Hungry Woman in Paris

by Josefina López

  “Ay Dios, ay Dios, oh God, oh God,” I whispered in ecstasy.

  “Oh Allah, oh Allah,” he grunted in between humps. God by any name in the heat of passion is still God.

  Two weeks after I had sex with Mohammed his mother figured out my age and the fact that I was American and said she didn’t like me hanging around. Mohammed had to come over to my apartment during the time Altair was working. One day I came to the apartment with him and we found her crying.

  “Altair, what’s wrong?” I called to her, making hand gestures. She looked up and I introduced her to Mohammed. Mohammed said something and she smiled with recognition. They began a conversation that I could not understand, but I was happy that Mohammed knew several Arab dialects; he’d grown up hearing them in the banlieue.

  “Au revoir,” Altair said in her heavy accent and left the room to give us privacy, but Mohammed remained disturbed. He was silent for a while and did not respond to my caresses.

  “Why did you interfere with her life?” he asked me, shaking his head.

  “Her husband was abusive. She needed to escape. She needed to experience life and have a baby—” I blurted out.

  “Baby?” He raised his eyebrows.

  “I mean her health was bad and she needed to get out or it would kill her—”

  “What are you saying? Who are you talking about?” He asked perplexed.

  “Luna—I mean Altair,” I corrected myself. “She asked me for help and she finally had the strength to leave and I had to help her escape and she wanted my help!” I talked rapidly, trying to get Mohammed to understand, until he walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders so I would stop talking and listen.

  “You had no right to interfere. You had no right to do what you did!” he scolded me.

  “She asked for my help. She was desperate. I had to help. I didn’t want her to die!” I yelled and started crying. He shook his head violently and practically spat at me.

  “You egotistical American! Can’t you respect other people’s cultures! What gave you the right to impose your American views about what women should think and be?” I couldn’t believe how sexist he was. Yes, I knew he was an Arab, but I thought he was acculturated and a modern Arab-Frenchman.

  “What about equality? What the hell are you fighting for? Oh, yeah, equality for Arab men!”

  “Mais de quoi tu parles? T’es folle!” he exploded. What are you talking about? You’re crazy!

  I yelled back and pointed him to the door. He was about to say something when I shook my head and kicked him out.

  I waited for Altair to come back that night, but she never did. In my dreams she would come in through the door and explain that she’d run into a friend. I would wake up and see if she was back, but only her belongings were still there. Had Mohammed found her and convinced her to go back to her husband? Had she been deported? Had she killed herself? I walked around the arrondissement looking for her at night, but she had vanished. Maybe she went to the Turkish embassy in the neighborhood and turned herself in. I kept imagining every scenario, and all the answers I came up with were more frightening than the last.

  One day I arrived at the apartment building and saw police officers interviewing Madame Bodé. She had been robbed; all her jewels had been stolen. She cried as she explained that she’d stepped outside for only an hour and someone had broken into her apartment.

  Several neighbors came down to pay their condolences and informed the police that two Arab girls had knocked on their doors, asking for someone. They kept changing the name of the person they were asking for as they went down the floors, and since Madame Bodé was not home they or someone else working with them broke into her apartment. I imagined Mohammed wearing Madame Bodé’s gold necklaces with his rapper look, but I erased the picture from my mind. I walked quickly past the scene and Madame Bodé took the opportunity to tell the police officers about all the suspected sans-papiers living upstairs who might be responsible for this.

  “We are sorry,” one officer explained in French, “but we are not connected with Immigration and are not authorized to search for sans-papiers.”

