both with his name and his army rank, which happened to be Major. Here it is, in full:
Dear Winchester:
I read your disgraceful article while on holiday in Spain. I have never in my life read or seen anything so dreadful. It caused me to vomit profusely. I had to end my holiday immediately and return to England.
I wish to tell you that I regard you, Sir, as a total scoundrel. If I ever encounter you in a street in London I promise you, Sir, that I will denounce you publicly and will then give you a sound thrashing with a horsewhip.
Major Ambrose Wilson.
His name I made up. The rest is true. I have happily never met the gentleman. But I have never eaten a dog since.
I did once eat a cat, though. Cat stew. It was given to me by a nun in West Africa. I wrote about that also. But no-one – not even the galloping Major – ever wrote in to complain.
Les Tendances Culinaires
DAVID LEBOVITZ
David Lebovitz is a pastry chef and baker from the San Francisco Bay Area, who worked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley for thirteen years. He is the author of five cookbooks, including The Perfect Scoop, a guide to making ice cream, and Ready for Dessert, a compendium of his all-time favourite desserts. He has been living in France for nearly a decade and penned a memoir (with recipes) called The Sweet Life in Paris, which chronicled his adjustment to living in a foreign land; the book was a finalist for an International Association of Culinary Professionals literary award. David also writes a popular blog, www.davidlebovitz.com, which features recipes, Paris travel tips and stories about coping with life in the world’s most popular – and sometimes perplexing – city.
A Moveable Feast Page 17
