Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘The bloody ladder slipped,’ he explains muffledly from the other side. ‘And these damned nail guns have hair triggers. Criminally dangerous. I shall most certainly have something to say to the maggot-brained Japanese who made it.’

  ‘But not until you’ve got down.’ I examine his boot. ‘You’re very lucky, you know. I think all the nails went into the heel.’

  ‘Well, can’t you get something and lever it off? Look, go down to my toolbox – toolbox, for heaven’s sake – and bring that wrecking bar. Oh God, that iron thing.’

  Luckily he can’t see me. I lean against the fence quite helplessly for a moment as he hangs above me, his meagre bum catching the morning sun as it glances through the trees. When I can speak I suggest it might be easier for the moment if I simply unlace his boot so he can slip out of it. This I do, raise the fallen steps, and he returns to earth leaving his boot nailed halfway up the fence. He fetches the bar and eventually, after much hefty levering, the boot is freed.

  ‘Bloody thing,’ Gerry says to no one in particular. ‘Could happen to anybody, a thing like that.’

  Once inside the kitchen I reach down the sacred bottle but this time he forestalls me firmly and calls for plain water.

  ‘Thirsty work,’ he says, draining a glass from the well that Signor Benedetti claims we share.

  I sit him down and congratulate him on his work. Actually, the fence is quite hideous in its newness. The panels must have been painted in the factory with some sort of anti-rot treatment which has left them a chemical shade of green so unnatural it stands out like a turd in a teacup, as our huntsmen so graphically put it.

  ‘How hard you’ve been working, Gerry, and all because of my helicopter.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not entirely.’ He is stuffing greedily from the plate of mavlisi I have given him, the last of the ones Ljuka brought me from home. I suppose you might say they are the Voynovian equivalent of florentines, although that scarcely does them justice. These are the very best, from Mrszowski’s in Voynograd. He selects the one we call ‘acorn’: a pigeon’s egg pickled in spearmint water, its base nestled in a delicate pastry cup, and pops it into his mouth whole.

  ‘The only thing that surprises me, Gerry,’ I say when I can regain his attention, ‘is how very close your fence seems.’

  ‘It’s where the surveyor’s pegs in the ground run, Marta. Feel free to go and check for yourself. The last thing I want to do is encroach on your property. Your house doesn’t have much land this side, as far as I can see. It’s all on the other side where you carry out your, um, aeronautical activities.’

  I suppose he must be right. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention when Benedetti was explaining such things, partly because my Italian was more rudimentary then but mostly because I didn’t really care. I loved the house and just wanted to get on with my work.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be reasonably aesthetic when I’ve finished, running artlessly through the trees. Now what I need to know is, should I put a door in the middle?’

  ‘But of course, Gerry. We’re neighbours. We need to have communication between us. Otherwise it will look as though we’re quarantined from each other.’

  ‘Mm. Well, no problem. They’ve got doors down at the yard. It just means a couple more posts. Simple job. I’d better be getting on with it. I couldn’t have another glass of water, could I? Those little doughnut thingies pack quite a punch.’

  ‘One day, Gerry, when we’re both of us not so busy, I will explain to you the full theory of mavlisi. You are supposed to eat them in the proper order. Each kind has a special significance and represents a particular event in Voynovian history which all true patriots know. So when you eat them in the right way you are eating the story of our nation. It makes us feel so close. During the time of the Russians we could do that while sitting in cafés all over Voynovia and they never realized that each day we were making nationalist statements. They just saw little cakes and wolfed them down by the handful in any old order with vodka chasers. Ignorant pigs.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Gerry, collecting his yellow helmet and going to the door. ‘Funny chap, your Russky. I’ll be off, then.’