  I stayed in my room, frozen in self-pity. I felt so sad and lonely, even sadder than Edith Piaf on her deathbed… Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but that was the worst I had ever felt in my life. Luna’s suicide became Altair’s assumed suicide and I hadn’t been able to save either one of them. I couldn’t even rescue myself from the abyss of depression I was sliding into. Not knowing what had happened to Altair was worse than knowing that she’d died at the hands of her husband or by her own hands. I felt ashamed for interfering with Altair’s life. I cried for hours, until my eyelids burned. I wanted to drink, but then I realized that since I’d gotten to Paris I drank every time I felt pain. Had I become a high-functioning alcoholic without even noticing it? The saddest part was that this realization didn’t stop me from drinking. I drank a bottle of wine and when I reached the bottom of it I thought I heard Altair calling out my name to buzz her in. I went out to the balcony and looked down. There was no Altair. I wondered how it would feel to jump off the balcony. Would my spirit fly out of my body as it was falling and crashing to the pavement? As drunk as I was, I knew that if I ever committed suicide it would be painless. Why kill yourself painfully when the whole point of dying is to escape pain?

  I remembered trying to talk Luna out of committing suicide a couple of times. She would begin to describe the hot bath she would make for herself, as her final resting place. I would try to convince her that she could have a wonderful life even if she couldn’t have children. I felt sad that all she wanted was to have children, she had found her reason for living, and here I was a fertile, healthy woman who never wanted to have kids, feeling sorry for myself because I had lost my passion for life.

  I got up and my hands, independent of my body, were turning the water knobs in the bathtub. Or was it La Calaca Flaca inside of me doing it? I looked around the room, searching for her. Why wasn’t she here to remind me that I wanted to die? Maybe because at that moment I didn’t need to be reminded… because I really wanted to die. I stared at my hands doing what felt natural to them. I searched in the medicine cabinet and found Rosemary’s sleeping pills. This was the first time I had seen them, but my hands knew they were there. I swallowed the first pill. Painless. I took the next one and a smile slipped out of me. I swallowed a third and I was horrified inside to see how peaceful my face looked. Then, finally, when I swallowed the fourth one, a tear slipped out. I prepared my hot bath and got in the tub. I felt like I was already floating out of my body, but I imagined people criticizing me for trying to imitate Jim Morrison. I wasn’t even a fan, but people might make that comparison. I hadn’t even gotten to see his tomb in Père-Lachaise while I was here in Paris—on earth, I told myself.

  I felt so relaxed, and my eyes began to close. I saw Luna coming to my side and presenting a letter to me. I was sinking and my hands could not reach up. She smiled at me and asked me, “Aren’t you going to read it?” I opened my eyes and she was not there. I got a flashback of being in Chef Sauber’s bathroom. Luna had been in the mirror holding a letter. Luna had left a letter for me. That was the letter Tía Lucia had passed to my mother at the wake. I jumped out of the bath and called my mother for the first time in almost eight months.

  The phone rang a couple of times before my mother picked up.

  “¿Sí?” she answered.

  “It’s Canela,” I announced.

  “¡Que milagro!” she said sarcastically. “To what do I owe this miracle?”

  “Hello, Mama.”

  “I carried you in my womb for nine months and you don’t call me in eight months? That’s not right,” my mother said, beginning her guilt trip.

  “Did Luna—?” I was about to ask when my mother cut me off.

  “So how are you?” she asked, completely disregarding my urgency.

  “I’m ah… I was calling—”

  She cut me off again. “I ha
ven’t been feeling well. I’ve been so worried about you—”

  I cut her off this time. “Ama, I was calling to ask you if—?” I tried asking.

  “You don’t do this to your mother. You don’t just get up and go and not call for months—” she admonished me before I cut her off again.

  “Did Luna leave me a letter?”

  My mother was silent for a moment. “Who told you? Did your sister tell you? She promised she wouldn’t say anything!”

  “She didn’t tell me. Luna did,” I replied.

  “Ay, ay, ay, I knew that Luna would figure out a way to let you know. She was always too clever for her own good,” my mother recalled.

  “Tell me what the letter says!” I demanded.

  “No. You come back to Los Angeles and I will give you the letter!” she shot back at me.

