The Food of Love (13 page)

‘Bruno let me in.’

‘Is he still here?’

‘No, he’s gone out.’

‘Oh. OK.’ Tommaso became aware that he was still cradling the

salad bowl. ‘It’s a very difficult salad,’ he explained. ‘First you have to slice the chicory just so. And the anchovies - the anchovies need chopping too. Salt, pepper, oil … it’s tricky to get it just right.’

‘It doesn’t sound all that hard. Not compared to some of the

other things you’ve cooked me.’

Tommaso’s face took on a serious expression. ‘Ah, but in cooking, the simplest things are the hardest. It’s a zen thing.’

‘Now you sound like Bruno.’

‘Bruno? Yes, I call him the philosopher of food. Not that he

knows much about it, of course,’ Tommaso added quickly. ‘But

he’s picked up the odd bit of knowledge here and there. Crumbs

from the master’s table.’

From the expression: ‘Agallina fa Vovo e }ogallo c’abbrucia ‘o cuW The hen makes the eggs, the cock just strains his asshole.

‘Is the master going to give me a kiss?’ Laura asked prettily.

Tommaso put the bowl down and kissed her upturned mouth,

followed by her neck, her chin, her eyes and the rest of her face.

‘Hey, forget supper,’ he whispered urgently into her ear as he

nuzzled and bit at her earlobe. ‘Let’s just go to bed instead, hmm?’

‘You must be kidding,’ Laura breathed. ‘It smells fantastic’

‘We can have it later.’

‘But I want to see what you’ve cooked me.’

‘It’ll keep.’

Tommaso’s hands were expertly undoing buttons all over her

body. She felt her trousers loosen as the button on her waist was popped. At almost the same time her bra was being undone. For

a moment she was in two minds, then she pulled away. ‘So will I.

Please, Tommaso?’

He accepted the inevitable with a shrug. ‘OK. Food first, then

we’ll go to bed.’

Laura felt a momentary flash of irritation. It wasn’t that she

didn’t want to go to bed with him, just that she didn’t want him to assume that she would, or that the meal was just courtship. She opened her mouth to explain, then closed it again. For all his

charm, she didn’t think Tommaso understood the complications

and contradictions of the way her body worked. She wasn’t altogether sure she understood them herself.

Once they had started to eat, though, she had to revise her opinion.

Anyone who could cook antipasto like that - who could put

what must have been hours of work into a few delectable mouth

fills of crisp, light batter, each one concealing a single morsel of tender meat or sharp crunchy fruit, each individual flavour as precise and decisive as the sound of different instruments in an

orchestra - must surely have depths of complexity and feeling,

even if he kept them very well hidden.

‘It’s like a lucky dip,’ Laura sighed happily. “I just have no idea what I’m putting in my mouth.’

‘I’ll tell you afterwards.’

She pouted. ‘Bruno already told me it included brains.’

‘Have you eaten brains before?’

‘Once, in an Italian restaurant back home. They were horrible,

not like this at all.’ She speared another piece of the fritto misto with her fork. ‘What about this? What is it?’

‘That is a sweetbread. A piece of the thymus.’

‘And what’s a thymus?’

Tommaso had absolutely no idea. ‘It’s a part of the thyme,

which is inside the animal, just here.’ He pointed to his chest, somewhat vaguely, with both hands.

‘Oh. Well, it’s good, anyway. How about this?’

‘That, I think, is a testiculo d’abbacchio. A lamb’s - well,

testicle.’

‘A testicle? Let’s try it.’ She put it in her mouth. Tommaso

could hear the noise her sharp front teeth made as she chewed it.

‘Mmm. It’s crunchier than I expected.’

‘Yes,’ Tommaso said faintly. “I wasn’t sure you’d like it, actually.’

‘Oh,

it’s wonderful,’ she assured him. ‘Chewy and gloopy at

the same time. Are there any more in there?’ She stabbed the

bowl of fritto misto with her fork.

Tommaso put his own fork down. Suddenly he wasn’t feeling

hungry. ‘I’m sure there are. You help yourself while I get the

pasta.’

