Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Years ago in the feckless wanderings of a gap year I found myself travelling by bus in Bolivia. Or was it Ecuador? Somewhere, at any rate, with that standard Latin American mix of vertiginous mountain roads, a bus with no glass in its windows and bald tyres, impassive Indian women passengers in bowler hats, and a matinée desperado at the wheel who periodically removed both hands from it in order to groom his heroic coiffure in the driving mirror. My internal voice was long since hoarse with shrieking and I had lapsed into the numb fatalism that can only be interrupted by a very few major urgencies. One of these was now making it imperative that we stop in the next five minutes. I had already checked the reassuring wad of tissues in the pocket of my rucksack and was going forward to order the driver to pull up when we swung into a mountain village over a hen or two and stopped by a rambling shack calling itself a bar. I was out of the bus and through that bar like Road Runner, leaving twisters of dust behind me. My face was probably more communicative than my Spanish; at any rate I was directed straight to the back of the building where a privy stood with its door hospitably ajar. Springing inside and banging the door to I found the only light came from a hole in the floor: a crusted circle about a foot across. I was in no state to argue. Mere seconds later I was panting in that squatting position so familiar to desperate travellers, sweaty face on knees, in a blissful state of release. I was able only to take in that disaster had been averted by a whisker, that life would go on and for all I cared the bus could too, without me. Gradually my senses returned even as I fumbled for the tissues and began to take in for the first time the unsteady planks of the floor, the drone of bluebottles and – most interesting of all – the view beneath me. The hole of this jakes afforded the sight of a stupendous gulf of blue air: a vertical drop over a chasm so deep I might have been in a helicopter. A thousand feet below my dripping rump lay stained and wicked crags above which my eye caught the slow wheeling specks of vultures sizing up my offerings. It was the first time I had experienced vertigo in a lavatory. I left the hut a good deal more gingerly than I had entered it, now having the leisure to note its true nature as a place of easement cantilevered out on bleached poles over an abyss.

  What days! And what I wouldn’t give to be able to return to them, though less for the conventional reason of erotic adventuring when sap was high than because even fifteen years ago the prospects still seemed good for living a reasonably serious life in my native land. I looked forward to becoming neither a wage slave nor a tycoon. But that was before British culture slumped to an infantile consensus obsessed with cash and fashion. New Labour and wall-to-wall football have left only exile, the stoic’s way out. If one is not allowed to be serious one may as well emigrate. Even mockery is an art form requiring discipline and sacrifice.

  So now I sally forth from my pointless house above pointless Casoli with a song on my lips to do away with a privy I have just recognized as a spectre from my own, as much as from the house’s, past. Obviously the Ecuadorean and Italian peasantry had thought along the same lines when viewing a handy precipice. Why dig when the hand of nature has already dug for you? However, the gulf in this case is nowhere near as deep or as steep, and as I run a practised eye over the job I realize for the first time that this privy was never built out over anything but was merely an earth closet at the edge of a hillside terraced for vines and vegetables. Gradually the hillside has been eroded by winter rains and a minor earthslip some time ago has left the hut’s outer wall dangling and sagging over thin air. Good: it shouldn’t take long to complete the job and send the remains down into the cleared patch below, where I’ve made a start on reclaiming the terraces from the jungle that has buried them over the years of abandonment.

  Do you find that certain pieces of music automatically suggest themselves as the only possible accompaniment to particular tasks? Well, I do, although I can’t always say why. As I contemplate the murder of this hut I find myself locked into that dramatic scene where Massaro confronts the terrifying Brasi who has sold him poison to kill Don Antonio, Erminia’s guardian, who refuses to countenance Massaro’s courting her. But the poison hasn’t worked although Don Antonio’s hair has fallen out and his skin has acquired a curious metallic sheen. Being a man of lively intelligence he has become suspicious. In terror and fury Massaro returns to Brasi to protest that the poison he sold him has itself expired. ‘Vedi!’ he sings with a passion provoked by his impending arrest and Erminia’s taking the veil, ‘vedi la data indicata sul fondo del barattolo! Perfido! Oimè!’