  He is utterly preposterous. And yet, impossibly, there is something almost touching about him. How can this be? It’s not the first time I have noticed it, while everything in me resists the very thought. He is so vulnerable, somehow, not to say fabulously incompetent. Who but Gerry in his bustling, DIY mode could have nailed himself to his own fence? And nor did I believe a word of all that nonsense he spun me some time ago about Ljuka having scared off his potential client. A try-on if ever I heard one. Obviously he and his one-night stand had fallen out, or it hadn’t worked or something, and he decided to save face by blaming me. Well, of course, if he will go picking up bald strangers on the seafront in Viareggio at his age what does he expect? It’s partly being able to see through him so easily that makes him touching. I wonder what he really did for a living before he moved here? I suppose he might have been writing people’s life stories as he claims, though I wouldn’t have said he had the necessary concentration to write a book. But here he is so obviously a gentleman of leisure just filling up his days with cookery and arias and bungled carpentry. A very nice life too, no doubt, but scarcely serious in any professional sense. That’s a side of the West I’m still not used to: the idea of people just killing time yet comfortably managing to survive.

  But if Gerry were only that I should merely despise him. I do despise him, of course, in a mild sort of way. Underneath, though, there’s a bleakness, an abandonment. If he’s at all close to Piero Pacini’s notions of nihilism he oughtn’t to be touching, either. To be made uncaring through injury – no, sad but not very attractive. So what is it about him?

  Nothing important, anyway. And unquestionably none of my business. Piero’s starting shooting next week and for reasons of his own wants me to be on hand. I can feel my career gathering steam. Sooner or later I shall need to think about the next job. I am not going back to Voynovia as a lady of leisure.

  Gerald

  27

  This fence project has been keeping me pretty busy these last ten days or so and I haven’t had time to brood much on Nanty Riah’s aborted visit. However, if I’d hoped he was going to give up on me as I had on him I was mistaken. Frankie phoned to say he was still as keen as ever that I should write his autobiography for him. Apparently Nanty claimed I had ‘the right vibes’ as well as having come up with the perfect name for his re-vamped group.

  ‘Huh. Did he tell you about the UFO he’s convinced he saw here?’

  ‘Oh yes. He says it’s changed his life. He’s thrilled to bits.’

  ‘I suppose you know he’s quite off his head, Frankie?’

  ‘I take that for granted in celebrities. Interestingly so?’

  ‘No, just the usual New Age drivel. Druids, karma, suffering beetroot, Men in Black. Alternative forms of stupidity. Hey, did you know he’s bald?’

  ‘Brill is?’

  ‘Nanty is. Alopecia, he says. And there I was, congratulating him warmly on his bald wig at the airport. Honestly, Frankie, the whole thing could hardly have gone more wrong from start to finish.’

  ‘That’s not what he thinks. He’s convinced you’re the sort of person around whom things happen. Not only does he still want you to do the book, he has upped the ante to fifty thousand quid. Seventy-five if you can do it in six months.’

  What is a poor author to say? I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant. I pretended I needed a week to think about it, which might even make Nanty put the fee up still further. On one of my daily trips down to builders’ yards in Viareggio for fencing materials I investigated what the various fishing smacks were landing. In times of tribulation the kitchen is a great solace. Suddenly I was overcome with a yearning for that old classic,

  Lampreys in Sherry


  Ingredients

  1 kg live young lampreys (not over a foot long)

  500 gm shallots

  1 bottle –

  but what’s the use? They only had a hoary old monster well over a metre from sucker to tail, and dead at that. What I really wanted was live river lampreys such as had proved Henry I’s undoing, although those might actually have been eels. The trick is to drown them in a good dry sherry. An oloroso will make a heavier, sweeter dish of the type favoured by TV chefs – need one say more? Not too much sympathy should be expended on the lampreys who succumb in a manner to which countless humans aspire, from acute alcohol poisoning. Blissfully drunk, in other words. They then need to be kept in the sherry for twelve hours in a cool pantry so that the flavour of the liquor can perfuse their flesh from inside and out. But there were no river lampreys to be had in Viareggio so I was reduced to buying some small eels and a bottle of vin’ santo.

