Read Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & Online
Authors: Anna Tambour
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary Collections, #General
"Do you fantasize?" asked Ben.
"Of course."
There was a long silence, in which you could have heard a clock ticking if there'd been that kind of clock. Instead, the radiator creaked, and Ben's stomach answered. He surreptitiously threw a couple of tablets down his throat and delicately poured himself a glass of water from the carafe on his desk.
"I'm waiting, Randy," he said, in a voice smooth as eggnog, as he brushed water beads off his knitted tie.
No one else knew Didier as Randy. Even for Ben, it was only "Randy" on the couch.
Ben's pointed AAA-narrow Ferragamo (last week it was Bass Weejuns—he'd never sorted out the shoe thing to his satisfaction) traced a faded silk teardrop on his old Qom (the only part of his office that wasn't now "Americana distressed"—Ben had paid so much for the rug that he was afraid to sell it—he suspected he'd been taken for the rube he knew he was with all this abused "farm furniture").
Randy was trying to fantasize about what he thought he should be, but his fantasies showed his genes to be northern European—utterly consistent. And Randy's consistency was food. The making of it. And often about pork. All the different treatments that he hadn't yet tried, maybe couldn't as he had secretly outgrown his slavish acolyte relationship to French Cuisine years ago, but couldn't admit it to the public.
"Sex?" prompted Ben.
"What?"
"What are your sexual fantasies?"
"I don't have any. Never have."
Ben sat up. He needed the distraction of his patients to keep his fantasies at bay. But one dull moment (and let's face it—most were), and Ben's rich imagined life exploded, fogging his eyes, his ears, his hot thighs, his twitching digital and other extensions. Enough money, he'd thought, could buy anything. So it had. Only, it cost more than he'd bargained for—thus his two unshakable leeches.
Randy's asexuality interested Ben, but didn't surprise him. He'd seen it before, but not in someone with those other tastes. Usually, people who like wild boar hung till the flesh is ready to drop from the bone
love
sex, just as they love cheese that smells like tinea. But to Randy, sex was as interesting as bowling.
"I think I should have erections—or at least one, once," Randy said, in his natural pragmatic voice. "Everyone else does. I just want to know what it's like."
Ben, who had to wear women's support tights to keep his down, agreed.
Then and there, Ben had a gestalt. "Randy, what you need to do is make your inner self express your outer self." Ben was delighted. It this worked, it would be the Dreiser Technique.
Randy, who had never read a pop-psyche book, waited for Ben to speak English.
"Tell you what, Randy. I've got an idea I think'll work."
Randy just waited, just as his father would have, for the man to say something.
"Randy," said Ben, who was now bubbling inside with excitement, "let's make food express your sexuality."
"I told you," Randy said, his voice just a tad frustrated. "I don't have any."
"Let's show it in all its glory."
"But Ben, it's as curled as a newborn kitten."
"Raaandy ... You're not helping. Let's
erect
it. Let's erect it through your food."
"Whah?"
Ben's imagination was in full flight now. "Tower cuisine, stacks of food, Babylons, gothic follies, Eiffels, Randy. Pile it up, tall, nobby or pointed—but penile, Randy. Penile!"
Randy's pragmatic, unreconstructed Iowan voice answered. "But wouldn't that be hard to eat? Fall over. Splatter people?"
Ben's bright eyes could have lasered Randy in an instant, but Ben only sighed and said, "So you want to be
nice
to people. Is that what you want? All these years wasted? Why did you leave home?"
It all hit Randy with a rush. "No, no. In fact, sheep have a better-developed sense of individual taste than most of my customers."
Ben stood up. "Ah, Randy ... I'm proud of you. Now go be an artist. Erect!"
~
Suddenly, haute cuisine became a tautology. Didier's new restaurant, Aether
,
immediately became the hottest spot in New York. Ties went out the door (they got too easily tangled in the penilities), and stains became ubiquitous with fine eating as Aether put the splat, spot, splish and crash into the hautest of haute cuisine.