  Decisively I insert the end of the crowbar between the hut’s floor and the ground and lever upwards with a fine gesture imitative of Massaro’s rage and passion. Unfortunately the floorboards are rotten and spongelike. Since I am standing a little higher than the hut I am flung forward by the unexpected lack of resistance and go crashing through the doorway itself, thudding against the far wall. There is a sudden lurch, a lot of noise and a confused tumbling, shot through with streaks of sunlight and bright pain. Silence. The world recedes and reapproaches, lulling like waves in tropical shallows. For a timeless period I am suspended, then unceremoniously cast up on dry land. When I open my eyes something terrible has happened and I am blind. I try some weak screaming but it hurts my side so I stop. I’m blind and going to die and the melodramatic effusions of halfwits like Massaro are not in the slightest bit consoling, any more than are the prospects of Hot Seat! selling a million. What do such trivia matter when I’m pinned to the earth and about to be pecked to death by the circling vultures? More time passes while I miserably drift, then without warning there is a neck-ricking wrench and the sensation of a lid being lifted. Light floods me. I can see again! It’s a miracle. ‘Un miracolo,’ I murmur weakly, like Erminia in Act 3 on discovering that her confessor is Fr Brasi, the ex-venefice who has now repented and taken holy orders. (They, I’m glad to say, are soon destined to elope, the nouveaux Héloïse and Abelard of pulp opera.)

  ‘No, Gerree, is no miracle.’ And there, with grisly inevitability, is Marta holding my hard hat which I suppose must have become jammed over my eyes by the fall. I notice – because in such moments of revelatory clarity one notices everything – she is also holding a bottle of Fernet Branca in the other hand. Poor dear, she simply can’t be parted from it. Awfully sad, really, what with her bogus musicianship as well. Still, in my present shocked and dishevelled state I experience an almost affectionate pang of neighbourliness towards her. Pretty lucky she was around, frankly. We’re a long way from civilization up here. I reach to pat her hand reassuringly but she misinterprets the gesture and holds the bottle to my lips with a murmured ‘Just a little, Gerree, if you must. Very bad for hospital.’

  I stop sucking at the pourer. ‘I’m not going to hospital,’ I protest. A dribble of Fernet runs down my chin. ‘I’m perfectly all right. Just a bit dazed, you know. Took a bit of a tumble.’

  ‘You asleep ten minutes.’

  ‘Oh nonsense. Just help me get – Ow!’ For as I sit up an interesting pain shoots through me. The phrase ‘cracked rib’ leaps into my mind. Thanks a million, God: that’s all I needed.

  ‘Maybe you break inside.’

  To the ironic the world is boilerplated with irony and I notice far overhead a pair of vultures twirling: buzzards, actually, but close relatives all the same. Their thin mewing drifts downwards, a feeble noise like kittens being wrung out which is so at variance with their supposed raptorial majesty. With some anguish and Maria’s brawny assistance I get to my feet. Already her alcohol is making my knees weak. I must have fallen a good half mile, to judge by how far overhead the plateau seems on which my house stands and which somehow has to be reached. Slowly and painfully we climb the path up the terraces. The pain eases somewhat, probably the effect of the Fernet, creating the illusion of my head floating upwards while a numb body plods below. At long last I slump into a chair in my kitchen.

  ‘Now I call ambulance,’ says Marta, looking around for the telephone.

  ‘You will do no
such thing,’ I tell her in my most commanding tone, which even to my ears sounds feebly buzzardish; Clark Kent emboldened by sherry. ‘As you can see, I’m perfectly fine, just a bit shaken and bruised. I shall retire to bed. Maybe you ought to do the same after your heroism. If tomorrow morning I’m at death’s door we may have to call in the sawbones, but not until then. I’m most grateful to you for your help, Marta, dear. That was a very neighbourly act. Thank you.’

  My quiet sincerity has its effect and she dimples at me.

  ‘Now I help you upstairs, Gerree.’

  ‘No,’ I say firmly, ‘that won’t be necessary at all.’ There are limits. I mean, where will it end? With her tugging off my intimi, as the Italians primly call underwear? She should be so lucky. Being helped out of one’s clothes by strangers is something the discriminating person reserves for Emergency Room staff, mortuary attendants and casual lovers. Ex-Soviet-bloc neighbours who try to get one drunk do not hack it. ‘Thank you all the same.’