  “I will never forgive you for this,” I told her and hung up. I was so angry with her I vomited. My body went into convulsive vomiting and out came the pills dissolved in my bile. I was so pissed I couldn’t go through with the suicide because I had to live to go get that pinchi letter and find out what it said!

  “Wanting to die is not normal,” an overentitled white male college friend had once told me—he who didn’t have a concern or any kind of social responsibility to make a difference in the world. I knew I was missing whatever chemicals in his brain were overflowing… I always knew I was not normal; the thought of being normal kills me.

  SUPERIOR CUISINE

  CHAPTER 16

  Spanish Omelette

  After ten weeks away from cooking school I was looking forward to socializing with Americans again. Sage hadn’t returned any of my phone calls after our night out. Bassie filled me in on the rumors about Sage in the courtyard, before I started Intensive Superior. Sage had been spotted by Françoise, also rumored to have been involved with all the chefs, on a romantic rendezvous with Chef Sauber. Chef Sauber’s soon-to-be ex-wife—it turned out they weren’t yet divorced and she was trying to mend things with him—found out about Sage and made it into a big scandal, getting her kicked out of school.

  “But I heard from Henry that he saw her doing an internship at a three-star restaurant,” Bassie added. “I think Chef Sauber got it for her.” I nodded my head in agreement with Bassie and said a silent prayer of thanks that my name had not been mentioned in the scandal.

  “So what have you been up to?” Bassie asked.

  “Just working on my French,” I lied, sparing her the details of my depressing life. I excused myself and sat in the demonstration room, waiting for my intensive course to begin. I had been warned that the students in this particular class were highly competitive because they were attempting to do in fifteen weeks what the regular students do in thirty. Despite the warning, I was looking forward to meeting my new classmates and hoping to make a friend or two. A group of students came in and some joked around, speaking Spanish. One was from Argentina and another, named Miguel Angel, was from Mexico. A Spanish woman named Pepa, who seemed like she should be in an Almodóvar film with her erect nose and witty comebacks, and a Spanish girl named Bianca, who acted like Chicken Little, said “Hola” to me and welcomed me to their group. Minutes later another woman from Peru came in. I introduced myself to her in Spanish and she told me her name was Blanca. She was dark and indigenous-looking with large brown eyes and a smile that sparkled like the sun. There was also a short student from Greece named Alexandros with spiky blond hair, and a student from Israel named Akiva who was too tall to be in a small kitchen.

  An American student sat behind me and introduced himself as Richard. “But call me Dick—I prefer that,” he said kindly, revealing a Tennessee accent. He was small-framed and looked like he couldn’t hurt an ant. One minute before class was to start another American, Craig, ran in taking deep breaths. On any other day his good looks and defined jaw would have gotten him the admiration of all the women, but since his plane had arrived late his whole schedule had been thrown off. He was jet-lagged and as frazzled as a cat left out in the rain.

  Chef Papillon, who reminded me of Popeye, and who hopefully didn’t remember me from my horrible hollandaise sauce experience, welcomed us in French to Intensive Superior Cuisine. Akiva looked to his classmates and asked in a Hebrew-accented English, “Where is the translator?” Chef Papillon reminded him in French that Superior is not translated. Akiva got up from the back and sat in the front row next to me, because he assumed I spoke French.

  “In Superior Cuisine we will be doing French dishes with influences from around the world,” he declared. I inspected the demonstration recipes and was appalled to see that the chef was going to demonstrate how to make guacamole with butter! We were also making salmon with Indian spices and spinach.

  When the dishes were done and I tasted the French guacamole I had to admit it was pretty good. I could never do this dish for my family and friends back in the United States, but it was rich and creamy.

  The class was dismissed and, to Craig’s horror, he and Blanca were the assistants for the week.

  I got to the practical room early and set up at my favorite cooking station. Dick came in after me and set up on the other side of the counter. We quickly did our prep routine and waited for the supplies to make their way up the elevator. Since Craig was tired I went ahead and started setting up the metal bowls and other people’s planchettes so everyone would have one when they arrived. Craig and Blanca distributed the supplies and the group was off and running at their usual pace. Blanca and I were new, so we tried to adjust to the pace and routine of this competitive group. Craig finally arrived in class and discovered that the space left for him was the worst station.

