Cleaving (27 page)
After a moment I put the car back in drive and pull away. Twenty minutes later I'm climbing the stairs to my apartment. My
eyes are no longer puffy enough for Eric to notice; he just calls out his usual greeting: "Mommy's home!"
"At last."
Robert the Dog sniffs me perfunctorily and lies arthritically back down. Maxine the Cat reaches out a paw to beg affection
from her perch on the kitchen island. Eric is drinking Charles de Fere, the same cheap pink champagne I'd brought upstate
for our good-bye toasts. It's known at our local wine store as "Julie Juice," I drink it so often. He puts down his glass
as I walk in the door, and he hugs me. Not a hard hug, just a long one, with his chin resting on the top of my head. "At last."
He doesn't comment on my meat smell, and now, I suppose, he won't ever have to, not for a long while.
Aping the actions of contentment can, sometimes, get to feeling almost like contentment itself, something I've learned in
the last two and a half years. So I get busy roasting a chicken while Eric pours me a glass. "I'm so glad you're home."
"I know. I'm glad too."
And it's not that I'm lying, not that the chicken roasting doesn't smell like home, that the cat purring on the kitchen counter
doesn't sound like comfort, that my husband's embrace doesn't feel like love. It's not that at all. It's just that the world
was feeling bigger to me, and here it begins to seem small, sometimes.
"H
OME AT
L
AST
" C
HICKEN
4 red potatoes, not peeled, coarsely chopped
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Pepper
1 whole chicken, about 3 pounds, rinsed and patted dry
Hot paprika
1 half lemon
Preheat the oven to 400degF.
Place the chopped potatoes and onions in a bowl. Pour a healthy glug of olive oil over them, season with salt and pepper,
and toss with your hands or a spoon to coat. Set a rack in a roasting pan and arrange the vegetables around and under the
rack.
Smear the chicken skin with more olive oil and season it fairly aggressively, inside and out, with salt, pepper, and paprika.
Tuck the lemon half up its bum and place it on the rack. If you want to ensure that the breast meat turns out moist, place
it breast down. (Eric and I are dark meat people, so we don't care so much about the breast meat--crackly skin is more important.
We roast it breast side up.)
Allow 15 minutes per pound of bird, plus 10 minutes or so to grow on. Open your first bottle of wine and watch something on
the TV while you're waiting--nothing too fraught with difficult emotions or likely to bring up uncomfortable memories or situations.
Nothing from the seventies, no
Dog Day Afternoon
or
Rosemary's Baby.
Something familiar, with the sort of sharp dialogue that you and your husband enjoy most particularly and particularly enjoy
enjoying together. A little Joss Whedon something, perhaps, to soothe the soul. Press the Pause button a time or two to get
up and stir the potatoes and onions around, so they don't stick.
The chicken is done when the legs wiggle easily in their sockets. Cut off the legs and thighs, all in one piece, the whole
limb, and plate along with a scoop of the potatoes and onions, a handful of bagged salad. This can serve as many as six people,
but a hungry husband and wife can make serious inroads themselves.
Eat in front of the TV, with more wine--something cheap and pink and reliable--until you fall asleep. Tomorrow, start trying
to live in your life again.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
--J
OHN
D
ONNE
, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"
This is the world we've made. Isn't it wonderful?
--A
NYA THE
V
ENGEANCE
D
EMON
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Carniceria
I'
M STANDING ON
an empty street corner in the Congreso district of Buenos Aires, well before dawn. It's very cold, my breath is showing.
I hadn't counted on northern Argentina ever being cold, mostly because it almost never is. I've layered the heaviest clothes
I brought with me here, a long-sleeved T-shirt under a sweater under my Brooklyn Industries sweatshirt, but it still isn't
quite enough to keep out the chill. I'm waiting for a man. My heart is beating furiously.
"You should do it. You've never really traveled alone. One of those unexpected consequences of being with the same frakking
person your entire adult life."
With the exception of D, he doesn't say, an exception like that of the one meteor that gets through and destroys 830 square
miles of the Russian taiga.
"You've traveled." I am staring at the screen of my laptop, where a
Mobissimo.com
reservation for a flight to Buenos Aires awaits a single click from my hesitant finger to be confirmed. "You've been everywhere."
"Well, exactly. I've done my wandering. You should have your chance. It's a big bad old world out there."
"So everyone keeps telling me."
I do want to go. I can feel the pull of it, of flinging myself into space, a world that seems now both bigger and scarier
than it did before D, before butchery, before
separation
was a word that threatened and enticed. "But I've left you alone already, for months and months--"
"And I've survived. I will survive. If you want to go, you should go."
"Okay. Thank you."
I hit the button
. Confirm.
While I wait in the predawn gloom, I peruse a map of central Buenos Aires that I found pinned to a corkboard in the entryway
of the apartment I've rented here for the month. The landlord's daughter has helpfully labeled good local restaurants, cafes,
and tango bars, with neat dots. I knew that I would become instantly disoriented once I stepped out onto the street, so I
unpinned the map, folded it up, and stuffed it in my pocket, along with the apartment key, which is large and old-fashioned,
like a key that would open up a secret room in a Harry Potter book, before I left this morning. The pointy end of the key
I have tucked between fore- and index fingers, much as I'd hold a meat hook. It's an old self-defense trick I learned ages
ago in some silly woman's mag, and though I don't expect any sort of harassment, it's become a habit of mine when I'm alone
in unfamiliar surroundings, which usually means the East Village after midnight or some gas station parking lot that seems
a little dark, but now means an entire new city on an entire new continent, more alone than I've ever been.