  At last I persuade her to leave, which she does reluctantly after swapping phone numbers. It is agreed I shall call her if I need assistance and she will anyway come over in the morning to see if I’ve survived the night. We part with expressions of goodwill. When I discover that she has forgetfully left behind her bottle of Fernet I almost call her back. Having collected a few necessities I climb the stairs stiffly, but not before I’ve noticed through the window the grand new panorama left by the privy’s demise. This sends me quite cheerfully to my bed of convalescence. My methods may have been a little crude but the end has been achieved – a thought that enabled even the Creator to take a day off.

  13

  By the time Marta calls round next morning at ten I have long since been up and about. We Sampers bounce back. I have the piratical makings of a black eye, presumably where the edge of the hard hat caught me, and I am covered with raw scrapes and contusions as well as having a large purplish bruise beneath one armpit. But the damage is all superficial and I don’t believe any ribs are cracked after all. I also have a light headache as a reminder that I was knocked silly in the fall. Otherwise I am in fine if stiff fettle.

  ‘Gerree!’ she cries, and certainly her voice has no connection whatever with music. It goes right through your head like a bullet, leaving a track of gross tissue damage. ‘You are not bedding! Is very good. Look, I bring a break-fast. Yes. Is Voynovian food for dying.’ She produces what looks like a ball of putty wrapped in a sock. ‘Is kasha.’

  Kasha, I remember, is Russian buckwheat or bulgur or something. I associate it with that vegetarian restaurant chain in London where the bread is dark and dense, the flans look like coconut matting and flapjacks fall like paving stones to the pit of the stomach where they lie for a week fermenting. For days afterwards one’s underwear smells of silage. I raise the ball gingerly to my nose. It is covered in her fingerprints. Molasses again. And … can that be linseed oil? Maybe it really is putty.

  ‘Is very good with cream. We boil like that.’

  Ah. A sort of Voynovian haggis for terminal invalids. Just what I need.

  ‘It gives very strength to stiff body.’

  Once again I would swear there was a leer. Surely she can’t mean …? Even in Voynovia could there be such a thing as an aphrodisiac for convalescents? This woman is terrifying. I am below par this morning and before I can utter a squeak of protest she has barged to the cooker, plonked the ball in a pan of cold water and lit a burner under it. Then she opens the fridge and appears to make a scornful inventory. Eventually she picks out a pot of cream which she sniffs suspiciously. I admit that its pretty buff colour is deceptive. She is not to know that I have doctored it with cinnamon for a fabulous baked pears in cheese sauce recipe I’m perfecting.

  ‘You have no good food, Gerree,’ she says, slamming my fridge door shut. ‘Of course you are weak. You not eating food to make you strong with good meats. Is everything delicatessen food.’ This comes with real contempt.

  ‘Not enough kasha and shonka?’ I suggest satirically.

  ‘Is right.’

  She nods vigorously and particles of this and that fall from her mop of hair. Insects? Really, it’s all too much. It isn’t right for the survivors of crashed privies to be bullied in their own kitchen. She’ll pay for this, I swear. It’s obvious that to a person with her peasant’s interior a mere gallon of garlic ice cream is like a mouthful of bread or a coffee bean: something with which to clear the palate before going on to the next dish. I shall have to devise an offering that even she will interpret as the cuisine of contempt. Cuisine mépriseur. How can we have managed without this category for so long? But for the moment I’m saved by the bell (‘below par’, ‘saved by the bell’: you can see what writing about sport heroes does to one’s style). I mean the phone rings and it is Frankie, my agent in London. Given they’re an hour behind over there it’s bright and early for him and suggests urgency.

  ‘Do you know Nanty Riah, Gerry?’

  ‘It’s an Indonesian scuba resort?’ I hazard. ‘A disease? A dish?’