Like most Romans, Tommaso had been brought up eating

offal, but for that very reason he had never really stopped to think about it. It was just there, something that was put in front of you by your mother and which you ate appreciatively while talking

very loudly across everyone else. He had never considered the

origins of the various dishes he had been served. Now, under the glare of Laura’s curiosity, he started to do so, with the result that he was soon feeling a little squeamish.

Laura ate everything he put in front of her. What was more, she

wanted to know what each new thing was, which part of the

animal it came from, what its function was in the body and how it had been prepared. ‘It’s so illogical,’ she was saying. ‘Why are people happy to eat a lamb chop, but not a testicle or a kidney? It hardly makes any difference to the lamb. In fact, as far as the

lamb’s concerned, it would much rather you did eat its testicles or kidneys - I mean, it could survive without one kidney, and without either testicle, but as soon as you decide to slice up its ribcage for chops, it’s had it.’ She forked another mouthful of rigatoni allapajata on to her plate. ‘Aren’t you eating? These pajate are so creamy, it’s like you’re suckling the cow yourself

Tommaso consoled himself with the thought that Bruno had,

at the very least, succeeded in pulverising any shred of inhibition Laura might have had. So long as he could get through dinner,

what happened afterwards was going to be fantastic.

Eventually they got to the strawberries, the sweetness of the

fruit colliding with the sharp tang of vinegar in an explosive conjunction of flavours. Laura exclaimed softly with pleasure each

time she put one in her mouth. ‘Oh - oh - wow - that’s so good.’

Tommaso smiled modestly and shrugged. She hasn’t made those

noises yet with me, he thought a little jealously, only with Bruno’s cooking. Then he stopped himself. It was he, Tommaso, who was

going to go to bed with Laura. What did it matter if she liked to put Bruno’s food in her mouth first?

‘I’ll make the coffee,’ he said.

When he came back from the kitchen with the little octagonal

espresso pot and two tiny cups, Laura had turned the lights down and was lying on the floor, leaning against the sofa. She had kicked off her shoes, and she smiled up at him invitingly. This is more like it, he thought. He poured two cups and sat down next to her. She sniffed appreciatively. ‘Interesting. What kind of coffee is it?’

‘Kopi luwak.’ He tried to remember what Bruno had told him

about it. ‘From Indonesia.’ He tried some. It had a slightly musty, smoky taste.

‘Kopi luwak - wow.’ Laura took an experimental sip. ‘I’ve

heard of this stuff but I never thought I’d actually drink it.’

‘No? Why not?’

She looked at his face. ‘You do know how it’s produced, don’t

you?’ When he didn’t say anything, she explained, ‘In the coffee plantation, there’s a kind of rodent called a luwak which eats

coffee berries - and because there are so many, it chooses only the very ripest, reddest berries it can find. The coffee bean, which is the seed in the centre of the fruit, passes right through the luwak and is excreted. It’s considered a great delicacy, and the young men who work in the coffee fields give it to their sweethearts, so it’s not usually exported. I love coffee, but I’ve never come across any of this stuff before.’

Unobtrusively, Tommaso put his cup down. He couldn’t

believe it. Bruno had given them coffee made from rat crap.

‘How about a distillatoV he suggested. Anything to take away

the taste of that coffee.

‘You go ahead.’

He poured himself a sambuca and put his arm around her.

That was better. She turned her head towards him and leaned in

close, her eyes closing as her lips found his.

That damned coffee. He could taste it in her mouth, and

behind that a faint ghost-taste of all the other dishes they had eaten that evening. The word ‘thymus’ popped back into his

brain. As her tongue explored his mouth and her teeth nipped at

his lower lip, Tommaso found himself wondering exactly where in

the body the thymus was. For all he knew, it was the same as a

prostate, and a prostate was … He closed his own eyes and tried to think of nice, simple things - pizza, meatballs, spaghetti alia carbonara …

He felt Laura’s hand slide inside his trousers and drew in his

breath. Now that was more like it. She was doing things with her long, delicate fingers that he certainly hadn’t expected. There was no doubt about it, she was a dark horse. He slipped his own hand under her T-shirt and expertly undipped her bra. She took his

hand away for a moment, then pulled her T-shirt over her head for him before going back to what she had been doing.