It became the fashion to outline Monterra's splats on the astronomically priced clothing of Monterra's diners, in gold like the cracks in treasured Japanese teacups. His craquelin praline stacked like an Italian circus troupe pyramid, exploded to the fork like glass shrapnel. The eater never won deconstructing these dangerous perpendicularities. Monterra always did, with treasured stains kept by the diners as mementos.
Didier followed Ben's prescription to the letter. Everything in Aether complemented everything else in reaching for the heavens. His glasses were now so tall and thin that only an Australian anteater could have felt comfortable drinking from them. A serving of the Terrine du Jour brought you a one-inch round and foot-high slice of deliciosity as striated as an unlucky prospector's drillcore sample.
The higher he erected, the more he was revered, the more imitated. His Billionfeuille Napoleons (everyone just called them "Monterrors") were the highest compliment any host could give. These desserts shattered crisp shreds of see-through pastry into coifs two tables away, as well as splattering mistresses and clients alike with alternating layers of passion fruit, povidle, persimmon, pistachio, pekmez, and pomegranate creams.
Didier couldn't help himself in one way. Everything still tasted delicious, even though the food was almost impossible to get into the mouth. But his style was imitated to revolting fusion levels around the world, with stacks beautiful to behold but as disgustingly mished as a turkey dinner with apple pie for dessert—all blenderized together.
~
New York was positively erupting with pre-Millennium joy, but Didier was burnt out. At forty-eight, he had nowhere left to go. He was richer than rich, still had a penis like a sleeping earthworm, and boredom, boredom, boredom faced him.
His creations now excited him personally as much as if he were planning the in-patients menu for the Iowa City General Hospital.
What did it matter? Didier looked out at his personal vista of ageing. He gave himself ten years, tops. He didn't have the energy to reinvent himself. And his creativity had been corrupted by the tower therapy.
The president of IER, "the name behind the names in foods, footwear, and fertilizers" begged to meet him. Eventually, they met in the president's dining room with its special access elevator and "real gold" walls and Louis XIV chairs, and wall-length fishtank with shark—"Yup. That baby's one a them monsters. We call him Fishsticks."
Before the pre-lunch drinks arrived, the man known as the genius of conglomerating revealed his vision. He asked Monterra to create a series of "Montowers" using their instant noodles and "real cheese" sauces, with as the bricks in these edifices, their newest secret shelf-killer: Mile-high Minute Bakes Flaky French Pastries, in Lite (97% fat free); or in Gotta Live Well (with Olestra). He offered a fee that would have made Didier have to look for a tax haven on another planet. There would of course, be no actual work for him or creativity wanted. The marketing men and accountants had already taken care of that. Monterra would only have to put his signature and face to these branded products and product-ridden recipes. It was an awkward lunch after Didier point-blank refused.
- 4 -
It was time to leave again. The destination? Somewhere without too many people. No society. A place where he could eat what he liked—simple, delicious food. Pork, fresh flavours, no art. Just natural beauty.
He went into frenetic seclusion seeking his illusive paradise, only dropping into Aether when he felt he must.
The morning after one necessary appearance there (a particularly acolyte-ridden evening of the stupid rich), he sold Aether to McDonald's, who'd been lobbying him for a year to open their first Hi-Life Singles Restaurant.
Telling no one his destination, he took off—to the island of Sufisi. If you have an atlas, you
might
find it. It is part of the large archipelago of Pauro, in the South Pacific.
In 1792, the HMS Sufficient floundered off what is now called Freekohnahat Point, and sunk in a torrential tropical downpour. Only five of its crew managed to make their way over the razor-sharp coral reef to shore. All press-ganged from London, they snuggled happily into accommodating arms; and today's often-blue-eyed descendants still bear their influences. The HMS Sufficient never gave the islanders' secret away, as the frigate was thought to be lost in a typhoon 100 nautical miles north.