  “Oh, great.” He tried to set up and asked Dick, who was taking up a lot of space, to move down so that he could settle in.

  “No, I’m not going to move,” Dick said coldly.

  “I know you don’t want to move, but I have no space left,” Craig said nicely, trying to avoid a confrontation. The other students noticed Craig’s discomfort at being mistreated, but everyone was too busy to interfere.

  “Why don’t you move down to the corner?” Dick suggested with some annoyance at being interrupted. Craig shook his head and just moved down to the corner, too tired to debate.

  We finished the class and had another demonstration to go to for the day. I looked through my schedule and was shocked to discover that we were actually going to have four classes one particular day. From eight-thirty in the morning until nine p.m. I counted the recipes, knowing these were going to be five long weeks.

  In Superior the chefs were kinder; that didn’t tell you much, because if you had made it to Superior you had already proven yourself. My Intermediate class had been laid-back and had had a lot of newcomers, but in this group everyone aside from Bianca and me had worked at a restaurant or had professional cooking experience. Bianca was there because her parents wanted her to be in charge of their kitchen at their resort. Blanca was already a professional chef back in Peru and was just getting her diploma to work at better restaurants. She was calm, fast, and organized. I quickly became friends with her by asking her to be my mentor. Blanca was so generous with her advice and always tried to help me out.

  On the third day of class Bianca confided in me that she hated her station because Akiva always took up too much space. The guy just didn’t understand that even though he was so tall and had long arms, he wasn’t entitled to more space on the counter than everyone else. She had been having nightmares about him suffocating her. I told her to tell him to move and she cowered like a little bird and said she was scared to do it. I felt sorry for her and switched stations with her. I set up my planchette and my supplies at the center of the counter and began my work. Akiva always came in late and was the first to finish. He took a lot of pride in doing that. So he set up next to me and told me to move down the counter.

  “No. I’m not going to move. This is exactly where I am supposed to be,” I said assertively.

&nb
sp; “You’re too close—I have no room,” he insisted. I knew he was trying to be a gentleman about it, but being nice didn’t make him right.

  “You see this line in the marble?” I asked. “This line indicates that this is exactly the center. Since there are five people on this counter, the third person should be right in the center of the line. Do the math and you’ll see.” It was like I was defending Texas before it was stolen from Mexico. Akiva stopped requesting that I move. The next day he stationed himself on my right side, thinking he would get more room there. The guy was like an octopus, chopping meat and slicing vegetables with no grace at all. Next to him I looked like a ballerina. I know you’ve heard me complain about the space, but they put us in an unfair situation: fourteen people in a tiny kitchen. It’s just very bad planning by the architects, who had no clue about cuisine or people’s tempers when things in the kitchen get too hot. There wasn’t even a place for the chef to station himself and taste the sample dishes. They would probably argue that working in a tiny hole was part of the education.

  The fact that six of the students in our tiny class were Spanish speakers made most of us close, like a community. We joked in Spanish and cussed in Spanish, and whenever we needed something everyone in our little group would share. Craig mostly kept to himself, feeling completely left out. I spoke to him in English and tried to help him along. He kept burning his food and I couldn’t believe he had actually placed number one in his Intermediate class. Later, when he got to know me better and trusted me, he revealed that there had only been five students in his class.

  “I’m a food whore. I’ll do anything for caviar, truffles, and champagne,” Craig said, and I knew we would be friends for life.

  I befriended everyone in class and realized that, in this group, I had no chance of placing, so I might as well enjoy it and not stress out about my scores or the things the chefs told me. I was determined that no matter what the chefs said I was going to finish and get that diploma and relish the experience. I decided I would laugh at how bad my food was instead of taking it personally.