  Can I be bothered to tell you all about the sorrel, watercress, tarragon, parsley, white nettle and rosemary necessary to the preparation of this zesty dish? And exactly what to do with the two eggs and celery stick? I don’t believe I can; I’m too fussed about Nanty Riah. Although the act of making the dish is a perfect aide-oublier, giving instructions would be too much of a distraction at present … Oh, and the double cream. Not to mention the saffron. In due course I ate the eels beneath my ravaged vine, between whose poor naked stems I could see a million stars and not one single UFO.

  It is very calming, this thinking about, inventing, preparing and eating food. Anything to do with food sets off reveries and memories and brilliant conceits while releasing floods of endorphins to take away pain. Sometimes I lie in bed and cheer myself up by gloating over the culinary challenges faced and overcome in the heroic cuisine of yesteryear. Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s Elements of Raj Cookery (1887) would surely be on every insomniac’s bedside table were it not so rare. He is full of cunning ways with fruit bats, python etc. and his recipes breathe a manly simplicity. ‘With a sharp dhauji remove the paws of a medium-sized panda. Discard the animal. Soak the paws overnight in a crock of fresh tikkhu juice. In the monsoon months it will be found expedient to mount a guard since the smell of tikkhu fermenting is irresistible to both upland tiger and bamboo wolf …’ Written, of course, at a time when the earth was ours and the bounty thereof. Nowadays we have pizza; and just look at the state of things.

  *

  These days spent putting up my beechwood cordon sanitaire have been surprisingly Marta free. I expected her to be in and out constantly, chattering and offering me her usual libations of Fernet Branca, which I now believe may be piped into her house like natural gas as part of some EU scam for chronic alcoholics and designed to benefit the Milanese economy. However, I think she was out a good deal at first and then has kept more to herself than usual by being quiet. Heard, no; seen, definitely. The glimpses of her in her kitchen have been most peculiar. I can’t think what has happened to her hair these days. It looks frizzled and greasy as though she had been frying it in Brylcreem. She’s a very odd person indeed and I can’t say she’s exactly going out of her way to appease me for having driven my potential client away and threatened my livelihood. You might have thought that the odd complimentary comment on the absolute plumb verticality of my fence posts would be in order. She is not to know that my client is still keen to the tune of £75,000. However, little sign of her until the other morning.

  I was getting along nicely putting up a new panel when I suddenly caught sight of her staring at me through her kitchen window. Actually, she gave me quite a fright. That mass of hair with the wet red mouth in the middle. I was so startled to find I was being spied on I inadvertently kicked over the steps on which I was imprudently balancing and would have had a nasty accident with the nail gun but for my foresight in wearing protective gear. By now I’m rather an experienced handyman and those thick-soled Doc Martens are worth their weight in foie gras.

  The ensuing contretemps unfortunately brought Marta out, which in turn took me into her house where as usual she tried to get me drunk with Fernet Branca. When that failed she plied me with what she called ‘delicacies’: brightly coloured Voynovian objects that were delicate to the same extent that traffic cones are. There were awesome pellets like miniature doughnuts wrapped in candied angelica leaf and injected with sweet chili sauce. Others looked like testicles set in dough. I gathered these were pigeon’s eggs and couldn’t catch her name for them although the phrase that came to me immediately was Christ on a Tricycle. Spearmint eggs? Who but a Voynovian pastry-chef …? I can now appreciate that history has muffed the chance of a great culinary partnership by segregating Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth and Marta in different centuries. Their respective tastes for a gastronomy unfettered by suburban norms would surely have made for a memorable association. On the other hand I detect from his book that the Major-General was a man of limited patience and it is likely that sooner or later Marta would have succumbed to a well-wielded dhauji. His subsequent recipe would have immortalized her.

  At least this damned fence is nearly finished. Let nobody think I enjoy this DIY caper. I do these jobs because I can’t afford – financially and aesthetically – not to. This Berlin Wall of mine snakes artistically among the trees for forty metres or so, broken only by a latched door with a heavy bolt on my side: a necessary Checkpoint Charlie for neutral commerce between us. By visibly marking the boundary it makes my property look bigger while adding to my sense of security. An additional advantage is that it may muffle some of the noise Marta makes with her pianos and keyboards and sound systems. The trouble with all this electronic gear is that it allows (‘empowers’ or ‘enables’, in the jargon of the times) the grossly untalented to pretend to be better than they are. Fire up the right program and even a cat strolling over the keyboard can sound like Scarlatti. The wonder is that despite this, Marta’s stuff still sounds awful.