Half of Sufisi is now wallboard in houses from Tasmania to skyscrapers in Hong Kong. The other half of the island (no minerals there) is sparsely inhabited by beautiful, overweight, caramel-coloured "Austronesians" as ethnicists are fond of classifying them (defined as "Malayo-Polynesian, Micronesian" and a few other 'nesians thrown in). The British connection was not known by anyone except the inhabitants themselves, whose own brand of Pidgin attests to its heritage—from the
one two free four five six sewen
to the
eight
which in Pauru is
palm
because palm plates were the crockery of Pauru when the HMS Sufficient met its destruction, and all the china plate was smithereened.
The Sufisians' habitual secrecy along with their hopes for a damages settlement from their former employers, Orix Resources, gave them a reputation amongst other Pauroans for being stuck-up and unfriendly. When even the corporate shell of Orix collapsed, the Sufisians' last hopes for an indigenous-sacred-site-defacement-style-settlement died, too. However, although they and the company had treated their island like dirt, the directors of Orix had already made sure that the Sufisians did as well, in their way, as they did, in theirs, when the last of the easy stuff was pulled out of the ground and shipped off. Generous cash payouts had been made to all. Not all mine companies are run by unscrupulous men. And besides, the management was used to the Sufisians, and thought that there was hope for a project on a neighbouring island that had no work force.
In fact, the cash given was so generous that it was decided by all to put it in the Sufisi Bank, set up by Tenuat Lenuru, who in a tragic accident one dark night, fell off his outrigger. His body was never found, but they often aren't when great whites regularly patrol the waters. The accident was particularly tragic because only Lenuru knew where the Bank's money was kept.
Since Orix's collapse, the Sufisians had whinged, whined, and mostly just sat around. The mining had ended ten years before that, so the habits of doing practically nothing had grown into a profession. The only income the islanders had generated for some years had been from baskets the women wove from palm leaves, and the men's speciality—blasting the hell out of the coral reef with old mining explosives. The coral-filled baskets were sent to Paurotown on the main island, on the
Venture
, the trading boat that stopped at Sufisi once a week. But palm-leaf baskets weren't popular with most tourists these days— instead, they bought T-shirts that said
Pauro been there done that,
or
I already bought a Fulu
. Modern Pauroians were embarrassed by baskets. They were attracted to the enamelled flowered or violent pink plastic basins that were made in China and were stocked by the town's "supermarket". The older suitcase-toting tourists would have bought more coral, but the reef was almost toothless now.
A short foray into tourism with P&O ended in failure. Nigel Pendergast, P&O's unflappable entertainment director was heard to scream, "I can find more charming natives in Tel Aviv!" And Flora Entwhistle, the Amazonian-proportioned, but very Sufisian head of festivities boomed back, "We can't do lunch for under twenty-five American dollars a head. Do you know the price of tin foil?"
It was the traditional lunch the ship had stopped for, called a
hangi
by Maoris in New Zealand, it was a
fingi
in Sufisi.
When Didier stepped off the
Venture
onto the Sufisi dock, he'd already bought his hunk of land. Actually, he 99-year leased it from the newly-formed Native Cooperative, Flora's final desperate plan to get a bit of money in to the island. This time, Flora (whose official Sufisi name was Princess Flora Dabuibo) administered the finances. No one expected any surprises from her.
Didier knew about the failed tourist effort, knew Sufisi was considered an island of disgruntled unromantic natives gone dole-bludgers, and unsuccessful at that. But these were plusses. Not too many friendly smiles, each to his own, and Didier could eat and cook his pigs in peace. For he'd researched well. The pig was the centrepiece of everything 'nesian cooking, and the whole reason for the
fingi
. And, on these islands, the pigs weren't the huge pink porkers from Iowa (now too-often drug and hormone-filled), but little cute wholly organic, succulent sway-backed black and white creatures—tropical Lolitas. Speaking of health, he would snorkel every day (no problem sinking), nurse his stratospheric cholesterol with a once-a-week healthy porcine gorge-out, and otherwise live on
poisson-cru
and pineapple.