He peeled her remaining clothes off her, kissing each area of

exposed skin. Then she was doing the same to him. He had been

right: the meal had shattered any inhibitions she had left. He took a strawberry from the bowl and stroked it down her breasts,

before going in with his tongue to lick up the trail of vinegary sweetness it left behind.

A few minutes later Tommaso said, ‘Oh.’

‘Do you like that?’

‘Urn - I just didn’t know heterosexuals did that.’

Laura laughed, a deep, throaty laugh. ‘Then there’s a lot of

things you don’t know yet.’

‘Oh,’ Tommaso said again. He yelped, and tensed. ‘Careful

with those, too,’ he said anxiously.

She felt strange and wild. Her body was just a collection of organs.

She was blood and p>lumbing, like any other creature, and there

was nothing that was forbidden about any of it. She gnawed on

Tommaso ravenously, like an animal plundering a carcass, and

when she had had enough of that she swung her leg over him, like a rider swinging into a saddle, and galloped.

She was riding naked on a big horse, among a pack of hunting

wolves, at night. The flanks of the horse were slippery with foam.

She could sense something in the distance, some small animal

which was desperately trying to escape the pack, but they were

getting closer to it every second. The wolves could sense it, too, and increased their pace. She galloped faster, urging her mount on with little cries and squeezes of her thighs. Closer and closer they got to their quarry. Now there was a jump ahead, a vast wall rushing towards her, but it was too late to stop. She dug her nails in

hard and held on for dear life. As she finally took off into the air,

98

99

At

she arched her back and shouted. The animal was screaming, too,

as the wolves finally caught it and tore it apart, ripping its soft pajate open with their sharp teeth, devouring the coratella and the bloody bright red heart—

‘Are you OK?’ Tommaso asked.

‘Uh,’ she panted.

‘Could you perhaps … ?’ He tapped one of her hands, which

were still squeezing his pectorals.

Her fingers were stiff, and as she unclasped them she saw she

had left deep claw marks in his skin. ‘Oh Tommaso, I’m so sorry.

I got carried away.’ She climbed off him and, as she cuddled up

against him, tried to tell him how amazing it had been, to explain the weird fantasies that had been flitting through her mind just before she came, that incredible sensation of flight. But Tommaso, exhausted, was already asleep.

Next morning, Bruno walked into the bathroom and stopped

short. Laura was crouched by the bathtub, wrapped in a towel,

washing her hair. She hadn’t heard him come in. The suds had

turned her hair into a soapy white meringue. For a moment he

stared at her, transfixed. Then he backed away and shut the door, his heart pounding.

Later, when she had gone, he went into Tommaso’s room. His

friend was printing out some photographs of Laura from his

computer.

‘Hey, Bruno. The meal was a triumph!’

‘That’s good,’ Bruno said. He looked over his friend’s shoulder

at the pictures. Something moved deep in his heart, like tectonic plates grinding against each other.

‘She’s a dark horse, all right,’ Tommaso confided. ‘Wild as hell once she’s been warmed up.’ He opened his cupboard door and

pinned a photograph of Laura alongside the other pictures. He

stood back to admire it. ‘What do you think?’

‘A worthy addition,’ Bruno agreed. ‘In fact, she’s the prettiest girl in your cupboard.’

‘She is, isn’t she?’ Tommaso agreed enthusiastically, looking at the dozens of photographs. He pointed at one. ‘Except maybe for

that one. Madchen, her name was. German. But she was a model.’

He sighed. ‘You know something tragic, Bruno? There’s only one

Tommaso in the world, and so many women.’

Laura phoned Carlotta for a serious talk.

‘Carlotta,’ she began cautiously, ‘do you ever have random

thoughts pop into your head during sex?’

‘Of course. Sometimes I think about shoes, sometimes I think

about bracelets. It’s generally always accessories though.’

‘So you don’t ever think about being naked on a big black

horse and hunting down a small furry animal with the help of a

pack of wolves?’

There was a short silence. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘Or tearing it apart with your bare teeth and devouring its

intestines by moonlight?’

“I think I’d remember that one.’

‘Just checking.’

‘That must have been some meal he cooked you.’