  The new fence does add slightly to a mystery, which is that of her comings and goings. Like most mature Englishmen of a certain class I have not the faintest interest in my neighbour’s doings provided they don’t disturb me. Even before the fence went up, once the trees were in full leaf I could no longer glimpse her ratty old car because her access to the road runs mainly behind her house. But now that I come to think about it I have the impression of hearing sporty car noises from time to time over the last two months which might have some connection with subsequent long spells of silence over at her hovel. Maybe the humble charcoal burner’s son has won the lottery and traded in his mule for an Alfa-Romeo? Of course I am not in the least inquisitive, but I will admit to the faintest curiosity as to who she is with and what they get up to.

  And now this morning’s bombshell. I had made a point of being down bright and early at the builders’ yard on the outskirts of Viareggio for when they opened at eight a.m. I needed a couple of kilos more nails and another twenty litres of wood preservative that would enable me to finish the fence today. Driving back along the Camaiore road I stopped for the lights at the Capezzano junction and blow me if, waiting on the other side, there wasn’t a flamboyantly scarlet open-top sports car of exotic design with Marta’s unmistakable tangle of greasy ringlets bursting up in the passenger seat like tumbleweed. At that moment the lights changed, and to prove this wasn’t an optical illusion she waved a bangled forearm at me as we passed while her merry scream Gerree! pierced the blare of exhaust. As I drove on, febrilely examining the after-image on my retinas of this unexpected vision, it was the driver who monopolized my attention. Who was he? A very young man indeed, of remarkable dash and handsomeness. Really extraordinarily good looking, now that I came to consider it. A real case of Beauty and the Beast. I admit it doesn’t reflect well on my customary generosity of spirit that all the way home I refused to feel at all enchanted by the idea that they might be lovers. It would be at once inconceivable and deeply, deeply unjust.

  28

  As I keep saying, Marta’s life is h
er own. We’re both grown-ups and what she gets up to is none of my business. On the other hand, that’s easier to say than to act on. All my life I’ve been interested in things that are none of my business, as well as bored by all the supposedly important things the good citizen ought to know (football scores, the name of the current Home Secretary, what ‘DNA’ stands for, where Voynovia is). None of my interests adds up to anything as dignified as knowledge, if only because in a world where knowledge is an infinite regression you may as well resign yourself to dilettantism. So I know lots of jolly recipes and spoof arias and can change a tap washer without either wringing my hands or ringing a plumber.

  But the things that really interest me are other lives and gossip. I find the doings of my fellow humans irresistible. I suppose that’s why I’ve always been able to manage even the least promising of literary hack work (Luc Bailly, Per Snoilsson). It’s the mortal contingency that fascinates: the real deal beneath the public exterior. It’s the only way I know to write the world – or scribe my globe, if I want an anagram of Lyme Regis Cobb. The thoroughly indecent bleak detail I collect along the way makes it diverting. The day I discovered about Luc’s enemas (Uphill all the Way) was joyous and set me off on those idle speculations with which the civilized can so pleasurably fill their time. Such as why Christopher Columbus is known in Spanish as Cristóforo Colón, a name I’d encountered constantly in that gap year of mine in Latin America. Since to English speakers his name suggests the lower intestine, I was obliged to wonder about a port city in Panama being called Colón until further research revealed that when it was founded in 1850 it had been named Aspinwall after an American railway magnate. So which address would you prefer? One also wonders if, other things being equal, there might have arisen a therapeutic pastime known as Columbic irrigation. In any case I shall remember the erstwhile city of Aspinwall to my dying day; but until someone can associate a ‘blind carbon copy field’ with anything more interesting than computers I shall never remember or care what it is, regardless of the number of times it is explained to me.