He arrived on a Thursday, and by Sunday night, he felt what a tired swallow would feel circling for landing over a Capistrano that had been redeveloped into mirror-glass office towers.
No pigs. None at all.
Those expensive P&O luaus had been baked in a pit on the beach all right, but they were chicken and taro in Reynolds wrap (burying the cookout looked romantic but tourists demanded foil), and watermelon. Fourth of July with sand. And for dessert, not ambrosia or strawberry shortcake, but ... snot? Actually, the villagers reacted the same way privately to sago, but each wife made it once a week for her husband for tradition's sake. No one admitted they hated it, and had since they were children. Everyone ate it dutifully, in all its grey mucilaginousness.
But on to the pigs. In April 1999 when the Nipah virus epidemic swept through Malaysia and Singapore, the entire pig population of Sufisi Island was slaughtered with machetes and burnt, by the very regretfilled order of Flora, Princess Dabuibo, formerly known as Sister Entwhistle during Orix's mining days. She had been sent to the main island by Orix to train as a registered nurse, and was, indeed, the only trained person of any degree on Sufisi.
The men didn't want the pigs killed. The women did. They had to care for the sick, and with no hospital on the island, when Flora said, "Killem pigs," that's what happened, especially as Flora weighed 300 pounds. So her pork ban stayed, and chicken it was after that.
Actually, chickens were rare, too. So most lived on bully beef and rice, purchased with the little money they had left. What they would do when that ran out, no one knew.
That first Sunday in Paradise, Didier's depression knew no bottom. To complete his woes, "Didiyae Monterra" he had to remain, as, firstly, the lease had been in that name. But even worse, Flora had seen him on TV in Sydney when she attended the South Pacific Empowered Women—SPEW—conference in 1996, so he couldn't even shed the accent. It was the famous
tête du porc
program. This one was the US-styled version. As she watched, Flora's mouth pricked at the edges as her saliva glands got working. Her only purchases in Sydney were the spices in the recipe, and she bought a lot of them. When she got home, she told everyone about the show. This was the only part of her trip that was inspiring for the islanders. They soon began to wish pigs could be bred with more than one head, as "Misser Monterra's tedupor" became the islanders' favourite dish. It was the only sophisticated food any of them had ever tasted, and they felt so worldly when they ate it. Besides, it was so good that it made the rest of the pig, no matter how they cooked it, taste like spam.
Tedupor
was the biggest reason that no one wanted the pig ban, but Flora was adamant—the risk was too great.
~
No pigs, not even the cute little swaybacked Lolitas. "Didiyae" for life. Nothing to read except his own books. And he couldn't even drink himself to oblivion. Nothing except toddy palm-wine in coconut "bottles".
So Didier went native. A self-hate response. Every day, a flat, flat pancake of bully beef and rice, three times a day. Corned beef hash from the hell of the bored. In tropical heat, fatty, salty bully beef is as refreshing as a bath of olive oil in Bombay.
The little orange and white-striped clown fish poked their heads from the swaying, stalked-bubble coral without making Didier giggle into his mask. The rainbow-striped parrot fish grazed the reef with their horsy teeth like flocks of LSD-created sheep, without a wondering sigh from the blimpy snorkeler above.
Didier's cholesterol soared into the why-isn't-he-dead range. But he was still, unhappily, alive. His Iowan soul couldn't suicide, but something in him also said,
You can't go back, and to where, anyway?
At least his house was comfortable. Cool, airy, and luxurious by native standards, with touches of the amusingly crass, it had belonged to Tenuat Lenuru, and no one knew how he'd paid for it—he hadn't been paid much to manage the islanders' money.