I'm waiting at the edge of the Plaza del Congreso, a broad expanse of grass and statues at the end of Avenida de Mayo, buttressed
on one end by the Congress building. It clearly was aiming for grandiosity when it was constructed but has instead wound up
sort of wilted and sketchy. Under a tree near a statue of someone or other, there is gathered a group of guys bundled up in
heavy coats, huddled around a fire in an oil can. They do not notice me or seem in any way threatening, but of course solo
American women have it built into our DNA to avoid men gathered around oil can fires. The plaza is dotted with well-fed-looking,
shiny-coated dogs, most of them colored like Rottweilers but small and basically terrier-shaped, who seem very much the home-is-where-I-lay-my-hat
sort. They negotiate the broken sidewalks, the trash cans from which they glean scraps, the traffic, heavy even at this early
hour, the blare of honking cabs, about ten times better than I think I ever could. They look both ways before crossing the
street, they know when the walk sign turns green, they never stumble, and they always know where they're going.
Despite all this evidence of decrepitude, the buildings and avenues and people that move among them exude a slightly tired,
European elegance. A few blocks to the south, if I'm reading the map correctly, if know where in the world I am, is Avenida
Corrientes, a long strip of cafes and intellectual bookstores, where poets and students and political revolutionaries once
drank and argued and wrote before dictators rounded them up, drugged them, and dumped them out of planes into the wide Rio
de la Plata. It is something nearly impossible to imagine, here in this city that today feels far more like Paris than anyplace
else. I suppose visitors to Paris in, say, 1965 must have felt the same way, back before the Occupation was ancient history,
was a more unbelievable, and appallingly recent, atrocity.
Santiago pulls up in the back of a taxi and I climb in beside him. He is a handsome man, perhaps even gorgeous, tall and lean
with a shaved head (the stubble is dark), large brown eyes, and a ready yet slightly shy smile. I've met him once before,
at his restaurant, Standard, a stylish bistro in the chichi neighborhood of Palermo, and I've already developed a bit of a
crush. He speaks inexpert English, and my Spanish is nearly nonexistent. It doesn't matter. The cabbie pulls away from the
curb. "Are you ready?" Santiago asks as he leans over to kiss my cheek in greeting.
I widen my eyes and shrug with a saucy smile. "Ready as I'll ever be."
I speak in the sparkling voice I've found myself employing since I arrived in Argentina, the flirtatious, humorous tone of
an American Dame. Traveling by myself is so far proving to be rather like playing dress-up. No one here knows anything about
me, so I can be anyone I want. Here I've decided to be all twinkle and sass and arched eyebrows, blithe drinking and sunny
disregard. I wish I had a jaunty Katharine Hepburn-style pants suit with shoulder pads, a cigarette holder, a little dog to
carry around in my purse. Maybe an eye patch.
When we first met, I told Santiago that I was a butcher, or wanted to be, and that I wanted to learn all about meat in Argentina.
And with an inexplicable dedication to fulfilling the whim of the friend of a friend--he's a friend of Ignacio, the chef in
New York who Jessica and Josh work with--he's arranged to show me all sorts of things. This morning we're headed to Mercado
de Liniers, the largest cattle market in Argentina, a country of cattle markets. Mercado de Liniers is so famous that the
whole neighborhood--a working-class place far from the classy neighborhoods of central Buenos Aires, chockablock with down-and-dirty
carnicerias
and
salumerias
--is named after it. The Mercado district. It's famous like Wall Street is famous; what happens in the early morning hours
at Mercado de Liniers determines how much beef is going to cost in every restaurant and grocery store in the country, and
in Europe as well, where Argentine beef is a coveted import. Santiago, a prominent chef, has agreed to take me on a tour.
It's still not yet dawn when the cab pulls onto the cobblestone drive around the market. I hop from one foot to another in
the chill as Santiago talks to a guy in a down jacket at a guard post. He doesn't seem particularly happy to see me, though
maybe I'm just paranoid and it's too damned early in the morning. I'm not sure where I get the feeling that I have no business
being here, whether it's just a delusion of mine or if I'm picking up on some actual hesitancy, because I'm a girl or an American
or a writer or just funny-looking.
But after a bit of back-and-forth, Santiago nodding deferentially and occasionally cutting his brown eyes briefly over to
me, the guy shrugs, points past the fence to something or other, then thumbs us through the turnstile. Beyond, there is a
wide boulevard of packed dirt, smelling pleasantly, pungently, of cow shit, lined on either side with metal railings punctuated
by cattle gates that open onto warrens of corrals. Dogs loll about, not pets who have the slightest interest in getting a
scratch behind the ears, but workers waiting for their job to begin. Honest-to-God cowboys on horseback are hanging around
too--not called "cowboys," of course, but rather
gauchos
--wearing jeans and windbreakers and sneakers or rubber boots, and distinctive berets, red or black.
There are prefab buildings here and there alongside the gates, the offices of the various meat vendors, and stairways up to
a winding network of catwalks, covered over with simple tin roofs. When we climb up to walk one, I realize just how vast this
place really is, an immense maze of chutes and stock pens I can't see to the end of, illuminated at this hour when the sky
is still a dark though lightening purple by massive sodium lamps, and every inch of the place is filled, it seems, with teeming
cow flesh, pressed in close, lowing, flicking tails and shifting, shitting, drinking from great troughs of water.
Not every inch, though, really. Santiago explains, leaning against the railing beside me as we gaze out at the view. "The
Mercado can hold thirty thousand head. Today? Maybe ten thousand today. Not too busy."