  ‘He’s the founder and lead singer of Britain’s number one boy band. Freewayz. Even you must have heard of them. You probably know him as Brill.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, he’s a fan of yours.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Apparently so. His agent rang last night to say that Brill has just been reading Downhill all the Way! and is, quote, “slammed” by it.’ Downhill, of course, was the book I wrote for Luc Bailly, the skier with the pop-up flag in his pants.

  ‘Ah. He wants the recipe for another love potion?’

  ‘That wasn’t what he said. According to his agent Brill has reached the difficult age, the pop star’s grand climacteric.’

  ‘Twenty-three?’

  ‘No, he’s actually just over thirty but keeps it secret. The point is, he’s extremely impressed by the way you made Luc seem a substantial figure even off-piste. A man of stature.’

  Twenty-five centimetres, by all accounts, although I do not mention this. I am trying to work out what Brill and Luc Bailly could possibly have in common apart from mountains of money.

  ‘Basically he’s got an early attack of McCartney’s Syndrome,’ explains Frankie. ‘You know: unlimited fame, unlimited cash, unlimited adulation, but wants to be taken seriously into the bargain.’

  ‘Don’t tell me: he’s going to write a Requiem for the Human Race to be premièred in St Peter’s, Rome. It will include recordings of whale song. Or else he’s working on a collection of rock sonnets called Roll Over, Shakespeare. Or could there be a forthcoming exhibition of artworks made from his body fluids at the Saatchi Gallery?’

  ‘At this stage I think he wants help with an autobiography as part of a campaign to invest the name of Nanty Riah with all-round artistic gravitas … I know, I know, but there we are. We ordinary mortals can only let our jaws drop at these people’s monumental chutzpah. Meanwhile, remember they’ve also got monumental quantities of dosh, which is why I think you ought to take it seriously that a pop idol wants you personally to help him towards his Nobel prize.’

  ‘Look, Frankie,’ I say. ‘I nearly fell to my death in a lavatory yesterday, but I don’t want to explain now beyond saying that I’m feeling a little delicate. I know nothing about the pop world and care less.’

  ‘That’s why Brill wants you. He was hoping you’d known nothing about downhill skiing, too, and his agent was partly ringing me to check. That’s the whole point. He expressly doesn’t want a pop biography done by one of those authors in Armani leather who come complete with baize scalps and closely-observed mockney vowels. He already has a brace of those, anyway; they go with the territory. No, he wants real writing. You’re very good at the wider picture, Gerry. Which you’ve just done for Per Snoilsson, by the way. I don’t know how you do it but you manage to make these one-dimensional people seem positively Renaissance figures. That’s exactly what Brill’s after. He’s determined to hit middle age as the twenty-f
irst century’s Leonardo, though my guess is he’ll settle for an Order of Merit or even a humble K.’

  God’s piles. ‘Will I have to start from scratch? I mean, would I be his ghost writer or his editor?’

  ‘He told his agent he’s already written something but no one has seen it. It may be five hundred pages of dazzling prose or it may be some stertorous jottings on the back of an envelope. No prizes.’

  ‘Well, Frankie, if you insist, I suppose I’d better see him. I’ll call you back a bit later when I’ve got my mind properly around it.’

  I hang up to find Marta prodding the putty-ball in the pan. It has swollen horribly and now looks like an enormous fibroid trapped in stockingette. For a while I had forgotten about both it and her. The thought that I’m about to move in the grand international ambit of a pop icon worried about middle age somehow makes Marta’s bossy importunings less threatening, even slightly touching.

  ‘You really think I should eat this?’ I ask her, playing cowed patient to strapping nurse (Hattie Jacques in a starched cap).

  ‘Yes, Gerree, you eat. Very good and stronging, you will see. So – we cut bag.’ She lances the stockingette and, unconfined, the monstrous dumpling bursts forth. She puts it on a board and bisects it with the bread knife. With a gasp of steam the two halves flop apart revealing a dense, greyish interior with what looks like an engorged prostate at its centre. ‘Very good,’ says Marta judiciously. ‘I make last night.’

  Numbly I watch her hack off a sturdy portion and pour sugar and cinnamon cream over it. After that there seems to be nothing for it but to sit at the kitchen table and address myself to this colossal duff.