The kitchen was not for show, though. Tenuat actually liked bully beef, so the cooking room was out back as a sort of outhouse—just a gas tank and a burner, a hose with a bamboo and plastic basin sink arrangement, and a stump for a table.
The house came with Tomasi, the live-in houseboy, and the only unmarried man on the island. His nickname was
Ui'lute
, which means "stick insect", as he had the metabolism of a hummingbird. He also liked gardening—traditionally women's work, but on Sufisi, all the taro and cassava anyone ate was grown by him. Although bananas and coconuts grew there like weeds, he had planted and nurtured a wide range of tropical fruits. Of course, he had never married. "Nothing to hold on to," the women laughed.
~
That Sunday night, as Didier slumped under the wide, palm-thatched eaves of his bungalow, eyes clouded to the wild coral topaz zirconium sunset over the vast calm sea, a five-minute walk-worth inland, words thrashed the air.
The entire population, including Tomasi, rustled their ageing, fat (excluding Tomasi) buttocks under the tamarind tree in front of Flora Entwhistle's house.
"I thought you said he was rich!" Sam Falepau yelled at Flora. "That cousin of yours in Auckland have coconut for brains?" Sam's heavy breasts shook with indignation.
"What you do with your payout from the lease, Sam? Where you get that again?" Flora sneered back.
"You people," she addressed all fifty residents. "You got your money for doing what you do best all these years. Sit. Sit and complain ... do you think ... like me? Do you go to conferences and learn?"
"Learn—oh, ho, too much!" Choku Pu'atoi cackled. He rolled on the prickly grass, scuttling a coconut crab into clattering flight.
"That Winsome Fraser weird woman from Sydney, and her church. She pay for you. Wouldn't send us. Fill your head wif ideas."
"Of course she wouldn't send you, you ... foolahan! And yes, I do learn ideas. I learn that there's many ways to get what you want, AND ... AND," she shook her finger at the grinning, sheepish, giggling, angry, frustrated, confused mouths. "AND, because I go, we keep those church people away. You want them come here again?"
"No, no, no," an urgent, panicked answer erupted from all mouths at once. The Sufisians had been warned about Christianity by their great-grandfathers, the press-ganged five.
But Flora needed to drive her point home. "They think we all believe that garbage. As long as they think it, they don't NEED to come. But give them an excuse, and they'll come, thick as (she struggled for a metaphor that she knew meant "thick", but also that would privately remind each person of its true distastefulness) ... sago pudding."
The handsome heads bowed in embarrassment. Flora had managed to keep those arrogant egotists out of the Sufisians' hair for years. She had thought of the lease and found Didiyae. Flora was smart, but the money from the lease couldn't keep them all forever. What was her plan?
"Now you listen here," she said patiently. "I told you good things would come from Misser Didiyae. And they have. There's more to come, too. I just know it. He's just got to get our island spirit. We got to help him. If you don't, you better make sure you make that money last forever, you hear? Nobody here getting any younger. You, Lily—you the youngest. You—what? Forty-five?"
Lily giggled
"And Jimmy—you oldest. What you think you are?"
A surprisingly meaty Jimmy mumbled, "Maybe eighty."
"And how many of your children send money home?"
A mass coughing fit took hold of the assembly. More than a few fingers toyed with the yard litter of dried palm fronds.
"I know they having trouble finding work," Flora almost whispered, "but ..." and she raised her voice to its full bass glory, "do you raise your lazy old bones? Huhf!"
Her red and white hibiscus-pattered backside wiggled in a paroxysm of disdain.
"Make the man welcome, I say. Make him forget his pigs. Then we see if he give us all a good old age."
With that, she huffed off, and without her, there was no meeting.
Tomasi shuffled home to his morose charge. Like all Sufisians, while he ignored simple complaining like he did the droning of mosquitoes at night, he hated being around true depression. It made him feel helpless. But he considered himself the island's ambassador. And maybe Flora could see him as its saviour someday. Flora was
some
woman. A widow, too.